Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age

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Harold Monro Poet of the New Age

Dominic Hibberd

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Harold Monro

10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



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Harold Monro

Poet of the New Age

Dominic Hibberd


© Dominic Hibberd 2001

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 0–333–77934–7 In North America ISBN 0–312–22421–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hibberd, Dominic. Harold Monro : poet of the New Age / Dominic Hibberd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22421–4 1. Monro, Harold, 1879–1932. 2. Literature publishing– –England—London—History—20th century. 3. Publishers and publishing—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Poets, English– –20th century—Biography. 5. Gay men—Great Britain– –Biography. 6. Poetry Bookshop. I. Title. PR6025.O35 Z69 2000 821'.912—dc21 [B] 00–059176 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Plates

vi

List of Text Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: Harold Monro 1879±1932

1

1

Inheritance

6

2

Cambridge 1898±1902

13

3

Ireland 1902±6

21

4

The Samurai 1906±8

32

5

Pilgrimage to Freedom 1908±9

57

6

The Mountain and the Tower 1909±11

71

7

The Poetry Review 1911±12

91

8

The Poetry House

113

9

Alida 1913±14

128

10 War 1914±16

147

11 Casualty 1916±19

177

12 A New Start 1919±20

200

13 Disillusion 1921±5

216

14 Great Russell Street 1926±8

232

15 No Way Out 1929±32

246

16 Legacies

259

Appendix A The Monro family

266

Appendix B Galloway Kyle and The Poetry Review

270

Sources

273

Notes

275

Bibliography

288

Index

292 v 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Contents

1

Edward and Sophia Monro with their children, Arthur, Harold and May. Ventnor, Isle of Wight, c.1885. British Library

2

Somerby Hall, Leicestershire, home of Harold's uncle, Russell Monro. D. Roe

3

The Essex Hounds meeting at Hylands, near Chelmsford, home of Harold's brother-in-law and sister, Sir Daniel and Lady Gooch. Essex Record Office

4

Harold as freshman, Caius College, Cambridge, October 1898. Gonville and Caius College

5

Maurice Browne, c. 1903. University of Michigan

6, 7 Harold Monro and Dorothy Browne, just before their marriage in December 1903. British Library 8

Maurice and his trophies, Kashmir, 1905. University of Michigan

9

Arthur Sabin, manager of the Samurai Press, 1907±9. University of Michigan

10 Harold attired for one of his long walks, Menton, probably early 1910. British Library 11 Monte Verita, Ascona, 1906. Harald Szeemann 12 Tending vegetables at Monte Verita, 1906. Harald Szeemann 13 Colonists at the waterfall below Harold's mill house, Ascona, c.1905. Harald Szeemann 14 Harold, probably by Sherrill Schell, in 1913 (The Bookman, July 1928). 15 Alida Klemantaski, by Sherrill Schell, c.1913. British Library

vi 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


List of Plates

List of Plates vii

19 Wilfrid Gibson, by Sherrill Schell, c.1913 (Collected Poems, 1929). 20 Claud Lovat Fraser (The Bookman, August 1921). 21 Basil Watt. University of Edinburgh 22 Maurice Hewlett (The Bookman, May 1920). 23 Edward Thomas. National Portrait Gallery, London 24 F. T. Marinetti, self-portrait, exhibited at the DoreÂ Gallery, 1914 (The Sketch, 13 May 1914). 25 Former Rhymers: Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore and W. B. Yeats, 1912. British Library 26 Future Imagists: Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Frank Flint, 1912. British Library 27 Georgians: John Drinkwater, Wilfrid Gibson, Edward Marsh, Lascelles Abercrombie, Geraldine Gibson and Catherine Abercrombie, 1914. Birmingham Libraries and the Sir Barry Jackson Trust 28 `Miss Klemantaski considering the Fates of the Poetry Book Shop. October, 1918.' Ink drawing by Fraser. Private collection 29 Harold in the twenties. British Library 30 Wilfred Owen. Private collection 31 T. S. Eliot (The Bookman, March 1931). 32 Anna Wickham. Margaret Hepburn 33 34 35 36

Charlotte Mew (The Bookman, August 1921). Osbert Sitwell (The Bookman, December 1919). John Gould Fletcher (The Bookman, February 1922). Alec Waugh (The Bookman, March 1922).



16 The Poetry Bookshop, 35 Devonshire Street (The Bookman, February, and The Cambridge Magazine, March 1913). 17 The Bookshop and a `customer' (The Daily Graphic, 4 January 1913). 18 Rupert Brooke, by Sherrill Schell, 1913. National Portrait Gallery, London

viii List of Plates

38 The interior of the former Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street in 1927, soon after the building became Cecil House, a hostel for homeless women. Cecil Houses 39 Harold at his desk in the new shop, Great Russell Street, 1926. British Library 40 Harold hanging the old signboard, newly repainted by Kauffer, 1926. British Library 41 Alida judging a poodle show in the United States, 1961. Private collection



37 Wedding group at Hylands, 1920. Harold with his brother-in-law, sister, mother and others. Essex Record Office

Harold Monro: drawing by E. McKnight Kauffer (The Chapbook, Oct. 1924) Frontispiece The Poetry Bookshop, 35 Devonshire Street: drawing by Charles Ginnner (The Chapbook, Oct. 1925) `Coronilla': wood engraving by Paul Nash for a projected book of Harold's poems (The Chapbook, Oct. 1925)

2 67

The Bookshop's first letterhead

115

Invitation to the opening of the Bookshop, 8±9 Jan. 1913

119

Harold's entries on the first page of the readings register, Jan. 1913

121

Two of James Guthrie's woodcuts for Trees, Dec. 1915

165

Àrches': wood engraving by Paul Nash for a projected book of Harold's poems (The Chapbook, Oct. 1925)

230

Letterhead, 1927±35, with a design by E. McKnight Kauffer

236

Letterhead, c.1927±35, with a design by Claud Lovat Fraser

237

ix 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


List of Text Illustrations

My first thanks must be to Freda McGregor, owner of the copyright to the works of Harold and Alida Monro, for her warm encouragement and help; to Ruth Tomalin, who would have written a biography of the Monros years ago had circumstances allowed, and who has most generously given me full use of her research notes; and to Joy Grant, author of the first ± and until now the only ± book on Monro. Without Dr Grant's Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop, and Howard Woolmer's splendid bibliographies of the Bookshop and the Samurai Press, the present book could hardly have been written. I am grateful to a number of people who have talked to me about the past: Edward Carew-Shaw, James Hepburn and Mrs Nicolette Gray remembered Harold; Ruth Tomalin, Anthony Luttrell, Pamela Travers and Samuel Hynes told me stories of Alida; Fred Urquhart wrote to me about Nigel Monro; and Jill White showed me the albums of photographs and press cuttings kept by her grandparents, Sir Daniel and Lady Gooch, Harold's brother-in-law and sister. Dianora del Re has written to me about her father, Arundel del Re, as has his former colleague, Ian Gordon. The late Patric Dickinson invited me down to Rye in 1990 when he heard I was working on Monro, and gave me a large box of material, collected long before when he had thought of writing a biography himself; the box proved to contain many treasures, including one of Monro's original diaries and hundreds of typed copies of manuscripts, made by Ruth Tomalin soon after Alida's death. Donald Gallup has generously lent me copies of letters from T. S. Eliot and others. Adrian Goodman, equally generously, has supplied me with transcripts of passages about Alida from Ottoline Morrell's journals. Penelope Fitzgerald helped me to begin my enquiries, and I am grateful for her work on Charlotte Mew and the Bookshop. Sarah Holmes kindly shared her knowledge of Alida with me. Acknowledgements to those who have given me information about the Monro family and the history of The Poetry Review are made in the Appendices. Harald Szeemann, Frau Jacob Flach, Heiner Hesse and Martin Green have told me much about Monte Verita. F. T. Prince, C. M. Woolgar (Southampton University Library) and William Mostyn-Owen did their best to further a vain search for Wyndham Lewis's portrait, or portraits, of Monro. I am also grateful to A. E. Money (Archivist, Radley College) for allowing me to see the records of Monro's school career; NicoloÂ Capponi for talking to me about the British in Florence (à sunny place for shady people'); Robin Harrison (Old Eastbournian x 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Acknowledgements

Association) and Yvonne Abbott (St Thomas Hospital) for tracking down records of Nigel Monro; and Jo Currie (Edinburgh University Library) and Lt.Col. Angus Fairrie (Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders) for doing the same for Basil Watt. The late Martin Taylor (Imperial War Museum) helped me on many details with his unfailing accuracy and shrewdness. My thanks are due to many people who have answered letters and provided information, including Stephen Banfield, Lorna Beckett, John Bell, Fr. Jerome Bertram, Claire Blunden, Jeff Cooper, Timothy d'Arch Smith, Lucy Forbes, Lord Horder, Denise Hooker, Peter Jolliffe, James King, Larry Mitchell, Peter Parker, Paula Quirk, Peter Redshaw, Anthony Rota, Miranda Seymour, George Sims, David Wilkinson, Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Caroline Zilboorg. I am grateful to numerous librarians and archivists, including Paul C. Allen (Beinecke Library, Yale); Melanie Aspey (News International); Kathryn L. Beam and her colleagues at the Special Collections Library, University of Michigan; Robert J. Bertholf (SUNY, Buffalo); Sally Brown and her colleagues at the British Library Manuscript Students' Room; Lauren Bufferd (Chicago Public Library); Anthony Burton (Bethnal Green Museum); Anne Caiger and her colleagues at the University Research Library, UCLA; Simon Cottrell (Cecil Houses); Jane Dansie, Jane T. Smith and others (Essex County Council Archives); Geoffrey Davenport (Royal College of Physicians); Dr E. Davy (Clinique La LignieÁre); Cynthia Farar and her colleagues at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Paul F. Gehl (Newberry Library, Chicago); Howard Gerwing (University of Victoria, B.C.); Valerie Helson (National Library of Australia); Guy Holborn (Lincoln's Inn); Sidney Huttner (McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa); Peter Jones (King's College, Cambridge); Marianna Moore (Fermanagh Divisional Library); Anne Neary and Alison Sproston (Caius College, Cambridge); Mark Nicholls (Cambridge University Library); Amy Rachlin (Institution of Civil Engineers); Gene K. Rinkel (University Library, University of Illinois); Patricia Schute (Royal Society of Literature); Deborah Sugg (Victoria and Albert Museum); and Therese Thom (Gray's Inn). I could not have done essential research for this book without two grants from the British Academy, enabling me to work in Los Angeles, Michigan, New York and London. I am also most grateful to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, for an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. Copyright material is quoted by permission of Freda McGregor (Harold and Alida Monro), Jeff Cooper (Lascelles Abercrombie), the Rupert Brooke Trustees, the University of Michigan (Van Volkenburg-Browne papers, Special Collections Library: Maurice Browne letters and Plates 5, 8, 9), Dianora del Re (Arundel del Re), Michael Gibson (Wilfrid Gibson), Jennifer Gosse (Sir Edmund Gosse) and the Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Acknowledgements xi

Library, UCLA. Quotations from unpublished letters by Ezra Pound: copyright # 2000 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Illustrations are reproduced by permission of the British Library (Plates 1, 10, 15, 25, 26, 30, 39, 40, all from Add. MS 57768, and 6, 7); Harald Szeemann (Plates 11±13); the National Portrait Gallery, London (Plates 18, 23); Essex Record Office (Plates 3, 37); Birmingham Libraries and the Sir Barry Jackson Trust (Plate 27); Margaret Hepburn (Plate 32); Caius College, Cambridge (Plate 4); Cecil Houses (Plate 38); the University of Edinburgh (Plate 21); and the Tate Gallery, London (two engravings by Paul Nash). Photographs from The Bookman (Per 25805 c.2) supplied by the Bodleian Library. Every effort has been made to trace the owner and whereabouts of Arthur Sabin's unpublished autobiography, `Pilgrimage', without success. I have quoted from transcripts made from it years ago by Ruth Tomalin. My apologies go to anyone inadvertently omitted from the preceding lists. I owe special thanks to Tom Coulthard, Richard Cox, Charles Heventhal, Douglas Kerr, James McLaverty and Ruth Tomalin, who have read all or part of my typescript and suggested many improvements.



xii Acknowledgements

Introduction

Devonshire Street (not yet renamed Boswell Street), 1912±19261. The oldest part of Bloomsbury, early eighteenth-century but no longer fashionable, the plain Queen Anne houses converted into cheap shops, lodgings and workshops, where tailors, gold-beaters and coffin-makers labour long hours to keep alive. Women stand in doorways, grubby children play in the gutters, and a reek of frying onions advertises the so-called `dining-rooms' halfway up the street. But one house is unlike all the others: 35 Devonshire Street is an outpost of Utopia. The hanging sign shows a torch flaming in a night sky, the pedimented front gleams with fresh paint, and the window boxes are bright with flowers. Bold lettering announces THE POETRY BOOKSHOP. The local tradesmen have for years sold chickens, cabbages, rope, saddles, violins, stained glass, guns and gold leaf, but never poetry. Now the oddest people come to buy it. The children shriek `Buffalo Bill' at Rupert Brooke in his wide-brimmed hat, or hurl insults and worse at Osbert Sitwell, elegant in bowler and canary-yellow waistcoat; the women gape speechless at Lady Ottoline Morrell, dressed, as Osbert once described her, in a masterly combination of early Russian ballet and late Bank Holiday. All sorts of people come to the shop in Devonshire Street: readers from the British Museum; teachers, soldiers, clerks; large Amy Lowell and larger Chesterton; Edith Sitwell like an exotic bird; Aleister Crowley, cloaked and sinister; Robert Bridges the Poet Laureate, or old Edward Carpenter, bearded like prophets; W. B. Yeats in search of the latest publications; Wyndham Lewis the Vorticist, Christopher Nevinson the Futurist, Paul Nash, Jacob Epstein; Richard Aldington and Frank Flint; Arnold Bennett, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster; Wilfred Owen in his new uniform; Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas; civil servants, librarians, actors, society ladies; W. H. Davies the SuperTramp, stumping along on his wooden leg; Australians, Japanese, French, Italians; young Americans, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Ezra Pound with his mane of red hair; and sometimes, rare but welcome, a local urchin asking for à penn'urth of poitry'. 1 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Harold Monro 1879±1932


2 Harold Monro

The Poetry Bookshop, 35 Devonshire Street: drawing by Charles Ginner (The Chapbook, Oct. 1925)


On a Wednesday evening in summer, when the windows of the panelled drawing room above the shop are open and literary London crowds in for yet another party, the street hears alien voices: the Staffordshire accent of T. E. Hulme, the falsetto of Eddie Marsh, the boom of big Anna Wickham, the level, still faintly American tones of T. S. Eliot, or the gentlemanly tenor of the host, Harold Monro. The Poetry House and its many activities are Monro's creation. At first glance, surprisingly, he looks like a Guards Officer, tall and straightbacked, with sleek, almost black hair and moustache, and red velvet smokingjacket. A dejected Guards officer, according to John Drinkwater. The sadness in Monro's eyes is never contradicted by his frequent, kindly smile; even in the thick of a party he seems alone, although his current chief lieutenant hovers nearby. There is always a lieutenant: fresh-faced Alec Waugh; Basil Watt the actor; or a romantic Irish-Italian with the name (if such it can be called, as a lady novelist once crushingly remarked) of Arundel del Re. Or there is a young woman, cool and beautiful, whom Monro introduces as Alida Klemantaski, without making the slightest acknowledgement that she is in fact his second wife. Afterwards, when the guests have gone and Alida has returned to her flat, where dogs and a cat are often her only companions, a gleam of light from beneath a blind shows that Monro is still up, trying to finish his endless, unfinishable epic about the death of God. Later still, the silence of the street is broken by knocking at the shop door. Gavin, Ronald, Red Mudie, Boswell Gary, no matter who, are calling him to another world, the sleepless, hidden London of all-night clubs, Turkish Baths, and strange meetings with young men in gaslit alleys. Before dawn or maybe later, with the pavement heaving under his feet, he will stagger home, perhaps bringing a youth in the hope that here at last is the perfect, long-sought companion for mind and body. In due course Alida will come to open the shop, explaining to customers that the proprietor always rises late. No-one did more than Harold Monro for the development of twentieth-century poetry, yet his reward has been near-oblivion. Studies of modern literature often say merely that he was a minor Georgian who failed to appreciate Eliot, unjust but routine comments which reveal more about their authors' `research' than about Monro himself. When he is given credit, it is usually for the Bookshop, which he founded in 1912 and ran for twenty years, first in Devonshire Street and later, from 1926, in Great Russell Street. But he was much more than just a bookseller, and the Bookshop much more than just a shop. All his achievements were based on socialist, futuristic ideals which he had explored during years of enquiry and experiment before he settled in London; all of them, too, were expressions of his own tormented personality. He was a poet, awkward and original, and a publisher, and founder-editor of three leading 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Introduction 3

periodicals; his Poetry House, as he sometimes called it, was a kind of mission station, dedicated to the making, reading and propagation of poetry, not just for poetry's sake, but for the sake of humanity's future. Extraordinary though he was ± and many of his acquaintances recorded that he was unlike anyone else they ever knew ± Monro belonged to his time. He was brought up as an earnest Victorian. When the Victorian era ended, just as he was about to leave university, he shared the hope of many young people that society could be radically changed. With his friend Maurice Browne he decided to become a poet of the new age, a Swinburnian singer before sunrise, heralding the dawn. They sought leadership from H. G. Wells, tried to launch his modern Utopia and in their chaotic, often comical lives felt the convulsion of one century wrenching itself free from another. When domestic crises ended these first efforts, Monro walked to Italy in search of the earthly paradise, finding it briefly with Arundel at the Mountain of Truth. Few British writers of his generation can have gained such extensive first-hand knowledge of the latest continental ideas about physical and mental health and what are now called alternative lifestyles. His manifesto, Before Dawn (1911), is one of the first collections of poems that can be described as `modern'. He proclaimed the gospel of sexual fulfilment before D. H. Lawrence did and he was an early `Green', a Nietzschean, a socialist of a kind, and an apostle of personal and artistic freedom. Above all he believed in `the great wonderful future', which would have to be shaped by poets, Shelley's unacknowledged legislators of the world; so his aim was to find and unite the poets and take their work to the people. He began by starting a periodical in January 1912. The Poetry Review, the first magazine of its period to be devoted entirely to the subject of poetry, had no rivals until his near-namesake Harriet Monroe founded Poetry in Chicago later in the same year. The success of the Review led him to establish a base for it, a centre where poets could meet each other and their public and where he could publish and sell their work. He was strictly neutral, favouring no clique or theory, and he would accept no bribes, unlike many editors, so he often had to use his own money to keep his enterprises going. The first result of his deciding to open the Bookshop was that Marsh and Brooke suggested he should bring out an anthology of the best new verse by the younger poets. Although neither the anthology, Georgian Poetry, nor notions of a Georgian `movement' could have come into being without Monro, it was never his intention, nor Marsh's, to found a school. He was delighted by the anthology's success, but worried when people began to talk of the Bookshop as a Georgian citadel. Just as he had been the first to name the new poets `Georgian', so he was the first to use the term disparagingly. Even so, critics have never tired of repeating the old myth about the shop and Georgians. A biography of Hulme published in 1960, for instance, describes the Bookshop (àt 50 Devonshire 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


4 Harold Monro

Place') as `the headquarters of the whole Georgian movement'. A more recent book on Pound refers to `John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, Edmund Blunden, and Lascelles Abercrombie, and the other Georgians who gathered at Harold Monro's Soho Bookshop'. The truth is that the only group to convene regularly at the Bookshop ± which was not, of course, in Soho ± was Eliot's Criterion Club. Except for a few meetings of the Rupert Brooke Memorial Committee in 1930, the Georgians never gathered there, while Masefield and Blunden seem to have been among the very few poets of the period who rarely if ever visited the shop. Modernists such as Eliot, Flint and Aldington were much closer to Monro than any Georgians were. He was careful to balance the first Georgian Poetry by publishing Pound's rival anthology, Des Imagistes, and he would have added an anthology of Futurist poetry if war had not intervened. The First World War destroyed Monro's health and hopes. Alida could not save him, but she saved the shop, and he married her in 1920, out of gratitude perhaps, although he hated himself for betraying his own sexuality and giving in to the respectabilities he had rejected years before. In a cruel pattern of reversal the younger poets overtook and forgot him, poetry retreated from the people to the study, and the green landscape of the future became the waste land of the present. He supplied details for Eliot's poem and gave what may well have been the first public reading of it; after all, he knew the grimy streets and pubs of the unreal city far better than Eliot ever did. Harold Monro fought a long, brave battle against his own failings, and in doing so gave great service to many writers. He wanted to be remembered above all as a poet, and he was indeed one of the first authentic poets of the twentieth century, giving voice to its hopes and despairs. He kept pace with the age, constantly improving and modernising his work; as Eliot said, the best of his poetry gives him a place second only to Yeats in the older generation. His friend, Frank Flint, said of him in 1933 that his life was one of `noble intentions and very considerable achievement. He should be remembered with honour.'



Introduction 5

1

I can imagine, Stretching my thought Backward and backward, my fathers, their fathers, and theirs, And the one long Faithful desire Driving through ages to me who am breathing and here. (Èarthliness') Harold Monro had `this ghastly Victorian mother', Alida Klemantaski remembered with characteristic lack of sympathy, `like four funerals all at once'. Sophia Monro ± handsome, heavy-featured, pious, deeply conservative, worried about everything ± practised melancholy almost as an art, and with good reason. Her husband Edward had been a compulsive gambler, bankrupting himself several times before dying of consumption on the Riviera at the age of 41, leaving her with three children and very little money. There were many other disasters. Ì don't know why I'm laughing', she would say in her rare moments of cheerfulness, and she would turn the conversation back to what she called `My Griefs'.1 Like many Victorians she had a taste for deathbed scenes; 10-year-old Harold was no doubt required to be present in 1889 to hear his father's last farewell. The dying Edward perhaps felt more anxiety for Harold than for the other two children. The eldest, May, was already vivacious and beautiful at 15 and sure to marry well. Arthur, two years her junior, had just started as a boarder at Radley, where the family had strong connections. Harold would also go to Radley in due course, but it was hard to imagine him doing well there. A strange, difficult, intensely serious little boy, sometimes lazy, sometimes bewilderingly energetic, prone to nightmares and daydreaming, he had inherited his mother's moodiness and sharp temper. She adored him and kept him close to 6 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Inheritance

her. Edward at least had the comfort of knowing that mother and children were devoted to one another, and that as he was her first cousin as well as her husband there was an army of relations who would give help if needed. Not all the help was kindly. The three children came under the protection of Edward's bullying elder brother Russell, the head of the family and the only Monro to qualify as `county'. Russell was married to a baronet's daughter and lived at Somerby Hall (Plate 2), near Oakham, where he rode to hounds and tyrannised the villagers. Having no children of his own he expected his nephews to live up to their ancient and honourable name, but he thought Harold a poor specimen; the boy lacked grit, he said, and would never achieve anything. Harold endured such comments in passive silence, secretly resolving to become prime minister. Aunt Emily said he was a very well-behaved boy. Monros and Munros, however they spell themselves, are members of the ancient Clan Munro, which has legendary origins in Fermanagh and historical ones in Scotland. Harold's branch of the clan, the Monros of Fyrish,* settled in London in the seventeenth century, keeping their High Church beliefs and still regarding themselves as Scots. Even he, born into the seventh generation south of the border, never thought of himself as English, and reminiscences of him often mention his `Scottish' characteristics: a long, lean body, dark hair, Celtic pessimism, a fierce temper, and an inbred austerity at war with a fondness for socialising and strong drink. Whether or not any of that was due to his northern blood, he certainly resembled his London-based ancestors in looks, temperament and high principles. If they gave him some of his failings, they also set precedents for his success, as well as burdening him with a sense of social obligation. London Monros had always been at the very top of the professional classes, mostly in the law, medicine and the church. One was Clerk to the House of Lords and another was Dean of Westminster during Harold's lifetime. Five in a row, from father to son, had been eminent specialists in the treatment of the insane; one of these doctors had bought a lucrative private asylum, Brooke House in Hackney, in the eighteenth century, leaving the profits to his descendants, so there was money in the family. Harold inherited about a thousand pounds a year, more than enough to live on until the inflation of the 1920s, but with the money came the duty to be a worthy member of the Fyrish line. When he decided to use some of his Brooke House income to set up the Poetry Bookshop in 1912, he was following in a family tradition. His grandfather, Dr Henry Monro, had founded a refuge for the homeless (it still survives in Soho Square). One of Henry's brothers had founded a school, and another a * For a more detailed account of Harold's family, see Appendix A. He is one of ten Monros of Fyrish to merit entries in the Dictionary of National Biography.



Inheritance 7

convalescent home. Dr Thomas Monro, Henry's grandfather, is still well known to art historians as the patron of Turner; Thomas's house in the Adelphi was an informal academy where artists could gather for supper, work and discussion. Harold's vision for the Bookshop was typical of Monro establishments in being both practical and idealistic: just as his great-great-grandfather had provided a London haven for artists, so he would open a Poetry House for poets and their readers. There was another legacy though: Monros seemed to suffer from a tendency to addiction, usually to alcohol, the more imaginative members of the clan being especially vulnerable. Theodore Russell Monro ± who was Sophia's half-brother, her mother having first married a Monro ± wrote romantic novels, developed a habit of driving `round Dawlish in a four-wheeler' hopelessly drunk and refusing to stop, and died at 48, becoming another of his half-sister's Griefs.2 The Reverend Edward Monro, one of Harold's great-uncles, a poet, story-writer and celebrated preacher, needed quantities of brandy before ascending the pulpit. He, too, died prematurely. Harold always believed his own weakness for alcohol was hereditary. Self-discipline and purposeful use of time seemed the best cure. Great-Uncle Edward wrote an epic in which the hero, a country parson, follows a regime of plain living and hard work, making it a first duty To conquer self; then, standing with firm foot Upon that vantage ground, to strive for men In the stern war of souls.3 The Poetry Bookshop, with its mission of winning souls for poetry, was not simply altruistic; it was part of its founder's strategy for conquering self. Harold would have been brought up to be very conscious of his large family and its complicated interrelationships. His parents had the same maternal grandfather, Sir William Russell (the Monros took to christening their eldest sons Russell in commemoration of this connection with a baronet). Sir William's two daughters had married two Monro brothers; Jane married Henry and they produced ten children, of whom Harold's father Edward, born in 1848, was the second; Emma married Theodore, who died scarcely a year later, leaving a son, the future novelist and drunkard. Emma then married a senior railway engineer, Peter Margary, and had another child, Sophia, Harold's mother, who was born in 1849 at Dawlish, where the spectacular railway line along the seafront was being built under Margary's direction. Edward seems to have been a black sheep. He went to Radley, where he did less well than his elder brother, Russell, leaving myteriously at the age of 17 in 1865. He is next heard of in 1871 as a civil engineer, a most unusual profession for a Monro, working in Budapest for the British-owned Neuchatel Asphalt 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


8 Harold Monro

Company. He had probably got his job through Margary and Margary's distinguished colleague, Sir Daniel Gooch, who had become a family friend. Gooch was one of the great engineers of the Victorian age, famous for many achievements, one of which, laying the first transatlantic cable, had earned him his baronetcy. With such backing and with a job in a new and booming industry, Edward seemed to have a bright future. Whatever doubts the family may have had about him were now set aside. He married Sophia in 1872 and took her to Budapest, where she acquired her first Grief, a son who died within a year. May was born in 1874 and Arthur Russell two years later; then Edward was transferred to Belgium. Harold Edward Monro was born at 137 ChausseÂe de Charleroi, St Gilles, Brussels on 14 March 1879. Little is recorded about his childhood. He went to school in Brussels, becoming bilingual in French and English. His father was away for long periods in Spain and South America. The only surviving photograph (Plate 1) of Edward and Sophia with their three children bears the name of a studio in Ventnor, Isle of Wight; they must have been staying with Edward's parents, who had a nine-bedroomed villa in nearby Bonchurch as well as a town house in Cavendish Square. Orchardleigh was a delightful place for holidays, with its long verandah and lush romantic garden above the beach, and in summer it must have swarmed with Harold's thirty or more first cousins. He may have hated the place all the same; he later confessed to a childhood terror of the sea's emptiness and clawing waves. After Edward's death in 1889 Sophia brought her children back to England and moved about uneasily from one family house to another, probably economising in the wake of her husband's extravagance. Harold attended schools in Wells, Bromley, Plymouth, Dawlish and London, all in the space of three years. His mother's Griefs continued. Her half-brother died in 1891, and her mother followed in 1892. Worse still, her eldest son, Arthur, was developing signs of the tuberculosis that had killed his father, and in the summer of 1892 he had to be taken away from Radley, a term before Harold was due to start there. So Harold went to public school that autumn without the reassuring presence of his brother, and with the dread of bad news from home added to the usual miseries of being a new boy. In the following February he was called back to London, where Arthur died on the 10th, aged 17. Harold never quite recovered from this loss. There is an impassioned lament in his 1910 diary for the childhood companion who might have been his lifelong friend. Fears of disease, dying and silence were always to haunt him, inspiring some of his best poems. His brother often returned in dreams: once, playing together on the beach, the two boys came across the grave of Jesus, but when the corpse began groping its way out Harold shouted himself awake. That was at least thirty years after Arthur's death. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Inheritance 9

10 Harold Monro

Did he see us round his bedside? As we watched with tender care, Could he see our sorrowing faces? Could he feel us stroke his hair? . . . The answer, needless to say, is yes, and the poem concludes that the dead boy rests with his earthly father in heaven. Sophia added a note: Ìn Memoriam A. R. M./Friday Feb 10th 1893/Written the same day/by his brother Harold'.4 Harold's career at St Peter's College, Radley, near Oxford, was undistinguished and probably not very happy, although the school was less harsh than most. Radley aimed to be as much like an Oxford college as possible, Christian (High Church) and civilised, with a `Warden', `dons', and `Social Tutors' (housemasters). Harold was the fifth Monro to attend the school, Warden Thompson was an old friend of the family, and R. T. Raikes, a tireless champion of the college and ancestor of many Radleians, was an uncle. Another Raikes, T. D., one of the longest-serving and most energetic of the dons, was the obvious choice as Social Tutor for both Arthur and Harold. Despite these advantages Harold seems to have found Radley hard to cope with for a while after his brother's death; he completed the spring term of 1893, but was absent for the summer.5 Then, settling down, he coasted along for two years, relying on his fluency in French. He was a keen cricketer, like other Monros, and he took up rowing and boxing, perhaps to please Uncle Russell, who had excelled in both. Sometimes in the holidays he had to go to Somerby for à fortnight of scolding'. Late-Victorian Radley was less respectable than Russell probably imagined. The boys had picked up the fashionable creed of aestheticism; in chapel in 1896±7 they lingered over the last word in the hymn lines, `Forty days and forty nights/Thou wast fasting in the wild', a salute to Oscar Wilde, who was a prisoner not far away in Reading Gaol, a monument they eagerly watched out for when they passed it in the London train. According to the memoirs of Louis Wilkinson (`Louis Marlow'), who entered Radley a year before Harold left and later knew him well, the school's ethos was languidly aristocratic, and love affairs between boys were a constant topic of conversation, younger partners always being referred to as `she': `Do you think they have?' `But of course all College knows they have!' Òh, she was quite ready, but he shied at the last moment.' `Squishy funked it.' `They nearly got caught that time, though, didn't you hear?' . . . `How's 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Sophia sought comfort in religion, copying Victorian consolatory verses into an album and reading them aloud to her two surviving children. Among these poems is a piece entitled `Did he?', scarcely distinguishable from the rest:

Inheritance 11

When two offenders were caught, as occasionally happened, the older boy was instantly expelled and the younger one birched by the Warden. Warden Thompson, who loathed birching, must have dreaded such discoveries. On 23 June 1896 Harold was at Clewer, near Windsor, for the marriage of his sister May to Daniel `Curly' Gooch, grandson of the famous engineer and heir to the baronetcy. According to The Windsor Chronicle the church was `crowded with a brilliant assembly'. May arrived on the arm of Uncle Russell and was given away by Sophia, who was dressed in widow's black and mauve silk, `handsomely trimmed with beaded net and jet'. Fifty little girls, half in pale blue, half in rose colour and all in poke bonnets, threw rose petals over the couple at the church gate. Every house in the village bore flags and there were three triumphal arches, one of which bore the words `Gooch: Monro' and `God Bless the Happy Pair'. Among the many presents were two silver pepper boxes from the Warden of Radley. Acquiring a baronet as a brother-in-law must have improved Harold's social standing among his class-conscious fellow-pupils. He had begun to gain a few modest distinctions of his own, too. His academic record had begun to improve; he was in the choir, having developed a fine tenor voice; and he had managed to reach the boxing final. In June, quite unexpectedly and only as a result of injuries to two better players, he became wicket-keeper in the cricket eleven. In July he was awarded his second eleven colours and rowed for his house. And then, suddenly, his name vanishes from the records. The whole school knew what had happened. He had been caught in flagrante with a younger boy, and the Warden had been obliged to impose the usual penalties. Schools have ways of dealing with such scandals; the story was put about that Harold had been found to have a bottle of wine in his study. Long afterwards he was welcomed back to Radley on at least two occasions to read poems and be on display as à real poet'.7 The catastrophic ending of his school career shook him into some selfawareness, as well as strengthening a tendency towards guilty introspection. The wine-bottle legend may have been as useful at home as in the school, but Sophia saved him from having to face the family by taking him to France in the autumn of 1896, and it was there that he began to think of himself as a poet: Ì suddenly became conscious of myself as a solitary and wayward person,' he recalled later, ànd in the seclusion of my bedroom I wrote a dozen poems and the same number of stories, all about an individual too obviously myself and all of the crudest immaturity.'8 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Brenda?' `How's Brown minor?' `Have you had an affair with her?' `Hulloa, Castor, where's Pollux?' Àre they lovers? I'd give my ears to know!'6

He tried to keep up his studies, but stress eventually caught up with him, bringing him down with congestion of the lungs. Dreading another death Sophia rushed him to Cannes, where the climate which had failed to help her husband slowly brought her son back to health. Harold was in no hurry to recover from an illness which was the perfect escape from work and all reproaches. He read Childe Harold and Endymion, and `wrote a long poem in rhymed couplets called ``The Madonna'' ' which has fortunately not survived. Ì became morose and developed the surly attitude I have kept ever since towards people who interrupt me at ``work''.' His poetic beginnings were thoroughly Romantic, developing in solitude, sickness and guilt. He returned to England in 1897 to study with a tutor in Suffolk, where he read Milton and Tennyson, courted a local girl and wrote à Christmas play in verse', acting it with friends. One of the performers may have been his sister, who delighted in amateur theatricals. She was now Lady Gooch, her husband having just inherited the title and a large fortune. The Gooches were no doubt already keeping the sort of household they always enjoyed, where drink flowed freely and visitors were numerous. Harold got on well with his brother-in-law, a keen sportsman, but after a few days of hunting and socialising he would feel ill at ease amid the general lack of seriousness and would return to his books. By the autumn of 1898 he was ready to begin at Cambridge.



12 Harold Monro

2

It was a fatal trick to play upon him. With lusty life all pointing to one aim, And his whole body watchful: She at the moment came. (`Holy Matrimony') Caius College, Cambridge, October 1898. Dressed like the others in unflattering cap and absurd stiff collar, Harold gazes from the freshmen's photograph with only a hint of a smile (Plate 4). The face is almost adult, with its dark eyes, strong nose and incipient moustache, but the character behind it seems still unformed. His new friends might have had difficulty guessing what sort of man he would prove to be, although they probably soon discovered his odd combination of uncertainty and obstinacy, good nature and sudden fury, reticence and occasional appalling tactlessness. The next three years were to decide his future. There were several options. The family had decided he should read French and German and then become a lawyer, although he still thought of going into politics, if only to spite his uncle. With both those possibilities in mind, he enrolled as a member of Lincoln's Inn during his first term at Caius and joined the college debating society. Another option was to start destroying himself with alcohol and gambling. His drinking probably began at Cambridge, and there is a legend that he spent much of his time and money there on horseracing, losing heavily until he invented a `system', whereupon a bookie cheated him out of his winnings and his mother had to pay his debts. That story has to be treated with caution, because there is a similar, better documented one about his Cambridge friend Maurice Browne, but Maurice himself remembered that Harold's rooms `savoured chiefly of roulette, horses and prize-poems'.1 The poems would have been secret until Harold's third year, when Maurice discovered him. Without Maurice he probably would have become a lawyer like 13 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Cambridge 1898±1902

many other Monros; instead he became a poet, but an unusually practical, almost legalistic one, eventually running what amounted to a poetry office and advising clients. He was never the sort of person to reject all options but one. He maintained his Lincoln's Inn membership all his life, often using his knowledge of the law and for a while making a living out of it. The dishonest bookie, if he existed, may have cured him of betting, but the gaming table and race track never quite lost their charm, and drink increased its hold. The family must have put him down for Caius, languages and the law because a senior cousin, Charles Monro, an eminent lawyer and linguist, had been a fellow of the college for many years.* Charles's greatest enthusiasm was for the eight languages in which he was fluent, but he was also a barrister of Lincoln's Inn and an expert on Roman law and the laws of real property (one of Harold's books was to be entitled Real Property). Like Harold in later years he was a curiously restless man, always on the move, travelling and walking in Europe where he was said ± possibly in a euphemism ± to have had a proteÂgeÂ in every town. He seems to have encouraged his young relative, who rewarded him by reading masses of French and German poetry. Much of that reading was done in the second half of 1900, when Harold spent a term in Germany, probably in the region of the Harz mountains, territory familiar to Goethe, Heine and Wordsworth. He took up Charles's custom of going for long walks, pacing the quiet roads alone. But Harold was not clever or disciplined enough to be a scholar like his cousin. Undergraduate Cambridge took little interest in scholarship anyway, preferring to be philistine and patriotic. A Union debate in Harold's first term expressed little confidence in current proposals for disarmament, some speakers arguing that war was necessary for the strengthening of character and the survival of the fittest. Harold joined the Volunteers. When the South African war proved tougher than expected, there was much talk of `manliness'. Lord Kitchener came to receive an honorary degree and was noisily elected a member of the Union, the evening's festivities turning into a near-riot when his admirers ripped shutters off shop-fronts to make a huge bonfire in the market place. Harold may not have joined in, but outwardly he was a `Blood' with the rest, hunting, rowing, drinking and gambling. Occasionally he performed in comic operas, some of them written by himself.2 His most serious public activity was debating. He was the first to speak from the floor in the Caius freshmen's debate for his year, and later he was `clear and pointed' as opposer of the motion `that Optimism is preferable to Pessimism'. * By the time of his death in 1908, Charles Monro was the last survivor of three bachelor brothers. He left his money, some of it presumably originating from Brooke House, to the college, where a Latin inscription and the Clan Munro eagle above the library fireplace still record his benefaction. He was an outstanding long-jumper; Cambridge used to talk of `Monro's Leap', a corner in the Backs where he had jumped from Trinity into St John's Wilderness, clearing a wide ditch and a fence without the least sign of nerves.



14 Harold Monro

In 1900 he tackled what was to be one of the major political issues of the next fourteen years, proposing that the army was ìnsufficient for the needs of the country': if British soldiers ever had to face the huge conscripted armies of the Continent, they would have to make up in courage what they lacked in numbers, even though `pluck only led to a useless loss of life'. The motion was carried. 1901 was a year of change. In January the tolling bells of the university church announced to Cambridge that Queen Victoria was dead, and in Peterhouse chapel that evening the Dead March was followed instantly by the national anthem, like eating marmalade and sardines together off the same plate as someone said to Maurice Browne.3 It was all theatre to Maurice, like everything else. A short, slight figure, youthful almost to girlishness, with curly hair, a pale, tense face and compelling eyes, he saw and lived life as drama (Plate 5). At some point in 1901 he met Harold, and Harold's life was never to be the same again. A new age was beginning, and Maurice wanted to be its poet. He explained that the great prophet was Darwin, who had proved that humanity was certain to evolve towards a higher reality without the help of a personal god. Harold had argued for pessimism, but his new friend set him on fire. He took his exams in the summer with his mind elsewhere, failing the German oral and getting only a third in the rest. Regulations required him to keep one more term in compensation for the one he had spent abroad, so he devoted most of it to becoming a poet with Maurice. Years later Alida told him she wished he had never met the `neurotic decadent' Brownes; she thought they had devoured him and destroyed his mind. They were certainly neurotic, with a history of insanity and suicide through several generations.4 Maurice's father, headmaster of Ipswich Grammar School, had killed himself horribly with a razor in front of the mirror. Mrs Browne ± `Marsie' to her four children ± seems to have been sane enough, but she was an indulgent mother; Maurice, the eldest, could always win her round with displays of wild affection or, if necessary, by threatening madness. After her husband's death Marsie had moved to Eastbourne and opened a girls' school. Maurice went to Eastbourne College, where he did well, winning a scholarship to Peterhouse, but just as he was about to become head boy he enlisted in the ranks for South Africa, eager to defend the cause of empire. His military career was inglorious. Storms at sea left the ship foul with vomit, and before he could get down the gangplank afterwards he was kicked by a horse, so his first experiences of war were the appalling sights and sounds of a casualty hospital. He never got near the front. After a few months a kindly officer sent him home. Maurice arrived at Cambridge in October 1900, full of scorn for war and imperialism. His South African adventure, which he always kept secret, had 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Cambridge 1898±1902 15

been typical of him: driven by wild impulses he would hurl himself into some harebrained scheme, then scramble out of it when things went badly, blaming everyone but himself and leaving someone else to sort out the mess. Always short of money he would borrow recklessly from friends, assuring them he was going to make their fortunes; when he lost every penny, he would be bitterly reproachful if they refused to lend him more. He was à born gambler with life', ruthless and excitable to the point of frenzy, according to Louis Wilkinson, but no one could resent him.5 Delighting to gather fellow-enthusiasts round him, he could make them feel capable of things they had thought impossible. Perhaps he and Harold met at a Union debate in February 1901, when the proposer, Leonard Pass, attacked the feebleness of modern verse, and the opposer praised the work of Stephen Phillips, widely thought to be the best hope for modern poetry. What was probably Harold's first published poem appeared in The Caian a few weeks later, and Maurice's appeared in The Granta.6 Neither piece showed any promise, but Maurice was convinced he could become a great poet and his new friend could be greater still. Harold, steadier and two years older, often advised prudence, yet he was driven onwards by his admirer's passion. Maurice says in his autobiography that they became `closer than brothers'. He also says he himself adopted a homosexual `pose' for most of his time at Cambridge, having been scared off women by a bout of venereal disease caught from a backstreet prostitute. The burning declarations of love in his early letters to Harold are by no means a pose, but they do not imply physical contact. There is a comparable, contemporary relationship in E. M. Forster's appropriately-named novel, Maurice: two undergraduates in an all-male world, deeply in love yet never seeking more than caresses or an occasional kiss.* Unlike Forster's characters, though, Maurice Browne was friendly with student Aesthetes, among whom a gay pose was fashionable, regardless of actual orientation; and he had literary interests in common with Harold, so that love could be diverted into excitement about poetry. It was not difficult to avoid the full truth, especially if one preferred not to know it. The `two fledgeling poets soaring rapturously from peak to peak' talked for hours together, as Maurice remembered, he small and fiery, his voice quivering with feeling, and Harold `tall dark dour', his `large brown eyes' blazing when he found a poem of Maurice's to rejoice over. Harold bought a portrait of Keats which he kept in front of his desk for the rest of his life, and Maurice worshipped before a bronze bust of Dante.7 Keeping watch from their shelves, as from those of T. S. Eliot's Cousin Nancy, were Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo * Maurice and Harold often seem like young men in a Forster story, with their faith in personal relationships and sincerity and their dreams of Italy as a land of freedom and self-discovery. Forster, two months older than Harold, started at Cambridge a year ahead of him but left only a term before he did.



16 Harold Monro

Emerson, `guardians of the faith'. The two aspirants liked to quote Arnold's phrase `high seriousness' and his belief that educated men should aim to `see life steadily, and see it whole'. Poetry should answer the question, `How to live?' They read in Emerson that `the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet', and they were impressed by his insistence on individual freedom and authority: `to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, ± that is genius'. By the autumn of 1901 Maurice had brought in two friends, Leonard Pass and Guy Pocock, forming a quartet who met regularly to discuss one another's work. In November Harold read a paper on Swinburne to the Caius Science and Art Society.8 It was a milestone in his poetic career, in effect his first manifesto, prophetic of his life and writing. Though as uncomfortable about Swinburne's àbject sensuousness' as he was to be about his own, he recognised that many of the poems described the strange mixture of love and lust in `the frail fabric of man's nature'. Yet Swinburne had declared that man could be `the master of things', now that the tyranny of the gods was almost at an end. Harold was cautious in discussing this dangerous message, but he did not conceal his interest. He already knew enough about human frailty to see the attraction of Swinburne's faith in the future. He praised the championing of freedom in Songs Before Sunrise. Freedom was to be his own most positive theme: freedom from God, from political oppression, from social, sexual and literary convention. His first really original book was to be called Before Dawn, a title borrowed from the Songs. He wrote in his diary some years later that he wanted to become the Swinburne of his generation. The Swinburne paper was his farewell to Cambridge. In December he took his degree and left for London. His mother had recently ended years of moving from one London address to another by establishing herself at 43 Connaught Square, a quietly respectable corner not far from Marble Arch. He had his own sitting room downstairs and a bedroom upstairs, where the portrait of Keats was hung alongside a few sepia postcards of the Harz. Maurice soon came on a visit, telling him later that the downstairs room expressed its occupant so powerfully that èverything is you . . . you and you and you'. Sophia was away, no doubt wintering on the Riviera as she always liked to do. Maurice's mother went abroad later that winter too, taking him with her to Italy, where his first sight of Florence sent him into raptures and made him long to live there with Harold. Maurice affected to be desperately lonely when he returned to Cambridge, but actually he had many friends. He liked to give candlelit dinners in his rooms, followed by merciless games of poker, when he would play with increasing excitement until he lost, relieving his feelings by hurling a soda-water siphon down the stone stairs. Ralph Straus, gourmet and bookman, was often there with the latest news of his novel, which publishers kept rejecting. Its 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



implicitly homosexual hero (Straus made little secret of his own orientation) belonged to a Cambridge dining society called The Openhearts, a group of dilettantes and sceptics based on Maurice's circle9 (in real life they called themselves The Querists, the pun no doubt being intentional). Louis Wilkinson, tall and willowy, with his celebrated greenish-bronze hair, was another regular guest; he had come to Cambridge by way of Radley and Oxford, Oxford having sent him down for blasphemy, an offence Cambridge had been pleased to overlook. Sometimes Harold was there too, up from London for the weekend. He would linger until everyone had gone, and then he and Maurice would read poems for hours together until dawn broke over the Peterhouse deer park. In the spring of 1902 Maurice thought he saw an opportunity to make the friendship closer still. Harold had by then started as a student at Lincoln's Inn; he was finding law and London tedious, despite dances and theatres. Keen to get back to poetry and friendship, he proposed a walking tour in the Harz. Maurice's sister Dorothy happened to be `finishing' her education in Germany, so it was easy for her brother to suggest she should join the walk. He did not reflect too long on the suitability of the match he hoped for, putting out of his mind the thought that Dorothy had his temper without his intellectual enthusiasms. Once when they were children she had tried to break his head with a poker. She was a pretty brunette, sweetly feminine and affectionate, but strongwilled, a keen games player and inclined to be bohemian. Fatherless and spoiled, she wanted a thoroughly masculine man who would be her protector and slave. The three met in Bremen on 3 April and went on into an enchanted landscape, walking some twenty miles a day with Heine's Harzreise as guide. Whenever possible Maurice let his friend linger behind with Dorothy. Harold had probably never met a girl so free from conventional attitudes. He could imagine how she might become a fit mate for a poet, with a little training. Excited, he fooled about with untypical levity, trying to drop a centipede down Maurice's neck or going to sleep in the snow. Dorothy grew radiant. By the time they reached Treseburg she and Harold were in love, or thought they were. Maurice's plot had succeeded ± and the plotter was astonished to find himself in agonies of jealousy. Soon Maurice had to dine at Connaught Square to meet Sophia, whom he thought formidable but polite, and Harold nervously accepted an invitation to visit Eastbourne. Sophia seems to have been appalled by the Brownes: when her son announced he was engaged, all she could say was, `God help you, my boy.'10 But Marsie Browne was understandably delighted: Dorothy would gain a secure income and a large step up the social ladder. Maurice began to realise he had brought about the opposite of the bond he had sought; his intimacy with Harold would have to end. He struggled to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


18 Harold Monro


Heaven knows where I arrived, some garden with lush bluebells and rank green grass: a red gold sunset and black water. . . . O Harold I dare not write ± I am mad, drunk, anything you will I could kill myself tonight as well as any other! . . . the realization suddenly flashed over me of what we were, what I was ± of our calling. Has it struck you ± do you know ± that we are sacrosanct, dedicated to God, whoever, whatever he may be, the God of truth and beauty. . . Oh! God only knows where we'll end, what we'll be, failures or successes, poets in reality as well as in theory ± what does it matter? We are sacred ± we must guard ourselves ± this feeling has come to us, we know not how and we have to foster it with all the care a mother could bestow on her first-born. Every day, every hour, every minute, we do not devote to it, is useless, and not only useless, but wasted, criminally wasted. Harold, am I going mad? or am I different from other men? dowered by God himself? with feelings other than the multitude's? Harold and Dorothy with Marsie as chaperone came up for May Week, and then Maurice fled in torment to the Lake District, where he found a cottage once occupied by De Quincey and worked feverishly on a long, muddled poem called `Zetetes', a Shelleyan allegory of a lonely poet wandering the world in search of peace. Harold returned to Germany that summer, writing from `the land of our happiness' that he was taking the waters at Bad Kissingen for gout (perhaps he was already worried about the effects of alcohol). In September he and Maurice took Dorothy to France. All three were agreed that they would devote their lives to poetry. No doubt influenced by Maurice's descriptions of writing in the Lake District, Harold dreamed of composing epics in some remote cottage, with a perfect companion who would share his vision and perhaps write poems of her own. Dorothy dreamed of having a virile, romantic poethusband who would buy her wonderful clothes and take her to parties. Maurice dreamed of living in Italy with Harold, preferably in a gypsy caravan. Harold was serious about the cottage. He had taken a Roman Law exam in May, gaining another third, and had done some useful work on his cousin's other subject, the laws of real property, but it was a boring business. He read Keats or Milton during lectures and dawdled home afterwards, composing poetry to himself, then sat up late trying to write it all down. Somehow he heard that a family friend, Anthony Maude, was looking for a land agent to collect rents on his large Irish estate near Enniskillen. There could be nowhere 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


prolong it: were they not bound to each other by poetry? The marriage was not to take place until late 1903, more than a year away, so there was still time. On the first summer evening of 1902 he wandered through the Backs at Cambridge:

more appropriate to go than County Fermanagh, legendary home of the Clan Munro. Harold withdrew from the law course, sent a card to Maurice with his future address and the message, `Law is over ± Thank God', and borrowed £150 from Sophia. By November he was settled in a tiny cottage on the shores of Lough Erne, with nothing between his door and the water's edge except a ruined castle. He had made his first bid for freedom.



20 Harold Monro

3

Young, young she was, And young was I, We cried: Love! Come! Love heard our cry. . . . I sit and faint Through year on year. Was it yesterday I thought her dear? (`Natural History') When Harold `fled the dingy haunts of frowning law/And disembarked on Erin's rugged shore'1 in the autumn of 1902, he told Maurice he intended to stay for about five years, time enough to become a poet. He would have over a year of the rural solitude prescribed by Romantic tradition, and after that there would be Dorothy to share life with him. His job required only a few hours' daily attendance in an office and probably some travelling round the farms and villages of the Maude estate. If he felt any qualms at collecting rents from the Irish tenants of an English landowner, he did not record them. The cottage, Crevenish, was in ideal hunting country, so he found a beautiful little mare and rode out twice a week. There was plenty of time to write. `London was all sour,' he told Maurice; `this has lots of sweet.' Crevenish had one other occupant, a burly, fair young man named Henry Bentinck, who was filling in a year between leaving Cambridge and joining the army. Tough and clean-living, he gave himself no airs, but he was a cousin of the Duke of Portland ± and of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was later to be a frequent visitor at the Poetry Bookshop. Unfortunately he had none of Lady Ottoline's enthusiasm for the arts; he had never been to a theatre, and his idea of a good read was a sixpenny novel. He thought the lake was nothing more 21 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Ireland 1902±6

than èxcellent fishing water' and the autumn woods `fine covert for pheasants'. He provided intellectual stimulus of a kind, nevertheless, because his life centred on a simple evangelical faith; he rose early to study his bible, and spoke of Christ as his daily friend. Harold was not convinced, but the long enquiry into religious belief which he was to pursue during the next few years perhaps grew from earnest conversations in the lamp-lit cottage. Harold returned to England for Christmas 1902, probably staying with the Brownes at Eastbourne. Dorothy was as keen as he was to use their one remaining year of freedom, but in her own way. She was a superb hockey-player. `For one season only,' said The Hockey Field ten months later, has this brilliant performer flashed comet-like across the hockey world. . . . Early last season Sussex hazarded the opinion that they had scored a useful recruit in the hitherto unknown Miss Browne. Not long afterwards the South made the same discovery, and before many weeks were over Miss Browne was playing inside right for England.2 Although she intended to sacrifice her hockey to Harold and his poetry as soon as she was married, her talent ± and his lack of interest in it ± showed how little they had in common. They began to have doubts, but Marsie would not hear of retreat: a baronet's brother-in-law with a private income was a prize her daughter could not afford to lose. Maurice noticed nothing except his own misery. Harold was trapped without a confidant in a tangle of hope, duty, selfdeception, other people's ambitions and a good-natured reluctance to hurt. Back at Crevenish at the start of 1903 he found solitude less agreeable than he had imagined. He could only write in àgitated poetical fits', he told Maurice, and the results were dismal. He composed an ode to Shelley and started a tragedy (`dreadfully bad') on the theme of Tristan and Isolde. Another subject was suggested by a footnote in his copy of Byron, referring to Pausanias, a Byzantine tyrant who stabbed the girl he loved while in the grip of nightmare. Not asking himself why this theme seemed attractive, and knowing nothing about Byzantium, he asked Maurice to send history books from Cambridge, soon hammering out over a hundred lines of pastiche Keats. In March he asked whether anyone had written a play on Alexander. And so it went on: the search for a subject, a bout of intensive writing with minimal planning and revision, and then wretchedness and lassitude. Cut off from all literary contacts except Maurice, and knowing nothing of new directions in the arts, he had little chance of producing anything original. It was partly because he never forgot his isolation at Crevenish that he later set up the Bookshop, where the next generation of poets could come for discussion and the latest publications. Perhaps he remembered his own early efforts when he read Wilfred Owen's manuscripts at the shop in 1916 and told him to be less Keatsian. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


22 Harold Monro

Ireland 1902±6 23

To my mind, everything points to my being with you; but I don't see the fun of being with you, if you're going to spend all day and every day evicting Irish tenants into Irish mud and Irish rain. . . . Take your courage in both hands and face things. Your primal wish is, like mine, to be a poet. You know quite well that neither of us will be that if we philander with land-agencies or anything else. The other things must go. Harold offered a room at Crevenish. He was longing to renew their old conversations, knowing better than Maurice did that Dorothy would be no substitute for her brother. I often think of your rooms at Cambridge and picture a night over the fire as of yore. Those were days of great aspiration. I am a little worried of Dorothy at present, as hockey and such like seems really to take a place over other things in her heart of hearts. But I suppose it's a great thing playing for England ± at least, it is . . . You say in your letter ` ± the other things must go. If you're going to marry D., she must be and is prepared for this.' My friend, I'm afraid that you're wrong. ± This is for thyself and none other. Maurice visited Ireland in March, where, as he later remembered, he talked by night and hunted by day in a `wild wet land', peat-bottomed, with its wide distances and stone walls. There were only three realities: poetry, cricket, horses; all the rest was moonshine. But that glass of hot rum and milk in the dawn twilight when the hunt met; then hell for leather over those doubles with Hertha ringing in your head ± and your own verse too: not such bad verse either ± this was the real thing, this was fulfilment.3 By the time he returned to Cambridge for his final term, though, his poetic hopes had been dampened by Irish rain. Harold sent reassurance, but it rang hollow; he himself was in à more deadly terrible numb state of depression than has ever been imagined'. His only hope was Dorothy, he said. He went to England in June, saw her again, visited Cambridge and all seemed well. Becoming his sporting self for a day, he took her to Ascot. Maurice was soon in another crisis, having suddenly become infatuated with a girl called Elinor. She was a parson's daughter, conservative, ordinary, nice and not at all his sort, but if Harold could adore a woman so could he. In a matter of 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Maurice kept up the challenge about Italy, saying they should go there for three months to write.

days he proposed, she wavered, her father advised her to refuse, and it was all over. During Maurice's ensuing despair his mother and sisters came to see him take his degree (`the hall-mark of ignominy'). Harold tried to be consoling: `Dorothy's mind is opening to Beauty and Truth like a flower's to the sun. There are so many many happy days in store for us three'. But Maurice, suffering as much from envy as from rejected love, replied in anguish, Ò you lucky, lucky, devil. You have the world before you and no pecuniary disadvantages.' Despair was followed by disaster. Convinced the only reason for Elinor's behaviour was his own lack of money, her frantic suitor rushed off to Monte Carlo armed with a friend's foolproof system for winning at roulette. It is impossible to be sure of the full story because he later destroyed some of the evidence, but he took a substantial sum with him, having borrowed £500 from his mother, promising she would soon be able to retire; he may have cajoled a similar loan from Harold.4 He came back with nothing. As usual, it was not his fault: if only his friends had lent him more, he would have succeeded. He hid himself away for a while, but was soon airily planning an epic or tragedy for the new age, a vehicle for all his ideas: progress, growth, evolution, and the rest . . . it will take the form of a vision ± if epic ± of the world from primal chaos through Greece, Rome, Christ, Mediaevalism (Dante and Leonardo), Christianity, Modern Times, London, on into the infinite future of the dreamer, and infinite space, and the infinity of God. The key-note will be ± it is the key-note of my philosophy ± that ± to put it allegorically ± Adam, by eating the apple, rose ± not fell. That is the religion of the future. There had been an idea that he should make a second visit to Ireland, but after Monte Carlo he decided against it, perhaps remembering that Harold believed in speaking bluntly. Harold was in England again in August, accompanying his mother on her usual summer health-cure at Harrogate. He took the chance to attend a meeting of the Theosophical Society, the first of many indications that he was looking into alternative forms of religion. Then he saw Dorothy, and there was some sort of quarrel, perhaps about Maurice. Harold blamed it on fate, but it made him apprehensive. Returning to Ireland he arranged to move into larger quarters, a lonely farm at Drumadravy, west of Irvinestown. Extra income was going to be needed, so he had decided try his hand at keeping chickens. He spent a `black week' getting the house ready and worrying about the quarrel. Dorothy and Marsie came over to inspect the new premises, the former bringing news of another row, this time with her brother, whose losses must have been a continuing sore. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


24 Harold Monro

Maurice was in Eastbourne, still writhing in what he called the ìmpasse'. All around him were preparations for the wedding. No doubt Marsie frequently reminded him of the damage he had done to her savings, but she was determined his sister should be married in style. He could only think of escape; he might farm in California, he told Harold, or write travel books about Italy or teach in India. He slipped away to London, wiring one last cry of despair to the friend he was about to lose: `The city of dreadful night Read Nightingale every stanza and line and word above all seven line seven and eight line two'. The two Keats lines are `She stood in tears amid the alien corn', which Maurice presumably saw as a description of his own solitude or of Dorothy's coming exile in Ireland, and `To toll me back from thee to my sole self!' `Not for some time', said one of the several Sussex papers which covered the celebrations, `has a wedding excited as much public interest in Eastbourne' (Plates 6, 7).5 The afternoon of Wednesday 2 December 1903 was bright and cold. Maurice escorted Dorothy to `the sacred edifice', St Saviour's, where they were preceded up the aisle by sidesmen with wands of office, the choir singing `The voice that breathed o'er Eden', and four officiating clergy. Marsie had thought of everything, except economising, and the time of year had not defeated the florists: red and green predominated, the colours of her school, and there were even some full-grown palm trees. `Seating accommodation could not be found in the church for the crowd of people anxious to witness the nuptials of one so greatly admired and esteemed as this girl-bride'. Dorothy was just 18, the reporters noted, and Harold `several years on the sunny side of thirty'. Actually 24, he was waiting in the front pew with his best man (it is somehow symbolic of the whole event that nothing is recorded of this individual, except that his name was Taylor). All eyes turned to Dorothy's dress, an exquisite confection in ivory Duchesse satin, old lace, pearls and orange blossom. Harold had presented her with a magnificent diamond and sapphire ring, and the bridesmaids with gold portrait lockets set with rubies and pearls. The bride's train was carried by Sir Daniel and Lady Gooch's two small children, Phyllis in white satin and Lancelot dressed as a Louis XV page. She was given away by Marsie, who looked `very handsome' in a black and white gown, green toque and ostrich feather. `The faces of the newly-married pair were wreathed with smiles of happiness as they walked to the vestry to comply with the customary formalities'. May Gooch, `much admired in her delicate gown of pale turquoise chiffon', and Russell Monro were among those who witnessed the signing of the register. The reception was at the school, where a temporary annexe had been constructed; Marsie greeted her 300 guests under floral garlands and a huge bell made of white chrysanthemums. After the bridal dress had been sufficiently discussed, its wearer went to change, reappearing in an outift of `Drap de Paris, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Ireland 1902±6 25

in a pretty shade of duck's egg blue'. Thus attired, Mrs Harold Monro was driven away with her husband to Polegate station. And what did Harold think of it all? Of the pious ritual, the social ostentation, the expense, the three or four hundred presents: jewellery, silver, lace, linen, furniture, china? Of the immense trousseau, a hoard of fur coats, evening gowns and elaborate hats, gushed over by the Sussex journalists? Maurice had said, `The other things must go', but soon the crates would arrive at Drumadravy, to be unpacked among the chickens and the half-finished poems. Perhaps it was easiest not to think at all, busying oneself instead with looking after Dorothy. One person, though, had at least partly understood the awfulness of what was happening. `Deep regret was expressed that Mrs Monro (mother of the bridegroom) was taken ill just before the wedding, and was therefore unable to be present'. Sophia had remained in London, counting her Griefs and waiting for more. The honeymoon was in the Harz. According to Alida nearly seventy years later, the bride knew so little about sex that she nearly jumped out of the window on the first night, a humiliating shock for Harold. Whether that was true or not, Dorothy learned fast, soon becoming the more demanding partner. By day the couple sledged, walked and ate huge German meals. They wrote to Maurice from the hotel at Treseburg on 9 December, Dorothy adding a postscript that they had several times almost wired for him to join them. The three were reunited at Eastbourne for Christmas, but Maurice could bear no more. A few weeks later he set sail for India. The Monros arrived in Ireland in January 1904 and spent their first month or so unpacking. Harold started to keep accounts in April, recording purchases of chickens and a few turkeys, as well as wages to Dorothy's maid, Kate, and another servant, and to three men probably employed on outdoor work. His letters mention poultry, calves, dogs, haymaking, rent-collecting and riding on his beloved mare. Having originally gone to Ireland to free himself for writing, he was now busier with worldly matters than he had ever been. He complained he rarely had a spare moment before ten at night, by which time he was too tired to do anything but go to bed. For a while things could be made to sound reasonably promising. They both enjoyed the hunting. With the great Georgian house of Castle Archdale only two miles down the road and other mansions not far away, there were opportunities for Dorothy to wear her new gowns. She tried to write verse, listening with as much patience as she could to Harold's explanations of poetry and the simple life. `News nil', he told Maurice in May, `± except that the chickens are doing well'. He was reading William Morris, Tolstoy (ìntensely attractive but idealistic in the wrong way') and Emerson. One of the attractions of Tolstoy may have been that he recommended sexual abstinence. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


26 Harold Monro

`We talk much of our freedom', Harold wrote in June, ànd if it does not come as soon as we hope, I fear I shall be entirely lost and spoilt'. `Strange that you should be envying us at home, and we be envying you in India. I think we feel that, lovely as this country is, it is a little narrow. First of all one wants a town sometimes, with theatres and particularly pictures and sculpture, and then there is this eternal rain'. The truth was that Dorothy was already finding life in Ireland unbearably dull. Harold retreated into ideas, immersing himself in recent European philosophy and sharing his speculations with Maurice. `The only thing that counts in a man is his moral worth. . . . Tolstoy thinks there was never any doctrine like that of the sermon on the mount and he is right. We only need to live beautiful lives'. In August he wrote with Ernst Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe open on one side of him and an unfinished letter about poultry on the other. Haeckel said people were `multicellular psychic organisms' or `modes or accidents of substance'. Harold admitted that humanity might after all be no more important than insects, but he preferred to believe that in the new age the race was again becoming conscious of what it called its `soul'. As he read on, he would have found that Haeckel ± whose book, published only five years earlier, was an immensely influential contribution to Darwinist debate ± argued that there was indeed a collective soul: matter and spirit were one, so that body and soul were both products of evolution, moving towards perfection. On that basis, a new form of religion might be founded, a pagan faith of nature, beauty and scientific truth. Maurice was sending long, vivid letters to his sister and brother-in-law, addressing them by their initials as one person (`Dearest Demhem'). He had joined the staff of St Paul's School, Darjeeling, an institution as stolidly British as its surroundings were spectacularly Indian. Teaching Latin and Greek in the Himalayas seemed absurd, but there were occasional adventures. Some of the best descriptions in his letters are symbolic of what he believed to be his tragic fate: riding his pony down a precipitous mountain-side in solitude and thick darkness, or finding a lonely British grave, magnificently sited among the hills. The Demhems arranged for Maurice's poems to be set up in type, apparently at their own expense, spending hours altering the proofs on instructions from India. Harold's letters show a keen interest already in the processes of printing, publishing and selling. He advised strongly against giving away complimentary copies, arguing as he always did later that a poet's labours should be paid for. He and Marsie sent out 100 circulars each. His labours were not wasted, although Zetetes and Other Poems can hardly have sold at all; his work for other people's poetry had begun. Maurice was briefly sheepish about the book, realising how immature its contents were, but his visionary ardour was not dampened for long. He read 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Ireland 1902±6 27

Winwood Reade's The Martyrdom of Man, which argued that each generation learned through the suffering of its predecessors and that humanity would in the end create paradise without the help of any deity. He thought Harold was out of date in criticising formal religion and wondering whether God existed. Truth lay in evolution, `the most glorious discovery. . . in the whole history of the world. It has proved Beauty and Truth, Poetry and Science to be identical'. Poetry was evolving like everything else. If only he and Harold could be free together in Italy, perhaps with some friends ± he tried to interest Pocock ± and of course with Dorothy, they might be able to write the great poems the future needed. By the summer of 1904, Dorothy was suffering the torments of a very difficult pregnancy. Harold took her to Dublin with Marsie and a nurse to get the best medical attention. He must have treasured the fact that she was still writing poems for him (two survive, very naive and unoriginal, dated 11 October).6 The baby was expected in the third week of November, but it was late, causing its mother `fearful pain'. On 17 December Nigel Harold Maurice Russell Monro was born, and Harold wired to Maurice the one word, `Son'. Maurice knew nothing of his sister's agonies until January 1905, when he wrote sympathetically to Harold. `Poor old chap, what a horrible time you've had; I know that you know that I can understand what you've been through, ± that at least is one gift the gods have given me, perfect sympathy with you'. He might have prophesied ± wrongly ± that a bright future would come out of pain, as Winwood Reade had argued, or at least he might have sent a message to Dorothy, but he was preoccupied with his own health. He had contracted dysentery during a holiday visit to Burma, and he thought he was dying. Ì've reached absolutely the lowest point of utter loneliness and desperation', he wrote to Harold. He couldn't sleep for memories of the Harz, `Peterhouse gardens and my room with you before the fire, you and I in Ireland . . . Oh! companionship is the only thing in the world that matters, and without it there is nothing, nothing'. Then his luck changed, as it so often did. He met a young American tourist in Bombay who turned out to be a Shelleyan poet like himself. Arthur Davison Ficke was on vacation from Davenport, Iowa, where he was training to be a lawyer. He spent three days with Maurice, coping good-naturedly with his fears and passions, and with his tearful relief when a doctor decided there was nothing seriously wrong. Ì, who was dead, live', Maurice wrote in high excitement. `Rejoice with me'. When the first copies of Zetetes arrived from England in May, he approved of the type and binding which Harold had chosen, but the contents no longer mattered. In July Harold received another summons to Italy, resonant with echoes of Arnold, Milton and Shelley. Maurice had seen reports of a ` ``simple life'' 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


28 Harold Monro

Ireland 1902±6 29

We would `see life steadily and see it whole', far removed from the turmoil of cities, but brooding over the life of man, like silence over the sea . . . O Harold, it's not a wild dream, but practical glaring common-sense, and, if you are the man you are, you must be able to see it. It is the first article of my creed that you and I are necessary to each other's existence, and, if that is true, and if poetry is true, all the rest follows. For the sake of friendship and of poetry rise up and come away from this sordid world. . . . The trumpet-call of Lucifer to his angels, caught up and reechoed by Shelley, rings across the vault of heaven, and is caught up again and re-echoed by me to you and to my own heart; Awake, Arise, Or be forever fallen. It would be good for Nigel, he added, as he busily filled pages with details about tents and other supposedly practical matters. He had been reading Arnold's `The Scholar-Gipsy', and a new book by H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, a vision of an ideal society governed by an order of voluntary `Samurai'. He urged Harold to read the Wells book at once, saying it was most important. Dorothy took months to recover from her ordeal, spending her days indoors making baby clothes, while Harold read to her from Milton and St Paul, giving less time to his job than he probably should have done. She eventually had to have an operation, after which she went back to England to convalesce, leaving him in `miserable loneliness'. He was slowly accumulating poems, sending copies to Maurice, who praised his Keatsian diction, discouraged his ideas and on one unfortunate occasion reviled some feeble efforts which were actually by Dorothy. In June Harold was working on a verse play about Guinevere: Ìt will be another log for the bonfire of unactable minor dramas (minor thoughts and minor poetry). Oh this fearful minor key! This age of clipped wings and misty intelligences!' In August 1905 he joined his wife and son in England, knowing he would have to settle there if his marriage were to survive. An old friend of Marsie found him a job with a property company, the Portman Estate, owners of several large blocks of flats in Marylebone; this would bring in a small, much-needed income, although his only duty would be to attend fortnightly board meetings in London, beginning in the new year. Àt last my real life is beginning', he wrote to Maurice. Ì shall be free, gloriously free at last to give my thoughts full vent'. He took Dorothy and Nigel back to Drumadravy until Christmas, when they revisited the grandmothers. Nigel was apparently left with Sophia; she had time 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


community' in the Italian lakes (perhaps Monte Verita at Ascona, which Harold was later to know well), but he was still hoping for a caravan or two with Harold and a few others.

on her hands, and sad memories to live with, so she may have been pleased to be given charge of a small grandson. The hard work could be left to his nurse, who was always in attendance. In the years that followed Nigel seems to have developed a closer bond with Sophia than with either of his parents. His other grandmother, Marsie, had no time for babies. His mother appears to have cared little for him too, perhaps resenting the suffering he had caused her. Harold tried to be a good father, but family life was never his first priority. So Nigel was passed around in a bewildering world, in which Sophia at least provided affection and stability, cheerless and suffocatingly respectable though she was. Maurice left Darjeeling in August 1905, having lost all interest in teaching. He had wheedled yet more money from his mother, but by the time he reached Kashmir in October his credit was exhausted. Refused cash in a Srinagar bank, he insulted the native cashier and was attacked by a crowd in the street, so he fled to the hills with his servants and masses of luggage, sending Harold a desperate appeal for funds. He claimed he had been robbed, saying he would need nearly £200 to get home, including the cost of a servant on the journey. So, while he kept up his role as an Englishman by shooting bears, the Demhems hurried to Enniskillen, where they pawned Dorothy's jewellery for £35, borrowed £70 and somehow found another £15. That was all they could raise. They were appalled at Maurice's fecklessness, Harold telling him that taking a servant on the ship was a luxury fit only for millionaires and mad generals. Unaware of the trouble he was causing, Maurice managed to slaughter several animals, scaring away more by firing his gun at the wrong moment. He had run out of stationery, so wrote to Harold on end-papers torn from books, plundering Shelley, Arnold, Keats and Milton in turn. These letters, written during mountain nights when it was too cold to sleep and crammed in tiny handwriting on an assortment of yellowing pages, contain a long dream-sequence recalling rooms from the past: Maurice's and Harold's rooms in Germany; the cottage room at Crevenish, with Bentinck eating breakfast; Pass's rooms at Cambridge, haunted by cumbrous folios and a Rossetti picture; Harold's rooms at Caius and Connaught Square; and Maurice's at Peterhouse, where, after many friends had come and gone on some typical evening, Harold would arrive late at night to `talk of sacred things, the innermost secrets of poesy, and love, and Dorothy, and Elinor'. Maurice said he no longer thought of Italy but yearned only for England, where he intended to write his epic, `the most ambitious attempt in English literature after ``Prometheus Unbound'' and ``Paradise Lost''!' By December he was back in Srinagar, successfully trying to avoid being imprisoned for debt. He had himself photographed as a sahib among his hunting trophies (Plate 8), booked his passage home, and at the beginning of March 1906 arrived at his mother's house in Eastbourne. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


30 Harold Monro

While still in Kashmir he had finished a long-delayed wedding present, Epithalamion: A Marriage Ode. Pocock had arranged for 100 copies to be printed. The ode describes Harold as a figure with `visionary eyes' and a poet's crown, hailed by Love as `he that from great sorrows came/Victorious; his brow is sealed with fame'. Dorothy is `she in whom all mysteries/Meet wondrously: God made her fair and wise`, while Maurice himself is, of course, the herdabandoned deer, `sorrowful now and wandering apart/As a spent and smitten hart pierced by the death-winged dart!' At the end there are dedications to Ficke, `Niphoessa' (Elinor), Dorothy, Pass, Marsie, Pocock and Harold, each with an appropriate quotation from Shelley and all dated 25 December 1905. What the recipients thought of this extraordinary tribute is not recorded.7 Harold began a diary at the start of 1906. The new year begins with all its young clean resolutions, so soon to be defiled. As I go on in life it seems to have become almost a foregone conclusion that resolutions are to be broken. But what a year this is to be. Once all the trivialities are over and blotted out, say by the end of January, I shall be able to sail ahead in my fair bark of Romance. Went to a dance at the D'Arcy Irvines. Packing up at Drumadravy was under way, so he and Dorothy were obliged to sleep on the floor; as a would-be ascetic, he noted that this was very comfortable. 3 January: Splendid hunt at Coa. Sold poultry farm to Irvine for £25 . . . 10 January: Got rid of packers. Oh freedom, freedom thou art near. There was a lively auction, after which Kate the maid confessed amid shouts of laughter that because mice had eaten the tops off the blackberry jam pots she had put on new ones, labelling them with every name she could think of; the pots marked as blackberry had sold much less well than the others. After a few nights at Castle Archdale, Harold and Dorothy left for London on 15 January. He had been based in Ireland for over three years, less than the five he had originally planned, but for him the experiment had not been a complete failure. He had gained some business experience and written a lot of poems. Letters to and from India had helped to develop his ideas, while air and exercise had kept him fit. He had done his best to support his wife, and she had tried to share his interests. Their one-year-old son was strong and healthy. For Dorothy, though, Ireland had been a place of boredom, pain and frustration. In England they could make a new start, with Maurice. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Ireland 1902±6 31

4

But now he dreamed the Knighthood of the world, Empanoplied in beauty, greater far Than Lancelot, or Gawain, or Galahad; Discerners and creators, demigods, Plumed with the flame of manhood, and with sword Of the sheatheÁd spirit burning inwardly. . . (`Return of Arthur') The England the Monros returned to in January 1906 seemed astonishingly forward-looking and alive after Fermanagh. With the Victorian age now well in the past everyone seemed to be talking about new ideas: political reform, alternative religions, social experiments, strange developments in continental art. Liberalism was building up to its great election victory later in the year, while socialism, still untried and unsullied, was attracting young people as never before. Feeling the excitement, Harold wanted to get involved. He began to think of joining groups and societies, and he embarked on an intensive course of reading now that he was within reach of books again. It was in the next few years, the twentieth century's one brief period of optimism, that the Poetry Bookshop and Georgian poetry were to have their origins. As soon as he and Dorothy arrived in London they went to see their son at Connaught Square, but there were more interesting things to do than spend time with Nigel. They hurried off to a concert, starting a hectic round of visits to museums, galleries and theatres. Having felt starved of theatre in Ireland, Harold was enthralled by the wealth of it in London, especially the new drama of Ibsen and Shaw. Among the plays he saw in early 1906, usually with Dorothy, were Ibsen's A Doll's House (`made one marvel'), Hall Caine's The Eternal City (`Hall Caine must be a dreadful idiot'), Pinero's His House in Order (`Wonderful'), Peter Pan (which he loved), Everyman, Measure for Measure, Gilbert Murray's version of Hippolytus, and something called All-of-a-sudden Peggy. A performance of Captain 32 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Samurai 1906±8

Brassbound's Conversion was not improved by Ellen Terry's repeatedly forgetting her lines, despite having the script open on the table in the front of her, but this play and several others by Shaw made a deep impression. The first stay in London had to be short because duty required visits to all the family, beginning with a month in Eastbourne with Marsie Browne. Harold always found his mother-in-law and Eastbourne trying. No sooner had he arrived than he lost his temper with Dorothy, suffering àgonies of remorse after. A sort of white rage seemed to come over me. Oh may this be the first and very last time'. He prayed to God for good-temper and patience. `Re-quicken my ideals; re-awaken my impulses; make me clean and full of power and energy to contrive and do. . . . Alas, I call on God without even being certain in my heart whether he exists!' Àll a woman cares about is for one to be strong one way or another. A woman can never really love you unless you are her absolute master, however unpleasant it may be at the time'. Sometimes the impulse to drink became overpowering. He hated himself for it, wondering whether exercise, cold baths and simple food might help. After Eastbourne came a fortnight at Somerby Hall, where Russell Monro must have shown approval that his supposedly gritless nephew had not only married a hockey international but also produced a son. He took his guests out with the Belvoir Hounds. `D and I followed Uncle Russell closely', Harold noted in his diary. `D went very well'. It was important she should make a good impression. Russell had probably regarded their stay in Fermanagh as a waste of time, but he may have been reassured by the character of Henry Bentinck, who came to lunch one day. Harold's former housemate, now a Guards officer, had taken accommodation nearby for the sake of the hunting.1 The two young men went for a long walk, Bentinck talking of the joy of Christ's presence, testimony which his companion thought `wonderful, but sadly unconvincing'. Perhaps prompted by enquiries from Bentinck and scepticism from Russell, Harold typed up the best of the poems he had written in Ireland and sent them off to Elkin Mathews, the London publisher. The next family visit was by far the grandest. Sir Daniel and Lady Gooch had established themselves in style at a country mansion near Chelmsford. Hylands, much larger than Somerby, was an eighteenth-century house altered, enlarged and grecianised by successive owners (Plate 3). The main rooms were palatial, with sumptuous plasterwork, and the estate ran to over 4000 acres, with 26 farms and a private railway siding. Curly Gooch expected everything to be done correctly, much though he enjoyed being a genial country squire. His children were allowed into the dining room only on Christmas Day, when the meal was served off gold plate, and the 14 gardeners were required to wear collar, tie and apron in the pleasure grounds round the house. But May installed a pair of laughing jackasses in a cage on the lawn; their braying, audible throughout the gardens, seemed to mock all this splendour. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Samurai 1906±8 33

Harold's sister and brother-in-law were busy, sociable people. A newspaper cutting in the family album describes May as à pretty, fair woman, blue-eyed, golden-haired, who reads a great deal, is fond of music . . . a clever linguist . . . one of our ardent motorists'. Curly kept a Rolls Royce, a Daimler, a Rover, a Panhard and a Renault, as well as two carriages, but he seems to have been as tough and practical as his famous grandfather; his numerous activities included shooting, sailing, carpentry, playing the French horn, and breeding and racing greyhounds. When he and May went on a world tour they were accompanied by five servants and a quarter of a ton of guns and other sporting equipment, yet he eagerly joined up as an ordinary crew member when he was invited to be in charge of the dogs on Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition in 1914.2 Hylands was a dazzling contrast to Harold's usual way of living, but he and Dorothy became frequent visitors, joining in the social life, hunting with the Essex Hounds and performing in theatricals. He and his sister seem to have been devoted to one another, possibly too much so; a short story he wrote in the twenties describes a woman, undoubtedly based on May, who is in love with her brother, as he is with her.3 After Hylands, it was Dorothy's turn to take her husband on a family pilgrimage, so at the end of April they cycled to Ipswich. `Bicycling delightful in every way, for conversation, for seeing nature, and for covering ground. . . . Dorothy in lovely sunset mood.' They saw her birthplace and were shown into the headmaster's study at the Grammar School, where her unfortunate father had worked. Then they put flowers on his grave, although they agreed ± in accordance with the ideological correctness Harold was trying to instill into both of them ± that funerals were absurd and that they would prefer to be cremated without ceremony. On Good Friday, 13 April, they returned to Eastbourne, having collected Nigel and his nanny in London, and there was another row. Ì contaminate every atmosphere and unconsecrate every place we come to with my vile temper. The fault is 2/3 mine and 1/3 Dorothy's. . . . She is a little gentle hot house flower and I have put her out in the north wind.' Only four days later he almost convinced himself they could be happy. À most lovely evening . . . Read Shelley aloud to her then she sat down to write a fairy tale and I did 60 lines of a sea poem'. One morning in May she told him her troubles ìn her sweet little old way', and later when she felt ill he sat with her all day. But her femininity frightened and sometimes revolted him; some years later he wrote a poem comparing her, not to a gentle flower, but to coronilla (claw vetch), hot and acrid, with tendrils that clutch and suffocate. Maurice was at Eastbourne, back from India with bearskins, curios and undiminished love, still looking for ways of strengthening the ties between him and his fellow-poet. His greatest discovery had been Wells's A Modern Utopia. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


34 Harold Monro

Harold was soon caught up in his excitement; it was possible to imagine that Wells's paradise, unlike others, could be worked for and made real. The book describes a world close to the actual one, post-Darwinist and evolving, but governed by a voluntary nobility, the `Samurai', who live under a Rule requiring among other things simple dress, abstention from alcohol and meat (everyone in this Utopia is vegetarian), and at least a week every year walking alone in wild country. The effect of the Rule is by no means conformist; in fact Wells declares that the ultimate significance of life is in individuality. Maurice had been an instant convert, certain he recognised himself in the book's conclusion: After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, undiscovered, unsuspected even by themselves, the samurai of Utopia are in this world, the motives that are developed and organised there stir dumbly here and stifle in ten thousand futile hearts . . . The idea of the Samurai was `something incommensurable', Maurice had written from Darjeeling. Ì am very anxious to start an order founded on its principles'. Planning started within days of Harold's arrival at Eastbourne. On 18 April he sketched out his first conception of a Samurai order. Members should seek Wisdom (`knowledge, assimilation, discrimination'), Love (ìnfluence, selfrepression, forbearance') and Strength (`self-control, physique, power'), the `three most beautiful possessions in the Universe', corresponding to the Christian idea of the Trinity. `The Samurai will be the Priesthood of the new religion, the nobility of the new State. The religion will be one which can never be overturned for it will be one of Humanity, present and concrete.'4 Fully qualified Samurai would have to be chaste (this, like Harold's threefold definition of Love, perhaps suggests the relationship he wanted with Dorothy), clean and fit, abstaining from meat, fish, alcohol, tobacco and all excess, and fasting in the open air for twelve days a year. Probationers would follow a course of minimal drinking, a regulated diet, daily exercise and from nine to twelve every morning (Harold bought an hour-glass) `hard intellectual work'. Breaking a rule would be òne of the most cowardly, dishonourable and unmanly actions that any being can commit'. He could never resist making resolutions, and the Samurai idea offered the chance of making a whole set of them as part of a team effort. `Nothing but the Samurai can help me now', he wrote in his diary after quarrelling with Dorothy. The two probationers followed their self-imposed discipline earnestly for several weeks, although there were unforeseen difficulties. The rules allowed only four courses at dinner, but Maurice soon had to report he had accepted a fifth: one could not refuse asparagus. His ideals remained high, however: he was reading Emerson, who convinced him that a poet should avoid all distractions, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



including a job. Rule IV said that food should only pass the lips on five occasions daily, but Harold broke that on 9 May by eating an orange and a chocolate biscuit. This sort of thing was worrying. He thought the whole scheme needed to be reconsidered; meanwhile they might do best just to record their activities. For two weeks he chronicled his use of every hour. On 4 May, for example, he read Maeterlinck's Wisdom and Destiny in bed from 7.30 to 8.15, breakfasted from 9.00 to 9.30, and studied German with Dorothy until 10.00. Then he drafted a dozen lines of a new poem on Judas (Maurice was writing on Job) and read some more Maeterlinck before and after lunch. Three hours in the afternoon were devoted to tennis. Maurice came to dinner (the Monros were staying in a hotel), and for three hours they `talked about life, tried to pick the 25 greatest poets and could only get 20'. Then they discussed Maurice's future and `separated rather suddenly'. Maurice had actually rushed away in a fury. He had been explaining he would live for a year on £150, all he had left, and Harold had told him three times he was not facing the future seriously. It suited Maurice to regard this as a triple accusation of insincerity ± and sincerity is the only thing in the world that matters; for it is sincerity that constitutes love and poetry and beauty and truth and God. Without sincerity, everything is valueless. If you believe me insincere, ± if you, even for a second, believed me insincere and refused to face or failed to realize that belief in your heart, I wish to God we had never met and that I had never loved you; for `to be wroth with those we love Doth work like madness in the brain' . . . Too upset to show himself, he conducted the argument by letter, although he was only a few streets away. Harold replied in astonishment, admitting his own manner was òften blunt, dogmatic, judgmatic and extremely tactless', but insisting he had never doubted his friend's spiritual sincerity. Maurice soon apologised. Maurice's demand for sincerity was typical of a generation which was coming to regard personal relationships and truth to oneself as supreme values, yet his own sincerity was questionable and his outbursts of self-righteousness were often prompted by other people's reluctance to lend him money. Harold was more steadily serious, but he too deluded himself. `He always struck me as being more puzzled by himself than anyone else I ever knew', John Drinkwater wrote of him long afterwards.5 That puzzlement kept him endlessly searching, always disappointed but always trying again. He was true to himself in that way at least, a courageous loser and seeker, a religious man in an age of vanishing faith. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


36 Harold Monro

His searches in 1906 took him through Tolstoy, Wells, Maeterlinck (he listed these and other authors in a preliminary `canon' of reading for the Samurai), Renan, Berenson, Schopenhauer and, among much else, Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming-of-Age, a discussion of relationships between the sexes which advocated `spiritual' rather than formal marriage and bravely defended love between men. He tried out a variety of churches, even going to a four-hour Salvation Army meeting addressed by `that wonderful old impostor' General Booth. He thought this event ended like a drunken orgy, especially when one Salvation Smith prayed over him and told him loudly twice he was a fool; Dorothy said afterwards he had turned white with anger, but they were both amused when Smith assured a sailor that God loved him, to which the sailor replied, `Well all I can say is that he's a perfect gentleman'. When Dorothy described herself as an agnostic, an Army lass cried, Òh no, dearie, you're too beautiful for that'. In May Harold developed what seems to have been an anal abscess, so painful that he was in bed for over a fortnight and in a wheelchair for some days after that. This is the first of many mysterious afflictions mentioned in his diaries and letters from 1906 onwards. Some may have been symptoms of long-term disease; others were perhaps a result of drink, depression and the strain of his marriage. His health, like his state of mind, was always liable to sudden, perhaps cyclical changes. One day he would walk for miles, or spend a long afternoon on the tennis courts, or dance for hours with extraordinary energy; on another he would be struck down by stomach pains, unexplained blood-poisoning or an abscess, or, in the early years, gout (`Never heard of in my time', Alida wrote in a margin long after his death). The obsession with diet that emerges in his rules for the Samurai probably began long before he read A Modern Utopia, perhaps originating, like his hypochondria in general, from excessive mothering after the deaths of his father and brother. His most persistent trouble seems to have been in the digestive system, and he blamed it on a hereditary habit of overeating, `the cause of all my ills'. He read in Tolstoy that self-control had to begin with fasting. While he was in bed, someone, presumably Maurice and Dorothy in turns, read him no fewer than seven books by Wells, whom he now regarded as the greatest prophet of the age. By the time he recovered he was in a mood of high seriousness, so he was dismayed to find his wife had reverted to frivolity. `She for whom I had built such cloud-capped summits of ideals cares for nothing better than to play tennis and read novels the whole week, . . . adorn herself like a primitive Briton on the Sabbath and flaunt herself on the greens.' He worked with Puritan determination, finishing his play on Guinevere and starting one on King Cophetua. The contrast between his own work and Dorothy's time-wasting had never struck him so sharply before. Then selfdisgust returned. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



38 Harold Monro

Soon afterwards, Maurice casually mentioned he had been breaking rules galore and didn't care a tuppenny damn. The Samurai dream seemed to be over already. There was one pleasure to look forward to: Elkin Mathews had accepted the Ireland poems for publication in his Vigo Cabinet Series. This was something to be proud of, for Mathews was a more discriminating publisher than most, some of the little books in the series being by quite well-known poets.6 The Monros left Eastbourne (`Hurrah!') for Hylands, where the new book arrived on 15 July and provoked eager discussion among the weekend guests, much to its author's embarrassment. May said some of the poems were less respectable than he seemed to be himself, but Curly said he had a `nice mind'. The Rector was interested to discover there had been a poet in the congregation that morning. It was generally agreed Harold was à deep fellow'. He was pleased, although he later said the book had been a feeble start. The poems were competent but hopelessly unoriginal, mere exercises in nineteenth-century verse. They earned a few kindly reviews, The Tribune being especially enthusiastic (`rare perfection of form . . . frankly pagan . . . deep love of nature . . . almost unerring sense of the beauty of words'), but shops were soon returning unsold copies. The parcel of books was followed five days later by a very different consignment, a second-hand motorbike. It proved a bitter disappointment, repeatedly breaking down miles from home, especially when the `tricar' was attached (Dorothy rode in the tricar), but they took the machine up to Harrogate for three ill-tempered weeks in August with Sophia, Nigel and the nanny, relieving the boredom by making expeditions. Harold was shocked by the Yorkshire industrial towns (`Their squalor a revelation to me'). On the 26th, happy at the prospect of `freedom' (presumably from Nigel as well as from Sophia and Harrogate), he and Dorothy set off alone, crossing the Pennines and Lake District with many unwanted stops. He caught a ferry at Barrow with two minutes to spare and spent a day in Ireland, arranging for their furniture to be sent to England. The journey south was in a heatwave. Ì am probably less of a poet than I have been in my life. I think however I must be gaining through it somehow. . . . Motor heats up every hill. We sweat away lbs and lbs. Desperate work'. They had been looking for a home for months and had decided to take a little house called Braeside in Haslemere among the wooded Surrey hills, a district 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Broke Samurai rules wholesale and fell ± I hope for the last time ± into the delusion that by indulging certain of my baser desires I could in some way compensate for great sorrow. Felt the helplessness of my weakness directly after. Drinking! Eating like a beast! Enveloping yourself in clouds of stinking smoke! ± These are pleasures (!) to ± ugh ± a dreadful subject.

favoured by intellectuals. Arriving early in September they spent several days alone, slaving over packing cases and doing their own cooking, until their servant, Kate, came to relieve them. Harold hung a copy of Watts's Galahad, the chaste knight, at the end of the bed, and the portrait of Keats in `the nicest little study I have yet had in my life'. His heart sank when his son's new `governess' arrived, a fine lady in white hat and feather boa, an omen of the respectable family life that was now beginning, but he set to work with the optimism he always felt in a new place. He wrote in his diary that in spite of idleness and èxtreme backwardness for my age', he thought of himself às the poet to follow Swinburne in one index of English poets and as at least one of the 10 greatest English singers'. Ì shall begin what is to be the 10 years of my life, the ten years of literary production, of real effort. I think we shall stay in this house at least during that time'. In fact they were to be there for scarcely a year. A pattern which had begun at Crevenish was often to be repeated: the discovery of an idyllic cottage, the perfect place for poetry and plain living; a few busy weeks of moving in; a period of intensive writing, fuelled by ambitions so extreme that they invited failure; and then the slow drift into frustration, and a longing to be `free'. For all his love of rural seclusion he was not a countryman at heart but a Londoner, as his forebears had been for over two centuries; he needed streets, theatres and the modern world. In literature, similarly, he was not the Romantic he dreamed of being but a Modernist, fretting to break out from exhausted conventions. Even so, he was too close to native traditions ever to abandon them entirely, unlike the two Americans he would later know well, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The picture of Keats would always be on his wall and he would always have a rural retreat; he was to own or rent at least fourteen country cottages during his lifetime, including five on the Continent, but his base was to be in a London slum. He continued to observe the Samurai rules, although he told Maurice in October that his resolve had been badly damaged by his friend's light-hearted apostasy. They had started out with such sincerity: could they not try again? This appeal had a dramatic effect. Maurice had talked of taking a public initiative and now decided to act, having earned a little money by teaching in Eastbourne. He found accommodation at Ranworth Old Hall on the edge of the Norfolk Broads, where a cousin was already a tenant, and resumed living under the rules. His first letter from Ranworth ends with the word `hurrah' repeated twelve times. Ralph Straus, his Cambridge friend, was summoned to advise, and on 25 October 1906 a circular went out to Harold, Ficke, Pass and Pocock, announcing the establishment of a `Samurai Press'. Straus was knowledgeable about printing and private presses, while Ficke had already suggested publishing monthly volumes. Maurice set out terms and costs, urging co-operation (a 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



hint that he hoped for loans): `the end for which we are all working is the ideal as expressed in and by poetry'. All volumes were to have à certain high seriousness'. Harold was sceptical, seeing that the cash forecasts were mere fantasy and knowing how short-lived his friend's enthusiasms could be, but Maurice plunged on; he would see Harold at Christmas and talk him round. In December it was Harold's turn to break the rules. His sister asked him to help organise a play she was putting on for charity.7 That meant a long stay at Hylands, three public performances and a ball ± hard work, but the play was mere froth, a light comedy in which brother and sister played opposite each other, May as a peeress disguised as a cook in a vicarage, hiding from a drunken husband, and Harold as her gallant rescuer. He found he behaved like everyone else, smoking heavily and taking six or seven whiskies in an evening, until he reached a state of oblivious good humour. His mixture of shame and happiness, and his remark to Maurice afterwards that suicide seemed suddenly attractive, may or may not have had something to do with his having appeared on stage as May's lover. His Samurai ardour redoubled, and he decided to give up drink for ever in the new year. It occurred to him that what he was looking for was the sort of life Jesus had preached. Why not adopt Christian rules? The thought of Christ brought him a strange sense of peace and fear. He spent the last weeks of 1906 reading theology and trying to be kind to Dorothy, who listened for a whole evening when he read to her from The Cenci. But they had to go down to Eastbourne for Christmas Day. À very disgusting day. All confessedly overeat themselves. The idea of their doing this, after my great Christ studies, fills me with horror. . . . The church service disgusts me horribly: terrible insincerity of preacher'. After that Maurice had little difficulty in disposing of Harold's brief interest in Christianity. They spent hours making plans for the Samurai Press, `real serious now'. On 31 December Harold accepted a last glass of champagne. `To-morrow what a beginning!' New Year's Day 1907 was spent at Hylands, which must have been a hard trial. Three days later he was getting desperate, telling Maurice they had been much too hasty. The rules seemed to deprive him of `that fine fire without which I am as something dead'; he meant inspiration, deceiving himself again. Perhaps they should try to find companions. But he kept up his efforts, and after a few days in London, `bohemianising' with Dorothy by queueing for cheap theatre seats, he drove to Ranworth. Maurice had already sent an elaborate letter and draft prospectus to Wells, who responded with cautious encouragement. The prospectus and subsequent publications bore a motto adapted from A Modern Utopia: `That is our purpose, to imagine our best and strive for it'. Subscriptions of a guinea a year were invited for the twelve monthly volumes, which would be ìndividual interpretations of 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


40 Harold Monro

life . . . characterized by sincerity and a strong ideal' and `that quality of high seriousness which is the touchstone of all excellence'. The aim of the Press was to find and organise Wells's `hidden, disorganised, undiscovered' Samurai. Pass and Pocock seem not to have been persuaded, but far away in Iowa Ficke agreed to everything and paid his share of the initial investment. Other Samurai would no doubt come forward as the message spread. Single-minded in the tranquillity of Ranworth, the two founders of the order composed the first of the monthly volumes, Proposals for a Voluntary Nobility, each writing an essay on the Samurai ideal and collaborating on a third essay which set out practical rules. Harold took the manuscript to a London printer at the end of January, and barely two weeks later the Proposals were published. It all seemed very easy, but the authors soon regretted their haste. Maurice described the book to Ficke as à hotch-potch of transcendentalism and H. G. Wells', which it was, and Harold feared the third section would come in for cheap ridicule, as it did (The Manchester Guardian wondered what sort of `rich and unhealthy foods' were forbidden ± perhaps buns with too many currants or swiss roll with too much jam).8 Harold returned to Haslemere to write a more considered volume for the Press, to be called The Evolution of the Soul. Drawing on his 1906 reading of Haeckel and others, he claimed that modern humanity had reached a new potentiality: groups were forming to redefine religion in the light of Darwin's discoveries, and the next stage would either be ruin or à passionate outbreak of co-operative effort'. There was a growing perception that the human soul was evolving with the body; when its evolution was complete, it would survive death. We are not dolls in the toy-box of a huge anthropomorphic god; we are units of a vast, composite, self-working, self-supporting, social system. This knowledge when once attained is a thing indestructible. It is high optimism. It is the stronghold of the soul. Materialists intent on having à really good time' (a phrase he often heard from Dorothy) would no doubt be extinguished at death, but people who realised their souls by living `strongly, cleanly, and rightly, though perfectly bluntly' would achieve immortality, as had been shown by the outstanding example of Jesus, who was not the slave of some unimaginable deity but the founder of `true Socialism'. The curious leap of faith which allowed Harold to argue for not just the survival but the immortality of the fittest would have seemed less bizarre in the Edwardian period than it does now. Religious belief was in such confusion that seekers after truth could take the notions they most needed and fit them together as they wished. Few people as yet could feel comfortable without any religion at all. Harold feared death, having seen it take his father and brother; if 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



the Samurai succeeded, the kingdom of complete sincerity would be established, allowing him to live for ever `perfectly bluntly' as his own awkward self. The Evolution of the Soul came out as the Press's April 1907 volume. Maurice complained its style was flat, an opinion echoed by reviewers. Harold's mother and sister were so shocked by its atheistical arguments that they refused to subscribe to further volumes. All the same, it outlined a philosophical basis for the Samurai enterprise; none of the Press's other publications was to come closer to meeting the aims laid down in the prospectus. The books for February and May were collections of poems by Ficke and Maurice respectively, old work written a year or more earlier, while the March volume was Straus's contribution, The Dust Which Is God, a sub-Wellsian fable about the elemental dust which would evolve into divinity. That exhausted Maurice's immediate material. Harold remained at Haslemere throughout the spring of 1907, working hard, avoiding meat and alcohol and struggling against depression. He knew now his marriage had been a terrible mistake (`How happy I might have been'), but he still had hopes for Dorothy, noting that she was becoming `quite a little socialist'. His twenty-eighth birthday on 14 March was a `divine day' with her; they went for a 12-mile walk, talking about the soul. That night he dreamed he had been conscripted for South Africa and condemned to execution for firing over the enemy's heads, but this chance of discovering how the soul would survive death was lost when a beautiful woman began `ministering' to him. Two days later, when his mother came on a visit, he dreamed that Christ had taken a villa in San Remo. His growing interest in socialism owed much to friendship with Romney Green, a craftsman and poet who ran a flourishing co-operative workshop in Haslemere. Rugged, warm-hearted and dependable, Romney made highlyprized oak furniture, preached the doctrines of Ruskin and Morris, and had an extraordinary talent for memorising. He could quote poetry endlessly, although he thought of it as simply a source of pleasure. Harold protested: the true legislators of mankind, however much unacknowledged, were the poets, and no reform could succeed without a basis in the spiritual values poetry stood for. Romney was interested in the Samurai scheme, although he saw no need for rules. What mattered was nationalising land and abolishing factories. He took Harold to meetings of the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the new Craftsmen's Union and probably the Peasant Arts Fellowship, an organisation based in Haslemere. Harold found this `socialist education' stimulating, if not altogether satisfactory.* * A Haslemere branch of the Independent Labour Party was formed in March 1907 with Green as secretary and Harold Murray as chairman.9 The Fabian Society, founded some twenty years earlier by Shaw, Sidney Webb and others, was expanding its membership under Wells's influence. The lists of new recruits in Fabian News 1906±7 include Harold and Maurice (March 1907), Green and Murray (June 1906), and several people Harold was later to know: J. H. Skilton, Stanton Coit, Rupert Brooke, J. C. Squire, Gerald Gould, F. S. Flint.



42 Harold Monro

Keen though Harold always was to debate ideas, he was rarely at ease in group discussion. The quicker intellects found him slow and obstinate; the slower ones found him intimidating. For his part he could never quite believe that other people liked and trusted him enough to take his thoughts seriously. He was to join a great many associations of one sort or another during his lifetime, but in all of them he felt, and was felt to be, an outsider, an oddity whom no one really understood. He gave several lectures to the Haslemere socialists, but he felt sure they suspected him of incorrect thinking, with his faith in soul and poetry rather than in reason and argument. (He noted that they seemed to disagree with each other, though, as much as they did with him.) When he contributed some Swinburne to a reading in the workshop, they annoyed him by laughing; like any other bourgeois audience, they presumably thought of Swinburne as a near-pornographer, not as a reformer. Ìn everything I go to', Harold complained to Maurice, èvery meeting formal or informal that I attend, I miss that high seriousness which I long for'. He was burning to get the Samurai started. Among the many idealists living within reach (the Monros had replaced the tiresome motorbike with a car) were Rollo Russell at Hindhead and James Guthrie at Harting. Russell, brother to Earl Russell and uncle of Bertrand the philosopher, had once edited a journal called The Utopian; he was too old to be a Samurai, but he gave encouragement.10 Guthrie, a socialist artist and writer who printed his own books, had heard of the Samurai plan and had written to Maurice in February, inviting him to move to Harting so that they could cooperate. He happened to have a fine old hand-press which he wanted to sell. If Maurice could take on a printer and manager, the Samurai Press would be able to produce its own books. Like Harold, and with Guthrie's encouragement, Maurice was getting involved in left-wing organisations. Isolation at Ranworth was losing its charm; he had discovered that running a publishing business single-handed was `slavery'. The more he tied himself down, the more he longed for Italy and freedom, but for the moment his resolve held. Still looking to Wells for leadership, he begged him to take the Samurai idea further. Biographies of Wells imply that many other young people were making similar requests, as perhaps they were, though few can have been as pressing as Maurice. Wells agreed to give a paper to the newly-formed Fabian Arts Group in April. Accompanied by Harold and Straus, Maurice went to the meeting in doubtful hope, as he told Ficke, fearing the master would not offer to make à business of the dream'. He was determined to force the issue if necessary, as he frankly told Wells later. It was a good moment for publicity, because the Fabian Society was keen to extend its influence into the arts; two of the Arts Group's founders, A. R. Orage (Harold had just read his little book on Nietzsche) and Holbrook Jackson, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



had recently bought a periodical, The New Age, with help from Shaw, so they gave the Samurai `Conference' generous coverage in their first number (2 May 1907). The large audience included some famous socialists: Shaw himself, Beatrice Webb, Haden Guest, Edward Carpenter and Aylmer Maude, the friend and translator of Tolstoy. Wells was nervous, aware not only that he could not provide the leadership his admirers were demanding, but also that the older Fabians were determined to block any effort he might make. The Òld Gang' had been battling with him for over a year, resisting his attempts to develop Fabianism into a Samurai movement; they had already defeated him in the Society itself, but he still had a chance of capturing the Arts Group. He was a poor public speaker, and he could see that the ever-articulate Shaw was listening impatiently, ready to attack as soon as discussion started. His paper was no rallying cry, although he did imply a case for the Samurai Press, saying that before anything else there had to be a self-trained class of model citizens who would spread ideas by means of literature and propaganda. As soon as the lecture was over, Shaw got up in undisguised exasperation, exclaiming that any Tory would agree with Mr Wells: the country already had Samurai, known as English ladies and gentlemen, the very people who were preventing progress. Carpenter objected that a Samurai order would risk producing prigs and priests. Mrs Webb capped that by saying they were all prigs already, her husband being the best prig of the lot. Maurice raged silently at the Old Gang's destructive tactics. When the meeting broke up he cornered the speaker, while Straus buttonholed Carpenter and Harold engaged Shaw. Wells at close quarters was disappointing: `short, fattish, funny high straining voice ± a common voice, good full-face, fair profile, and splendid humorous poetic eyes ± he's a young middle-aged man'.11 He soon pleaded heat-exhaustion and fled. Once again Maurice felt the impulse to escape; he told Ficke the only reason he was not going to kill himself just yet was that he was in love again, this time with a girl called Gwynneth. Despite the failure of the meeting, the Samurai enterprise was beginning to develop its own momentum. The Press had attracted forty-two subscribers, several reviewers had praised its efforts and The New Age had carried a fullcolumn advertisement next to its report of the conference. Maurice wrote at length to Wells, saying he was being urged to start an order himself. Would Wells take over, or at least advise? A private meeting might ensure sensible discussion. At least five people besides himself would like to attend: Harold and Dorothy Monro, Romney Green, J. H. Skilton, a City clerk from Woodford Green, and W. F. Vernon, an engineer from Stafford. Harold thought this approach to Wells was premature, but he promised to help by becoming convenor, admitting that experience with dramatic clubs and poultry farming had shown he had a certain capacity for administration. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


44 Harold Monro

A friend in Gray's Inn lent a handsome room, where the meeting took place on 8 May 1907. Wells seems to have been positive, without committing himself. Like all Fabians he knew the importance of working out a basis of common beliefs, so he recommended members should first formulate a `creed', setting out what they understood to be the nature of the Universe and their relationship to it and defining the purpose of a Samurai order. This was a useful start. Maurice told Ficke the occasion had been thoroughly satisfactory. Harold wrote in his diary that `the thing is really on its feet. Wells showed extraordinary tact in keeping us together'. As convenor, he put a notebook into circulation so that the group could work out a creed. He renewed work on his play, `Cophetua', sometimes at `fever heat' for up to ten hours a day. The source of his inspiration seems to have been not only Wells but also Nietzsche, whom he must have been reading at least since the spring, when he had sent Maurice `The Superman', a poem about `the man-god of the future'. Nietzsche revealed a sterner, more glorious destiny than anything imagined by Wells, a world after `the death of God' in which a new breed of men, impervious equally to victory and defeat, would take full responsibility for their own fate. Thus spake Zarathustra: Behold, I teach you the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes!12 È bermensch) had obvious attractions for a would-be The ideal of the Superman (U Samurai; even though Harold was not yet ready to give up all belief in immortality, he was beginning to think of Nietzsche as an even greater prophet than Wells. One 1907 draft of `Cophetua' was written as a Shavian allegory in prose, but the only surviving version is more like Byron than Shaw, an unactable versedrama on a grand scale. It ends with an invading army threatening the gates at sunrise, even as the king defeats corrupt priests and courtiers within the city. Cophetua is clearly not just a Romantic hero but a Superman, master of the new dawn, overcoming the old evils of false religion and social repression. The ambiguity of the ending is deliberate: according to Nietzsche, the Superman must live through an eternal cycle of achievement and destruction. Harold believed, as he said years later, that the modern Utopia had to be endlessly striven for, even though it would always be just out of reach. Harold showed a 1907 draft to a distinguished Surrey neighbour, Gilbert Murray, whose translations of Greek tragedy he had much admired in 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



performance. Murray gave encouragement and invited him to tea to meet Shaw's famous producer, Harley Granville-Barker, and Barker's wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy, who was later to read several times at the Bookshop. The next step was to send the play to producers. The inevitable string of refusals followed, from Forbes Robertson, Beerbohm Tree and others. Eight years later Harold was still talking of rewriting. The project now seems a sad waste of effort, one of many doomed undertakings in that limbo time between two ages of literature, but he believed in it. Finishing the summer 1907 version was a moment of relief and triumph. With the play off his hands for a while, he could give more time to Dorothy. He took her for a holiday to Normandy, but the hotels were too dirty for her, so they transferred to Switzerland, which she much preferred. They went for long walks and lay on mountain ledges in the sun, reading Emerson and Thoreau. Harold was unhappy all the same, and his usual luck reasserted itself on the way back when they stopped in Paris on a Sunday and ran out of cash. They tried Cook's, the consulate, the Anglican chaplaincy, the embassy and a pawnshop without result; in the end he raised £4 on his watch at a hotel after much haggling, and they were able to have supper off salmon and peaches before leaving for home `wedged in the infernal region' of the train. He was very sick on the ferry. Behind the ill luck lay insights he had reached in the clear air of Switzerland alone with his wife. He wrote in his diary that she had not married `the athlete of her dreams', nor even the Harold she thought existed. He had noticed ± at last ± that she had frowned on hearing the word `soul'. Ì ought never to have married! My subconscious self knows that to be true, but I may repeat it and repeat it and my other self will never believe'. Real-life tragedies had no dramatic ending, he decided. If a play could leave an impression of ùtterly hopeless infinitely protracted misery, no possible deliverance by death but a hopeless endless poisonous possession of life', that would be a true tragedy, deep and indelible. Thus the poet who dreamed of paradise (one of the most frequent words in his writings) also imagined himself to be in hell. Always strangely innocent, he set his aims much higher than most people's, with the result that his disappointments were correspondingly deeper. He was perhaps unfortunate in lacking the Browne family's materialistic streak, for ordinary life brought him no consolations. When he could see the great wonderful future with the modern Utopia waiting for its Samurai, everything seemed possible. When depression returned, the question `What's it all for ?' battered incessantly at his mind until he thought he would go mad. Maurice found a new home for the Press that summer, much to the relief of his cousin at Ranworth. He had sent out copies of the prospectus to all the young poets he could think of, and a friendly reply had come from one Arthur Sabin, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


46 Harold Monro

who suggested that, if the Samurai were striving for the best, as they claimed, their books ought to be better produced. He evidently had some experience of printing. Remembering Guthrie's advice about finding a manager, Maurice hastened up to Newcastle where Sabin was working miserably as a hairdresser's assistant. It was obvious at once that here was the right man: a short, slim figure rather like Keats, with deep poetic eyes and a wonderful voice, an admirer of Dante, unquestionably full of high seriousness (Plate 9). Sabin wavered, delighted to be offered a job but reluctant to put his wife and child at risk. His visitor bubbled with confidence: money was flowing in, a new age was beginning. Sabin seemed to be persuaded. Maurice went south to see Guthrie about the hand-press, and cycled miles looking for a house within reach of the Monros. The bubble burst when he received a doubting letter from Newcastle. Ì feel an old man, and broken', he announced, asking Harold to help `cremate the S.P. in the back yard'. Harold replied that `we cannot and will not drop and smash this weapon you have partly forged for us', adding that his friend's letters formed a fine specimen of quicksilver in bulk. Maurice wrote back cheerfully, agreeing about the quicksilver: Sabin was coming after all. Guthrie could not spare the press until August, but he was keen to help; one of his many suggestions was that the new movement needed a bookshop as a meeting-place and publicity centre, an idea Harold perhaps remembered. Sabin arrived at the end of June and approved of the press, a splendid double-crown Stanhope of about 1800. With his family and new employer, he moved into a house Maurice had found at Dunsfold. Harold had advised on the lease, although both he and Sabin were uneasy. It was all very well to have a roseentwined verandah looking across fields, but there was nowhere to put the press. While Sabin `struggled to tie together the loose ends of a business which seemed nothing but loose ends', as he remembered in his autobiography, his employer sat in the sun, answering queries `with amused patience, and reading dozens of novels in the new sevenpenny editions'.13 Sabin soon discovered that the bargain price agreed for the Stanhope had only been for a half-share: the other half still belonged to Guthrie's printer, who would have to be bought out. Maurice denied all knowledge of this, claiming he had been swindled; then he suddenly left for London, pleading urgent business. His disappearance at least meant the Samurai Press could be rescued from Utopia. The first need was for a practical house, so the Sabins took an old cottage and workshop in Cranleigh. The Monros motored over several times to help, the printer brought the Stanhope from Harting on a horse-drawn wagon, and work soon began on the first hand-printed Samurai volume, The Stonefolds by W. W. Gibson. The bungled deal with Guthrie was only one reason for Maurice's flight. He had been desperate for money all summer, ostensibly to save the Press but 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



actually because he wanted to marry Gwynneth, who was a minor with no funds of her own. In August he went to Haslemere to make a last, frantic appeal to his brother-in-law, saying one's first duty should be to one's neighbour, not to ideas or poetry. He hinted at some secret trouble which he preferred not to discuss. This undiplomatic approach upset Harold, who thought it showed a lack of confidence in him as both poet and comrade; with typical bluntness, he told Maurice not to be so self-centred. Had he known about Gwynneth, he might have been blunter still. Maurice flew into a rage, envious as he still was of a marriage he believed to be perfect and of wealth he imagined to be much greater than it really was. Harold must have ached to reveal the truth about himself and Dorothy; instead he had to endure furious reproaches for being too selfish and happy to save a friend who had come to him in urgent need. The quarrel was an exceptionally painful one, leaving wounds that perhaps never quite healed. Turned down by Harold, and then, inevitably, by Gwynneth, Maurice sought refuge with Straus, who watched over him night and day for a week, probably fearing a suicide attempt. Soon afterwards Maurice contrasted this demonstration of loyalty with the treatment he had received at Haslemere, telling Harold that if he had been able to turn to him instead of Straus it would have meant `the difference between a bitterness worse than death and a calm if uncomprehending resignation to the inscrutable purposes of a God I do not now believe in'. This letter was written from a Paris cafeÂ; he was going away to find àn excuse for continuing to live'. He was next heard of on Capri. If he were to write any more poetry, he told Ficke from there on 15 October, `well, it will help to pass the time till the end comes. May it come soon, for I am very tired'. He rather spoiled the effect by revealing that he had found a flat with a fine view and a housekeeper who had taken a fancy to him. His long-suffering mother had paid his debts, and he was free and in Italy at last. Harold was left with sole responsibility for the Samurai order. In the September of 1907, he and Dorothy moved into a romantic old farmhouse at Upper Ifold, deep in the hills above Haslemere, having decided Braeside was too small for them. Making himself hope the peaceful beauty of the place might restore their happiness, he concentrated his attention on Samurai affairs. The notebook was still going round the group, which consisted of himself, the absent Maurice, Skilton, Vernon, Green and a newcomer, Harold Murray. Wells said he had no time to help, but he contributed an admirably succinct statement, declaring that the universe is systematic; that the systematic quality could be called God or God's purpose, working through the individual, who must seek it out; that humanity moves forward to a collective consciousness; that this evolutionary process can be furthered by socialism; and that the individual should aim at full knowledge, living and expression. Wells said 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


48 Harold Monro

that for himself this meant exercising his greatest talent, which was for imaginative writing, especially in the promotion of a world-state.14 Harold would have agreed with all of that, if the systematic quality could be called evolution. His own creed stressed intuition as the means of perceiving God and good ± there had been no sadness in Eden until the intellect-serpent had introduced knowledge ± but this Romantic, anti-intellectual position puzzled the rest of the group. Vernon and Murray were uncontroversial, except that the latter earned a rebuke from Harold by arguing that monogamy was natural rather than merely expedient. Green took a practical, socialist line as usual, unlike the others. Maurice sent in his own creed from Italy; Harold thought it too personal, but prudently added that it was deeply sincere. The toughest statement came from Skilton, who said the universe was not concerned with him, nor he with it (then he wasn't likely to be concerned with anything, Harold remarked disapprovingly); all he knew was that society had treated him shabbily. Instead of speculating about the infinite and appealing to the comfortable classes, the Samurai should be looking for recruits in the submerged tenth, with the aim of training them to be physically and mentally efficient. The other Samurai thought Skilton was excessively lower-middleclass. Maurice's escape to freedom soon turned into farce. According to his autobiography, he became friendly with an elderly Englishman on Capri who was looked after by three sisters, the youngest very attractive. The good-natured Mr Spedding noticed Maurice's interest in the sisters and presented him with a double ticket to Sicily for a holiday. Maurice boarded the ship ± and at the last moment the second sister, à magnificent Amazon', hurried up the gangway to join him, while Spedding happily waved them goodbye. This story was probably designed to save face. Letters Maurice wrote at the time mention Spedding and Rosina, but not the younger sister. He had almost certainly fallen prey to his own housekeeper.15 All went well in Sicily until a local newspaper announced the arrival of Mr and Mrs Maurice Browne, a report which reached England, where even Sabin heard of it. Maurice rushed home, anxious for his reputation, but he had to bring Rosina with him as she was by now pregnant. He hid her in a London flat, where she had a miscarriage, apparently induced by one of his medical friends. Her lurid protestations convinced him he could not abandon her, but he was as poor as ever and on the edge of mania. Straus wrote to Harold for help in getting her back to Italy, saying she was an adventuress who would soon find another man; somehow funds were raised, and Maurice was persuaded to take her home. When he revisited her on Capri later he was chagrined to find that she only wanted an allowance and his `death' so that she could live respectably as a widow.16 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



As soon as Harold had got himself and Samurai business organised at Upper Ifold in September, he took up the poem on Judas he had begun in the spring of 1906. It had been hard going before, but now it came in à fine rush'. The key was his realisation a month earlier that a true tragedy should convey an impression of `hopeless endless poisonous possession of life'. The poem's narrator meets Judas in hell and hears his tale. The `master' had talked of making a new world, yet had been uninterested in practical action, so Judas had decided his own contribution should be to amass capital. After making a final appeal for a decisive move, the traitor had fled from the upper room, With Freedom! Freedom! ringing in my ears. He forced it on me ± Why? I could not tell: I did not care, and still I do not care. 'Twas like the clapping of a prison door Behind me. Now to feel and kiss the world! To be sincere: to love myself again! When Harold read through his final draft, he was amazed to find ideas he hadn't suspected were there. Appropriately for a work in the tradition of Dante, Judas could be read on at least three levels. As narrative, a Spectator reviewer later thought it powerful and imaginative, with psychological insight into the central character. As political and social allegory, it dealt with topics its author had often heard discussed during the year. Judas is a capitalist and landowner, supposedly accumulating money for the common good but actually using it for his own benefit. A recurrent storm of blood represents the misery of exploited humanity; at the end `the grinding of the wheels' can be heard in his voice as well as in the storm, with the implication that he is the precursor of modern industrialism. The third level of meaning is personal, for this is a poem about some of Harold's private concerns in 1906±7, more so than he probably intended. In Jesus, the charismatic, visionary master who listens to appeals but declines to take action, there is a trace of Wells and his reluctant dealings with the Samurai. And in Judas there is more than a trace of Maurice Browne. The bitterness of that August quarrel, when Harold had been so unfairly accused of treachery, had found its way into the poem. It had been Maurice who had urged the master to take the lead in building a new world ± Maurice who had fled in the sacred names of `freedom' and `sincerity', betraying the friends he had promised to serve and wasting their money ± Maurice who had lived in an endless cycle of self-delusion, ruin and ever-renewed pride. Despite his fine talk he had run away, leaving Sabin enslaved and half-starved to turn the wheels of the press. More deeply still, Judas's torment reflects Harold's sense of the ùtterly hopeless infinitely protracted misery' of married life with Maurice's sister. At least 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


50 Harold Monro


This first separation was intended as a short-term experiment. It must have astonished Maurice, but it came as no surprise to Sabin, who had noticed how Harold had been making use of a cottage in the garden, spending days and often nights alone there with his books. Evidently sympathising with Dorothy, Sabin makes the seemingly defensive comment that she had `sought some relief among friends and companions, innocently enough', because her husband had been too serious to appreciate her `natural lightness of heart'. A note among Maurice's papers suggests that she may have had an affair with Romney Green, and certainly Maurice believed the fault was as much hers as Harold's, even though, as he told Marsie, Harold was àn utterly tactless and a most difficult man'. Harold's diary records only that on 19 November 1907 he took `rooms at 60 Gloucester Place near Portman Mansions. Excuse of business. Crisis D and I'. Having attended the fortnightly board meetings of the Portman Estate since his return from Ireland, he now spent every morning in the estate office, although there was little to occupy him there. The rest of his time was filled with seeing friends, going to theatres and extending his socialist education. The `passionate outbreak of co-operative effort' which he had prophesied in The Evolution of the Soul seemed to be under way. Intellectual London was in ferment, with many organisations meeting to thrash out schemes for the world's social and spiritual future, convinced that the new dawn was about to break. He put himself through a busy training, visiting a slaughterhouse, a lunatic asylum, the Old Bailey, Crosse and Blackwell's factory and the Bryant and May matchworks, once the scene of a famous strike and now, he thought, run on model lines. He spent several evenings with Skilton and heard lectures by Wells, G. K. Chesterton (who was heckled by Shaw), George Lansbury and others. It was strenuous work, but not always satisfying. `Walked part way to Hammersmith town hall . . . stopped by unemployed miner with wife and child ± after long talk gave him 2s ± consequently refused admittance because house packed to hear Snowden and Bull debate. Furious . . . get back somehow with very sore foot'. On Sundays he attended the West Kensington Ethical Society, hearing its American leader Stanton Coit preach on such congenial subjects as `Shelley' and `The Ethics of Diet'. Coit, a keen Fabian of Wells's faction, was in the process of founding an Ethical Church that would have no dogma or mysticism. Harold eagerly joined his Society (Àt last I have found what I want'), and met him several times for lunch.17 Harold's favourite lunching place was that magnet for idealists, the Eustace Miles Restaurant near Trafalgar Square. Its proprietor was well known ± and in 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


that real-life tragedy could have an ending. Finishing the poem seems to have been decisive. Less than a fortnight after sending his manuscript to Sabin on 6 November, Harold was living alone in London.

some quarters derided ± as a health expert, marketing patent foods and diet plans; he was also a Samurai Press author, having sent in a little book which Sabin had just printed. Harold had recently put himself on a Eustace Miles diet, starting the day with nothing but Eustace Miles Proteid Powder dissolved in hot water. The restaurant was a popular rendezvous, each table even having a flag customers could raise if they were willing for others to sit with them, a system which could have its disadvantages; Harold saw Dorothy there on one occasion and felt obliged to join her. Husband and wife met several times, not always by chance. Once they stayed together at Hylands, where Dorothy was acting in one of Lady Gooch's plays, and sat up in front of their bedroom fire until four in the morning debating their future. Àfter that bed, but did not close my eyes'. He sought advice from the Gooches and others, revealing more to his mother than he meant to; Sophia could have said, Ì told you so', but instead she was kind, as he gratefully recorded. By contrast, May Gooch took Dorothy's side. He foresaw he would be `dreadfully dreadfully blamed in the end', but he was convinced now that the fault was not his. Dorothy wanted him to give up èverything good and great for a sort of Musical Comedy life'. Eventually it was agreed he should go abroad for a few months, while she found a flat for herself and, presumably, Nigel. Then they would try living together again. Christmas came. Harold returned to Upper Ifold, which was already in the hands of agents to be let furnished. Three years later he published what seems to be a memory of this cheerless occasion: Beside the frozen pond in the bleak world of December, you smiled at me lightly and rather disdainfully, and passed indoors humming an old song that you know I love. I stood in the falling evening empty of all sound, by the margin of the ice, long, long, till my heart became so cold and hard that I could feel no more. . . . And I should spoil your Christmas with my gloomy eyes ± so you told me.18 Dorothy seems to have banished him from the house for the 25th, but he had to be there two days later for a Samurai conference. Wells had declined to attend, saying he could not give to the group what he owed to the world, although he felt sure they were getting good mental exercise. Maurice also failed to turn up, being in no position to work for ideals of chastity and honour, but Green, Skilton, Vernon and Murray all came, and a provisional creed was drawn up: iii. That there is Purpose in the Universe; iii. That the individual is vitally important to that Purpose; iii. That the best means of furthering that Purpose is by collective action. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


52 Harold Monro

That first joint statement by the Samurai seems also to have been the last. The third sentence bears the mark of Skilton, who perhaps pressed his own views too hard. He took over the secretaryship, but if the group survived into 1908 it did so without its two founders. Harold was miserably disillusioned: Wells was never going to help; Maurice was never going to resume the leadership; Romney was doubtful; Dorothy had lost interest; and the group was unlikely ever to agree on the one thing its convenor had really wanted ± a strict pattern of living which would keep him away from alcohol and guarantee his freedom. Even he and Maurice had not been able to confide in each other or keep to the rules. Utopia would have to be found by some other means. That the Samurai Press lasted for more than another year was entirely due to Sabin. He had been enchanted by Maurice but not fooled, telling Ficke that the Browne children had been so spoilt by their mother that they wanted more than they could ever get. Fortunately he was not the sort to waste time resenting the way he had been used and abandoned. He was exercising a craft he loved, and was even able to print two of his own books. He published 25 volumes from Cranleigh altogether, printing at least 11 of them himself.19 He put the Press's finances in order as far as he could. A surviving balance sheet, probably drawn up at the time of Maurice's flight in September 1907, records the realities of the founder's Utopian methods. Income is shown as £35 from sales and £75 from author's `commissions'. These modest earnings from nine months of business are set against the cost of buying, moving and setting up the press (£46), wages to Guthrie's printer (£42), production costs for the first five volumes (£88) and other expenses (£103). The debt was paid off by loans, including `various advances' from Maurice and no less than £45 from Sabin himself, whose salary was apparently only £1 a week.20 Sabin also seems to have bought out the printer at his own expense. There could be no question of fulfilling the original aims of exquisite craftsmanship and monthly volumes, although Sabin was able to set high standards for some of the printing he did himself. Nearly all the 1908 titles were commissioned by their authors, enabling the Press to run at a small profit. Even so, crisis always threatened (at one point Marsie Browne had to send some of her jewels to be pawned), and by the spring of 1909 it was obvious that the business could not continue. Maurice returned to take control, saying he had come to the rescue, and after that even Sabin could not keep things going. The Stanhope was bought by Straus, who later sold it on to Hilary Pepler at the St Dominic's Press. The many unsold books were lodged with an agent, who eventually sent them to Marsie; in the end they went, appropriately, to the Poetry Bookshop, where Harold put a few on sale and sent the rest to be pulped. Sabin embarked on a career in the museum service, setting up his own private press as a hobby. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



The Samurai Press deserves a place in literary history in spite of its absurdities. As a would-be practical attempt to build a path towards Utopia by publishing affordable, well-produced books, all with the required high seriousness, it gave Harold experience which he was to put to impressively good use in 1911±12 when, with help from several former associates of the Press, he founded The Poetry Review and the Poetry Bookshop. As a source of original literature the Press was more significant than it had any right to be, given Maurice's managerial incompetence and Sabin's lack of interest in new writing. Most of Sabin's later contributors were insipid versifiers or `crank' essayists. The best of the authors ± Harold, Ficke, Gibson ± came through Maurice, and there was some justice in his later claim that Georgian poetry started not with Edward Marsh's famous anthology in 1912 but with the Samurai Press in 1907±8.* The Press published early work by three poets ± Harold Monro, W. W. Gibson, John Drinkwater ± who were to be among Marsh's most regular contributors. Gibson's two 1907 books, in particular, marked a new stage in the development of modern poetry, including Harold's. Gibson was undoubtedly the Press's best catch. Maurice had sent him a copy of Zetetes from India, a gesture Gibson always remembered as the first sign that he had reached an audience beyond his native Northumberland. When he received a Samurai prospectus two years later, he happened to have a large package of manuscripts ready for posting and was wondering what to do with it. It contained not only lyrics and ballads of the old-fashioned kind he had already published but also some miniature verse dramas, bleak evocations of peasant life, written in a new, plain style. Maurice could see that most of the poems were ìnfernally level' and minor, as he told Harold, but the dramas were better than the rest, so he divided them up to make the two volumes for June and July 1907, The Stonefolds and On the Threshold (both books must in fact have been printed in August). The Stonefolds is arguably the first manifestation of what is sometimes referred to as `Georgian realism', a style that was later to influence Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen and many others. When Maurice sent Harold's first book of poems to Gibson in the spring of 1907, Gibson said it seemed just a little too `poetical' in choice of theme and in diction ± too full of stockpoetry. . . . Plodding along in my own rut, I suppose the tendency is for me to think mine is the only way; and to think that bread-and-cheese is the only fare. And yet I once devoured confectionery greedily, and even tried my * Too Late to Lament (1955), p. 87. Maurice described himself in Who's Who as, among other things, `Co-founder with the late Harold Monro of Samurai Press . . . from which the Poetry Bookshop originated and, in part, the Georgian Poets'.



54 Harold Monro


Harold was `very much interested' in these comments. Someone of exactly his own age had got ahead of him, opening up the way to a new kind of poetry. He was perhaps the first poet to be directed away from confectionery by the example of Gibson's bread-and-cheese. In so far as a Georgian movement can be said to have existed, it may have begun at this moment when one of the four founder-Georgians (the other two were Brooke and Drinkwater) first influenced another. Some critics recognised that The Stonefolds might be the beginning of something new, but there was very little agreement about the other Samurai books. Reviewers had already started calling for a regeneration of literature, so the Press received a surprising amount of notice, although there were soon doubts. The New Age warned that most of the monthly volumes had little relevance to the Samurai ideal. One reviewer hailed Maurice as `the poet of the future', but another said he wasn't worth reading. There was a good reception for Judas (nominally the November 1907 volume, but actually published early in the following year); The Sussex County Herald even said it was òne of the few great poems the twentieth century has yet produced', a work of àuthentic genius'. It was certainly the most promising poem Harold had yet written, and its publication helped to lighten the gloom of an otherwise dreary start to 1908. While he and Dorothy waited for the house to be let, he prepared a lecture to the Haslemere branch of the Independent Labour Party on `Socialism and the simplification of life'. The branch was now almost a year old, but he was still sceptical about the local socialists with their hand-woven clothes and incessant chatter. Drafting his talk, he thought of telling them they had heard too much about socialism: `You can all think of nothing else'. Ì have noticed that the proposals I have made as to the choice of subject have been received with suspicion and reserve. . . . I often feel that I am only allowed on sufferance to call myself a Socialist'. That would have been a `perfectly bluntly' sincere way to start, but it was a trifle paranoid. He crossed it out and went straight into his message, using ideas he had learned from Stanton Coit: essential socialism was not a matter of economics; it had to start in the soul, expressing itself not in sandals and barley-water but in a religious search for wisdom. If his listeners could believe that socialism should become more and more a religious movement, they would be òn the side of the great wonderful future'.22 He expected a hostile reception when he gave his lecture on 24 February, but his old debating skills stood him in good stead; much to his surprise and pleasure his audience was keenly appreciative. It was a sad moment though, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


hand at making it myself! But now, alas!, I am already twenty-eight, and, I suppose, the veteran of the `Samurai'!21

his farewell to political involvement. His youthful dream of becoming a politician still lingered ± Green and Gilbert Murray had even urged him to stand for parliament ± but the disaster of his marriage had ruled out a public career. `Wasted powers! Wasted powers! But never mind'. What mattered was that he had declared himself as an apostle of the future, and had been applauded for it. There was still a great cause to work for, even though friendship, family life and the Samurai had all failed him. All he needed was a companion; leaving Dorothy was deeply painful. The Monros left Upper Ifold on 25 March and stayed briefly with the Greens. Harold sold the `dear little car', opened a bank account for Dorothy into which he would pay £30 a month, and took leave of friends. On 30 March 1908 he got up at six, said goodbye to his hosts and Dorothy, who was `very miserable', and left for France. By the evening he was in Paris, feeling once again à glorious sense of freedom'. He went to see Rigoletto, but noted in his diary that he would have preferred Wagner.



56 Harold Monro

5

Joy of the hero in his motion showed: He moved the clear ways of the earth along, And to the daylight of the orient strode. (`Two Visions') Having failed to find the modern Utopia in Surrey, Harold was to spend the next few years looking for it on the Continent. The narrator of Wells's book had found it while walking in the mountains of southern Switzerland, later discovering that solitary long-distance walks were an essential part of the Samurai discipline. Harold decided his own search would start with a `pilgrimage', a journey of the soul through snow and hard weather to the ever-returning spring. He would walk to Italy, the land Maurice had dreamed of, hoping the rigours of the way would clear his mind and help him to see his own and the world's `great wonderful future'. And in some strange way it worked. His old life of social conformism, sexual pretence and literary pastiche was left behind for ever. He made final preparations in Paris, sending his heavy luggage ahead to Milan and arranging for mail to be forwarded to post offices along his route. After much repacking he got his knapsack down from 21 lb. to 15 lb., reluctantly leaving out More's Utopia and Keats but keeping Shakespeare and Emerson.1 He also took his diary, intending to use it for some sort of publication later. A photograph taken before another of his long walks a year or two later shows him dressed most uncomfortably by today's standards, equipped with only a walking stick and rain cape (Plate 10). He probably looked much the same when he left Paris, ready for a walk of nearly 600 miles. He decided to let his beard grow as a gesture of liberation. The walk began from Paris on 1 April 1908. He made for Fontainebleau, where he spent three days, his mother arriving on the 5th to fuss over him and sew on missing buttons. For the next few weeks he walked steadily 57 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Pilgrimage to Freedom 1908±9

south-east, averaging some fifteen miles a day, often in rain. He preferred roads to rough country, enjoying the freedom to look around him and keep up a regular stride. Cars were still rare, but when motorists passed they stared in puzzled amusement, France having not taken up the new German-Swiss fashion for hiking. The further he went from Paris the kinder people became, but the more they regarded him as a lunatic. Sometimes a boy would trot along beside him, asking questions; once he was checked by the police. In the mornings he often wrote for several hours, but then he would walk without pausing except for a lunch break, unless the weather was especially bad. Occasionally even lunch was omitted, and he would fast for ten hours or more, convinced it did him good. Sometimes he walked on until the moon rose; it was by moonlight that he entered the hilltop `dream-city' of Flavigny, silent within its ancient walls, and slept on the inn landing, pestered by fleas. Many of the villages and little towns had medieval gates and splendid churches; often some great spire or ruined castle would seem to dominate the horizon all day. The hotels were cheap, damp and grubby, but they provided friendly company in the evenings, when mill hands, railway porters, commercial travellers and soldiers would tell him about poverty in France and ply him with too much wine. Ã te d'Or with a flourish of When spring broke among the vineyards of the Co butterflies and the sound of a cuckoo, he felt `the first thrill, that vernal quickening of the blood, . . . the most beautiful sensation of the year'. People kept warning him of brigands, so at Dijon he bought a revolver, soon cursing its useless weight. As he approached the high plateau of the Jura the weather reverted to winter, with some snow. Locals suggested a diversion to Baumeles-Messieurs to see the caves and a genuine hermit; a storm trapped him there for two nights, swelling the famous waterfall, a gigantic plume gushing out of the cliff face. Further on he climbed the remote valley of the HeÂrisson, where the river plunges over precipices, losing his way three times and stumbling among icy rocks in the dark in danger of his life. On 27 April he reached Switzerland at La Cure and found himself looking down on Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc, a view so overwhelming that he had to turn away. He lost 15 francs at petits chevaux in Geneva, hated the town and walked back along the lake shore to Nyon. By this stage he was in poor shape, suffering from his supposedly gouty feet and from pains in chest and stomach. A doctor suggested a sanatorium at La LignieÁre near Gland, a few miles further on. La LignieÁre is not mentioned in Harold's published account of his walk, but he stayed there for a week, undergoing fomentations, massage, scotch douches, hot baths, electric light baths, sun baths and other treatments. Health foods made on the premises were a speciality, and all meals were vegetarian. To begin with he felt worse, but the peacefulness of the place soon began to take effect. The sanatorium was 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


58 Harold Monro

run by Seventh Day Adventists, `wonderful admirable people'. His room looked over wide lawns towards the lake and mountains, and nightingales sang in the woods; in the surrounding countryside, where the trees were heavy with blossom, the ancient villages seemed half asleep. By the time he took to the road again on 11 May, he was full of regrets at leaving `this enchanted world'. In Lausanne he bought himself a New Testament, but the next stretch was worldly. From Vevey to Chillon the lake front seemed òne continuous row of immense jerry-built hotels with the well-known detestable names ± Palace, Majestic, Splendid, Grand, Royal, Imperial'. Under the walls of Chillon castle there was even an English racing four with a cox yelling orders as though on the Cam. By contrast, the meadows beyond the head of the lake were full of flowers and the sounds of cow bells and flowing water; he thought it would be a good site for Utopia. Much to his disappointment he was told it was too early in the year for a lone walker to attempt the St Bernard pass, so he turned northeast towards the towering citadel of Sion and on up the Valais, where he saw groups of Italian workers camped along the road, the first evidence of southern poverty. On 19 May he climbed Napoleon's steep road to the Simplon pass, slithering on masses of wet ice in the tunnels, and spent the night in the huge, bleak hospice just beyond the summit. Next morning he walked down into Italy, feeling the sudden heat and shouting aloud with the roar of the river as the mountain water rushed past him down the gorge on its way to freedom. He made for Lake Maggiore dreaming of Utopia, but, after Switzerland, Italy seemed far from Utopian, with its squalid villages and many signs of superstition, although he acknowledged that the omnipresent crucifixes represented an ideal of a kind. The countryside was beautiful; he sent a postcard to Wells, saying the open-air life was so delightful that he felt he had never lived before.2 Crossing Lombardy, he reached Busto-Arsizio, `the Manchester of Italy', where he was forced out of bed at five in the morning by factory whistles and church bells, symbols of the twin tyrannies of capitalism and religion. He reached Milan, aching and exhausted, on the afternoon of 26 May, his thirty-seventh walking day since leaving Paris. After a brief rest he took the train to Florence, his final goal, where he was soon caught in the old city's spell, as Maurice had often told him he would be. He met an expatriate artist and started doing some sketching. `Have never been anywhere near so happy in my life', he wrote on 5 June, but on the 7th, `the old crushing depression returns again with its appalling ``What's it all for?'' ± ``What's it all for?'' ringing in my ears'. Despite such lapses his month in Florence seems to have been exceptionally enjoyable; many pages of his diary are blank, often a sign that he was busy and cheerful. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Pilgrimage to Freedom 1908±9 59

He worked hard at turning his walk into a series of articles, then decided they would make a book. Ten chapters of The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage were typed by 18 June, but on that day the task was interrupted by a sudden idea for a series of short satirical poems, sketches in words, to be called `Fifty portraits' or Ìmpressions and Portraits'. These Ìmpressions', as he finally called them, turned out to be unlike anything he had written before. Somehow his pilgrimage had given him the strength to break away from Romantic themes and language; although his models were probably late-Victorian poets such as W. E. Henley and John Davidson, his career as a genuinely modern poet begins at this moment.* For the rest of his stay and at intervals for another year he composed portraits for his new project, sometimes at the rate of four or five a day.3 The first, written on 18 June, was of a rich man lunching at the Carlton: He took the paper patiently, with like Patience began to read it and to carve A shilling strawberry. `Twas about the strike ± A hundred, in the cause, had sworn to starve. He put it down and muttered: `Let them starve!' Other poems were about corrupt businessmen, idlers, dilettantes and a priest, with a strong bias towards socialism, abstinence and vegetarianism; the only worker to be represented unfavourably is in a slaughterhouse: He moves in blood; from his distorted face It trickles down his garments; on each hand Is gore and filth: the atmosphere is red And heavy with the stench that fills the place, Where he ten loathsome hours a day must stand Slaughtering that the million may be fed. The portraits were probably all based on actual people. Harold had not forgotten Gibson's advice that a poet should write about real life in plain language, `bread-and-cheese' being preferable to `confectionery'. Actual gluttony is a recurrent theme of the Ìmpressions', and their simple style is intended to reinforce their spartan, Samurai message. In the few cases where there is no message but only lyricism, the language tends to revert to the archaic. If Gibson's The Stonefolds is the first example of Georgian realism, the best of the Ìmpressions' are probably the second. Harold's convictions were compelling him to become a poet of his own age; his first modern book, Before Dawn * The word Ìmpressions' was a consciously modern choice. During the poetry revival in 1912±13, avant-garde verse was often loosely described as Ìmpressionist'. It is only in fairly recent times that `Modernist' has become the established term.



60 Harold Monro

(Poems and Impressions) (1911), started to take shape on that June day in Florence 1908. He returned to Gland for a longer course of treatment in late June, having found the wine and other temptations of Florence worryingly hard to resist. After a bad start, and a terrifying dream of his body being eaten by a mass of writhing worms, he set himself a routine of running round the bathing enclosure, then diving into the lake. `Those who among thy waters plunge, arise/Filled with new wisdom and serenity', he wrote in `Lake Leman', a lyric composed at about this time. He felt fit and well by the time he left on 17 August, recording proudly that he had not drunk alcohol for two months nor smoked for three. He vowed to be teetotal for life: Ì shall not forget that promise ± unless I forget everything'. He was sure he could achieve lasting health and freedom, ànd then I shall be able to really live'. The sanatorium was the nearest he had yet come to Utopia. If the Adventists who ran the place then were like their successors today (for La LignieÁre still flourishes), they could have passed for Samurai: clean, healthy, serious young men, radiating quiet confidence. The tone was purposive and thoughtful; Harold even gave a lecture on socialism, to about fifty people. If the intellectual and physical discipline of Gland could be pursued in some other community, untrammelled by religion or ill-health, the true Samurai might yet be found. On 17 August he moved on to an establishment which had been warmly recommended, a colony on the Waidberg above Zurich. Walking up to the hilltop, he found a meadow among pinewoods where women in simple white dresses and men in nothing but shorts were playing games, dancing, or tending vegetables. Everyone seemed brown, fit and happy. He was allotted an àir-hut', a cubicle closed only by a curtain and partitions which stopped well short of the wide roof, so that he slept virtually in the open air. In the morning a bell rang at 6.30 for barefoot gymnastics in the dew, followed later by games, reading and, for newcomers, regulated exposure to the sun. In the afternoons the colonists went for long walks, putting on coats to pass through the villages. It seemed an ideal society. Dressed like the others, sun-tanned and with his new beard, Harold must have looked very different from the conventional figure who had left Paris in March. A young blind man came to the compound every day for a cold shower. He had been advised to become a `fruitarian', and had found life on the hill so beneficial that he had built a hut for himself in the woods. Gazing at him, as one could do unseen, Harold was suddenly enthralled by `delight in the beauty of developed manhood'.4 Here was a genuine Utopian, a man of the future, possessed `by the happiness of the sane mind in the strong body and by a kind of forest-joy'. The regimen at Waidberg was as prescribed by the celebrated holistic doctor, Max Bircher-Benner, the inventor of muesli, whose patients during a long career included Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann (the latter's novel, The Magic Mountain, describes another hilltop heath colony just before the First World War). The doctor believed in the importance of solar energy, agreeing 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



with the theory of a London physician, Alexander Haig, that many ailments, including gout and a propensity to tuberculosis, stemmed from an excess of uric acid caused by a `dimly-lighted diet' of meat, alcohol and over-refined foods. The mind had to be treated as well as the body, so Bircher-Benner had recently taken up psychoanalysis. Five Monros had been experts in the field of mental health; Harold may well have known that Zurich was a major centre for new theories. C. G. Jung had been in charge of a large asylum there since 1900, developing ideas and attracting disciples. Bircher-Benner incurred Jung's suspicion as a mere amateur, but his methods seem to have been often successful. Harold had several consultations with him, presumably at the doctor's clinic near what is now Bircher-Benner Platz in Zurich, receiving advice about diet and being treated ± in the doctor's word ± `psychologically'. The patient was made to recount the history of his òutside and inside life', but his only record of these sessions is some notes he made of his dreams. One night all the ugly women in the world found husbands and screamed the joke in his ear. On another he was made to walk the roads naked as a cure, with many fat people. Loud discussions about vegetarianism shook the houses in Oxford Street. He married Dorothy a second time and was supremely happy, but in other dreams he started to drink again and had to console his mother. One dream mirrored the way he had clutched at the ideas of Wells and others to save himself: `With some one else below me am letting myself slowly down a very narrow tower lined inside with books in shelves to which I cling to keep myself from falling'. Bircher-Benner would have heard all this and much else. Harold must have been one of the very first British writers to undergo analysis. One result seems to have been immediate and profound: there are signs in his ever-reticent diaries that from this time, as never before, he knew he was homosexual. His happiest relationship had been in the early days with Maurice, after which he had vainly looked to Dorothy as a younger companion whom he could teach and draw strength from, a Samurai with a mind eager for beauty and truth. It was probably his talks with Bircher-Benner, reinforced by watching the blind youth on the hill, which showed him that his marriage was beyond rescue and that the friend he longed for would have to be a man. The moment of reunion with Dorothy was approaching. His diary is mostly blank, until a sudden entry on 23 September: Take Heinrich to the theatre for the first time in his life. This glorious life is coming to an end. My period of happiness is closing. I feel a sombre mist closing about my spirit. My faculties are drying up. I cannot fight it. Oh how happy I have been! How I have lived! 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


62 Harold Monro


Two days later he left for Gland. There is no other mention of Heinrich, unless he is the subject of an Ìmpression' written on the 30th:

O Youth, Youth of the marble shining limb, With arms uplifted to the vernal skies; O perfect face, O blue beloveÁd eyes ± Soul of all souls, keep loveliness in him!

On 2 October 1908 Harold went to Lausanne station with a sinking heart. From the Paris train, in a flurry of hats and toys and luggage, emerged Dorothy, Nigel, Kate the maid and Miss Violet Fenton the governess. He took them all to Gland, which can hardly have been to his wife's taste. She made every effort to appear reformed, but at the end of the month she prevailed on him to move to the Riviera, where English society liked to spend its winters. They quarrelled about vegetarianism on the journey. He found a villa for them all at Garavan, near Menton. The local English-language newspaper duly reported their arrival, reviewed Judas and said Mr Monro was working on a play. Ten days later he was free again. `Decide that Dorothy must return to England and have all she can done to prevent ±', he wrote on the 15th, and next day she set out alone. In the back of his diary there is a note of fees for an operation and a nursing home. She could not risk another pregnancy after the dangers of her first, but she would not accept the chaste relationship he wanted. He was left to curse himself: It was my aspiration to be a real poet, not a tame producer of verse. It was my desire to stand apart and observe ± not to mingle. But now for the folly and obstinacy of my early youth I must atone. What bravery and courage I feel as soon as she is gone! ± What a feeble and will less creature I am while she is here, torn by the ceaseless struggle to do what of course I cannot. For five days he filled his diary pages with Emersonian hymns to liberty and the Over-Soul, and then set down `the plain dismal facts': All the time she was here with me I was in a state of black melancholia, longing only that some cliff might slip beneath my feet . . . Since she has left me I have been happy beyond all bounds, without a sigh for death or a longing for anything but ever freer fuller more beautiful and complete life. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


He issues from the waters of the stream, And moves along the flower-bespangled grass; . . .

64 Harold Monro

. . . at last I gave way to the drink fiend and fell right into the habit. I poured myself out a tremendously strong whiskey and soda, and, as I did so, a radiant Christ-Figure appeared at my side. . . . He bent down and kissed my feet, imploring me. I did not like the action. I made him rise, and said to myself: now it all depends on the way he asks me. Then he did not forbid me, but merely shook his head and meekly implored, so I drank it down. It was no good looking to divine authority. He would have to take charge of his own fate. He seems once again to have been reading Nietzsche, who persuaded him this time that God was indeed dead and that there could be no immortality; in his happier moments he thought this made `present life more real and more important'. He made yet another attempt at `Cophetua', then laid the play aside on 24 December, whereupon new ideas came flooding into his mind. Kate was puzzled by his excitement, asking why he didn't write `some nice love story that one could read', but the governess was sympathetic and Nigel seems not to have been a distraction. The next few weeks were remarkably productive. Ìnspiration blows like a wind. One feels the storm gathering with all the usual signs; and when it has spent its force one may whistle till one's cheeks crack.' The storm blew hard, if briefly. He composed two poems about Christ returning to bring `the kingdom of an everlasting youth' and the end of social injustice, and a long dramatic piece in which various characters try to explain their notions of God without reaching any agreement. Then the most remarkable poem of the group formed itself in two dreams, and Harold wrote it down next morning, suffering great exhaustion afterwards. `Two Visions', which was to become the introduction to Before Dawn, sets the theme for much of his work in 1909 and later. The first dream was of contemporary humanity, a hellish mass which Broke in stark faces, mouths and eyes agape; Then shrank again and indolently slept; Then sprang with guttural noises of the ape; Then drifted, formless, out of sight and wept; True to no cause, yet swift in all deceit, When slumber almost held me, slowly crept Round the low wainscot, and in violent heat, Roared at me, crimson suddenly; then leant Backward to shake with laughter. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


He recorded another dream:


Far in a faintly golden mist he stood: The Titan of the dawn ± Humanity. Colossal as the silences that brood Over the deep, he filled the tranquil sky; . . . His visionary eyes looked out afar Beyond the transient semblances of death. No sound of supplication came to mar The rhythm of his calmly-taken breath. No ripple of a thin or faint delight Moved round his crimson lips; and underneath His bright skin aureoled by the rose twilight Rolled the vast torrent of majestic thews. Master of his strong passion, . . . O symbol of the earth, ensanctified With joyfulness of manhood's high intent! The coming Superman, the Samurai of the future, is seen as a naked hero, a figure from Waidberg perhaps, beautiful in the sunlight. Harold had never written so honestly before. The public, social meaning of `Two Visions' rests on the private duality of his own nature, so that for the first time he not only uses his drink-induced horrors as a source of poetry but also finds an image for his Utopianism: the Titan of the dawn, fit and perfectly self-controlled, represents both his ideal self and his ideal companion. When Dorothy returned on 16 January, his hopes were `dashed to the ground at the first sight of her', but inspiration lasted for one more day and he composed a vision of the woman of the future: `Grey-eyed and fearless, I behold her gaze / Outward into the furnace of the dawn' .5 The woman of the present could hardly have been more different. `How she could have written that now she really hoped all would go well and then have appeared as she is ± with all those sausages of hair lying about over her head for instance ± beats all comprehension . . . she must want to finish it off as quickly as possible and get free. Oh Nigel!' Work became impossible. `By now I should have been among epics if she had not come back.' She constantly asked for money, then spent it on luxuries. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Like many another idealist, he sometimes found his fellow-humans repulsive and threatening. Dreams, some caused by drink, brought out his paranoia, as blurred faces lunged at him in fury or drew back in contempt. The second vision came just before dawn:

When the weather kept her from tennis, she lay about reading novels, ignoring a book by Wells that he wanted her to discuss. `She lies on the sofa in her dressing gown in the morning, draws and draws me and cries till she gives herself a headache . . . She says `Ìf you won't give me `love' I warn you I shall take it where I can get it'''. `. . . picking up a novel, leaning her feet up against the mantelpiece and devouring the book and the contents of the sugar basin. She devours novels just as she does sweets, her meat at meals, life, everything . . .'. He struggled against her, knowing himself to be the main object of her greed, yet even now she could sometimes overcome him, having long ago found ways of arousing his conscience if not his desire: `last night late I made up my mind that in fairness to her I must try one more effort ± It felt impossible, but mechanically I went and tucked myself into bed next to her and our last trial began'. Nearly eight years later he wrote `Coronilla', a poem in which the twining yellow flower symbolises Dorothy's devouring embrace: Oh, what is that I think I see, So pale beyond the yellow dusk, Beyond the trailing bitter flower And reek of marrow-bone and musk? Is it a face? ± My frozen hands Are hiding in their bone: The stare above the little mouth; And she and I alone. She calls me. Oh, I wonder why. She wants me. Shall I go? Now is your time, my brain, to cry The often-practised No. She went to Cannes for a few days at the end of March. When she came back, she told him about the `good time' she had been having. Ànd my heart froze heavier and heavier ± I believe I could have made a better show if there hadn't been that musty smell of tobacco about her lips when I kissed her. . . Phillips is courting her. It is a disgusting performance. He is a married man of about 47, a very nice man of the most ordinary type, the ``comfortable'' type that she loves. He keeps her supplied in chocolates and cigarettes'. `Her chief domestic occupation consists in making appointments with the dressmaker to meet her here . . . and then going out and missing them. When I suggested lately that she should watch over N[igel] a little more she said, `Ì'm not going to spend my day in the nursery ± I'm not a cow-woman''.' On 17 May 1909 àt last the long inevitable event takes place and Dorothy and I part for what looks to be our final separation. She starts by the 1.17 for 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


66 Harold Monro



`Coronilla': wood engraving by Paul Nash for a projected book of Harold's poems (The Chapbook, October 1925)


68 Harold Monro

In the previous autumn a letter had come from Maurice, apparently his first gesture of friendship since the quarrel fifteen months earlier: ìf our love means still to you what it used to mean, as it does to me, will you not resume our old relations?' Harold had readily responded, sending him the typescript of the Chronicle, which Maurice deeply admired and hoped to publish through the Samurai Press, a hope which collapsed with the Press in the spring (the book was subsequently accepted by a London firm for publication in November). Early in May Harold sent him a batch of poems, all probably written since Dorothy's return in January. The most ambitious was a preliminary draft of `The Death of Jehovah', a major project which its author hoped would develop into a modern epic; its Nietzschean aim was to demonstrate the death of God by relegating Christianity to myth, while calling on the men and women of the future to accomplish their own deliverance. The first version seems to have dealt with political and social themes in a `bread-and-cheese' style. There would be many rewritings: completing `The Death of Jehovah' was to be one of his highest ambitions for nearly twenty years, although the idea had little more chance than Utopia ± or Maurice's world-epic ± of becoming a reality. Maurice had been pleased to hear he was finding Nietzsche helpful, but was appalled by the results; still an unreconstructed Romantic himself, he thought the new work prosaic and inhuman. Harold thanked him warmly for his furious comments, which had the sincerity proper to a Samurai. Arriving alone at La LignieÁre, Harold took a pleasant room and lined it with his books, resolving to devote his mornings and evenings to writing and his afternoons to labouring in the grounds, where the company of a muscular young gardener made the work agreeable. The boy had run away from a butcher's shop to take refuge in vegetarianism and religion. Gardening was part of the therapy Harold set himself; the natural men of the future would raise their own food, taking Zarathustra's advice literally to be `true to the earth'. Yet for many weeks he was in acute depression, thinking of Dorothy and Phillips. When you are in his arms at dead of night, Safe in the darkness, though you cannot see, Sudden shall flash upon your inward sight The form of me. In theory he was glad to be rid of her, but in practice he was horribly jealous. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


England with Nigel, Violet and Kate, and I . . . go by the 3.10 straight through to Gland'.


Freedom had not yet brought happiness, but it was freedom all the same. He could now continue his pilgrimage in search of the `great wonderful future'. He revisited Waidberg and heard talk of an even more advanced Utopian colony in the hills of southern Switzerland above Lake Maggiore, where European intellectuals had been gathering for a decade or more. At the end of August he went to Locarno on the lake, arranged to rent a chalet, and then returned to England to settle his affairs. It may have been no surprise when a legal official cornered him in September, apparently on Paddington Station, to serve him with a court order for the `restitution of conjugal rights'. Dorothy was either hoping to get him back or trying to establish evidence for a divorce. He ignored the order, and she did not pursue it. Many of their possessions were still at Upper Ifold, so he spent a sad day at the old farmhouse; he had agreed that she should have most of the furniture, but he disposed of almost everything else except his own books. Wedding presents assembled in splendour six years before were sent off to be auctioned in Godalming. There could be no going back. He had a consultation with Bircher-Benner's colleague, Alexander Haig, talked to Stanton Coit and sought comfort from old friends, especially Straus, Romney Green and Sabin. No comfort was to be had from Maurice, who was threatening suicide and blaming friends again, having run out of money after the failure of the Press. Nor was there comfort at Hylands, where May Gooch had been saying for months that her brother had been mad to leave Dorothy. It was best to be practical. He spent hours with Sabin discussing what might replace the Press, deciding that a first step would be to launch a periodical dedicated to new poetry. He also made contact with several influential people, including a friend of James Guthrie, Edward Thomas, who invited him to call, and an extraordinary entrepreneur, Galloway Kyle, who had founded the Poetry Recital Society earlier in the year. Kyle asked him to give some unpaid lectures. It was thus in October 1909 that Harold made his first public appearance as a champion of poetry, by giving three talks to members of the Poetry Recital Society (later the Poetry Society) in the London suburbs. His message was simple and often to be repeated, that poetry should be taken seriously as the highest form of human utterance. Tolstoy, Shaw, Wells and others had defined Utopia in prose, but poets began where prose writers left off. Poetry should be 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


I will so haunt you to the verge of death, That when, in bitterness of spirit, he Shall lean across you, you with your last breath Shall call for me. (`Go now, beloved')

memorised, read aloud and even, as was his own habit, recited to the stars after a long walk. `Let us keep the past poetry of our race alive: let us see that the present learn its poetry ± no, be filled with it, and let us be conscious of its chords vibrating out into far time and binding us, apart from all sense of time, spiritually, actually with the hope and promise of the beautiful future.' These ringing generalities by `The Author of ``Judas''' were very much to the taste of Kyle, who wrote them up in the next number of the Poetry Recital Society's journal, unaware as yet that some of the speaker's ideas were not the sort of thing most members of the Society would approve of. The same issue of The Poetical contained a review by the new lecturer, as well as his lyric about a youth bathing (printed anonymously) and an announcement of a new `Centre' for the Society in Montreux, to be organised by Harold Monro, Esquire, of La LignieÁre (Harold was still thinking of the sanatorium as his main base).6 A centre in Montreux was all in the day's work for Kyle, who was also arranging one in Australia, as well as a camp in Morocco and a huge banquet for descendants of the great poets. Years later his veneration for poetry was to be revealed as a cover for making money out of unsuspecting enthusiasts, but even in the early days of the Society it was obvious that his critical standards were almost non-existent. `What ± what ± what are you doing in this galley?' spluttered Maurice on seeing The Poetical, saying the Society seemed to be a dumping-ground for quacks and nincompoops. Harold replied that one had to build on whatever was available and hope for a miracle. He was probably wise: although his association with Kyle was to be at heavy cost, it was the start of a career that would lead within four years to a dominating position in the London literary scene. The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage was due out on 10 November, so Harold sent a copy to Edward Thomas, who was well known as a writer on the countryside. Thomas thought the book uneven and too impersonal, and he was right. The private motives for the pilgrimage are so thoroughly concealed that the narrative seems curiously aimless, its tone shifting at random from whimsy to sermonising. But although Harold had been unable to tell the true story of his spiritual journey, he had travelled a long way since setting out from Haslemere eighteen months earlier. The pilgrimage was not yet complete. A week before the Chronicle was published, Green and Sabin helped him load his heavy cases of books into the boat train at Victoria. On 5 November 1908 he installed himself in the chalet at Locarno.



70 Harold Monro

6

You are my chosen comrade, I am yours. We will erect of consecrated hours . . . A temple to the universal soul. Let us depart for where the sweet airs flow Body and mind as one together grow There in the forest by the mountain stream . . . (Ìnvitation') It was appropriate, perhaps essential, to Harold's divided self that his Continental pilgrimage paused in two very different centres of freedom, one for the mind and one for the body. He discovered the mountain first, windswept and comfortless, fit for Supermen, a place of self-discipline and hard work. Then he ± or rather Maurice ± found the tower, a medieval one in Florence, the city of aesthetic and sensual delight. For a while he shuttled between these two homes, as though they represented the two poles of his own personality, until spirit and flesh came briefly together in the Utopian relationship he needed. There would have been no Poetry Bookshop without this double experience in Ticino and Tuscany. The significance of the Lake Maggiore area for an idealist lay not in Locarno but in the mountain foothills above the nearby fishing village of Ascona. The Swiss canton of Ticino was a symbolic borderland between northern intellect and southern passion, free from both Teutonic over-regulation and Latin anarchy. Wells had made it the gateway to his Utopia, and many free-thinkers had been drawn there, including a Belgian, Henri Oedenkoven, who had arrived in 1900 and bought a hilltop behind Ascona, naming it Monte Verita, the Mountain of Truth. It was Monte Verita and its associated colony that had made Ascona famous, especially among the sort of people who frequented places like La LignieÁre and Waidberg. 71 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Mountain and the Tower 1909±11

Oedenkoven ran his magic mountain as a hotel where guests could undergo cures while living in harmony with the elements. He built simple `light and air huts', sun baths, and small houses for longer-term residents, and named parts of the estate ± Parsifal Meadow, Valkyrie Cliffs ± in homage to Wagner, who, with Nietzsche, was the inspiration for much of the new age's thinking. Food was vegetarian, raw wherever possible, and clothes were minimal or dispensed with altogether. Photographs show guests dancing in the woods and working in the vegetable garden (Plates 11, 12). Harold must have visited Monte Verita soon after arriving at his Locarno chalet. Most of what he saw would have been familiar to him from Waidberg, but there was a more extreme colony in the woods beyond the compound. Some of Oedenkoven's original companions had deplored his commercialism and withdrawn to live as children of nature, obeying only one law, to be true to oneself and the earth. Nowhere else in Europe, perhaps, was there so much of that `simplification of life' which Harold had lectured about to the Haslemere socialists just before starting his long walk.1 Visitors to Ascona ranged from city-dwellers taking brief health-cures to longhaired mystics and anarchists, drifting in from all over Europe in search of freedom. Not everyone was impressed. An Austrian aristocrat in about 1907 was revolted at the sight of ill-washed, naked figures capering in the moonlight, scrawny from their diet of cabbage-water and raw turnips; having expected to find rampant sexuality, he decided the commune had in fact developed an unhealthy apathy towards sex, and he was glad to get back to the world of beefsteaks and long skirts.2 Other guests were less sceptical, especially Germans at odds with the militaristic culture of their homeland (the language of the mountain was predominantly German, which was no barrier to Harold). The local villagers, all Italian-speaking, were suspicious, and their descendants still remember the colonists as matti, mad ones; but Switzerland was a uniquely tolerant society. The colonists believed their attitude to sex was healthy and natural, free from `civilised' titillation. From 1905 the Munich psychoanalyst Otto Gross became a dominant influence, preaching his gospel of erotic liberation; regarded as dangerous by both the police and orthodox practitioners, he maintained that analysis was a means to inner and outer revolution, overthrowing the ego by releasing deeper forces to reshape the mind. He had been treated by Jung in Zurich earlier in 1908, a crucial year in the history of analysis; Harold may have heard of him there, and perhaps went to Ascona to learn more. During the next few years, there were rumours of Asconan orgies in which Gross encouraged people to act out their fantasies. His name is not well known to British readers, but some of his ideas are: in 1907 he had a passionate affair with Frieda Weekley, the German wife of an English professor (Gross told her she was `the woman of the future'), and when she left her husband in 1912 for 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


72 Harold Monro

D. H. Lawrence, Gross's sexual theories began to find their way into English fiction. Harold was one of the first British writers to be influenced by the new ideas. He was already on the right wavelength, with his hostility to orthodox religion and marriage. He had written in his 1906 diary that he hoped for a return of paganism, and the imagery of a poem such as `Two Visions' suggests that he was attracted by current German attempts to revive ancient sun-worship, a cult that was certainly practised at Ascona. Two of the poems he wrote at the chalet in November 1909 are clearly a response to Asconan sexual doctrine, possibly even to conversations with Gross. `Don Juan in Hell' portrays Juan rejoicing in the memory of his loves, and `To Tolstoi' (written in half an hour on 23 November) rejects the Tolstoyan creed of chastity which Harold had for years been `carving with my will / Into my flesh': Praised be the fate that under southern skies Hath led me forth from thy grim northern ways! The sex drive, `the Spring that shall eternally renew', is recognised as a necessity which cannot and should not be resisted. Harold had not written about sexuality before, but the subject preoccupied him at Ascona, both because he found it difficult and because he came to see it as central to his vision of the future. The springtide, representing the force which generates all terrestrial life, became a leading image in his poetry. He was still looking for the ideal society, but with a difference: the Samurai way of life was now to include sexual fulfilment, not chastity. He had a good deal in common with Lawrence, another Utopian, whom he met several times in later years and greatly admired. Lawrence's novels would be always available at the Bookshop, although the danger of police raids sometimes meant that they had to be put out of sight. Among the many other writers influenced by Monte Verita, one in particular seems remarkably similar to Harold. Hermann Hesse, the German novelist who was to become a reluctant hero of the hippy movement half a century later, was in many ways typical of the people who came to the Mountain of Truth. Like Harold, he was prone to disappearing for long walks and was always a pilgrim, needing a base yet never settling in it and believing he should never have married. Like Harold, too, he wanted to spread ideas, yet refused to identify himself with any movement or party. Both men were hypochondriacs with a weakness for heavy drinking. Both were treated by Dr Bircher-Benner, as well as at Monte Verita. It was in search of a cure for drinking that Hesse went to Ascona in 1907; he slept on the ground in one of the huts and roamed the hills naked, getting scorched by the sun and gashed by thorns.3 While there is no evidence the two writers ever met, it is a fitting coincidence that the mill house 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Mountain and the Tower 1909±11 73

74 Harold Monro

Harold's tenancy of the chalet at Locarno was short-lived. The house was far too small and too remote, being a mile or more beyond the funicular above the town and a long way from Ascona. Having never had to keep house for himself before, he sheepishly hired a manservant. Then, after a few productive weeks, he was obliged to leave in a hurry for the Riviera, where Dorothy was begging for his protection. She had returned to Menton for the winter season, only to find that àll the females in the place' had `started trying to claw her to pieces' when they saw she had no husband with her. He had to spend the whole of December at Menton, discussing arrangements with her and Phillips, all three showing such candour and sincerity that he thought they `might almost be in Utopia or in Wells's `Ìn the Days of the Comet'' '. He tried to think of himself as a Wells character, dealing with sexual relationships in the modern progressive way; it seemed right to release her to her lover rather than force her to be unhappy, but he felt they were cheating him. It was all miserably painful. Sometimes she still seemed the perfect comrade, talking about poetry ± she was enthusiastic about his new work ± or the future, but then she would become an empty-headed socialite again and hurry off to a party. Mrs Phillips, who was refusing a divorce, waylaid him several times, lecturing him in the street. Half-wishing he could go mad, he drafted and redrafted a poem about dragging his rival from lovemaking and strangling him very slowly. Perhaps because he had agreed to be responsible for Nigel for part of each year, he returned briefly to Locarno, where he moved his books and servant to a less inaccessible chalet on the Monte Verita estate. His journey back to Menton in January 1910 was partly on foot, a tough winter walk along the coast from Genoa; one day he covered 35 miles between Albenga and San Remo, `the longest walk I've ever done'. As he went he planned a prose work or perhaps a prose-poem, to be called `The Springtide'. For the next two months at Menton he tried to keep himself sane by labouring on his new scheme. Essentially ± though by no means explicitly ± `The Springtide' was to be about the sexual urge and the way in which `civilization' cannot cope with it, an Asconan subject still largely taboo for British poets. There were to be twelve books, one for each month, the early ones dealing with the birth of the spring force and with questions of morality and fecundity. July would be a vision of `The City of the Future' (he left this page blank in his notebook). August was to be the month of grief and mourning in which one has to recognise the meaning of the earth having been defiled. Now the human spawn is abroad showing 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Harold eventually bought near Monte Verita was later to be occupied by Hesse's son, Heiner, who was born in the year Harold arrived in the Ticino.


Socialist ideals were hard to reconcile with the reality of the masses. The winter visitors on the Riviera were no more attractive, perhaps the worst of all being Dorothy and Phillips, she so easily charmed by chocolates, lust and kindness, he so masculine and dull. The great natural drive towards generation, the `rut' as Harold called it in his notes, produced the `human spawn', a `crawling and wriggling' monster. Somehow the poet had to see beyond that. The autumn sections of `The Springtide' would explain the crudities of modern life as manure for the vintage of the future. The books for November and December would be a farewell to the dead gods and an Òde to the Future'. The whole project was impossibly ambitious, and the gaps in his notebook slowly filled up with other work, but he was to persist with his efforts for another year or more. He spent as much time away from Dorothy as he could, going to concerts and operas, including the complete Ring cycle in Monte Carlo; afterwards he lingered in cafeÂs until the small hours, talking to new acquaintances and giving way to his òld enemy, the aching lust for wine'. One of his regular companions was his near-contemporary at Cambridge and Lincoln's Inn, Charles Tennyson, who seems to have had a bachelor flat in Nice; occasionally they met Oscar Wilde's former host on the Riviera, Frank Harris. Sometimes Harold spent whole nights away, at Tennyson's flat or elsewhere, although his diary only hints at the circumstances: ` ``The Valkyrie'' at Monte Carlo ± Played heavily and lost ± On to Nice for the night afterwards: How amazing! Of course the opera sandwiched in between two such occupations hardly touched me'. He started visiting Turkish Baths, having probably discovered that sexual activity was tolerated (patrons could stay all night). Young men were easily available in Nice, as Wilde had found eleven years earlier. ` ``Hold off from sensuality,'' says Cicero', Harold wrote in February, ` ``for if you have given yourself up to it, you will find yourself unable to think of anything else.'' I thought I was going to appease my senses, but the more you give the dog the more he howls for ±'. The Asconan ideal of sexual freedom seemed no better in practice than drinking. He fed the dog of sensuality in secret, fascinated by the adventure. It was finally agreed that he would return to Ascona, while Dorothy and Phillips took a holiday nearby; the Riviera crowd would thus think she was still with her husband, who could deal with her mail and look after Nigel. Harold thoroughly approved of this arrangement, thinking it `so Utopian as to be scarcely credible'. He left on 11 March for Milan with his wife and son and a new nanny, a Swiss girl named Marie Spati (later to be a housekeeper at the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


itself, and having its photo taken. And one asks oneself: is it possible that for this the woods have been cut down and the factories and hotels piled? (the woods, green-aisled).

76 Harold Monro

Having only just taken new quarters, Harold now moved yet again, to one of Oedenkoven's larger houses nearby. Casa Sasso, `the white house on the rock' opposite the entrance to Monte Verita, had enough space for Nigel, Marie and the manservant, while the flat-roofed extension made a delightful study `just made for me', a six-angled room with a vast window and balcony towards the whole expanse of the lake.4 Many of Oedenkoven's buildings had flat roofs, not only for sunbathing but also because he wanted people to live with as little between themselves and the sky as possible; similarly, his doors and windows and even the elaborate gates across the road from Casa Sasso had rounded corners, because right-angles were unnatural. On the Mountain of Truth even the architecture was Utopian. How far Harold mingled with the colonists is not recorded, but by moving into one of their houses he entered their semi-monastic world, ready to emulate their freedom and dedication. He spent most of his time working, or walking alone in the hills. On a clear day the view was magnificent. The mountains and lake look immense and so calm that one can only just believe them real. Little catches of all kinds of music from mandolins to grasshoppers and ripples are floating up in wisps, and bells are ringing every now and then from villages. I can see 14 villages and towns all with church steeples along the lake and in the mountains, from my window.5 He was determined to control his restlessness and `the sexual difficulty' to which he now felt he was a martyr (`there is always the fear that alone will drive me mad'). If psychoanalysis had helped him to recognise his homosexuality, it had not enabled him to be at ease with it. At least Tolstoyan repression could be left behind: when the manservant gave notice, Harold took the chance to summon a rather less respectable replacement, a youth he had probably met in Florence. Oreste seems to have been poor, uneducated and known to the police, but Harold described him to Maurice as a `faithful and excellent servant', paid him a regular wage, took him out at least once for a `treat' and made him generous loans. After the boy's arrival the 1910 diary makes no further mention of `the sexual difficulty'. Oreste gave Harold àn awful dressing' in May, presumably about drink (`Never have I had anything said so direct to me. . . . If that simple honesty does not at last impress me, nothing will'), but he could not keep him from the depression that always seemed to follow a move. Day after day a cold wind came roaring down the lake, while rain battered on the flat roof as if in mockery 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Bookshop). His mother, who was wintering at Menton as usual, stood waving on the platform, witness to the family's respectability. At Milan Dorothy went to meet Phillips at Orta, while the others travelled on to Ascona.

of Monte Verita's ideals. Yet again Harold resolved on a regular programme: `for the morning, . . . one hour letter-writing, one hour Italian, one hour correction and typing, and 1/2 an hour learning by heart ± This leaves the rest of the day clear for reading and writing'. Meanwhile Nigel and the governess Marie came and went; sometimes the child was a `supreme Joy', but his incessant chatter soon became wearisome. When they left for London in mid-May 1910, Harold fled south to Florence for a week's `thorough dissipation' with Maurice, whom he had scarcely seen for two years. Maurice had recently established himself as a tutor in Florence. He was delighted to meet Harold again, and they spent long evenings together, renewing their companionship, talking earnestly until wine overcame them. There was much to tell about the pilgrimage and the new ideas and experiences it had led to: poems and reading, Waidberg and Bircher-Benner, the strange world of Monte Verita. Harold seems to have revealed his sexual orientation: Ì look back longingly to Florence', he told Maurice afterwards, ànd, now that I have to do without, I know one reason why I was so happy there. My ``stomach'' though of a different construction to yours, calls out, I fear, just as loud and often'. Maurice seems to have replied that his friend's activities had not gone unnoticed. `Heavens', Harold wrote back, never comfortable without a shield of respectability, Ì hope I haven't already got a disreputable character at Florence ± but I suppose there's not such a thing as disrepute there! Still you fill me with horror'. The large British community in the city included people whose way of life would not have been possible at home: Italian law allowed sexual relationships between men aged over 16, for example. Harold was keen to return, although he was well aware of the danger he would run if he spent too many evenings drinking: Ìf the demon I dread gets hold of me in Florence, it is 2 years down hill to the grave'. The risk seemed worth taking, all the same. He asked Maurice to find him a flat for the winter, preferably in some old palace across the Arno `(if only it could be a little quaint and unusual!)'. Back at Ascona he was joined by another former Samurai, Romney Green, who was accompanied by a new partner, Bertha, for whom Romney had abandoned wife, family and Haslemere workshop. Harold was pleased to see them, especially as they were a willing audience for his latest poems, one of which, `The Last Abbot', he dedicated `To R. and B.' They thought he read aloud exceptionally well, suggesting that he should give regular readings in public, an idea he found very attractive. Encouraged by their approval, he wrote more of his epic, `The Death of Jehovah'. He also expanded his notes for `The Springtide', which was to be a prose allegory and defiantly unlike work by professors, `the scratch of their pens drowning the thunder of the moving suns'. His outline for the opening books personifies the season as a naked earth-god racing down through the mountain 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



forests with the melting snow, seeking the future. Springtide reaches the fertile plains and meets a beautiful boy, catching him in what seems to be a generative embrace. The boy then runs into a city, reappearing here and there, perhaps as a bootblack or a street musician, with Springtide in pursuit; as the invisible presence of the season passes through the ugly streets, a new spiritual life begins to stir among the people. Had Harold ever finished `The Springtide' it would have been a document very much of its time, late nineteenth-century in its language and early twentieth in its ideas and optimism. The more he worked on it, though, the vaguer it became; the old language could not be reconciled with the modern need for explicitness. He should have been writing a novel, but his prose kept edging towards verse. His preliminary notes have a sharpness of detail lacking in his later drafts: And here, in the south, he rushes down from the snow-hills, leaping the terraces, tangling himself in the vines. His lips are parted and his black hair is crowned with the wildest flowers. The act of love far from being immoral is the one morality. It is man's one escape from himself and function with beauty. Youth in the shape of the little urchin at the CafeÂ Monot, Nice, slipping about (driven away 1/2 a dozen times) with his little block under all the tables to clean people's boots. Young peasant girl in train towards Locarno bursting over towards everyone ± Hunger on men's faces. Piece of a torn letter I found on a country path about the end of the world, with algebraical calculations on the back. The infernal mischief has been this dream of an outside paradise and therefore not making the best of the world. The insistent `No Being but Becoming' written up in Romney's workshop. In the future when the earth is ours again and the great garden we would have and locomotion assigned its right values, we shall tramp about gladly with our luggage on our backs. . . . June 28 '10. Now suddenly the whole thing stands out clear. The suggestion from Romney that the Springtide should be a poem shows me that it must, and in one hour I have the whole 12 books sketched out. Springtide represents the perfect harmony of spirit and body:± the real living which is as yet hardly thought of. He is the new sense. Super-conscious life incarnate ± a soul for the first time born.6 When he worked too fast, disillusion was sure to follow. His two big projects began to seem thin and incoherent. He was worried that Romney and Bertha 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


78 Harold Monro


O how much longer must I tolerate The flowerless repetition of the hours, And little occupations without cause? Love! Love! I want to lay my body out, To be all covered over, to receive; I want to hold, and fasten, and be held: I hunger; I am starved . . . And I have thought Sometimes men gazed upon me half in fear, As though they guessed my hunger. His listeners were right if they rated `The Virgin' more highly than `The Death of Jehovah'. He found that it stirred up controversy whenever he read it; some people hated it, especially women, but some approved. In later years he was proud of it as a pioneering statement, written well before Lawrence had taken up the theme of sexual fulfilment. The poem's personal significance could be kept hidden; under its Asconan pity for lovelessness lay its author's bitter solitude. Early in July he returned with Romney and Bertha to London, where he stayed in Dorothy's flat. Among many other engagements, he started his long career of public readings by presenting some of his new poems to the Hammersmith Ethical Society, only to find that the young ladies tittered at his descriptions of the woman of the future. He had more success at a meeting arranged by Galloway Kyle at the Holborn Restaurant on the 20th. The 400 members of the Poetry Society, as it was now called, had been informed that Mr Harold Monro, àuthor of ``Judas'' and lecturer to the Poetry Society', would be `vocally publishing' his own work ìn illustration of the accepted axiom that poetry is written for sound rather than sight reading'. Only 13 people turned up, but they were appreciative. Next day he went down to Petersfield to have lunch with Edward Thomas. The encounter seems to have gone well: `We might make a great friendship, I think'. But after an amicable meeting with Phillips and Dorothy at the end of July (`we are acting very rightly ± except perhaps over Nigel'), it seemed more than time to get back to work. It was first necessary to arrange winter quarters in Florence, `the city of my heart' as Harold called it when he saw it again. Maurice was away in Levanto, but he had done as he had been asked, finding the most `quaint and unusual' rooms imaginable at the top of a medieval tower house in the Via dei Bardi, near the north end of the Ponte Vecchio. Presumably the two poets intended to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


thought `much more always of my erotic or semi-erotic poems than of my more serious work'. They probably heard `The Virgin', a long monologue by a woman regretting her lack of sexual experience:

share this eyrie, making a reality of the comradeship in Italy which Maurice had so often imagined.7 Harold delightedly signed a lease from 1 October, then left for Ascona, pausing for a day in Levanto, where Maurice was deep in gloom once more. Drinking heavily again they discussed Harold's latest poetry, some of which Maurice liked although he warned against excessive preaching. Harold agreed about the preaching, saying that there were innumerable clergymen in the family. Ì value your condemnation as much as your praise', he wrote afterwards, ànd you throw up the dark spots with a fine scorn'. The charms of Italy were making Ascona much less attractive than it had been. Harold was disgusted when he saw Casa Sasso again, rain-lashed on its rock. Oreste had developed an eye infection, so he had to be sent off to Milan for treatment, leaving his employer with the weather for company. Gales smashed several windows. The Levanto wine took its toll: `passed the most awful night alone in the house roaring with pain'. He blamed uric acid and starved himself for some days, listening to the rain drumming on the roof. Ì have come to associate the place now entirely with rain and to honestly hate it ± as D used to hate Ireland'. On 4 September, aching with loneliness, he filled a whole page of his diary with a lament for his long-dead brother. Then sunshine and Oreste returned, reviving his sense of purpose. He worked steadily on `The Death of Jehovah' for several weeks. On 1 October ± Àt last, at last, ± Oh day of joy and freedom!' ± he left for Florence with Oreste. A few days later he made another of his mysterious diary entries: `How strange! How strange! And what will come of all this?' Perhaps he had met some of Oreste's friends. Florence was not a place where one could concentrate on writing, anyhow. Soon the familiar doubts began. Taking the tower had been à fatal mistake': it was `luxurious beyond all my liking', and the noise from the street seemed intolerable. The tower was hardly luxurious by any normal standards. It was an early medieval fortress-house, of the kind still to be seen in the old city, rising tall and narrow from among crowded roofs. Access was through a grand portal on the street, across an arcaded courtyard, and up 139 steps; Harold had the top two floors, with a little terrace. According to Maurice, there were no beds, only mattresses on the floor, and at dusk a shimmering army of cockroaches descended through cracks in the ceiling. Bread, milk and cheese had to be hauled up from the street by rope and basket. It was all wonderfully romantic, but the new tenant, perverse as always, longed for the spartan solitude of Ascona. Things were not made easier by a startling change in Maurice, who was back in Florence. Having talked of suicide at Levanto, he was now overwhelmingly cheerful. He was going to be married. This time he was sure he had found the right girl, Nellie Van Volkenberg, a charming American actress who had come to stay in the pension where he was living. They had fallen for each other within days, after which she had been obliged to leave for home. Harold could not trust 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


80 Harold Monro

himself even to mention their engagement, although he talked with Maurice for hours, `drinking very much too much wine'; on the mornings after, he felt `the same kind of shame as succeeds some act of lust', knowing `the great high talk' of old was becoming muddied by alcohol. Maurice returned to England at the end of October to raise money, having never moved into the tower. Conveniently forgetting his scorn for the Poetry Society, he persuaded Kyle to appoint him organising secretary in America; then he followed Nellie to Boston. So Harold was alone again, and miserably disappointed. His own engagement years before had left Maurice envious, lonely and dreaming in vain of living with him in Italy; now they had met there ± and their earlier roles had been immediately reversed. 26 October 1910. The situation has become just more than an ordinary mortal can be expected to stand. Presently a wave of real pluck will sweep through me and I shall commit suicide. If I cannot be working why should I remain in the world? It seems as if love could prove the only solution ± it is one for most people. I prefer work, yet I can't do it. At present I'm drinking: there seems no doubt about that ± it presents itself as the only alternative. . . . A friend again would settle things ± one with whom I could share everything. Perhaps he revealed his state of mind to acquaintances in the city. His next diary entries read: 4 November. Beginning to revive. 5 November. O day, day in my existence that I dare not believe! To what heights am I suddenly exalted from the depths of hell? G brought A in to introduce him to me yesterday. He could only stay a few minutes [ but] I asked him to come in to luncheon to-day. It has all begun so unremarkably, but I know I have found ± Ah what a friend! We talked then went a long walk and then stay [sic] on till late in the dusk talking. 9 November. A came to tea and then stayed on to supper. I am transformed. A friend! A friend! I shall have to reread my own writing to see what he has found in it. It is worth while to have done it to have been able to give him some pleasure.

The new friend was an 18±year-old youth named Arundel del Re. Tall and slim, with dark hair cut long by English standards and a face more pale and dreamy than seemed usual for an Italian, he was part-Latin, part-Celt, the son of an illpaid Italian army officer and an Anglo-Irish mother. Being bilingual and feeling 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



no close ties to home, he was full of adolescent eagerness to explore the world beyond Florence. Although he was still at school, he had already become a regular guest ± awed and silent, or so he said later ± at conversazioni held by several well-known English-speaking residents: Hellen Bayley and her partner Edward Gordon Craig, the celebrated theatre designer; George Herron, an American socialist who preached the simple life but gave sumptuous dinners; and `Vernon Lee' (Viola Paget), the mannish English authoress, who, like Herron, lived in a villa at Settignano. It was at Vernon Lee's that Arundel first heard of Harold. in came `young' Collingwood Gee, a clever fan painter. . . short, thin and bird-like with a piping voice . . . I had scarcely time to think before he had whisked me out of the house and was tearing along the street taking me ± he said ± to meet a young English poet, Harold Monro, who had just arrived . . . He seemed tremendously thrilled and something of his mood must have communicated itself to me for when, ± out of breath and panting we finally reached the top of innumerable flights of dark stairs, and I was all screwed up with expectation at the prospect of seeing my first real living poet ± no answer came to our repeated knocking and ringing, I almost felt sick with disappointment. We ran into him, however, in the street, but the meeting was a bit of an anticlimax; he seemed such an ordinary mortal, so unlike in his looks, dress and hair from what I pictured a poet should be. He wore a soft felt hat turned up in front, he had a pleasant oval-shaped face with a high forehead and a rather large nose, nice eyes and a quiet reassuring personality that at once set me at my ease. Gee scampered off and together we slowly and silently climbed up to his flat. The study smelt agreeably of tobacco; the walls were lined with books; a Bar-Lock typewriter ± which later was to be my faithful enemy when it became the editorial typewriter in the offices of the Poetry Review. . . ± lay on the desk covered with papers but, so it seemed to me, very tidy for that of a poet. A log fire was burning in the grate, though the weather was still warm, and it gave the room a friendly feeling. Above the mantelpiece hung a large photogravure portrait of the young Shelley [actually Keats], in a broad dark oak frame, which Monro took with him wherever he went. . . . Outside, beyond the red-tiled terrace with its pots of flowers and orange trees, I could see an undulating plain of dark red roofs and the square brown tower of a church, and beyond it again the olivecovered hillside rising in terraces to the black and white marble facade of the old church of San Miniato . . . I curled myself up in a deep armchair in front of the fire and plunged straight away into the subject of poetry and discussed Keats, Shelley, Carducci and D'Annunzio. Then Monro started to read aloud in his soft yet clear, musical voice. It was my first experience of the kind and I have never forgotten it.8 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


82 Harold Monro

Gee the matchmaker had done well. Harold was careful to seem unexcited, so Arundel saw only a sympathetic older friend, a typically restrained, rather formal Englishman, willing to discuss poetry and music as a teacher might with a gifted pupil. But Harold saw a dream made real, a young Samurai who would respond to his teaching far more readily than Dorothy had ever done. Among his papers there is a long, lyrical description of the evening of 10 November 1910, when, having climbed the tower after a long walk, he found Arundel waiting for him: Like a chord of triumphant music swift repeated, the notes of your voice ran along the air to meet me, greet me. My heart leapt out toward you, then rushed back to within itself, and whispered glad words that you must not know. . . . What little twilight remained fell full on your face and I watched you. The glow of your eyes was soft as moonlight. I could not distinguish your features, only the perfect oval of your face was clear, and the light seemed to gather about it and glorify it, and for a moment I worshipped you. They talked of poetry or sat in contented silence, while sounds drifted up from the streets below and the cathedral bell measured the hours. You rose. It must have been very late. . . . I touched your elbow to guide you to the farther door; then I touched your hand in farewell. . . . I was back in the room at once, seated in the same chair, imagining, believing you had not gone. And indeed you had not. The moonlight held you for me and the silence contained your voice. . . . I woke at dawn with a sudden joy knowing that you and I shared the same eternity.9

The next few weeks went by in a Utopian haze. Arundel was busy with school work, but was sometimes able to accompany Harold to the opera (they were both Wagner enthusiasts) or on a walk. He introduced him to his family and many other people. Algar Thorold, editor of The Florence Herald, must have been impressed by the newcomer; between mid-November and the end of the year he published two of the Ìmpressions', warm reviews ± almost certainly by Arundel ± of the Chronicle and Judas, and, in the Christmas number, Harold's prose piece about Christmas at Upper Ifold, a sad memory that could now be left behind.10 Harold had already met another of Arundel's contacts, Vernon Lee, a fellowUtopian and keen admirer of Wells; she invited him to several of her select lunches, which were famous for her habit of walking her guests round the garden 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



afterwards, then suddenly dismissing them at the gate. Harold could always be sure of finding high seriousness at her villa and at Herron's, where he dined with nineteen other guests on 13 November. That afternoon he had been annoyed by the audience's levity at the first conference ever held in Italy on `sexual problems'; a woman had spoken up for sex education, saying she had believed for years that babies were made in ovens like bread, but the conference had merely laughed. Earnest conversation over dinner was a welcome change. Herron was a man of the future: formerly a professor and clergyman in Iowa, he had been compelled to resign for his outspoken socialism (he said the gospel was ìnadequate to the Social Revolution') and for his divorce and second marriage ceremony, at which each partner had chosen the other as an equal. One of the many socialists Harold met through Herron was Edward Carpenter, whom he had heard teasing Wells at the Fabian Arts Group in 1907. Arundel seems to have taken a dislike to Carpenter, but he remembered that Harold spent hours talking with him. Harold must indeed have been eager to discuss the famous sage's congenial, near-Asconan views on the great future, the beauty of male comradeship and man's relationship to the earth. November ended with a disaster. The month that had opened with Arundel's unexpected arrival closed with Oreste's equally unexpected departure. 30 November 1910. Am wakened by voices in the hall at 7am. and in a few minutes Oreste comes in to tell me the police are there to take him for 3 months imprisonment for the theft of a bicycle 3 years ago. Almost before I have my clothes on, they have taken him away. It is like killing some one. All his things are left lying about. I sit half stunned all the morning. Arundel has stayed the night, but has to leave for school. Meet him later and he is most sympathetic and prevents my bolting away in disgust. Spend afternoon in futile attempts to visit Oreste. Dine at Herron's. 1 December: Trying to visit Oreste, but shall not be allowed yet for some time. Awful day. Towards evening much better. Go to `Don Giovanni' at the Pergola with Arundel. 2 December: Further attempts to see Oreste. Lunch with Vernon Lee . . . Have almost forgotten there's such a thing as work. No success at all in settling down. And with that the èxcellent and faithful' Oreste disappears from the story. Harold's 1910 diary stops there too, bringing to an end the series of page-aday diaries he had kept since that distant time at Drumadravy, when Kate the maid had put misleading labels on the blackberry jam pots. If he kept diaries in 1911±12 they have not survived. The Florence Herald's weekly list of permanent British residents includes him at the Via dei Bardi for most of the winter and 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


84 Harold Monro


According to Alida Monro, it was in April 1911 that Harold was finally persuaded that he would have to return to England. He met the Italophile novelist and poet Maurice Hewlett, who took to him at once though nearly 20 years his senior. They tramped the Tuscan hills together, deep in literary talk, until Harold grew eloquent on the deplorable state of English poetry, prompting Hewlett to exclaim, Ìf you feel like that, for God's sake go back to England and do something'. Alida may well have been right that Harold made up his mind at this moment. He explained his hopes to Craig, who at first thought him à man utterly weak yet determined to do or die'.11 Harold was achieving nothing in Florence and was probably only staying there to be with Arundel, who was due to leave school in the summer; after that, if Arundel would join him, their summers would be in Ascona and their winters in London, where there was great work to do. As a first step Harold wrote to Edward Thomas, asking what chance a young friend might have of making a journalistic career in England, adding that he himself was thinking of finding a home in Hampshire. Thomas was pessimistic about literary journalism, but pleased to hear that Harold might become a neighbour.12 Harold's own chances partly depended on getting a more substantial reputation than his early poems and Judas could ever bring him. Sabin had been labouring on the new poems for months, getting up at six every morning to set them up in type on his own press before leaving for his job at the Victoria and Albert Museum; and Straus had been vainly hawking the sheets round publishers' offices. Help now came from a more influential ally: Hewlett wrote from London in mid-May, grumbling at the mood of the town, where the flags were going up for the coronation of George V, and reporting that he had taken the poems to his own publisher, Constable. Before Dawn was accepted for publication in mid-July. Sabin says Harold was in London in June or July 1911.13 They walked miles along the river and through the parks, considering possibilities. Harold's main idea was for a poetry journal, although Sabin also argued for à centre with a library, a hall for lectures and readings, and cloisters where the student could dream, study and write'. Harold proposed a crusade in which missionaries would `spout poetry at street corners, in public houses, and even in private houses'. Sometimes they called on Romney Green, who listened patiently to their incessant discussion. In the absence of Maurice Browne, Sabin had become Harold's principal adviser and confidant; steady, dependable, generous to a fault with his time and skill, he was in some ways an ideal helper, though hardly a poet of the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


spring of 1910±11. Arundel records that in December 1910 Harold took him to Ascona, where Marie and Nigel joined them for Christmas.

86 Harold Monro

Ìt ought to be called the Gorgeon restaurant,' said Harold, with one of his rare touches of slightly sardonic humour. . . . `This is the first time since my return that I have been reminded we are living in a new Georgian era ± and, by Jove, Arthur, we are the new Georgian poets!' Neither of us realised the momentous nature of this spontaneous exclamation ± the term Georgian Poets had sprung alive from the lips of its parent. Sabin seems to be right that this was the first time anyone had referred to the poets of the new age as Georgian. Edward Marsh believed the term to be his own when he chose it for his anthology a year or so later, but perhaps he had actually picked it up in conversation with Harold. Maurice thought the poems in Before Dawn were the most important collection since Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise. His sister went even further: according to Sabin, Dorothy believed the new book was the twentieth century's equivalent of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Harold was pessimistic: Ì am six years too old', he wrote to Maurice. The book might be promising at 26. At present all the fire has quite died down in me. Florence has partly quenched it, and partly I know too much to go on writing the old sort of stuff and too little to write any new. He added that apart from Hewlett, Maurice and, to his surprise, May Gooch, no one seemed to like the book. `Wells writes most unfavourably'. Thomas had been unable to discover `the unity of word and spirit' he always looked for in poetry; he suggested that prose might have been a better medium, a point echoed by several reviewers. Harold was puzzled by this, although he could see that the poems preached too much. His best work was in fact always to be near the border between poetry and prose, but in 1911 the blunt sincerity of his ideas and style, a poetry for the Samurai, struck his readers as new and unorthodox. The style seems less daring now, with many traces of `the old sort of stuff' showing through the simplified language he had learned from Gibson. The newness of his work lay in his ideas, freshly imported from Ascona and Florence. Before Dawn (Poems and Impressions), the product of three years ùnder southern skies', is an extraordinary book, perhaps the first collection of genuinely modern English poetry. It is dedicated to `those who, with me, are gazing in delight towards where on the horizon there shall be dawn'. The opening poem is `Two Visions', with its image of ideal youth facing the sunrise: 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


future. He remembered that Harold took him out to lunch at Harrods, where a new `Georgian Restaurant' had just opened.


In `The Moon-Worshippers' and `The Swamp' the dying people of the past are shown trapped in superstition, worldliness and fear of sin. Images familiar from the Decadence ± ennui, night, pallor ± are cast aside to make way for sunlight, fresh air and unashamed sexuality. Two poems describe the return of Christ, one describes the return of King Arthur, who rallies `the Nobility to come', and in another Don Juan prophesies his own return and the earthly paradise of the Superman: O crowd funereal, Lifting your anxious brows because of sin, There is no Heaven such as you would win, Nor any other Paradise at all, Save in fulfilling some superb desire With all the spirit's fire. `The Virgin' and `To Tolstoi' reiterate the value of sexual fulfilment. `Paradise' condemns formal marriage, perhaps with a memory of a year's engagement to Dorothy; in a Carpenterian image that Harold was to use again, a sexual relationship is given the same natural sanctity as a tree: BeloveÁd, I had given you my soul, (Which is my body): you and I had dwelt One year in paradise ± when God appeared. . . . The tread of God is murder: if he comes Pursuing us with vengeance, let us stand Together, silent still, against some tree, Whose sacred life we shall be conscious of Within trunk, boughs and leaves. Thus let us pass, If need be underneath the foot of God, Back to the everlasting . . . In poem after poem, God is seen as the giver of law and death, and now he is himself dying, as the speaker in `The Last Abbot' confesses. Immortality is in the human mind and in the continuity of time: All that a man may do or say Is eternal: my soul shall last



Beautiful human body cool and strong, In the full consciousness of human pride, With the slow rhythm of a perfect song . . .

88 Harold Monro

A separate section at the end contains thirty of the short Ìmpressions' begun in Florence in 1908; most of them are satirical portraits, outlining the ills of modern society ± greed, unhealthy eating, idleness, snobbery, elaborate clothes, heartlessness ± which the future must discard. The first readers of this insistently optimistic book would have been astonished at the poet's state of mind soon after publication. He had returned to Florence, where the city's corrupting influence had attacked him again, as he told Maurice: At 32 one must either die or be new born. I was thinking something about the latter, but it keeps slipping my memory, and the former never seems attractive for a long enough period together. . . . I am still often amazingly fond of my senses, and should always want to kill myself very slowly ± about 3 years. Hang all one's senses out first like dry herrings on a string, and when they were quite putrid, one would turn over with something between a groan and a laugh and close one's eyes. I began for quite a short time in Florence, and the amazing thing is that it was not boredom that stopped me, but beauty. Harold decided to leave Florence for good. He went to Ascona, ended his tenancy of Casa Sasso and bought a tiny house in the forest, an ideal home for himself and his young friend. Returning to the tower for the last time he started rewriting `The Springtide' as a long Ìnvitation (to A. d. R.)': Come Love let us build the Future of our dreams High in the solemn woodland, where the streams Shall feed our souls with their eternal song . . . You are my chosen comrade, I am yours. They would grow their own food, worship the sun and build a `temple' of thought, a first structure for the City of the Future. Out of their bond would grow an ìnfant of the soul, not of the flesh'. At last, at last a manhood shall have birth That shall be worthy to possess the earth Gazing no more with penitential eyes To some imagined Heaven in the skies. Fawning no more on the uplifted rod Of some imagined and revengeful God. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Knit into everlasting day, Linked to the Future out of the past.

Fired by this vision of the beautiful future, Harold went to Waidberg to strengthen himself for life in the wild. As soon as term ended Arundel joined him at Meiringen for a strenuous hike over the Rhone glacier to Ascona. The new home in the solemn woodland was an abandoned mill house hidden among the trees, just below the road ± then a mere path ± which runs from Monte Verita to the hill village of Ronco. It had two simple rooms one above the other, connected by a ladder and trapdoor. A small, swift stream rushed almost to the eaves, then dropped sheer to the disused mill wheel, flowed across a little garden and fell in a cascade among the rocks on its way to the lake far below. The waterfall was the only available shower for those of the forest colonists who cared to wash, so groups of them were sometimes to be seen splashing in its pool (Plate 13). Except for these naked visitors the place was deeply secluded; Arundel remembered it as à wonderful spot, an island of greenery among the trees, suspended as it were between earth and sky'.14 When Harold advertised the mill for sale years later, Hewlett enquired where the servant slept if not in the owner's arms. But there was no servant except Arundel, who acted as cook and housekeeper, doing the washing-up in the stream and sometimes hurrying down to the pool to retrieve lost cutlery. Harold fetched and carried, bringing provisions, mostly vegetables, up the mountain paths from Ascona. At night the water thundered close to the wall, its èternal song' making sleep difficult at first, and in the morning Arundel bathed in its cold torrent. Sitting on the primitive verandah at dusk, Harold expounded his vision of their future: they would spend half of each year in England, working for poetry and progressive ideas, and every summer they would be at Ascona, living at one with nature as Supermen `true to the earth'. For a few weeks, he was happier than he had ever been or would ever be again. His Ìnvitation (to A. d. R.)' looks forward to a union that will be physical as well as spiritual: Let us belong to the unrighteous few. . . Already we are one: my soul with thine Begins in flowing thought to intertwine Our passions and our fancies when we hold Each other, when our spirits interfold And when our hands and lips together press Lean outward to the future we confess The lovely earth, nor curse nor even blame The body, we are joined and without shame . . . Another fragment in the same notebook suggests that Arundel was less passionate:




90 Harold Monro

In later life Arundel said he had left Florence in 1911 because he had been turned down by a girlfriend, and he gave no hint that Harold had ever been in love with him. The two men may have slept together at the mill house, but they were not there for long. Arundel was not keen on Asconan isolation, although he liked the idea of London. He sought company, scrambling down through the woods to a romantic house by the lake where he was made welcome by the German writer Emil Ludwig and Ludwig's beautiful wife, with whom the young visitor fell desperately in love. She invited him to Berlin. Harold was furious at this suggestion, calling it babysnatching, and he faced Arundel with a stark choice between Germany and England. Arundel was angry in return, but as he had no money and spoke no German the Ludwigs left without him. For this and other reasons the rural idyll turned sour. As Harold told Maurice on 12 September, It seemed as though I had reached the summit of my life ± the moment that was really to count, and glorify everything that came after it; but Love beat my body till it bled all over at the very moment he was whispering his message from Heaven in my ears. Then the idyll ended altogether. After a blazing summer the Asconan rain returned and the stream burst its culvert, pouring in through the roof of the cottage. The two inhabitants took refuge at Monte Verita, where neither wished to linger, and Arundel made up his mind. Ì was very much down in the dumps. The news from home wasn't particularly encouraging. Monro said: Well, come on. So I said: All right. So we went off to England.'15



Your hand once touched me and it turned me cold To think how little tortured you could be When I was on the leash not to enfold And crush your little body into me . . .

7

There, in London we will laugh again. The tame trees in the square will be enough. We need not see their leaves fall at our feet. (`Love in the Autumn Forest') Harold and Arundel arrived in London on a grey morning in September 1911. The young Italian was fascinated by everything ± the vastness of the Strand Palace Hotel, the smell of English tobacco, the terraces of drab houses ± and Harold was amused by his excitement, though none too excited himself at being back in England. The papers were full of news about strikes, armed escorts for food convoys, the growing threat from Germany and trouble in Ireland. Yet there was a longing for change everywhere; perhaps an innovating poet with a periodical at his command might be able to `do something' towards building Utopia. The two would-be reformers soon moved to a borrowed set of rooms in Gray's Inn, on the edge of Bloomsbury, an auspicious first base, for it was here that the fledgeling Samurai had held their private meeting with Wells in 1907. Harold still hoped to be instrumental in discovering the leaders of the new age. His intentions were simple: to help young writers produce the poetry of the future, and to take their work to the people, so that poets might once again become the unacknowledged legislators of the world, bringing new answers to the old question, `How to live?' In his gloomier moments, he thought of his new undertaking as penance for a wasted youth, the years when he had tried to be a married man instead of writing his own poetry; his highest aim, still, was to write a great poem or drama worthy of the age. His poetic manifesto, Before Dawn, was beginning to find appreciative readers. Carpenter wrote warmly in October, hoping the book would be read by many as a harbinger of the great, wise paganism of the future.1 A young parish assistant named Wilfred Owen came across a copy and was impressed, quoting 91 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Poetry Review 1911±12

from two of the poems in his letters; later he was to draw on the satire and realism of the Ìmpressions' for his own work. In Florence, The Italian Gazette remarked that Mr Monro `thinks and writes in a vein of almost aggressive modernity', and The Florence Herald praised his ùnfalteringly high spiritual purpose'. Among the many reviewers who stressed the book's modernity and outspokenness was Straus, who said in The Bystander that the Ìmpressions' were of èxtraordinary interest' for their ùnexpected directness of diction'. In The Bookman, Edward Thomas was more positive than he had been privately: Mr Monro was àlways intensely interesting', and if one were to choose half-adozen books to show a Martian what modern poetry was like, Before Dawn would be among them. A review by `B. H. W.' in the illustrated magazine Black and White (9 September) hailed the new book as `Poetry that counts. . . . by far the most original and stimulating products of poetic philosophy we have had for years. . . . We are sweeping behind us all the watery sentiment, the reticence and ridiculous proprieties of the Victorians'. A photograph of Harold with this review was captioned: `Mr Monro is a thinker of originality with very fine poetic gifts, and his new work is attracting a great deal of attention'. `B. H. W.' sounded as though he might turn out to be one of the hidden Samurai. Harold launched his campaign immediately. With Sabin as his principal adviser and Arundel as his assistant, he again approached the Director of the Poetry Society, Galloway Kyle, who gladly invited him to `develop' the Society's journal, now called The Poetical Gazette, offering him a half-share in it for £50. The Gazette was an absurd affair, with vacuous articles, sycophantic reviews, and in each number a list of nearly a hundred Vice-Presidents, Patrons and Hon. Members of the Society, including not only respected writers such as Hewlett, Henry Newbolt, Edmund Gosse, Gilbert Murray and Arnold Bennett, but also a princess and a duchess, Miss Melba, the Dean of Salisbury and Mrs Mosscockle. Kyle was too canny to give Harold an entirely free hand, but eager to acquire what might be a distinguished periodical, edited by someone who could write `Poetry that counts'. Perhaps there could be two magazines in one? Harold was keen to get started; ìn a moment of impatience', he confessed later, Ì practically sold myself to the Society'. The resulting contract gave him full editorial and financial responsibility for what he decided to call The Poetry Review; the Society would receive any profits, after paying interest on his money, and would also take 1000 copies of each number for a mere £5 a month. The Gazette would be included as a supplement (though Kyle refused to accept that word), there would be a supervisory committee, the Society would retain legal ownership of the entire magazine, and the agreement would be reviewed, and if necessary cancelled, after a year. It was a most unequal bargain, but it gave Harold a guaranteed print-run and a year's 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


92 Harold Monro

freedom in which to make his mark. Kyle had admitted that the Society looked more substantial on paper than it really was, and the `Committee' soon evaporated, so Harold probably hoped that any objections the Society might make would be easy to dispose of; if so, he underestimated the shrewdness of the man Hewlett later referred to as `Kalloway Guile'.2 For the next few weeks the prospective editor busied himself making contacts and recruiting helpers. Hewlett took him to the Poets' Club, a dining society which saw itself as heir to the old Rhymers' Club of the nineties. It was probably there that Harold met three of the original Rhymers, Ernest Rhys, Victor Plarr and Edward Storer, all of whom were willing to review for him. He wrote to everyone he could think of. The former Samurai poets, John Drinkwater and Wilfrid Gibson, were keen to help. Eminences such as Newbolt and Gosse were encouraging. Frank Harris hoped he would find a new Browning under a hedge. Craig, who happened to be in London, gave advice. Only Edward Thomas was doubtful, remarking to Gordon Bottomley that the Poetry Society was à home for incurables', but Monro, à nice fellow in sympathy with advanced thought', would at least get èmployment, a sense of usefulness, the use of a typewriter and possibly some pocket money, but I should think not'.3 It may have seemed to Harold that the field ahead of him was clear, but in this as in other things he was not to be lucky. In that same autumn of 1911 another crusader returned to England from the Continent, fierily committed to the reform of poetry. Ezra Pound had been abroad for most of the previous eighteen months; in Germany he had met Ford Madox Hueffer, the former editor of The English Review, and had shown him his latest collection, Canzoni, which had been published in July, the same month as that much more up-to-date book, Before Dawn. Hueffer's response had been to roll on the floor in agonised protest at Pound's archaisms and contorted language, teaching him the painful lesson that what poetry needed above all was a new technique. Pound was keen to spread the message. He was already known in London, having arrived in 1908, and soon became notorious for his brash personality and consciously poetic appearance. His poems had been published by Elkin Mathews in the same Vigo Cabinet series in which Harold had first appeared. In 1909 he had joined a small group of poets, including Storer, F. S. Flint and T. E. Hulme, who had been meeting to discuss new ideas. Most of the ideas came from Hulme, the group's most original thinker, and Flint, who was exceptionally well informed about the latest French poetry, but Pound had soon appointed himself leader. He asserted himself again as soon as he returned in 1911: visitors to Yeats's Monday evening gatherings in Bloomsbury found that the flamboyant American had somehow taken charge there. Pound's selfassurance was irritating, his manners were not to the English taste, and his scholarship could easily be faulted, but he was difficult to ignore. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Poetry Review 1911±12 93

It was inevitable that he and Harold should soon meet and find one another difficult. They were both looking for a new poetry, but their methods were far apart: whereas Harold was a democrat, committed to educating the people without serving any kind of group, Pound liked to work through a coterie in the Parisian way, making no secret of his scorn for intellects slower than his own. In 1932, in what must be one of the most grudging obituaries ever written by one poet about another, he said Harold had arrived in London believing there should be `national minstrelsy' and `tradition'. Against that travesty of Harold's aim may be set the opinion of a leading national minstrel, Henry Newbolt, who said in 1927 that Harold was à born revolutionary and a born poet', always `the eager supporter of all innovators'.4 Harold was rather too eager, in fact, lacking Pound's eye for genuine new talent, but he was no less keen than the American to see a radical change in English poetry. His principal offence was not so much that he did not understand Pound's ideas as that he refused to close his mind to other possibilities. Eventually Pound damned him as stupid, along with almost everyone else in London, but with a qualification: Harold's habitual melancholy showed that he, unlike all the others, actually knew he was stupid. Early in November 1911 Harold decided to go ahead. The periodical he founded, The Poetry Review, is in publication to this day, but in its early stages it seemed a risky business. Pound and Hueffer warned him that it could never be a financial success, but he put in some money of his own, took a cramped office just behind Lincoln's Inn, began paying Arundel a pound a week as assistant editor, and set to work.5 For the next two months, Arundel wrote later, we were literally haunted by The Poetry Review; sleeping, eating, drinking, sitting, or walking, the thought of it never left us . . . My own part in all this turmoil was a very modest one, consisting chiefly in sending out prospectuses, addressing envelopes, typing letters to likely contributors and subscribers and touting for advertisements . . . From nine-thirty in the morning until five or six in the evening, I sat in our offices on the top floor of 93 Chancery Lane that looked out upon a dingy courtyard and a square of dun-coloured, smoky sky. I believe Monro found the sunlessness of those dreary winter days even more depressing than I did. The only thing that kept up our spirits at all was the growing pile of subscriptions and the occasional letters of encouragement from various parts of the country. Fortunately for us, in a narrow passage leading into Lincoln's Inn Fields, a few minutes from the office, we discovered the Wayside Tearooms, kept by a delightful Welshwoman ± Miss Davies ± who was interested in the venture and always gave us a warm welcome when we turned in there for a cup of tea, a piping-hot crumpet and a comfortable armchair in front of a bright fire, at the end of a hard day's work.6 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


94 Harold Monro

The Wayside became an informal committee room, where the editor and his assistant would gather with their helpers, chief of whom in the early days were Sabin, Green and the Review's publisher, the invaluable Cuthbert Wilkinson of the Westminster Press. Wilkinson may have been recommended by the editor of Rhythm, John Middleton Murry, who was also based in Chancery Lane. Harold worked in a characteristic surge of energy, reading and acknowledging manuscripts with a care most editors would have scorned. Freedom came on Saturdays, when he and Arundel banked the week's subscriptions, shut up the office and `like a couple of boys let out of school' treated themselves to a large lunch. Then Harold rushed off to catch a train into the Essex countryside, where he had taken a picturesque cottage, the Malting House at Great Canfield. Weekend retreats became part of his self-discipline, times for writing, walking and serious conversation with selected guests, who usually came one at a time. Despite dreams of Asconan summers, he probably had to remain in England throughout 1912, tied down by the business of editing a monthly, so the cottage had to be a substitute for the Ascona mill house.7 Arundel sometimes went to the Malting House with him, and they apparently continued to share lodgings during the week, soon moving from Gray's Inn to rooms in Great Ormond Street. Arundel was by no means the ideal assistant. Looking back nearly twenty years later, he recognised that his moodiness and `sudden attacks of unreasoning hatred of poetry' must have been very trying. And London was full of distractions. He talked to writers, went to concerts and fell in love with actresses. His reminiscences show him as attracted only to women, but he clearly enjoyed being befriended by older men such as Edward Marsh or Wilde's devoted followers, Reggie Turner and Robert Ross. When Virginia Woolf met him in 1919, she described him as `Logan's prize young man' (Logan Pearsall Smith was well known to be homosexual).8 Some of Arundel's friendships must have saddened Harold, who had to watch his chosen comrade slowly drifting away. The youngster could be exasperatingly unreliable in business matters ± Hewlett, who disapproved of his long hair, once described him to Harold as a blackhaired goose ± but he was a delightful talker, becoming a popular guest in several households, especially Ernest Rhys's, where he was present one evening with Hueffer, Lawrence and Yeats, when Pound slowly consumed the roses from a vase on the dinner table.9 Another haven was Edward Marsh's flat in Gray's Inn. Marsh was beginning to be a patron of young artists and writers; genial and ever-hospitable, he sometimes asked Arundel (but not Harold) to breakfast, afterwards accompanying him to Chancery Lane before going on to his own office in Whitehall, where he was secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Harold had no time to be sociable. He hated interruptions when he was busy, and must have loathed having to spend Christmas 1911 with Dorothy and 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



Nigel. A few days later he had to travel to France in answer to an urgent summons from his mother, who was now Mrs Callwell, having married a retired Colonel in the previous year.* The couple had taken up residence at Menton, but their happiness was short-lived: on 30 December Albert Callwell died on the Riviera, where Sophia had lost her first husband twenty-two years earlier. She had acquired another Grief for her collection. Harold hastened back to London as soon as he decently could, anxious to start his new magazine. The moment seemed more than ever auspicious: several recent publications, notably Lascelles Abercrombie's The Sale of St Thomas (August), John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy (October) and Rupert Brooke's Poems (December), had set people talking about a poetic renaissance. The first number of The Poetry Review ± À New Monthly Periodical devoted to the study and appreciation of Modern Poetry of all countries' ± appeared in January 1912, only a week behind schedule. Substantial and handsomely produced, it was impressive testimony to the editor's managerial competence, although some of the credit should doubtless go to Arthur Sabin. Harold was to publish 12 monthly numbers, containing work by some 60 contributors; not all the 60 were worthy of his pages, but many are still famous names. His magazine records a crucial year, when the schism developed between the two groupings now loosely known as Georgians and Modernists; if he had never done anything else but edit the Review, he would have earned himself a place in the history of early twentieth-century British and American poetry. One result of his editorship was that the idealism of the Samurai Press lived on through the Review into the Georgian `movement', which was a `passionate outbreak of co-operative effort' of the kind he had called for in The Evolution of the Soul. Six of the ten contributors to the January 1912 Review were former associates of the Press. Three Samurai poets, Gibson, Drinkwater and Harold himself, all keen on social and spiritual reform, were to be present, with Marsh, Brooke and Arundel, at the famous lunch in September when the anthology, Georgian Poetry, was agreed on. The first Georgian Poetry, originally planned as a Review publication, contained work by 17 authors, 11 of whom had by then contributed to the magazine. The element of Samurai high seriousness among the Georgians was not altogether to their advantage ± Pound complained that Harold went in too much for `that Nobility-of-soul sort of thing' ± but their anthology might never have got off the ground without it.10 There can be no satisfactory definition of `Georgianism'. Marsh's poets were much too English to think of themselves as a school, with theories and a manifesto. In the sense used in the present book the Georgians were simply * Under the terms of Edward Monro's will, three-quarters of the income from his capital had to be transferred from Sophia to their children in the event of her remarriage. So Harold's finances must have improved in 1911 ± one reason, perhaps, why he felt able to risk starting the Review.



96 Harold Monro

the new poets of the George V period who appeared most often in Georgian Poetry: in the first generation this means a nucleus of Brooke, Gibson, Abercrombie and Drinkwater, all of whom worked together; Masefield, Bottomley, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, Ralph Hodgson; and some less typical contributors, including Lawrence. In this definition no one was more Georgian than Harold himself, who published and contributed to all of Marsh's five volumes, although in practice his difficult personality and commitment to independence kept him detached, and his most serious poems were beyond Marsh's range. In a wider usage, `Georgian' refers to any verse of the 1912±18 period which shares the prevailing characteristics of the anthology: plain language, clear detail, realism, a strong feeling for the countryside and a belief, widely shared by the reading public, that the new poetry really was new, a radical departure from the grand rhetoric of the Victorians. As late as 1917±18 a young poet such as Wilfred Owen could take pride in describing himself as a Georgian, but the adjective became a term of abuse when Georgian Poetry went into decline after the war. In the early days there was almost no poetry available that seemed more modern than the best work of the Georgians, and the most modern-seeming figure among them was undoubtedly Brooke. `He was the moving spirit', Harold wrote of him long afterwards; ìt was his warm contention, indeed, nearly his main principle, that the British public should be shocked'. Later irony, bitter to Harold, dictated that this witty, iconoclastic socialist should become a symbol of traditional England, and Georgian poetry a derided victim of the post-war Modernist triumph, but when the first volume of the anthology came out at the end of 1912 Brooke and his fellow-poets seemed to be the vanguard of a revolution, as to some extent they really were. Harold made their success possible. The Review was by no means a Georgian preserve. It recruited most of the very few incipient Modernists, including the future Imagists, Flint, Pound, Richard Aldington and John Gould Fletcher (Fletcher was a more frequent reviewer than anyone, except Harold himself). Of the three most famous contributions, one ± Brooke's `The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' (November) ± was by a Georgian, but two were by Modernists: Pound's first manifesto (February) and Flint's survey of contemporary French poetry (August). Other contributors ± Hewlett, Newbolt, Gilbert Cannan, Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore ± belonged to no group. The May number was devoted to women poets and that for October to Americans, although Harold thought both these numbers òbviously bad' (they caused a drop in what were otherwise steadily increasing sales). He admitted to only one bias, aiming to establish the Review as `the representative organ chiefly of the younger generation of poets'. His extraordinary independence won him respect and probably some ridicule. One of his most unyielding principles was that log-rolling of any kind 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



was unacceptable. In this as in other matters he was ahead of his time, doggedly resisting the common practice of accepting advertisements from publishers who required friendly notices in return. In the same spirit, being `perfectly bluntly' sincere in the Samurai way, he did not hesitate to publish unfavourable reviews of work by his own contributors; as far as he was concerned, reviewers were free to say what they thought, while poets should be capable of accepting criticism. One of the first poets to take offence at this was Pound, who of all people should have known better. More predictable consternation came from Galloway Kyle: poets who belonged to the Poetry Society could be sure of being puffed in his Poetical Gazette, so they expected similar treatment in the Review. The Utopian origins of the Review could be seen in the first number. Harold's preface described poetry as the finer essence of thought, the vivid expression of personality; it is never the mere product of literary skill and craftsmanship. Therefore we believe in personality before we believe in books, and in life rather than in letters. We admire sincerity more than originality. Sincerity, the virtue he and Maurice had sought for, was to become a central ideal in Georgian poetry, although it probably seemed an empty slogan to Pound, who was concerned above all with skill and craftsmanship. After the preface came three leading articles: Sabin called in rather cloudy terms for a new spiritual attitude in criticism; Harold prophesied the coming of the poets of the future, who were in the world already but unrecognised, like the Samurai; and Maurice contributed a gushing appreciation of Gibson's poetry, taking the chance to plug Sabin's work as well and to claim that Gibson's two 1907 volumes had marked the beginning of a new era in poetry. Other items included new poems by Gibson, and reviews by Green and Guthrie. Samurai authors were to be much less conspicuous in subsequent numbers, but Harold always thought of his periodical as an instrument for the bettering of society; for him poetry was a means to the Utopian end, which was why he valued personality above books, and sincerity above technique. Even in this first, Samurai-dominated Review Modernist ideas began to emerge. Harold's article declared that ìt is now at last absolutely necessary for the fetters of stereotyped poetic language' to be shaken off. Poetry `must be packed and tense with meaning; no line may be thin, no link may rattle'. Hard work would be essential: the poet of the future would need à clear and sound grasp upon facts, and a stupendous aptitude for assimilation'. These statements, still quoted by historians of Modernism, were in line with Pound's new preaching, and with the principles of Ìmagism' which Flint was later to define: `direct treatment of the ``thing''', no surplus words, no mechanical rhythms. In a warm 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


98 Harold Monro

review of The Everlasting Mercy Arundel twice used the adjective `tense', having no doubt picked it up from his chief, just as Harold had probably picked up àssimilation' from Pound. The tone of the first Review was rather too noble-minded for a London audience. Several readers protested at Maurice's effusiveness, making Harold realise that what he had once valued as `high talk' was all too like the rhetoric of The Poetical Gazette. He never published any prose by Maurice again, and Sabin ceased to be a major contributor. Another difficulty was the Gazette itself, which many readers and reviewers assumed to be under the same editorship as the Review. The more Harold drew away from his embarrassing stablemate, the more ill-tempered his relationship became with Kyle, who had no use for anything `modern'. Modernist influence strengthened in the February number with Pound's credo, `Prolegomena', introducing a batch of his recent poems. The article owed something to Hewlett, with whom Pound had been staying, but much more to Hulme, and through him and Flint to French writers. It was one of the first statements in English of its kind, although Brooke and others might have thought it was only saying the obvious. Pound declared that poetry should be àustere, direct, free from emotional slither'; rhythm should correspond to emotion, symbols should be natural objects, and there should be fewer `painted adjectives'. In an adroit, implicit answer to Harold's demand for sincerity above originality and craftsmanship, Pound said the test of sincerity was craftsmanship; the sincere poet could not be bound by outdated conventions. `Prolegomena' has come to be regarded as one of the key documents in the history of twentieth-century poetry. Had Harold been willing to be directed by Pound, the Review might have become a leading vehicle for Modernism, a function which was instead to be transferred to two later periodicals over which Pound for a while had much greater influence, Poetry and The Egoist. But it was not in Harold's nature to take orders, and he made his impartiality clear by printing a fulsome essay by Gibson on Lascelles Abercrombie immediately after Pound's poems. `Since the issue of his first book', Gibson wrote, `there has been no doubt in the hearts of those who most care for poetry. . . that Mr Abercrombie's is the most significant voice of our time', a voice of profound thought and `golden and glowing' exaltation. Abercrombie was the most intellectual of the future Georgians, though hardly the genius some people imagined him to be. Small, shy and bespectacled, he had trained as a surveyor, and then worked as a journalist, but in 1910 he had moved to the countryside with his young family to become, like Harold in Ireland, a full-time poet. In 1911, that year `before dawn', he had taken a beautiful old house, Gallows Cottage, deep in rural Gloucestershire. His verse play, The Sale of St Thomas, which he published from the Gallows, was seen by some as a modern masterpiece. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



Pound must have been infuriated by Gibson's article and Harold's evenhandedness. He eventually accused Abercrombie of being a public menace, the most stupid of the younger poets, and challenged him to a duel, offering him the choice of weapons; Abercrombie, far from stupid, suggested they should bombard each other with copies of their unsold books. The duel never took place, but Pound never forgave Harold for giving space to Abercrombie and Gibson, warning him that `the moraly [sic] righteous but illiterate Gibson will be the final slough into which you perish'. He was still irritated in the twenties: Ònly HELL ± you never have had a programme ± you've always dragged in Aberbubble and Siphon, and Wobbleberry and wanted to exploit the necropolis'.11 Harold must often have heard Pound talk like this, but he was not to be persuaded; as an editor, he would not take sides, even though he admired Pound's poetry and knew that Abercrombie's was often dull. Like a farcical sub-plot to the Review, the Gazette kept up a stream of chatter about the Poetry Society. Kyle loved to be at the centre of everything, so he often protested to Chancery Lane at never being consulted about the Review, which was after all a Society publication. Harold refused to be `heckled'. When he objected to the Gazette's snobbery, Kyle accused him of intolerance, saying it was much to the Society's credit that judges, actors and titled persons could meet on the common ground of an interest in `Poetry'. The combination of Kyle's eagerness to recruit poetry-lovers and Harold's willingness to consider contributions on their merits meant that the Review office had to deal with many amateur bards. Harold read everything he received, returning most of it with a letter that was meant to be polite, but his business letters were nearly always brief to the point of terseness (Brooke once teased him for their ìnimitable prose-style'), and they occasionally provoked lengthy protests. One elderly correspondent complained as early as January 1912 that the editor of the Review was `virtually the arbiter of the poetic destinies of England', although the `democracy of song' might be better served by a committee; he was dismayed that there was nothing acceptable among his 500 pieces. Harold and Arundel kept a file for the more eccentric letters, many of which came from lonely people who were certain they had heard the call of the Muse.12 A man about to enter the workhouse hoped with all his `poor overwrought heart' that his work would not be thrown aside. A boy recovering from brain fever pleaded, Òh Sir, please heed the cry of a young bird who has commenced to wander along a path within the orbs of music and rhyme'. A spiritualist medium offered verses dictated to her by the great Victorian poets. A minister in Oklahoma sent a poem in the hope that `you people over there in England may appreciate something good'. A Mr Alfred Smythe declared himself no `mushroom', explaining that his poems had been accepted by London journals. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


100 Harold Monro

Some of the silliest letters turned out to be practical jokes from a new friend, Basil Harry Watt, the critic who had praised Before Dawn as `Poetry that counts'. Basil was very much the sort of man Harold found attractive, a striking figure, strong, lithe and elegant, with a penetrating gaze and wayward personality; he wrote poetry of his own rather badly, and recited other people's exceptionally well. Nearly three years younger than Harold, and, like him, a Scot and a fluent French speaker, he had been educated in England, Germany and Scotland, finally graduating from Edinburgh, where he had taken a further degree in medicine, captained a rugger team and served as President of the Union. His great love was acting, and he had worked with a West End company; by the time Harold met him he seems to have been making a precarious living by teaching, writing the books page in Black and White and giving poetry readings. He soon became one of Harold's regular team of assistants.13 The March 1912 Review carried essays by Gibson and Abercrombie on poetic drama, the topic of the month. Harold added a note that if poets were writing for the stage rather than the study, a theatre should be founded for them; it was too soon to say more in public, but he had just heard that Maurice and Nellie Browne were planning to start a small repertory theatre in Chicago, with an opening programme of verse plays by, among others, Yeats and Gibson (Maurice wanted a Monro contribution as well, although Harold had no time to write it). High hopes were still being entertained for Gibson. Harold reviewed his latest book, saying its author had once written `confectionery' (the word Gibson himself had used in 1907) but now produced only `shavings from the block of life'. The more notice the Review took of Siphon and Aberbubble, the more Pound grew hostile, but he kept a foothold in the magazine, attending weekly meetings, writing about Hueffer's High Germany as the March `Book of the Month', and contributing to a new feature which he liked, a section of short, unsigned reviews, most of them unkind (Hewlett quietly advised against such notices, and Harold soon dropped them).14 The April Book of the Month was Rupert Brooke's Poems, reviewed at length by Marsh as òne of the stations of the fiery cross which the Muse now seems to be sending out through England'. Marsh had thought the January Review rather absurd, failing to distinguish it from the Gazette, but he had been delighted to be asked to write about Brooke, whom he adored, and had come round to Chancery Lane to argue in favour of a long article. Harold had given way reluctantly, worried that Marsh's eulogy might lead to accusations ± several had already been made ± that the new periodical was serving a clique. He must also have had qualms about an admiring essay by Abercrombie on Drinkwater, who himself contributed a lengthy poem about `the choric song/Of exultant, strong/Earth-passionate men with souls of fire', the builders of the future. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



Drinkwater was based in Birmingham, where as actor-manager and playwright he was a leading figure in the new Repertory Theatre, another of the cultural enterprises of 1912. Good-natured, efficient and reliable, he called on Harold in January and became a faithful friend. He was to gain a considerable reputation in the theatre world, although his fellow-poets, many of whom he met through Harold, were sceptical about his self-important verse, which he would read to them for hours with dreadful solemnity.15 Harold eventually became more sceptical than anyone, but he was hopeful at first. He visited the new theatre in April to see Drinkwater's play Cophetua (his own play on the same subject was in its fourth draft and still unsatisfactory). The growing strength of the Georgians-to-be was reinforced in April when Gibson at last decided to seek his fortune in London. Now 34, he was short of money and innocent of all practical skills; fortunately his boyish looks and bashful, charming manner made him instantly endearing, so his southern contacts, Harold, Abercrombie, Murry and others, gave him a warm welcome, introducing him to Marsh, who was happy to be adopted as patron and counsellor. Harold arranged three lectures in the name of the Poetry Review during the summer of 1912, giving the first himself on `Modern Poetry' on 15 May, and taking the chair for Darrell Figgis on 17 June and Hulme on 15 July. Figgis, once thought of as a leading new poet, has long been forgotten, but Hulme, who spoke on `The new philosophy of art as illustrated in poetry', is now recognised as the principal English theorist of early Modernism. Hulme was a big, florid man, with bluff manners, proud of his Midlands accent. Ì want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs', he had told the Poets' Club a few years earlier, saying that poetry had nothing to do with the soul soaring into higher regions. Ì always suspect the word soul . . . '. The idea that the new age needed an epic was also a misconception; what it needed was Ìmpressionism', in poetry as in painting, an art that would capture direct images such as the `vision of a London street at midnight, with its long rows of light'. Modern poetry, no longer concerned with heroic action but with phases in the poet's mind, was meant to be `read in the study', not chanted, so it did not need a regular metre; the great technical innovation of the age was free verse.16 Hulme's lecture in July 1912 probably contained similar statements. Harold's feelings can be imagined as he heard some of his most cherished beliefs so ruthlessly demolished. At least he had written some Ìmpressions', but his approach to poetry had always been semi-religious. He had talked endlessly about the `soul', even writing a book on the subject, and he had shared Maurice's hope of writing a great modern epic. His first talks to the Poetry Society, and perhaps even his lecture in May, had been full of the noble 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


102 Harold Monro


The Review ran into controversy in the summer. The radical New Age, instead of supporting the new age's poets, loftily damned them all as upstarts who were challenging established standards for the sake of self-advertisement. It lashed out at the Review on 25 June, accusing it of puffing `verse-writers whose achievements should have been kept as a private family joy. What a string of them we can remember, formless, thoughtless, rhythmless, and rhymeless . . .', and a list of names followed, including `H. Monro', with the strong implication that they had all paid to get into print. The anonymous critic made similar jeers in later numbers, never taking the trouble to notice the difference between the Review and the Gazette. It was unfortunate that this unjust attack was followed by the July Review, in which Harold, now on the lookout for new language, introduced some poems by his latest discovery, Emilia Lorimer. Her eccentric vocabulary was not without interest, but he should have seen that lines such as `Rude rocks the haddock in reel of the ring!' might make people laugh. Hewlett told him Miss Lorimer had got on his blind side. Years later Pound recalled how in 1912 `dear Harold was always trotting out sloppers and trying to tell one how wonderful and deepsouled, or something or other etc.'.17 It was true that Harold was prone to initial enthusiasms, for poets as for country cottages; in some cases his excitement would cool after a while, and the unfortunate poet would be met with refusals or sometimes even silence. His August editorial bravely declared that great poetry could only emerge after ìndefatigable discussion, unending fearless experiment', but his judgement had been shown to be faulty. When Miss Lorimer sent him some more poems later, he said he found them uninteresting. Two reviews in the July number caused more serious trouble. Pound had just published a volume of translations from Cavalcanti, so Harold chose Arundel as the obvious reviewer. Good scholar that he was, Arundel was unable to be flattering: remarking that Pound was either ignorant or `totally lacking in that critical judgement necessary to the translator', he demonstrated in a few lines that the book was full of elementary errors and based on an obsolete text. This enraged Pound, who broke off all contact, suspecting a plot and blaming Harold for it; Flint brought them together again over dinner a few months later, but Pound did not forget. Another July review horrified Kyle. Writing in the magazine for the first time, Brooke heaped scorn on an absurd new Introduction to the Poets, probably unaware that its author, W. F. Rawnsley, was one of only two lifemembers of the Poetry Society. Kyle complained to Harold at this `blazing 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


sentiments that Hulme was attacking. But on one matter he was sure Hulme was wrong: no poetry, not even the newest, should be written for the study. Poetry was meant to be heard.

104 Harold Monro

If the July number caused offence, the August one could only arouse admiration, even from The New Age. Almost all of it consisted of Flint's monumental account of contemporary French verse. Writing with the same vitality that he saluted in French poets, he worked through an astounding quantity of names and schools, giving British readers a more authoritative view of his subject than had previously been available on either side of the Channel. It was courageous of Harold to devote a whole issue to a single contribution, but he had welcomed Flint's offer to write for him, and the high praise accorded to the article for years afterwards ± it is still regarded as a major event in the history of Modernism ± showed that the risk had been well worth taking. It is hard to believe that Frank Flint was entirely self-taught, `gutter-born and gutter-bred', as he would say with a rush of tears or laughter. His energy was extraordinary; he reminded people of a volcano, with his restless green eyes, fiery red hair on end as though overcharged with electricity, tall frame always in movement, and sudden bursts of emotion.18 He was an unhappy man, burdened with a dreary job and a home life he half longed to escape from, so Harold recognised a kindred spirit, like Hewlett or Thomas, and Flint became one of his most sympathetic friends. Both men were Fabians and reformers, keen to develop new ways of writing. During the next twenty years Harold quarrelled with a good many literary colleagues, but he seems never to have quarrelled with Flint. Flint's article gave Pound the idea that if French poets could make themselves heard by giving themselves labels such as `Symboliste', English-speaking poets could do the same. During the next few months the rules of Ìmagisme' (as Pound originally spelled it) were formulated. One advantage of a label was that it shifted debate from the generalisations favoured by Aberbubble and Siphon towards precise definitions. The question now was not whether poems were `good', but whether they were Imagist. That was not only a useful protection against hostile critics; it also helped to make readers ask themselves what modern poetry should be. Pound first awarded the title Ìmagiste' to his American friend, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), then to Richard Aldington, Hulme and himself. A few other Imagists were found, although Pound later said most of them, including Flint and Fletcher, were at best only Impressionists. The school was tiny and short-lived, but it became as notorious and influential as its founder hoped. Harold has been given scant credit for his part in the development of Imagism. He was responsible for ± and delighted by ± Flint's triumph, having got 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


indiscretion', saying he could not allow the Society and its values to be trodden ùnder the heels of Rupert Brooke'. It was beginning to be clear, at least to the Director, that the association between Harold and the Society would have to end.

him started by sending an enquiry to France in March. He saw a good deal of Flint, Hulme and Aldington in 1912; his French was probably better than theirs, fluent though they were, and his hospitality helped to keep the group together. Aldington, young, tall and handsome, soon became as close a friend as Flint; he had only recently started out as a writer, and Harold had been one of his first contacts. So, knowing the Imagists well, Harold tried out their method in some of his own poems, both Pound and Aldington later acknowledging that he succeeded. Had he been on better terms with Pound, he would almost certainly have figured in the first Imagist anthology. Harold spent part of August in Harrogate with Sophia, who was funereal once more in widow's weeds. Ì am [here] with my little boy and my mother, who is lonely', he told Drinkwater. Ìt's a cold miserable church-wardenish spot, and I'm going to drink dreary sulphur water'. He was depressed again, and overworked, unable to find time for his own poetry. Towards the end of the month he heard from Basil, who asked for the loan of a promised fiver, adding, Ì suppose you go back to Hell ± or is Harrogate also Hell ± tomorrow'.19 Back in London on 8 September, Harold wrote to Maurice: Ì've been in a very bad way on and off. Despair has awful claws to stick into one's liver'. Anyone who knew him less well than Maurice did might have thought this a strange comment in a letter which also brought the first news of the Poetry Bookshop: Ì am going to open a poetry shop next year. It will be a good move. I've got a lovely old house in Bloomsbury for shop, offices, bedrooms, etc.' Late 1912 brought a rush of activity. The idea of a centre for poetry had been in the air since Sabin had suggested it several years earlier. It may have been Maurice's example in starting a new theatre which finally drove Harold into action; the Little Theatre in Chicago and the Poetry Bookshop in London would be twin expressions of their founders' long-shared idealism.* Harold had explored Bloomsbury during the summer, sometimes accompanied by Gibson, looking for somewhere that could become a `Poetry House', a `Poetry Depot', a `poetry shop' ± he used all these phrases. He seem to have found 35 Devonshire Street in early September. Sophia agreed to the release of some capital, although she was as pessimistic as usual, thinking her son distressingly extravagant. The Gooches perhaps approved: Harold had started his bookselling career in June by organising a stall at a huge fete in their gardens.20 If any establishment was a model for the Poetry Bookshop, it was that of Harold's first publisher, Elkin Mathews, who had kept a quaint old shop in Vigo Street, Mayfair, since 1887. Mathews did not live on the premises, but * Maurice later claimed that his theatre pioneered the American repertory movement. It specialised in verse drama and simple staging, strongly influenced by the ideas of Gordon Craig. As at the Bookshop, public involvement was encouraged; there was a lounge for members, and once a week Maurice lectured on a literary topic.




he was usually available in the back office, where authors often called on him (many of his regular visitors later became regulars at Devonshire Street). As both bookseller and publisher he had brought numerous young poets into print, demonstrating with his long-running Vigo Cabinet Series that series publishing was an excellent way of promoting new poetry. He celebrated the hundredth Vigo book in September 1912 by producing an anthology from some of the early volumes, saying there seemed to be a revival of public interest in new verse.21 Harold noted this with interest in his next editorial, although he pointed out that the poems Mathews had chosen were disappointingly feeble; perhaps he talked to friends about doing a better job with work by Review poets. Just such an anthology was soon under way, the first and most famous product of the Poetry Bookshop. It cannot have been coincidence that Marsh and Brooke hatched their scheme for Georgian Poetry in September 1912, only a fortnight or so after Harold had taken 35 Devonshire Street. Brooke suggested the idea as a joke on the evening of the 19th, but Marsh thought it worth pursuing. They probably knew of Mathews' anthology, in which Gibson was a conspicuous contributor, and they must have known about Harold's plans. Next day Marsh held the lunch party in his flat for Brooke, Harold, Arundel, Gibson and Drinkwater.22 This `Georgian lunch' is sometimes thought of as a gathering of Marsh's cronies, but it was Harold, not the host, who knew everyone and whose advice was most needed. Ì must always be grateful to him', Marsh wrote later, `for his help in the matter of Georgian Poetry, which but for him could never have come into being'. Marsh had known Brooke for some years and Gibson for a few months, but he had introduced them to each other only three days before. Drinkwater was a stranger to both Marsh and Brooke; apparently he just happened to be in town that day, so Harold took him along. Brooke and Harold had corresponded and no doubt met during the summer, Harold being charmed, as everyone was, by the handsome young Cambridge don. Brooke himself was delighted to be in a new circle of friends. Ì've been meeting a lot of poets in London', he told a friend soon afterwards; `they were so nice: very simple, and very goodhearted'.23 That Harold and Arundel were at the lunch shows that Georgian Poetry was thought of from the beginning as being under the neutral auspices of The Poetry Review. Harold intended all the activities of the Poetry House to be done in the name of his periodical, so it was agreed the book should appear under the Review's imprint. Ì do want it to be clearly understood', Marsh wrote later, ` that my sole and simple object was to provide a means by which writers whose work seemed to me to be beautiful and neglected might find a hearing . . . I had no smallest intention of founding a school, or of tracing a course for Poetry to follow'.24 This aim won Harold's immediate approval. He agreed to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


106 Harold Monro

act as publisher, on the understanding that Marsh would cover any losses. Profits would be divided equally between publisher and editor, the latter's half being for distribution among the contributors. Full of excitement, the first Georgians completed their afternoon by going to see the new `Poetry Review House', as they called it, only a few streets away. Just as Harold refused to identify himself with the Modernists, so he kept at a distance from the Georgians, as they did from him. Marsh remembered him as à curious and memorable figure', impulsive, awkward, and hard to fathom. Publisher and editor did not reach first name terms until 1915, and then only at Harold's suggestion (by contrast, Marsh was Èddie' to Gibson as early as September 1912). Marsh, Abercrombie and perhaps some of the others were persuaded to visit the Malting House, but they probably found their host's seriousness hard to cope with. Brooke stayed away. `You beast', Harold wrote to him in 1913, Ì believe you think it's dull at my cottage (Marsh perhaps said so) and you don't want a weekend'. Harold's private life, bizarre range of acquaintances and sometimes baffling poetry all helped to make him seem alien; he alarmed one Georgian supper party by introducing Aleister Crowley, who was a poet as well as a notorious satanist but not the sort of man that the others knew or wanted to know. They put their publisher's oddities down to lack of self-knowledge. `We who were his friends', said Drinkwater, òften found him as elusive as he found himself, but we knew always that his devotion to poetry was absolute'.25 With a flourish of Utopian confidence, Harold told readers of the September Review that `we are expecting a new dawn, converging towards some vital exuberance, a rushing, untameable new creative impulse in English poetry'. (If this language seems extreme, it may be compared with Marsh's observation that the Muse was sending out `stations of the fiery cross' through England, or with Lawrence's response to Georgian Poetry: `we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning'.26) The back cover of the October number carried a `Special Announcement' that on 1 January 1913 the Review would open à Bookshop for the sale of Poetry. A lounge will be provided for the convenience of customers. Purchase, however, will be strictly optional. During 1913 The Poetry Review will be considerably enlarged and will appear quarterly instead of monthly'. November brought further information: `we shall endeavour to tolerate a limited amount of loitering', the Review would be run in co-operation with the shop, where there would be a Poetry Society noticeboard, and the aim of it all would be to establish àn informal Guild' for poetry's scattered public (Harold was still thinking as a Samurai). After its probationary year the Review would be calmer and more confident, waging war on `false traditionalism', and supporting poets who were trying to `stretch, force, and even wrench form to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



meet the exigencies of expression'. The shop would be open for inspection from 1 December; on the same day a new anthology would be ready, Georgian Poetry 1911±1912, èdited by E. MARSH' and published by the Review.* These announcements created widespread interest, although The New Age was contemptuous. The November number also contained five poems and a letter by Brooke, who had written several of the shorter poems to Harold's order, scribbling to catch the post at Grantchester under the envious eye of Gibson and wiring to Harold, `Have written four poems. Do you want more', or words to that effect. The letter, a sharp reply to a sneer at Abercrombie which Pound had made in the October number, had also been written at Harold's request. Pound may not have known of this rare departure from editorial neutrality, but his suspicions of conspiracy must have intensified.27 It was probably thanks to Brooke, who was full of ideas for publicity, that Harold made new contacts at Cambridge in 1912, after a decade in which he had rarely if ever revisited the university. The Cambridge Magazine, whose editor, C. K. Ogden, became an immediate ally, reviewed Before Dawn in November (`Mr Monro must be listened to, for he is saying things which are worthwhile'), and in due course reported the opening of the Bookshop, noting that it was à matter for congratulation that Cambridge should be so closely associated with this unique enterprise in the person of Mr Harold Monro'. The Magazine also reported on a lecture Harold gave in November to the Heretics, a Cambridge discussion society, on `Contemporary English Poetry'. He began by defining modern poetry in the way that Maurice had done years before, as work that had `caught the spirit of Darwin'. The best hope lay not with `traditionalists', such as Abercrombie, `whose poetry everyone thought ``so splendid'' but no one read' nor with the Italian Futurists, but with the Ìmpressionists', chief among them Pound, one of whose poems Harold read `with sympathy and feeling', and with the best of the contributors to the forthcoming anthology, especially Brooke, Gibson, James Elroy Flecker and James Stephens. The lecturer took the opportunity to advertise the Bookshop, which would even be able to provide `bedrooms for such as may present a sonnet and a shilling at the door'.28 It may have been on this occasion that Harold recruited one of his most loyal assistants, John Alford, a recent graduate from King's. Alford was keen on modern art and had run a college literary society to which Pound and Hulme had been invited as speakers. The son of a wealthy businessman, he had no immediate need of a job, so he offered his services to the Poetry House and even lent it £200. The loan may have been in return for the publication of his * This advertisement seems to have been unique, both in giving Marsh's name as editor in full ± he was always È. M.' thereafter, although his identity was never a secret ± and in stating that the publisher would be the periodical rather than the Bookshop.



108 Harold Monro

Poems, the only book the House published in 1913 and probably the only one it ever published on commission. If Harold thought he had discovered another genius he was mistaken, but he had certainly found a good-natured, reliable lieutenant. November was an extremely busy month, although Harold somehow found time for a weekend with Thomas. The first proofs of Georgian Poetry reached Marsh on the 5th. At about the same time, Harold must have moved into his new home and office at 35 Devonshire Street. On the 9th Gibson joined him as his first tenant, occupying one of the tiny attic bedrooms, and on the same day Harold wrote to Drinkwater, summoning him to a forthcoming meeting: `We've something tremendous on the carpet'. The `something' was the plan Harold had already proposed to Sabin, to take poetry into the countryside by holding open-air readings, an Asconan idea perhaps supported by Brooke, who had preached Fabian socialism on village greens. Nothing came of this scheme, the meeting perhaps deciding that enough was happening already. On the 12th Maurice opened his Little Theatre in Chicago, just beating Harold, who welcomed the first customers at the Poetry Bookshop on 1 December. A fortnight later, after maddening delays at the printers (the intended publication date had probably been 15 November), the first 250 copies of Georgian Poetry 1911±1912 went on sale, just in time to catch the Christmas trade. The pressure of work must have been intense. Credit for the anthology has usually gone to Marsh, who certainly chose the contents and negotiated with the poets, but Harold dealt with the entire printing and publishing side. At the same time there was the shop to organise, with its stock and fittings, as well as new living quarters to make habitable, tenants and staff to find, business correspondence to answer and the Review to edit. And in the middle of all this activity came a sudden intervention from Galloway Kyle, whose compliance Harold had rashly taken for granted. The Poetry Review had been its editor's creation: he had named it, funded it and found the contributors. But on 22 November he received a curt letter from the Secretary of the Poetry Society, informing him that the `Council' had decided to take direct control at the end of the year. Protests were vain. Kyle pointed out with pained reasonableness that the Society was acting within its rights, and that all his attempts at `co-operation' had been rebuffed. At the last possible moment he inserted a notice into the December Gazette, announcing that the Review would henceforth be edited by Stephen Phillips, who would contribute a regular article on `the eternal significance of Poetry'. A `brilliant list of contributors' had been secured, including àll the principal leaders of moral life and thought and criticism'. One can imagine the hilarity in Devonshire Street when Arundel and Basil read this nonsense, but Harold was as hurt and angry as Kyle meant him to be. The Review was lost ± and, as a crowning insult, given to Phillips, a faded star if ever there was one. Harold just had time to add 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



an announcement on the cover that his own periodical would continue as a quarterly under the title of Poetry and Drama.* The break with Kyle brought many benefits, painful though it was. Unexpectedly, and in a whirl of business, Harold became an independent editor, publisher and bookseller, three activities which could all be conducted from his new base. There was plenty of goodwill to be carried forward into Poetry and Drama, many people feeling he had been shamefully treated. Quarterly publication would make life less frenetic, and the addition of drama to poetry would allow him to pursue one of his keenest interests. During the labours of 1912 Harold struggled to keep up his own writing. His Òverheard on a Saltmarsh' was first published by the Murrys in the November Rhythm. Nymph, nymph, what are your beads? Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them? Give them me. No. Give them me. Give them me. No. Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them. Goblin, why do you love them so? They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green glass beads on a silver ring. Hush I stole them out of the moon. Give me your beads, I desire them. No. I will howl in a deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them. No.

* The late appearance of Georgian Poetry may have been caused by the last-minute need to change its imprint. When the book appeared, its spine bore a shield-shaped mark enclosing the letters `PB'; presumably the initials were originally to have been `PR', symbolising the relationship between The Poetry Review and its new headquarters (the shop's hanging sign was shield-shaped). For the subsequent history of Kyle and the Review, see Appendix B.



110 Harold Monro

With its dramatic form, impressionistic style and erotic undertones, this mysterious fragment of dialogue, perhaps influenced by Yeats's Celtic verse, soon became an anthology favourite, one of the first recognisably modern poems to catch the taste of the reading public. It probably contains more personal meaning than most of its admirers could guess. According to Arundel, the green glass beads belonged to Vera Tchaikovsky, a niece of the Russian composer; she was a beautiful boyish-looking actress who had become a close friend of both himself and Harold. It seems she had an affair with Arundel, so the poem may reflect something of their relationship. Harold included two of his newest poems, the product of much hard work, in his last Review. They must be among the earliest attempts by any poet to develop Hulme's ideas about free verse and Ìmpressionism'; `Great City' even remembers his call for a `vision of a London street at midnight, with its long rows of light': When all the lamps were lighted in the town I passed into the streetways, and I watched, Wakeful, almost happy, And half the night I wandered in the street. Yet the poem avoids being entirely in the Modernist camp by making a distinctly Georgian shift of subject from town to country and back again; typically, Harold makes use of the two newly-emerging methods, without committing himself to either or compromising his own honesty. Thomas queried the last line above, which in any other poet might have been merely rhetorical, but had to apologise when Harold assured him it was literally true. No detail was invented. `Great City' is an ìmpression' of Bloomsbury in the autumn of 1912, as is its companion piece, `London Interior': Autumn is in the air, The children are playing everywhere. One dare not open this old door too wide; It is so dark inside. The hall smells of dust; A narrow squirt of sunlight enters high Cold, yellow. The floor creaks, and I hear a sigh, Rise in the gloom and die. Through the hall, far away, I can just see The dingy garden with its wall and tree. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



112 Harold Monro

Then all is still. Time must go Ticking slow, glooming slow. The evening will turn grey. It is sad in London after two. All, all the afternoon What can old men, old women do? It is sad in London when the gloom Thickens, like wool, In the corners of the room; The sky is shot with steel, Shot with blue. The bells ring the slow time; The chairs creak, the hours climb; The sunlight lays a streak upon the floor. That is almost certainly the first of many literary descriptions of 35 Devonshire Street, the Poetry Bookshop.



A yellow cat is sitting on the wall Blinking toward the leaves that fall. And now I hear a woman call Some child from play.

8

From that first moment . . . . . . we by slow Intent and movement modified the line Of its design So to receive our character and be Friend to our various personality, Gradually so to take us and to hold Our furniture and form our outer mould, That every angle slightly gave its place, And even corners made a little space, And open walls took shadow. (`The Empty House') For over twenty years the Poetry Bookshop, or Poetry House, as Harold was still calling it in January 1913, was the most famous centre for poets in the Englishspeaking world. He opened it informally in December 1912 in Devonshire Street, and kept it open there until 1926, when the lease ran out. New premises were then found not far away in Great Russell Street, where the shop continued until Alida closed it in 1935, three years after his death, but everyone agreed that the romance of the old shop did not survive the move. When poets who had known both places wrote about the Bookshop in their memoirs, it was usually 35 Devonshire Street they had in their minds' eye, the shop bright with book jackets and rhyme sheets, the reading room hushed and dimly lit, the big drawing-room often packed with literary guests. Harold's ten-year search for Utopia was fulfilled in an organisation entirely of his own making. It turned out to be a trap, like his earlier experiments, and some of his friends said it killed him, but it was also a triumph.

113 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The Poetry House

There was a sense of adventure even in finding Devonshire Street. Osbert Sitwell remembered it as narrow and `rather dark, but given over to screaming children, lusty small boys armed with catapults, and to leaping flights of eighteenth-century cats'. According to Alida, rooms in the house next to the shop were occupied by àn unruly family presided over by the grandmother, a very fat old woman who sold flowers in Piccadilly Circus'; when the grandchildren were offered some illustrated poetry books, they tore them up and stamped on them. Another nearby house was rumoured to be a brothel. Maurice Browne, with characteristic melodrama, described the district as `murderous'. It would not have been in the interests of romance to notice that many honest trades were plied in Devonshire Street. John Gould Fletcher, one of the Bookshop's first customers, took a typical view, writing on 5 January 1913 with warm congratulations on Harold's courage, offering help, and enclosing a sonnet: We bear our torch and timbrels of desire To this dark slum of sorrow; for it keeps Treasuries yet unfound: pearls without price . . .1 There is nothing left today of the Devonshire Street where poets came seeking treasure ± bombed and drearily rebuilt, it even has a new name, Boswell Street ± but in 1912 most of the Queen Anne houses were still intact, if grimy, except that many of their ground floors had been converted into little shops. The street had begun in prosperity in about 1700, built to connect Theobald's Road with the new Queen Square, one of the first developments in London's sudden expansion into the Bloomsbury fields. Unlike most of Bloomsbury, the area had no single owner, so the plots and streets were small and the layout not quite regular, but it was a highly respectable place in the eighteenth century. Captain Cook and Dr Johnson had friends in Queen Square, and Dr Burney lived in it. As Harold was pleased to discover, Pope was said to have been educated in Devonshire Street itself, and No. 35 was believed to have been occupied by the clown, Grimaldi, whose visitors could have included Byron. Decline came with the Victorians. Shop signs sprouted from decaying houses, while the square was invaded by hospitals and other establishments, William Morris's workshop among them. Another famous firm of glass-painters, Clayton and Bell, were still in Devonshire Street in 1912, as were a remarkable diversity of small tradesmen.* Rows of bell pulls testified to multiple occupancy, and cards said `Rooms to Let'. One dusty window displayed a trumpet and busts of musicians, with the sign `Musical Instruments/Repaired Polished Cheap/ * Among others: butcher, grocer, greengrocer, dairyman, stationer, tailor, builder, carpenter, oilman, sign-writer, shirt and collar dresser; also `dining rooms', a laundry, a pub and two undertakers. The Bookshop seems to have raised the tone: by 1927 the street had attracted a publisher (Leonard Parsons), a typewriting office, a printer, two craft shops, a hand weaver and a chocolate manufacturer.



114 Harold Monro

Violin Bows/Repaired First Class'. Next door to 35 were Wheatley and Son, who made gold leaf for lettering on the covers of bibles and prayer-books; the soft, incessant thudding of the goldbeaters' hammers was to be a sound remembered by many of Harold's visitors.2 The future Poetry House was empty in the summer of 1912. It had been occupied for years by a leather merchant, whose picturesque Victorian shop window and double doors filled the ground-floor front (Plate 16). The facade above was early eighteenth-century, almost unaltered, the best in the street: two floors with three windows each, and a decorative cornice and pediment, half-concealing two little dormers in the roof. The shop interior was only about 12ft square, with a fireplace and a booth for a clerk (Plates 17, 38). Comments in memoirs and letters show that there was a little office at the back, and a passage to the yard or garden, from which there was access to what was then Gloucester Street. In the yard stood a detached, two-storey workshop, also eighteenthcentury, perhaps originally a stable, now used by the goldbeaters. The front doors of the house opened into a little hallway, with the shop door to the right and the stairs ahead. The staircase still had its original panelling and twisted balusters, and there were old fireplaces and more panelling on the first floor, where a handsome drawing room ± Gordon Bottomley later described it as `stately'3 ± occupied the full width of the house, with folding doors opening into another room at the rear. The second floor consisted of two or three bedrooms, one of them large; above were two or three more, squeezed under the roof. The basement would have contained the kitchen, rooms for laundry and storage, and perhaps a servant's bedroom. Lighting was by gas. There was probably one lavatory in the yard, a cold tap in the kitchen and no electricity, arrangements which may have seemed adequate to the spartan Harold. He made enquiries, discovered the lease had another fourteen years to run, and took the house, probably in the first week of September. It seemed likely he would also be able to take over the workshop, which had a spacious upper floor like a hayloft (an ideal place for readings) reached by a steep outside stair, and at least two habitable rooms below. Friends were summoned to help. Both Sabin and Maurice say Dorothy lent a hand. Romney Green made shelves, two or three wall benches, an oak display table, and a hanging sign which was painted by an art student, Phyllis Searle, with a design of a torch (or three torches according to Amy Lowell) burning in a starry sky. Some of the other designing seems to have been done by Guthrie, who was probably responsible for the shop's first letterhead.



The Poetry House 115

By mid-December the shelves were half-stocked. A newspaper report a few weeks later noted that one case was devoted to the works of Yeats, while a whole wall was given over to classics, foreign poetry and translations. A shelf under the window held literary periodicals. The first-floor parlour must have been furnished as both dining and drawing room, while the adjoining room became the editorial office for Poetry and Drama, a business Harold always kept strictly separate from the shop. In front of his desk hung the portrait of Keats which had accompanied him since Cambridge. There must have been at least six bedrooms, including those in the attic and the workshop, but their occupants are not fully recorded. Arundel presumably moved in; he certainly remained Harold's assistant editor for most of 1913. John Alford, his successor on the magazine, had `rooms' under the reading room in 1913±14. Basil Watt became a resident in 1914. One bedroom may have been set aside for Nigel's occasional visits. Harold's letters to Drinkwater mention a cramped rear bedroom for guests and a `caretaker's room'. There was probably always at least one living-in servant. The shop was staffed by a succession of clerks, managers, travellers and delivery boys, but they probably lived elsewhere. Until 1916, if not later, the large room on the second floor and the smaller ones in the attic were available as cheap lodgings for artists and poets, of whom Gibson was the first. Marsh took several pilgrims up to see him, including the sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska, one of whose letters refers to Gibson's `tiny hole' and the `huge vast rooms' occupied by other poets below. A sign over Gibson's door said, Ìn case of fire, access to the roof through this room'. He lived there for a year, often visited by friends, including Marsh, Brooke and Lawrence, who were usually more interested in him than in his landlord. He wrote verse endlessly as usual, finding the steady hammering from next door an appropriate accompaniment: And I within my garret all day long To that unceasing thudding tuned my song, Beating out golden words in tune and time To that dull thudding, rhyme on golden rhyme: But in my dreams all night in that dark shed With aching arms I beat fine gold for bread. (`Gold') Gibson was writing one evening about the northern moors, the sound of hammers turning into the beat of hooves, when the American poet, Robert Frost, came up to introduce himself.4 Two lodgers recorded a few memories. M. Willson Disher, an aspiring young dramatist, occupied an attic in the spring of 1914. He was followed by an equally young Radleian, Eric Gillett, who arrived shepherded by nervous parents and 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


116 Harold Monro

stayed for June and July. The rent was a little more than the `sonnet and a shilling' which Harold had rhetorically promised: Gillett paid 3s:6d: a week, which was cheap but not a mere token. Disher wrote his first play at the Bookshop, using a chest of drawers as a table and suffering torments from pianos being played, or perhaps tuned, by neighbours. He met Gaudier and Jacob Epstein, and heard Sidney Colvin give a reading from Keats with lip-smacking relish. Gillett could watch a seamstress at work in a room opposite, or customers ordering toad-inthe-hole and sheep's heart in the shabby restaurant below. He found Harold dour and perplexing, albeit unfailingly kind, but it was exciting to go in and out past the colourful shop. He remembered seeing Pound several times, red-haired and green-eyed, explaining theories of poetry to Harold or, on one occasion, clutching a bag of ancient tennis balls and complaining shrilly that someone had failed to turn up for a promised game in the Queen Square garden.5 Many other people must have taken up Harold's offer of accommodation. Abercrombie stayed for a night or two, sending half-a-crown in payment. Robert Frost came for a week in 1914 with his wife and children, in lieu of a fee for poems in Poetry and Drama; he looked back on the visit as Arcadian, even though one of his memories was of a slum woman wailing over a squashed cat. Wilfred Owen stayed for ten days in 1915, and Sherard Vines took a room briefly later in the war. The only other recorded lodgers are T. E. Hulme and Jacob Epstein. That two such prominent leaders of the avant garde lived at the Poetry House in 1913±14, at the height of the early Modernist revolution, has usually escaped the notice of those critics who like to see the place as a Georgian citadel. Hulme occupied the large second-floor room in about December 1913, later moving into smaller quarters upstairs, apparently staying for several months.6 He would have delighted in being a close neighbour of Epstein, whose work he was championing. The young sculptor had a base in the country but seems to have made periodic use of a Bookshop attic in 1913±14, sometimes staying there with his wife. He was there with both Disher and Gillett in 1914, and he used the address for a letter to the Times in 1913.* He was already a famous, controversial figure, and his presence must have added to the shop's reputation. `Boredom is the source of most evils'/HM/March 22 '13. So Harold wrote on the flyleaf of his 1913 diary (from 1913 onwards he used only little pocket diaries, mainly for noting engagements). He was determined to keep busy as the best way of controlling addiction and despair; as always, his altruism was entangled with his fight for self-preservation ± hence, for example, his enthusiasm for convivial gatherings, which were a means not only of advancing the cause of * The letter (8 November) rebuked Aleister Crowley for having removed the bronze fig-leaf which the Paris authorities had insisted on adding to Epstein's notorious Oscar Wilde monument. The sculptor would have preferred an official change of policy, but Crowley was exultant, turning up at the CafeÂ Royal with the bronze hung round his neck like a medal.




poetry, but also of avoiding solitary drinking. How far he succeeded in his efforts at self-control is not clear, but it seems likely that he managed fairly well until the war. Even so, instead of taking pleasure in working for other people's poetry, he secretly despised himself for betraying his own. His conscience insisted his true vocation was to be a poet: as Maurice had said years before, `the other things must go'. Despite a record of seemingly enviable success, he looked back on early 1913 as a bad time. All but three of his 1913±31 diaries survive as originals or copies. Entries are straightforward at first, but they become ever more cryptic as the years pass.* 1913 January 2: A [Arundel] translate 10.30/B. H. W. [Basil] Poetry House 3.30 5: Arundel week end. Dorothy dinner 8 6: British Museum/Charing X Rd for shades/ Drake 7.50 gallery door B. H. W. 7: Morning Wayside for tea things/Sabin 10: Morris dancers at Dunmow 12: Shanks week-end 15: Nigel Victoria 4.17/Take Lancelot theatre 16: Lunch with Dorothy 28: Brooke reads/Mother dinner 29: Thomas 3.30/Flint 5.30/Romney Greens supper/Take R's poems This selection is fairly typical of entries in the 1913 diary. Arundel spends a weekend at the Essex cottage. A week later, the guest is a new young friend, the poet Edward Shanks. Sometimes there were events at Dunmow nearby, organised by what the diary refers to as a `Literary Colony'. In London, husband and wife are still seeing each other, despite five years of separation. Their 8-year-old son Nigel, now a boarder at Mount Arlington prep school, Hindhead, arrives for a visit, and his first cousin Lancelot Gooch, heir to the baronetcy, joins the party. Basil is a favourite evening companion. By day Harold prepares for the launch of Poetry and Drama, meeting potential contributors and discussing business with Arundel. Brooke gives one of the first of the famous readings on the 28th; he was a keen supporter of the Bookshop, although he thought Harold and Arundel sadly unbusinesslike. The next day Harold dines with the Greens and has to comment on Romney's poems (an awkward task, for Romney was a mere versifier compared with Brooke). It is characteristic of Harold's erratic habits as a diarist that he failed to note the two most important events in January 1913, the formal opening of the Book* Selected quotations from 1913 and later diaries and notebooks are shown here in italics, with many minor entries omitted and occasional small amendments. It would be impossible to comment on every detail; the original diaries are as stark as the quotations.



118 Harold Monro



shop and the first public readings. His visit to the Wayside Tea Rooms must have been to borrow crockery for the opening, which was a two-day affair.

Invitation to the opening of the Bookshop, 8±9 Jan. 1913


Some 300 people turned up on the two afternoons, squeezing into the little shop and the room above, and the Poetry House began one of its most valuable functions, becoming a meeting-place for writers. Among the encounters at that first party, Harold introduced Marsh to W. H. Davies; and Flint, always interested in foreigners, spotted the young American, Robert Frost, who had seen a notice in the window and decided to gatecrash, having never met any poets before. When Frost asked what had revealed his nationality, Flint said `Shoes' in his abrupt way, going on to tell the delighted intruder about Pound and the new poetry. Henry Newbolt made a brief speech, declaring the shop open; Harold had chosen him as a respected senior poet who had expressed sympathy towards the younger generation. The whole event seems to have been a great success. The publicity was not altogether welcome, as Harold told Amy Lowell later. Some people just came to sit and smoke. Every bad poet in England seemed to be sending him manuscripts, one lady even having her poems delivered by express messenger to arrive on the opening day. A poetess from Bristol hoped he would be able to sell her small volume, which was `quite suitable as a little gift-book and contains songs of a simple, serious nature and a few astronomical pieces'. A Mr Watkinson asked for the `club rules', if any, and enquired whether the Bookshop would be à fraternity to help and encourage amateurs and lovers of the Muse' or would `soar high like the Poetry Society'. Harold could not be too discouraging, for the shop was there to make poetry available to all.7 An essential element in his vision for the House was that people should hear poetry read aloud. Regularity would be important: every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 p.m. sharp, except in the summer months, there would be half an hour or so of spoken poetry for anyone who cared to come and listen. Brevity would also be important: he reckoned about thirty-five minutes was as much as most audiences could absorb. Tickets could be bought in advance at the shop, although subscribers to Poetry and Drama would be entitled to free admission and monthly fixture lists. Anyone could attend a first reading free to see how they liked it. This typical combination of idealism and practicality worked well, continuing steadily until 1915, when meetings had to be reduced to one a week. A detailed register was kept until 1921, after which sporadic records show readings continuing for at least another ten years, despite intervals caused by absence and illness. There may have been a reading on the opening day, as the invitations promised, but the first noted in the register was on 9 January 1913, when Harold read from Brooke, Pound, Emilia Lorimer and others. He included Shelley's `Hymn to Intellectual Beauty', and even though he recorded it as a `Failure', he was to read it at the start of almost every season thereafter, as the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


120 Harold Monro



Harold's entries on the first page of the readings register, January 1913

finest expression of the Bookshop's ideals. The first guest reader was Brooke, reading from Donne, Swinburne and himself, three of the most influential poets of the time. Only six people came, but audiences soon grew.8 On the following Tuesday Ernest Rhys, who had a fine voice and was often to be invited, read from Beowulf and the ballads. Two days later Harold read a `very 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd

successful selection' suggested by Shanks. For the first few weeks meetings were held in the back office or the room above the shop, with some of the audience sitting on the floor, but on 4 March Harold inaugurated the new room in the yard by reading from Lawrence and Shelley. Attending a Bookshop reading was, and was meant to be, a memorable experience. Although Harold detested the histrionics and special effects favoured by some professionals, he liked ± though he denied it ± to maintain a slight sense of theatre. The audience would gather in the shop, browsing, until just on the hour, when he would gravely draw back a curtain and stand with welcoming gestures and a faint smile, inviting people to go through. Everyone remembered a moment in the open air, the clatter of feet up wooden steps, and then the interior of the reading room like a little barn or chapel, with exposed beams, whitewashed walls, a large skylight and three big, curtained windows down one side. There was space for 60 chairs at most, with a desk at the far end for the reader. Audiences could hear the rhythm of the goldbeaters' hammers and the chimes of the church clock in Queen Square. The curtains were always drawn, even in summer, so that in winter the only light came from two tall oak candlesticks on the table, later replaced by a green-shaded oil lamp which cast a strange glow upwards on the reader's face. Some people thought the lighting pretentious ± à fatuity of Monro's', Marsh said ± but others were impressed. Alec Waugh's first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), describes the `perfect serenity in the small room at the top of the wooden stairs, with the dark blue curtains, the intent faces, the dim, shaded lights, the low voice reading. It seemed the very sanctuary of art'. The effect was that of a church service, as Harriet Monroe noted when she heard Harold read with `priestly authority' after the war; she pointed out that the room stood empty for `seven days and nights, the holy reserve of silence and emptiness', so that the readings, which by then were only on Thursdays, seemed a `weekly rite'.9 Seventy-nine readings were given in 1913, with an average attendance of 26 people. Among the readers were Harold (33 readings), Alida Klemantaski (9), Vera Tchaikovsky and Rhys (6 each), Arundel (5), Hewlett (4), Gibson and Sturge Moore (3 each), Alford (2), and Newbolt, Abercrombie, J. C. Squire and Francis Macnamara (one each). Some readers were highly experienced, such as Florence Farr, the well-known interpreter of Yeats. Some were from the theatre, including Brooke's friend, the beautiful Cathleen Nesbitt, who read in 1915 and later. Sometimes a foreigner would read in his or her own language or in English; the register contains French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, German, Polish, American, Japanese and Indian names. Arundel read in Italian, although he always liked to include some of Harold's poems. One of the largest audiences in 1913 was for Yeats on 3 July, when 40 people had to be turned away; he recited his own Celtic lyrics in his famous sing-song 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


122 Harold Monro

chant, head back, hands clutching his lapels, pince-nez perched precariously on his nose, and a lock of hair falling across his forehead. Newbolt also attracted a full house for a reading of Robert Bridges, the new Poet Laureate. Harold was keen that the Bookshop should support drama as well as poetry, so sometimes several readers would present one of Gibson's playlets or extracts from a Greek tragedy in Gilbert Murray's translation. Occasionally there was a song recital or a lecture instead of a reading. A season of puppet plays was announced for the autumn of 1914, much to the annoyance of Craig, who begged Yeats to intervene because high art should not be vulgarised; the plan seems to have been scotched by the war, but there were several puppet seasons at the Bookshop in the twenties. Harold had to steer a difficult course between popularisation and exclusiveness. Audiences found unorthodox work difficult; when he tried reading from Nietzsche in June 1913 he had to record the event as a `complete failure . . . Too many old ladies of the schoolmistress type', and he had no better results with Carpenter's prose-poetry in September (`bad failure'). Sixty people came to hear Filippo Marinetti the Italian Futurist in November 1913, but most were probably expecting entertainment rather than art. Every now and then, though, Harold would read from Pound and other Ìmpressionists'. In December 1915 he read not only his favourite piece by Pound, `The Return', but also `The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by the still almost unknown American, Èlliot' [sic], perhaps the first-ever public reading of that seminal poem; but he prefaced these advanced works with extracts from Samson Agonistes and Arnold to show that free verse was more traditional than it seemed. The Utopian aims of the Poetry House could never be fully met. Its supporters always included too many ladies òf the schoolmistress type', and too many poetasters in search of recognition. Dilettanti like Marsh and intellectuals like Pound were always inclined to be sceptical, while the attitude of the Devonshire Street locals hardly encouraged hopes of taking poetry to the masses. Even so, regular attenders at the readings heard a great range of verse, almost always delivered well. Attendances never fell away (the average had risen to 33 by 1915). Sometimes a larger room had to be hired, often the delightful hall of the Artworkers' Guild in the square. Fourteen people even turned up on New Year's Day 1914, although no reading had been arranged, so Harold read impromptu ± from Shelley.

1913 February 5: Wayside 4.30/Turandot with Hodgson 7.30 11: Thorold Savoy Grill 8.15 12: Crowley 4.30 13: Squire Sloane Sq Booking Office 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



124 Harold Monro

Nearly all the names so far mentioned in this chapter appear in Harold's diary for early 1913. Almost every day he met a minor literary figure or two: Max Plowman, Francis Meynell, Bonamy DobreÂe, Laurence Binyon, Vivian Locke Ellis, Gilbert Cannan and many others. Cannan, a playwright who had been tipped as a genius, seems to have been a frequent helper. There were meetings with publishers and their representatives, and with artists, among them Claud Lovat Fraser, who was to become the Bookshop's leading illustrator. Utopians and socialists were informed of the new venture. The wire to Wells seems to have resulted in lunch a week later. Carpenter visited the shop several times. The Bookshop archives contain letters from an assortment of idealists, including George Herron from Florence, Patrick Geddes of the Edinburgh Outlook Tower, Arnold Eiloart, a disciple and translator of Dr Bircher-Benner, and Henry Bryan Binns, a follower of Carpenter. Harold remained a member of the Fabian Society, ensuring that Fabian News mentioned his periodicals, and occasionally he made a note to attend a socialist meeting, chairing at least one of them, a lecture by Green on `Furniture and the Simple Life'. His usual habit was to get up late and work in his office until lunchtime, when he would leave Arundel or Alford in charge for an hour or so. In the afternoons, visitors would call on business, many of them authors with contributions for the magazine. They could never be sure of their reception; at times Harold seemed talkative and hospitable, at others taciturn and remote. Everyone noticed his melancholy. `No one can laugh while he is looking', Frost said. Fletcher, himself an awkward man, was repelled by his ìron gruffness and lack of cordiality', his `cold and unbending attitude of Scottish reserve'. Even so, for a surprising number of people Harold's ready smile, warm sympathy and willingness to listen were the most memorable things about him. He had no lack of friends, inwardly lonely though he always was.10 If work allowed, he would sometimes join Edward Thomas, Ralph Hodgson and their friends for tea at Thomas's favourite haunt, the St George's Restaurant in St Martin's Lane. He nearly always dined out in the evenings; many writers and artists lived in and around Bloomsbury, so he could find company in the French and Italian eating places where they gathered. He liked to arrange such gatherings himself, having written of founding an informal `Guild' of poets, and he often took the party home afterwards to talk and drink in the room above the shop. Or he would go to the CafeÂ Royal, still a fashionable meetingplace for the literati. Occasionally he would attend Yeats's Mondays, once at least in Brooke's company and once in Pound's, or Hulme's Thursdays, or 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


19: Read Everlasting Mercy at Dunmow 27: Brooke 12.15/Murray [sic] and [Katherine] Mansfield 8/ Read from Yeats March 6: Wire Wells

Hueffer's and Violet Hunt's at-homes.11 Once a month, the Poets' Club met to dine, and hear poems and a talk by one of its members. He went to many plays and operas, sometimes buying a spare ticket in the hope of taking a friend; afterwards there were the CafeÂ Royal and innumerable bars and clubs, some fashionable, some disreputable, some both. Serious drinking could go on all night if one knew where to go. He usually got to bed very late. At weekends he would occasionally stay with someone ± Thomas invited him several times, taking him for the long walks they both loved ± although he preferred the Malting House. He was no doubt remembering his reading of The Everlasting Mercy at Dunmow when he said in the June Poetry and Drama that Masefield's poem had been read aloud with `startling success at village gatherings' and that a navvy had said, `That was the best fight I've ever seen' (Harold's italics). Excursions from London became easier when he bought himself a new motorbike, not a primitive machine like the one that had caused him and Dorothy so much trouble in 1906, but the finest American model, an Indian, chain-driven, quiet and reliable. The first Poetry and Drama was published from the Bookshop on 15 March 1913. Eight quarterly numbers were to follow, until publication was brought to a halt by the war. The first number had a picture of the shop on the front cover, a map on the back and advertisements for the readings and Georgian Poetry. Regular features included surveys of current literature and a list of new books, with a note that all the titles mentioned could be obtained through the shop. Editorial continuity from the 1912 Poetry Review was made explicit with an announcement that a prize offered in the previous July had been awarded to Brooke's `Grantchester' by a panel of seven judges: Newbolt, Rhys, Thomas, Plarr, Marsh, Hulme and the editor. The names were a reminder that the best people were not going to remain with the Review under Stephen Phillips, despite Kyle's boasting. In a lengthy `Personal Explanation', Harold described his misalliance with the Poetry Society and repeated his opposition to log-rolling. The Review had been started by former Samurai, then helped on by Modernists, and finally dominated by Georgians, but this time the editor was determined to be his own man. The Georgians were held back: Brooke provided articles and poems, although he was abroad for most of the year, and Abercrombie contributed occasionally, but Drinkwater appeared only once and Gibson not at all. The Modernists fared better, especially Flint, who supplied reviews, poems and, in all eight numbers, a `Chronicle' of French poetry. Harold printed poems by Pound, referred to him in editorials, and in due course explained Imagism. Sabin and Green were eased out, giving place to several experienced critics who had not written for the Review, notably Thomas. Harold said in his editorial for March 1914 that Poetry and Drama existed as à testing-shop for the poetry of the present, and a medium for the discussion of 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



tendencies which may combine to make the poetry of the future'. The magazine was actually more like an extended shop window than a testing-shop, keeping readers informed about the best new work in Britain, Europe and America. Most numbers began with an editorial on topics of special interest. Several main articles followed: Brooke on Webster or, admirably, on Donne; Thomas on Hardy's poetry; John Cournos, a Russian-American poet who had recently arrived in London from the States, on `Gordon Craig and the Theatre of the Future'; or Basil Dean, a promising young theatre director, on the new repertory movement. There was plenty of new poetry. An early editorial called for the abolition of the Laureateship, but when Bridges was appointed to the post Harold established friendly relations and managed to publish his first poem as Laureate. Nearly fifty other poets contributed new work to the magazine, among them Hardy, Brooke, James Elroy Flecker, Pound, Flint, Aldington, Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Frost, Hewlett, Rhys, Abercrombie, Davies, Walter de la Mare and Harold himself. As in 1912, Harold was keen to encourage new talent, giving space to such little-known names as Shanks, Rose Macaulay, Anna Wickham, Godfrey Elton, Frances Cornford and Douglas Goldring. He regarded the `Chronicles' as especially important. Flint's offer of a continuing survey of French poetry was gladly accepted at the outset (`We could announce you as one of the reforms'12), and Cannan agreed to report on the London theatre. As these two chroniclers proved to be both perceptive and exceptionally well-informed, Harold developed the idea, eventually eliminating short reviews altogether. Arundel contributed two Chronicles on recent Italian poetry, and Hulme one on German, probably the best account of its subject that had yet appeared in English; Alford wrote several times, rather naively, on American poetry; and in June 1914 Thomas began a quarterly report on reprints and anthologies. Harold was fortunate to be able to call on authors as talented as Thomas, Cannan and Flint, but most of his regular team ± Arundel, Basil, Alford, Shanks ± lacked years and experience. In his second number he introduced a Chronicle of current English poetry, but found no satisfactory author for it, so in 1914 he took to writing it himself, reinforcing each of his reports with a selection of substantial quotations from the books he discussed. Pointing out that he was well-qualified because he had to read all the new verse that came into the shop, he said his aim was to give a `desultory record' of his own impressions ± hardly a recipe for incisive criticism. Useful though his articles were, he was unwise to take over so much of his own periodical; his treasured independence, always obstinate and sometimes angry, eventually began to look like isolation. In 1913, though, the Poetry House was, as Brooke said in June, `the centre of the New Poetry'. Harold had no intention of isolating himself or of becoming a 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


126 Harold Monro

dictator, nor was he concerned to promote his own work or to make a profit, although he had to cover his expenses. His declared intention was to establish à practical relation between poetry and the public'.13 Out of that relation might grow the poetry ± and hence the society ± of the future. His first priority was the periodical, because it reached the widest audience; when it drew people to the shop, they could see the full range of new work. The shop was designed to be welcoming and homely. With its flowers, cheerful fire and settles, it had something of the atmosphere of an old-fashioned country inn, reflecting its proprietor's commitment to `the earth'. But he never regarded bookselling as the primary function of the House, saying that poetry existed independently of books, which were only à painful necessity, aids to the memory, reminders for moments of discouragement'.14 The visitor's journey ended not in the shop but in the reading room, which was, as Harriet Monroe implied, a kind of chapel. Harold's need for religious faith and observance found expression in the life of the Poetry House: when he read Shelley's `Hymn' there each September, he was rededicating himself and all he possessed to poetry and the betterment of the world. Properly understood, 35 Devonshire Street was not so much an inn as a religious foundation, like a slum mission or even a monastery, with its own chapel, guest-room, library, scriptorium, resident brethren, and twofold task of contemplation and evangelising. In March 1913 it acquired a priestess.




9

How did you enter that body? Why are you here? At once, when I had seen your eyes appear Over the brim of earth, they were looking for me. (`Strange Meetings') Harold's life perhaps reached its zenith, and certainly changed for ever, on 14 March 1913, his thirty-fourth birthday. The first Poetry and Drama was due out next day, and the Bookshop was flourishing. He was well known, even famous, having won a unique position for himself among English poets in little more than a year.* The Poets' Club had invited him to speak that evening at the CafeÂ Monico in Piccadilly Circus.1 Club dinners were evening-dress affairs, attended by a hundred or more members and guests, and it was the custom that after the meal some of the speaker's poems would be read by way of introduction. On this occasion the reader was a young woman. Alida Klemantaski was 20 (not 17, as she later said). She had been asked to read by the Club's founder, Henry Simpson, who had been impressed, as many people were, by her rich contralto voice. Someone had given her a copy of Before Dawn, and a friend had lent her a velvet dress, although she had arrived in such a state of nerves that she had dropped the book in the gutter in getting off the bus and splashed mud on the dress. The diners may only have noticed how calm and strikingly beautiful she looked. She knew very few of them, perhaps only Simpson and Hewlett, whose daughter was a friend of hers, but she noticed a `very feline' woman (Vera Tchaikovsky) who seemed rather too interested in Harold. And Alida felt suddenly jealous, for Harold seemed to her the most wonderful man she had ever encountered. Her reading was flawless. One of the poems she chose was `Go now, beloved', because she liked the drama of its slow, ominous stanzas. * He was not universally admired. When he contributed to the `How I Began' series in T. P. 's Weekly in April, The New Age sneered that `we very much wish Mr Monro had never begun'.



Alida 1913±14

Alida 1913±14 129

Afterwards she wrote in a poem of her own: I look across the table There you are. I think ± I shall sleep And eat and drink till life be done But this moment is ours . . . And you ± `By jove That's a pretty girl over there'. The universe has fallen about my heart.2 She was wrong about his thoughts. He could see at once that she was a fellowUtopian. But she was also a woman, and as he listened to her reading one of the most personal poems he had ever written he felt his private life was being put on display. He could never be healed from the wounds Dorothy had inflicted; she had betrayed him, preferring worldly pleasures to the ways of the Samurai. He believed she had ruined his capacity for love, and he dreaded getting involved with a woman again. He read his carefully prepared paper on `John Davidson, Poet, Philosopher, and Martyr', saying that Davidson ± who had committed suicide only four years earlier ± had been à martyr, of the twentieth-century kind, to consciousness, his own acute self-consciousness', aware of the forces that were changing the world, yet unable to put his ideas fully into poetry. The audience could have concluded that the speaker hoped to succeed where his subject had failed: hence his impatience with critics who regarded Davidson as the first truly modern poet.3 When conversation resumed, Harold thanked Alida, but added in his blunt way that he wished she had not read `Go now, beloved'; he inscribed her book: Ìn memory of a perfect rendering & a grudge/from the author./ March 14 '13.' Five days later she gave her first reading at the Bookshop, choosing passages from the Medea and Hippolytus, two plays about sexual jealousy. Harold may have recorded unease in his diary; the page for 13 to 19 March 1913 is missing, perhaps torn out by Alida when she went through his papers after his death. His only surviving comment on that eventful week is the one already quoted, that boredom is the source of all evils. He must have been elated at his 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Slow year by year I shall become more true, Until I never leave you day nor night; Shall faithfully take my station between you And all delight.

successes, but it would have been typical of him to feel some foreboding. Yet this time, surely, chance had brought him the comrade he had looked for in Maurice, Dorothy and Arundel. Like him, Alida wanted to `do something' to reform the world. She was keen to work and learn: he needed a helper and pupil. Attracted to youth and innocence as he always was, he tried to make it clear that theirs was to be a spiritual friendship only; as Alida was modern in her views about marriage, and old-fashioned in her reticence about sex, he was able to hope that all might be well. Alida was still living with her parents at 2 Tanza Road on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Her father was white-bearded and frail, though only in his forties; he had been a prosperous trader in horsehair, but had lost most of his capital. He was the son of a Polish Catholic refugee, who had acquired a Jewish wife in Holland before settling in London. Alida rarely admitted to being partly Jewish, but it was to her mixed ancestry that she owed her looks (Virginia Woolf described her as à handsome swarthy Russian looking woman' when she met her over tea with Eliot in 1935) and perhaps her intellectual curiosity.4 Her mother, Lizzie (neÂe Phillips), was presumably English, possibly a Cockney, as Alida had been born (on 18 December 1892) in Stoke Newington. Mother and daughter were not on good terms. Alida was secretly writing a feminist pamphlet entitled `Mother ± The Unhanged Criminal'. She considered herself an advanced thinker. Having made bohemian friends at school, she had joined the suffragettes, helping to form a noisy splinter group which had drawn a rebuke from Mrs Pankhurst: `Your parents have my deepest sympathy'. Just before the Poets' Club dinner she had earned some money for the first time, three guineas for appearing on stage as a Maenad, crying `Hail to Bacchus'. Bacchanalian pleasures meant nothing to her in real life, and for a long time she had no idea Harold might be different, imagining him rather as a priest of Apollo, working tirelessly for the coming sunrise. She longed to see more of him, to tell him her hopes and ideals, and to help in his great enterprises. In June 1913, when she read again at the Bookshop, she realised she was in love. It was impossible to talk freely to Harold there among the staff and customers, so she began writing to him almost daily; her many surviving letters, and his sparser replies, form the principal record of both their lives from this time on. Ì wish I were you', she wrote, `to be able to write really good poetry'. Ì do so want to do something to make the world a better place'. When she asked for his views on religion, he recommended the èlementary destructive books on Christianity': Arnold, Reade and above all Emerson, whose essays she should learn by heart, although she might outgrow them in time. He invited her to practise in the reading room whenever she wished, saying he would like to listen, and he took her to the Malting House for an afternoon, finding her shy silence reassuring. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


130 Harold Monro

1913 June 19: Suggest Abercrombie week-end/Tagore Ken Town Hall 20: Basil comes to London wants room till next Thursday 21: Read at Mrs Gardner's my poems. . . . /Shanks 7 24: Lunch Lady O Morrell/44 Bedford Square 1.15 July 1: Romney Green re new book case/Opera with RH? 3: Yeats reads (own poems) 7: Caius dinner Imperial Restaurant 8 21: Dorothy lunch/Get in Complete Bridges/Liberty's sale curtains/Dine Hewlett 8 23: Contributors meeting ± Hulme Hewlett Alford Marsh Vera Festing [ Jones] Gibson Miss [Naomi] Royde-Smith Macnamara [ John] Helston The meeting on the 23rd, one of several which Harold arranged to discuss editorial policy, was followed later in the day by a party to meet two special guests, Maurice and Nellie Browne, who were over on a brief visit from Chicago. They stayed in the attic, with Gibson across the landing. Before the party, according to Maurice, they saw the first London production of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps after which intellectual or near-intellectual London gathered at the Poetry Bookshop. Monro had a copy of Epstein's Christ in his living-room; controversy raged round it nightly. Now to Epstein's new vision had been added Stravinsky's. [Guests] surged with bitter words up and down the narrow stairs. Christ had to be rescued hastily from defenders and detractors alike, and I from an eminent novelist's sister, whose umbrella threatened Stravinsky in my unworthy person. Harold listed the people who came to the party, among them Alida, Alford, Shanks, Flint, Gibson, Frost, Hodgson, Storer, Sabin, George Mallory, Hulme and Mrs Kibblewhite, Hewlett and his daughter Pia, and Lady Ottoline Morrell and her sister-in-law, Lady Olivia Bentinck. Maurice's autobiography is predictably unreliable. Lady Ottoline, one of the great characters of Bloomsbury, was not an eminent novelist, but the wielder of the umbrella was probably Lady Olivia, who had strong opinions about modern art. The offending sculpture, a big marble piece recently bought by Alford, was not of Christ but of a pair of copulating doves; it remained in the house until 1926, a defiant symbol of the frankness which Harold considered, in theory, to be proper to the modern age, but it seems to have been moved to some less conspicuous position, as later visitors never mention it. When it was finally carted away to be sold back to the sculptor on Alford's behalf, Harold insisted on its being covered from the public gaze.5 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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The host drove away on the motorbike a few days after the party, perhaps relieved to escape from his old friend. Maurice the married man, happy, successful, bursting with energy and wildly excited by all that was happening in London, must have been overwhelming in the confines of the Bookshop.6 Harold paused in Surrey to take part in a fathers' cricket match at Nigel's prep school, then went to Winchester, whence he wrote to Alida. He had left Alford and an assistant in charge, and they could rely on the help of his efficient Irish secretary, Miss Townsend. Sitting in the cathedral nave, he felt the illusion of freedom returning, as it had done so often in the past with solitude and a change of scene. It's lovely to be quite alone. I only really care for solitude, and everything I've enjoyed most I've done alone. . . . I can feel very much at my ease with you sometimes, but also sometimes so dreadfully ill at ease, more perhaps than with anyone I know. He knew she would be horrified when she discovered more about him; he wanted to tell her the truth, if only he could be sure what it was, but he could not find the words or the occasion. He went abroad in August, probably with Arundel, calling on the Futurist leader F. T. Marinetti in Milan and going on to Ascona, where he translated some Futurist poems. He told Alida that diet, sun-baths and exercise were making him feel fit again. Being on the Mountain of Truth he made a further effort to speak directly: `From the first moment I knew you I always felt that you were a real liver of life, who must have all or nothing, and not take it readymade, but make it for yourself ± just as you insist on making even your own clothes'. He told her that as far as human relationships were concerned, he was àbsolutely faithless'. This was an appropriately Asconan declaration: relationships on the mountain were required to be spiritual and free, allowing both partners to shape their own lives. But if Arundel was with him, as seems likely, this summer visit of 1913 was to be their last time together at Ascona. Two unexpected vacancies occurred in Devonshire Street that autumn when the Poetry House lost its first secretary and its first lodger. Geraldine Townsend and Gibson were an unlikely couple, but one day when she passed him on the stairs it dawned on him that they were in love. Geraldine was tough and capable ± even domineering, according to Arundel ± and she was willing to take care of Gibson's practical needs, leaving him free to write; he told everyone he was gloriously happy. Early in October she asked for a few days off ± `to stay with Abercrombie (Gibson) I am quite certain', Harold told Alida. Òh damn, I will not let it annoy me; but I can't help it. Of course I have said she can go. Will you take the shop all Saturday? . . . I love you dear little friend'. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


132 Harold Monro

Harold's annoyance was not only at the prospect of losing a secretary. Gibson, Abercrombie and Drinkwater were working on a scheme to print their own poems and Brooke's in an occasional magazine, New Numbers, to be published from Gallows Cottage, where Gibson had the use of a room. Given the association between all four poets and the Bookshop, they might have been expected to ask Harold to be their publisher, but, as Abercrombie tactlessly assured him on 21 October, they never even thought of him. Their project had been inspired by Elkin Mathews' first poetry series, not by Georgian Poetry, and Abercrombie had already published his own work from home. Harold was deeply hurt; he believed, wrongly, that they intended to compete with his own periodical and he may have suspected, perhaps rightly, that they did not want him as a contributor. His greatest hope had been that poets would go forward together, as he told Drinkwater later. When he discovered Geraldine was helping with the new magazine, he rounded on her angrily, exclaiming that Gibson had ensnared her for the sake of her experience with Poetry and Drama. Geraldine wrote at once to her fianceÂ, who was on holiday in Italy with the Abercrombies and Lawrences. He in turn wrote furiously to Harold, as well as telling the story to Marsh and probably everybody else, saying that Harold was a self-centred swine. Marsh had recently been in the shop to congratulate Geraldine, who sent apologies through Gibson for having changed the subject hastily when New Numbers was mentioned; she had noticed that `Monro's female' was listening. Three weeks later Gibson wrote to Maurice from Gallows Cottage, still raging; Maurice tried to mediate, only to receive a pained rebuke from Harold, whose anger had given way to misery. Gibson and Geraldine were married on 9 December, soon moving into a cottage near the Abercrombies, where they joined in the preparations for New Numbers. The other poets remained friendly with Harold, who in due course put New Numbers on sale at the shop, but the row must have seemed confirmation to the Georgians that he was not one of them.7 Basil Watt may have stood in as secretary. He occupies that role in an anonymous sketch he probably wrote himself at about this time.8 The cast includes an editor (Harold), anxious to get away for a break in the country; a sub-editor (Alford); Argyll del Principe (Arundel), a poet; and Juba Kamarinski, an actress (Vera Tchaikovsky, not Alida). Juba wants to give a reading of Argyll's new poem, claiming she has made him a poet by sleeping with him. She also wants to kiss the editor, who resists. Argyll mutters `marinetti-noises', and the sub-editor irritably dismisses the poem as unsuitable for what he expects to be an audience of shopworkers. As Juba is carried out in hysterics, the new secretary, Basil Tumbles, enters, glowing-eyed and innocent. This version of life at the Bookshop in late 1913 may not be entirely fiction. Harold must often have been teased about his passion for rustic weekends. His friends, the moody Irish-Italian and the beautiful Russian actress, may well 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Alida 1913±14 133

have staged tempestuous scenes from time to time, and Alford may have found them as tiresome as Basil found them funny. The inner circle at 35 Devonshire Street consisted not of tweedy, respectable Georgians, as is often imagined, but of young bohemians, whose passions, hilarity and unorthodox ways made the house seem `modern' and at times chaotic. Ìf the place seems to be becoming too poetical, I rattle it up violently', Harold told Amy Lowell.9 High spirits were probably dampened a little in November, when Alida began to work in the shop as often as she could at Harold's request. She seems to have got on well with Basil, who in turn liked her, and she said nothing worse about Alford than that she hoped he would leave, but Arundel was too close a rival. Her scarcely-concealed dislike perhaps gave him an excuse for escape from drudgery; he resigned as assistant editor that winter in order to read for a London University degree, but he felt guilty ever afterwards at having let Harold down. Many years later he asked Alida to forgive him for Harold's sake. Harold may have spoken bitterly. Revisiting Ascona early in 1914, he realised he would never again have a use for the little house where he had tried to build a friendship worthy of Utopia, and he made a note in his diary: àdvertise mill'. Nevertheless Arundel remained a loyal supporter, often helping in Bookshop activities. Arundel was careful to praise Alida when he wrote about her later, but Gibson's reference to her as Harold's `female' in 1913 suggests she was not well thought of at the beginning. Some people saw her as the victim of a married man twice her age. Hewlett, for one, became increasingly anxious. On the other hand, insiders may have felt that the victim was Harold, as they watched her trying to monopolise him. She thought of him constantly, worried that much of his life was still unknown to her. Ì hope you'll be in bed before a quarter to five', she said in a typical letter. Ì'm always trying to think in the night what you are doing. I now begin to think that probably you go to bed as I get up, or a little before. Don't make yourself ill'. At first she was very much a junior, regarded by customers as just another high-minded volunteer, and she was frustrated to find that Harold was usually cloistered upstairs in his office. Ì feel horribly angry that Hodgson can see you for one hour and a half and I can't! . . . Oh, I do love you so'. Ì could have pulled that Frost man down the stairs by his coat when he said he was going up to see you!' She resented them all, making friends only with Ralph Hodgson and Lovat Fraser. Fraser, handsome, charming and interested in everything, was a frequent visitor. He was collaborating with Hodgson on producing illustrated booklets and single sheets of verse under the imprint of `The Flying Fame', an enterprise for which Harold was keen to be publisher. `R. H.', too, was often at the shop, the only Georgian who regularly went there; notorious for his reluctance to talk about literature, even though his poems were much admired, and always 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


134 Harold Monro

Alida 1913±14 135

1913 November 11: Thomas Alford Davies Flint Hodgson de la Mare Plarr Hewlett Storer Squire Frost Arundel/Dinner at Pecorini/Cabaret 13: God's press-cutting agency/Davies P and D/Belloc comes Poets Club/fetch bicycle/Magic [play by Chesterton] with Epstein 14: Crowley 16: Daily Express News Editor 11.30/Marinetti Cabaret 17: Epstein 11/Poets Club Marinetti 18: Dinner Florence 9/Marinetti Reading 21: Schell sitting 12 (116 Vic Str) Sherrill Schell, the American photographer, had taken a bare-shouldered portrait of Brooke which was to become a famous icon of the period; he also photographed Gibson and Alida (Plates 14,15,18,19). The need for a publicity picture, and the appointment with the Daily Express (on a Sunday morning), were no doubt to do with Marinetti's presence in London. The noisy Italian and his Futurist colleagues had been startling Europe with a series of manifestos since 1909, exalting the modern values of speed, energy and violence. Absurd though they seemed to most British observers, they were a force the Poetry House had to take note of. After meeting Marinetti in August Harold had devoted much of the September Poetry and Drama to Futurist material. His editorial had declared his own position as a rather different `futurist', quoting from his preface to Before Dawn: `Long ago, before we had heard of the Italian Movement, we conceived the desire to ``serve, worship, and obey the beautiful Future'' '. Nietzsche, whom the Futurists repudiated (although he was in fact a major influence), `has commanded us unflinching loyalty to the earth'; one should forget God, immortality and the past, and live in the future of the earth. This personal credo placed Harold as far from Marinetti as from Pound, making no reference to their interest in new forms, but he approved of Marinetti's success in taking poetry to the people, remarking ± no doubt with Hulme in mind ± that the current tendency to transplant poetry ìnto the study' had to be resisted. Marinetti's brief visit in November was a follow-up to the publicity Poetry and Drama had provided. He arrived on the 15th and stayed at the Savoy, where Harold met him that evening. Marinetti evidently regarded Harold as one of his principal British allies, addressing him in letters ± in an enormous, swaggering script ± as `treÁs cher confreÁre et ami' and adding good wishes to `notre ami', Arundel. Both were present, probably with Alida, at the first of 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


accompanied by his bull-terrier, he would sometimes take Harold off to play billiards for hours, but more often he would linger to chat with Alida, who shared his love of animals. Harold noticed his interest in her, and was annoyed to find himself jealous.

several engagements which Harold had arranged: a recital at the Cabaret Club on the 16th. The Cabaret, also known as the Cave of the Golden Calf, was one of Harold's regular haunts. It had been opened in 1912 by Mme Strindberg, widow of the playwright, in a basement just off Regent Street. Its life was to be short: raided by police in May 1913 after `scenes of drunkenness', it was closed down by the magistrates a year later. According to The Times, the clientele consisted of `wealthy men, and women of a certain class', but the club was also a centre for the new arts. It had ruthlessly modern murals by Wyndham Lewis and others, sculptures by Epstein, and a stage for experimental music and drama. Hearing Marinetti perform in this shrine of Modernism was an unforgettable experience. He roared his verse at the top of his voice, sweat pouring down his face and veins bulging in his forehead, as he imitated the sounds of the Future: machine guns, heavy artillery, aeroplanes. SOLE A RIPETIZIONE 20,000 PROIETTILI AL MINUTO urzzzzzzz aaaaaaaaaaa gioia gioia gioia gioia ancora ancora vendetta tatatatatatatatatatatatata RICOMINCIARE INUTILE NON C'E MEZZO vuoi notare fibra di 2 millimetri pluff plaff plaff gottgott gluglu ammoniaca odor-di-donna-matura ascelle tuberosa cadavere10 In the calmer atmosphere of the Poets' Club next day, Marinetti lectured in French ± he spoke no English ± on `Futurism and Poetry', arguing that Romanticism was dead and that the new poetry must break away from the old forms or die too. The Poets were probably sceptical; Hewlett thought the visitor an impudent rascal and refused Harold's invitation to meet him. Even so, there was a full house next day to hear Marinetti lecture and read for an hour and ten minutes at the Bookshop. He began by protesting at the dimness of the room, declaring that Futurism stood for `Light, Light, Light'. Marsh told Brooke the lecture was à full and roaring and foaming flood of indubitable half-truths', and the poetry a supreme music-hall turn. The dinner at the Florence Restaurant afterwards, attended by about thirty leading writers and artists, had been organised by Christopher Nevinson (the only Englishman willing to be known as a Futurist) and Lewis, but they must have collaborated with the Bookshop. `Harold dearest, dont for my sake become a Marinetti', Alida begged anxiously. She was not alone in imagining that Harold might have Futurist leanings. When he defended the visitor in The Daily Herald on 22 November (`Marinetti is wild Youth once again in the world ± therefore let us honour him!'), a correspondent assumed he had èspoused' Futurism. Harold replied 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


136 Harold Monro

that he was only in very limited agreement with the Futurists, being himself inclined to follow Nietzsche, but he valued them as `by far the most active and daring rebel force of modern Europe'.11 He distanced himself a little further in his December editorial by saying that British problems needed British solutions. His instinctive sympathy with Futurist ideals had to be tempered with native caution. Few of his readers would have understood the surge of Asconan excitement in one of the poems he had translated at Monte Verita, Paolo Buzzi's `Hymn to the Spirit of the New Poetry', with its hope that poetry would outsoar not only its old forms but also the new bookishness which was threatening to imprison it in the study: Cast thy song then, O man, through dilated lips on the wind of tomorrow! . . . Hast thou ever computed the number of feet to the scansion of a jagged segment of lightning? How many caesuras break the beat of a gust of the wind? Love only that rhythm by which I can wed my strong heart to thy heart, to the heart of the world. Another way of restoring poetry's popular appeal might be to revive the old tradition of broadsides and chapbooks. Harold followed his discussion of Futurism in the September Poetry and Drama with a reminder that for centuries people had liked to read their news in verse, printed on single sheets or in booklets and sold on street corners. He wanted `to see a public created that may read verse as it now reads its newspapers'. Poetry should once again be portable and cheap, `sold anywhere and everywhere, carried in the pocket, read at any spare moment, left in the train, or committed to the memory and passed on'. Expanding on this in the September number of The Imprint, he repeated his condemnation of the `transplantation of poetry into the study' and explained that publishing broadsides had been part of his plan for the shop from the beginning. A first rhyme sheet in the summer had not sold well, but children had come in to ask for à penn'urth of poitry', and several old women returning from the gin shop had bought copies after poring over them in the window. A poet and artist (Hodgson and Fraser), `both adapted beyond dreams for the purpose', were already producing broadsides and chapbooks. Harold quoted one of their bucolic poems and commented: `This is to hang up by your bedside if you are ill in London, and you will smell the hayfields'.12 By the end of 1913 he had published at least five `rhyme sheets' (he thought the word `broadside' sounded archaic), at the traditional price of tuppence coloured, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Alida 1913±14 137

penny plain; one carried his own poems, Òverheard on a Saltmarsh' and `Wind in the Dusk', with illustrations by Charles Winzer. More than sixty sheets were to follow during the next twenty years, the poets ranging from Pope to Pound and the artists from Fraser to Paul Nash; some sold in thousands of copies. The usual format was a single strip, from six to eight inches wide by a foot or two long, with a simple poem and specially commissioned illustrations. Printed in bold type and hand-coloured, they were meant to be kept on the wall and enjoyed. Harold claimed that one customer had papered an entire cottage with them. As well as cheering up many a bedsitter with the smell of the hayfields, they served an important function in the shop itself, where they were displayed in the window and elsewhere as the newcomer's introduction to poetry. Fraser and Hodgson soon wound up their Flying Fame project, handing over their stock to the Bookshop, where their influence became pervasive. They more than anyone else were responsible for an increasing element of rusticity and old-fashioned quaintness in the image the shop projected of itself, a characteristic which helped to gain the place its misleading reputation as a Georgian centre. The image was easily misunderstood. Harold had no intention of being old-fashioned: as far as he was concerned, the noblest, truest life was that of the countryman, living simply and close to the earth. So his two friends were welcome visitors; few artists knew more than Fraser about broadsides and chapbooks, and few poets were more learned than Hodgson about animals and birds. Their approach to art and literature ± democratic and Nature-loving, but not at all Futurist or Modernist ± was in tune with Alida's. By the end of its first year the Poetry Bookshop was well established. If it was rather more relaxed and unconventional than some customers expected, that was part of its magic. As Harold pointed out in his December 1913 editorial, official institutions for poetry were always likely to fail. At Devonshire Street `we have simply a few people gathered together, and, since the English climate is bad, a house ± otherwise a field or a beach might have done. We make a regular practice of reading poetry aloud, and any one who wishes to stroll in and listen may do so'. `We hope that Poetry Bookshops will eventually be established in all the principal towns of England'. These remarks conceal a liturgical echo (`when two or three are gathered together'): the Poetry House had a spiritual message for the whole country. As for Poetry and Drama, Harold reckoned his apprenticeship was over: `we stare you boldly in the eyes and challenge you not to overlook our existence'. His private life was less ideal. Alida's letters were becoming increasingly miserable, as she realised how elusive he was always going to be. He wrote to her from the Malting House on 7 December, saying he dreaded love almost as one might dread an operation. It had caused him to be faithless to his own poetry. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


138 Harold Monro

Whenever he had been in love, it had been with à young and unformed life which I have wanted to form ± and failed. I have never loved an equal'. And a week later: Ìt's dreadful to cause you such suffering dearest. . . . Great friends love each other, and I love you very much. . . . it is impossible to explain everything, but you will gradually understand'. Alida's father died at the end of 1913, leaving very little money. Mrs Klemantaski seems to have kept her daughter at home by pretending the household could no longer afford a servant, so Alida had to get up early in the mornings, cold, hungry and furious, to light the fires and organise the kitchen with no help from her mother or sister. In a rash moment Harold offered her a room at the Bookshop. She thought it might be good for Nigel to have someone to look after him when he came to stay, but the prospect of eating out every night was unappealing. Perhaps she could cook and make the place more homely, so that Harold `might not feel these wandering impulses so often'. In the end she never lived at the Poetry House, but she accepted a small salary, apparently £5 a month. Her move to Devonshire Street, had it happened, would probably have been respectable. Harold seems to have taken a little house in Chelsea for his own use, presumably so that he could work on his own poetry undisturbed. He was still hoping to finish `Cophetua' and `The Death of Jehovah'. How long he kept 36 Margaretta Terrace is not clear, but the experiment was probably no more successful than that of Crevenish or Casa Sasso. Again and again he said he wanted to be alone, and that Alida was the only person he could trust to act on his wishes. She tried to take the hint, convincing herself she was protecting his freedom, but she could not stop herself from begging for his company. The succession of weekend guests at the Malting House seems to have come to an end; from late 1913 onwards most of his weekends had to be reserved for her. He went abroad again at the end of February 1914, leaving her lonely and envious. After brief visits to Ascona and Florence, he stayed with his mother at San Remo, whence he wrote on 8 March, saying he was not to be envied at all. The hotel was like a vast barracks, with `the awful gathering for meals in the immense dining room, and the dreadful nature of all one's co-`ìnmates'', and the salutations of the hotel servants every time one moves'. He was fond of his mother, but there was nothing to talk about and nothing to do except fidget. Even correspondence was difficult, although Alida, like Dorothy before her, was constantly demanding letters. Dorothy used to get frantically angry and make me feel cold all over. . . . Oh I wish I could disassociate comradeship between the two sexes from certain kinds of obligations that are altogether against my instincts. I suppose I am what they call a `born bachelor'! I have tried so hard to make myself otherwise. One cant. One cant. I had learnt at last not to bother about it and 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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140 Harold Monro

I wont do so. It's nothing but small things, which are so much to a woman and so little to a man, at least to a hybrid man like me.

Harold launched a publicity drive early in 1914, mainly because the magazine was not selling well enough. He, Alida and Basil had marked the first anniversary of the Bookshop on 8 January by giving a special reading, but the main celebrations took place on 17 March, the anniversary of Poetry and Drama. Alida sent out 200 invitations to `specials and poets', and Alford sent out more. Experience had shown that conventional topics and well-known names were the way to draw a large attendance, so the four-hour event consisted of addresses by Hewlett, Gosse and Newbolt, and readings by Basil, Harold and Abercrombie (who read from his latest verse play, The End of the World). Pound was predictably scornful. Alida found work in the shop hard and rather depressing. Harold hoped that together they would be `very tidy and methodical', so she learned typing and proof-reading, but she was not a natural organiser, nor was she patient enough to be good at managing staff or tiresome customers, although she disliked being alone. Harold considered it part of the staff's duty to advise on purchases, answer literary queries and even identify quotations. Sometimes she had to deal single-handedly with thirty or forty people arriving for a reading, all wanting to talk, buy books and be shown the way. Worse still, she was pestered by men, although she was sure Harold was `the only person for me'. No one else understands me in the very least. They dont ever realise that I'm only interested in what they've got to say. That I dont want to go to the CafeÂ Royal, or be made to smoke, or to drink wine, or have my arm held, or to be touched, that I absolutely hate and loathe that and them. The chief offender was one of the lodgers, Hulme, a notorious womaniser, who kept asking her out to Epstein's current exhibition or elsewhere. On one occasion she had to ask Harold to come down from his office, which he did with an ill grace, muttering that he had no wish to be à protector of females'.* She continued to detest Hulme, even when he turned his attentions elsewhere. The `beastly Hulme is in the shop', she told Harold on 2 March. Ì am writing to you and not taking any notice of him. He has just got a remarkably irritating * This was presumably the origin of the story told by Wyndham Lewis, that Hulme pestered a beautiful assistant in a bookshop so much that the proprietor had a hole cut in his office floor to be within call.13



A `hybrid man'. She knew about what was called Uranianism, and could discuss it with her friends, but she did not understand what he was trying to say.

female in to talk to him. Why does he need to put his arm round her in the shop?' Harold's birthday brought more distress for her; having agonised over finding a present when he already seemed to have everything, she chose a pair of cufflinks, but he gave them back, explaining he had some gold ones (`How I cried', she wrote in her letter to him years afterwards). She could never shake off the fear that their love might fail or that fate or death might intervene. Ì wish you were free, as I am. That you had no civil bonds that you have now, and I loathe the idea of your having a son'. By now they had slept together, despite Harold's reluctance. She thought they were perfectly attuned to each other, but he refused to contemplate living with her, saying that a `woman and man living together entirely seems a fatal thing to me'. She made a will, leaving him all she had. She dreaded meeting Dorothy, but the day came when Dorothy arrived at the shop unexpectedly. Harold wrote that evening, full of remorse: Darling, I do understand so well what your feelings were to-day. It all happened so suddenly. . . . Of course she saw in a moment (my instinct tells me so) ± but her view is very sane, believe me. It is won by much suffering ± alas. She's not my `wife'. She's some one I married, and we have a child, and for that reason we try to keep up a sort of loyalty (mixed with inevitable associations) to each other. But you are the only woman in the world I have ever loved, and you know that. Love is perfected with you. The idea, the mind, meets, and the body follows in the natural impulse.

Having promoted the Georgians and found audiences for Futurism, Harold was equally generous to the Imagists in April 1914 when he published their first anthology. Des Imagistes was compiled by Pound as a challenge to Georgian Poetry. It had already been published in New York, so sheets were available, but it had no chance of commercial success. Several indignant customers are said to have returned copies to the shop. As usual, Harold's record of neutrality was ignored; just as he was seen as a Georgian and a Futurist, so a critic was to describe him as the shepherd of the Imagists.14 It was true that at least five of the contributors to Des Imagistes ± Pound, Flint, Aldington, Hueffer, Cournos ± were known to him personally and had written for his periodicals, and his brief commentary on the anthology in the June Poetry and Drama put him among the first and most appreciative critics of Pound's new school. Technically their volume is of immense interest and importance, aesthetically of great delight. . . . Faint, shadowy, cool, almost, it must be said, mellifluous, their words enmesh images, hint, imply, suggest; seek, while never too hotly pursuing, find, but never definitely articulate; hold you out their 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Alida 1913±14 141

142 Harold Monro

Pound half-admitted later that the only reason for Harold's absence from the anthology was personal irritation on the part of the compiler. Pound's hostility may have annoyed Harold's friends; Alida disliked Modernist work, and Basil composed a parody, `Pathologie des Dommagistes', which Harold was to publish after the war.15

1914 April 24: Private View Futurists 25: Theatre with Basil/ . . . /Aunt E [Emily Russell] re Nigel/Gee 28: Marinetti Lecture 8.45 29: Alfred Brooke [Rupert's brother] May 1: Nigel go museum with mother 4: Marinetti 8 The family was debating Nigel's future education. Harold renewed contact with Radley on 9 May by giving a reading there, but it was decided the boy should follow his Uncle Maurice to Eastbourne College, where he would be near his maternal grandmother. He was doing well at his prep school, earning praise from one of his teachers, T. P. Cameron Wilson, a poet and novelist. `Jim' Wilson was a tall, athletic and entertaining man, not unlike Basil, whom he met at the Bookshop; he became devoted to Harold, and Harold grew to love him. Marinetti had returned to London for a major publicity campaign, much to the excitement of the press. His lecture on 28 April was on Futurist clothing. He had already prophesied the garment of the future, to be made of a single piece of brilliantly coloured cloth, fastened by a `dynamic button', so Aldington turned up in a dazzling mock-Futurist creation designed by himself, H. D. and Pound: Marinetti, who always wore an orthodox suit himself, was not amused.16 Harold gave a dinner for the visitor on 4 May. The other guests were Alford, Flint, Sturge Moore, Plarr and Squire, as well as Aldington, who did not repeat his sartorial indiscretion. Thomas, de la Mare and Gerald Gould dropped in after the meal, but Harold ruefully made a note of several eminences who had declined to attend: Pound, Hueffer, Carpenter, Newbolt, Chesterton, Yeats, Marsh. Yeats was not to escape, however. `We had tremendous fun with Marinetti the other evening', Harold told Marsh on the 12th. `He came round and declaimed to Yeats and made the room shake!' This may have been the oftenmentioned occasion in Yeats's flat, when Pound, Aldington and Sturge Moore acted as interpreters to Marinetti's thunder until the recital had to be halted because the neighbours started banging on the walls. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


meaning, but withhold it before you grasp; tantalize you if you are dull, irritate you if you are violent, exasperate you if you are blunt or too English.

Alida 1913±14 143

The DoreÂ Gallery in Bond Street had mounted a Futurist exhibition of pictures and sculptures made of string, cigarettes and other unexpected objects. One of Marinetti's works was a self-portrait, consisting of bits of wood and a clothesbrush (Plate 24). He was due to give several performances in the gallery, so he urged Harold to distribute tickets to `toutes tes connaissances geÂniales, intelligentes ou presque'. Harold took him to speak to the Cambridge Heretics on the 3rd and may have introduced at least one of the DoreÂ recitals. One of the gallery events, probably that on the 12th, was famously interrupted by a gang of hefty young artists led by Wyndham Lewis, Hulme, Gaudier Brzeska and Edward Wadsworth. These ringleaders were all among Harold's `connaissances': he may well have given them tickets, thinking, as anyone might have done, that they would be sympathetic. But they had decided Marinetti was a tedious foreigner, and they were furious at having been hailed as Futurists by Nevinson in a new manifesto. So, while Marinetti bellowed, Lewis and his accomplices added to the uproar with howled invective. Or so Lewis recalled, although other versions of the story describe Gaudier heckling Nevinson during a reading of the offending manifesto, and someone letting off a firework. Whatever the details, the most progressive artists in London publicly repudiated Futurism, leaving Nevinson and Harold uncomfortably isolated.17 Worse followed on 15 June, when the Futurist `Noise Makers', as Harold called them, were given their British premieÁre at the Coliseum as an item in a music-hall programme. Marinetti first exasperated the gallery by talking at length in French, ignoring protests. Harold arrived late, to find the big auditorium resounding with catcalls: Marinetti's colleague Luigi Russolo was conducting conscripted members of the orchestra in compositions for 23 Intonarumori, long wooden boxes with handles at one end and megaphones at the other, producing a variety of roars, rumbles and screechings. The music of the Future was hardly audible above the yells of audience; the effect was `pitiful', Harold told Alida. He discovered Marinetti afterwards claiming a victory `like a lion with his claws cut trying to scratch ± it was awful. I like him much better'. The March Poetry and Drama had announced a Bookshop anthology of Futurist poetry, an appropriate companion to Des Imagistes and Georgian Poetry. The shop's files still contain an elaborate manuscript of Marinetti's `Bombardement d'Andrinople: Mots en liberteÂ futuristes', with the author's instructions to Arundel on how the poem should be printed (Nevinson was to have provided 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


1914 May 28: Marinetti DoreÂ 8.45 June 3: D.M. [Dorothy] wants to stay here./Gillett 11.30 June 4: Meeting re P & D 12: Dine Mother 8 sharp/Marinetti and Nevinson lecture 8.45 15: First Performance Noise Makers afternoon

illustrations). This would have been a remarkable publication by any standards, but it never appeared; it was probably abandoned when the real bombardments of August upset the book trade along with everything else. A book on `The Future', for which Harold was paid an advance in May, also came to nothing. One more `-ism' appeared in these hectic months of artistic warfare before actual war changed the world. Fired by their triumph at the DoreÂ, Lewis and his friends declared themselves `Vorticists', causing a sensation in June when they published their magazine and manifesto. Blast seemed at first to be another display of Futurism, with its flamboyant use of bold type and exclamation marks, but it contained violent attacks on Marinetti and anyone else who believed in `the sentimental Future'. Pound being a chief contributor, some of this fury may have been aimed at Harold; on the other hand, Harold was friendly with Lewis and sympathetic towards his Rebel Arts Centre in Great Ormond Street, just round the corner from the Bookshop.* The new magazine went on sale in the shop, in any case. If Gillett can be believed, the customers who swarmed to buy it on the first day included several clergymen, one of whom explained that he was hoping to find something in it for his next sermon. Harold was anxious about his own periodical, which was fast running into debt. His break with Kyle had lost him The Poetry Review's ready-made subscription list and most of its income from advertisements. Poetry and Drama probably had more readers than any other `little magazine' of the time, but when he had started out in January 1912 there had been no competition. Now the Vorticists had Blast; the Imagists had been publishing in the monthly The Egoist all year, with Aldington as literary editor; Pound was recruiting for Harriet Monroe's Poetry; and the Georgians at Dymock had already produced two issues of New Numbers. Poetry and Drama's proud independence from factions inevitably made it less provocative than its rivals, and the best poets were starting to publish elsewhere. Harold called a meeting for 4 June. Not everyone was keen: Abercrombie grumbled to Marsh about `the absurd time of the absurd Monro's absurd meeting', but he attended, as did Marsh and others.18 It was agreed to hold a larger meeting on 3 July. The editor's nervousness showed in the June number, which opened with an angry denunciation of the popular poet Alfred Noyes, who had told an interviewer in America that the Bookshop was a deplorable place where `young poets from the country come with their long hair and flowing neckties and pose and * Blast contained two conspicuous lists of names, one headed `Blast', the other `Bless'. Galloway Kyle was blasted, but among the blessed names are those of two of Harold's authors, Gilbert Cannan and Mrs Hepburn (Anna Wickham), and `Watt' and `Munroe'. Basil Watt? Harold Monro? (Or Harriet Monroe? But Blast does not refer to other women by surname only.) Pound helped to compile the lists, and his spelling was always erratic; his letters refer to Harold as `Munro', `Monroe' and `Monro'.



144 Harold Monro

read their own verses, and bring the contempt of the man in the street down on all poetry'.19 Harold did not add that Noyes had also praised the new Poetry Review as the best thing of its kind, but elsewhere in the June number he and Thomas wrote contemptuously of the Review and the Poetry Society. Readers knew enough about his quarrel with the Society to notice the personal animosity behind these attacks. As the poet Herbert Trench wrote to him from Florence, a dignified silence might have been a wiser course. However, Trench said Poetry and Drama was splendid: if its high standards of honesty and taste could be kept up, Harold would be doing England a great service.20 Maurice and Nellie Browne revisited England in mid-June 1914, having travelled on the same ship as Rupert Brooke, who had introduced himself to them in Chicago at Harold's suggestion. Brooke had been touring America and the South Seas; he had taken every opportunity to advertise Georgian Poetry and the Bookshop in America, and had given Harold's name to several young poets who were about to visit London. That Maurice was Harold's brother-in-law and Gibson's publisher qualified him to be an instant friend. The Brownes were drawn into Marsh's circle as soon as they reached London. Swept along with them, Harold had no choice but to meet Gibson again, and the two poets were perhaps reconciled in the glow surrounding the travellers. Marsh gave a party to celebrate Brooke's return: Maurice remembered iced coffee, Cathleen Nesbitt's beauty, à poetic multiplicity of Gibson and Monro, and Brooke solemnly dancing a Tahitian hula-hula on the grass of Gray's Inn'. On another evening at Marsh's flat, Abercrombie, Brooke, Gibson, Harold and Maurice `talked metaphysics at each other the night through'.21 Harold had sent out circulars about the plight of his periodical, hoping backers would come forward, but he privately drew some of his father's capital, knowing he would have to make the largest contribution himself. Little is recorded of the big meeting on 3 July, except that Gillett was called in to hand round biscuits, noticing how eagerly they were consumed by all the poets except Brooke, who had just dined at 10 Downing Street. Pound suggested contributors should give £10 a year, either in cash or as articles or poems; this arrangement, already used by Poetry, seems to have been agreed on, and Poetry and Drama was saved for the time being.22 1914 July 26: Thomas 27: Mother's birthday. Dine with her 28: Brooke, Hewlett, RH [Hodgson] dine/9.30 Birch Aiken Flint Shanks? Cannan 29: Basil comes/Nigel 31: Gillett goes home 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Alida 1913±14 145

Brooke gave a reading on the 28th, the last of the season. He was nervous and had a severe cold. The young poet and playwright, Hermon Ould, one of the few men present, noticed how Brooke's blue shirt matched his eyes, and how Harold, busy adjusting the desk and lighting, seemed scornful of the 56-strong audience. As the reading progressed, ever more inaudibly, admiration turned to murmurs of complaint, and Brooke was obliged to repeat several poems. According to Gillett, one old lady with an ear-trumpet shouted, `Speak up, young man'. Other accounts say this interruption came from the American Amy Lowell, who was visiting London on a personal campaign to become leader of the Imagists; she thought the reading was an absurdly pretentious affair.23 Brooke was able to relax at dinner afterwards. Arundel always remembered the occasion as an image of the bond which united poets at the Bookshop in spite of differences in age, taste and outlook. The dark panelling gleamed dully in the light of the candles that wavered on the massive oak table round which we were sitting at dinner: Rupert with his rebellious mane of gold hair, deep-set blue eye[s] and soft skin tanned by the sun, Monro silent and serious, occasionally smiling a slow smile that wrinkled at the corners of [his] eyes, R. H. excitedly discussing the points of bull-terriers with Hewlett who sat and listened, his face like a mask carved out of old ivory.24 The others came in after dinner, as the slow dusk settled on Bloomsbury: Flint, Cannan, perhaps Shanks, Frank Birch, one of Brooke's colleagues at King's, and Conrad Aiken, a young poet recently arrived from America with masses of poems by himself and his friends. Though the gathering was convivial, there was good cause to be serious that evening. In the street outside a newspaper boy was still shouting the headlines: Austria was at war with Serbia.



146 Harold Monro

10

Is not my house your house? There is a bed Upstairs. You're tired. Lie down; you must come home. Some men are killed . . . not you. Be as you were. And yet ± Somehow it's dark down all the stair. I'm standing at the door. You are not there. (`Lament in 1915') `Child dear, I'm obsessed by one feeling only', Harold wrote to Alida on 5 August 1914, the day after Britain declared war. It's inevitable for me, in what feeble way I can, to help. . . . If there was a pack of wild beasts at the door, we should strive in a body for the defence of the house. It's a question of killing and every one has to combine in order that the smallest number possible may be killed. Nearly everyone in the country would have agreed, even Utopian socialists, who had to believe with Wells that this was a war to end war, a final convulsion which would destroy the old evils before bringing in a permanent peace. Maybe, indeed, the dawn Harold had so often prophesied had now arrived. While Siegfried Sassoon and many others were volunteering with their horses as cavalrymen, Harold, the modern man, volunteered with his motorbike as a civilian messenger. He was rejected, probably because his American machine would have caused difficulties with spare parts. When he returned next day on another bike, he was told the last vacancy had been filled. Brooke found this astonishing, but the authorities were being swamped with well-meaning offers.1 For a month or two everything seemed unreal. Harold probably kept to his pre-arranged programme for August, shuttling Nigel up to Harrogate, where not even war would have prevented Sophia from taking her annual holiday, and 147 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


War 1914±16

then shuttling him back to Dorothy. He had tea with Pound on the 19th and visited Hewlett on the 24th, but Pound seemed almost contemptibly irrelevant, a long-haired dilettante chattering about free verse among the teacups, while Hewlett was in a mood of conventional patriotism. `From the day war was declared scarcely any one has entered the shop', Harold told Marsh on the 19th, adding that Poetry and Drama would be suspended until December, by which time `the Prussians may be cooped up in Berlin'. Early in September the Automobile Association rang up, asking him to go to France after all because his French and German would be useful, but a customer in the shop advised caution so he said, `Not yet'. If poetry mattered as much as he believed it did, the poets had a great task to do. Astonishing amounts of verse were certainly appearing in the newspapers; he collected hundreds of cuttings, but there was sadly little to admire. In a poem of his own, `The Poets Are Waiting', apparently written in late August, he deplored both the professionals, who were `measuring their thoughts/For felicitous sonnets', and The unprofessional Little singers, Most intellectual, Merry with gossip, Heavy with cunning, Whose tedious brains are draped In sultry palls of hair, . . . Cake at their elbows ± They will not write us verses for the time; Their storms are brewed in teacups and their wars Are fought in sneers or little blots of ink. Òne would call this poem Futurist, not Imagiste, wouldn't one?' Alida asked nervously. Whatever it was, its attack on Pound was rather too obvious. Harold was right, though, that the professionals were not going to produce anything original, and that the Modernists would mostly remain silent about the war. He tried composing some denunciations of Germany and eulogies of his native Belgium (`Sweet holy little land, bulwark of Europe', etc.), but he could do no better than the bards in the newspapers. A plan for a ten-part war poem, beginning with `The Rage of Song' and ending with `The emergence of Beauty', got no further than his notebook. Almost everyone he knew was affected by the war, except Maurice, who retreated to America for the duration. Alford, whom Harold regarded as his deputy and possible successor, decided to sublet his rooms and volunteer for ambulance work. Shanks joined the Artists' Rifles, starting his training in 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


148 Harold Monro

Bloomsbury: `Form fours! Re-form two deep! We wheel and pair/And still the brown leaves drift in Russell Square'. Hulme became an artilleryman, and Fraser went into the infantry. Brooke joined the Royal Naval Division. Edward Thomas was so little moved by the current fervour that Hodgson accused him of being pro-German; Thomas told Harold that the gibe almost made him willing to face bayonets, but not quite.2 No doubt Hodgson would have approved of the American poet, Alan Seeger, who called in at the shop in late August on his way to the front; Harold disliked the visitor's haughtiness and scorn for modern poetry, but admired his thirst for adventure. Arundel held aloof as a citizen of a neutral country, saying the war was based on hatred and revenge. Jim Wilson enlisted in the ranks of the Grenadier Guards. Ì couldn't bear the thought of that chap going to be killed . . . I like him very much', Harold told Alida. Basil, who had been living at the Bookshop for some months, sat scarcely moving for a few days, then went out one morning and reappeared in London Field Ambulance uniform, Harold having begged him not to volunteer for anything more dangerous.3 Harold imagined what the job would be like, and wrote a poem, which he never published, about a stretcher-bearer who knows the importance of not looking wounded men in the eye. He put some of his anxieties about Basil and others into four poems published in December as `Youth in Arms'. The first portrays the typical volunteer as the eternal boy-soldier, sent to fight by women and old men, a theme which was to be taken up later by many wartime writers. The second and third poems, which Harold included in a reading on 22 October, are `Soldier', describing the recruit's last night at home, and `Retreat', which shows him at the front: Damn this jingle in my brain. I'm full of old songs ± Have you ever heard this? All the roads to victory Are flooded as we go. There's so much blood to paddle through, That's why we're marching slow. Yes sir; I'm here. Are you an officer? I can't see. Are we running away? How long have we done it? One whole year, A month, a week, or since yesterday? Based on newspaper accounts of the retreat from Mons and the troops' habit of putting their own words to popular song tunes, this attempt at battlefield realism is highly unusual for autumn 1914, a time when most poets were still writing propaganda. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


War 1914±16 149

150 Harold Monro

It is plain now what you are. Your head has dropped Into a furrow. And the lovely curve Of your strong leg has wasted and is propped Against a ridge of the ploughed land's watery swerve. You are swayed on waves of the silent ground; You clutch and claim with passionate grasp of your fingers The dip of earth in which your body lingers; If you are not found, In a little while your limbs will fall apart; The birds will take some, but the earth will take most of your heart. You are fuel for a coming spring if they leave you here; The crop that will rise from your bones is healthy bread. You died ± we know you ± without a word of fear, And as they loved you living I love you dead. No girl would kiss you. But then No girls would ever kiss the earth In the manner they hug the lips of men: You are not known to them in this, your second birth. No coffin-cover now will cram Your body in a shell of lead; Earth will not fall on you from the spade with a slam, But will fold and enclose you slowly, you living dead. Hush, I hear the guns. Are you still asleep? Surely I saw you a little heave to reply. I can hardly think you will not turn over and creep Along the furrows trenchward as if to die. With its idiosyncratic combination of lyricism and near-prose, and its theme of body becoming earth, earth becoming body, `Carrion' is one of Harold's most characteristic poems. It is also one of the best early poems of the war. Had it been written in, say, 1918, modern readers might well think it influenced by Wilfred Owen, but the influence actually went the other way: Owen read the `Youth in Arms' poems in 1916, probably at the Bookshop, and their plain Georgian language and Imagist clarity, as well as their pity for the death of youth, are reflected in his own later work. The homoeroticism of `Youth in Arms', an element that would not have been lost on Owen, helps to show where Harold's deepest feelings about the war came from; what moved him most was not the invasion of Belgium or the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


The fourth poem is `Carrion':

War 1914±16 151

First, when he stands just waiting, and no thought Governs his body: that I've often watched . . . For he is muscle always then . . . Flesh breaking into flower; Thought taking form . . . And then his body leans toward one hip: So slight a change I hardly know it . . . . . . when he walks it is a native action, As though the ground had said: `Now I will drive My furrows on before me, all alive: Out of my movements body shall be made ± The image of the moving furrows is developed in `Carrion', where the `ploughed land's watery swerve' seems a living power, ready to absorb the corpse into a new life; flesh and earth interact, the dead soldier taking his position from the shape of land, and the land itself accepting the `lovely curve' of his leg. This detail of the angle of the leg, also mentioned in the first of the `Youth in Arms' poems and in `His Positions', is a clue that all these poems are about Basil: he had a distinctive way of leaning from his hip ± a `curious motion, not like other men', as Harold was to describe it in 1916 ± which Harold found strangely beautiful. Like the Springtide or Arundel at Ascona, Basil seemed to be an embodiment of the earth itself; visions of his death must have haunted Harold's imagination from the moment war was declared. If Basil had any lingering doubts, they would have been dispelled by news of the retreat from Mons. The disaster proved the point Harold had made at Cambridge years before, that the British army could not make up in courage what it lacked in numbers. The German advance seemed unstoppable. Ìt's dreadful to-night', Harold wrote to Alida on 4 September. Ì think they're at Paris'. But Paris was saved, thousands more volunteers came forward, and Hewlett told Harold he had done well to postpone the thought of war service, adding that the most useful thing he could do now would be to keep the magazine going and the shop open, especially as Alida needed her salary. So the September Poetry and Drama came out after all, albeit late and obviously put together in a hurry. `War monopolises the brain', Harold said, in apologising for the brevity of his Chronicle of new poetry. He had to use a 1909 essay by Bridges as a lead article, and he reverted to the old system of short 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


alleged crimes of Prussia, but love and the dread of losing friends. Above all he feared losing Basil, who is almost certainly the subject of `Youth in Arms' and of `His Positions', an unpublished `Fragment of a (possible?) poem on Earth made Flesh':

reviews (there were only two, both by Squire). Amy Lowell had sent in seven poems, and Hewlett contributed a further instalment of what was probably the best poem he ever wrote, a verse history of the English labourer. The poetry section closed with a full-page denunciation of the Kaiser; drafts in one of Harold's notebooks show that this was his own work. Still convinced that the poetry of the future would have to deal with social and political affairs, he hoped in his editorial that the war might strengthen the modern tendency for poets to strip away romantic language and èxpose the raw material of thought, and the elementary facts of experience'. The style of despatches from the front might be a model. `Devoid of all ornament, all superfluous detail, they lay bare to us, in direct terms, the plain facts of the human psychology of the moment'. This suggestion, echoing the calls Harold and Pound had made in 1912 for unornamented language and truth to experience, seems almost revolutionary when set against the high-flown rhetoric of most 1914 war verse, but Harold followed his own advice in `Youth in Arms' and his example was soon reinforced by Gibson, who may well have read the Poetry and Drama editorial. Although `the war poets' have long been standard fare in classrooms, it is still not generally recognised that the first of them were Harold Monro and his former lodger, Wilfrid Gibson. Just as these two had pioneered Georgian realism long before the first volume of Georgian Poetry, so they were the first to write about war in a way that Sassoon, Owen and others were to develop later. Gibson's first war poem, `Breakfast', written in early October, was based on the sort of material Harold had advocated, a soldier's simple anecdote which Gibson came across in a magazine. `Youth in Arms' and `Breakfast' were the first attempts in English poetry to imagine the `plain facts' and `human psychology' of front-line experience in 1914±18.4 Harold opened the new season of readings on Tuesday 15 September 1914 with Shelley, but he decided to use some Thursdays for war àddresses'. Hewlett lectured to 45 people on the 24th, Newbolt to 62 on 8 October, and on 15 October Mrs Gerard Meynell spoke on `Nelson's Victories'. The poetry readings were similarly bellicose: Harold read À Private of the Buffs', Wordsworth's `Happy Warrior', Hardy's new `Song of the Soldiers', and some war poems of his own; Arundel read from D'Annunzio; and Rhys read war ballads. The Poet Laureate was invited to lecture, but he firmly declined, beginning a wartime silence which was later to become a subject for complaints in Parliament. Bridges was probably right, and when only 25 people came to hear Mrs Meynell, Thursday evenings were given back to poetry. The American Little Review for October published a mocking description by Amy Lowell of the Brooke reading she had attended in July. Harold protested furiously, and she hastily apologised, assuring him she knew his work for poetry 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


152 Harold Monro

was immensely valuable, although she did think the reading had been rather silly with its worshipping audience and Brooke's `high seriousness' (Harold must have winced at that phrase). She promised to write in praise of the Bookshop if Harold would supply her with information, which he did, feeling contrite and grateful. Her ensuing article was generous, but the hatchet was never quite buried.5 Brooke revisited Devonshire Street in October, having been to the front at Antwerp. He sat for a whole morning in the shop, Harold remembered, `mostly on the corner of the table, in his uniform, looking haggard and discouraged, and talking almost entirely about the War'.6 During the next few months he was to measure his thoughts for `felicitous sonnets' like any professional, albeit with strong feelings born of experience. A reading by Anna Wickham of her own work in November must have been a welcome change from war poetry. She was one of Harold's more interesting discoveries, passionate and furiously energetic, constantly at odds with her role as Mrs Patrick Hepburn, the wife of a staid solicitor and mother of four sons. Unorthodox, bluntly sincere as any Samurai, `blessed' by Blast yet belonging to no school or movement, she came as near as anyone to being a typical Bookshop poet. She once said `Harold Monro was in love with my poems, and my poems were me'. One of her unpublished verses shows that she was in love with him and that, being lesbian, she was able to cope with his own orientation by imagining herself as his male lover. She and Alida loathed each other.7 The audience at Hewlett's lecture on 24 September seems to have included T. S. Eliot, who had been in Germany at the outbreak of war. He had found refuge a few streets away from the Bookshop at a boarding house in Bedford Place, where his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken, now back in America, had been staying. Writing to Aiken on 30 September, Eliot made a flippant mention of `lectures at 5 P. M. with wax candles', which must be a reference to the Bookshop talks despite the wrong hour.8 He may not have made himself known at the shop: Aiken had told him Harold had declined to publish `The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Nothing has done Harold's reputation more damage than the legend of his initial rejection of Eliot's early poems. The story ± rarely questioned and endlessly repeated ± originates from Aiken alone, who told it several times, with variations. He said he offered `Prufrock' to Harold, who returned it with the comment that it was àbsolutely insane', or words to that effect. Later, discussing symbolism with Harold and Flint at a party, Aiken produced Eliot's `La Figlia Che Piange' with no better result. `Harold . . . so obviously thought I was seizing the opportunity for showing something of my own that I put things right the next day by sending it to him, with Eliot's address in Germany and ± of course that too was rejected'.9 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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Aiken soon told Eliot some such story as this, but details in his 1914 letters and elsewhere show that his versions of what happened are misleading. In 1913 he had protested to Poetry that an article by Pound about new British writing had failed to mention the Bookshop and the Georgians. Aiken's Georgian sympathies are evident in his Earth Triumphant, an interminable poem which he had sent to Harold in 1913. Other manuscripts followed, not all by himself. When he arrived in London in June 1914, imagining himself as an ambassador for American poetry, and determined to sell and advertise his own and his countrymen's work as much as possible, he was confident, mistakenly, that the shop would publish his work and invite him to read. A note of 3 July shows him sending Harold poems by an unnamed friend (apparently not Eliot). He must have seemed tiresomely bumptious; it was not unreasonable of Harold to suspect him of pushing his own work under different names.10 If `Prufrock' was pushed at all, it was only with quantities of lesser material ± and in July 1914, a date Harold's detractors have ignored. It was no time to be pestering a worried editor; Poetry and Drama was in serious trouble, and war was brewing. Harold probably liked Aiken all the same (they became fast friends later), and Brooke seems to have done so too, so the newcomer was invited to join the after-dinner party on 28 July, the day of Brooke's reading. It must have been then that Aiken showed `La Figlia' to Harold and Flint, and on the 29th that he passed on Eliot's German address. Given the date, it is hardly surprising that Harold took no action.11 Aiken's advocacy of Eliot was almost certainly less keen than he later liked to imply. He claimed he went to see Pound to get him interested, having failed with Harold, but Pound remembered him as only casually mentioning that there was a `guy at Harvard doing funny stuff'. If Aiken really did press Eliot's poems on Harold, it is strange that he did not offer them to Pound, who was first shown them by Eliot himself in September, after Aiken had left the country. Pound sent `Prufrock' to Poetry, delighted to find work that was both modern and American. When the poem appeared in 1915 Harold discovered it, according to Pound, òn his unaided own', which suggests he had no recollection of having seen it before.12 He admired it enough to give a reading of it, and in 1916 he probably considered publishing Eliot's first book, until conscription and rising costs wrecked all his plans. Harold's decision to continue Poetry and Drama proved to have been a mistake. The unsatisfactory September number can hardly have helped sales, the debt was growing, the assistant editor, Alford, had left in October, and everyone's mind was elsewhere. The December editorial announced that publication would be suspended until 1916, when the editor, like most people, expected that the war would be over. The last number was one of the most interesting, with new poems by 21 poets, no fewer than ten Chronicles, the second of two 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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articles by Hueffer on Ìmpressionism' in fiction, and a thoughtful study of war poetry by Thomas, who had borrowed the Bookshop's collection of cuttings. But the magazine had outlived its usefulness. Despite Harold's efforts to hold the poets together, the division between Modernists and the rest was now established fact. Neither side needed him as it had done, and his row with Gibson and resistance to Pound had weakened his standing in both camps. Amy Lowell had been puzzled by his neutrality, though saluting it as singularly unselfish; a policy which had made good sense at the end of 1911 seemed almost perverse three years later. All the same, he always believed, justly, that he had made a unique contribution as an editor to the growth of English poetry in 1912±14. Few periods in literary history had been as productive or eventful, and he had been at the centre of it all, promoting, advising, commenting and recording. Many of the best poets of the time had argued their views and displayed their work in his pages. He had kept them in touch with each other and with new writing at home and abroad, and had made them known to a substantial readership. His achievements were ± and are ± impossible to measure and easy to overlook. When an American professor published a history of recent British poetry in 1920, Harold complained to him that the book made no mention of `the movement begun by the ``Poetry Review'' in 1912', nor of the Bookshop and its facilitating machinery.13 There had indeed been an immense change in English poetry since 1911, and Harold more than anyone had been its enabler. He assured readers of the final Poetry and Drama that the shop would continue publishing. If the times were wrong for a periodical, they seemed right for two other projects, chapbooks (small collections of `finished and carefully selected poetry for extensive circulation at a low price') and broadsides (for `the large and easy distribution of topical or in any other way notable poetry'). `We're going hard for Chapbooks and Broadsides now', he told Lowell on 14 December. In the event there were very few broadsides. The first, a twopenny folded sheet, carried a war ballad by Hewlett, who imagined a million copies could be sold on the streets in aid of Belgian refugees; he seems to have contributed to the cost of printing, but he ended up out of pocket. The Bookshop was too small and too highly principled to compete with the many publishers who were trying to profit from the current wave of anti-German feeling. Harold made another attempt in 1915 with some patriotic poems by Newbolt and Flecker, then wisely reverted to non-topical rhyme sheets. The first two chapbooks were also of war poetry, one very conventional, a little collection of Hewlett's `sing-songs' (November 1914), the other a thoroughly Modernist counterbalance, Hueffer's Antwerp, with a Vorticist cover by Wyndham Lewis. Antwerp seems to have been in print by December, when Hueffer came to give a reading of it; like Hewlett, he wanted profits, if any, to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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go to refugees. The third chapbook, also published in December, was by Harold himself. Children of Love, Harold's first book since Before Dawn in 1911, contained just sixteen `finished and carefully selected' poems.14 Most of them were more nearly Modernist than Georgian, but reviewers from both factions approved. In The Egoist Aldington singled out `Great City', `London Interior' and `Hearthstone' for their accurate detail. From the Georgian side Shanks said in the December Little Review that the poems were èxtremely uncomfortable and, after a little while, extremely impressive'. The book pleased a traditionalist too, much to Harold's surprise: Newbolt wrote to say that he liked it very much and had read almost all of it aloud to a delighted audience. A very different verdict came from Sabin, who told Harold sadly that the book's thoughts were brutal and unhealthy, and its modernity mere fashion. He may have been thinking of poems such as `Suburb': Here on warm nights the daughter brings Her vacillating clerk, To talk of small exciting things And touch his fingers in the dark. . . . She trembles like the pampas plumes. Her strained lips haggle. He assumes The serious quest. . . . (Herbert Palmer later made the convincing suggestion that this passage influenced Eliot's portrait of the `young man carbuncular' in The Waste Land.)15 Children of Love contains some of Harold's best-known work. In November 1915 he was to be the only poet represented in both Marsh's Georgian Poetry 1913±1915 (`Children of Love', Òverheard on a Saltmarsh', `Milk for the Cat') and Pound's Catholic Anthology (`The Strange Companion', `Hearthstone', `Suburb', `Milk for the Cat'). The cat poem, thus uniquely distinguished, became an anthologists' favourite, earning its author many fees. Its scrupulous observation, Georgian in simplicity, Imagist in precision, drew admiration from Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Marsh and many others. Harold is often thought of as a poet of animals; such subjects would not have occurred to him before he met Alida, but he came to regard fondness for animals as one of the characteristics of the modern poet. After all, it was one aspect of being true to the earth. When the tea is brought at five o'clock, And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there. . . .



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Among the other poems in the book, `Hearthstone' is often quoted by critics as an example of its author at his best, probably because Pound praised it. Òverheard on a Saltmarsh' and the `Youth in Arms' quartet are still in anthologies. The most obscure poem in Children of Love, `The Strange Companion', drew little comment at the time, perhaps because people who knew Harold understood that it is an alcoholic's confession. That strange companion came on shuffling feet, Passed me, then turned, and touched my arm. . . . He said: Ì bring you your inheritance.' . . . Published in Poetry and Drama in June 1913, but apparently started in about 1909, the poem was probably familiar to Harold's friends.* Since his return to England in 1911, he had tried hard to control his drinking, mainly by keeping himself incessantly busy, apparently hiding his secret from Alida until 1915. Even so his `strange companion' had been whispering to him all the time. The details in the poem ± nocturnal streets, mirthless laughter, futile quarrelling, maudlin reconciliation ± may well reflect actual experience during the many nights when he was up until dawn. That side of his life, scarcely hinted at in his other 1912±15 writings, was to become more visible during and after the war. He made it known that he wanted to publish more chapbooks. One of the first responses came, quite unexpectedly, from Thomas. Always overworked ± Harold had vainly offered him the Malting House and the Ascona mill for holidays ± and hard up, Thomas had been glad to earn the small fees Poetry and Drama could pay for articles. In June 1914 he had asked whether the shop would consider making an advance on a book about modern poetry. Then in November, with Frost's encouragement, he started writing poems himself, and on 15 December sent some to Harold. Only two other people had so far seen the manuscripts. Harold apparently returned the package four days later, saying he

* It is the only poem of his known to have been amended by Pound: one draft shows il miglior fabbro simplifying the diction, although Harold was not satisfied with the result. Pound altered Ànd both began together to advance' to Ànd both of us advanced', for example, making the line more natural but depriving it of the slow pacing Harold wanted. The final wording is Ànd slowly we advanced together'.16



The children eat and wriggle and laugh; The two old ladies stroke their silk: But the cat is grown small and thin with desire, Transformed to a creeping lust for milk. . . .

was too busy to read it. The Christmas period was always a hectic time in the shop, but he must at least have glanced at the poems. Thomas was bitterly disappointed, though too reticent to say so. When he tried again with more and better work a few months later, the response was just as negative. No record survives of Harold's reasons for a decision which he later regretted and which has often been held against him. Most of Thomas's friends were equally unenthusiastic about the poems. A booklet of introspective, understated verse by an unknown author (Thomas wanted anonymity) would have been difficult to sell in early 1915, and the shop would have had to bear any loss. It would have been more economical to offer a loan, as Harold seems to have done with typical generosity and tactlessness (the offer was gratefully declined). Thomas remained in touch, although the friendship must have been weakened. Harold tried to get the poems back after the war, but Thomas's widow reminded him of the pain he had caused in 1914 and said she had found another publisher.17 The end of Poetry and Drama allowed Harold to give more time to his own life and poetry than he had been able to do for years. His 1915 diary contains many bursts of rough work for poems, especially for `Trees' and `Strange Meetings', two long sequences about the mysterious relationship between humans and nature, and for `Week-End', a celebration of days in the country with Alida. One source of inspiration was a new weekend cottage. Beake, as he and Alida called it, was an isolated house among fields somewhere in south Essex, probably in the vicinity of Beke Hall near Rayleigh, despite the spelling. Visits to the place took their friendship into a new stage. The Malting House had been his own territory, where she was only a guest (and perhaps a subject for village gossip), but Beake was jointly shared. Locals were probably allowed to believe that the couple were husband and wife. The weekend companionship seems to have been kept a secret in London, perhaps partly because Dorothy was becoming troublesome for some reason. `That woman has ruined my whole power of personal love', Harold told Alida, `± Yet she still quietly claims to be in the right. . . . I am polluted for ever. . . . Dearest, let us take what fate will give us out of our wonderful meeting under the stars, and if it's merely what Despair tells me it must be ± so much the better for Despair'. Alida knew now that things were never going to be easy. She confessed to wondering whether it was worth going on, but Hewlett had once told her that ten minutes' happiness a year was all a human being could stand. She reminded Harold she was not like Dorothy: Ì have given you a friendship of steel and a loyalty that never breaks or falters no matter what you do or have done ± based on a perfect understanding. It is there or not as you desire'. He told her she was like the earth itself, tolerant and always there. She seems to have suspected she 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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was pregnant in the spring of 1915, but it was a false alarm. He said it would be better to choose their time. In London, longing for tranquillity, he cursed town life, wartime conditions and the endless interruptions to his work by shop business and visits from friends such as Vera and Arundel or `little Shanks'. But he was a London Monro, so he kept the shop going and renewed his offer of himself and his motorbike for war service. By February he was in the Special Constabulary, and in May he was on patrol daily, helping to police anti-German riots in the East End. The first wartime death among the poets had nothing to do with the fighting. James Elroy Flecker died of consumption in Switzerland in January 1915. He had corresponded amiably with Harold, teasing him for taking Pound and Marinetti seriously. His widow was willing for his last poems to be published as a chapbook. At Aldington's request, Harold wrote an obituary for The Egoist, speaking of Flecker with a disinterested precision appropriate for an Imagist journal, but declaring personal admiration for his poetry. He always believed that Flecker and Brooke had been the best of the young pre-war poets. Aldington was sceptical, telling him in a letter that Flecker had been seduced by the English weakness for pretty language.

1915 April 6: Play at Nigel's school 9: Thorold 7.45/white mice/Imagiste like actor 16: . . . /Rabbit Basket/Bloaters/Hair cut 22: funnel/apron/speedometer/Dunhill pump/ . . . /Mother's pillow case/ oil can/napkins/nut crackers/Chapbook publication date?/Shanks's agreement/PBS circular 23: Child Bribery Whenever Harold was away, Alida dealt with correspondence and other business, as well as keeping an eye on Nigel ± and his mice and rabbit ± during his periodic visits. She found the child hard to like: he was not only Dorothy's son, but also a `little hypocrite', pretending to be pious when staying with Sophia, for example, yet jeering at religion when at the Bookshop. Alida saw his insecurity and urged Harold to give him some guidance. Four new chapbooks were in hand: Songs by Shanks, The Contemplative Quarry by Anna Wickham, Spring Morning by Frances Cornford, with woodcuts by Gwen Raverat, and The Old Ships by Flecker. `Have you chosen the green cover for Spring Morning?' Alida asked. Ìs Anna Wickham to have the snipped orange cover in the Dragon paper book? Is the paper for Spring Morning to be the one that came yesterday? Have you passed sheet 1 of the The Old Ships? Finally?' Reading the day's post could take hours. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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Arundel (from St Leonards on Sea) sends you a ticket for a performance at Cosmopolis . . . Guthrie sends you a long dissertation on the virtues of himself in relation to his workshop. Cannan thanks you for your cheque and wishes he could send it as a contribution to the P & D debt. There is an awful prose M. S. from a female called Ùnder the Wings of the Holy One'. I shall send it back with letter I unless you say No. There must have been several standard letters for sending out to enquirers. The shop was perhaps more efficient in this period than in any other, thanks to an experienced clerk, Percy McDonald, who sorted out the accounts and other matters, working as both cashier and traveller. In February Harold took on a housekeeper, a Mrs Palmer, who came to live in the house with her small daughter. Aldington wrote in May that he liked the new chapbooks by Wickham and Flecker very much, although he was less keen on the one by Shanks and not keen at all on the Cornford. He reviewed all of them in The Egoist in generally favourable terms; the appearance of four books not about the war was an event to be welcomed. The Bookshop's trade was picking up. Devonshire Street itself was changing, perhaps because Harold had made the place well known: early in 1915 a Peasant Shop opened at No. 41, selling pottery, handicrafts, and drawings by David Bomberg.18 Harold was away in April, probably on holiday with Nigel, when Alida told him of another death: Ì have just heard a dreadful thing: . . . Rupert has died of sunstroke in the Dardanelles. It seems too awful to think of. I am frightfully glad that he wasn't shot arent you?' The shop was soon flooded with requests for Brooke's newly-famous war sonnets, one of which had appeared in The Times, the rest only in New Numbers. Harold begged Abercrombie and Gibson to reprint, but they declined, presumably not wishing to compete with the edition of Brooke's poems which Marsh decided to prepare. The transformation of Brooke from socialist and rebel into national hero began immediately, to the dismay of his Cambridge friends, who did what they could to fight back. The Cambridge Magazine of 1 May carried an obituary by Gilbert Murray and an anonymous note, no doubt by the editor, C. K. Ogden, stressing `the real Rupert'. Ogden then asked Edward Dent, a distinguished music don at King's who had known the dead man well, to write about Brooke's life, and Harold, as the Cambridge poet most closely associated with Brooke, to write about the poems. Harold praised Brooke's honesty, intelligence and humour, deplored attempts to explain away his most characteristic poems as youthful indiscretions, and spoke out, probably earlier than any other critic, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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against the fast-growing myth. `His whole poetry is full of the repudiation of sentimentalism. His death was not more lovely than his life. His death is a sinister and ironical episode in the annals of this melancholy war, another instance of its dreary and incomprehensible waste'. Ogden suggested that the Bookshop should publish a memorial volume, to contain, among other things, Brooke's reviews in the magazine and Dent's and Harold's articles, a collaboration between Cambridge and Devonshire Street which would have been admirably appropriate. Harold mentioned the plan to Marsh, and that seems to have been the end of it; it may have been blocked by Brooke's mother, who disapproved of Cambridge's view of her son, or by Marsh himself. Harold could do no more than give a reading of Brooke's poems on 20 May and arrange another for November by the famous actor Henry Ainley.19 Brooke's death was an omen. In May the Allies were joined by Italy, where Marinetti had been telling excited crowds that war would lead to greatness, so Arundel became liable for conscription. Basil visited the Bookshop on 12 May in the uniform of a Second Lieutenant in the 7th Cameron Highlanders; ambulance work had not been enough to satisfy his conscience after all. Aldington asked Harold to review Amy Lowell's recent Imagist anthology for the May issue of The Egoist, saying no one else could write from a position of such complete impartiality. The entire May number was to be devoted to the Imagists. Impartiality was needed, because Lowell had taken over the group from Pound; its members had fallen out badly with their former leader, angered by his claim to be Imagism's founder and by his defection to what they regarded as the charlatanry of Vorticism. Aldington himself, who had once walked out of one of Harold's literary lunches when the conversation had turned against Pound, was now so hostile that he wanted to omit Pound from the May Egoist altogether, as he confided to Harold, although in the end he wrote an article dismissing the lost leader as a Romantic who had tried and failed to be modern. Flint helped in the debunking by contributing a brief history of Imagism, designed to show that the group had been founded by Hulme and others well before Pound's arrival.20 Harold reviewed Lowell's anthology at some length, noting the Imagists' virtues but pointing out that they were less original than they thought they were and too prone to `labouring to appear skilful'. On 8 July 1915 the 7th Camerons crossed the Channel on a ship named the Arundel. The battalion was in peak condition after months of training, and there was much excitement at the prospect of real fighting. Edward Thomas looked in at the Bookshop on the 19th and saw Alida. `Tell Hodgson I've enlisted', he said, relieved that no one could call him pro-German any more. He had just joined the Artists' Rifles at their Bloomsbury headquarters.21 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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That summer, with help from Harold, Alida moved into a flat in Red Lion Square, only a few minutes' walk from Devonshire Street. Her salary seemed just enough to cover the rent, which was low because, as she was amused to discover, the building had formerly been a brothel. She was fervently grateful, but troubled at the implications of the move, which made her almost entirely dependent on her benefactor (who was considerably older than herself, as she often remembered). My dearest dearest. I could tell you for hours how I love my flat . . . it all comes from you. . . . I spent a most unhappy night last night. That was why I was crying. . . . The first thing that came was the thought that you were dead, it often happens, and I simply cant bear it ± then Mrs Rowat [an old friend], or someone like her, kept saying: `You dont know what you are doing ± You are missing everything in the world that is worth living for. . . Wait till you are old. Wait till you have nothing. Wait till he's dead. What will you have then ± ' . . . If you were going to be dead, though, I'd want most awfully to have a child . . . I know, quite definitely, that one day I shall want to have a child ± you will too wont you? They had been talking of legacies again, so she begged him to leave her with a say in the shop and not to make Alford the trustee (Ì can't stand thinking of him managing it all wrongly'). Mrs Rowat wanted to take her to the doctor. Hewlett, ever more worried about her, invited himself to tea to see the flat. She and Harold took a brief holiday in Devon, where they talked about books, memorised poems and identified wild flowers, exactly the sort of companionship he had once hoped for from Dorothy. When he left for Harrogate and the usual torments of boredom with his mother, Alida stayed with some women friends and then returned to the shop, where she met à strange female on the stairs'. Harold had engaged Marie Spati, Nigel's former nanny, perhaps because he needed help with his son's visits; it had probably not occurred to him that Alida was sure to resent her as a daily reminder of his married life. Louis Untermeyer wrote to Harold from America on 5 September, having heard variously that he was working for a London newspaper, helping with transport in Belgium, and serving on a battleship at Gallipoli. Actually Harold was at Devonshire Street, but the war reached him even there on the night of the 8th, when there was a severe air raid. A bomb landed in Queen Square, blowing out hundreds of windows; five incendiaries fell very close to the Bookshop, and several more narrowly missed Alida's block of flats. Sightseeing was irresistible: he went for one of the most dangerous of his many night walks, through streets ankle-deep in broken glass, lit only by burning buildings. Standing near St Paul's for almost an hour he watched the fires in the City 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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Basil had written from France in August, grimly describing the discomforts of the front line. On 25 September his battalion went into action at Loos, fighting their way to a low rise marked on the maps as Hill 70, where several hundred troops had already charged over the crest, straight into the enemy guns. Of the 20 Cameron officers and 827 men who went into the attack, only 6 officers and 290 men answered the roll next morning. Basil was among the missing. A disagreeable lawyer brought the news to the Bookshop a week or two later. No trace of the body had been found. `No coffin-cover now will cram/Your body in a shell of lead . . .'22 Alida tried to give sympathy, although her own fear got in the way: My dearest dearest ± The world has become very black . . . I am haunted again by the vision of you lying dead . . . Basil will never be dead to us, that is the one comfort. You must never think that you weren't always kind to him. You were, sometimes too much so. I think he liked us both better than anyone else in the world (in the sense of friends) and I'm awfully glad. Harold perhaps said little, but the loss was the worst he had suffered since his brother's death. He put his grief into a long, impassioned `Lament in 1915 (B. H. W.)', remembering his last meeting with Basil: You're rigged in your best uniform to-day; You take a momentary martial stand, Then step inside and hold me out your hand, And laugh in that old solitary way. . . . I'm going down to meet you on the stair. Walk to me! Come! for I can see you plain. How strange! A moment I did think you dead. How foolish of me! Friend! friend! Are you dumb? Why are you pale? Why do you hang your head? . . .

The `Lament' was written in London, but during rural weekends at Beake Harold finished what seems at first sight to be an entirely unrelated poem, `Trees', which starts by instructing the reader how to become a tree. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


leaping as high as the dome, while a huge glow spread across the sky. When soldiers moved him on he went to the West End, seeing a Zeppelin like a giant finger balanced on searchlight beams above Piccadilly, shells bursting uselessly all round it.

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The effort has to be strenuous and concentrated, with the mind empty as it drives itself into the timeless growth of the forest. Ì did that', the poet says, though admitting that the trees soon forced him out of their paradise. He recognises that loving them may be a kind of immorality, but How beautifully they grow, Above their stiles and lanes and watery places, Crowding the brink of silence everywhere, . . . They follow us and haunt us. We must build Houses of wood. Our evening rooms are filled With fragments of the forest: chairs and tables. . . . and the raw Wild stuff, built like a cupboard or a shelf, Will crack and shiver in the night, and sing, Reminding everybody of itself . . . The first workings for `Trees' appear in Harold's diary on 1 May 1915, a few days after he heard of Brooke's death. He seems to have had Brooke's pre-war Metaphysical work in mind, and one passage may be a memory of both Brooke and Basil, men who had been embodiments of natural, unconscious grace, earth made flesh: There are some men, of course, some men, I know, Who, when they pass, Seem like trees walking, and to grow From earth, and, native in the grass, (So taut their muscles) move on gliding roots. `Trees' records an attempt, doomed to failure though it must be, to overcome the pain of solitary consciousness by entering into the life of the earth itself, beyond time and death. Harold had long been interested in the possibility that the soul might be able to enter another dimension by some evolutionary process. That dimension would have to be terrestrial, because to a Nietzschean there was no other, but on fine summer days at Beake there could be little doubt that paradise existed, almost within reach. Perhaps it could be reached. As Joy Grant has pointed out, `Trees' is a mystical poem, the attempt to become a tree being an exercise in 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Grip hard, become a root, so drive Your muscles through the ground alive That you'll be breaking from above your knees Out into branches.

Two of James Guthrie's woodcuts for Trees, December 1915



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formal meditation. Harold must have tried it (Ì did that'). He knew something of mysticism, having been to Theosophical Society meetings, and his 1915±16 diaries show him noting many of Yeats's Mondays, on one occasion reminding himself to consult that great mystic about a spiritualist. Like many other people during the war, he may have tried to make contact with the dead. The oddity of `Trees' seems to be recognised in workings for the poem written in a notebook he had used for `The Springtide', the Asconan allegory from which `Trees' is one of many offshoots. He intended to explain that he had succeeded in becoming a tree, until the spell had been broken by a suspicious passer-by: Ùnnatural fool. Don't imagine you'll stay long. This is what happened to me. Man down lane, touched me(?), suspected me. Saw him ± Shame. Unnatural vice. Rejected love . . .'. Loving trees, or their human counterparts, the men who seem `like trees walking', is seen by other people as an ùnnatural vice', so the dreamer is shamed back into the familiar world. Even so, although entry into the life of trees is impossible, at least on this side of death, their presence is everywhere, their leaves caressing the traveller and their strength surviving in the things humans make of wood, including country cottages and homely furniture. Harold knew his quest for companionship was vain, whether among the murmuring trees and creaking house timbers at Beake or on the London streets, but there were consolations. Poetry was worth living for, and apparently inanimate things did seem to have an existence of their own. The many lists in his diaries are sometimes of people and sometimes of household objects, as though there were not much difference between guests and glasses, customers and chairs. A lonely man might well feel that objects were the more reliable companions. The ticking of a clock, the murmur of a joist at night, the song of a kettle ± these were reassuring voices, reminders of stability and of a life just beyond the human range, whispered signals, it might be, of friends who had perhaps only been known in dreams. News came early in October that Harold's nephew, Lancelot Gooch, was dangerously ill in the Mediterranean, where he had just arrived as a midshipman on active service. His parents prepared to visit him, but before they could set out they heard that he was dead. He was just 18. Harold tried and failed to write a poem about him.

1915 October 17: I don't intend to comply/I may as well tell you there's some one else, and if you care to have me watched it will probably save expense both to me and my wife A note of a telephone conversation. Dorothy had just petitioned for another decree for the restitution of conjugal rights, having presumably resolved on a 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


166 Harold Monro

divorce at last. She may have been motivated by patriotism, or possibly spite, for conscription was impending and single men were going to be called up first. Men who had not yet volunteered were being asked to àttest' their willingness to serve if called upon. On the 18th Alida urged Harold to tell the authorities that `your inside isn't the kind to stand army life', and three days later she said she would like to kill anyone who made him join; it was dreadful to think that the most fruitful years of his life might be wasted. The decree was served on 28 October. There was no point in not providing evidence. The court was soon informed that on or about the 29th he had committed adultery by spending a night at a hotel in Kingston with a woman calling herself Àlice Monro'.23 While Harold was trying to decide about volunteering, another poet arrived in Bloomsbury with his mind made up. On 21 October Wilfred Owen signed on with the Artists' Rifles in Duke's Road, as Shanks, Thomas and other poets had done before him. He took lodgings nearby and wrote home: `The Poetry Bookshop is about 7 mins. walk! There is a reading this very night!' Alida read that evening from Emily BronteÈ and Christina Rossetti. Owen returned on the following Tuesday to hear Harold read from The City of Dreadful Night, and `had a talk with him afterwards'. The new recruit came again on the Thursday, this time in uniform; as he selfconsciously `clamp-clump-clamp-clumped' in army boots up the wooden stairs of the reading room, `the poetic ladies were not a little surprised. The Readings were from Rabindranath Tagore, read by a Lady [Alida] without much insight into the Hindu spirit. I could not speak to Monro, but he smiled sadly at my khaki. He has a poem in his last book, which goes' ± and Owen quoted from the first `Youth in Arms' poem. The shop had no bedroom vacant, so he arranged to stay above the restaurant opposite at 5s.6d. a week ± lighting was by candle and there was no bath, conditions probably typical of the street ± but he was sent away to a training camp before he could move in.24 Owen's visits to the Bookshop illustrate its value in wartime. Robert Bridges told Harold that a youthful poet had recently said it was the one place in the world where art was still alive. One of the many writers who had reason to be grateful was Robert Graves, a young subaltern who had just been through the horrors of Loos. His father brought his work in, determined to find a publisher, and Marsh lent support; Harold told Marsh, fairly, that the poems were `too consciously young', but he agreed to bring them out as a chapbook. So the Bookshop became first publisher to Graves, as it did to Aldington, Charlotte Mew and others.25 Harold first heard of Mew when Alida happened to recite one of her poems; he got in touch with her at once, hoping she might have enough new work for a chapbook. She said no one would read it if she had, but she sent one new poem, raising no objection when Alida decided to include it in a reading in November. Five minutes before the event began, a tiny, white-haired lady arrived, her head 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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cocked at a defiant angle; asked by Alida if she were Charlotte Mew, she replied, Ì'm sorry to say I am'. It was the beginning of a warm friendship. Alida took Àunty' Mew into her confidence, with the result that Mew came to disapprove of Harold, although he admired her work as much as Alida did and tried hard to win recognition for her.26 Harold was in low spirits in November, grieving for Basil and worried by Alida's ever more fervent messages of love. Ìf I had a god to worship I believe it would be you', she told him. It was perhaps in response to such declarations that he revealed a little to her about his drinking habits and companions. She knew that much of his life was still hidden from her, even though she had no secrets from him. Dearest, please tell me why you want to chuck your body on the ash heap. Isn't it possible to resist the feeling± but then you said you dont want to ± I loathe your friends . . . All these people and these thoughts of yours belong, I imagine, to the Harold I don't know, and so it is very hard for me to cope with him. . . . There is one other thing I have to tell you. Dont mind, it is I who do that. R. H. kissed me. I have to tell you. I couldnt help it and couldnt prevent it, he knew that and apologized after. It is very curious the terrible repulsion I have to the feel of any one besides you near me. I dont suppose that you have it, have you? Alida soon forgave Ralph Hodgson. Nothing could shake her devotion to Harold, although he resisted all her efforts at rescue. The best she could do for him was to provide the literary and domestic friendship that part of him seemed to need. `Do you realize that we have got to read tomorrow', she wrote on 24 November, ànd that we haven't been through Prometheus once?' It is disgraceful ± and you didn't take your day off either. I have got a good recipe for medlar jelly ± you have to use lump sugar for it which makes it rather dear. Will you buy half the sugar this time ± it will be about 3/- I should think ± and I shall supply the gas which will cost nearly that and the hours and hours of standing cooking and skimming. That is quite fair isn't it?

Ì feel dreadfully sorry for Vera in some curious way', Alida said on 24 November. Ì believe Arundel has chucked her and that's dreadful'. Arundel had gone back to Italy in the summer to join the army, but he was sent back to London in November as private secretary to the Italian Military AttacheÂ. Writing to Alida long afterwards, he asked what had happened to Vera, saying he thought she had died of tuberculosis in Paris in 1914. He misremembered the year, but 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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A new Georgian Poetry was in press, Marsh having decided to compile a second volume. Proofs were held up when a compositor was taken off to work on an advertisement for The Daily Mail ± `They couldn't have made a more ugly excuse', Harold wrote to Marsh ± but the first copies were delivered in November, perhaps in time for Ainley's reading of Brooke on the 11th, four days before the official publication date. Sales were not expected to be as good as those for the 1912 volume, but they turned out to be even better. Pound's Catholic Anthology 1914±1915 was also published in November. He had told Harold he wanted to include work by à dozen or more writers who are looking straight at the thing, neither posing nor hugging an out of date illusion'.27 The book is said to have been intended as a showcase for Eliot, five of whose poems were in it, including `Prufrock', but it also contained four poems by Harold, nine short pieces by Pound, and work by thirteen other British and American poets. It was a counterblast not only to Amy Lowell's new brand of Imagism but also to the second Georgian Poetry, as Des Imagistes had been to the first; Harold had been willing to be publisher as before, but Pound had given the job to Elkin Mathews (because Harold was a contributor, Pound said). Thus deprived of the chance to balance one anthology with another, Harold demonstrated the Bookshop's neutrality by including `Prufrock' and Pound's `The Return' in a December reading. In the same month he published a pair of Imagist chapbooks: Aldington's first book, Images, and Flint's second, Cadences, both with covers by Paul Nash. Harold also brought out his own `Trees' as a separate volume for the Christmas trade. Both Flint and Marsh had liked the poem, Marsh suggesting some improvements, and in November it had appeared in The English Review. Harold asked Guthrie to illustrate it as a book, and Sabin to print it; the result, all in black and white with six striking woodcuts, was one of the shop's most elegant publications. Harold was delighted with it, and it sold out rapidly. 1916 January 1: Better furniture upstairs Room/cheque for Guthrie 2: Wilson 6.30 6: Hewlett dinner/ . . . /McDonald wages/``Trees'' 7: Dine M/Dent lunch 1.15/Mrs Shove 2.30 12: Medical 13: 4 Rehearse Reading 14: Essex Hall/Fabian Meeting 8/Dickinson: Preventing war by International agreement 17: Yeats [a Monday] 18: Book for Russell's lectures 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


perhaps not by much; there is no mention of Vera Tchaikovsky in the Bookshop records after 1915.

Harold had attested on 10 December, three days before the final deadline, so the medical was presumably the next stage. He hoped he would fail it, other people's experience having shown that poor health was the surest way of keeping one's freedom without straining one's conscience. Shanks had been invalided out of the army in 1915, before seeing active service. The shortsighted Gibson had been rejected several times. Abercrombie, also unfit, was preparing to go into munitions work. Lovat Fraser, less fortunate, was sent home early in 1916, gassed and shocked. Christopher Nevinson had written to Harold in April 1915, saying he had been through a merry time with the French ambulance service; his ordeal had in fact wrecked his health, but it freed him to become one of the war's best artists. Charles Winzer, another of Harold's artist-friends, was now a prisoner in Germany, where Harold was able to send him cigarettes and other comforts. Winzer sounded as cheerful as anyone, writing affectionate letters and asking for news of Bookshop acquaintances. Harold was becoming ever more sceptical about the war, half-persuaded by his Cambridge contacts ± most of whom had been friends of Brooke ± that the fighting could be ended by negotiation. Although Brooke was dead and his fellow-Kingsman, Alford, was with an ambulance unit on the Italian front (whence he wrote to say he had given a well-received reading of `Trees'), the connections between Cambridge and Devonshire Street were still strong. Harold knew at least two Cambridge poets, Frances Cornford and Fredegond Shove, and Mrs Shove's husband, a pacifist don at King's. Two more King's dons, Frank Birch and Edward Dent, had joined the shop's team of occasional readers. If Harold went to the lecture by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, yet another Fellow of King's, and to the series given in the next few weeks by Bertrand Russell, the most famous of the Cambridge pacifists, he would have heard strong arguments against the continuation of the war. Like most people, he was undecided. When the French began their resistance at Verdun in February, he thought it would be, as he wrote to Marsh, òur turning point . . . quite a new hope'. The hope did not last long. He told Maurice on 1 March 1916 that it was impossible to describe `the dreariness of present life in England . . . I'm attested all right, but not medically fit, and entirely without heart for the business. No logic or understanding can be applied to it at present. It just IS.' Even so, he added that he felt more patriotic than ever before, understanding `for the first time that the Empire is a Fraternity, a kind of huge tree'. Alida was terrified at the prospect of his being called up. She could hardly bring herself to eat, and she refused to go away, although he begged her to take a holiday. Her misery increased when he decided they would have to leave Beake, which was likely to be requisitioned by the military. In the early spring they moved from the `wild and lonely' cottage they both loved to a less isolated refuge in Essex, Chestnuts Farm, near Woodham Ferrers, where she hated having neighbours. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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Her relationship with him was a constant embarrassment, forcing her to dissemble to everybody. Listening to people like Anna Wickham was a sore trial. `Bodies seem lovely things till she comes and strives to make one feel that sex is the only thing that matters . . . I hate having to come in contact with her and only want to get away and hide from everything'. Alida kept very few of her own letters to Harold from the first half of 1916, and none of his to her. She may have protested at being made a party to his divorce; she longed for a child; she may even have asked him to marry her, but he could not contemplate imprisoning himself again. Having committed herself to Utopian principles, she had to live with the consequences. She started writing a pamphlet on the history of marriage, aware that he thought the task beyond her. The readings were attracting record audiences: 50 people came to hear Harold, Alida, Dent and the composer, Geoffrey Gwyther, read scenes from Hardy's The Dynasts; 55 came to a similar reading of Gordon Bottomley's `King Lear's Wife', a verse drama in the recent Georgian Poetry. Harold read from the Laureate's new anthology, The Spirit of Man, and from Charles Sorley, a young poet who had been killed at Loos. No fewer that 300 people listened to Ainley reading from The Argive Women in the Ashburton Hall on 22 February, and 335 to Yeats at the Passmore Edwards Settlement on 11 April. A. P. Graves, Robert's father, drew 32 people, Wickham 50, and de la Mare 80. The Belgian poet Emile Cammaerts gave a reading from his fellow-countryman, Emile Verhaeren, who had himself read at the shop a year before; Gonoske Komai read translations of Japanese poems; a Polish academic lectured on Polish poetry; Gosse read from his own work; and Alida read from Mew. The Bystander for 26 January had published a portrait of Harold, òne of the finest of our present-day poets', saying that when the `Professors of Literature of the future come to discuss the work of this troubled period of ours, they will not deny to Mr Monro the very real services which he is performing to-day for poetry in this country'. Harold was encouraged by such comments, telling Maurice on 1 March that the Bookshop was òne of the most thriving and appreciated concerns in London at present'. `People come straight in here back from the Front, and all the students have found it out'. One soldier who was certainly appreciative at that moment was Owen, who was occupying one of the attics, having been sent to London for a ten-day course. Being fluent in French, he made friends with Marie, who took him up soup before he went to bed. He was hoping her employer would look over his poems, which were mostly love sonnets in the style of Verlaine, and on 4 March, back at camp, he wrote home: last night at eleven o'clock, when I had strewn about my goods preparatory to sorting and packing, up comes Monro to my room, with my MSS! So we sit 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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down, and I have the time of my life. For he was `very struck' with these sonnets. He went over the things in detail and he told me what was fresh and clever, and what was second-hand and banal; and what Keatsian, and what `modern'. He summed up their value as far above that of the Little Books of Georgian Verse. . . . So then, I have gained his esteem and a (first) handshake! I need not say that he is a peculiar being; and I doubt whether ever we shall become `Friends'. Owen left early in the morning and got into trouble for parading without his belt, later hinting that this was a result of the previous evening's encounter.28 If he had watched his host getting drunk he would have had reason to consider him à peculiar being', but his poetry was to benefit greatly from that conversation in Devonshire Street. It was Harold ± not Sassoon as is often believed ± who first directed Owen away from Romantic lushness towards `modern' language. The warning about the Little Books of Georgian Verse was also helpful; Owen had been thinking of getting his sonnets published in the series, but Harold knew it was run by Galloway Kyle, who was ensnaring young poets by making unscrupulous use of the word `Georgian'. Harold regarded advising novices as part of his self-imposed job. His interview with Owen must have been typical of many similar, unrecorded occasions. One of his letters to Marsh implies, for instance, that he had been shown Isaac Rosenberg's poems by their author. It is difficult to agree with those critics who have said that the course of English poetry would have been the same if the Bookshop had never existed.

1916 March 3: Out for a walk I can't get out of my head the idea I am moving on water March 15: The Bridge hits you on the head. Orchard Trees whirl round each other./Caught in the middle of the commonplace/Cleaning a bicycle or washing his face He was sketching out `Journey', a description of a train ride. The `commonplace' becomes commoner still in the finished poem, with a self-conscious touch of Georgian realism: Some dignified inhabitant is found Right in the middle of the commonplace ± Buttoning his trousers, or washing his face. Like `Trees', the best of Harold's 1915±16 work treats the ordinary world as baffling, full of strange metamorphoses, where the ground may become water 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


172 Harold Monro

or bridges hit you on the head. His awareness of such possibilities may have had something to do with alcohol, but he wrote about it soberly enough. It is seen at its most relaxed in `Week-End', a set of ten sonnets written between September 1915 and April 1916, describing an idealised summer visit to Beake with Alida. The house and its contents seem alive as they welcome the visitors: Your homely floor is creaking for our tread; The smiling teapot with contented spout Thinks of the boiling water, and the bread Longs for the butter. . . Critics have been embarrassed by `Week-End', with its crooning blankets and talking furniture. Its title presumably gave rise to the term `weekend poetry', used of the sort of verse that post-war reviewers liked to damn as `Georgian'.* A curiously private poem, it makes the reader feel an eavesdropper in a `paradise' for two. Only Alida could have known, for example, that the name of the slow kettle, Murry, referred to an ex-employee of the Bookshop. The imagery sounds uncomfortably like the childish whimsicalities of a childless couple. Yet the two people are not lovers. On the Sunday morning they lie on the grass, listening to the earth and merely holding hands; John Ireland later set these lines to an erotic accompaniment, but his music is not supported by the text. On the Monday the house is locked up and left. Week-end is very well on Saturday: On Monday it's a different affair ± A little episode, a trivial stay. . . In London Alida had to become once again ± as she was to say bitterly in December ± the `woman who runs the shop'. Yet `Week-End', one of Harold's happiest poems, could not have been written without her friendship. The apparent triviality of `Week-End' can be misleading. The poem is closer to the progressive ideals of Before Dawn than it may seem. Like `Trees' it has origins in `The Springtide', where the closing, unwritten Òde to the Future' was to have had an epigram from G. E. Moore: `Glad worship of the visible world and incurable belief in the beauty of material things is sufficient for all the needs of life'. Moore was an important influence on many writers of the Georgian, Bloomsbury period, notably Brooke, whose `The Great Lover' celebrates the beauty of material things, even blankets and crockery. * Ironically, the term `weekend poetry' seems to have been coined by Shanks, a more `Georgian' poet than Harold ever was.29



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Brooke's poem is light-hearted ± Harold thought he was always afraid of seeming serious ± but Harold's is typically serious in its development of Moore's dictum. During the winter of 1915±16 Harold wrote many of the twenty-one brief lyrics which form `Strange Meetings'. More searching and disturbing than the `Week-End' sonnets, these Òracles of paradise' are variations on themes of earth metamorphosing into flesh and back again, and the unrecognised kinship of all living things. If suddenly a clod of earth should rise, And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love, How one would tremble, and in what surprise Gasp: `Can you move?' I see men walking, and I always feel: Èarth! How have you done this? What can you be?' There are echoes in `Strange Meetings' of Wordsworth, Brooke, and even Sorley, but if Harold had a model it was Blake's Songs of Innocence, some of which were published as Bookshop broadsides later in 1916. A flower is looking through the ground, Blinking at the April weather; Now a child has seen the flower: Now they go and play together. Now it seems the flower will speak, And will call the child its brother ± But, oh strange forgetfulness! ± They don't recognise each other. The poet is left puzzled and afraid. A man who has clung to a branch and he hangs ± Wondering when it will break. . . . A tall man rubbing his eyes in the dusk, Muttering `Yes'; murmuring `No'. `Strange Meetings' could well have been in Paul Nash's mind after the war when he described Harold's poems as àn interesting fumble'. But the fumbling was not mere incompetence. It was almost impossible to write poetry in the war years without fumbling as one waited for the branch to break. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


174 Harold Monro

1916 March 29: Dine May [sister] 7/ . . . /Yeats re Spiritualist/Rainbow [Lawrence's new novel] for May/Squire 30: Arundel 10 April 1: Week end Hewlett/Order coal/ . . . /MSS (4 a day) 5: Shanks?/Tea Graves 10: Decree Nisi The decree stated that the marriage would be dissolved on 16 October, unless objections were made in the intervening six months. There was a second reading of `King Lear's Wife' on 11 May. Alida took the main part, that of the young Goneril, a cold-blooded virgin huntress. Harold read Lear, proud and self-deceiving. Other parts were taken by Dent and Anna Wickham; the latter, a trained singer, read the old woman who lays out the dead Queen at the end, humming a song about a louse, a passage which had scandalised some critics of Georgian Poetry. The first reading had been a success, so Harold was sad that only 35 people came to the repeat performance. He had timed it badly: a week later, a sanitised version of the play was put on by a professional cast at a theatre, as part of a `Georgian matineÂe'. He took the chance to set up a stall in the foyer, where Thomas was amused to see him `standing up straight and just pursuing the women with the whites of his eyes'.30 Georgian Poetry was still selling well, with the first volume into its eighth thousand and the second into at least its fourth. Harold had committed himself to publishing chapbooks by Graves and Mew, and had approached Frost, whose publisher refused permission, much to Frost's regret; de la Mare, who was interested but had no new poems available; Fletcher; and Lawrence, who declined, having taken a dislike both to Harold and to chapbooks. Marsh had suggested a chapbook by Sassoon, and William Rothenstein had made a tempting proposal for a series of portraits of contemporary poets. Harold was also willing to consider Pound's latest collection, Lustra, and probably, despite all the mythology to the contrary, Eliot's first book, Prufrock and Other Observations.31 Soon all these possibilities had to be abandoned. Harold's reputation would be much higher than it is had circumstances allowed him to publish Lustra and Prufrock, but rising costs and impending military service forced him to cancel all plans for book publishing, except for the two chapbooks he had already promised. Graves's Over the Brazier and Mew's The Farmer's Bride came out in May 1916, both books earning high praise (Hardy and Virginia Woolf decided Mew was by far the best living woman poet). But after that, for nearly a year, the shop produced only a few rhyme sheets and a little book of children's verse. Harold had brought out eleven titles in just over twelve months, a remarkable achievement he was never to surpass. He must have been intensely disappointed at being forced to stop. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


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176 Harold Monro

I wish you were here, with your sympathy and your power of laughing at the same things as the man you're with ± laughing and weeping, almost, it would be here. Here's a thing that happened. When I first `joined' out here I noticed a man ± a boy, really, his age was just 19 ± who had those very calm blue eyes one sees in sailors sometimes, and a skin burnt to a sort of golden brown. . . . we got very pally when it came to real bullets ± as men do get pally, the elect, at any rate. Well, the other day there was a wiring party out in front of our parapet . . . and the `sailor boy' got seven bullets, and died almost at once. All his poor body was riddled with them, and one went through his brown throat. When I went over his papers I found a post-card addressed to his mother. It was an embroidered affair, on white silk. They buy them out here for 40 centimes each, and it had simply `remember me' on it. And they say `don't get sentimental!' I wanted you then, to ± oh! just to be human.32 Full conscription had begun in January. The invaluable clerk, McDonald, was called up in April. Harold decided to take a last chance of joining voluntarily (`3 weeks before I must', he noted later); having tried in vain to find a desk job, he applied to his late stepfather's regiment, the Royal Garrison Artillery. By early June he was in uniform, beginning his training at the barracks in Handel Street, not far from the Bookshop.33



Jim Wilson wrote from the front on 1 June:

11

They asked me my philosophy: I brought Bits of it forth and laid them on the floor. They laughed, and so I kicked the bits about, Then put them in my pocket one by one, . . . There was no happiness at all In that short hopeless argument Through yawns and on the way to bed Among men waiting to be dead. (Òfficers' Mess, 1916') From the moment he joined the army in June 1916, Harold loathed the whole business. Soldiers confined to home duties, as he was, enjoyed none of the glamour accorded to front-line service, and they were often suspected of shirking. Feeling inadequate from the start, he could find no common ground with his fellow-officers, most of whom were younger and less intellectually-inclined than himself, and for all his socialism he had no idea how to deal with workingclass troops. The army gave him completely unsuitable jobs in its typical way, making no use of his languages and literary skills until the last weeks of the war. Worst of all was the loss of freedom in a world of all-pervasive, often seemingly pointless regulation. He hurriedly put his affairs in order as soon as he joined, visiting Brooke House, the family-owned asylum which was the source of most of his income, and dining with his solicitor and cousin, Fred Monro. Alida had to be instructed in business matters. He engaged a book-keeper, whom she instantly regarded as incompetent. The rest of the staff seems to have comprised Mrs Palmer the housekeeper, Marie the Swiss maid, an office boy, a part-time traveller, and Pinknose the cat. McDonald the clerk was much missed; his job was kept open for him, the Bookshop continuing to pay him a token wage. Òh, may he not be 177 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Casualty 1916±19

killed', Harold exclaimed in a letter to Alida, but she noted in the margin long afterwards, `He was'. Harold was in London long enough to supervise the end of a distinguished season of readings. Alec Waugh remembered seeing him in private's uniform taking part in a play recital, probably on 22 June.1 He read from Georgian Poetry `(By request)' on the 27th and from new work of his own a week later, then closed the series with Shelley on 11 July, by which time he was already an officer. With his background he had no difficulty in getting a commission; he was gazetted as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery on 7 July. The RGA was responsible for the anti-aircraft defence of Britain, with a Gun Belt round London, many gun sites elsewhere, a central Depot at Abbey Wood in Kent and an Anti-Aircraft School of Instruction at Shoeburyness. He was told he would be sent to the School and then probably to a gun station somewhere in England. His diary for July fills up with frantic lists, in which Devonshire Street business is elbowed out by the petty demands of military service. As though in a last gesture of defiance, he made a note of three recent books by Bertrand Russell: 1916 July 27: Justice in War [Time]/Policy of the Entente/Principles of Social Reconstruction 28: M's birthday/Cap badge/Change collars/Dr Payne/send out MSS/ Bank letter 29: clean belt and buckles and spurs/Socks/change collars/do. mackintosh/cap badge/city/gaiters /try on time/whiskey/drawers/cab for kit/ shave/send address Waterproof stores As an officer, he was expected to buy most of his own kit. The War Office sent him £8, but he had to spend three or four times that on uniform and other necessities. On about the 29th he left London for a billet in Shoeburyness, still without the gaiters. Alida got away to Dorset in August for a much-needed holiday. On the 16th she visited H. D., who was staying at Corfe to be near the camp where her husband Aldington was in training. He had been called up in May and was hating the humiliations of life in the ranks, although he looked so unlike a private that men kept saluting him. H. D. told Alida that the QuartermasterSergeant had asked, `Well, what are you?', to which Aldington had replied, Ì'm a poet', receiving the astonishing answer, Òh, are you? Have you ever heard of the Poetry Bookshop?' Aldington was able to say that the shop had published a book of his. `So there you are', Alida wrote to Harold. `Now we know why they think him funny'. She had taken some work with her, and set about colouring a hundred of each of the current rhyme sheets, ready for the Christmas trade. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


178 Harold Monro

Casualty 1916±19 179

So now I take it everywhere; See it whenever I look round; Hear it growing through every sound, Know exactly the sound it makes ± Remembering, as one must all day, Under the pavement the live earth aches. Alida was always proud of `Real Property', the only one of his poems based on material borrowed from her. Her greatest achievement for him was in keeping the shop open while he was away in 1916±18. She did much of the work herself, updating files, answering correspondence, making blackout curtains, delivering parcels to other bookshops after hours, and organising the readings, which were reduced to Thursdays only. Almost as nervous in her new role as he was in front of his men, she was determined to assert her authority. When she got back from Dorset, she discovered that Marie had started hanging about in the shop on the pretext of helping to tie up parcels, and that a male customer, coming in one day through the back door, which was supposed to be private, had sat on the table, chatting and laughing with her. Ì'm furious', Alida said. I know the sort of impression a woman of her kind would give to a man who wanted to joke with her. She isn't what's called by the name `lady' and doesn't know how to behave like one and would enjoy any thing from a man. It makes me absolutely sick. I won't go away again . . . I shall be very fierce with people. That sort of thing is just what we want to avoid. Marie had charmed Owen and no doubt other visitors, but she seems to have gone back to Switzerland in the autumn of 1916. The Poetry House became a chillier place than it had been, not only because Mrs Palmer could never master the art of laying a fire. Alida fended off poets who might influence Harold, determined that his work should be his ± and hers ± alone. She detested his relations and many of his friends, especially anyone she suspected of ùsing' him, such as the `little beast' Shanks and another poet, Ian Mackenzie, whom she thought insufferably conceited. Harold's mother offended her by making periodic visits of inspection, treating her as a superior kind of servant. One visitor who was always welcome, though, was Lovat Fraser, who had again become the shop's most favoured artist now that he was out of the army. The only book published from the shop in the second half of 1916 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Harold failed his first gunnery exam, feeling like a schoolboy. He rested his mind on a description in one of Alida's letters of a vast Dorset cornfield, an image which soon became a poem, `Real Property':

seems to have been entirely his work, in selection as well as in design, an archaic little collection of rhymes for children; it appeared in July, the month of Harold's departure, as though marking a change of direction. Alida had been unable to afford the rent for her flat in Red Lion Square after all. By the autumn of 1916 she was living in a single room at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, a house which must have been familiar to Harold because Vera Tchaikovsky had lived there. The landlady was a Miss James, a suffragette who liked to have literary tenants (Alida once brought tears to her eyes by reciting the opening lines of `Lycidas'); tiny but redoubtable, she had held a tea party after the big air raid in September 1915, thereafter giving one whenever bombs fell. According to Vera's fellow-Russian, John Cournos, who moved into the house in 1915, most of the tenants were also suffragettes; he shared the top floor with three of them, amid frequent smells of burning toast. In December 1916 his and Alida's friend, H. D., took the largest apartment for herself and Aldington, who was now at the front. Alida did not enjoy sharing a house. I want to stop Cournos knocking at my door to see if I'm in. I don't want to see him. He is, no doubt, very nice, but I want my room to myself. Yesterday evening I'd been working and went down to put a penny in the gas to boil some water and found Cournos outside my door in the dark. I couldnt prevent him speaking and he wouldn't go away so I had to let him in. He bored me horribly for about 1/2 an hour. . . . What do you advise me to do? `Shut Cournos out', Harold said. Ìt's your only way'. She had a more alarming encounter in September, when she was invited to supper by a female friend who had sold suffragette papers with her in the East End before the war. They talked until very late, so Alida was persuaded to stay the night. After she had settled down in the spare room, the other woman came in, blew out the candle, and sat on the edge of the bed. There was a long pause while the truth dawned. I thought of all the horrors, hurriedly, of Forel and Lesbian love. I realized that all her behaviour to me was that. I had thought always that she liked me, but this time it was more. I realized that she was what people call ìn love' with me, and hated her at once. I'm much too normal to like that sort of thing. So I said nothing and lay very still, pretending to myself to talk to you . . . Suddenly without any warning she flung herself on to me and started kissing my face and neck and trying to pull me about. I was absolutely terrified and nearly went off my head ± (Does this sound absurd) ± Somehow I pulled myself together and began to laugh, which upset her and made her get up. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


180 Harold Monro


Without you here all sorts of beastly things seem to happen. People in the streets say dirty things that I hear ± people show their beastly minds to me; and now this has happened. I hate it. I realize now her hatred for men is purely sexual. I thought it `social' like mine. . . . I shall have to retire to a convent with Pinknose. Do you think he ought to be operated on? Every one says you cant keep a cat in London unless you do. Evidently she still had no knowledge of Harold's homosexuality. He had difficulty in being sympathetic: Ì simply can't think there's anything wrong in any one loving another ± I'm not made to think it. I dont care who loves whom'. He was finding army organization hard to bear. Having learned a little about big guns, he was suddenly transferred to six-pounders, and the only thing he knew about them was that they were useless. I've got to go on learning that gun drill. It's a dreary windy evening and everything is fading. The children are screeching all about the place with their hideous accents. I'm in my bedroom and the other men are stamping about the house and jabbering trying to make unimportant things important. . . . I hate the sound of guns. I hate the furniture in this house. But I love you, and that's something. Next day he was so busy `swotting' that he missed a lecture by the Colonel, who swore at him and threatened demotion. `Strange Meetings' had just been published in both The English Review and Poetry, but Harold thought no one would read it. He passed his exam second time round and was graded fit for Light Duties. On 12 September he was posted to a gun station at Newton Heath in north Manchester, near important factories and railway yards, and went into billets at 131 Queen (now Queensferry) Street. Life in an industrial town was a new experience. The factory hooters scream all day here, all day, like lashes. One wakes up to them and goes to sleep to them. I hate them. The women crawl and clack and giggle about in their shawls. It's all ugly, so ugly that I feel it cant be real. But it is. Child, what shall I do? His men sensed his resentment. `They hate me: I see it in their eyes'. He tried to teach them some astronomy and bought books for them to borrow, hoping in his usual way to improve their minds a little, but most of them took no notice. Alida's almost-daily letters were a lifeline, although he must have wished she 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Alida left next morning without further molestation, but she was very shocked.

would not tell him quite so often that she was ill, overworked, despairing and aching to see him. She had to get used to solitude. She set up an aquarium in her London room, peopling it with insects collected from a stream at Chestnuts Farm, where she spent her weekends alone. She was beginning to like Chestnuts, but she longed for Harold to be there too. Then she started taking the cat home with her after shop hours: Ì cant think why I havent done it before as he's so sweet to have. He talks so much. It's very bad for him to be with Mrs Palmer who considers him an `ànimal'''. Finally, in mid-October, she told Harold excitedly she had bought a puppy, Joggles, a white West Highland terrier, four months old, full of energy and character. À few animals and books and a piece of ground and a baby or two would suit me very well. No doubt you think me very immoral. I can't help it. I'm getting old and doing nothing'. Major Henry Bentinck of the Coldstream Guards, Harold's former housemate in Ireland, died of wounds on 20 October 1916. He had been hit a month earlier while leading his men into action, and had lain for hours in a shell hole, ashamed and feeling a failure. All his strength and faith had been unable to save him from gangrene. Alida visited Harold in Manchester at the end of October, taking the cat's basket filled with apples from the farm. He showed her the draughty hut on waste ground where he spent his days, and his dismal bedroom, which other men had to pass through to get to theirs. He read her a poem he was working on, `Coronilla', which she found `haunting' but puzzling. It was a memory of Dorothy on the Riviera (his divorce had gone through on the 16th): The candles flicker in the room. He trembles by the wall. She gave him all and all again, But still he asks for all. . . . Yellow, yellow is the flower; Fatal is the bloom; And no one any time returned Who slept inside the shuttered room. Alida sensed that he had found a kind of freedom away from both Dorothy and herself. His mind seemed to be making no contact with hers, and he seemed to be getting to know a surprising number of people in Manchester. Dent had given him an introduction to Lawrence Haward, another Kingsman, curator of the city art galleries; perhaps through Haward, Harold met Allan 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


182 Harold Monro

Monkhouse of The Manchester Guardian, who gave him some reviewing to do, and F. W. Halliday, a poet and schoolmaster turned subaltern. There were HalleÂ concerts, and music in the cathedral, where the beauty of a Haydn anthem inspired him to resume work on his epic, `The Death of Jehovah'. In later years he looked back on Manchester with some affection, remembering the tram bells and noisy traffic, and `queer glimpses of sunlight, lovely moments when everything black became strong yellow'.2 Alida could not help suspecting that his social life went further than he was willing to tell her and that he was having an affair with another woman. She was probably right about the affair, though not about the woman. His diary entries for October include rough work for a poem: Ì remember his red curly hair/ Of course he's a rogue . . .' `Languishing fond procrastinating boy/Drifting in the skirt and trail of love . . .' Less unmindful of her than she sometimes imagined, he wrote a poem for her, `Solitude', which even mentioned Joggles. The little dog rolls over half awake, Stretches his paws, yawns, looking up at you, Wags his tail very slightly for your sake, That you may feel he is unhappy too. She was touched, but she felt her loneliness was unnatural for a woman of her age. London was an increasingly empty place at night, especially when the moon was shining; even on cloudy nights there could be heavy gunfire. A Gotha bomber made the first daylight raid in November. More and more people were moving out. Business in the shop fell away. Occasionally a friend looked in, Fraser or Charlotte Mew, the latter sometimes helping to colour rhyme sheets. Hodgson came in to see Joggles, pronouncing him à show dog very nearly'. The puppy barked for the first time on 6 November, startled when Pinknose jumped onto the periodicals shelf and knocked over a pile of Poetry. Alida was invited to give a reading from Brooke to a society audience in Chelsea, and was worried by the poems' incessant references to bodies and kisses; she wondered if it was normal `to loathe the feel of any one but the person one loves'. Disturbed by her letter, Harold said it was possible to feel love for one person and lust for another at the same time. Still looking to him for instruction in advanced ideas, she sought his advice on the psychology of sex. She had read August Forel, skipping the explicit bits (`much more suited to medical students'). Harold recommended Krafft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis, though warning her they made the subject rather dull. She told him she had dreamed of fishing in the stream: Suddenly I saw a brass lantern sticking up and . . . a deadly white hand tightly holding the ring at the top. Someone came from nowhere and said `Why it's 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



184 Harold Monro

Ì'm inclined to curse God and die', she said in another letter. Ì swallow heaps of beastly food stuff that I loathe simply to keep alive for you. . . . I weep all the time from sheer tiredness'. Hewlett tried to help by inviting her to live with him as an adopted daughter. On an earlier occasion, when he had asked her to stay with him on her own, he had received a sharp reply from Harold, admitting jealousy; Hewlett had explained that his own affection for Alida was simply that of an old friend. This time an outraged reply came from Alida herself. Somehow her friendship with Hewlett survived, but the high esteem in which he had once held Harold was turning into stern disapproval.3 Harold was put in charge of a gun at Urmston for a fortnight in November. One night at an outlying searchlight station a sentry took a rope off a tarpaulin and carefully hanged himself in a half-built guard room. No one knew until next morning, when the builders saw the man apparently looking over the wall and wondered after half an hour why he didn't move. The sergeant cut him down, remarking crossly that there were plenty of low branches outside. Harold liked hearing the footsteps of his own sentry patrolling at night, but he was haunted by the image of the dead man, blue and white, with hard cold hands. Orders went out that searchlight stations should be regularly visited. He was told he would have a week's leave from 12 December. Alida got the farmhouse ready, putting out his civilian clothes and delighting in the lingering smell of his favourite tobacco. She had dreamed for months of being alone there with him when his leave came, but to her intense disappointment he chose to stay in London, perhaps not wanting to be alone with her. 1916 December 12: Eddie [Marsh] /Boulton/ . . . /Dine with AK 13: . . . /Flint afternoon/Dine with M [Mother] 14: Longmans morning/Dine with Boulton 16: Automatic Ecstasy/Rambling Railing round the town/We must go into the Bar/If we want our dreams to drown 19: D [Dorothy] Moulin d'Or 1.40 Alida was upset by their first evening together. He took to Joggles, but seemed sadly unlike his old self; his moustache had been trimmed army-fashion, and it was horrible to see him always in what she called `costume'. And what had he meant by talking of `wickedness'? He had obviously been drinking heavily in Manchester. Perhaps it was in part-answer to her anxious questioning that he invited her to dine with him 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


a man', and they lifted him out. I can't tell [you] the ghastly, white, spongy colour of his face ± Then I saw it was you, and all your eyes were blue and phosphorescent. . . . Then they found me.

and his friend Boulton on the 14th. She wrote next day in èxquisite torture'. Boulton had talked about nothing but drink. How did Harold explain her to such people? As the `woman who runs the shop'? After all her hopes of being with him at Chestnuts, she had heard him talk about `my cottage in the country' as though she had no connection with it. Yet she had been reluctant to leave, knowing the two men would spend the rest of the evening getting drunk. It was a `ghastly agony' to think of `the you of 2 years ago and the you of today and then next year'.4 Returning to Newton Heath, he recorded the dreariness of Queen Street in a poem, Àspidistra Street': Every window grumbles. All day long the drizzle fills the puddles, Sure the lovely fools who made Utopia Planned it without any aspidistra. . . . 1916 December 30: 1 Angle of sight/2 Angle of elevation/3 Quadrant Angle/The 2 together form it of elevation or depression/4 Angle of Departure/angle of descent/angle of incidence 31: Muzzle velocity of 18-lber is 1610 ft per sec.

January 1917 was bitterly cold. Men in the trenches froze to death. Several children died of measles in Devonshire Street. Alida shivered in front of Mrs Palmer's reluctant fires. In Manchester Harold raged at the northern winter: The weather is always at beastly experiments here. The other night it snowed hard in bright starlight, or it will snow, sleet, hail, rain and thaw all at the same time, or great waves of black fog will suddenly come up about 20 feet broad with rain sandwiched in between them. Constantly the sun pretends to be the moon, and then the moon, the sun. Alida was sending him the socialist weekly, The Herald, which was demanding a British response to German peace moves. Huddled close to his gas fire in Àspidistra Street' and dropping coins into a meter that moaned like a child in pain, he could see no grounds for hope, `yet all the points at issue could be so easily settled with a little good-will'. Alida said The Herald was as good as a medicine because it made her blood boil. When Edward Carpenter made one of his occasional visits to the shop later in the year she was pleased that `he went quite as far as me in every way'. She was contemptuous of a poem by William Watson, who was leading a poetic chorus in praise of the new Prime Minister,




Lloyd George, a hero `frankly of this hour;/No faggot of perfections, angel or saint'. `Watson's poem is the most wonderful tosh I've met. I do like Lloyd George being called a ``faggot''. . . . ``maggot'' would be nearer as he insinuates himself in everything'.5 The war seemed to be corrupting behaviour as well as poetry. Soldiers tried to corner her in the streets, and even her room was not sacrosanct. Having warned off Cournos, she was now constantly being interrupted by H. D., who had started wandering in uninvited, lonely in Aldington's absence. H. D. talked endlessly about her own poetry, taking personal offence at any criticism; she may also have revealed the lesbian side of her nature. Alida felt obliged to keep her door locked, ignoring knocks in the evenings, with the result that the household soon ceased to take any notice of her, which she thought most unfair. Harold was saddened to hear that H. D. was no better than Pound at coping with criticism. The small-mindedness of H. D. preys on my mind horribly. Because you don't gush about her poetry she thinks she must cut you ± that's about what it amounts to. What a world hers must be! It's lucky there is Flint to help the Imagists out a bit. Pound, Amy Lowell, Fletcher and H. D. are apparently all no use as fellow human beings. The shop's traveller was conscripted, the book-keeper decided to leave, and the office boy disappeared. Alida took on the book-keeping, teaching herself as she went along. Harold was grateful, recognising that without her the shop would be `smashed by facts'. The accounts were in a poor state, and too many customers owed money, including Arundel and Shanks. Harold was always far too generous to people he knew. Ì loathe your friends, they all use you', she said. `Brutes'. W. H. Davies gave a reading on 22 February 1917. He arrived `whining like a baby' and pleading illness, but Alida marched him round to the Artworkers' Guild, where she had hired the hall, and gave him a glass of water. He read very well in a simple, unaffected way. Ì thought his poems very good indeed too. Sweet Stay-at-Home is still my favourite'. Critics of Georgian poetry have said that Davies has much to answer for, and he himself admitted in his autobiography that his work had been overvalued, but 149 people came to the reading at a shilling a head, so there was enough to pay him just over three pounds, the sort of fee Alida had aimed for. `Not so bad?' she said, with justifiable pride. Harold was sent to Partington on the Manchester Ship Canal in February, with à beast of a sergeant'. It was a depressing place, remote without being rural. Mail came seldom. He disliked all the men except one, whom he liked too much ± `which I think the others dont like but they can go hang themselves'. He had to have four teeth out in March; his health was beginning to give trouble. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


186 Harold Monro

Alida wrote on 8 March that `Pound has been in hawking T. S. Eliot's poems. We don't want them but he wouldnt take ``No'' and said he'd send them to be seen'. It was the Bookshop's last chance to publish Prufrock and Other Observations. The final decision must have been Harold's. His reasons for refusing the book are not known; all that can be said for certain is that he had known and respected Eliot's work since 1915, and that in 1917 he cannot have thought it, in the phrase so often quoted from Conrad Aiken, àbsolutely insane'. Elkin Mathews also refused the book, so Pound arranged for it to be published by The Egoist in the summer. As in the case of Thomas's poems, commercial considerations must have played a large part in Harold's refusal. His critics tend to forget that losses on Bookshop enterprises had to be made up from his own pocket. He had probably turned Eliot's book down once already, along with others, when he had stopped publishing in 1916; the cost of paper had risen alarmingly since then,* and there was no market for avant-garde work. He had recently persuaded Sherratt and Hughes, the Manchester booksellers, to place an order for Bookshop publications, but they had declined to take the Imagist chapbooks by Flint and Aldington. He wanted to start publishing again all the same, provided he could be sure of sales. He had already offered to take anything Hodgson could produce,6 and he decided to put out a new collection of his own, Strange Meetings, confident that a thousand copies would go in the first year (as they did). It might be an economy, he thought, to print twice that number, the second thousand to have `1918' on the title page; if the first thousand failed to last the year, there could be an emergency reprint.y Fraser drew a `strange meeting' for the cover, a naked man growing out of the earth and looking down in half-recognition at a skeleton. Alida added the title in her own calligraphy and coloured many of the covers, determined to make her contribution. The book came out in April. In keeping with his policy for chapbooks Harold had chosen only fifteen poems, and he had made many revisions, altering the sequence of `Strange Meetings' and rewriting the end of `Trees'. These two poems, with `Lament in 1915' and `Week-End', were the longest in the book (all four had been written before he had got into khaki: army life had done nothing for his poetry). Unlike Children of Love, Strange Meetings seemed more Georgian than Modernist. Eliot named Harold some months later as the most interesting writer in the Georgian group, less literary and insular than the rest, a poet who could handle the * Two quotations from the Westminster Press to the Bookshop illustrate the wartime increase in paper prices. Producing 500 copies of a book in 1916 would have cost £30; two years later, the price for the same book had more than doubled to £70. y Similar arrangements were made for several volumes of Georgian Poetry, so that what seem to be later impressions were in fact printed at the same time as the first. This sometimes had unfortunate results in the shop, when the wrong parcel was opened. However, all copies of Strange Meetings were dated `1917'; the second thousand were bound up in December.




pretty, as in `Milk for the Cat', which èscapes insipidity by its extraordinary cleverness', or be reflective, almost Emersonian (Eliot had been reading Emerson, and was right in detecting his lingering influence), or, above all, express the strangeness of familiar objects and `meetings'. Eliot thought Strange Meetings às a whole makes a more complete impression than any but a very few [books] of recent years'.7 The influence behind much of the book was really Alida rather than the Georgians. `You've been like the flame to the torch', Harold assured her. Ì know the influence of your thought is apparent in my work, and I like finding it there'. Joggles made an appearance in `Solitude', and Pinknose was mentioned by name in `Cat's Meat'. At least eight of the poems described rural companionship at Beake or Chestnuts.8 Much to Alida's delight Harold dedicated Strange Meetings to her, albeit without revealing her name: Child of the Earth, shall we walk? Your hands have been busy so long to-day. Are you tired? Let us go to the meadow-pool. Out in the grass it is cool. . . This sexless `Child of the Earth', associated with coolness and the open air, is often present in the book as companion and friend. Not all the poems are within her territory, however: `Coronilla' is about a strongly sexual femme fatale, described in imagery of heat and enclosure, while the most deeply-felt poem is to neither of these characters but to the dead soldier, `B. H. W.'. Alida worked at her role as Child of the Earth, sending lyrical accounts of gardening at Chestnuts. Ì had the greatest difficulty in preventing myself from lying down and rubbing my forehead in the ground'; to be buried in the dark black earth with no coffin would be `the greatest joy in the world'. Shop duty was less enjoyable: when customers spoke to her of `Mr Monro' and asked if he might be sent to the Front, she felt her heart would burst. `They all think they know you so well. That young fool Mackenzie comes in and gasses about you, as if you were writing to him always and telling him all about your writing . . . Your mother comes and talks of ``Harold'' ± gulp ± er ``Mister'' . . . and I have to pretend that you are immaterial to me except from a ``business'' point of view'. Harold's northern tour ended in April 1917, when he was sent to the RGA Depot in Kent. When Alida visited him at Easter, he apparently found courage to tell her he did not want to sleep with her any more and that it would be wrong for them to have a child. He talked of his past, saying his impulses were uncontrollable, even by her. He seems to have admitted that he had indeed been involved with someone else in Manchester, but when he edged towards revealing more he frightened her and lost his nerve. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


188 Harold Monro

He gave her a letter from Dorothy, which she read with disgust, deploring `this person' ± she could never bring herself to write the name ± who seemed so unstable, dashing about `doing all sorts of idiotic things', writing about cranks and `soul', and now even taking drugs (Alida's comments imply that Dorothy had somehow become addicted to morphine). It had been a disaster, Alida said, that he had not known someone of steady mind and character in his early days. She blamed the Browne family `for having devoured you and destroyed your mind. It was a horrible fate that decided to pitch you into this neurotic decadent atmosphere'. It did not occur to her that Harold might have been moved by the letter, with its evidence that Dorothy was still interested in his ideas. He still seemed unwilling to revisit the farmhouse. Alida was `desolately disappointed . . . You see, foolishly, till recently, I always thought you wanted to go there as much as I did. . . . Sometimes I feel as if you were ashamed of the fact of our caring for each other, or that you resented it'. And deep down he did resent it. Just as Dorothy had tried to trap him in her suffocating web, so Alida was trying to trap him in cool domesticity, a world of cats and dogs and smiling teapots. She repeatedly assured him he was free, but she had taken plenty of his freedom and was demanding more. He would not yield what was left. The spring offensive which everyone had been expecting opened at Arras on 9 April 1917. Edward Thomas was killed by shell-blast during the first hour. Some ground was gained, but not much. `The war won't stop', Alida said on the 26th. `Things are becoming worse'. In May Harold was transferred to Western Sub-Command on Putney Heath, a station which controlled the ground defences of all south-west London through telephone lines radiating out to hundreds of guns, searchlights and observation points. It was a much pleasanter posting than Manchester, especially in spring weather, and he was able to visit the Bookshop once a week. Alida rejoiced to see him in his own clothes for the first time in nearly a year. `You are yourself out of your slave's dress and I want you so'. She was overexcited; when he was at last persuaded to visit Chestnuts, she was struck down by a stomach upset. Jim Wilson wrote from France, saying he liked Strange Meetings and was proud to know who `B. H. W.' was. Gosse wrote to thank Harold for a copy, saying it was `marked throughout by your delicate and homely grace. You are sometimes a little too obscure for me: but I love you when you are lucid'.9 Marsh also sent warm praise, and at his invitation Harold read some of the poems on 21 June at a charity event organized by Elizabeth Asquith, with Harley Granville-Barker in the chair. Several other poets read, including Hewlett, who grumbled that such duties were among the minor horrors of war. Jim was pleased to see from a newspaper report that Harold had performed better than anybody else. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



After the reading Marsh unexpectedly proposed a third Georgian Poetry. Harold wrote to him next day, saying they should not let themselves be deterred by high costs; their aim should be to `show as clearly as possible that English poetry does not allow itself to be distracted by such a passing event as a war'. But he wondered whether there was enough new material. Marsh was confident: the soldiers, Graves, Robert Nichols and Siegfried Sassoon had written well, Herbert Asquith, W. J. Turner and John Freeman had done impressive work, and Squire had read a fine new poem, `The Lily of Malud', on the 21st. It was true the old stagers had not done much, except Masefield and à certain Mr Monro', but it would be legitimate to explain in a preface that space had been made for newcomers. Harold was willing to be convinced. The shop could cope: `Miss Klemantaski is just splendid and understands everything'. Nichols and Sassoon at their best were worth having, some of Graves would do, and Turner and Freeman had written some fine things. But the Squire piece was questionable (here Harold was more perceptive than Eliot, who was to praise it in The Egoist later), Asquith would not have made the grade in earlier years, and a long poem by Maurice Baring which Marsh was determined to include was not only not `Georgian' poetry but definitely bad poetry. As for himself, Harold was not keen to be cut back for the sake of younger poets. He told Marsh he had `never had a real ``show'' yet' in the anthology; Ì do rather feel I've been gaining some better power of expressing myself lately. I've been one of the minor details of the book hitherto'. His claim was generously met with eleven pages, considerably more than any of the other established contributors and only one fewer than Graves or Sassoon. He was also successful in arguing for the poets to be placed in reverse alphabetical order, which at least put Baring and Asquith at the end. Much to his exasperation, however, he could not persuade Marsh to include Charlotte Mew. Alida had to deal with most of the arrangements for the new book, so she was allowed to move upstairs into Harold's office, where she could use his big desk. Leaving for home late on 4 September she was passing the shop door at the foot of the stairs when the guns opened up; she hastened in to reassure Mrs Palmer, who was shrieking, and stayed with her until one in the morning, feeling very sleepy. When she got home, something made her dream all night of Harold's family; next day she was horrified to see Dorothy and Nigel arriving at the shop. I could quite comfortably, and with no regrets, kill both of them. I hate them so. If you arent there, I can just bear Nigel, but [not] otherwise. It's no good my saying these things. They appear unwarrantable to you as a man, and as a man who hasnt the normal point of view. You dont know what it feels like to see you with her child ± with mine in my heart ± and you whom I love ± and the child who, as far as you are concerned, I'm almost certain not to have. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


190 Harold Monro

He told her she should accept the situation, but she protested: he had said it would be wrong for them to have a child, so he ought to throw off àll pretence of fatherhood'. And even now there were questions she dared not ask for fear of the answers. Ì'm a prize fool', she concluded, `with all my eggs in one basket'. Travelling on the tube one day she was handed a card which said it was every girl's duty to have a baby as a contribution to the war effort. Harold tidied his desk one afternoon while she was out, not thinking she might be hurt, but when he said sadly that she had made a mistake in choosing him she argued back at once. He must trust her: were they not èach creative in the other'? She wrote a poem and destroyed it, and then, with the resilience which was to keep her going through years of mingled suffering and happiness, she wrote another, this time about the ecstasy of lying on wet grass and mingling with the earth.10 In Flanders the troops struggled through the mud towards Passchendaele. A shell falling on the gun lines killed T. E. Hulme on 27 September; Wyndham Lewis in the next-door battery saw the earth flying. The air raids on London got worse. Flint, who had narrowly missed being killed in his office, was nearly killed at home as well, and his wife was shellshocked. Then he was called up as a rifleman. Early in October Harold was admitted to hospital in London with tonsillitis and a high fever. Alida said there was no point in her worrying, because he wouldn't worry if she were ill, but she worried all the same and made sure he knew it, telling him he had to get well or she would die. Then Joggles fell ill. Having originally said she would have preferred a baby to a puppy, she now admitted she loved the dog às much as most people do their children'. Joggles soon recovered after a starvation diet, surprising her by eating her supper when she wasn't looking, but Harold seemed to be getting worse. She dreamed of his death again, and woke up shouting. When she was told at the shop on the 11th that his mother had been telephoning, she jumped to the conclusion that he really had died, and `for two minutes, I did what I thought people only did in plays. I fell to the floor with my heart thumping so that I was almost sick'. Luckily Mrs Palmer, busy dusting, thought she was attending to Joggles. Harold was actually out of bed and beginning to convalesce. Ten days later it was his turn to suffer a disturbing dream. He described it to Alida at length, saying it had made him `write to you on a subject on which I have (wisely, I believe,) kept almost unbroken silence'. The dream began with confused wanderings in London, until someone told him there was to be a committee òn the question of Alida'. The committee, which included his and her mothers and her old friend Mrs Rowat, decided she must be married, although he could still be her friend. Suddenly he was in a single bed, next to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



a double one where she was being fondled by her new partner. He rushed across and kissed her, crying, Àt any rate I was the first wasn't I?' She replied, `You were, my darling', whereupon he returned to his own bed, buried his head in the pillow, and awoke `gasping in an agony of mind'. He had let things drift on without explanation, he said, but the dream had made him realise that he had been inflicting torture on her. She had given him `some very definite hints lately as to the root of this evil. One evening I gave you the crudest and ugliest possible half-explanation of myself, which shocked you very much'. And yet even after filling pages he could not write down his promised explanation. His letter is unfinished and may never have been posted; at the end there is a note: `This is all there was. I found no more at his death. A. M.' He was discharged from hospital on 22 October and given sick leave. Alida protected him from visitors for a while, saying only that he was ìn England, but ill' when Owen called in on 8 November. A week later, when Owen called again, Harold was in the shop and willing to chat at length about Owen's new friends, Graves and Sassoon. Owen almost certainly bought a copy of Strange Meetings, a title he was soon to borrow; then the first copies of Graves's latest book arrived, so he bought one of those too, feeling highly privileged to know so many poets. A customer started asking about Sassoon. `Monro proved himself as reticent as his books', Owen told Sassoon afterwards, but `we exchanged some delicious winks'.11 Georgian Poetry 1916±1917 was published in mid-November, to muted applause. The plain style and harsh subject-matter which had been among the most controversial features of the earliest Georgian poetry were carried on in the war poems of Sassoon, Graves and Nichols, yet Eliot was able to say of the book that its hallmark was `pleasantness': `the Georgians caress everything they touch; Mr Monro does it far better than the others, and more intelligently'.12 Harold was back on duty by 24 November, when he wrote from the Bridge Hotel at Staines. Subalterns drinking themselves stupid in a neighbouring room were glancing at him through the glass door, and he was sure they were saying he was a bad sport; he stared in icy contempt when one of them came in to tell him about a dance that evening. `The hideous business of this war blocks all thought and effort', he told Alida. `These fools, who have nothing really to do except wear the uniform and drink, are enjoying it. . . . I wish I had the pluck to rebel. . . . Dearest, I'd rather have 10 000 Ezra Pounds and R. Aldingtons than one average junior officer'. Alida sent sympathy, agreeing about uniform. `The word betrays them. They love `ùniform'' in all its real meaning'. Two weeks later he was sent to a station at Wyken, on the edge of Coventry. He visited Drinkwater in Birmingham, and heard a lecture by the former Premier, Asquith, who called for a `clean peace'.13 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


192 Harold Monro

Trade was reviving at the shop, with big packages of Georgian Poetry arriving from the printers for distribution to other bookshops. One night Alida had to work until four in the morning with the housekeeper helping her, after which she slept on Harold's bed because Mrs Palmer was sure she would be murdered and put in a sack if she walked home so late. Next morning the cart Alida had ordered failed to turn up, so they had to take the parcels to the carrier's office in relays by tram.14 For once she admitted she was enjoying herself, although she was annoyed to discover that her excuses about hard work and headaches were not believed by her family, who suspected her of spending her days with young men. Fifty people came to hear Caroline Spurgeon read Shakespeare's sonnets on 15 November, and the same number to hear Erica Royde Smith read from Thomas on the 29th. The shop took £21 in the first week of December, a very satisfactory figure. Sometimes a poet would be among the customers: Turner perhaps, or Nichols, who had been a frequent visitor since before the war. Nichols wrote twice to apologise for having talked hysterically about poetry; the success of his latest book had combined with shellshock to derange his nerves. Meanwhile life at 44 Mecklenburgh Square, Alida's lodgings, was becoming as complicated as a novel. Aldington had been sent back from France to a training camp, so H. D. had gone to live near him, sub-letting their rooms to Dorothy Yorke, an old friend of Cournos. When Cournos left on a mission to Russia in October, Dorothy Yorke moved into his room, and the Aldingtons' flat was borrowed by the Lawrences, who had been expelled from Cornwall as suspected spies. Years later Alida used to tell stories of the Lawrences' eccentric behaviour. When Frieda had nothing to wear to a party, Lawrence made her lie down on a length of material and sewed her in. The couple often quarrelled, Frieda once hurling her husband through a connecting door into a neighbouring flat, much to the occupant's alarm.15 The house became no calmer when the Aldingtons returned in late October: their guests moved out, but still often visited; Aldington began a passionate affair with Dorothy Yorke; and H. D. was attracted to Lawrence. On 18 December, Alida's twenty-fifth birthday, a bomb fell nearby, bringing down the ceiling of her room. Perhaps she was not sorry to have to move out for a while; she took temporary refuge in Harold's bedroom. She visited him at Wyken over Christmas. When she got back to Devonshire Street, there were 65 letters awaiting her attention, mostly orders for Georgian Poetry. Worn out and depressed again, she felt sure he didn't need her and that he would be bored by her if it were not for the shop. Ìf it is so, will you tell me? If it isnt will you tell me the mysterious thing which you wouldn't tell me while you were here'. There are comparatively few entries in Harold's 1918 diary, and the thinness of the record has been made much worse by the unexplained loss of all his letters 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



to Alida between March 1918 and May 1929. His Bookshop correspondence became enormous after the war, his social and business life revived, and he made more use of diaries, but for most of 1918 the details of his life are missing. Alida wrote to him on New Year's Day, urging him not to `rebel': he would be much less free in jail or `being tortured in a madhouse'. They would both have known of the extraordinary protest Sassoon had made in the previous summer, and of how the authorities had silenced him by putting him away in a shellshock hospital. Like many opponents of the war Alida had begun to hope the fighting would end soon: Labour politicians were talking sense, she thought, and the news from the Eastern Front seemed encouraging. Ìf the Germans have accepted the Russian terms there's no need why the whole world shouldnt be sensible'. Chesterton came into the shop to buy a Shakespeare, a Masefield and an expensive Keats. Hewlett came in, and said his Song of the Plow had been so well received that he had been appointed a Commissioner for housing agricultural labourers. `He says it is the first time in the history of literature that anyone had procured such a job by a poem!' Among the new books coming in was the second volume of Soldier Poets, an anthology edited by Galloway Kyle, who was making money out of the vogue for `songs by the fighting men'. It contained a feeble poem by Ian Mackenzie, obviously based on `Strange Meetings'. Alida was indignant. Ìt is just like Kyle to curse you and admit very dirtily watered versions of you into his coterie. I get blind and hot with rage at the way you are ignored'. In clearing up the plaster brought down by the bomb at Mecklenburgh Square, Miss James was annoyed to discover that her tenant and Joggles had let mice gnaw through a cupboard. Alida took offence, and found herself a congenial little flat at 4 Millman Street, closer to the Bookshop, with its own entrance from the street. She asked for a pay rise, saying she was only getting ten shillings a week from the shop. Harold had to attend a Medical Board on 17 January: `by the time they had all my history down I seemed to come out as a kind of walking corpse'. It was decided he was permanently unfit for General Service and unfit to command troops for six months. Alida said long afterwards that he had been found to be `gun-shy', unable to stand the noise of firing, but there is no evidence for this in his army file. The Board decided he was twenty percent disabled by chronic stomach pain, marked bowel irregularity and an inflamed throat; none of these symptoms was thought to be the result of military service. He was sent to the Northern Command Depot at Ripon for training as a convalescent. Several friends of the Bookshop, including Lovat Fraser, were pulling strings on his behalf, hoping to get him a desk job. Meanwhile he asked Alida to send him books about the archaeology and folklore of Palestine to help with `The Death of Jehovah'. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


194 Harold Monro

He arrived at Ripon on 21 January. The camp was one of the principal training bases in the country, housing about 30,000 men in hundreds of long wooden huts; most of the inmates were recruits being prepared for the front, but there were also many convalescents, including shock cases and mutilees. He slept in a dormitory hut, probably with a dozen or more other officers, ate in a mess hut, and had to walk between the two eight times daily, maddened by incessant saluting. Military life still made no sense to him at all. `We're kept like convicts', he told Alida, listing his routine: physical exercises, signalling and musketry all morning, and General Parade and a route march every afternoon. Absence from the dinner parade was permitted only once a week, and travel beyond Ripon was forbidden. There seemed to be many signs of poor morale: Everybody drinks hard. I've noticed people who were teetotallers when they came, and now drink with the worst. Gambling is pretty strong too. At church `God Save the King' is always received in dead silence. Everyone shouts the hymns, but there is a complete understand[ing] that no one sings G S the K on any occasion. The silence makes you feel quite creepy. It's typical of the prevailing spirit, which is sinister. I hear constant talk of trouble brewing, but am not very inclined to believe in it. If it should break out no one will be to blame but the idiots who can instigate a place of this kind. There is no organisation, only eye-wash and waste, waste, waste.* It was his first experience of living among men who had been at the front, and he misunderstood their attitudes. Assuming they shared his disgust at the current right-wing press campaign for a `fight to a finish', he proposed in the suggestions book `That the predominance of Northcliffe papers in this Mess is to be deprecated; [and] that the Daily Chronicle or Daily News be substituted for at least one of the copies of the Daily Mail'. The Mess Secretary replied that leftwing papers should not be introduced into an Officers' Mess. Another man added that it would be ìnteresting to know how long the instigator of this suggestion has left Civil Life, and whether he is on Home Service'. This was a deliberate insult, implying that Harold was both a conscript and a shirker. Taking up the challenge, as he had to, he staged a very public row which he reckoned he won, although the mess may have thought otherwise. He complained to the CO, who reported the matter to the Commandant, saying Harold seemed to be trying to spread ideas `rather like those of the pacifists'. Harold was probably given a warning, and he ceased to talk about rebellion. A protester without the authority conferred by trench experience would merely be written off as a coward, especially by the men whose lives he might be trying to * Discontent may have produced reforms. The regime was much milder when Owen was at the camp in the spring.




save. He felt he was being stared at and avoided, as he probably was, and he was soon moved to another mess. Mentally and physically exhausted, he developed an internal pain which he thought was appendicitis; he dreaded an operation. Alida told him about her own miseries, saying it was his fault she was `bored stiff and desperately unhappy', but she was not quite as bored as she imagined. Someone took her to see the playwright Clifford Bax, who had asked to meet her. She dined with friends in Chelsea and was thrillingly close to a bomb (it blew out Sophia's windows at Burton Court nearby). Pinknose needed nursing after losing an eye in a `desperate love affair'; she said he ought to have a wound stripe.16 On the night of 17 February an incendiary bomb fell at the end of Millman Street: an enormous, tongue like wave of heat swept on to my face, rose and flame I saw it, and immediately I was in the Rose Garden of Hafiz, it ended in a mad dash, and fury of falling glass and shuddering air. . . . I was filled with excitement. It may have been this incident which earned Joggles his name of `Firebrave', the patronymic Alida was later to use for all her dogs. Her excitement was less unusual than modern readers might suppose. Shaw knew the experience too, incorporating it into the end of his play Heartbreak House, where it becomes the symbol of a decadent society rejoicing in its own ruin. On 18 February 1918 Harold wrote from the camp hospital, where he was being treated for what had been diagnosed as digestive trouble. Everyone else in the ward had tales of the trenches, so they were suspicious of him when they discovered he had never `been out'. Turning his mind away from such matters, he told Alida he was saving some of the shop's profits to build an ideal cottage for `the shop's faithful servants'. Each day of her labours would bring the dream nearer. And that affectionate promise to the Child of the Earth is followed by an eleven-year gap in his letters to her. Other sources record that after another Medical Board on 22 February he became Àssistant, Branch L2, Labour Supply Department' at the Ministry of National Service in London. Someone seems to have worked hard to get him there. The army wanted to post him to the Isle of Wight, but the ministry intervened, saying he was wanted `very urgently'. When the camp authorities at Ripon sent details of the mess quarrel, the Minister himself appears to have replied that he could see no reason to dispense with Harold's services.17 Harold could sleep in his own bed again. Sixty-one people came to the Bookshop in March to hear him read from Sassoon. While Alida was imagining Germany was ready for peace, the silence in No Man's Land told a different story to the men in the line. In the early hours of 21 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


196 Harold Monro


Harold left no record of his feelings about Jim's death, an event he had been dreading since 1914. Alida wrote as soon as she heard: Ì know you loved him. There's nothing I can say or do that will in any way express what I feel about it. I liked him awfully. . . . Come round this evening, if you care to. Flint is coming, and, as they were dying to meet him, I have asked the entire Sitwell family'. Harold may have been unable to face such a convivial gathering, but he held several Wednesday evening parties during the next month or two. Everyone was under strain, nerving themselves for news of defeat. Gosse undertook to read from Swinburne, said he had found the room stuffy on a previous visit, grumbled at the Bookshop's failure to answer his letter, and caused offence; afterwards he wrote kindly: `The terrible crisis through which we are passing strains the nerves and deranges the temper. People don't really mean what they seem to say. I was delighted by the serious attention of your audience'.18 Some friends were still alive. Arundel met Harold for lunch on 11 June at the Wayside Tea Rooms, their old haunt; he was still working at the Italian Embassy, and was soon to be awarded an OBE for his services to Anglo-Italian relations, but he looked worn out and ill. He came to a big party a week later, as did another old acquaintance, Ralph Straus, whose war service had gone no further than the Special Constabulary and a job in a hospital, thanks to a severe limp which mysteriously disappeared after 1918.19 Among the other guests were the three Sitwells, rising stars on the literary scene; Christopher Nevinson and the art critic Paul Konody, veterans of the Futurist battles of 1913±14; Robert Nichols, Gerald Gould, Sherard Vines and Nigel Playfair; and some of the Bookshop's earliest supporters, including Eddie Marsh, Frank Flint and Ernest Rhys. Harold's diary records July meetings with Marsh, Walter de la Mare, Edward Shanks, Edward Dent and F. W. Halliday, and two evenings with Pound, who thought him more `befuddled than ever'.20 On 18 September he was transferred to M17D, the branch of Military Intelligence responsible for monitoring foreign press reports and compiling daily summaries. Alida remembered that he was issued with a manual instructing him how to give èssential but not literal truth' about German successes. Based at Watergate House in the Adelphi, the department was staffed by army officers and a team of civilian translators. He must have been a welcome recruit; the army had at last given him work suited to his abilities, if not to his conscience, after wasting two years of his life. He began keeping a pocket notebook for business memoranda, drafts of poems, fragments of overheard conversation, and anything else that caught 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


March, the night was split by the sudden, appalling sound of an immense barrage, heralding the long-awaited German offensive. Jim Wilson was killed soon afterwards. Another poet whom Harold knew, Isaac Rosenberg, was killed on 1 April.

his attention. His 1918±19 notes include reminders to write to Henri Oedenkoven about the Ascona mill, and to organise refurbishments at Devonshire Street and Chestnuts. He drafted an advertisement for a new cashier, and made a note to buy Alida some goldfish, which soon became subjects for a poem. There are lists of things to take to the farmhouse, poems about Joggles and Pinknose, rough work for `The Death of Jehovah' and a fragment in the style of Eliot. Several of the longer notes are about family affairs; one seems to refer to a fire in Sophia's flat, possible started by Nigel, now aged 13 and beginning to be a cause for anxiety in the family. The German advance eventually failed. Early in October the Allies broke through the Hindenburg Line, where Wilfred Owen won a medal for capturing a machine gun. He was killed a few weeks later. The Bookshop lost one more of its poets on 11 November: Alida's beÃte noire, Ian Mackenzie, already weak from pneumonia, died of joy on hearing of the Armistice. Harold had been comparatively lucky, having never been in danger, except in air raids, but he was sick in mind and body. The influenza epidemic had caught him in October, further weakening his health, and the intestinal discomforts which had long troubled him were getting worse. His career as an army officer had been dismally undistinguished. Men who had been in action had insulted him. Like his former lodger Wilfrid Gibson, who had been conscripted in 1917, he had experienced the humiliations peculiar to home service. Both poets had hated their ordeal; neither their pre-war championing of `the people' nor their pioneering war poems in 1914 had prepared them for the realities of military routine. Ì think we are on the threshold of a happy age', Harold had written in The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage ten years earlier. `Whenever the many begin consciously, articulately to desire, then shall they begin to have, even unto the establishment of the kingdom of heaven ± which is Utopia'. In that spirit he had set up the Poetry House, to educate the people's desire, only to see the world try to destroy itself. There could be no `great wonderful future' now. Only one freedom seemed certain: `The vaunted, vast, and everlasting right/Of living is the liberty of dying'.21 But he would not give in; with typical, obstinate energy he set himself to reviving the Bookshop. Alida's reign at the shop was over. The change must have upset her old friend, Pinknose the cat, who seems to have absconded for ever in February. She herself was near breakdown. Ralph Hodgson gave her a stern lecture on the need to eat. Her doctor probably advised a long rest; that meant leaving Harold, who was less dismayed at the prospect than she would have liked. She suspected there was someone else who would take her place.



198 Harold Monro


On 27 March 1919 she left for an extended holiday. Harold was officially demobilised on the same day, two weeks after his fortieth birthday.



Dearest, can you never explain your hints to me? Wouldn't it be better for me to know the real facts than to be terror stricken by suggestions I don't understand? . . . I loathe going away from you. Do you understand in the least?

12

We are the twentieth century; we are fun. (Fragment from a notebook) Harold entered peacetime as one of the First World War's many unacknowledged casualties, exhausted and depressed. His drinking had got out of hand; Alida had seen it and was afraid, and she was even more frightened by his repeated half-confessions of `wickedness'. Thanks to her the Bookshop was still just functioning, so she was hurt by his willingness for her to go away, but he was excited at being free, hoping in a characteristic burst of optimism that he could save himself by hard work, regular hours and no distractions. Released from slaving in the army, he threw himself into slaving in the shop. `Trade is wonderful and I work day and night', he told Marsh on 15 April 1919. A new clerk settled down to deal with the enormous backlog of accounts Alida had after all been unable to disentangle. One of Harold's first tasks, a labour of love, was to publish Jim Wilson's poems: Magpies in Picardy came out on 15 May, a handsome little book at the ambitiously high price of 4s. (copies were still available five years later, much reduced). The last four pages of Magpies listed 55 titles published by the shop since December 1912. Among the items still available were the three volumes of Georgian Poetry, the first now into its twelfth thousand; eight chapbooks, all but one in second or third impressions; ten rhyme sheets; and various books and broadsides. It was a fine record, and Harold wanted to build on it. Central to his plans, as always, was a periodical. The quarterly Poetry and Drama had been too solid for many readers, but the monthly Poetry Review had involved too much work. His solution was ingenious: the wartime chapbooks had been easy to produce and sell, so the periodical itself would be treated as a chapbook, each number unique, with its own cover and sometimes even its own editor. Like the Samurai Press of old, but to far higher standards, the Poetry House would produce a monthly volume. Other books could be published 200 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


A New Start 1919±20

occasionally; orders for a fourth Georgian Poetry were already coming in, for instance, although no such volume had been announced. A new series of rhyme sheets was put in hand, illustrated by Fraser, John and Paul Nash, Charles Winzer and Rupert Lee. There were soon some new outlets for these publications. The Poetry House idea seemed to be spreading, as Harold had always hoped it would. Three new bookshops started up in 1919 with his advice and encouragement: the Poetry Shop in Hull, founded by two ladies who were to run it for twenty years on the model of 35 Devonshire Street; Sylvia Beach's famous Shakespeare and Co. in Paris; and the Chelsea Book Club in London, founded by Arundel, with Aldous Huxley as his assistant. Arundel's establishment has been described as a rival to Harold's, but it was in fact an ally, selling Poetry Bookshop publications and advertising regularly in Harold's periodical. Arundel planned to sell pictures and rare books, hold readings and publish broadsides, but he was no businessman; the Club soon passed into other hands, losing its links with Devonshire Street.1 Harold's own enterprises seemed to flourish at first, the Bookshop becoming more famous than ever before. Social evenings there were one of the bestknown features of literary London, especially as most of the pre-war àt homes' had come to an end. A typical Devonshire Street party in the early twenties was on a Wednesday evening, beginning at nine and ending at àny hour you like', often very late. Some thirty or forty guests, all male, would cram into the elegant room above the shop, to be regaled with sandwiches, wine and conversation. According to Douglas Goldring, no one but Harold at that time `could possibly have collected together so many poets and writers under such friendly and informal conditions'. On Goldring's first visit the door was opened by Harold's new, boyish-looking lieutenant and devoted friend Alec Waugh, who was working part-time as salesman and as compiler of a new project, a catalogue of modern poets. Other guests whom Goldring met on this and later occasions were the Sitwell brothers, Hewlett, Hueffer, Flint and the poet and civil servant, Humbert Wolfe. Harold himself was in deceptively good form: à good-looking, dark man, with what is officially called a ``fresh complexion'' and a sudden charming smile, which revealed dazzlingly white teeth'. (The teeth were almost certainly false.) Not everyone was so complimentary; Wolfe thought Harold looked like an intelligent horse.2 Lively though these parties were, with frequent noisy arguments between opposing factions, the old spirit could not be recaptured. Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, T. E. Hulme and many others were dead. Hodgson, once widely regarded as the best of the pre-war talents, had stopped writing and was soon to take up a teaching post in Japan. Pound, isolated, angry, perhaps despised for his lack of war service, was about to go into exile. Abercrombie was 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


A New Start 1919±20 201

embarking on an academic career, his poetic ambition almost at an end. Flint's self-confidence as a poet, never strong, was rapidly waning. Aldington and H. D. had separated; Aldington retreated to the country in December 1919 with Dorothy Yorke, asking Harold not to tell anyone in London about this new `wife'.3 Yeats had gone back to Ireland; he wrote to Harold that one of his few regrets at leaving London was that he could no longer visit the shop to look for the latest poetry.* Behind the shop's public activities, Harold's private life continued its unhappy course. He still acknowledged no personal relationship with Alida, so people would not have thought it odd that he gave only what were called stag parties: a bachelor with no lady to act as his hostess would not have been expected to invite women to late-evening gatherings. Probably few of his guests were aware of his homosexuality, a subject he discussed only with, in Jim Wilson's phrase, `the elect'. 1919 June 9 [Whit Monday] : Southend etc./How like a chap! On every holiday/ Out for his gain/To prove his angry muscles right 13: Joggie's birthday. Ingram Mtg 8.15/89 Maida Vale Kenneth Ingram, whom Harold had apparently met in the army and who came to several parties, wrote to him at least twice in 1919 about meetings of a new circle of `sympathetic friends', mentioning John Gambril Nicholson, Charles Kains Jackson and Leonard Green; all these were Ùranian' authors like Ingram himself, writing in praise of male comradeship, especially relationships across the boundaries of age and class. It all had to be very discreet, but Ingram clearly regarded Harold as trustworthy, asking him to bring like-minded guests. Another Uranian poet, Sydney Lomer (`Sydney Oswald'), had been a good customer of the shop for some years; it was probably through him that Harold met E. M. Forster's friends, J. R. Ackerley the diarist, Leo Charlton, a distinguished RAF officer, and Leo's charming secretary, Tom Whichelo.5 There is no sign that Harold ever committed himself to the Uranian cause or fully came to terms with his own nature; his unease is a key to much of his life in the twenties, underlying his fierce independence at the Bookshop, his refusal to live with Alida, and his increasing reliance on alcohol. His sexual relationships went almost completely unrecorded, but they seem to have been numerous and all more or less unhappy; his post-war notebooks are full of poems, often unfinished, about betrayal, repression, lost direction, broken promises and mistaken identity. A town-dweller and bookman, he cannot make contact with country `lads': * Preparing for a lecture in Dublin on the new poetry, Yeats asked Harold to send him books by W. H. Davies, war poems by Brooke and Julian Grenfell, and Harold's own cat and dog poems.4



202 Harold Monro

A New Start 1919±20 203

He lingers in a city park, watching the passers-by, but the sought-for youth only stares and moves on, eluding pursuit. He cruises the London streets with other lonely, silent men: And they speak with no creature they meet But they gaze into kindred faces Long long with a gloomy delight And they pass the unholy night Standing and wandering, sighing . . . If he does find someone to take home, he is ashamed. What God in what recriminating mood Made that wild hundred-second-long hot act The culmination of our strained delight? Always searching for the individual, he is disgusted by crowds and types: fat purple-nosed businessmen, cockney lovers smelling of onions, coarse women smothered in make-up, crowds `Pre-inhabited by Worm'. One day at a Bloomsbury street market, he stared in fascinated horror at a tray of swarming crayfish until the stallholder asked him what the devil he wanted. Sometimes he turned to Alida, who could not understand. I often thought there was something wrong in your ways. What are you? Where have you come from? What self between You and the you that I know will slip into our days? But now from the edge of silence I hear you speak: Òur boots are wet with the heavy dew ± and mine leak.' ± Let us go home. We have letters to answer. The coal Is almost out. We've enjoyed our little stroll. (`Field Excursion') `The Garden', a poem written in about 1919, symbolises his quest. A chance drinking companion tells him about a secret garden, but when it turns out to be Eden they turn back afraid into their own world. The themes are familiar: strange meetings, glimpses of another dimension, a paradise which might 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


And if I wander near you at the hay, You hum a song, or softly stroll away. What have I done? Is everyone who looks Across the pages of a hundred books By your fair innocence for ever damned?6

perhaps be reached by a supreme effort. Harold had once thought of Utopia as a complete social system, but now it is no more than a dream of friendship, forbidden not so much by conventional morality ± for the angel on the gate drops `his hopeless sword' ± as by personality and habit. The easiest way to reach the garden was through alcohol, listening to that strange companion who had always been the one dependable friend. Afterwards, as he wrote on one of his manuscripts, there was a price to pay: `Drink oneself almost to death and then regret it and want life to an ecstasy of appallingness'. Alida was in the country from March to May 1919, spending much of the time on the Sussex coast. There were reminders of war: American caps and lifebelts littered the beaches, relics of some torpedoed troopship, and a policeman came to check up on the visitor because the name `Klemantaski' sounded suspiciously foreign. She wrote to Harold often, hating to think he might be overworked but trying to believe it would be good for him to be `chained for a bit. . . . I know it is the turning point and you are well on the other side now'. They spent Easter together in Somerset (a note in his diary implies they stayed as a married couple under a false name on such occasions). Seeing him again did not improve her state of mind. `Dont say I'm different. I'm ill all sorts of ways. I dont suppose I shall ever get better. You might help me. But you cant'. Her physical health had actually been much improved by cycling and walking in the sea air, and Joggles had been ecstatic, tearing about on the sands. Harold was busy with preparations for the new magazine. Turner, Goldring, Aldington, Alec Waugh, Wyndham Lewis, Shanks, John Gould Fletcher, Osbert Sitwell and a new Modernist poet, Herbert Read, came to two parties to give advice and support. The first number of The Monthly Chapbook (Poetry and Drama New Series) (the title became The Chapbook: A Monthly Miscellany from January 1920) was published in July. Editorial matter was limited to a list of possible monthly topics and a brief explanation that the aim was to entertain and inform, with each number complete in itself yet complementing the others, so that a year's issues would add up to a survey of new poetry and drama. The rest of the first Chapbook consisted of covers by Fraser and 23 new poems, each by a different author. The poems were printed anonymously, with poets' names given only on the contents page. À poem is to be judged irrespective of its author', Harold told Marsh, anticipating the New Critics and hoping in vain that a similar arrangement would be adopted for Georgian Poetry. The first Chapbook was as representative a selection of English verse in the immediate post-war period as one could find, ranging from Imagist poems by H. D., Aldington and Flint, and more `modern' work still by Read and the Sitwells, to Georgian poems by Lawrence and de la Mare, a haunting lyric by Charlotte Mew and a mysterious evocation 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


204 Harold Monro

of the underworld by Harold himself. No one group was dominant; Gibson, Drinkwater, Abercrombie and Hodgson were all missing, but so were Pound, who had ceased to write lyric poetry, and Eliot, who was struggling with fragments of what was to become The Waste Land. The most conspicuous newcomers were Osbert and Edith Sitwell, who seemed to believe modern poetry should be eccentric and amusing. A review of the Chapbook in the Daily Express mocked them as `the Asylum School'. They became good friends of the Bookshop, à great meeting-place', Osbert remembered, for `whole schools of poets of the most diverse faith, opinions and temperament', Harold being `the most considerate and, indeed, inspired of hosts'.7 Harold, who had always sought high seriousness, had to adjust to the new mood; in announcing his periodical as entertaining he was getting into step. Subsequent Chapbooks never quite equalled the first, although there were to be forty of them altogether. Compared with the twelve numbers of the original Poetry Review or the eight of Poetry and Drama, they contributed sadly little to the advancement of English poetry. The idea of their forming a complete annual survey had to be abandoned in 1921, leaving the later numbers with no clear aim except to please (which some of them certainly did, with writing and illustrations of high quality); this led to a variety which puzzled some readers, one lady even complaining that the title should be changed to `The Monthly Insincerity'. Serving no school and grinding no axe, though showing a distinct preference for Eliot and the Modernists, the Chapbook fell between two markets, appealing neither to the sort of readership catered for by the Poetry Society nor to the intellectuals who were to support The Criterion, the journal Eliot was to launch with Harold's help in 1922. Harold had lost sight of his prewar reforming purpose; for that reason among others his last periodical slowly foundered, to his bitter disappointment. Work multiplied. Perhaps it helped to keep him off drink as he hoped, but it was more than his health could stand. The clerk left and had to be replaced. Marsh decided to edit a fourth Georgian Poetry for publication in November 1919, although Harold advised a year's delay. Bad dreams began again: anxious house-hunting in the country; a `plot to kill the poultry' in a place that seemed a cross between Drumadravy and Somerby; Curly Gooch building railways and killing a savage. Harold's strained nerves were starting to show. He was furious in August when Robert Graves and William Nicholson turned down a new poem, `Spring', for their periodical, The Owl: Graves was too young to be capable of sound judgement, and Nicholson wasn't a poet at all so how could he know? Harold was beginning to fear that he had been overtaken by youngsters he had helped, such as Graves, or Squire, Turner and Shanks, all three of whom were becoming influential. `My mind is in a state of upheaval and transition', he told 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


A New Start 1919±20 205

Marsh, `so that I cant polish the old things, nor make myself at home in the new phase'. He intended `Spring' and other work to form a book-length sequence to be called Real Property, but he could not complete it. Critics were taking his work seriously, all the same: one of the first post-war studies of British and American poetry, Conrad Aiken's Scepticisms (1919), regretted his `muttering' style, but praised his ìntellectual saltiness of originality', pointing out that he was writing about the stream of consciousness, the most promising field for modern poets. Harold suffered some kind of nervous breakdown in August 1919 and had to retreat to a sanatorium at Caterham. The production system he had devised for the Chapbook was successfully put to the test in his absence: the August number was produced by Albert Rutherston, the artist, probably at short notice; Fraser seems to have been editor for September and November; Flint took over for October, with a continuation of his pre-war chronicle of new French poetry; and Dent put together a collection of four poems with music for December. Thus relieved of editorial work for a while and encouraged by so much cooperation, Harold made a recovery of sorts, and by late October his diary was full again: a Sitwell party, dinner with Waugh, lunch with Ingram, an appointment with Ivor Gurney, visits to theatres and concerts. 1919 November 4: Pd Jackson for 6 botts whiskey/Eau de C/Gas stoves/wine glasses/go Arundel tomorrow/ . . . /Trojan Women/Eliot dinner 7 18 Crawford Mansions This was perhaps his first visit to Tom and Vivien Eliot in their cramped flat. Aldington was also invited. The neurotic and unhappy Vivien got the meal ready, but then went out, leaving the men to pursue highbrow conversation.8 Eliot had resolved to become a literary eminence in London, so Harold was a useful man to know; during the next few years they became close friends, two serious, melancholy men ± Eliot once said in a letter to Harold that Eliots could never laugh ± with a fondness for cats and whisky. Georgian Poetry 1918±1919 was published from the Bookshop in mid-November. Marsh had chosen five of Harold's recent lyrics. A reviewer in Squire's new London Mercury said the `curious and good' `Man Carrying Bale' was like a modern painting, flashing a light on a familiar thing from an unfamiliar angle: The tough hand closes gently on the load; Out of the mind, a voice Calls `Lift!' and the arms, remembering well their work, Lengthen and pause for help. Then a slow ripple flows along the body, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


206 Harold Monro

A New Start 1919±20 207

So moved the earliest carrier of bales, And the same watchful sun Glowed through his body feeding it with light. So will the last one move, And halt, and dip his head, and lay his load Down, and the muscles will relax and tremble . . . Earth, you designed your man Beautiful both in labour, and repose. Amy Lowell commented on the `beautiful and exceedingly satisfactory' `Dog' (a poem about Joggles), which was `not only good poetry, but good dog'. But reviews of the fourth Georgian Poetry as a whole were far from friendly. Lowell herself thought the anthology `desperately sad', `stale stuff', its staleness a pathological result of war-weariness. Rebecca West wrote so scathingly in The Herald that her editor, Gerald Gould, felt obliged to send Harold a personal apology. The most damaging attack came from John Middleton Murry in The Athenaeum, ridiculing the book for its complacency and `false simplicity' and not sparing Harold: `Mr Monro is fond of dogs (``Can you smell the rose?'' he says to Dog. `Àh no!''), and inclined to fish ± both of which are Georgian inclinations'. Murry contrasted the Georgians with Owen, whose newly-published `Strange Meeting' had àn awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that which has been most profound in the experience of a generation'.9 Harold was hurt, perhaps especially by the comparison with Owen: another young poet who had owed much to the Poetry House had begun, even posthumously, to outshine its founder. No one seems to have thought that Owen might have chosen his poem's title in homage to the man whose advice he had been delighted to have in 1916, nor did reviewers allow for the fact that Georgian Poetry represented Marsh's increasingly conservative taste rather than the best the poets could do. Harold was in an awkward position, being the anthology's publisher and one of its founder-contributors. He was even Vice-President of a Georgian Society, which had been started a year or two earlier at King's College, London (`What can they do?', he had wondered when drafting a lecture for them). The anthologies were an important source of income for the shop (the new volume sold nearly 5000 copies in its first month). On the other hand he had no wish for his own poetry to be thought of as `Georgian'. He took every opportunity, as he always had done, to point out that there was no Georgian school. When the Book Monthly referred to the `Georgian Movement', he wrote to say the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


While all the muscles call to one another: `Lift!' and the bulging bale Floats like a butterfly in June.

anthology had begun simply as a `co-operative effort' (a Samurai phrase) and that Squire, now widely regarded as the leader, was in fact a newcomer. He felt obliged to refuse some Georgian parodies which Bax offered for the Chapbook in January 1920, but he lent him a copy of Before Dawn, saying that `people of the ``Georgian'' type' had found the book entirely uninteresting.* Harold had been doubtful for some time about several of the leading Georgians, but it was the critical reaction in 1919 that destroyed his last hopes for poetry òf the ``Georgian'' type'. As late as December 1918 he had rejected a charge from Patrick Geddes that the Georgians were failing to write about great issues, saying ± as Pound might have done ± that it was time for poets to deal in accurate detail rather than vague generalities.11 In his talk to the Georgian Society he had spoken of both Georgian and Imagist verse with respect. But the 1919 reviewers put an end to the old pre-war confidence, leaving him and many other poets adrift. A new Modernist magazine, Coterie, printed a satire by Douglas Goldring in the spring of 1920, entitled `Post-Georgian Poet in Search of a Master': I've thought of middling Murry and Sturge Moore, I've thought of Yeats (I thought of him before), I've toyed with Aldous Huxley and Monro ± I don't know where I am, or where to go.

Harold joined his mother in San Remo for ten days in January 1920, then moved on to Cap Ferrat, where the roulette wheels of Monte Carlo were temptingly close; each day for a week he wrote down `Red' or `White' in his diary. Returning from Beaulieu station early one morning, perhaps flush with winnings after a long night at the casino, he was walking along the mule track on the crest of the Cap when he found ± again ± the house of his dreams. 1920 February 1: Sun just visible 4.30. Narcissus in flower. Beans also. Faces SW directly towards opening of bay/ . . . /nearest house 50 yds 2: Precise area 1500/name none/title none/Is there always water? Yes

* This seems to be the earliest recorded use of `Georgian' in its now-familiar pejorative sense. Harold also coined the expression `neo-Georgian' in 1920, to distinguish between the original Georgians and their post-war successors. This term, still in use, was well known by 1925, when Punch, in a series of `Poetic Refusals', imagined Mr Monro refusing to have à sale of poets in my shop': Though some young Neo-Georgians, I allow, Scorning the mid-Victorians sweet sop, Write the most fearful slop. For, as you know, I have to feed my cat . . .'10



208 Harold Monro

He arranged to buy the Villa des Oliviers ± for it did have a name ± almost at once. It was a tiny, primitive cottage, but its site was superb, high on the narrow ridge with the picturesque harbour and castle of Villefranche far below. The purchase price seems to have been just over a hundred pounds, and he knew he could get that back in rent within a few years. His most famous tenants were to be Ford Madox Hueffer (or Ford Madox Ford, as he renamed himself in 1919), who lived there for several months with Stella Bowen from December 1922, and Paul Nash, who painted the view from the garden. It was at the villa that Ford began his trilogy, Parade's End, the greatest English novel of the First World War. But Harold himself seems to have stayed in the house only twice; like the Ascona mill, it proved to be a false dream.12 While Harold was in France, Alida prepared the February Chapbook, a collection of articles edited by Alec Waugh. Ì have seldom read anything so useless', she said of Waugh's own contribution, and she was so appalled at an essay by Goldring that she went through it with Waugh, deleting `most extraordinary bitter personal attacks on Gosse, Squire, etc.'. Even after her excisions, Waugh asked for his name not to appear on the title page for fear of Gosse, but there was little left that Gosse or anyone else could have objected to. Harold returned to London in February, stopping in Paris to visit Sylvia Beach. The March Chapbook, consisting of essays by Eliot, Huxley and Flint, was too important to be left to a sub-editor. `We can have a great number', he told Eliot, adding that its target should be `the hopelessness of the fixed wrong standard'. Ì hope you'll join up with a whole heart . . . The opposition (here) must show its large eyes, and wag its tail for the fun of being a right-minded opposition'. Eliot would have understood the reference to Joggles, whose opinions were often consulted at Bookshop gatherings. He said the Chapbook was àn extremely useful periodical for any writer to be able to contribute to' and agreed to give Harold first refusal on any suitable contribution.13 Eliot's March article deplored current standards of reviewing, which he considered to be little more than society advertising. Huxley argued for a modern approach to nature and sex in poetry, while Flint compared poems by H. D. and Squire, to the detriment of the latter. Harold added a note that the Chapbook served no clique, but by giving over a whole number to the Modernists he was making his own sympathies pretty clear. In attacking `the fixed wrong standard' the three critics were most obviously aiming at the Poetry Society and the Poets' Club, but beyond that they saw Squire as a more dangerous enemy; he had become suddenly powerful as editor of two periodicals, contributor to several more, principal `neo-Georgian' and relentless opponent of Modernism. Harold must have found it difficult to keep his mind on these literary matters. One event loomed above all others in the early months of 1920, and it filled him 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


A New Start 1919±20 209

with fear and self-contempt. His diary for March records meetings with Gould, Vines, Fletcher, Winzer, Cournos and others. He saw at least two Shaw plays, called on his solicitor, gave a reading at Twickenham, and went up to Hull to read at the new Poetry Shop. Writing to him on the 18th, Shanks remarked that the best way to live would be to cut all ties and go as one pleased, but he reckoned neither he himself nor Harold would ever do it. The words `Divorced' and `Demobilised' are triumphantly encircled in Harold's 1916 and 1919 diaries, marking great moments of freedom. But his 1920 diary gives no indication whatever that on 27 March, Easter Saturday, he married Alida Klemantaski. People had been telling him it was his duty to make an honest woman of his assistant, and she had been embarrassed by neighbours gossiping when he visited her flat. She said later that she had been willing to defy convention if he would do the same, but the truth was that she wanted to marry him. Hewlett had made one last, vain effort to persuade her to join him as an adopted daughter, assuring her she could bring as many animals as she liked.14 Charlotte Mew had tried to warn her. But Alida was determined to go ahead, even though she dreaded Harold's reactions to being married again. The hasty ceremony in the crowded Holborn register office could hardly have been a greater contrast to Harold's first marriage in 1903. This time there were no `smiles of happiness', no `sacred edifice' and no guests, except two strangers who were brought in as witnesses. He failed to provide a ring, so Alida used one of her own, and he shocked her horribly afterwards by hurrying away to `stay with a friend' for the night. Legend has it that when he finally brought himself to get into bed with her again he said, `Come here, boy'.15 For him, the wedding was a ruinous defeat. He did his best to pretend it had never happened, ignoring congratulations from friends and continuing to live as a single man. He still referred to her as `Miss Klemantaski', and they usually addressed each other as `Friend' in letters. He never lived with her on a regular basis. Yet she was his best companion: once they were even thrown out of a hotel when the manager grew suspicious of their incessant talking. No respectable couple could talk so much, the manager thought, so he searched their room (or rooms, for Harold sometimes insisted on having one to himself) and found Alida's surname in her books. Harold was furious, refusing to pay the bill, but he would not act the part of a husband. However much Alida might assure him that he was as free as ever, he had capitulated, and the horror of it would not leave him. According to his own autobiographical notes, he suffered his first attack of alcohol-induced amnesia later that year. A fortnight after the wedding, the Monros left for the Villa des Oliviers. 1920 April 14: . . . /Beaulieu 12.53/Villefranche 12.58 17: Painter 1.30/Leave keys for carpenter 21: Gardener day 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


210 Harold Monro

A New Start 1919±20 211

Perhaps Harold intended the villa to be the ideal cottage he had promised Alida in 1918. They had the house refurbished while they were there, even adding a dog to the premises, but Harold seems to have been deeply depressed. `Really, really it isn't as bad as [you] think', Alida wrote to him after their return to London in May. `Wait a little and see that life goes on as usual. You have the whole of life and your work in front of you ± You have me'. Life did go on. Conrad Aiken, now back in England, brought in some poems and was invited to a Wednesday `squash' on 2 June. He grew very fond of Harold during the next few years, eventually valuing his friendship more than anyone else's in England. Harold often visited the Aikens' romantic old house at Rye; he and his post-war poetry are well described in Aiken's autobiography: stubborn, crotchety, perverse, and difficult [Harold], down from his bookshop for the weekend, with his latest kinky poem. . . . ready for the libations of Bristol Milk and the stubborn rearguard defense of Georgian Poetry ± or some of it, anyway, he would say belligerently. . . Paul [Nash] had once happily described [Harold's] own poetry as an ìnteresting fumble'; and nothing could have been truer. There was a kind of angry desperation in it, and in its dogged insistence on the literal truth, nothing less, and every inch of it, it tangled itself in the contingent, got helplessly in its own way, and suddenly came to an end exhausted. But his talk was searching and invaluable.16 One of the poets asked to the June squash was unable to attend. Ford ± or Hueffer, as Harold kept calling him, despite reminders ± had left London to become a farmer. In replying to the invitation, he mentioned he had offered a book of new poems to the shop in 1917, only to be brusquely told to wait. `General Amnesty for all offences', he added amiably, inviting Harold to spend a weekend with the livestock. Harold testily defended the shop, which had been under Alida's management in 1917, but accepted Ford's `Modern Morality Play', The House, for publication as the March 1921 Chapbook. He was annoyed again when a fee was hinted at. Ford had been unaware, like most people, that the shop was financially dependent on its proprietor; he was abashed, and said he would write for nothing from now on, `your services to Literature being so splendid'.17 The June 1920 Chapbook consisted of a bibliography of all the books of verse published in Britain between January 1912 and May 1920; it filled 44 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


26: Boot laces/photos of house/water works/The cables from which heaven hangs are becoming rotten

close-packed pages, astonishing testimony to the poetry boom in which Harold had played a leading part. Many readers must have supposed he was the compiler, who was named only as `Recorder', but the pseudonym was in fact a cover for Alida, who had no doubt made use of the catalogue Waugh had been working on. The task helped to keep her busy during the miserable months before and after the wedding. `My help tempered by habits', her husband noted later. About a tenth of Recorder's thousand or so poets received what was meant to be an unbiased comment. Hodgson was `the real descendant of all the ``great'' poets', and Mew Ùndoubtedly one of the best poets of the century'. Flint, Flecker, Davies and Ford (still referred to as Hueffer, to his annoyance) were favourably mentioned, while Shanks, Squire and Turner were written off as derivative. Among the founder-Georgians Gibson was no longer interesting, Drinkwater never had been and Abercrombie was `chipping granite with a blunt chisel'. Recorder teased the Sitwells, to Osbert's subsequent amusement and Edith's mortification. The longest note was on Pound, who was owed a great debt for `his power of imparting energy to those who were floundering in the Victorian backwash', although he had recently become bitter. Another long note went to Harold himself, one of `the most original poets of the time', unique in his preoccupation with the relation of man to the earth. Harold took up cricket again for several summers in the early twenties. In that last age of village England, there was a fashion for bookmen to take teams into the country, staying for a week at some picturesque inn and playing against rustics on idyllic, elm-shaded greens. Alec Waugh suggested that Harold should be invited to join Clifford Bax's team, the Old Broughtonians, who included Drinkwater, Straus, Eric Gillett and Waugh himself. Harold made a poor impression on Bax, who thought him incompetent on the field and depressing off it, but another captain, Francis Meynell, was more appreciative, remembering him as an invaluable batsman. Meynell's Long Primers, mostly left-wing pacifists like their captain, included the actor Miles Malleson, who sometimes read at the Bookshop. Harold also played several times for Squire's cheerfully chaotic Invalids, again with Straus and Waugh.18 Harold visited Hylands in August 1920 for the wedding of his niece, Phyllis Gooch. `First suit since war': it cost five guineas, and he can be seen in it in one of the photographs, chatting to his correctly-attired brother-in-law (Plate 37). Curly and May Gooch gave their daughter a grand piano, a fur coat and diamonds (Harold gave a toasting fork and trivet), but this was perhaps a last flourish of extravagance. Life was not what it had been for the Gooches. Their fortune had probably been diminished by pre-war recklessness and post-war inflation, and Hylands had lost its charm after Lancelot's death and wartime 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


212 Harold Monro

use of the house by the army. And May, grieving for her son, had all too obviously fallen victim to the family weakness for alcohol. Watching his sister in pity and horror, Harold thought she looked like a beautiful fish in a tank as she drifted through the state rooms with unseeing eyes. She smoked incessantly, and was rumoured to be getting through five or six bottles of whisky a day; two maids attended her all night, one to prevent her from setting the bed on fire, the other to discourage her from drinking. Curly sometimes crept into her room, gazing at her in helpless misery.19 A few weeks after the wedding he put Hylands up for sale, moving the family to a smaller mansion near Southampton. The move ended Harold's connection with Essex; after 1920 he and Alida took a series of weekend cottages in Sussex. The annual series of Thursday readings began each autumn. Sassoon read to nearly 150 people in 1919. The Monros and two others read Edna St Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo from behind a curtain in October 1920; Harold was pleased with this experiment, which was perhaps a source for the similar arrangement used for Edith Sitwell's Facade two years later. The American poet Vachel Lindsay gave the noisiest performance any Bookshop audience had heard since Marinetti's visit in 1913; Eliot thought he was appalling. Harold invited Eliot himself to read in November 1920, in the same letter asking him to dinner to meet Davies, and to a party (`Lord, I'm out of breath!'). Eliot duly read from his own work, standing tall and ghostly in the dim light, his long overcoat tightly buttoned.20 Pound wrote on 24 November, saying he would `rather like to read again sometime if the audience will stand it. I find pouring stuff at that stolid mass of Drinkwaterian-Abercrombogibsonian stodge, I will not say exactly enjoyable, but instructive'. Harold was well aware, if only because Aldington had recently told him so, that Pound still had a low opinion of him, and indeed Pound had become near-paranoid about almost everybody.21 Only a month after offering to read he left England for ever and settled in Paris, announcing that Paris was now the world's cultural centre. His remark about stodge may have been prompted by noticing the names of Drinkwater and Gibson on that winter's programme of readings. Gibson's reputation was in rapid decline, but Drinkwater had become famous as an actor± manager and playwright, always attracting a large audience when he came to read his own poetry. Alida thought he was becoming exactly like a bishop. His success must have been almost as galling to Harold as it was to Pound. Recorder might deplore Pound's bitterness, but Harold was bitter too, and his feelings found an unfortunate outlet at the end of 1920 when he was commissioned to write a study of contemporary poets, probably as a result of Alida's bibliography. He set down his opinions with his usual bluntness, writing fast to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


A New Start 1919±20 213

catch the Christmas trade. As publication approached, he began to have misgivings, trying to warn Drinkwater in particular, but it was too late. Some Contemporary Poets came out on 18 November to be greeted with anger, astonishment and derision. The book's tone was cynical and disillusioned, although few readers would have known that the dedication `To P.T.F.J. (Greatest of Critics)' was to Joggles. `Verse-writing in the year 1920 is a professional occupation', Harold wrote in his introduction; ambitious young poets were forming coteries and seeking contacts with `the Great'. (He was one of the Great himself, in this sense at least, although he could not say so; Goldring had described him in the first Chapbook as `sly Monro, with Chapbook under arm/And fair aspirants round him in a swarm'.) He summarised the pre-war revival, mentioning the 1912 Poetry Review and the Bookshop, without explaining why he felt little admiration for the post-war results. Much of his commentary on individual poets seems uncontroversial now, and it forms a unique record of the period immediately before The Waste Land, but it is strangely dull. Eliot said in The Dial that Harold had made all the poets seem equally uninteresting, and a New Statesman reviewer wondered why he had written the book at all. His half-conscious motives could not be openly expressed. He was embarrassed at being seen as a Georgian and resentful that his achievements were being increasingly ignored or misrepresented. In attacking Noyes, for instance (Òf Mr Alfred Noyes nothing can be written in extenuation'), he can hardly have forgotten that poet's insulting comments about the Bookshop in 1914. His brief account of Murry as a poet included an unnecessary aside about Murry's unreliability as a critic. He treated most of the Georgians with heartless candour: Abercrombie (`turgid', `frequently tedious'), Gibson (`more facile than most . . . but his mind has not sufficient range to justify that facility'), Squire (àn interesting case of the modern professional poet' ± and hence, by implication, of the typical climber mocked in the introduction). Drinkwater came off worst of all: à very adept in the `èxtravagant and absurd diction'' condemned by Wordsworth over a century ago'. Some reviewers welcomed the book's honesty, but most were incredulous that the Georgians had been scorned by their own publisher, who was also their salesman and colleague. Even his old mentor Maurice Hewlett came out against him, remarking that it was not only ungentlemanly and imprudent for a poet to denigrate his fellows, who might well reply that his own work was no better than theirs; it was also bad business for a shopkeeper to devalue the goods in his shop. An old enemy, Galloway Kyle, gleefully took the chance to be spiteful in the Poetry Review. This Achitophel of poetastry, who has been everything in turns, and nothing long, `revolts' against his successive anti-Tennysonian, futuristic, imagistic, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


214 Harold Monro

A New Start 1919±20 215

vorticist manifestations and Georgian and formless alliances, and treats very scurvily his comrades of a day that is scarcely past.

Mr Monro as critic doesn't think very much . . . he moves in a maze of preferences and distastes . . . [his book lacks] any governing principle . . . his prose is oddly ineffective, neutral and spiritless . . . I don't like Mr Monro's book nearly as much as I like him and his poetry. . . I think it is an uncommonly bad book. Harold drafted a furious reply to Drinkwater, but could find no convincing defence. Some Contemporary Poets did lack any governing principle. He had called for a new criticism in 1912, but had never worked out what it should be. His book explicitly refrained from theorising, beyond dismissing the old notion that poetry should teach: `the function of poetry is rather to delight'. Unlike the Modernists he could not get away from the belief that poetry had to have a purpose, so he tried to èmphasise the characteristic light-heartedness of modern verse', a strange emphasis to come from a former Asconan and Samurai. If there is no underlying argument in his book, there is underlying despair. The response of the critics increased his sense of alienation. They seemed to be mocking him, as his fellow-officers had done during the war, staring in amusement at his ruined hopes. What had once seemed a great, spontaneous advance towards the poetry of the future had ended with the Georgians reduced to a laughing-stock, the Imagists dispersed, the leaders of both groups dead or in exile, and the role of the Bookshop forgotten. Everything he had believed in seemed to have failed: Wellsian socialism, Nietzschean optimism, co-operation at all levels. He was disgusted by the 1919 peace treaty, blaming France for dictating vindictive terms, and by British oppression in Ireland. In his own life he had given way to social convention by marrying again. One evening at the CafeÂ Royal he leaned across the table to Cournos, whispering with intense feeling, Ì wish I were dead.'22



An old friend, Drinkwater, wrote a long review in The Observer. Kindly man though he was, he could not resist being as honest as Harold had been.

13

I have discovered finally to-day This house that I have called my own Is built of straw and clay, Not, as I thought, of stone. (`The Silent Pool') Harold's 1920 book, Some Contemporary Poets, was the prelude to a series of humiliations and disasters. In mid-January 1921 he and Alida suddenly left for the Villa des Oliviers. He told several correspondents he was ill, and Mew had been worried that Alida was starving herself again, but it may be that the anonymous author of some mock-epitaphs in the Saturday Westminster guessed the true reason for their flight: Harold Monro Had got to go And (considering the kind of book he's been writing about his friends lately) 'Tis better so. Mew wrote cheerfully to Alida, imagining her promenading under a parasol, but changed her tone when she heard of cold floors, influenza, gastritis and, for Harold, severe toothache. Alida had scarcely been abroad before, but Harold was on familiar ground where wine, gambling and young men were welcome distractions. It seems to have been a wretched holiday. There is no sign that either she or he ever stayed at the villa again.1 Their unplanned absence disrupted the Chapbook. Edward Gordon Craig filled the February number with a lively essay on puppetry, Ford's The House took care of March, and Aldington was editor for April with articles on prose-poetry by himself, Eliot and Frederic Manning. The original scheme for a pattern of twelve annual topics had been more or less adhered to until now, but when 216 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Disillusion 1921±5

Harold returned to London in April he had to abandon any pretence at a topic for the May number, hurriedly collecting some not very interesting poems and padding them out with Basil's old parody of Des Imagistes. The June Chapbook, a bibliography of plays to match Recorder's number a year earlier, was provided by the British Drama League with no input from the Bookshop. Harold then announced that the magazine would be suspended for six months. One reason for this break, apart from the editor's personal troubles, was probably the death of Lovat Fraser in June, a sad loss to the Monros and the Bookshop. He had designed several numbers of the Chapbook, as well as seventeen rhyme sheets and at least six book covers. Drafting a note about the Chapbook later, Harold wrote that `Fraser was the man for it'. A fresh start was overdue, though; he had encouraged Fraser's taste for folk ballads, thatched cottages and windblown elms, but the shop needed a more modern style. Soon there was another death. May Gooch died on 26 July 1921 aged 47, `her foot gangrened and her liver nearly rotted'. Even in her final coma she had never ceased to smoke an invisible cigarette. The official causes of death were cirrhosis of the liver and èxhaustion'. It was a grim warning to her brother, and probably a deep sadness. Of the little family he had spent his childhood with in Brussels, only he and his mother were left. Sophia had good reason to be like `four funerals in one', having now lost three of her four children, as well as two husbands and a grandson. May was buried next to her son Lancelot at Widford, on the edge of the Hylands estate. Her husband was buried there with them only five years later; family legend says that he too died of drink. In need of a supporter as always and cloaking his inner depression in gloom about the condition of Europe, Harold turned to Aldington, who advised him to give up alcohol, tobacco and newspapers, and to go for long walks. He was impatient with Harold's surviving socialism, telling him he was of more value to the country as a man of culture than as a champion of people he would loathe if he had to live with them (Aldington had not forgotten the miseries of life in the ranks). Harold stayed with him several times in 1921, saying that they had much in common. The Monros leased another house in Bloomsbury that year, 19 Heathcote Street, just behind Alida's wartime lodgings in Mecklenburgh Square (she was succeeded in her Millman Street flat by Aldington's friend, Brigit Patmore). Harold installed his books at Heathcote Street, slept there occasionally and often went for supper, but for much of the time Alida had only a lodger and her animals for company. She put her aquarium in the front window and bought a mate for Joggles. With the lawns of the square nearby and an old burial ground at the end of the road, it was a good area for a dog owner. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Disillusion 1921±5 217

218 Harold Monro

It must be something serious to you, if you of all people allow anyone to come into your rooms at any time they happen to be in town and to sit in your sitting room like that. . . . (I dont suppose I ought to be writing to you now because my inside has come on and I'm being so sick, but my brain is raging and I must). . . . I dont think that Dr. has done you the slightest good . . . I always think when I dont see you in the week, except on Thursday, well, there'll be the week end and there never is . . . I dont really make any demands on you do I? Not really. Then you see I had that dream . . . I saw you in your room going to bed with a young man there with whom you were laughing and talking and presently I saw you lying in bed with him and to my mind loving him very much. . . . Then when I was getting a book from the Drama shelf in the morning I actually saw the man in uniform, creeping out of the swing door. You can imagine the psychological shock I had. . . . If you arent really liking Heathcote St what's the good of it? How can I like it? Harold was reluctantly seeing a psychiatrist, Dr Irvine, every Monday. He made notes for one of these consultations: ± If I stop drinking shall I remember all those most interesting phases out of my past life? ± Am I to stop up the other side for ever? ± Not mention Suggestion; Psycho Analysis or ± or any thing of the kind to me. Leave out `talks', ± `when we meet' e.g. ± How can AK be useful? ± (He said it). ± Will he dine with me next Monday instead of my going to see him? Quite ordinary. ± Resent the idea of coming under her control. ± Thurs night less ± Usually Thurs if any. Bad sleep. Pain. Dreams. . . . Gradually worse ever since known her. Had to get drunk. Alida's pleading did more harm than good. It probably reached a peak each Thursday, when she would have been anxious for him to stay sober for the reading. He recorded some dreams for Irvine, as he had done for Bircher-Benner in 1908: nervous attempts to jump over a ditch (several Monros had been prodigious long-jumpers), with Alida encouraging him from the other side 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


One reason for her solitude was now clear to her: she had at last discovered the nature of her husband's `wickedness'. She tried to blame drink (but in later life she used to exclaim, Ìt's all glands, it's all glands' ).2 His 1922 diary shows him making assignations with `J', apparently a soldier named Jim. She wrote miserably on 4 March:

but not showing him the easy way across; being pitied by his mother for eczema and a swollen nose; going to a Turkish Bath with Arundel `together to clear up everything. Can't get there. . . . 1.15 Jim. Bunks confused. Love mine. A climbs over top etc.'. There were plenty of clues here for Irvine: guilt at not reaching clan standards, resentment at Alida, a continuing need for maternal comfort, and still the old love for Arundel, never to be fulfilled. Harold published Real Property from the Bookshop in March 1922. His introduction explained that the twelve poems in the first section were `fragments' of what he had hoped would be a complete sequence. His original plan must have been ambitious, drawing on psychology and evolutionary science to show the reality of life in a godless world. The surviving `fragments' are about the burden of modern consciousness and the relief which could come from contemplating the `silent pool' of earth-life itself. Perhaps Dr Irvine was a Jungian; at any rate some of the themes are Jungian: ancient memory, heredity, the evolutionary drive `through ages to me who am breathing and here'. Harold's personal difficulties are evident in poems on the lost paradise (`The Garden') and the horror of self-awareness, represented several times as a closed room or house, in imagery which may well have influenced Eliot: That house across the road is full of ghosts; . . . They sit before their open books and stare; Or one will rise and sadly shake his head; Another will but comb and comb her hair, While some will move untiringly about Through all the rooms, for ever in and out, Or up and down the stair; . . . Then drift back from the window to the table, Folding long hands, to sit and think again. (Ìntrospection') In draft work for `Fate' the poet describes himself as living in a room with a locked door, through which he can always half-hear endless talk about himself, but when he looks through the keyhole all he can see is his own eye. His insistent, ever-baffled questioning runs through almost all the poems. `Why have you veiled your eyes?' `Where are you? I have lost you in the dark'. `Who was it talking within me and to me at once?' The second part of the book, dedicated to `the Zoo and its Owner' (Alida and her animals, not, as one critic has suggested, Marsh and his Georgians!), consisted of nine descriptive pieces, including `Man Carrying Bale', `Goldfish' and `Real Property' itself, the poem about the field which Alida had seen in Dorset 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



in 1916. Harold said in his introduction that some of these poems were `tainted with slight Georgian affectations, which no amount of polishing could successfully remove' (one of the many results of this polishing was the disappearance of the line in `Dog' which Murry had sneered at). Nevertheless he could write in the Georgian vein better than most Georgians, as Eliot had said, and some reviewers thought the second section of the book was better than the first. Real Property was well received, friends such as Newbolt, Wolfe and Aldington writing appreciatively and The Times saying the book showed `real inspiration'. But Harold remained unsatisfied, still longing to produce a great work. He laboured on with `The Death of Jehovah'.

1922 May 3: AK's doctor says she has to retire for a week from to-morrow 4: Nigel 6. Theatre. Night. 5: Nigel's Extra Work/ . . . /Nigel returns school 7: Things in right places/Dust books/One day each room 11: Jehovah I write your story because it haunts my brain Nigel was still at Eastbourne College. Harold's diaries mention him from time to time, without giving any clue as to what father and 17-year-old son thought of each other. Probably Harold continued to be both dutiful and indulgent, seeing the boy regularly and arranging treats for him, yet perhaps dreading such occasions for the contact with Dorothy which they had to involve. Alida was diagnosed as having a patch on the lung.3 The diaries make no comment about that either, but her letters show that she was anxious to spend as much time in the country as possible. Her beloved Joggles died at the end of May, to her great distress. He had become a father not long before, showing her that breeding dogs could be a useful source of income. The Zoo now consisted of his mate, two of their puppies, a cat and the goldfish. Alida said she needed them all as a bond with Harold. She treated them almost as though they were his and her children; the dogs and cat sent birthday presents to him, for instance, with messages in childish language, and he was expected to reciprocate. Illness and animals gave her ways of coping with her predicament. Selling puppies did not bring in enough to solve increasing financial troubles. Annual payments to Dorothy and Nigel were taking almost a third of Harold's income, and the Chapbook was not paying its way.* Hoping to write for money, he started to note down ideas and phrases, but he was never at home in prose, as he readily admitted; almost all the many plays and stories among his papers seem to have been still-born. He began taking small sums from the shop, * Harold's income in 1922 was about £1500, comprising £1239 from Brooke House, £104 in dividends, £102 from literary earnings, and £55 interest on an existing £1000 loan to the shop. A 1918 court order had fixed alimony at £300, plus £150 school fees and £30 maintenance for Nigel.



220 Harold Monro

keeping a muddled account in his diary. It must have been a disappointment, though hardly a surprise, when he was left nothing by his tyrannical uncle, Russell Monro, who died in October 1922 (all the other nephews and nieces received legacies). Kind-hearted Aunt Emily remained friendly, later even offering a loan to help with the alimony. When she told Harold and Alida some years later that the nephew Russell had chosen as principal heir was drinking too much, Harold managed to look innocently shocked.4

The crane makes a brurring kinkling sound like the sea raking back pebbles. Albert's story:- woman in pub with knut. False teeth . . . rough suddenly sees. Resolves to have. Makes her sick. Kind. Nicks. They manage men much better over there I believe (in the USA) ± much better than they're managed here (AK) The Monkey Cage is Lincolns Inn Common Room I had an idea on 8/9/22 on my way home. I registered it in my mind but then ± `The Bookmaker' at Henneky's: ± treated as an High Priest. `The male body has no shape (Albert) Man at Henneky's ± just standing there all day leaning on his stick . . . All Europe dies of influenza and the dogs take possession. Their pitiful civilisation is soon overcome. Story begins with walking along Lambs Conduit Str and hearing a man knocking nails into a coffin for influenza victims at midnight. I drink to stave off the evil moment when I shall be face to face with myself Ronald thought I had written all the books in the shop Cunt is bloody getting to a There won't be any cunt if now if they go on . . . Eh-Spinoli/Tommy-growo/Forward carriage ± adyetnodyet/ . . . Creator's Teeth (Lovely!)/Col a mol at three apence each ± Lovely . . . Two types [of poet]: the RA [Aldington] and the Dick [Shanks]. The former queries use the whole time, and will therefore arrive at something. The latter is certainly more innocent and primitive ie The Keats type ± but this as genius is very rare. Wanted at Heathcote/Fender/Poker/ . . . /2 oak bookcases/Books/Oak Table/Tin box/waste paper basket/coal scuttle/small Hearth rug These jottings come from a notebook Harold used in 1922±4.5 Each morning in Devonshire Street he woke to the sound of the builders' crane, which he could see from his window (it reappears in several poems): bombed houses were still being rebuilt in Bloomsbury. When he went out he could hear the local craftsmen at work, and the cries of the vegetable sellers. Being still a member of Lincoln's Inn, he could use the Common Room where the lawyers chattered, and on the way back he would linger in Henneky's, the cavernous old wine bar in Holborn, afterwards trying to record snatches of the foul-mouthed talk of the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



drinkers, remembered in an alcoholic haze. Sometimes he would find a young man whose mind needed improving and would take him back to the shop. The note on Aldington and Shanks is part of an outline for a lecture. At Heathcote Street Alida longed to make a home for him; sometimes he longed to live in it among simple, kindly things. Àlbert's story: woman in pub . . . False teeth . . .': all these details recur in The Waste Land. Harold must have passed the story on to Eliot, who probably regarded him as a valuable source of information about London pub life. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. The Waste Land also seems to borrow from several of Harold's poems, including `Suburb' and Ìntrospection', and his presentation of Real Property as `fragments' of a sequence may have helped Eliot to solve the problem of how to assemble his own poem, which was finished only a few months after Harold's book came out. On two successive days in September 1922 Harold lost his memory after heavy drinking. The experience was becoming familiar, but it always horrified him. On this occasion for the first time he tried to record events afterwards: supper with Alida, a tour of Soho and Bloomsbury pubs, a night in a Turkish Bath. After this `break out' he had to spend a month or more in a sanatorium at Watford, leaving the shop in the hands of Alida and a new friend, Terence Prentis.* The sanatorium, The Stanboroughs, À Modern Hydrotherapeutic Health Institution' where Vivien Eliot was also treated, was run by Seventh Day Adventists on the same teetotal, vegetarian regimen as La LignieÁre. Harold took a tennis racket, and was soon well enough to write a play. His absence may have delayed the publication of Georgian Poetry 1920±1922, which came out in December 1922 (the title page said November). He had reluctantly allowed Marsh to include three poems from Real Property, remarking that one of them, Ùnknown Country', first drafted in 1913, was àlmost too Georgian even for G. P.!' The book was better received than its predecessor, although reviewers commented that what had once been a near-revolutionary anthology had become an institution, so that being chosen for it was widely regarded as a public honour. Harold could have reflected that the highest honours had gone to himself, de la Mare, Davies, Drinkwater and Gibson, the * T. C. Prentis, an artist, seems to have succeeded Alec Waugh at the Bookshop; his initials appear frequently in Harold's diaries, but almost nothing is said about him. He married in 1928.



222 Harold Monro

only poets (out of forty) who had appeared in all five volumes. Four thousand copies of the new, fifth volume sold more or less automatically before Christmas, after which interest waned. He told Marsh the book had been à lost opportunity. . . the moment had arrived to become less ``Georgian'', whereas we became more so'.6 No doubt he was thinking of The Waste Land, which Eliot had published in October. The Chapbook had been due to start again in January 1922, but monthly publication had not in fact resumed until July, with a number that was different from all the others. Harold had been worried by an incident at a lecture he had given in the East End: he had quoted Satan's rallying call from Paradise Lost, and a big, grim-eyed, black-bearded man had bellowed threateningly from the back of the hall, `What's the use of poetry?' The lecturer would have had an answer to this simple question before the war, but now it was frighteningly difficult. The passage from Milton, a favourite of Maurice Browne's long ago, was enough to show that poetry was not just meant for entertainment. When Harold tried to put down some ideas after the lecture his notes turned into a strange dream-sequence, in which his Cockney interrogator became a Satanic hero leading a great battle song. Baffled by this, he decided to put the question to about thirty authors, over twenty of whom replied, including Eliot, Pound, Ford, Graves and Flint. Their answers formed the July Chapbook. There was little agreement among them all, though; the Cockney would still have been puzzled.7 The December 1922 Chapbook consisted of the puppet play Harold had written at Watford, the only one of his plays ever to reach print. The cover was by Albert Rutherston. One Day Awake is a modern Everyman, in which a businessman meets life's realities personified. The central character is very like his author, harrassed by `questions that burn my brain', trying to run a business in which profit and ideals are at odds, fearing that being `modern' means being not only godless but also purposeless, convinced that Enemies is talking about him behind his back and that Friends is too light-hearted to understand him, and knowing that sooner or later Death will find his door. Like nearly everything else Harold wrote, the play begins much better than it ends: he knew the questions but not the answers. He offered to read One Day Awake to the Cambridge Heretics, saying it was certainly heretical enough. It gained approval from Granville-Barker and Miles Malleson, and several people enquired about producing it, including the Bookshop's former lodger, Willson Disher.8 In the end, though, its only performance seems to have been a puppet production at the Bookshop by the Model Theatre Club in 1926, when the author read the main part and Alida read the voice of Life.




224 Harold Monro

Another resolution for 1923 was to make a success of the Chapbook. Harold told readers of the last 1922 number that the magazine would enter its fifth year `with every prospect of becoming the best and most engaging periodical of its kind in England'. He wrote round to possible contributors in much the same vein (Pound replied that England was a shit house, nothing personal intended, and he would never write for the place again). The first six numbers measured up to the editor's promises, with spirited covers by Rutherston, Prentis, Ethelbert White, Paul Nash and and the young American artist, Edward McKnight Kauffer; illustrations by Nash, Jacob Kramer, Craig and even Picasso; and poetry and prose by Mew, Read, Abercrombie, Wickham, Aldington, Goldring, the Sitwells, Graves, Hardy, Iris Barry, Ford, Wolfe and many others. At what must have been a memorable Bookshop occasion on 25 January, Malleson gave a one-man reading of his angry pacifist play Black 'Ell, which had been banned during the war. On 15 February, perhaps equally memorably, Harold read The Waste Land; as with `Prufrock' in 1915, he may well have been the first person to give a public reading of Eliot's poem. Kauffer, who was in the audience, was much impressed.9 The February Chapbook, published on the same day, contained an imaginary dialogue between the editor and Eliot. The poetry of the future had at last arrived, and Harold was one of the first poets to recognise it: Those poor little people who string their disjointed ejaculations into prosaic semblances of verse ± they pale as one reads The Waste Land. They have no relation to it: yet, through it, we realise what they were trying, but have failed, to represent. In making Eliot's answers in the dialogue exasperatingly brief and unhelpful, Harold was no doubt remembering actual conversations; his personal knowledge also showed in his shrewd comment that `poetic' passages in the poem often break off with a sneer, not only as a way of mocking professional poets such as Squire but also because Eliot was afraid of strong feelings. Eliot was very pleased with the article, which he thought much more perceptive than some of the more pretentious reviews.10 Praise for the new series of the Chapbook came from Lewis, Ford, Turner, Craig and Alfred Kreymbourg among others, but sales remained obstinately at about a thousand a month, not enough to meet costs. Harold was resentful that writers whose publishing careers had begun in his pages before the war were now 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


1922 December 31: Mozart's 12th Mass at St Bartholomew's. Final scheme for Jehovah, quite certainly the best. All next year.


The shop staff kept changing, and the new employees made endless mistakes. Harold began to complain that Alida was keeping short hours; hurt, she pleaded overwork, ill health and depression. His own administrative work was erratic. He had become a poor correspondent, often answering letters months late or not at all, and then defending himself angrily when customers complained. Every now and then he would decide to clear out surplus stock, sending quantities of books to be pulped (over three-quarters of a ton went in 1922), but no reforms could stick without professional management. The shop ran at a loss throughout the twenties, its auditors regularly expostulating at absurdly high expenses, low profits and chaotic accounts. Harold tried in vain to recruit Bonamy DobreÂe as manager, and gave a trial to the novice writer, A. S. J. Tessimond, soon discovering he had what Alida darkly described as a `proclivity' which made him unsuitable. Other young men followed, some of them poets, although she disliked them all. Harold took on more and more lecturing, needing the fees. He spoke at University College, London, and Balliol College, Oxford, probably thanks to Arundel, who had found the right career for himself at last as an academic, with jobs at both colleges. Harold also went to Cambridge in March 1923, where old acquaintances ± C. K. Ogden, Edward Dent, Frank Birch, Gerald Shove and others ± gathered to meet him. In June he addressed the Heretics on `the character of the God Jehovah'. On 9 July he read at Radley, where the Warden introduced him with the unfortunate remark that it was rare for a public school to turn out a poet. Facing nearly three hundred pairs of staring eyes ± `many of us had never seen a real poet before', The Radleian said ± he was nervous and read badly, but he wrote to the magazine afterwards, inviting anyone interested to come and discuss literature, òr indeed anything else, at an obscure little haunt for which I am responsible, called The Poetry Bookshop'.11 The Bookshop was still a magnet for visitors. Harriet Monroe came to several readings in 1923, giving one herself; Harold invited her to tea in May with the Sitwells, Read, Kauffer, Graves, Flint, Cournos and Wickham. In the autumn the reading room was used for a seven-week season of puppet plays given by Arthur Wilkinson, a bearded Tolstoyan who had learned his art from Craig. Sometimes there were lectures: one in 1924, on Ànonymity', was by E. M. Forster, who * One of the illustrations was a portrait drawing of Harold by Kauffer (reproduced as the frontispiece to the present book). There are two other known portraits of Harold. One drawn by Wyndham Lewis in July 1923 was sold at auction in 1985, but I have failed to trace it further. Lewis may have made two versions. The National Portrait Gallery has a September 1923 drawing by Jacob Kramer.



sending work to other editors. In June 1923 he had to announce that the next number would appear in November to cover six months. Even this proved too optimistic. When the Chapbook appeared again, it was as a hardback annual in October 1924.*

visited Harold several times and discussed the strange life of their mutual friend, Joe Ackerley. Publishing continued, with many rhyme sheets and an annual Christmas card. Harold relied on his usual illustrators ± Nash, Kauffer, Lewis, Nevinson, Rutherston, Winzer ± as well as giving commissions to newcomers such as the Welsh poet David Jones. The Bookshop published sixteen books between 1920 and 1925, including successful anthologies by Ethel Fowler and W. H. Davies, and two children's books by Eleanor Farjeon. Economics made it impossible to produce publications like Des Imagistes, however; the only exception was Flint's third and last book, Otherworld (1920), for an old friend could not be refused, but the book made a painful loss, most copies eventually having to be sold as waste paper. When Flint brought in some more poems, Harold upset him by being discouraging. È rren in August 1923, at the invitation of Arnold Lunn the Harold went to Mu Alpine sportsman, staying at Lunn's enormous hotel in exchange for two readings to the wealthy guests. His diary anxiously records too many visits to local bars, although he assured Alida his drinking was under control. He returned home through Germany, where inflation was raging. A bed in a cheap Munich hotel cost a million marks, and a good dinner two and a half million. One night he went to a four-hour performance of TannhaÈuser, then walked through the city by moonlight. Despite the complete absence of beggars and police, he felt sure the country was on the eve of a great calamity. 1923 August 29: Fly to Zurich and spend languid day there. Paris evening 30: Paris. Ezra [Pound]. Walk about in the evening. 31: Ezra Chinese Restaurant. Everyone else away. Hateful spot. Miss Beach. Folies Bergere. September 1: Wet Morning. Back to London. Oh! 2: W/e H/S [Heathcote Street] 3: Begin old life again! Stagnation. Cup full. Drink and failure racing you to death. France is a perfidious harlot Germany is a calm house keeper. Planting forests. They used to do, and they did think of the future. We dont care now what sort of an earth we shall leave to our descendant. Mrs S. C.: I really think it must be the end of the world with this awful wireless and all these cars. M. : Well they say we're going to be burnt up: there are so many meters about. Between the feet of a stone Cupid, two doves fighting and maiming each other. I've never been fucking well drunk for a week of Sundays.



226 Harold Monro


Europe, wild with the echo of war Hooks the placards of evening papers Scrawls its wrinkle on disillusioned faces Europe, the fury, France, the vixen, Pock-marked drunken civilisation . . . No maimed soldiers or miserable unemployed or dirt ± Men with guns in street ± Colours ± A whole bottle of Erbacher for 500000 . . . A lady didn't see the good of the wind. ± Must be so disagreeable for the sea (AK) They are whispering in the corner/They are pouncing towards me/Civilisation attacking me A suggestion to publishers: silence for a year.12 Old woman to 2 other old women in street:± I don't know what's happened. I mean to say its generally the reverse:± You bugger the Coppers off ± and fuck on their corpses. How sad I am sitting a corpse among my unread books in this ± is this my room? Train saying `Windy Bore' all one's way to lecture I can't decide to be ephemeral therefore I cannot write the Epic of J as a ballad of Kipling, Chesterton, or Noyes. Lady buying Noyes: The Lady I'm buying it for, she's very poetical inclined: she likes, you know, good poetry Gangrene; Chelsea pensioners; trees decaying and falling; why not write about `Beauty'? Labour will force every house to have an aspidistra in its parlour window as an emblem. That will be the English way. When I get in bleeding company I get as pissed as [an] arse-hole, but then I can go for fucking months without having a bleeding drink. So I buggering well can, I fucking well tell you. They are all mad and give me their money wherewith to drink myself mad Red Mudie came into my house When he was warmed and fed He made a long and strong carouse Then lay down in my bed. Can't I eat up some of these pornographic experiences and swallow them into my stomach, and digest them not, but spew them out again as beauty?



Publish the best poems being written in English and no one pays the slightest attention to them. Publish F. E. Cummings [sic] and the whole press and all your friends ± Picture presented in gratitude to Radley by Mrs Bentham-Edwards: `The Flight from Sodom'

228 Harold Monro

1923 December 12: They are talking about me in the street. This is suicide? 1923 ended with the breaking of an old dream. Arundel had met an Anglican clergyman's daughter, and on the last day of the year they were married in Oxford at the Roman Catholic church of St Aloysius. So the Asconan companion, who was to have been the embodiment of earth and freedom, was finally lost, not only to the imprisoning bonds of marriage but also to religion, for Arundel had returned to his parents' faith, rejecting whatever scepticism Harold had taught him. A week later Harold wrote a poem called `Holy Matrimony': O prison church! O warder-priest! Now they who used to walk the wind of freedom Are living in your gloomy house of stone . . . He stayed for a few nights at Heathcote Street, kept Alida awake by snoring, and told her she was being nasty when she woke him up. 1924 was the year of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Harold went several times and was horrified. The future he had once eagerly looked forward to seemed likely to be an industrial nightmare, with most of the earth built over and the few remaining beauty spots preserved for coachloads of tourists. He had prophesied the coming dawn before the war; now he wrote a poem, `Dream Exhibition of a Final World', a vision reminiscent of the early Wells at his most pessimistic, opening with a dawn controlled by a crane, a mechanical God. The leaves of the last tiny forest rustle in artificial winds, and the last big animals are preserved in cages, each lectured on continuously by an expert. In a special cage There lives, walking up and down, in tweed, with a stick of rarest ash-plant, Murmuring, making a note, or sipping beer from a tankard, (Gloated on by the crowd), Rarer than lion, or granite, the last, last, Nature Poet. Further on is a huge arena where the sport of war is played with the latest weapons and enormous casualties. If Harold had lost faith in the future, Alida had almost ceased to believe in what she called `the illusion of Devonshire Street'. She decamped to the country for 6 months in April 1924 on doctor's advice, taking a cottage at Sidlesham 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


He started a `club' for his young companions, but when he let them in at night they found him drunk, so they lured him out to pubs and Turkish Baths. In theory evenings were the time for writing his epic, so he had a blind fitted to prevent the gang from seeing when his light was on.

Common, near Chichester. A year later she and Harold took a long lease on another Sidlesham house, so that she could live there every summer and make frequent winter visits. They paid the rent by letting the Heathcote Street house in summer, and by selling the Villa des Oliviers and, at long last, the mill house at Ascona. Alida was as happy at Long Farm as she could ever hope to be anywhere, walking her dogs in the fields, watching birds, writing a little poetry and working through ledgers brought down from the shop. It may be evidence of an easier relationship that before and after her rural break in 1924 she and her husband were hosts together at Devonshire Street, possibly for the first time. Her presence made it possible to invite married couples and women on their own: the guest lists include the Eliots, the Sassoons, the Nashes, the Reads, the Mallesons, Eva Gore-Booth, Iris Barry, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Grace Lovat Fraser and even, surprisingly, Mr and Mrs Alfred Noyes. Harold still felt a prisoner as a married man, `fettered, manacled, enslaved', as he wrote in an unpublished poem, but he had to acknowledge he was grateful; even if Alida were to release him, he would return like a tame bird to her shoulder. She was sure that his relationship with her was good for him, insisting that his depressions were only caused by drink. It was at Sidlesham that she first saw him completely helpless, when he arrived sitting on the floor of a taxi. `He's paralytic', said the charwoman, as the driver heaved him into the house like a sack of coal. After such events he would seem to remember nothing of what had occurred. She begged him to take a cure, but he remained obstinate, unwilling to give up one sort of dependency for another. In January 1925 he accompanied his mother to Menton on what was to be the last of her many visits to the Riviera. Sophia was getting old. Harold listened to the ominous sea, imagining it clawing its way to the window, then remembered Alida: I lay my body on the bed, And cross my arms, and think of death, And think, nine hundred miles away, You draw calm breath. At last, imagination through That distance reaches out to you.13

The fortieth Chapbook appeared in October 1925, published by Cape for the Bookshop. Like its immediate predecessor it was a hardback annual produced to high standards, with contributions from many well-known writers and artists. Harold had worked hard on it for months, with help from Prentis, hoping the association with Cape would put the enterprise on a sound footing. The 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd




230 Harold Monro

Àrches': wood engraving by Paul Nash for a projected book of Harold's poems (The Chapbook, October 1925)


frontispiece was a charming drawing of the Bookshop by Charles Ginner (reproduced on p. 2 above), and among the many other illustrations were two woodcuts by Paul Nash, intended as part of a set for a selection of Harold's poems (reproduced on pp. 67 and 230). One of the Nash pictures showed the sinister, voracious chamber of `Coronilla`, a design the artist subsequently developed into a painting.14 The final item in the Chapbook was an exchange of letters between the editor and Marsh, in which the former proposed a sixth Georgian Poetry to `round off the Series by suggesting new directions'. Marsh replied that the new directions were not to his own taste, and he would not care to sponsor a selection made by someone else. The published version of Harold's letter omits not only the names of new poets he thought Marsh should consider ± Eliot, Edwin Muir, Sacheverell Sitwell, Roy Campbell ± but also a wonderfully tactless suggestion that the selection should be made by À. K. (an individual of most clear and careful judgement)', who would draw up a scheme and `submit it to you, or not, as you like'. After that, as Marsh said in his autobiography, Georgian Poetry was `hushed in grim repose'.* The decision meant a serious loss of trade for the Bookshop (Harold had been furious in the previous year when Squire had brought out an inferior anthology aimed at the Georgian market). Alida did not give up the idea of a sixth volume. The 1925 Chapbook cannot have sold well, excellent though it was of its kind, and it brought Harold's editorial career to an end. It also commemorated several other endings. Georgian Poetry, the most famous anthology of the century and the Bookshop's best-selling publication, was dead. The projected volume of Harold's poems with Nash illustrations was never to appear. And Ginner's drawing of 35 Devonshire Street was a sad reminder that the lease on the Poetry House had less than a year to run. The end of 1925 might have been a good moment for Harold himself to round off his work as a bookseller and seek new directions. But he did not take the chance, if chance there was.

* Marsh's letters to Harold show that he did not realise who À. K.' was, having no doubt got used to thinking of her as Mrs Monro. He redrafted his letter of refusal before it was published to make it as courteous as possible, telling Harold he hated having to refuse him anything.15




14

What have I done that I should be alive? O, can I not forget that I am living? How shall I reconcile the two conditions: Living, and yet ± to die? (`Living') On one of his good days in the late twenties, Harold Monro might still have seemed a successful, even an enviable man. Internationally famous for his work for poetry, he was friendly with many of the leading personalities in contemporary literature and theatre. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and on the councils of the Stage Society and the English Verse Speaking Association.1 He and Alida were regarded as two of the finest verse readers in the country, and they gave several broadcasts. He was still in considerable demand as a lecturer, with engagements in Aberdeen, Brighton, Liverpool, Hull and many points in between. But the good days became fewer with every year that passed. In the spring of 1926 his eyesight suddenly deteriorated, a result of nicotine damage to the optic nerve after a sinus operation. He took a cure at Champneys, the new health resort, but then, `too soon', spent a weekend with Aldington. This may have been the occasion described in Aldington's autobiography. Harold and I were old friends, and I knew that he was one of those afflicted people who for their own sakes ought to be rigid teetotallers. . . . up to a certain point wine seemed to have no effect on him at all, and then at a quite indeterminate moment another half-glass or even a sip would make him hopelessly drunk. Aldington cautiously provided one small bottle of Chianti for supper, but his guest had arrived already well oiled. Harold drank one glass, consumed another `with horrid avidity', 232 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Great Russell Street 1926±8

and in a second my old friend had become a feckless and rather unpleasant lunatic. I promptly called for coffee; but before it was ready, Harold insisted on going for a walk, and became violent when I tried to persuade him out of it. So for a walk we went, . . . He kept embracing and kissing tree trunks, and telling me how much he loved trees. Of course, I knew all Georgian poets love trees, but I thought he should not have been so ostentatious about it. Then, unfortunately while it was still light, he insisted on returning, appearing to get more instead of less drunk at every step. He stumbled about so alarmingly that I took his arm, and together we lurched back, Harold talking very loudly and incoherently, past all the cottagers sitting at their front doors . . . Finally I got Harold back to the cottage intact, and made him drink strong coffee. It seemed to have the same effect on him as brandy on other men. He kept insisting that he must go into the garden and `laugh at the stars,' which I recognised as another disquieting Georgian symptom. While laughing at the stars he tripped over backwards, and knocked his head on the flints bordering the path. For a moment I thought he'd killed himself, and wondered how I should explain his corpse to the police. But no, he was totally unharmed; and after a lot more silly pranks eventually agreed to go to bed. Aldington was noisily stropping his razor later that evening when he heard a crash from Harold's room. I went and opened his door and found him lying on his back in a strange confusion of ill-adjusted pyjamas. He stared at me without recognition, and said fiercely: `Who are you? What are you doing here?' Ì'm Richard,' I said, rather crossly. `What the devil are you doing on the floor?' He ignored this. `Where's that motor-bicycle?' he demanded angrily. `Who are they? What are they doing here?' Aldington dumped his guest back into bed. Next morning Harold àppeared trim and self-possessed', as though nothing had happened.2 Alida found more and more excuses to stay out of London. In the spring and summer of 1926 the Heathcote Street house was let to Anna Wickham, who had finally left her husband; she was grateful for the refuge, instructing her young sons to take good care of the goldfish, although she continued to dislike Alida (`Your woman breeds dogs/Like an old ham/Breeds maggots', she wrote in a little poem to Harold). Alida was marooned at Sidlesham by the General Strike that spring, feeling scant sympathy for the strikers, but in June, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Great Russell Street 1926±8 233

234 Harold Monro

The lease on 35 Devonshire Street had almost completed its fourteen years. Harold moved the Bookshop to 38 Great Russell Street during the summer, for a few weeks conducting business at both addresses. The many press reports of the move assumed that the change signified growing prosperity, and the new house certainly seemed a great improvement, being at the end of a tall terrace almost opposite the gates of the British Museum, with windows to Great Russell Street in front and Willoughby Street at the side. There was much more space in the shop, and a room in the single-storey rear extension could seat an audience of a hundred or so for readings. Doors in Willoughby Street gave access to the reading room and to three upstairs flats, one for Harold and two for longterm tenants, whose rent would be a useful income. Romney Green's shelves and furniture were brought from Devonshire Street, and specimens of the famous rhyme sheets, now selling upwards of 20,000 a year, were hung in the windows, so something of the old shop's rustic, eighteenth-century flavour was preserved, but the decorations were by Kauffer in the latest Art Deco style: bright blue woodwork and primrose-yellow walls for the shop, purple and pink for the reading room, red for the external window frames, and a striking modern design for the old signboard (Plate 40). Even the writing paper was new, some blue, some yellow, with a drawing based on the signboard at the top. The prominent site seemed likely to draw in plenty of passers-by, so Harold announced that he would be catering for general ìntelligent' interests as well as specialising in poetry. Promising though the new house seemed, ill-luck haunted it from the start. The Poet Laureate declined to perform the opening ceremony, being averse to all such public functions. Eliot promised to officiate instead, but he took Vivien for a summer health-cure in France, where she became so unwell that he felt he had to stay with her. Ì am absolutely relying on you', Harold wrote in alarm on 6 September. Eliot suggested a postponement, offering to pay for the cost of new invitations, but Harold replied that several hundred had already been sent out. Eliot wired back Àbsolutely impossible to return in time grievously distressed if postponement impossible can I send something to be read'.3 On top of this came news that Harold's mother had been taken seriously ill. The shop was declared open on 30 September 1926 by Thomas Sturge Moore, a senior figure respected by both traditionalists and moderns but hardly a celebrity. Reporters spotted Arnold Bennett, May Sinclair, Davies, Drinkwater and Gonoske Komai among the numerous guests. Harold had to announce that the shop's external appearance had displeased the landlord, the Duke of Bedford: the hanging sign would have to be put flat against the wall, and the red windows restored to conventional black. No doubt this ducal interference was 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


in a rare stroke of luck, she won a little car in a raffle and ceased to be dependent on trains.


Harold sadly handed over the keys of the old Poetry House on 9 October. We were not wrong, believing that it cared; When we had watched it gradually bared Of furniture, I, going back alone, Heard all its rafters moan. (`The Empty House') But 35 Devonshire Street was put to good use. Mrs Chesterton, widow of G. K. Chesterton's brother Cecil, had recently spent a few weeks living rough on the London streets to experience the plight of homeless women. She rallied support among literary people, bought the old house and converted it into a hostel, installing a laundry and forty-five iron bedsteads (Plate 38). Cecil House was opened on 28 March 1927, not by the Lord Mayor in his coach as the street had been confidently expecting, but by the Mayor of Holborn. Chesterton, John Galsworthy and Shaw made speeches. Stacy Aumonier said that perhaps the candles at the poetry readings had lit dark places in the human mind: a poet's dream had come true. The new establishment was certainly a charity very much in the Monro tradition.5 Just before Cecil House opened, the new shop in Great Russell Street had to close. This sudden collapse seems to have resulted from the death of Harold's mother on 13 October 1926. Having helped to keep her son's enterprises afloat ever since 1912 by advancing capital whenever he was in serious need of it, Sophia had decided to leave her remaining money in trust for her grandson Nigel. Harold would get the income for life, but it would not be nearly enough to cover his commitments. He was deeply upset, both by his mother's death and by the provisions of her will. She had been a constant source of affection and comfort, despite her incessant worrying and dismally predictable conversation, but in the end she had put her grandson first, seeing more clearly than his parents had ever done that life was going to be hard for him. Harold seems to have discovered Sophia's intentions shortly before her death. He sent out a brochure in September, inviting supporters to buy shares in the new shop and offering two directorships at £2000 each. The result was negligible, perhaps because people knew too much about his habits to risk investing.6 Letting property was the only solution. Alida rented out every possible room at 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


booed by Harold's listeners, among whom were many young people, some wearing outlandishly modern clothes. In the evening `the beautiful Alida Klemantaski' gave the first reading in the new room, `with a diction and sensitivity rarely heard on any stage', choosing work by poets who had been associated with the Bookshop.4

Letterhead, 1927±35, with a design by E. McKnight Kauffer

Heathcote Street for the winter, and even gave up the Sidlesham cottage, while Harold arranged to let the front premises at Great Russell Street to the publishers Kegan Paul. The shop would have to be moved into the reading room at the back. Of all his dark times this must have been one of the worst. His mother's death, her unwitting betrayal of his hopes, and the prospect of a humiliating move only six months after the shop had opened in its proud new home all seemed too much to bear. His eyesight had worsened so much that he thought he was going blind, and no amount of cures or dieting seemed able to reduce his chronic digestive pains. He began to talk of dying. On 12 March 1927 he and Alida went to Switzerland, while builders made the necessary alterations at Great Russell Street. He showed her Locarno and Lake Geneva, remembering his old life, when there had been a future worth living for. She loved the landscape and him, for he remained sober, but after a week she had to return to London to oversee the final stages of the move, reluctantly leaving him in Geneva for a long course of eye treatment. He hired someone to read poetry to him, went to concerts, revisited La LignieÁre, and found a few old friends and perhaps some peace of mind. Alida thus dealt single-handedly with an upheaval which proved even more unpleasant than she had expected, but the back room was soon ready for business (the first book sold was entitled Quo Vadimus). It seems from her letters that the Willoughby Street door led through a small lobby into the front half of the room, where Romney's big table faced customers as of old and two of his settles still invited lingering. Two large bookcases were full of poetry; smaller ones contained drama and Bookshop publications. Three low cases for fiction, second-hand and children's books were aligned with a gas stove as a room divider; behind these were a cupboard for first editions, and two tables, one for Alida and one for what she called her Sleeping Partner. Two new designs were ordered for the shop's writing-paper, one showing Kauffer's drawing, the other an old picture of a cottage by Fraser, as though to illustrate Harold's



236 Harold Monro

Letterhead, c. 1927±35, with a design by Claud Lovat Fraser

continuing unbiased support for both Modernist and what had once been called Georgian writing. Alida had been pessimistic about Great Russell Street from the beginning, although she had not guessed how bad things might become. By April there was only £29 in the bank. Bills kept coming in, but she could only pay creditors who threatened. She cut the staff to its 1918 level, employing only an errand boy and a secretary. There was nowhere for stock except a damp cellar, and nowhere for readings except Harold's bedroom. He had gone away with the key, but she had his door forced open and kept the tradition of Thursday readings going.* Humbert Wolfe visited Harold in Geneva, perhaps bringing copies of a new booklet in the sixpenny Augustan Books of English Poetry series. This was a selection of Harold's own poems, chosen and introduced by Wolfe, who had suggested the idea to the publishers. The series editor had been doubtful, fearing that Harold was known only as a Georgian who wrote about cats and dogs, but Wolfe had made a sympathetic choice, omitting the animal poems in favour of more substantial work; he had spent an evening at the Bookshop consulting with Harold, who had been too drunk to remember anything, and Alida, who had recommended ruthless cuts.7 While Harold was abroad Alida was invited to a PEN Club dinner in honour of James Joyce. She found the occasion absurd, as she told Harold. `Honest John' Drinkwater made a five-minute speech from the chair, sounding more like a bishop than ever and admitting that he had never read Ulysses. Joyce said twelve words in reply. Alida sat near Galsworthy, whom she thought à prize prig and a dough-like bore'. Joyce himself, à small sad looking man with a high iron-grey head and tiny moustache . . . looked as if he might burst into tears at any moment'. She had heard he was nearly blind, but noticed that he read the wine-list without difficulty.

* A room at the back of the adjoining house was later used for readings, the Bedford Estate having allowed a door to be made in the party wall.




Early in May Charlotte Mew came into the shop, to say that her beloved sister, Anne, was mortally ill. Alida visited the sisters the next day and was much moved, not only by the sight of Anne, who looked like a corpse already, but also by Charlotte's grief. Anne lingered on for another six weeks; when she died, Charlotte's spirit seemed to die too. Harold was doing his bit for the shop's finances by dictating short stories and sending them home. They weren't very good, but Alida loyally submitted them to editors; some may have reached print. He managed to stay off alcohol and tobacco for two months. When his treatment ended he went across the lake for a holiday at Thonon, where Alida may have joined him before his return home in August. His eyes had not improved. Back in London, with no editorial work and no paid assistants, he began serving regularly in the shop for the first time. Young hopefuls newly arrived in town often made straight for the Bookshop, as Walter Allen did from the train at Euston: Monro was lolling in a swivel-chair, reading, his feet on the desk in front of him. There seemed yards and yards of him. The shop was empty, and he did not look up when I entered or address a single word to me while I was there. He was the first poet I had set eyes on in the flesh and I recognised him from press photographs. He seemed prodigiously tall, wore horn-rimmed spectacles and had a clipped military moustache; he had been an officer in the Army during the war and in appearance at least was a typical guardee. . . . As I looked round the shop, it dawned on me that I hadn't realised there was so much poetry in existence. Allen bought a little book of Aiken's poems, Harold taking the money without looking up. The young Geoffrey Grigson was treated a little better: `waste all that money on Doughty,' said Monro, putting the volumes of The Dawn in Britain back on a high shelf and making me, with his habitual frown of impatience, buy Grace After Meat by John Crowe Ransom, introduced by Robert Graves, at a cost of 4s. 6d. instead of 35s. or so. Occasionally Harold could be charming, but all too often he seemed, as Hermon Ould remembered, à saturnine and forbidding person, . . . many poetry lovers . . . hesitated to visit his shop because they could not face the atmosphere of oppressive gloom which [his] heavy and dour personality unwittingly created'.8 Ould himself soon learned not to hesitate; as General Secretary of the 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


238 Harold Monro

PEN Club, with offices in Great Russell Street, he saw Harold often, becoming one of his most considerate and understanding friends. One reason for Harold's surliness was that no patron had come forward. He probably never knew that in September 1927 Virginia Woolf and Vita SackvilleWest plotted to marry him off to Lady Dorothy Wellesley, who was talking of giving £200 a year to the cause of poetry. Lady Dorothy was soon put off by his earnestness and drunkenness, according to Woolf's diary.9 News of Harold's second marriage may not have reached the remoter parts of Bloomsbury, but his drinking was probably general gossip, however much he tried to keep it secret. Somebody is whispering on the stair. What are those words half spoken, half drawn back? Whence are those muffled words, some red, some black? Who is whispering? Who is there? (`Rumour')

On 19 October 1927 Harold had lunch with Maurice Browne, who was back in London for the first time since 1914. The familiar pattern of Maurice's life had repeated itself in America: quarrels, bad management, and financial crises had finished his Little Theatre in 1918, after which he had kept alive by running a repertory company and teaching drama; he had divorced, remarried, had a son, separated again, and ended up in a San Francisco slum with his life in ruins. So he had fled, just as he had done twenty years before from the Samurai Press, taking refuge in London with his sister Dorothy. He and Harold had much to talk about, most of it depressing; both of them seemed to be in a hopeless personal situation, while family affairs were scarcely better. Dorothy was still `Mrs Monro', having never married Phillips after all, although by 1927 she may have found a new partner, an adventurer named George Hill, whom she was to marry a year later. She was still running up debts. Harold hated her now. He used to tell stories of how they would occasionally meet by accident, start talking with all their old vivacity, and then suddenly break off, realising how intensely each had come to detest the other. She is referred to as `the vixen woman' in his poem `Natural History', and in one of his account books. He told Maurice there could be no possibility of any kind of reconciliation. Nigel Monro must have been badly affected by his parents' mutual loathing, all the more so because he could no longer turn to his grandmother. After leaving school at the end of 1923, he had opted for a traditional family profession by becoming a medical student at St Thomas' Hospital, but he seems to have neglected his studies for long periods. He tried to make friends with Alida, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



who had him to supper in 1927 and thought him `much improved'. As she had long foreseen, though, the spoiled boy had grown into a sadly insecure young man. Later in the year he turned up on her doorstep asking for money, having incurred a first gambling debt, according to a note made by his father. Sometimes he would arrive at the Bookshop late at night demanding a bed, perhaps too drunk to return to his lodgings. The family held a conference about him early in 1928 at Fred Monro's office; Harold tried to speak plainly about Dorothy's irresponsibility, and she no doubt responded in kind, while her brother tried to mediate, anxious for harmony and for Nigel's future. If Maurice was worried about Nigel, he soon had cause to be even more worried about Harold, whom he found alarmingly drunk one evening in January 1928. He wrote to Alida offering help, unfortunately addressing the envelope to `Mrs H. E. Monro' at the Bookshop, with the result that Harold opened the letter by mistake and was appalled: `you must not write to AK like that. She has never been ``Mrs H. E.'' . . . If I had drunk a plentiful quantity the evening we met, it can have nothing to do with her. . . . The whole basis of understanding between AK and me is non-interference with each other'. Maurice had to learn what other friends had already discovered, that any attempt to intervene between Harold and his `strange companion' would be met with resistance and denial. Harold was in bed for the first fortnight of February with what was said to be a poisoned leg. Maurice gave a reading on the 9th. Alida moved into a new cottage, Crablands at Selsey, having been unable to bear life without somewhere to retreat to. When her husband complained at the expense of keeping three houses, she said she had to be able to get away when he misbehaved. On the 23rd she went to see Charlotte Mew, who gave her a treasured Hardy manuscript as though in farewell. Next day Charlotte drank half a bottle of disinfectant and died in slow agony. `First day of spring. Long walk in London', Harold wrote in his diary on the 25th, unaware of what had happened. He kept up a busy social life, in spite of illness and near-blindness. His diary for March 1928 records meals with Maurice, Prentis, Wolfe, the Rothensteins, Leo Charlton, Wilkinson the puppeteer and others; tea with Lady Ottoline; a row with a tenant; a party at the Bookshop on his birthday; a reading of Flecker; a film with Flint; a play and two art exhibitions; lectures at Imperial College and Pontypool; lunch at the Favil Press to discuss new Christmas cards for the shop; a meeting with Dr Johnson, the physician in charge of Brooke House, the family-owned asylum (Harold was now a trustee, and the board met several times at the shop); a weekend at Heathcote Street; and a Sunday visit to the Temple Church, where Ould had started taking him to hear the choir. Among his other March engagements was a lunch with the Criterion Club, the support group for Eliot's quarterly, The Criterion. Harold had been a chief adviser 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


240 Harold Monro

from the beginning in 1922; when he lost his own periodical at the end of 1925, he transferred his loyalty to Eliot's, becoming the Club's principal organiser and host. In August 1926, he dined with Read, DobreÂe and Flint to make some new proposals, apparently at Eliot's request. The four recommended monthly publication, a scheme of contents very similar to that of the old Poetry and Drama, and two meetings a month for àssociate editors', one for business at the editor's office, to be followed by dinner at a restaurant, and the other at the restaurant with guests, with an adjournment afterwards to the Bookshop or elsewhere.10 These suggestions were typical of Harold; Eliot seems to have accepted most of them, although the social programme sometimes lapsed when he or others were away. Records of the Club's activities seem to be scanty, but Harold's diaries note the dates of many of its meetings. Occasionally he took a guest, Kauffer in 1926, for instance, or Sturge Moore in 1930. A surviving invitation to the Club's `Fifth Epiphany Dinner' on 2 January 1929 asks for replies to be sent to him, and he is named as `Cellarman' in a note to Aiken announcing that the recipient has been elected to the Ùnited Bolovian Coprophilic and Deipnosophist Societies', a typical specimen of Eliotic humour. According to DobreÂe the post-prandial gatherings in Harold's flat eventually took the place of the dinners themselves, becoming the Club's most fruitful times for discussing the magazine and its contents, although Harold's seriousness was sometimes at odds with the prevailing hilarity. Eliot once stopped a conversation about religion by saying the only things he cared for were dancing and brandy. Ò Tom! You mustn't say things like that!' Harold exclaimed, horrified.11 For him, after all, it had been a central Utopian principle for many years that reformers should meet regularly for purposeful debate; although the reality was often far from the ideal, the Criterion Club was a replacement for the 1907±8 Samurai group, or that informal `Guild' of poets which he had talked of founding with the Poetry House in 1912. Eliot's aim in forming the Club had been to strengthen his periodical and to gather disciples who would assist his bid to become the leader of the new poetry. With their help, he succeeded where Pound had failed, so that by the late twenties he was recognised as the most important critic and poet of the day. His letters, published and unpublished, show that he felt much indebted to Harold, who took the role of enabler for him as for so many others. Harold never liked to back one poet or group against the rest, but he was sure that Eliot had to be supported, arguing that the `central tendencies' of modern poetry, as represented by Eliot, Pound, Flint and Aldington, were `strong and logical'. He had been delighted to publish three short poems by Eliot in the 1924 Chapbook, despite their author's fastidious refusal to share a page with anyone else, and greatly disappointed when Eliot was too ill and busy to write anything for the 1925 number.12 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd



Eliot was much too cautious to let himself be seen as a Bookshop poet, for that might have led some people to imagine he approved of the Georgians, but he often visited Great Russell Street from his nearby office in Russell Square, meeting Harold for lunch to discuss Criterion matters or literature in general. Sometimes he was even persuaded to read or lecture at the shop, much though he disliked public speaking. When Fletcher heard him talk on Whitman and Tennyson there early in 1928 and wrote to congratulate him, Eliot replied that it had been a poor performance but done for Harold's sake: if Harold had been pleased, nothing else mattered.13 It was probably thanks to Eliot, as a director of the publishers Faber and Gwyer, that two of Harold's poems, `The Winter Solstice' in 1928 and Èlm Angel' in 1930, appeared in the prestigious Faber series, Ariel Poems, each printed as a two-page booklet with illustrations by, respectively, David Jones and Eric Ravilious. Harold valued these signs of recognition; underneath his draft of `The Winter Solstice' he had written, Ì believe I may really have written a poem for the Ariel Poems. (Oh!) but we shall see tomorrow'. When it was published, Eliot asked him for a signed copy. That Harold contributed comparatively rarely to The Criterion seems to have been more his fault than the editor's. In May 1923, for instance, Eliot asked for an article on Wordsworth, but Harold took over a year to write it; when Eliot begged him for a promised second instalment he declined, saying he had become rather bored with the subject. His longest contribution, in September 1928, was a strange description of a dream about Basil Watt and a woman, presumably Alida, who compete with each other in trying to get him to descend a dangerous cliff. Whether the cliff represents drink or sexuality, and why the two helpers change places at the end, one above and one on the beach below, is not explained; Harold probably had no answers, but he wrote down the dream with his usual scrupulous accuracy. In its strange combination of matter-of-fact style and bizarre content, À True Adventure at Dawn' is probably his best prose work, painfully honest yet reticent, vivid yet perplexing and perplexed. Presumably Eliot liked it. Harold's last collection of poems, The Earth for Sale, was published from the Bookshop on 24 May 1928. Alida came up from the country to give a celebratory reading. Not that the book lent itself to celebration. Written at intervals during the previous six years, most of the poems were about the `two conditions:/Living, and yet ± to die': the brain (he rarely used the word `soul' now), trapped in the body, separated by silence and great distance, strives to make contact with another being before death intervenes. But I can only hear Far off the beating of your lonely heart, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


242 Harold Monro


I cannot find a way Through love and through; I cannot reach beyond Body, to you. When you or I must go Down evermore, There'll be no more to say ± But a locked door. (`Midnight Lamentation') The speech rhythms in these poems were achieved with great care. He always made Alida read his new work aloud; if she stumbled, he altered the line. He wrote to be heard, not read. Critics of his poetry from Eliot onward have usually agreed that it expresses the consciousness of a tormented individual, not the spirit of an age. Yet the closing poems in The Earth for Sale are public statements. The stark change from the social optimism of Before Dawn in 1911 to the almost unrelieved pessimism of the 1928 book was a result of the Great War and its aftermath, as well as of private experience. Although Harold was still a Nietzschean idealist, believing that people should be true to the earth, his old dreams of Samurai Supermen living in harmony with their environment had been overwhelmed by visions of what war, industry and teeming populations could do to the planet. The earth was being `reckoned up for sale', its trees and wildlife annihilated. In the end humanity Exceeding death ten million times by birth, Will halt (bewildered, bored), And then may droop and dwindle like an autumn weed. How shall we meet that moment when we know There is no room to grow; We, conscious, and with lonely startled eyes Glaring upon ourselves, and with no Lord To pray to: judged, without appeal, What shall we feel? (`The Earth for Sale')



While in between us flow the hurrying waves. A deathly wind is blowing us apart; Lovers are not more foreign in their graves. (`Silence Between')

He was ahead of his time as a pessimist, just as he had been as an optimist. He explained in a brief note that one poem in the new book, `God of the World', was a condensed version of an epic he had been working on for some fifteen years. After what had in fact been nearer nineteen years of sporadic but sometimes feverish labour, coupled with intensive reading, `The Death of Jehovah' had finally been reduced to a three-page summary. Here and there among his papers one finds records of his struggle: At last in a dream of the night came the vision to me of my great poem, and I knew I was chosen for the supreme revelation. At last it was all composed in clarity. I wandered in the garden, and was taunted by Wells. He said my little poems would pass on like Gibson's for a few years, or like less, and would drift out as the thinnest smoke. And I grew so sad I could hardly stand. And suddenly saw a vision of the million poetasters ± But as I gazed on the dark wet bushes, my poem grew like a great dawn in my spirit.14 None of his many attempts at the poem seems to have been completed. Most of the surviving manuscripts are work for the first few books, which were to have told how the early tribes made gods for themselves, and how Jehovah became the supreme poet-created deity. The young Jehovah would have been portrayed with some sympathy as a god in close touch with his people, but once elevated to heaven he would have become a tyrant, resentful of Jesus, the perfect Wellsian socialist. On a visit to earth he was to have toured America and Palestine as a wealthy Jewish merchant, making profits from the world war. Returning to heaven he would find the place in ruins and retreat to earth, ending up as a ragged Jew in Whitechapel, maybe with a bright future as an armaments supplier in another war. (The apparent anti-Semitism of this was typical of its period, but only skin-deep; the poem would have been much more hostile towards priests, popes and generals.) There had never been much chance of completing so vast an undertaking. It had grown out of Harold's ± and Maurice's ± youthful belief that writing an epic for the new age was a high public duty, a means of conveying much-needed teaching to the world. Such a poem would overthrow notions of divine authority, imperialism, commercial profit and military conquest, to prepare the way for the Wellsian world-republic and the Samurai. One major difficulty, for Harold the would-be epic poet as for Wells the novelist, was that ideas had to be expressed as narrative. Harold could draw on ancient legend to start with, but as the story reached modern times he had to begin inventing an entirely new myth, a task that would have been immense even before 1914, when his ideals were more or less intact.



244 Harold Monro

Perhaps he had never really believed in `The Death of Jehovah'. It had always been an excessively bookish project, weighed down with ideas and research; its only strongly-felt element had been, perversely, his hatred for its subject. If there was a psychological origin for what Herbert Palmer once called his 'antiGod complex',15 his bitter resentment against a bullying father-god who is no true father, it may have had to do with the early death of his own father and with half-buried memories of his overbearing uncle, the childless Russell Monro. Drafts of the epic never resolved the problem of Jesus, who could hardly have been Son to such a Father. If Christianity was the religion of Jesus the supreme Utopian comrade, rather than of Jehovah, it might still be worth thinking about: Harold even started going to church again in his last years, albeit with much scepticism. That he had given up on his epic after so much labour suggests he was beginning to give up on life itself. As always, though, his depressions continued to alternate with bursts of activity. He spent most of July and August 1928 travelling by car in eastern Europe, an expedition apparently arranged on the spur of the moment by people he hardly knew. He tried to write a play about the journey. His London social life and shop duties went on unabated. Robert Frost revisited the Bookshop, giving an entertaining reading on 18 October, and Eliot came to dinner next day to meet him. At the end of the year Harold scored his most spectacular success as an enabler. He attended the first of two Stage Society performances of a new war play on 9 December. That night Maurice was woken by the telephone: `Harold Monro's voice announced, hazily, that he had just returned from a wonderful, a perfectly wonderful, play; it was the most wonderful play ever written; I must put it on at once; it was a wonderful play'. Harold rang again next morning, promising that he had been sober. So Maurice sought out the play's author, R. C. Sheriff, read the script, and knew Harold had been right. He found backers and a cast, and on 21 January 1929 Journey's End opened at the Savoy. Within a year Maurice Browne Ltd had bought two London theatres, and Maurice was, in his own words, `the most powerful theatrical magnate in the English-speaking world', with a chauffeur, a grand office in St James's, and fame and wealth beyond his wildest dreams.16




15

His lost eyes lean to find and read the number. Follows his knuckled rap, and hesitating curse. He cannot wake himself; he may not slumber; While on the long white wall across the road Drives the thin outline of a dwindling hearse. (`Bitter Sanctuary') Perhaps it was not coincidence that Harold finally gave way to alcohol in the early months of 1929, the time of Maurice's triumph. Once again their roles had been reversed: in the past, when Harold had seemed wealthy, Maurice had begged for loans; now Harold was desperate, and Maurice was the obvious patron to turn to. Yet Harold could not bring himself to ask for much more than the repayment of an old loan. He felt helpless and ashamed, trapped by the shop, Alida's invincible love, and the relentless burden of annual payments to Dorothy, as though the great ideals of his past life had combined to form a prison. The one door which always opened to his knocking was drink, but that was only a darker captivity. `There was no way out', as Eliot said of him later. `There never is'.1 One evening at the Fitzroy in Charlotte Street, a pub favoured by bohemia, the young poet William Plomer was being introduced to literary people. `There's Harold Monro,' said one of his contemporaries, and then called out to him in a mocking voice, `Monro! Miaow, miaow!' Monro turned, looking displeased, and said in a serious tone: `That's a good poem, Z. That's a good poem.' Everyone knew `Milk for the Cat'. Plomer had read the more recent poems too, thinking they sounded like the voice of someone ìmmured and trying to get out'.2 246 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


No Way Out 1929±32

Since the move to Great Russell Street Harold had become a regular at the Fitzroy ± or Kleinfeldt's, as it was called after its proprietor ± and at the Plough in Museum Street near the Bookshop. The Plough closed an hour later than the Fitzroy, so the migrating drinkers seem to have got into the habit of calling for him as they passed his door; he hated them for playing on his weakness, but he could not resist. Some of them were interesting people, such as the gay journalist, Michael Davidson, who remembered him as a `charming drunk', and the hard-drinking artist, Nina Hamnett (`N Hamnett 6 draw me', Harold wrote in his diary in May 1928, but the portrait has not survived).3 Once the intellectuals had started him drinking, he would drift into the familiar round of street-cruising, all-night coffee-stalls and Turkish Baths, sometimes ending up at the Nag's Head in Covent Garden, where the pubs were allowed to open at five in the morning for the benefit of the costermongers. The rough trade knew he was an easy touch for money, and his quick temper, fired by whisky, made him an amusing target for baiting. Sometimes he got into fights. It seems from brief notes in his diary that he started taking Nigel out drinking with him, Dorothy becoming so alarmed that she sent George Hill to watch the shop; fortunately Harold saw the spy, and refused to unlock the door when Nigel next rang the bell. Alida knew little about her husband's nocturnal activities, but the aftereffects were obvious. Having never fully confided in anyone except her old friend Mrs Rowat, she surprised herself in February 1929 by talking openly to Ottoline Morrell, who had a knack of attracting secrets. Alida felt guilty afterwards, and that night as if in proof there was àn awful orgy' at the shop. Ottoline soon heard more, however, as she was now living nearby in Gower Street; she often called in for a chat on her way to Cecil House, where she was a keen voluntary helper.4 On the morning of 2 March she arrived to find Alida distraught; Harold was lying on the floor of his room, his face black with blood and several of his false or real teeth broken. He had been dumped there by rent boys, who had brought him home and robbed him after an àffair', as he later called it, at the Plough. There were probably other such incidents, but this seems to have been the worst. Alida summoned a doctor, who was distressingly casual, having no doubt seen many similar cases; he recommended hourly mouth washes, warning her to report any signs of delirium tremens, although she had no idea what to look for. As usual Harold tried to pretend nothing had happened; his diary only mentions an àccident' and visits to a dentist. He must have been appalled all the same, not only at himself but also at Alida's reaction: she fled to Selsey as soon as she safely could, remaining there for several weeks, feeling that the ideals for which she had sacrificed her young life were being horribly betrayed. When she returned, he promised reform yet again. She encouraged him to 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


No Way Out 1929±32 247

248 Harold Monro

1929 March 26: Ackerley lunch PB/Lloyd George at Albert Hall 27: Toynbee Hall Lecture (Lascelles) ± Dine ? 28: De la Mare reads and supper at PB April 8: Broke the RULE on purpose as a test Alida begged him to revive his half-forgotten custom of staying with her in the country at weekends. `Went successfully by 3.20', he noted one Saturday, but on another, `Rang her from Fitzroy 9.45 but didn't go'. The cottage had no phone, so she had to be summoned to the embarrassingly audible one in the village pub, her heart pounding for fear of what she might discover. She dared not interfere too much, knowing he could be violent when drunk and angry, but she could not refrain from preaching. The more he tried to listen, the more his inner self demanded freedom. Ezra Pound turned up at the shop on 9 May. He had written in 1926 to ask if Harold thought a periodical might sell, enclosing an advertisement which said the proposed magazine, The Exile, would be ùnlikely to appeal to anyone save those disgusted with the present state of letters in England'. Harold had replied wearily that sales would be very small indeed; Pound seemed to imagine one could `spit in a person's face and shake hands with him at the same time'. But the Bookshop would help if it could: Ì have always numbered myself among your supporters.' Perhaps Pound knew that was true. At any rate he seems to have been inclined to forget old hostilities, and on 22 May he had supper with Harold and Flint. It may have been then that he picked up the Bookshop cat by its tail; thereafter, improbable though it may seem, the animal delighted in being gently Èzra'd'.6 Harold's eyesight was now so poor that he could sometimes only recognise people by voice and gesture. Isolated by blindness, he wrote miserably to friends, complaining that they had forgotten him. He was bitterly hurt when Bax and others dropped him from the reading committee of the Stage Society, but commenting on a script was almost beyond him. Even the earth to which he had been so loyal seemed to have withdrawn its companionship, as he tried to say in a poem, writing in big, childish letters: There was a former road I loved and walked To flowers and beggars and trees I talked Now in this everlasting blur of sight The flowers are far silenter than night. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


spend his evenings with sensible friends, and to establish a rule of never touching alcohol before 6 o'clock in the evening.5

No Way Out 1929±32 249

It was uncalled-for bad luck that I should run into you on the eve of departure once again in an unusual condition. I am sure nobody else in so short a time has discovered me so often ± let alone that it is somebody who I particularly wished should not. Well, of course nobody has. I can't make it out! I am being treated for the eyes in various unusual ways in this city of pleasant gardens, and already have much improved reading-sight . . . What bores me and bores me from morning to night is not being able to recognise and observe people: the colour of eyes, wrinkles, teeth, the shape of nails, and indeed often whether they are smiling or are sneezing, which may be an important matter. I live in a phantom world. He added that the Tommies who were occupying that part of Germany were well-liked locally. One of them, Trooper H. Jones, scarcely literate, wrote his name and address in Harold's pocket book. Alida went to stay with friends in Scotland, pausing on the way in Hexham, where she looked up Wilfrid Gibson's brother and was amused at the unconscious ambiguity of his proud remark, Òf course we always knew Wilfrid would get where he has got'. She knew, as the brother did not, that reviewers were now often contemptuous of Gibson, and she felt no great sympathy, having never forgiven him for his row with Harold in 1913. On the way back she visited Somerby, where Aunt Emily insisted she should stay the night, saying Harold was abroad so `you have nothing to get back for'; `shows how her mind works', her guest observed to Harold, who had always been bemused by his aunt's loyalty to her ferocious husband. When Harold got back to London in August, he could see again. He put the finishing touches to an anthology of modern verse Chatto and Windus had commissioned two years earlier. He had worked very hard on this project, reading over 600 books and pondering for days on his selection from each poet. 1929 August 28: Faber 12.45. Lunch with Eliot to meet Joyce. 29: 5.30 Final interview with Chatto re antho September 1: Very quiet in London after brief storm. Lunch RAC. Return to Golden Rule. 4: Joyce to supper 8.15 6: Sent final instalment of anthology to Chatto 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


He was recommended to consult a Dr Pagenstecker in Wiesbaden, so in June he went for a month's drastic treatment: five bleedings at weekly intervals, each followed by thirty-six hours in complete darkness, and then electric shocks. He wrote to Maurice:

250 Harold Monro

October 14: Torment of swine, who caught me ± How? 17: Torment of brutes. Police. 18: AK went Selsey at lunch time. I caught the 6.20 Vic. comfortably and drove out in taxi 19: Lovely day at Crablands. Hot Sun. Three Walks. AK not depressed till evening. The anthology, Twentieth-Century Poetry, was published on 11 November. Harold had chosen work from many of the poets he had known, although he had made one exception to chronology by including Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose work he greatly admired. The Modernists made a strong showing, mingling with many of the Georgians, the war poets, the women poets and some youngsters who were often guests at the Bookshop, such as Peter Quennell, Roy Campbell and Richard Church. Pound said the book was the ùsual god damn sugarloof of brish poesy', but it sold well for years.7 Early in 1930 there was a last, unexpected gathering of the founder-Georgians. Without consulting any of them a Belgian poetry enthusiast had launched an international appeal for a memorial to Rupert Brooke, asking Ould at the PEN Club to raise a British contribution. Ould organised a committee, consisting of himself as secretary, Drinkwater as chairman and Harold as treasurer, together with Marsh, Maurice Browne and Brooke's three heirs, Abercrombie, Gibson and de la Mare. Maurice had only known Brooke briefly, but he was a celebrity whose name might bring in funds. The committee met at the Bookshop on 10 January to draft a letter to the press. It was an extraordinary occasion, bringing together everyone who had been at the Georgian lunch in 1912 except Arundel, Brooke himself and Gibson (who had sciatica but came to subsequent meetings). The additional presence of Maurice, of all people, must have made Harold remember how the modern Utopia had just been beginning in September 1912, with the Poetry House and the Little Theatre about to open. M. Vandenborght, who evidently knew nothing of `the real Rupert', had already told the world that Brooke's life had been èntirely consecrated to the love of poetry and humanity'. Harold had been one of the first of Brooke's friends to speak out against this kind of nonsense; he could hardly refuse to serve on the committee, but his reluctance was obvious to Marsh and probably to the others. Fortunately Ould found another poet, William Kean Seymour, who happened to be a bank manager, to do most of the work that might otherwise have fallen to the treasurer. 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


13 October brought the third anniversary of his mother's death. He had intended to visit her grave in Highgate Cemetery, but the Plough crowd waylaid him. Next day they `caught' him again.

From a British point of view there could hardly have been a worse moment to launch such an appeal. Many people were in difficulties after the Wall Street crash in the previous October, and Brooke was not the hero he had been. New books by Sassoon, Aldington and Graves were helping to uncover some of the realities of what Harold had once called in an unfinished poem `that great lying War'. Although Brooke's poems were still selling and Bookshop readings of them were always well attended, the wartime myth-makers had done his reputation irreparable damage; he was beginning to be seen as spokesman for the great lie. The letter to the press fell flat. There were several more meetings at the shop, as well as a fund-raising dinner at which Harold was one of the speakers. Vandenborght had only asked for £500, but collecting even that much took another six months. The fund was eventually brought up to target by a secret donation from Brooke's mother. A statue of Ìmmortal Poetry', represented as a naked Greek youth about whom Brooke would have been splendidly witty, was erected on the island of Skyros; Abercrombie, the committee's only representative at the unveiling in April 1931, reported that the celebrations were a great success.8 In June 1930 a Criterion Club evening at the Bookshop seems to have got out of hand. Only four members were present: Harold, Read, Flint and Frank Morley, Eliot's colleague at Fabers, a fat, jovial man who had been irritating Harold for some time by preferring drink and chatter to serious discussion. Flint, too, had become a disappointing companion; forgotten as a poet and overwhelmed by Eliot's intellect, he was turning into a bar-room bore. What happened on the evening of 25 June is not recorded, but Harold had to clear up the shop next day. Then he wrote to Read, saying he felt inclined to withdraw from the Club, even though he had been largely responsible for its evening meetings; he admitted he enjoyed drink as much as anybody, however, and the incoherence of his letter told its own tale.9 Alida returned from a brief holiday to find him ìn the horrors of a real attack'. He wrote her a remorseful note afterwards: Ì wont live [like] this any more. In yr bitter disappointment in a friend, I am more sorry for you than for any of myself in my degradation'. On 1 July he lunched with Eliot and Stephen Spender. On the 8th Eliot and Read came to supper at the Bookshop to discuss reforming the Club. Two days later Alida lost her self-control for the first time, recoiling from the smell of stale drink that hung about him. Whatever he resolved, he would be drawn back to a pub again, often ostensibly for meals. His usual eating place was the Rose and Crown in Charing Cross Road, where the landlord, John Pecorini, was an old acquaintance. 1930 July 17: lunch at Pec's. Back with bearded fellow in shirtsleeves. Missed supper with AK through sleep. But went there 8.45 and found 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


No Way Out 1929±32 251

252 Harold Monro

He wrote these things down, trying to fill the blanks in his memory. On the 30th Arundel called in on leave from Japan, where he was now a professor, and was shocked to see an exhausted, almost broken man. It was probably their last meeting. Earlier in the year Harold had consulted two specialists about a discharge from his ear. One of them had suspected a more general trouble, but the other had performed a mastoid operation, probably with no useful result.10 In August Harold developed something he described as an abscess, which had to be lanced in hospital. `Broke loose under gas'. Alida said later that he was so drunk that the nurses had to strap him down. She took him home after the operation, but soon got away for another of her frequent breaks, unable to bear being close to him for long. He invited Aiken to supper on the 20th. At the door the guest encountered Eliot, who murmured that Harold was `not altogether himself' and left. Aiken never forgot the scene that followed. Harold was seated at the dining table, his head in his hands, all but speechless, or his speech reduced to four-letter words of imprecation, imprecation from the last depths of loathing and disgust and despair. Incapable of serving the cold collation which had been laid out on the sideboard, he rolled his head in his hands . . . and cursed his existence, cursed everything, cursed everyone, but above all cursed the utterly meaningless caprices and bad jokes and filthy connivings of a destiny that would compel one to fall in love, for instance, with a dishonest little tailor's assistant, who was utterly incapable of fidelity; and thus to destroy all that one had believed in, or been faithful to, in one's life, all that was good. What was it for? What? And the muttered imprecations would begin again, round and round and over and over, in an ecstasy of self-loathing.11 In September he was in pain again, so Alida urged him to return to the sanatorium at Watford. After another ruinous evening he went, dreading what the doctors might tell him. Someone on the staff said his smile would get him into heaven. He managed to attend a Criterion lunch on the 10th, and was pleased to find that the reforms had taken effect: `very different ± much business. TSE ± Self ± Herbert ± Frank ± Morley ± Vines ± Terence'. Treatment at Watford, which continued throughout October, included an operation for a painful rectal fistula: Ì didnt know God kept these little things in his box of conjuring tricks', he told Aiken, who had suffered from the same affliction. Aiken went to see him, finding Alida there, too, with dogs in tow. Harold looked old and ill.12 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


bare table. Then Pec's again for supper and etc., ending apparently with abortive [CafeÂ] Royal.

No Way Out 1929±32 253

Thursday December 11: Period of horror begins gently. Gave Rdg of Watson. McCarthy Recital. Oddonino [club] with A. K. (1/2 Burgundy). Write and post letters at P. B. Frid. 12th Lunch with Crow International (?). 10 p.m. Hanchant saw me Plough. ± Bought Bott. Sherry ± He came back with Ital. Loo and his woman till about one. H stayed. About 1 went stall Shaft. Ave. Accused man of £15. Row. Question of Policeman. Then Theo Rd. Journalist Beast. `Man who travelled in motor cars' intermediary. Back with him and H, who left about 5.30 a.m. Former slightly later. Then blank. Probably slept in chair. Sat 13th:± Plough about 1. Pay Sherry. (Story to H. that everyone at P. B. has turned me down. Apparently absent from Shop at this important moment.) H. saw me leave Plough. Evening went Kleinfelt, then Plough with Evans. H. came back to P. B. till about 12 (What did I?) . . . Must have gone stall and brought back teetollars [sic] The next day he had to borrow cash, his own having been spent or stolen, but he went back to the Fitzroy. The 15th was a complete blank, although people told him later that Alida had returned and that he had been seen at the two pubs and the coffee stall. Wed 17th Recovery set in ± Terribly shaky ± Great fear of break-down Thurs 18th AK had cut me off. The 18th was Alida's birthday, when it had been the custom for him to take her to dinner at the RAC. This time she went with Mrs Rowat, writing to him next day: Ì cannot lose the inner vision of your disgusting appearance while drunk, as soon as you become sober. If I see you much more often in that state the better vision will be quite blotted out.' She tried to divert her thoughts by discussing Lawrence's novels with Ottoline, deploring the `horribly ugly words' in Lady Chatterley's Lover. `We are not the only animals that require privacy for these functions ± Cats for instance ± '. Harold bought her a bottle of whisky for Christmas, drank most of it himself and vanished for three days, reappearing in a taxi on Boxing Day. `Should have dropped him off at a police station,' the cabbie said, `but we don't like doing that to gentlemen.' 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


In December Alida went away yet again, leaving Harold alone at the shop, and he slid into one of his worst alcoholic nightmares, afterwards trying to reconstruct it.

The shop remained open, there were several large parties, and the readings continued. Making a last effort to bring poets together, Harold proposed a regular Wednesday `Stammtisch', a restaurant table where friends could meet; a few distant acquaintances showed interest, but people who knew him well were wary, although Ould, Flint, Kauffer, Lewis and Church wrote kindly, assuring him that they liked his company. On 16 April 1931 he gave a speech on Ùnnecessary Books' at a Double Crown Club dinner, arguing that far too many books were being produced. He backed up his case with details and statistics, but the Club's members, mostly printers and publishers, were none too pleased. It was typical of his tactless honesty that in what was probably the last of his many lectures he should have attacked the very trade on which his shop had to depend.13 He was still writing poetry. In July The Observer published Òn the Destruction of the Foundling Hospital', his protest at a current plan to replace Coram's Hospital in Bloomsbury with blocks of flats. The trustees of the charity had sold the nine-acre site and the surrounding squares and streets, including Heathcote Street, in what was widely condemned as a betrayal of their responsibilities. A traitor to Mankind is man to-day. What can we do? What offer? How contrive To keep those trees and all that ground alive? Harold's poetry was uniquely his own, as Aldington, Flint and other friends had often told him: no one else could have written that series of questions, with their idiosyncratic cadence and passionate devotion to trees and the living earth. And for once there was no lack of answers: the protest campaign was successful, the hospital site was saved as a children's playground, and the great plane trees Harold loved still shade Coram's Fields. His defence of the trees unexpectedly helped to save the Bookshop as well as the playground. The shop's finances, worsened by the international slump, were on the edge of collapse. Maurice had provided some money, but he was spending recklessly and was probably already in difficulties. Rescue came from a quite different quarter: an obscure poet named John Helston, whose work had attracted brief notice before the war, saw Harold's poem and sent him a fiver for the Coram appeal. After some hesitation Harold wrote to him in August about the shop. Helston came in, looked at the accounts, and wrote out a cheque for £120, enough, Harold told him, to stave off bankruptcy for six months. Helston would accept no interest, and said that if the money were lost in the end he would not regret it. There are few letters in the Bookshop archives more warmhearted and generous than his. Another visitor to the shop who heard about its troubles was Abercrombie, who was now a university professor, having long since had to give up living as 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


254 Harold Monro

an impecunious poet. He must have known about Harold's alcoholism, as perhaps Helston did not, but he promised to rally support, remembering how much he and many others had owed to the Poetry House. Ì have given so much of my life to it', Harold wrote to him gratefully, `that it would sadden me very much if, after all its vicissitudes, its head were now forced under water'. Harold wrote again in September to say that the room which had been used for readings was about to be walled off again and let as a desperate economy measure. The records do not show how much money Abercrombie raised, if any, but Helston's gift and the extra rent were in any case just enough: Harold had barely six months to live.14

`Do you remember a lady with golden hair who came here yesterday and bought Àspidistras'? I want something for her rather weird ± and well ± deep, and ± well ± a bit so-so.' Yankee: Ì don't want to know the names of his books. You just tell me now what he eats for breakfast.' The questions of a small staring Oriental: Òh ± Is it prose or poetry you sell? Have you any books on tea? ± Nothing like that? Have you the Confessions of a saint ± any saint? like St Patrick, or St Francis, or St Joseph? No? Good day.' Mr HÐMÐis prepared to criticize a limited number of MSS by young authors, and to offer advice. Particulars will be sent on application. Overheard in a Rly carriage: What an awful woman, Miss Edith Sitwell, isn't she? She's the worst one in my paper (Daily Mirror). Overheard: `Plenty of Grub? . . . What bloody more d'ye want?' Answer: `Nothing Pal ± praps a . . .' Heard a Policeman saying as I came round the corner: ± `Well if I ever got one of those into my emporium, I'd operate on him straight away'. Ìn England there are many gentlemans ± No?' Gavin please be a slight pal to me. I make no demands on you. You was up early this morning Arold wasn't you? I asked him why he sneered at me. Ì've no time for you Mr. The other evening you tried to do the rough on me.' Haward: Ì want to know what I'm in for. Judging by the experience of this life I don't want another'.



No Way Out 1929±32 255

256 Harold Monro

`Nothing should matter except actually at the moment' (said by Vines at Kleinfeldt). Fear threatens me round the corner of each moment.

He was ill in the summer, but managed a holiday in France with Alida. She told him she would go home immediately if he got drunk. He heard someone talking about Pernod one evening and left the table saying, `You go home if you like ± I'm going out'. He was brought back in a taxi at three in the morning, refusing to get out, and had to be carried into the hotel. In September he went to Germany for more treatment, suffering agonies from having to sit for hours in the train. An efficient surgeon who examined him said his best course would be to live quietly in the country; any further operations would damage already weakened rectal muscles. More fistulae had developed, as well as ulcers in the colon, and the surgeon believed there were signs of tuberculosis. Ìs this my doom?' Harold wrote to Aiken. `Does the ``shade of His hand outstretched caressingly'' offer me so ignominious an Exit as that?'16 Oh, the dull mirror! Never will it hold A new reflection, less deformed and old? Roll up the long scroll, far too long unrolled. (`The Sickroom') When he got back to London in October, he hobbled about for a few days until a doctor told him he would die without an immediate operation. On 8 October Alida took him to a nursing home in Fitzroy Square where he underwent not one but three operations. As before in crisis he turned to poetry, making ± and keeping ± his last resolution, to memorise a few lines of great poetry each day. Reading J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time persuaded him once again to record his dreams. His past life refashioned itself in strange patterns as he slept: inheriting a fatal cough; Alida and himself being molested on a beach by soldiers; people afraid of the sea; his sister May at Hylands; Devonshire Street; himself trying to rescue the young Nigel, who had fallen into a drain, while a crowd of gasmen, watermen, and Edith Sitwell got in the way. One night, after showing someone over endless versions of Upper Ifold, he met Dorothy at Victoria Station for a duty visit to Eastbourne; he had chosen a first and second class train, but she said she was sure all his seconds were thirds, and she passed him roughly by, Nigel laughingly agreeing with her.



Brutal to give us all this beauty only to force us to leave it behind.15

No Way Out 1929±32 257

Thin arms and ghostly hands; faint sky-blue eyes; Long drooping lashes, lids like full-blown moons, Clinging to any brink of floating skies:

What hope is there? What fear? ± Unless to wake and see Lingering flesh, or cold eternity. On 5 December he was strong enough to walk round the square with Alida, soon afterwards making the same circuit with Ould, leaning heavily but diffidently on Ould's arm and telling him about Dunne's book, in what was to be the last of their many conversations about metaphysics. Drinkwater and Ackerley also came to see him. 1931 December 13: 2 long walks alone 14: . . . My heart aches (word perfect) 15: IV-1 will fly to -5, is the night. -7, around 16: Return home promised for today Next day, with what must have been an enormous effort, he gave a reading from Arnold, one of his lifelong mentors. The 18th was Alida's birthday, so he did his best to be cheerful although he was in severe pain. He presumably had to miss a family occasion on the 23rd, when his son Nigel married a coastguard's daughter at a London register office. There seems to be no mention of this event in Harold's papers; perhaps he never knew about it. His diary only mentions lunch with Eliot on the 23rd. Eliot wrote on 1 January, thanking him for a pork pie which Harold had probably been unable to eat, and suggesting the next Criterion meeting should be put off for a month so that Harold could be present. Eliot hoped they might meet privately before that to discuss Flint's contributions, which were becoming unsatisfactory. Perhaps this was a show of optimism put on at the request of Alida, who was anxious that Harold should not know how ill he was; or perhaps Eliot, like many other people, did not realise how bad things were. Maybe only Maurice knew the full extent of Harold's torture. He seems to have come round to act as nurse in the evenings, relieving Alida. Under the dark-framed portrait of Keats still hanging on Harold's wall, memories returned of the passionate comradeship at Cambridge thirty years before and the latenight conversations about poetry, love and the future. Now, night after night, Harold had to be helped to bed, 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Dreams sometimes took over the day too, as in one of his last poems, `Bitter Sanctuary' (originally `The Alcoholics'):

suffering inwardly as it may be hoped few have to suffer, savagely embittered, sick in body and mind, [cursing] God, poetry, his friends. It seemed as if on that bed lay only pain, a wraith abstracted from reality. The real presence in the room seemed to hover above the bed; and at times the body which lay there would open its eyes for an instant and the old look would come into the ravaged face and the twisted mouth would say: `You know, Maurice, this isn't me; I'm somewhere else: I'm all right; you needn't worry.' Self-tortured, battened on by male prostitutes and poetic parasites, innocent-hearted to the end, Monro in those later years rejected, like Ibsen in When We Dead Awaken, his own earlier work and felt that he had accomplished nothing. Posterity has a habit of discounting contemporary judgments, even when they be a poet's own. The greatest-hearted friend that a youth could have had and a lifelong benefactor of English verse, he also earned the right, like his mighty exemplar, `to be numbered among the English poets.'17 Alida drove Harold down to a nursing home at Broadstairs in February, ostensibly so that he could convalesce. Eliot wrote on the 17th to report on the Criterion meeting and other business.18 Harold seemed to get better, then relapsed early in March. A nurse asked Alida whether the trouble might be tuberculosis, so Alida told her about the German doctor. The English doctors, promising a cure, decided on another operation. Alida sat in a dreary waiting room for hours, reading Moll Flanders ± àn extraordinary book to choose', she thought later ± until the surgeon came in to tell her the operation could not proceed. The entire intestine had been found to be covered with tubercular lesions. Harold had probably been incubating the disease since his father's and brother's deaths long before; it may well have been the cause of his abscesses, internal pains and other ailments. Eventually it had taken its most deadly, miliary form, when a tubercle bursting into an artery had sent the infection into every corner of his body. Against all the odds, he was not to die of drink. Alida did not tell him what the operation had revealed. Instead they talked about the life they would have together in the country, far from the sickness and temptations of London. He seemed to rally, asking her for some writing paper as a present for his fifty-third birthday on 14 March; he wanted to try his hand at writing sonnets again. As she left his room at the nursing home on the evening of the 16th, he said, Ì think this just about ends your day with me'. She was summoned back from her hotel later that night, to find him unconscious. He died soon afterwards. She sat beside the body for three-quarters of an hour before she could bring herself to move.



258 Harold Monro

16

Harold left instructions that one of his veins should be opened before cremation, and that his ashes should if possible be placed at the foot of a young oak tree, but he left the choice of funeral rite to Alida. She chose to be orthodox: the poet who had hoped to celebrate the death of Jehovah was commemorated in a Christian service, conducted by the Rector of St George's, Bloomsbury. The congregation at Golders Green Crematorium on 21 March 1932 numbered scarcely thirty people, conspicuous among them the tall, melancholy figures of Edith Sitwell, Eliot and Flint. Perhaps no one was more visibly moved than Flint, who was always quick to tears; `when the coffin began to slide slowly through the ferns to the flames', he wrote later, he felt that the `largest and best part' of his own life went with it.1 Alida probably showed little outward sign of emotion. She was touched to see her old friend Ralph Hodgson, who happened to be on leave from Japan. No doubt she did her best to be polite to Nigel with his new wife, and to Maurice and his sister Dorothy, all of whom were present. Helston and Abercrombie were there, and Alec Waugh with his father Arthur; several Monro cousins, including Harold's solicitor Fred; Dr Johnson, the physician in charge of Brooke House; Leo Charlton and Tom Whichelo; and a scattering of writers whose names rarely appear in Harold's many lists and diaries: Henry Nevinson (the distinguished journalist, father of the artist), Archibald Lyall, E. H. W. Meyerstein and a few others. Meyerstein commented to a friend afterwards: this man helped dozens and dozens of people to get their names up (Never me, I may say; you won't find me in any of his anthologies), he got them to give recitations, printed them, and what not. No doubt some of them sent wreaths. But would you not have thought the crematorium would have been packed?2 Many poets in fact wrote to Alida, warmly praising Harold, and there were plenty of obituaries. The Times gave nearly a column to À poet and His Ideal', 259 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Legacies

noting Harold's fluency in three languages, his walk from Paris to Milan, the founding of The Poetry Review, Poetry and Drama and the Bookshop, the readings and above all the welcoming fireside where poets of all persuasions could meet and talk. This unsigned obituary was actually by Eliot; keen as always to further the cause of Modernism, he drew attention to the help Harold had given to the Imagists and made only a passing reference to the Georgians. Alida was very unhappy for a time, haunted by the memory of Harold's last weeks, but she took comfort in having kept her old promise of unfailing loyalty. After a rest on the Riviera she applied herself to clearing out the two houses at Heathcote and Great Russell Streets, eventually sending nearly two tons of books and papers to be pulped.* One of her first public appearances was in July, at a grand poetry festival in the forecourt of Blenheim Palace; she read Eliot's `The Hollow Men', which must have sounded startlingly modern in such surroundings.4 There was perhaps no one in the country who knew more about contemporary poets and poetry than she did. She was only 40 and still beautiful, her voice as richly musical as ever. Anyone might have thought that she had a brilliant career ahead of her in the literary world. That she read `The Hollow Men' at Blenheim shows how much her taste had changed since 1917, when she had resisted Pound's offer of Eliot's first book. She and Eliot had become very close during Harold's illness. She had read some of the poems at the Bookshop in 1931 so well that Vivien Eliot, desperate to do anything to win Tom's favour, had arranged a repeat performance in January 1932: a ghastly evening, according to Ottoline, with chairs arranged in the Eliots' flat like a dentist's waiting room, and Vivien talking wildly in the street outside, but it must have helped to draw Tom and Alida together, each knowing the miseries of the other's marriage. Vivien told Ottoline in April that Tom was doing a great deal for Alida, and that Alida understood him because he was so like Harold. Both he and Ottoline seem to have been able to rely on Alida to cope kindly and efficiently with Vivien's strange behaviour. When he left for an American lecture tour in September, taking Vivien and her brother with him to see him off, he arranged for Alida to follow in a second taxi in case of trouble. On the way to the station he discovered that his briefcase had been left behind with his lecture notes in it. Alida was sent back to the flat, where she found the bathroom locked. She persuaded a small boy to climb in through the window above the door: Vivien had put the briefcase in the empty bath. Alida got the case to the station just in time.5 Harold's poems were probably also in the briefcase. Eliot certainly took them to America, having promised Alida to write a critical introduction. He had * The best of Harold's library went to auction; among the two or three thousand books were 11 volumes of Swinburne, 12 of Emerson, 17 of Nietzsche and 5 copies of The Waste Land.3



260 Harold Monro

decided not to return to Vivien, so he was under considerable strain, but he managed to complete his essay at Harvard early in 1933. Alida offered him one of Harold's bookcases as a reward, a gift he gladly accepted, and Vivien installed it in the flat, hoping it would please him. (When he finally saw it in 1934 it was in a depository with his other furniture.) The thought must have crossed his mind, and Alida's, that life would have been very different if they had married each other, and that such a match might now become a possibility. But guilt, repression and painful memories were barriers neither of them could have overcome, even had they wished to. When he came back to England in 1933, he avoided contact with her for several months. Their friendship lasted for years afterwards, but perhaps they never did more than meet occasionally for tea. Harold had left his Brooke House income to Nigel, and almost all the rest of his estate to Alida, with the recommendation that she should wind up the shop. She had no intention of following that advice if she could help it, so she sub-let the Heathcote Street house and moved into his flat. The shop remained open and the readings seem to have continued; she even gave occasional parties and published some new books. Harold had only brought out three books after 1925. Alida added three more in 1933, the last of them an anthology edited by herself. The title of Recent Poetry 1923±1933 was a deliberate echo of Georgian Poetry 1920±1922. She had long wanted to produce a sixth Georgian Poetry, to `round off the Series by suggesting new directions', a book which would free the series from Marsh's limited taste and re-assert Harold's policy of supporting good new work from whatever school. She omitted the old Georgians, brought in new names ± Spender, W. H. Auden, William Empson ± and gave due recognition to Eliot's supremacy, though remarking defensively in her introduction that no one years ago could have foreseen the importance of `Prufrock'. Her book was the fortyseventh and last in a list that had begun with Harold's publication of the first Georgian Poetry twenty-one years before. Harold's Collected Poems also came out in 1933, published by CobdenSanderson, with a biographical preface by Flint and Eliot's critical essay. Eliot said that poetry grows from a `dark embryo' within the poet, not from external sources. Although Harold had belonged historically between the Georgians and the moderns, he had steadily improved and modernised his technique throughout his career; his work had been his own, concerning itself with the world inside the skull, a place of bad dreams and endless questioning. There was no way out. There never is. The compensations for being a poet are grossly exaggerated; and they dwindle as one becomes older, and the shadows lengthen, and the solitude becomes harder to endure. We can only 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Legacies 261

262 Harold Monro

Reviewers who thought of Harold as the poet of cats and green glass beads were surprised by the book's quality and variety, and by the advanced style of the later poems. Those who had known him better remembered his sadness and idealism. Writing in The Observer Wolfe said he had died before the spring, a `cold fact' which symbolised his life: he had taken many poets to the promised land, but had never entered it himself. Àll his life he was an eavesdropper on eternity', beating on the locked door and seeing ùnder his sad lashes the weekend cottage'. In The Spectator Pound reluctantly acknowledged that Harold had been a genuine poet, brooding over the collapse of an era (this reference to history suggests a different perspective from Eliot's). In The Criterion Spender said the poems were the work of a blind, suffering man, à figure of strange and powerful consistency as inescapable to the eye of the observer as a huge and noble figure of bronze'. The shop had little chance of continuing without its founder. There had, after all, been something compelling about him; for all his gloom and awkwardness, he had been able to get things done and to win loyalty and affection. Alida lacked his creativeness and generosity, as well as his income, and she disliked many of his friends. Her fixed opinions and often peremptory manner were very unlike his eagerness to share new ideas. And for months she only wanted to talk about her grief for him, wearying Edith Sitwell and Ottoline with endless lamentations. Ottoline wryly remembered how Alida had complained about him while he was alive, sometimes even wishing he would die; life with him had left her hard, self-centred and starved of love, Ottoline thought.6 Alida made an American lecture tour in 1934, armed with warm testimonials from Osbert Sitwell, Henry Newbolt, Maurice Browne and others, but she could not raise enough support, abroad or at home. On 22 June 1935 she sent out an announcement that the Bookshop would have to close. Letters of regret came from Sturge Moore, Holbrook Jackson, Gilbert Murray, Miles Malleson and many more; Gibson recalled roaming through Bloomsbury with Harold in 1912 looking for suitable premises, and Newbolt wondered whether London would ever again know such enjoyable parties. Several correspondents said the Bookshop had achieved its aim: what had once been the poetry of the future was now accepted as the poetry of the modern age. The stock was stored in the cellar, and an agent took over sales. Alida negotiated with Eliot at Faber's and with Hilary Pepler at St Dominic's Press to continue some of the shop's publications; Charlotte Mew's poems and some 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


say: `Sleep, and if life was bitter to thee, pardon'. . . . I think that his poetry, as a whole, is more nearly the real right thing than any of the poetry of a somewhat older generation than mine except Mr Yeats's.

of the rhyme sheets were still in print over a decade later, the last survivors of the many enterprises of the Poetry House. Alida remained at Great Russell Street until at least 1939, although she still had a weekend cottage in Sussex. The animals that still recognised Harold's name died off one by one, leaving her feeling `too truly alone', as she told Hodgson later, but she kept the Zoo replenished with other dogs, taking particular pride in two miniature poodles. It was probably a blessing in disguise when the Blitz put an end to her income from property and a burst water-pipe ruined the last of the stock; she left London at last, bought a beautiful old farmhouse at Sidlesham, and put all her pent-up energy and devotion into breeding poodles commercially. Her Firebrave kennels became internationally recognised (Plate 41). She soon had over fifty dogs, many of them living with her in the house all the time. An invitation to judge a show in America in 1955 gave her the opportunity to stay with Hodgson, who had left Japan and settled in a remote Ohio farmhouse with an American wife. Writing to him to arrange her visit, she said she was still in touch with Eliot, but he `never knew the Harold you and I knew'.7 She seems to have lost contact with most of her other literary acquaintances. Harold's papers and the Bookshop files were left heaped up in barns and store-rooms, damaged by dogs and infested with fleas. Occasionally she sold a batch of manuscripts, keeping no record of what went or where it went to. She always hoped that a biography of Harold would be written, and she made several efforts to start one herself, but the truth of her married life was more than she could ever face. On 27 July 1969, mortally ill and dosing herself with dog medicine, she called in Ruth Tomalin, whom she had chosen as biographer, and talked more freely about herself and Harold than she had ever done before; even then she made no reference to his homosexuality. She died a few days later, aged 76. Maurice Browne never had a success to equal Journey's End, but some of his other productions are still remembered, notably Hamlet with the young John Gielgud as the prince, and a famous Othello with Paul Robeson, Peggy Ashcroft, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike (the producer played Iago to Robeson's Othello until the critics shamed him into giving the part to a professional actor). The usual crises soon began, made worse by scandal in 1934 when Maurice's younger brother shot himself in a Great Ormond Street boarding house. Maurice Browne Ltd failed three years later, beset by quarrels and financial difficulties, and its founder seems to have ended up living off the charity of friends. He died of peritonitis in 1955, aged 70, leaving his autobiography to be published posthumously. His sister, Dorothy Hill, died in Germany five years later. In June 1951 headlines in the London evening papers reported the death of a recently disgraced doctor. Nigel Monro had killed himself with a lethal 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Legacies 263

264 Harold Monro

Àll gone. Bombed,' Jacob Epstein said to Willson Disher with evident emotion, when the two former lodgers happened to meet after the war. 35 Devonshire Street had been reduced to rubble. A replacement Cecil House was built on the site. 38 Great Russell Street survived; the front premises are presently occupied by a `deli-diner' named Munchkins, and the rear extension, the third and last home of the Poetry Bookshop, appears to be in private use. Attempts to get a blue plaque put on the building have twice been rejected by English Heritage on the grounds that the shop is remembered for its customers but not for its proprietor. Heathcote and Millman Streets have been entirely rebuilt, but the front of 44 Mecklenburgh Square is unaltered, and Alida's first Bloomsbury flat, at 19 Kingsway Mansions, Red Lion Square, can still be identified by the balcony she once mentioned in a letter to Harold. At Hylands, now a public park on the edge of Chelmsford, the shrubbery paths where Harold used to walk with his sister are still as blackbird-haunted, velvet, secret, ghostly and moss-grown as he describes them in one of his short stories. The house stands empty, boarded-up and shorn of its Victorian and later accretions, awaiting further work in a merciless scheme of restoration. Somerby Hall, Russell Monro's house in Leicestershire, was demolished in 1949 for road widening. The old tower in Florence was destroyed by the retreating German army in 1944, one of many medieval buildings blown up to block the Ponte Vecchio. But in the woods near the Mountain of Truth the little stream, now safely culverted, still rushes past the mill house where Harold and Arundel once planned the modern Utopia. Arundel's career as a professor in Japan ended when he was interned during the war. Afterwards he worked for the American administration until 1962, when he and his wife and two daughters went to New Zealand. The Japanese government invested him with the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1963 to add to his British OBE, and a year later the Italian Ministry of Education awarded him its gold medal. Yet he knew he would be remembered for none of these things, any more than for the great works of scholarship he had often talked of but somehow never quite got round to completing. Alida must have been astonished to receive a letter from him in 1966, written from New Zealand.9 His mind was full of images from the past: long walks in Switzerland, the BarLock typewriter, Romney's oak furniture, Vera Tchaikovsky and her beads, Marinetti reading at the Cabaret. And the Bookshop and Georgian Poetry; he 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


injection. His marriage had failed, as had at least one love affair with a man.8 He had just served a three-month prison sentence for drug abuse, and the inquest heard that he had earlier spent a year in prison for assaulting his wife. The Monro tendency to addiction, and the Browne tendency to suicide, had together found their saddest victim.

Legacies 265

Believe me the only `record' of me will be my association with the Poetry Review and the Bookshop ± while I realize how inadequate I was and how disappointing I must have been. Please try to forgive me for his sake. . . . It is such a lovely day and the harbour stretching inland surrounded by shapely hills ± reminds me always of Lake Maggiore ± and the Mill House and Harold.



wondered whether both had been a prison for Harold. Harold had been very much in his thoughts recently.

Legend traces the origins of the Clan Munro to an eleventh-century prince of Fermanagh. Written records at least as far back as the fourteenth century show the Clan as occupying ancestral lands north of Inverness, at Fowlis (pronounced `Fowls', hence the eagles in the family arms). The chief of the Clan was made a baronet by Charles I. Harold's branch of the Clan, the Monros of Fyrish, one of several cadet families, started in the sixteenth century and later adopted the spelling `Monro'. In 1690 Alexander Monro was dismissed as Principal of Edinburgh University and incumbent of St Giles for his Jacobite sympathies; he was apparently sent to London so that the government could keep an eye on him. Dr James Monro (1680±1752), Alexander's son, became physician in charge of Bethlehem Hospital for Lunatics, the ancient asylum better known as Bedlam. He was succeeded there by his son, Dr John Monro (1715±91). Both men were criticised for discouraging research and for keeping their knowledge and patients to themselves. John went so far as to say that madness was à distemper of such a nature, that very little of real use can be said concerning it`. A preference for doing rather than theorising was perhaps a family characteristic, but there were probably good financial reasons for keeping a monopoly. In 1781 John acquired control of Brooke House, a medieval mansion in Hackney which had been converted into a profitable asylum for patients from wealthy families. John was a man of culture, a Shakespeare scholar, a friend of Hogarth and a keen collector of books and prints. His house at 43 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, one of the newest and grandest squares in London, contained a fine library, rich in seventeenthcentury drama, travel books and many texts in French, Italian and Latin. He shared his father's political opinions and is said to have frequented the Pretender's court in Rome. It was presumably John's eminence which made Sir Harry Munro of Fowlis, 7th Bt, entail his estates on the Monros of Fyrish, should his own line ever fail. Had enough Munros and Monros died, Harold might have found himself heir to `the manor-place, tower fortalice of Fowlis' and all its tofts, crofts, . . . milns, multures, . . . all and sundry houses, biggings, yards, orchards, mosses, muirs, marshes, outsets, insets, shealings, loanings, grazings, woods, fishings, annexis, connexis, customs, arriages, carriages, secular services, tenants, tenandries, and services of tenants, parts, pendicles, and whole universal pertinents. John was survived by three sons, James, Charles and Thomas, all of whom inherited shares in the profits from Brooke House. The wealth accumulated by James's line was eventually left to Caius College by the last of his descendants, the law don who befriended Harold. James's brother Charles had numerous descendants. One of his grandsons, Robert Webber Monro, became Chief Clerk to the House of Lords in 1901 (Robert was a typical Monro of Harold's parents' generation: Harrow and Oxford, Lincoln's Inn barrister, cricketer, supporter of London slum charities). John was succeeded at both Bedlam and Brooke House by his third son, Thomas (1759± 1833), whose career coincided with a change in attitudes to madness. For centuries 266 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Appendix A The Monro Family

Londoners had enjoyed watching the ravings of the Bedlamites, wretched creatures kept in chains amid straw and filth, but the new sensibilities of the Enlightenment (and perhaps the sufferings of George III, whom Thomas attended in 1811±12) made the spectacle intolerable. A handsome classical building was erected in Lambeth (the core of it survives as the Imperial War Museum), and the patients were ferried across London in a fleet of hackney carriages. Even so they had to endure a first winter without glass in many of the windows. Summoned before a Parliamentary committee in 1815, Thomas said his methods had been `handed down to me by my father, and I do not know of any better practice'. It emerged that he attended Bedlam `but seldom', and that at Brooke House there were as many servants as patients ± and no chains. Chains were `fit only for pauper lunatics', Thomas said; gentlemen would not like them. He was forced to resign. But if Thomas was undistinguished as a physician, he remains famous as a patron of artists. His discovery of the young Turner in 1791 is pictured in Arthur Sabin's autobiography: riding his cob down Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, the Doctor saw drawings stuck up in the shop window of Turner the barber. He rapped on the pane with his stick, and enquired about them. `They are by my son,' said Mr Turner, not, I am sure, without pride. `He is just sixteen and works for John Raphael Smith the engraver, colouring mezzotints.' `Send him round to me of an evening,' said the Doctor, ànd he can get some practice with several other young artists, and make friends with them.' Varley, De Wint, Linnell and Girtin were among the artists who regularly gathered at 4 Adelphi Terrace. Harold inherited some drawings by Thomas and his circle and sold them to a Bloomsbury dealer in about 1917, presumably to raise money for the Bookshop. The Victoria and Albert Museum had long been looking for products of Thomas's philanthropy, so some of the collection was acquired for the nation; an exhibition was organised by Sabin, who was on the Museum's staff at the time. The Monro family was annoyed by Harold's carelessness, but they came forward with more drawings and information. Sabin thus met several of Harold's relations, including a cousin, William Foxley Norris, Dean of York and later Westminster. Thomas was replaced at Bedlam by his son, Edward Thomas Monro (1790±1856), whose resignation in 1853 brought the long family rule there to an end. Edward Thomas married a daughter of a Master in Chancery and Treasurer of the Foundling Hospital, and had eleven children. He made a fortune from medico-legal work, but lost much of it through extravagance. Edward Thomas's eldest son, the Rev. Edward Monro, set up a short-lived school for poor boys at Harrow Weald and then took a parish in Leeds, where he became famous for his preaching. His Parochial Lectures on English Poetry and Other Subjects (1856) reveals a love of poetry as passionate as Harold's, and some of his descriptions of boys discussing literature might almost be portraits of Harold and Maurice at Cambridge: Schoolboy days and college days, how they are mixed up with the first, deep consuming passion of the love of poetry! . . . How many a long summer evening among haycocks, or sitting in a little room with the window open, with one companion and no candle, and the bat whirling outside, and the yellow glow of sunsat melting off to cool the dewy twilight ± how many such scenes we remember, when we sat and talked of poetry! or the long hot walk with that one friend we meant always to love, and in loving whom we first learnt what love meant when we were both sixteen, and we always have loved him, and always shall!



Appendix A 267

Edward Thomas's second son, Dr Henry Monro (1817±1891), Harold's grandfather, was the fifth and last Monro doctor, although the DNB is mistaken in saying he was at Bedlam. His hospital was actually another asylum, St Luke's, but he probably spent most of his time in private practice. He owned a collection of valuable pictures, inherited from Thomas, and was himself a talented portraitist. With Gladstone and others he founded the House of Charity (now the House of St Barnabas), Soho, in 1846; this was originally a hostel for families left homeless on the London streets, people who had sold all they had to emigrate to the colonies only to find that shipwreck or swindle had made their tickets worthless. At the House, as at Radley, where Henry sent his three eldest sons, High Church observance was the rule. Harold probably remembered his grandfather best at Orchardleigh (now the Lake Hotel), Henry's villa at Bonchurch, Isle of Wight. Bonchurch was a favourite resort for cultured Victorians. The largest house belonged to the Swinburne family, and the poet spent much of his boyhood there. Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle and Macaulay all spent holidays in the village. Among the long-term residents was the educationist Elizabeth Sewell, whose brother was the founder of Radley, a connection which may explain Henry's choice of the school. Henry Monro and his brother Theodore married two daughters of Sir William Russell on 5 April 1842. Sir William, another doctor, had earned his baronetcy for work in a cholera epidemic ten years earlier. Theodore died in April 1843, having fathered one child, Theodore Russell Monro. His widow then married Peter Margary; their only child was Arabel Sophia, Harold's mother. So Sophia had a Monro half-brother and numerous Monro first cousins, one of whom, Edward, became her husband. Henry's eldest son, Russell, married Emily, daughter of Sir George Nugent, 3rd Bt, grandson of a Field Marshal. The present Baronet, Sir Robin, tells me that Sir George's diary records satisfaction at the match but also the expectation that the couple would not be rich. Russell seems to have prospered, however, perhaps because he had a partnership in a Yorkshire brewery. He lived as a country gentleman and lord of the manor at Somerby, where he is still remembered locally as an autocrat. Several other connections are worth noting. One of Harold's first cousins married a lawyer named Matthew Arnold, a relation of the poet. The family firm of solicitors still exists, the current partner, David Monro, being the son of Lionel and grandson of Fred, both of whom worked for Harold, and great-grandson of Dr Henry's solicitor and first cousin, another Frederic. In one of those complicated marriage patterns the family seems to have been prone to, one of Fred's sisters married her first cousin, Percy; another married Edward Weaver; and one of Percy's brothers married Maude Weaver. The two Weavers were siblings of Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of The Egoist and patron of James Joyce. When Miss Weaver first decided to send money to Joyce, she did so anonymously through Fred, who thereafter became a regular intermediary, earning an honoured place in Joyce biography. One of Dr Henry's daughters, Harold's Aunt Sophia, married R. T. Raikes, a barrister and devoted Radleian. Their only son, Frederick Monro Raikes, who left Radley a year before Harold went there, was killed in action in 1917. Aunt Sophia died a few years after her marriage, so R. T. Raikes married again, producing five sons, all of whom went to Radley. Raikes eventually became President of the Radleian Society; there is a conspicuous memorial to him in the College chapel. He was one of Dr Henry's executors and a trustee of Harold's parents' marriage settlement, so that his permission was needed if Harold wanted to withdraw capital. Harold is sometimes confused with his distant relative, Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki, the author of satirical short stories. The two men were very different in



268 Appendix A

Appendix A 269 their political beliefs, but they had acquaintances in common, including Robert Ross, and they probably knew each other; Saki is listed in the huge address book kept at the Poetry Bookshop.

Several members of the Monro family, including Jim Jefferiss, Tom Curtis Hayward, Kenneth Monro of Fyrish and David Monro, have helped me with information. D. Roe and William Bayliss told me much about Somerby, and D. G. Saunders and Edna Funnell shared their knowledge of the House of St Barnabas-in-Soho. Printed sources include Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Monros of Fowlis (1898); Charles Ian Fraser, The Clan Monro (1954); The Clan Monro Magazine ii (1954); Biblioteca Elegantissima Monroiana: A Catalogue of the elegant and valuable library of John Monro M. D. (1792); Arthur Sabin, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings chiefly by Dr Thomas Monro (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1917 [an error for 1927?]); Anthony Masters, Bedlam (1977); Edward O'Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital (1914); Denis Leigh, The Historical Development of British Psychiatry i (1961). For Peter John Margary, see Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings cxxv, 409±10. Portraits of all five Monro doctors are reproduced in G. Wolstenholme, ed., The Royal College of Physicians: Portraits (1964). For Brooke House, see the Survey of London xxviii (1960).



Sources

Kyle began as a newspaper journalist in his native Yorkshire, but soon went freelance. He founded an Àuthors' Association' in Darlington in 1902 with the Countess of Aberdeen as President, but he soon aroused the suspicions of the Society of Authors; the Countess quickly resigned. He denied that he was running a commercial agency, yet he charged fees for reading and placing MSS. One of his letterheads claimed that the Association had a Press Department with a hundred branches worldwide. In July 1907 an editorial in Truth warned that he was offering to include poems in an anthology in return for cash. His Authors' Association seems to have disappeared soon afterwards, but on 24 February 1909 he started the Poetry Recital Society (renamed the Poetry Society a few years later) in London. The Society's first President was Lady Margaret Sackville, herself a poet, and its Hon. Patrons soon included Galsworthy, Bennett, Gilbert Murray, Florence Farr, Eustace Miles and many others. It had a motto from Matthew Arnold: À clearer and deeper sense of the best in poetry and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it'. `Membership implies a missionary spirit', Kyle wrote in 1910. Members were encouraged to devote an hour a day to memorising verse, programmes of study were drawn up, and exams, prizes and a diploma were announced. The Society's early success was undoubtedly a symptom of, possibly even a contributory factor to, the great pre-war revival of interest in poetry. Harold was one of many serious-minded people to be attracted by Kyle's outward show; he was also one of the first to see through it. In wresting The Poetry Review from its founder±editor in December 1912 (see Chapter 7 above), Kyle obtained a flourishing journal at no cost to himself. A victory had been won for `Poetry', and the Society was no longer in danger of being trodden under the heels of Rupert Brooke and other futuristic versifiers. The new editor, Stephen Phillips, would supply ± or at any rate sign ± the right sort of editorials, and the promised `brilliant list' of contributors would consist of docile nonentities. `Let the singing be full-throated and from any bush', declared the Review's first 1913 editorial in Kyle's typical language. He openly took over the editorship when Phillips died in 1916. Every now and then his unsigned news columns contained a thinly veiled sneer at Harold and the Bookshop. In October 1909 the Society's journal, The Poetical, later The Poetical Gazette, included an announcement that a `slim edition of the poems of Mr Alfred Williams, the Swindon forgeman', was to be published by a Mr Erskine Macdonald. This seems to be the first mention of Macdonald, whose publications were thereafter recommended in the Gazette and after 1912 often mentioned in the Review itself. He was always willing to consider work by previously unknown poets. It was an ingenious arrangement: aspirants were drawn in through the magazine, Macdonald published them at their own expense, and Kyle made them feel successful by supplying generous reviews. Macdonald cashed in on the adjective `Georgian' in 1915 by launching the `Little Books of Georgian Verse'; anyone interested in becoming a `Georgian' poet in the series was told that they would first have to buy four Little Books and subscribe to the Review. Business prospered in 1914±18, London Opinion remarking approvingly that `Mr Erskine Macdonald is the unofficial publisher in general to the poets of the British Army'. Most of 270 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Appendix B Galloway Kyle and The Poetry Review

Macdonald's authors were sadly untalented, but Edmund Blunden's first book appeared in the `Georgian' series, and Wilfred Owen would have been caught in the net if Harold had not warned him off in 1916. Mr Macdonald proved to be elusive. Royalty statements were hard to obtain, letters went unanswered, and callers at his office were told he was out. Several poets, including Emilia Lorimer and Max Plowman, wrote to Harold for help, but he had to be cautious, having learned that Kyle knew how to use the law. He reluctantly ordered Macdonald books if customers asked for them, and when he tried to resist high charges in 1915 Kyle seems to have sued him successfully for a small sum. Members of the public often confused the Poetry Bookshop with the Poetry Society, sometimes writing to the wrong address. Kyle probably took the chance to reply, advertising his own services; Harold accused him of `fraudulently appropriating' the shop's mail in 1916. By 1918 Erskine Macdonald Ltd, as the business had now become, was insisting on cash with orders and a discount of only one percent unless books were ordered by the dozen, terms which Harold rejected as exorbitant. All this provoked laughter as well as fury at the Bookshop. Alida and Harold sometimes exhanged news of an invented war poet, Rawnsley Atkinson Smythe, whose Poems, Paeans, and Posies were typical of the work of many Macdonald `songsters'. Smythe was no doubt named after W. F. Rawnsley and the Alfred Smythe who had announced himself to Harold as no `mushroom' in 1912. Alida even sent in some spoof war poems to the Review under the name of Miss Gwladys Smythe; Kyle did not print them, but he offered to consider them for publication at Miss Smythe's expense. In 1919 Kyle said he would do no further business with the Bookshop. Harold replied that his friends had been amused by the letter, and that the shop would no longer attempt to conceal Kyle's methods. The response was vituperative, but Kyle knew the game was up. The Society of Authors had received so many complaints from members ± fourteen in 1917 alone ± that its journal had finally exposed him in April 1918, revealing, inter alia, the obvious truth that `Mr Macdonald' did not exist. Kyle sued for libel, but had to delay in order to accumulate funds. Evidence was provided by Harold and many others. When the case came before the Lord Chief Justice in 1922, the jury had no difficulty in finding for the defendants. Kyle was ordered to pay costs, but was unable to comply, so the Society of Authors had to raise emergency cash (this was the origin of its modern Defence Fund). Kyle said in court that he had chosen the name Erskine Macdonald because he had been `rather attracted' to it; presumably he had hoped it might be confused with that of Elkin Mathews. The idea for the `Little Books of Georgian Verse' was blatantly copied from Mathews, who had invented the system of cheap series publishing for new poetry; his `Little Books for Little Folks', a series of children's books, may have been the source of Kyle's title. A further confusion could be hoped for after 1912: by lucky chance the editor of Georgian Poetry identified himself only as È. M.' (at least one reviewer fell into this trap). The Macdonald imprint seems to have disappeared after the trial, but its perpetrator continued unabashed with the Poetry Society and the Review. `Kyle still thrives,' Harold told Pound on 18 February 1930, `(and as far as I know his daughters still attend the Band of Hope) and The Poetry Review has reached the end of its twentieth volume'. Kyle was still thriving in 1947, when Muriel Spark took over from him as editor; even after that, he and his wife stayed on in the handsome flat the Society had provided for them. The new editor found it was usual for poets to send in their work with cheques enclosed, made out to Kyle personally; she soon concluded that he was thoroughly dishonest, as devoid of scruples as he was of genuine culture.



Appendix B 271

272 Appendix B

I am grateful to Muriel Spark, John Heath-Stubbs, Kate Pool (Society of Authors) and Chris Green (Poetry Society) for information. The Monro±Kyle correspondence is at BL. 39. See also The Author (March 1903) 171±2, (April 1918) 114±15, (April 1922) 232±8, (Summer 1968) 71±3; Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae (1992); and my À publisher of First World War poetry: Galloway Kyle', Notes and Queries (June 1986), 185±6.



Sources

The five main collections of Harold Monro and Poetry Bookshop papers, at the British Library, the Berg Collection and the Universities of Michigan, California at Los Angeles and New York at Buffalo, are noted below. Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin have numerous letters between Monro and his literary acquaintances. There are smaller collections at the other libraries listed below, and at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester; the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; and elsewhere. The following abbreviations are used in the notes: AdR AK BL

Buffalo Harvard HM HRC Huntington JG King's MB NY Oxford RT

UC

UI UM

Arundel del Re. Alida Klemantaski (Monro). British Library, Monro papers, Additional MSS 57734±68. My references are abbreviated: e.g., BL.47 indicates Add. MS 57747. BL is the principal collection of HM's and AK's personal papers (letters between them, diaries, notebooks), general correspondence, Bookshop business records, rhyme sheets, press cuttings, etc. Bought from AK's executors in 1971. Described in Jenny Stratford, The Arts Council Collection of Literary Manuscripts 1963±1972 (1974), 140±53. Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. A large, miscellaneous collection of letters, mainly to HM from other poets. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Harold Monro. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Joy Grant. King's College Library, Cambridge. Maurice Browne. Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Correspondence between HM and Edward Marsh. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Ruth Tomalin, or typescripts and photocopies made by her from originals lent to her by AK's executors, and from other sources, c. 1970. Most, but by no means all, of the originals are in BL. Where the originals are missing, the RT copies are now in BL, together with RT transcripts from Arthur Sabin's autobiography, and letters and other papers sent by AdR to Ruth Tomalin in 1969±70. Department of Special Collections, University Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles. The main collection of Bookshop correspondence (3 boxes) and HM's MS verse, plays, stories (5 boxes: mostly not paginated, so that one can usually only give references to the box and sometimes the file, e. g. UC.5Q). University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Special Collections Library, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. MB's papers, including many letters between him and HM. 273 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Sources

274 Sources McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Giving a reference for every quotation from the main collections would have made the Notes impossibly long. All letters between HM and AK, and all HM's diaries, are in BL; all letters between HM and MB are in UM; and all these MSS are filed in chronological order. References are only given when the source might otherwise be difficult to find.



UT Yale

To save repetition, references to a published source which is drawn on more than once are usually given as author's name, date of publication and page number. An abbreviated title is also given if confusion might otherwise occur. Full titles can be found in the Bibliography. Place of publication London unless otherwise stated. Consecutive references are sometimes given in one note, identified by key words where necessary. In quoting from MSS, I have eliminated ampersands and made minor amendments to spelling and punctuation. Omitting apostrophes was a fashion of the time. The quotations at the heads of chapters are all from HM's poems or verse drafts.

Introduction 1 Devonshire Street: renamed in the 1930s (after the original builder, not Johnson's Boswell). There was already a Boswell Court across the road ± hence, no doubt, the name of one of HM's young men, Boswell Gary.

Chapter 1. Inheritance 1 AK left reminiscences of HM and his family in various brief attempts at a biography (BL.47) and in her last memoir (RT). Other sources for this chapter include HM's autobiographical notes (BL.43) and his `How I Began' (1913). 2 AK, last memoir. 3 Edward Monro, The Parish (1853). 4 BL.36 (A). 5 Information about Radley and HM's career there is from College registers, magazine, archives and Boyd (1948). The archives contain a file of letters assembled in 1965 by Michael Meredith and James Thomson for an article on HM in The Radleian. 6 Wilkinson (1934), 68±9. 7 Wilkinson (1934), 69±70, refers to a distinguished Old Radleian, unnamed but clearly HM, whose recent obituary in The Radleian had not mentioned that he had been expelled for a homosexual offence. Wilkinson confirmed the reason for HM's expulsion in a 1965 letter to Thomson (n.5 above), adding that it was another boy, not HM, who was sacked for having drink in his study. Entries in HM's diaries suggest that he considered sending his own son to Radley. The Times of 17 July 1929 published a letter from him about the College's fortunes in the Henley Regatta, and one of his notebooks contains a nostalgic, unfinished poem about revisiting the school. 8 `How I Began'.

Chapter 2. Cambridge 1898±1902 1 MB to HM, n. d. [Nov 1905] (UM). The story of HM and the bookmaker is told in Flint's introduction to HM (1933). Flint seems to have taken much of his information from AK, whose knowledge of HM's early life was sketchy. 275 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Notes

2 The Caian records HM only once as a sportsman, rowing in the second boat in the Lent races, 1899. BL has the libretto of a comic opera he wrote at Cambridge. 3 MB to his mother, 27 Jan. 1901 (UM). 4 AK to HM, 6 Apr. 1917 (BL.48). MB's great-grandfather, father, nephew and brother committed suicide. His grandfather made several attempts and was confined as a lunatic for a time. His father's suicide was reported in gruesome detail in The East Anglian Times (1 Aug. 1894). 5 Wilkinson (1934) describes MB. They were friends for many years. 6 `Song to Sleep', The Granta (14 Mar. 1901). `The Pine Tree' (anon., but said by a later reviewer to be by HM), The Caian (Lent 1901). 7 Quotations from MB (1955). MB to HM, [Nov. 1905] (UM), recalls seeing the portrait of Keats at Connaught Square. MB (1955), 65, remembers it at Caius, Haslemere and the Bookshop. AdR (Apr. 1932) describes it in the tower at Florence and says it was of Shelley, but RT, who saw it in AK's house long after HM's death, tells me it was certainly of Keats. 8 The Caian (Lent 1902). HM also read this paper and one on Goethe to the University Modern Language and Literature Society (scripts at UC). 9 Straus's novel eventually appeared much revised as The Man Apart (1906). A poem by him declaring his orientation survives in an album kept by MB (UM). 10 Many details in the preceding few pages are from MB's letters, but Sophia's exclamation is from AK (memoir, RT), who heard the story from Sophia herself.

Chapter 3. Ireland 1902±6 1 2 3 4

HM to MB, verse letter, n. d. [late 1902] (UM). Quoted, Eastbourne and Sussex Society (8 Dec. 1903). MB (1955), 75. Several letters are missing or incomplete. MB (1955) fudges the story. One of his letters soon after Monte Carlo mentions a debt of £500 to HM, but an Oct. 1905 letter says HM had refused a loan. Perhaps the refusal was to a second request. HM wrote a long, outspoken letter to MB after the fiasco, but MB kept only the end of it, a declaration of spiritual friendship. 5 Sussex Country Herald (12 Dec. 1903); Eastbourne Chronicle (5 Dec.); Eastbourne and Sussex Society (8 Dec.). 6 In MB's album (UM). 7 Woolmer (1986) gives details: 100 copies, and two bound in vellum, privately printed by the Chiswick Press, 1905. The dedications seem to have been printed by mistake; HM advised that they should be omitted from a reprint (11 copies) in Dec. 1906.

Chapter 4. The Samurai 1906±8 1 Bentinck (1919). 2 Information on the Gooches and Hylands from family albums ( Jill White) and Essex Archives (including reminiscences quoted in Jane Dansie, `Hylands: Family Home through 200 years: a stage documentary'). According to Dansie, Curly eventually lost a leg to frostbite; for his Antarctic adventure (he only got as far as S. Georgia), see R. Huntford, Shackleton (1985), 396. 3 Untitled story, filed as Òswald', UC.7.



276 Notes

4 MS dated Apr. 1906 (UC). HM's diary first mentions the Samurai on 15 Apr.; by the 18th he was drafting rules. UC.6Q has his Samurai papers. UM has MB's: creeds, comments, prospectus, etc.; letters from Sabin, Green, Skilton, Guthrie, Ficke; MB's explanatory notes: press cuttings, including a few from Australia (Straus seems to have gone there soon after his visit to Ranworth ± hence his absence from later Samurai activities). UI has nine letters and a draft prospectus from MB to Wells, 1906±10; eight from HM to Wells, 1907±11; three from Wells to HM, 1907±8. 5 Drinkwater (1932), 223±4. 6 HM, Poems (1906), No. 37 in the Vigo Cabinet Series (the number was later changed). HM probably had to pay Mathews a commission. Among the poets already in the series were at least four he was to know later: Yeats, Plarr, Masefield, Gibson. Two sonnets in Poems were published in The Idler in July (`my first remunerated appearance in print'). 7 R. C. Carton, Lady Huntworth's Experiment (Samuel French, c.1900). Audiences at Chelmsford, Colchester and Braintree were enthusiastic, according to local newspapers. 8 Press cuttings (UM). 9 Farnham, Haslemere and Hindhead Herald (4 Nov. 1908). Green seems to have been a friend of Curly Gooch, which may explain why the Monros chose to live at Haslemere. 10 Mentions of `the Russells' in HM's diaries seem to have misled AK into believing he had been friendly with Bertrand. Bertrand often stayed at Hindhead, but I have found no evidence that HM met him. HM's Russell ancestors seem to have been unrelated to Rollo's family. 11 MB to Ficke, 21 Apr. 1907 (UM). 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (1969), 42. 13 Sabin: RT transcripts. 14 Wells's creed (copies, with a covering letter, UC, UM, UI) was a summary of a lecture, `The Faith I Hold', given to the Fabians on 6 Dec. 1907 (HM was in the audience). 15 MB (1955), 89±94. MB's 1907±8 letters reveal some of the true story, including names. On 16 Oct., still on Capri, he told Spedding he didn't love Rosina and couldn't afford to have children; presumably Spedding persuaded or tricked him into taking her to Sicily. 16 Straus to HM, n. d. [1907±8] (UM). MB later pretended he had been keen to take Rosina back to Italy. 17 Warren Sylvester Smith, The London Heretics 1870±1914 (1967), gives an informative account of Coit and other reformers. 18 HM, `The Inglenook' (1910). 19 See Woolmer (1986). Sabin also printed a few books for Guthrie's Pear Tree Press. 20 Eight titles had been published by Sep. 1907, mostly priced at 2s. Print runs seem to have varied from 300 to 500 copies. If income from sales was £35, Maurice must have sold about 350 books, leaving perhaps as many as 3000 unsold. 21 Gibson to MB, 28 Apr. 1907 (UM). 22 MS: UC.7.

Chapter 5. Pilgrimage to Freedom 1908±9 1 He weighed himself in clothes and boots at 11st. 71b. In 1896 as a schoolboy in rowing clothes, and in 1929 as a sanatorium patient fully clothed, his weight was exactly one stone less.



Notes 277

2 HM to Wells, 23 May 1908 (UI). 3 A UC notebook contains drafts of over 40 of these poems, some unfinished. 18 are dated between 18 and 23 June 1908 (Florence); 11 between 29 June and 26 July (Gland); 2 in Aug.; and 9 between 8 Sep. and 1 Oct. (mostly Waidberg). The last (`So wayward') is 30 June 1910. Revised versions of 21 of these, and 9 new pieces, were published in Before Dawn as Ìmpressions'. 4 À modern Hermit', typed article (UC.7); a companion piece, `The ideal air-bath', describes HM's arrival at Waidberg. Both articles seem intended for publication; his diary for June 1909 mentions typing and posting `2 newspaper articles'. Harald Szeemann has kindly sent me photocopies of an old album of Waidberg photographs which confirm HM's description. The brochure specifies a Bircher-Benner diet. 5 1908±9 diaries give dates: `The Tomb of Christ' (conceived and completed, 30 Dec.); `The Kingdom of Christ' (begun and nearly finished, 3 Jan.); `God' (begun, 6 Jan.); `Two Visions' (conceived and completed, 9 Jan.); `Dawn of Womanhood' (in progress, 17 Jan.). All these poems are in Before Dawn. 6 The Poetical: The Official Journal of the Poetry Recital Society i. 2 (Jan. 1910). HM's lecture is at UC.

Chapter 6. The Mountain and the Tower 1909±11 1 Ascona: see Szeemann (1978), a detailed and richly illustrated catalogue, and Green (1986). Some of the Monte Verita buildings are now a museum. 2 Leopold Wolfling, My Life Story (New York, 1931). 3 See Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis (1979). 4 Not the modern Casa Sasso, apparently built in the twenties. Old maps show a hexangular room attached to the next house up the hill. 5 HM to AK, 11 Aug. 1913. 6 Extracts from BL.36 (B). Pan emerging from the woods was a theme of the period, as in e.g. stories by E. M. Forster and Saki. 7 HM's diary does not mention MB's involvement, nor does MB (1955) mention HM's, but MB had certainly suggested that they should share a flat in Florence. MB refers to the tower in a letter to his mother of 8 July, when HM was still in England. HM signed the lease on 18 Aug. MB contributed to the rent, keeping up payments for some years; he stayed in the tower in 1914. 8 AdR (Apr. 1932), 323±4. 9 HM, `Florentine Evening' (UC.7). Information about AdR from his letters to Ruth Tomalin, 1969±72. See also Who Was Who and Balliol College registers. 10 The Florence Herald (1910±11), Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence. 11 Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. R. J. Finneran (1977), 259. Craig was annoyed when he wrote this letter; he became friendly with HM in later years and remembered him as à good fellow'. 12 Thomas to HM, 19 May 1911 (Buffalo). Writing to Wells on 15 July (UI), HM said he was thinking of taking a cottage in England for perhaps seven months a year. 13 Sabin gave a date which RT copied as 7 July, JG as 7 June; June seems more likely, as HM used the tower as an address for a letter to MB on 19 July. 14 AdR to RT, 30 Nov. 1969. 15 AdR, incomplete typescript apparently made from a recorded interview, c. June 1967 (RT).



278 Notes

Notes 279

1 Carpenter to HM, 3 Oct. 1911 (UC). 2 For HM's dealings with the Poetry Society, see his `Personal Explanation', Poetry & Drama i. 1 ( Jan. 1913) and BL.39. 3 Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed. R. G. Thomas (1968), 218±9. 4 Newbolt, New Paths on Helicon (1927), 378±9. 5 HM's income for 1911 was about £1500, mostly from Brooke House and a few dividends. Out of that he paid £275 to Dorothy (there may have been a second, similar payment, as he had agreed to pay her £400 a year when they separated), £103 to Oedenkoven (rent for Casa Sasso?), £200 for purchase of the mill house, £103 rent for the Chancery Lane office and associated expenses, and a £100 float for the Review (BL.44). 6 AdR (1934), 30±1. 7 HM had presumably chosen Essex to be within reach of the Gooches. 8 Woolf (1977), 289. 9 Rhys, Everyman Remembers (1931), 271. Eric Homburger, À glimpse of Pound in 1912 by Arundel del Re', Paideuma iii. 1 (Spring 1974), 85±8. See also Rhys, Letters from Limbo (1936), 222±4. 10 Pound to HM, 28 Oct. 1913 (UC). 11 Pound to HM, n.d. [Gibson]; 21 Feb. n.y. [Aberbubble] (UC). 12 BL.40 and RT. 13 For Watt, see The Student, Edinburgh University (1907), 271±2, 709±10, 762±4. 14 Pound (1988), 249. 15 Marsh, Brooke, Gibson and Sassoon all mention this ordeal in letters or memoirs. 16 The text of Hulme's 1912 lecture is apparently not known; I assume that then and on other occasions HM heard the arguments in the `Lecture on Modern Poetry' in Roberts (1938), 258±70. 17 Pound to Aldington, 14 Jan. [1928?] (HRC). 18 Church (1964), 57±64. Flint's papers (HRC) include correspondence with HM and others. His article is reprinted and discussed in Pondrom (1974). My account of the development of Imagism draws on letters by Flint and Pound (HRC). 19 HM to Drinkwater, 10 Aug. 1912 (Yale). Watt to HM, 22 Aug. 1912 (BL.40). 20 Press cutting, Gooch family album ( Jill White). 21 Nelson (1989) gives an invaluable account of Mathews. 22 Marsh (1939), 320±2, and AdR (Sep. 1932), 464±5, agree on the six persons at the lunch. Drinkwater (1932), 228, adds Abercrombie and omits AdR and Gibson, but he is unreliable; he implies he already knew Marsh, but his first surviving letter to Marsh, 29 Sep. 1912 (NY), thanks him for being friendly to a stranger. See also Hassall (1959), 190. 23 Marsh (1939), 325. HM, `Personal Recollections of Rupert Brooke' (1930). Hassall (1964), 360. Drinkwater had been in correspondence with Gibson for a year or more. 24 Marsh (1939), 322. 25 Marsh (1939), 324 [curious], 328 [Crowley]. HM to Brooke, 9 Feb. 1913 (King's). Drinkwater (1932), 224. 26 Rogers (1977), 102. 27 HM, `Personal Recollections . . .' (1930). Brooke (1968), 403, and unpublished postcard to HM, 3 Oct. 1912 (described in a Michael Silverman catalogue, 1994). See also JG (1967), 50. 28 Cambridge Magazine (23 Nov. 1912). Lecture text at UC. 29 Alford: obituary, King's College Annual Report (Nov. 1960), 14±15.



Chapter 7. The Poetry Review 1911±12

280 Notes

1 Sitwell (1949), 35. AK, quoted JG (1967), 61. See also AdR (1932±4), MB (1955), etc. Fletcher to HM, 5 Jan. 1913, and sonnet, `Poetry in the Slum', dated 3 Jan. (Yale). 2 Information from Post Office directories (Guildhall Library); Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, London ii (1925), which describes the street as in `fairly good' condition and mentions the `modillioned cornice and pediment' of No. 35; Hamilton (1926); Greater London Record Office photographs (82.0 DEV). Cecil House, first annual report (1927), contains interior photos of the house in 1927. 3 Bottomley to HM, 8 Jan. 1923 (NY). 4 H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah (1931), 189±90 [Gaudier]. Gibson, `Gold', Friends (1916); `The First Meeting', Hazards (1947). 5 Disher to JG, n.d. (UT). Gillett, `The Poetry Bookshop', BBC Third Programme talk, 28 Sep. 1962 (RT). 6 Abercrombie to HM, n.d. (Buffalo). Frost to Flint, 18 May 1914 (HRC). Vines to HM, n.d. (UC). Hulme to HM, postmark 3 July 1914 (Donald Gallup). 7 HM to Lowell, 24 Jan. 1914 (Harvard). Watkinson et al. (BL.40). 8 Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, ed. Pippa Harris (New York, 1991), 234: Brooke said his reading had been very well attended, but the register tells another story. 9 Marsh (1939), 295. Waugh (1917), 287. Monroe, `The Editor in England', Poetry (Oct. 1923), 35. Other details from JG (1967), 75±86, register of readings (BL. 56), RT, etc. Rhys Davies (1969), 104±5, describes Eliot, Wickham and Edith Sitwell as readers, shadowy figures in the `religious air of repose'. 10 Frost (1965), 105. Fletcher (1937), 50. Fletcher should have been more appreciative: when he first made contact with HM in 1912 he was in despair at not being published; The Poetry Review made his name known. 11 HM's diaries often note `Yeats' on a Monday, although an undated letter to him from Pound implies that he stayed away for a while because Pound was there. Nevinson (1937), 65, remembers HM at Hulme's parties. Violet Hunt to HM, n.d. [1918] (HRC), implies that he had been among her and Hueffer's guests before the war. 12 HM to Flint, 11 Sep. 1912 (HRC). 13 Brooke to HM, 11 June 1913, from New York (King's). Advertisement in Georgian Poetry 1916±1917. 14 HM, `The Poetry Bookshop . . .' (1914).

Chapter 9. Alida 1913±14 1 Poets' Club: founded 1907 on a suggestion from Gosse. Hulme was treasurer for the first few years. The Second Book of the Poets Club (1911) contains a poem by HM. 2 AK, notebook: BL.36 (O) . Other information from her last memoir. 3 HM's paper: UC.7. 4 Woolf (1982), 294. AK's father is also officially recorded as a `Russian merchant'. She herself said he was Polish. 5 MB (1955), 162. MB wrongly says the party was on the first night of the ballet. HM's guest list: BL.56 (A). Alford's Doves, first shown at a Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition at the DoreÂ, Oct. 1913, is now in Jerusalem; another version is in the Tate. Correspondence about Doves: HM to Alford, Margaret Epstein to HM (UC). The story of covering the sculpture was told to me by Samuel Hynes, who heard it from AK.



Chapter 8. The Poetry House

6 MB gave an ebullient interview about his theatre to The Pall Mall Gazette (24 July 1913). 7 Gibson: details from his MSS (Brotherton Library) and his letters to Marsh (NY) and MB (UM). Abercrombie to HM, 21 Oct. [1913] (Buffalo). Several of HM's correspondents expressed surprise that he was not involved in New Numbers. He told Drinkwater on 23 Dec. 1913 (Yale) that he had been very upset. 8 `Devonshire (street) Cream', BL.57. 9 HM to Lowell, 24 Mar. 1915 (Harvard). 10 Quoted, Times (5 May 1914). Details of Marinetti's visit and the Cabaret from his letters to HM (UC), press reports, Cork (1976), Marsh (1939), Nevinson (1937), Wees (1972) etc. 11 Press cuttings (BL.66). 12 Rhyme sheets: see Woolmer (1988). Once again, HM seems to have borrowed an idea from Elkin Mathews, who had published broadsheets ten years earlier with poems by Masefield, Yeats and others (Oxford, John Johnson Collection). 13 Lewis (1937), 111±12. 14 `Harold Monro who . . . shepherds the `Ìmagist'' poets', Herbert Palmer, `Modern English Poetry', Vox Studentium ii, 7±8 (c.1924, copy at UC). 15 Pound (1932). Basil's parody: Chapbook (May 1921), part-reprinted in Peter Jones, ed. Imagist Poetry (1972), 151±2. 16 Aldington to HM, 25 May 1914 (UC), and to Charles Norman, 5 Nov. 1960 (HRC). 17 Lewis (1937), 36. Wees (1972) shows from newspaper reports that Lewis is unreliable. See also Cork (1976), 232. The Bookshop archives contain a copy of the Nevinson manifesto (UC). 18 Abercrombie to Marsh, n.d. [summer 1914] (NY). 19 Cutting (BL.57) from the Literary Digest (25 Apr. 1914). 20 Trench to HM, 20 June 1914 (UC). 21 MB (1955), 164. 22 Pound to HM, n.d. [ June 1914] (UC). Gillett, see ch.8 n.5. Fletcher to HM, n.d. (UC). Fletcher certainly gave £10, although he was later so annoyed by inefficiencies in the editorial office that he insisted on being paid for contributions like everyone else. 23 Ould (1947), 365±6. Lowell (1914), 6. 24 AdR (Sep. 1932), 42.

Chapter 10. War 1914±16 1 Hassall (1964), 459. 2 Thomas to HM, n.d. [autumn 1914] (Buffalo). 3 HM, À True Adventure . . .' (1928). Cournos to JG, 23 Dec. 1961 (UT), describes HM pleading with a young poet, almost certainly Basil. 4 Roger Hogg, `W. W. Gibson: People's Poet', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle (1990), points out that `Breakfast', first published 17 Oct. 1914, derives from a story in The Nation (4 Oct.). 5 JG (1967), 85±6. HM to Lowell, 24 Mar. 1915 (Harvard), and Lowell (1915) are important sources of information about the Bookshop. Later Lowell±HM correspondence is sometimes prickly. 6 HM, `Personal Recollections of Rupert Brooke' (1930). 7 `HM was in love . . .': quoted to me by Wickham's son James Hepburn, 1995. Her unpublished poem, `To Harold Monro', is at HRC. The entirely different poem of the



Notes 281

8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

same title in Writings (1984), 332, should probably be read as affectionately humorous, although `The Indictment', 342, seems harsher; both these poems refer to AK with scorn and envy. AK to HM, 27 Oct. 1930, implies that he and Wickham had spent a night together. Eliot (1988), 59 and note. JG (1967), 101±2, gives the story Aiken told her, correcting the version in Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (1960). See also T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, ed. R. Marsh and Tambimuttu (1965), 22. Aiken (1978), 36±7, 39. Unpublished letters to HM, 22 Oct. 1913, 5 Apr., 22 May, 3 July 1914 (Harvard). Aiken drew HM's attention to `The Pall Bearers', a poem by the unnamed friend; as far as I know, there is no Eliot poem of this title. Aiken to Norman, 30 Oct. 1960 (HRC), alters the story by saying `Prufrock' was submitted to Poetry and Drama by mail, and HM described it as insane some time after the July party. Carpenter (1988), 257±8. Pound (1951), 108. HM to W. L. Phelps, 22 June 1920 (Buffalo). The lettering on the cover was by AK, who had been teaching herself calligraphy. Newbolt to HM, 31 Jan. Sabin to HM, 21 Jan. 1914 (UC). Palmer (1938), 180. Early work for the poem appears in a c.1909±10 notebook (UC). Pound's amendments: UC.5N. William Cooke, Edward Thomas: A Critical Biography (1970), 264. Eleanor Farjeon, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (1958), 104. The lack of any 1915±17 letters from Thomas to HM in the collection at Buffalo does not prove that the friendship ended; UC has two 1915 letters, 11 Apr. and 24 Dec., the second suggesting a meeting. Many of the earlier letters are to do with Poetry and Drama business. The Peasant Shop had connections with several Jewish artists whom HM knew, including Isaac Rosenberg and John Rodker. Rodker to HM, n.d. (UC), accepts an invitation from HM to become assistant editor on Poetry and Drama if a vacancy should occur. (But HM loathed Rodker's later poems, often quoting one of them in lectures as an example of Modernism carried to an absurd extreme.) Cambridge Magazine: E. J. Dent, `Rupert Brooke' (8 May 1915), 390±6; HM, `Some Thoughts . . .' (22 May). HM to EM, 19 May 1915 (NY). Aldington (1968), 100 [lunch]. Aldington to HM, 22 Feb. 1915 (UC). Flint's papers (HRC) confirm the hostile intention of his article. Wartime letters (HRC) by him, Aldington, H. D. and Cournos, contain bitter comments about Pound. Robert P. Eckert, Edward Thomas: A Biography and Bibliography (1937), 165. `Carrion'. Basil is recorded on the Loos memorial as having no known grave, but his body was later identified in the Canadian No. 2 Cemetery, Neuville St Vaast. Divorce file, PRO (WD 7414). Owen (1967), 360±5. Bridges, Selected Letters (1983), 690. HM to Marsh, 19 Mar. 1916 (NY). For AK's friendship with Mew, see Fitzgerald (1984). Pound to HM, n.d. [1915] (UC). Owen (1967), 382±4 (where the letter is wrongly dated 5 March), 501. Shanks, `The Week-end school of Poetry', My England (1938), 61. Ross (1967), 153. Thomas (1995), 127. Frost (1965), 185; de la Mare to HM, several 1915 letters (HRC); Fletcher to HM, 9 Mar. 1915 (UC); Lawrence, Letters ii (1981), 581. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon (1998), 262. HM to Rothenstein, several 1915±16 letters (Harvard). Pound (1951), 132, and letters to HM (UC). Eliot (1988), 125: `my putative publisher will probably



282 Notes

be conscripted' (10 Jan. 1916) ± to whom does this refer, if not to HM? Aldington as literary editor of The Egoist, the magazine which finally published Eliot's book in June 1917? But Eliot could hardly have described him as a publisher, and I'm not sure anyone had as yet suggested the Egoist Press might take on the book. 32 Laurence Housman, ed., War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (1930), 301. BL.40 has the originals of this and other letters from Wilson to HM. Mrs Wilson wanted to get her son's letters into print after the war, but HM could not find a publisher. A collection of Wilson's writings was published in New York as Waste Paper Philosophy (1920). 33 HM's army file, released in 1998 (PRO), records details: height 5'10'', weight 150 Ib., chest 39'', physical development `Good'. Slight chronic colitis, first suffered at Volunteer camp while at Cambridge. Varicose veins in legs. Fit for service, except infantry. Certificate of moral character signed by Edward Marsh from 10 Downing Street.

Chapter 11. Casualty 1916±19 1 Waugh (1962), 192±3, dates this reading autumn 1915, but summer 1916 was the only time HM could have been seen in private's uniform. Waugh was introduced to HM in 1917 by Ian Mackenzie. 2 Note for a post-war lecture in Manchester (BL.37). 3 Scattered hints of these quarrels with Hewlett survive in letters from him to HM (Harvard) and to AK (RT), all n.d., and in AK's letters to HM and her last memoir. 4 AK to HM, n.d. [probably 15 Dec. 1916]. Boulton: probably Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Bt, a minor poet. HM had known him in France. 5 Watson, The Man Who Saw (1917). 6 HM to Hodgson, 17 Nov. 1916 (Yale). 7 Eliot, `Reflections on Contemporary Poetry', The Egoist (Sep. 1917), 119. 8 AK's copy of Strange Meetings has a place name against each poem title, and some dates. 9 Gosse to HM, 21 Apr. 1917 (UC). 10 BL.36 (O), AK's notebook of poems. HM could see her poetry was poor, so to save embarrassment she pretended it was by an imaginary Gladys Biff. 11 Owen (1967), 506, 508, 511. 12 Apteryx [Eliot], `Verse Pleasant and Unpleasant', The Egoist (Mar. 1918), 43±4. 13 HM to Drinkwater, 12 Dec. 1917 (Yale). 14 Some of these consignments may have gone to the War Office. It had certainly ordered 50 copies of the previous volume for army libraries (the unopened parcels were found years later in a Whitehall cellar). 15 AK told these stories to Samuel Hynes. 16 AK to Hodgson, 7 Mar. 1918 (Yale). Sophia had taken a flat in Chelsea in 1912. 17 Correspondence in HM's army file. He left the army on joining the Ministry, but went back on army pay at M17D in the autumn. 18 Gosse to HM, n.d. [June 1918] (UC). 19 Waugh (1917), 97. 20 Pound (1988), 247. 21 HM (1909), 111 [threshold]. HM, `This Our Life' [vaunted].

Chapter 12. A New Start 1919±20 1 Hull shop: JG (1967), 75 n.2. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York, 1956), 18, mentions getting advice from AK at the Bookshop, à wonderful place'.



Notes 283

2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

Woolf (1977), 289±90, records a visit from AdR about his Book Club. The Club produced at least one broadside, with a prose passage by Woolf, illustrated by Vanessa Bell (Oxford, John Johnson Collection). Goldring (1935), 233±4; (1945), 153±4. Waugh (1962), 192±3; (1967), 96, 146. Wolfe (1934), 157. Aldington to HM, 29 Apr. 1921 (UC). HM drafted part of a poem on the verso of this letter, so the MS was filed among his verse fragments, eluding Aldington researchers. Yeats to HM, 10 June 1921 and n.d. (HRC). Uranians: see Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest (1970). Several of HM's Cambridge acquaintances, including Edward Dent, were homosexual. He also knew Charles Scott Moncrieff, who sent him a cryptic verse dated 22 Apr. 1914 (UC), seemingly implying a shared secret, if not a shared relationship. The link may have been Ian Mackenzie, who seems to have been one of Scott Moncrieff's lovers. Draft work for Ùnknown Country'. This and the next few quotations from UC notebooks. Sitwell (1949), 34. Osbert was a frequent visitor, always full of comic anecdotes; AK liked him, but thought him a poor listener. Vivien's diary (Oxford). Reviews reprinted in Rogers (1977), 260, 256, 233, 236. HM to Bax, 15 Jan. 1920 (HRC). Not knowing of this letter, Rogers (1977), 11, follows Hassall in attributing the first pejorative use of `Georgian' to HM in 1922. Rogers says the first use of `neo-Georgian' is in HM (1920), 156. Punch (30 Sep. 1925). HM to Geddes, 6 Dec. 1918 (National Library of Scotland). Ford (1934), 186; (1965), 147±8. See also Bowen (1974). I assume Nash stayed at the villa; he certainly told HM he wanted to rent it. Causey (1980), 397±8, catalogues two versions of `Cap Ferrat, Mediterranean', a painting of the sea from a high garden. HM to Eliot, 17 Dec. 1919 (Harvard). Eliot (1988), 388. RT has photocopies of four letters from Hewlett to AK, all undated and barely legible. AK notes on one that it was written just before her marriage. Her last memoir says that Kauffer persuaded HM to marry her, but Kauffer's letters to HM (Donald Gallup) show that the two men did not meet until Jan. 1923. Fitzgerald (1984), 177. Aiken (1952), 258. The term `squash' (an informal party), which Aiken used in a letter, has been seen as a Bookshop coinage, but it is an old Cambridge expression. Ford (1965), 100, 132. Bax, Some I Knew Well (1951), 174±5, and letters to HM (HRC); Meynell, My Lives (1971), 66±7, 193; Squire, The Invalids (1923); Waugh (1962), 171, and (1967), 62±3. The famous cricket chapter in A. G. Macdonell, England, Their England (1933), is based on Invalids matches. Details from Òswald' (see Ch.4, n.3 above). HM to Eliot, 24 Oct. 1920 (Harvard). Rhys Davies (1969), 104±5. Pound to HM, 24 Nov. 1920 (UC). Pound's paranoia: see the note at the end of his Cathay (1915); Aldington drew HM's attention to this. Reviews of HM (1920) mostly quoted from RT. Hewlett's Wiltshire Essays (1921), 224± 7, reprints his review. Kyle's (anonymous) comment: Poetry Review (1921), 113. Cournos to JG, 2 Dec. 1961 (UT).



284 Notes

Notes 285

1 Òbituary Verses`, Saturday Westminster Gazette (2 Feb. 1921), 10. Another epitaph: Èzra Pound/Has gone to ground'. Mew to AK, several letters (Buffalo). Fitzgerald (1984), 177, is mistaken in saying that AK went to France alone. 2 Freda McGregor remembers AK saying this. 3 AK suffered at least one haemorrhage, 1922±5. 4 AK to Ottoline Morrell, 23 Feb. 1929 (HRC). 5 BL.36 (E). The only date in this much-used notebook is 1924, but some notes in it showing HM preparing for the Chapbook questionnaire cannot be later than July 1922. 6 HM to Marsh, 4 Feb. 1923 (NY). 7 The East End incident is referred to in several UC MSS. Correspondence about the questionnaire: King's (Barnes Papers MS 32). An absurd answer by `Galloway Keetes' was no doubt composed by HM. 8 HM to Sebastian Sprott, 20 Jan. 1923 (King's) [Heretics]. HM to MB, March 1923 (UM) [Barker]. Disher to HM, 18 Apr. 1923 (Buffalo). 9 Kauffer to HM, 17 May 1923 (Donald Gallup). 10 Eliot to HM, 27 May 1923 (Donald Gallup). 11 Warden Fox to James Thomson, 30 Mar. 1965 (Radley). The Radleian (29 July 1923). Boyd (1948), 318. 12 Quotations up to this point selected from a notebook begun in Jan. 1923; the rest from one begun in Sep. 1923 (BL.36 (C±D)). 13 `Great Distance', MS dated 2 Jan. 1925. MSS of `Sleeping by the Sea' and `Too Near the Sea' are dated 18 and 21 Jan. 1925. 14 Nash's painting is reproduced and discussed in Causey (1980), 179±83. UC has letters between Nash and HM. 15 HM to Marsh, 8 June 1925 (NY). Marsh (1939), 33.

Chapter 14. Great Russell Street 1926±8 1 HM was elected FRSL in 1925, proposed by Drinkwater. Early brochures, n.d., of EVSA show him as treasurer; AK and several other regular readers at the Bookshop were also on the council. 2 Aldington (1968), 238±40. 3 Sims (1982), 265. 4 Details of the new shop from press cuttings (RT). 5 Cecil House, First Annual Report (1927±8), kindly lent to me by Cecil Houses. 6 BL.41 and RT. Aldington, Kauffer and Rutherston undertook to take 5 £1 shares each; Wolfe, John Bailey and Mrs M. Ball 10; Halliday 5 or 10; Major H. Brodie 20; Arnold Bennett 25. Galsworthy, Forster, Gordon Bottomley, Sydney Cockerell and Owen Seaman were among those who declined to subscribe. Other papers may well have been lost, but the total offer of capital must have been far less than HM had hoped. 7 Letters between Wolfe and Edward Thompson, and AK to Wolfe, 1926±7 (NY). 8 Allen, As I Walked Down New Grub Street (1981), 23±4. Grigson, `Coming to London ± IV', London Magazine (June 1956), 45. Ould (1947), 306. 9 Woolf (1980), 157. See also her Letters iii (1977), 416. HM knew most of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, including the Woolfs, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey, but



Chapter 13. Disillusion 1921±5

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

there was not much contact between their (north-west) Bloomsbury and his (southeast). Unsigned typescript, 30 Aug. 1926 (UC, with HM±Eliot correspondence). HM wrote the paper; Flint typed it, making a copy for HM to sign and send to Eliot (Flint to HM, 31 Aug. 1926, UC). Invitations: Eliot±Fletcher correspondence (HRC); Aiken papers (Huntington). DobreÂe: in Allen Tate, T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1967), 77±8. HM to Jack Lindsay, 3 Sep. 1923 (UC) [strong]. Eliot to HM, 13 Oct. 1924 (UC) [fastidious]. Eliot to Fletcher, 6 Mar. 1928 (HRC). From a notebook, among drafts of wartime poems (UC). Palmer, draft of an article on HM (HRC). MB (1955), 306, 319. MB's account may well be exaggerated, but the play was certainly a huge success.

Chapter 15. No Way Out 1929±32 1 Eliot, critical introduction to HM (1933), xvi. 2 Plomer, At Home: Memoirs (1958), 60±1. Plomer had corresponded with HM from South Africa. 3 Plough: see Davidson, The World, the Flesh, and Myself (1977), 160; Denise Hooker, Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia (1986). 4 Seymour (1992), 406, 488. 5 Few details of the Plough affair survive. With a little guesswork, I reconstruct from AK's letters to Ottoline (HRC), AK's last memoir and HM's diaries and notes. 6 Pound to HM, 26 Oct. 1926; HM to Pound, 21 Feb. 1927 (UC). Ould (1947), 310 [cat]. 7 Pound to HM, `24 Nov.' (UC). 8 Brooke Memorial Committee: papers in PEN archive (HRC). HM's speech at the 4 Mar. dinner was published twice as an article (see Bibliography). 9 HM to Read, 28 June 1930 (University of Victoria, B. C.). 10 The first specialist was Edward Carew-Shaw, who in 1991 still remembered examining HM. 11 Aiken (1978), 259. 12 HM to Aiken, 8 Oct. 1930 (Huntington). Aiken (1978), 162. 13 HM, Òver Production of Books' (1931) is an adaptation of this speech. 14 Several 1931 letters from Helston to HM and HM to Abercrombie (BL.41). 15 Quotations, out of sequence and with slight amendments, from HM's last notebooks and other papers (BL). The first three are some of the anecdotes with which he used to start his lectures. 16 HM to Aiken, 16 Sep. 1931, from Bad Eilsen (Huntington). 17 MB (1955), 65±6. 18 Eliot to HM, 1 Jan. and 17 Feb. 1932 (Donald Gallup).

Chapter 16. Legacies 1 Flint, introduction to HM (1933). Months later, Pound described Flint as `draped in grief over ole 'Arold's tombstone' (Pound, 1951, 329±30). Flint was one of HM's executors (the others were AK and Fred Monro's son Lionel); HM had appointed



286 Notes

2

3 4 5

6 7 8

9

him in place of Aldington, after Aldington had made an unkind reference to HM in an article. Some Letters of E. H. W. Meyerstein, ed Rowland Watson (1959), 142. AK remedied the Bookshop's neglect of Meyerstein by publishing a collection of his verse in 1933, no doubt because it contained an elegy to HM. Hodgson & Co catalogue (Oxford). Sale held on 11 Nov. 1932. Lillah McCarthy organised the event for the English Verse-Speaking Association (scrapbook, HRC). AK told this story to Samuel Hynes. See also `Robert Sencourt' (Robert Gordon George), T. S. Eliot: A Memoir (New York, 1971), 150, where she is unnamed but referred to as a `devoted friend'. Eliot to Ottoline, 9 and 14 Aug. 1933 (HRC), mentions George in connection with AK. Other details from Ottoline's diary (Adrian Goodman) and Vivien's diary (Oxford); Eliot to AK, three letters, 1932±3 (HRC), and two further letters, 1934±5 (Donald Gallup). Ottoline's diary, 20 Aug. 1933 (Adrian Goodman). AK to Hodgson, 24 Feb. 1954 (Yale). The Scottish writer Fred Urquhart, whose first published novel, Time Will Knit (1938), has a quotation from HM's `New Day' as its title, has told me that Nigel seduced him in 1934. Only when they met again ten years later did Urquhart discover that Nigel was married; by that time a divorce was under discussion, and Nigel was already on drugs. As well as inheriting HM's sexual uncertainty and proneness to addiction, Nigel seems to have had his father's tendency when drunk to get into arguments in public places; he often quarrelled in restaurants, on one occasion threatening to kill Urquhart. AdR to AK, 11 Nov. 1966 (BL.52). AdR died in Australia in 1974.



Notes 287

Bibliography

Books and pamphlets Poems (Elkin Mathews, Vigo Cabinet Series No. 37, July 1906). Proposals for a Voluntary Nobility, joint author with Maurice Browne (Samurai Press, Ranworth Hall, January 1907). The Evolution of the Soul (Samurai Press, Ranworth Hall, April 1907). Judas (Samurai Press, Cranleigh, dated 1907 but published early 1908; reissued, Sampson Low, Marston, February 1911). The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage: Paris to Milan on Foot (Brown, Langham, November 1909; reissued Sampson Low, Marston, 1912, and Leonard Parsons, 1925). Before Dawn (Poems and Impressions) (Constable, July 1911). Children of Love (Poetry Bookshop, December 1914). Trees (Poetry Bookshop, dated 1916 but published December 1915). Strange Meetings (Poetry Bookshop, April 1917). Some Contemporary Poets (1920) (Leonard Parsons, November 1920; reissued Simpkin Marshall, 1928). One Day Awake (A Morality Without Moral) (The Chapbook No. 32; Poetry Bookshop, December 1922). Real Property (Poetry Bookshop, March 1922). Harold Monro, ed. Humbert Wolfe (Augustan Books of English Poetry, Benn, 1927). The Earth for Sale (Chatto & Windus, May 1928; Dial Press, New York, 1928). The Collected Poems of Harold Monro, ed. Alida Monro with a biographical sketch by F. S. Flint and a critical note by T. S. Eliot (Cobden-Sanderson, 1933). The Silent Pool and Other Poems, chosen by Alida Monro (Faber & Faber, 1942).

Selected articles and other prose pieces `The Inglenook', The Florence Herald (17 December 1910). `How I Began', T. P.'s Weekly (4 April 1913), 419. `Broadsides', The Imprint (September 1913), 61±73. `The Poetry Bookshop: A year's experience and results', The Daily Citizen (31 January 1914), 4. `Some Thoughts on the Poetry of Rupert Brooke', Cambridge Magazine (22 May 1915), 425±6. `Poetry in 1915', T. P.'s Weekly (15 January 1916). À Dog's Agreement' (signed `Joggles'), Punch (24 April 1918), 262. `The Georgian Movement in Poetry' (letter), Book Monthly (April 1920), 240. `Words to Music' Music and Letters (January 1920), 52±9. `Wordsworth Revisited', The Criterion (July 1924), 468±76. `The Revival of the Broadside', The Town Crier (December 1926), 282. `Poetry and the Public', The Daily Chronicle (30 December 1926). À True Adventure at Dawn', The Criterion (September 1928), 27±32. `The Future', The Radleian (June 1927), 238±9. 288 10.1057/9780230595781 - Harold Monro, Dominic Hibberd


Harold Monro: published works

`What is Right with English Poetry', Everyman (6 February 1930), 35. `Personal Recollections of Rupert Brooke', Everyman (24 July 1930), 803. Another version in The Rising Generation (1 October 1930), 15±16. At least twenty articles in The Rising Generation (University of Tokyo, June 1930±July 1931), including Òver Production of Books' (15 July 1931, Monro's talk to the Double Crown Club) and various adaptations of lectures.

Periodicals and an anthology edited by Monro The Poetry Review (St Catherine Press, monthly, January-December 1912). Poetry and Drama (Poetry Bookshop, quarterly, March 1913±December 1914). The Chapbook (Poetry Bookshop, 1919±25). Published as The Monthly Chapbook (Poetry & Drama New Series), Nos 1±6, July-December 1919; The Chapbook A Monthly Miscellany, Nos 7±38, January 1920±June 1923 (no numbers for July 1921±January 1922 nor for March, April, June 1922); The Chapbook A Miscellany, Nos 39 and 40, October 1924 and 1925. Twentieth Century Poetry: An Anthology Chosen by Harold Monro (Chatto & Windus, 1929).

Poems Monro liked to publish his poems in periodicals before assembling the best of them in collections. No complete bibliography exists, but poems by him can be found in The Caian, The Cambridge Magazine, The Chapbook, Coterie, The Criterion, The Dial, The English Review, The Florence Herald, Form, The Idler, The Listener, Mandragora, Microcosm, The New Statesman, The Observer, Poetry, Poetry & Drama, The Poetry Review, Rhythm, The Saturday Westminster Gazette, The Spectator, To-Day, The Westminster Gazette and elsewhere.

General Aiken, Conrad. Selected Letters, ed. Joseph Killorin (New Haven, 1978). ÐÐ Ushant: An Essay (New York, 1952). Aldington, Richard. Life for Life's Sake: A Book of Reminiscences (1968 edn, first published 1941). Bentinck, H. D. The Letters of Henry Major Bentinck, Coldstream Guards (1919). Bowen, Stella. Drawn from Life (Maidstone, 1974). Boyd, A. K. The History of Radley College 1847±1947 (1948). Brooke, Rupert. The Letters of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1968). Browne, Maurice. Too Late to Lament: An Autobiography (1955). Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (1988). Causey, Andrew. Paul Nash (1980). Church, Richard. The Voyage Home (1964). Cork, Richard. Vorticism (1976). Cournos, John. Autobiography (1935). Davies, Rhys. Print of a Hare's Foot: An Autobiographical Beginning (1969). Davies, W. H. Later Days (1925). del Re, Arundel. `Georgian Reminiscences', three articles in Studies in English Literature (University of Tokyo, April 1932), 322±31; (September 1932), 460±71; (1934), 27±42. Doyle, Charles. Richard Aldington (1989). Drinkwater, John. Discovery: Being the Second Book of an Autobiography 1897±1913 (1932).



Bibliography 289

Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot i, ed. Valerie Eliot (1988). Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984). Fletcher, John Gould. Life is My Song (New York, 1937). Ford, Ford Madox. It Was the Nightingale (1934). ÐÐ The Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, 1965). Frost, Robert. Selected Letters, ed. Lawrance Thompson (1965). Goldring, Douglas. The Nineteen-Twenties (1945). ÐÐ Odd Man Out (1935). Grant, Joy. Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (1967). Green, Martin. Mountain Of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona 1900±1920 (Hanover, NH, 1986). Hamilton, G. H. Queen Square: Its Neighbourhood and Institutions (1926). Hassall, Christopher. Edward Marsh: Patron of the Arts: A Biography (1959). ÐÐ Rupert Brooke: A Biography (1964). Hodgson, Ralph. Poets Remembered (Ohio, 1967). Hutchins, Patricia. Ezra Pound's Kensington: An Exploration 1885±1913 (1965). Hynes, Samuel. Edwardian Occasions (1972). Lewis, Wyndham. Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Lowell, Amy. À Letter from London', The Little Review (October 1914), 6. ÐÐ`The Poetry Bookshop', The Little Review (May 1915), 19±22. Marsh, Edward. A Number of People: A Book of Reminiscences (1939). Monro, Alida ed. Charlotte Mew, Collected Poems (1953). ÐÐed., Recent Poetry 1923±1933 (1933). ÐÐwith Clara Bowring, The Popular Poodle (1953). Monroe, Harriet. A Poet's Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York, 1938). Nelson, James G. Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison, 1989). Nevinson, C. R. W. Paint and Prejudice (1937). Ould, Hermon. Shuttle (1947). Owen, Wilfred. The Collected Letters of Wilfred Owen, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (1967). Palmer, Herbert. Post-Victorian Poetry (1938). Pondrom, Cyrena. The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry 1900±1920 (1974). Pound, Ezra `Harold Monro', The Criterion (July 1932), reprinted in Polite Essays (1937), 1±16. ÐÐThe Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (1951). ÐÐ`Merit', The Spectator (23 June 1933), 913. ÐÐPound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson (1988). Roberts, Michael. T. E. Hulme (1938). Rogers, Timothy. Georgian Poetry 1911±1922: The Critical Heritage (1977). Ross, Robert H. The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910±22 (1967). Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1992). Sims, George. Àlida Monro and the Poetry Bookshop', Antiquarian Book Monthly Review (July 1982), 262±7. Sitwell, Osbert. Laughter in the Next Room (1949). Szeemann, Harald. Monte Verita: Berg der Wahrheit (Milan, 1978). Thomas, Edward. Selected Letters, ed. R. George Thomas (1995). Waugh, Alec. The Early Years of Alec Waugh (1962). ÐÐThe Loom of Youth (1917). ÐÐMy Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles (1967).



290 Bibliography

Wees, William C. Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto, 1972). Wells, H. G. A Modern Utopia (1905). Wickham, Anna. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, ed. R. D. Smith (1984). Wilkinson, Louis (`Louis Marlow'). Swan's Milk (1934). Wolfe, Humbert. Portraits by Inference (1934). Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, i. 1915±1919 (1977); ii. 1925±1930 (1980); iv. 1931±1935 (1982). Woolmer, J. Howard. The Poetry Bookshop 1912±1935: A Bibliography (Revere, 1988). ÐÐThe Samurai Press 1906±1909: A Bibliography (Revere, 1986).



Bibliography 291

Index

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 5, 96±7, 99±102, 107±8, 117, 122, 126, 131±3, 140, 144±5, 160, 170, 201±2, 205, 212, 214, 224, 248, 250±1, 254±5, 259 Ackerley, J. R., 202, 226, 248, 257 Aiken, Conrad, 145±6, 153±4, 187, 211, 238, 241, 252, 256 Ainley, Henry, 161, 171 Aldington, Richard: contributor to PR, 97, 126; on HM's poems, 105, 156, 220, 254; Futurist costume, 142; literary editor, Egoist, 144; reviews PB books, 160; HM reviews for, 159, 161; Images (PB), 167, 169, 187; army service, 178, 217; at Mecklenburgh Square, 193; leaves London, 202; contributions to Chapbook, 204, 216, 224; dines with Eliots and HM, 206; HM stays with, 217, 232±3; HM's executor, 287 n1; mentioned, 1, 5, 104, 141, 213, 251 Alford, John, 108±9, 116, 122, 124, 126, 131±5, 140, 142, 148, 154, 162, 170 Allen, Walter, 238 Arnold, Matthew, 16±17, 28±30, 130, 257, 268 Ascona (Monte Verita), 4, 29, 69, 71±4, 76±7, 85±6, 88±90, 132, 134, 137, 139 Asquith, H. H., 192 Auden, W. H., 261 Aumonier, Stacy, 235

Blake, William, 174 Blast, 144, 153 Blunden, Edmund, 5, 271 Bottomley, Gordon, 93, 97, 115; King Lear's Wife, 171, 175 Boulton, (?Sir Harold), 184±5 Bowen, Stella, 209 Bridges, Robert, 1, 123, 126, 131, 151±2, 167, 171, 234 Brooke, Alfred, 142 Brooke, Rupert: at PB, 1, 116, 124; founder-Georgian, 4, 55, 96±7, 106; Poems, 96, 101; contributions to PR, 97, 103±4, 108, 125; avoids visiting Malting House, 107; support for PB, 108±9, 145; reads at PB, 118, 121, 145±6, 152±4; contributions to PD, 125±6; HM's regard for poems, 108, 120, 159, 173±4; HM on his death, 160±1, 164; Memorial Committee, 5, 250±1; mentioned, 42 n, 99±100, 133, 135±6, 147, 149, 170, 183, 201, 202 n Brooke House, 7, 14 n, 177, 240, 259, 261, 266±7 Browne, Dorothy (Maurice's sister): see Monro, Dorothy Browne, Marsie (Maurice's mother), 15, 17, 18±19, 22, 24±5, 27±31, 33, 48, 53, 142 Browne, Maurice: at Cambridge, 13, 15±19, 23±4, 267; feelings for HM, 16, 18, 24±6, 28, 36, 48, 258; poetic ambitions, 15, 17, 24, 28±30; Zetetes, 19, 27±8, 54; in India, 27±8, 30; reads A Modern Utopia, 29; Epithalamion, 31; plans Samurai with HM, 35, 38; Samurai Press, 39±42, 46±7, 53±5; meets Wells, 43±5; quarrel with HM, 48; flight to Capri, 47±9; the lost leader, 50, 52±3; renews contact with HM, 68, 70; in Italy with HM, 77, 79±81; marries in USA, 81; praises Before Dawn, 86; contribution to PR, 98±9; Little Theatre (Chicago), 101, 105, 109, 239; visits London, 131±2, 145;

Baring, Maurice, 190 Barry, Iris, 224, 229 Bax, Clifford, 196, 208, 212, 248 Beach, Sylvia, 201, 209, 226 Belloc, Hilaire, 135 Bennett, Arnold, 1, 92, 234, 270 Bentinck, Henry, 21±2, 30, 33, 182 Binns, Henry Bryan, 124 Binyon, Laurence, 124 Birch, Frank, 145±6, 170, 225 Bircher-Benner, Max, 61±2, 69, 73, 77, 124, 218



HM stands for Harold Monro, AK for Alida Klemantaski (Monro), PB for Poetry Bookshop, PD for Poetry and Drama, PR for Poetry Review

returns to England, 239; finds HM drunk, 240, 249; and Journey's End, 245; financial help to HM, 246, 254; on Brooke Memorial Committee, 250; nurses HM, 257±8; at HM's funeral, 259; later life, 263 Buzzi, Paolo, 137 Byron, Lord, 12, 22, 45, 114 Cabaret Club, 135±6, 264 CafeÂ Royal, 117 n, 124±5, 140, 215, 252 Caius College, Cambridge, 13±14, 17, 30, 131, 266 Callwell, Albert, 96 Cambridge Magazine, The, 108, 160 Cammaerts, Emile, 171 Campbell, Roy, 231, 250 Cannan, Gilbert, 97, 124, 124, 144 n, 145±6, 160 Carpenter, Edward, 1, 37, 44, 84, 87, 91, 123±4, 142, 185 Cecil House, 235, 247 Chapbook, The, 200, 204±6, 208±9, 211±12, 216±7, 223±5, 229±30 Charlton, Leo, 202, 240, 259 Chesterton, Mrs Cecil, 235 Chesterton, G. K., 1, 51, 135, 142, 194, 227, 235 Church, Richard, 250, 254 Coit, Stanton, 42 n, 51, 55, 69 Colvin, Sidney, 117 Cornford, Frances, 126, 159±60, 170 Cournos, John, 126, 141, 180, 193, 210, 215, 225 Craig, Edward Gordon, 82, 85, 93, 105 n, 123, 126, 216, 224±5 Crowley, Aleister, 1, 107, 117 n, 123, 135 Darwin, Charles, 15, 27, 35, 41, 108 Davidson, John, 60, 129 Davies, W. H., 1, 97, 120, 126, 135, 186, 202 n, 212±3, 222, 226, 234 Dean, Basil, 126 de la Mare, Walter, 5, 97, 126, 135, 142, 171, 175, 197, 204, 222, 248, 250 del Re, Arundel: with HM in Florence, 81±2, 83±5; HM's love for, 83, 89±90, 130, 151, 219; at Ascona mill, 88±90, 132; accompanies HM to London, 90±1; assistant editor, PR, 92, 94±6, 99±100, 106, 109; reviews Pound, 103; and Vera Tchaikovsky, 111, 133±4, 159, 168;

assistant editor, PD, 116, 118, 124, 126, 134; readings at PB, 122, 152; and AK, 134, 186; and Marinetti, 135, 143; war service, 149, 161, 168, 197; Chelsea Book Club, 201; university posts, 225, 252, 264; marries, 228; last meeting with HM, 252; letter to AK, 264±5; mentioned, 3±4, 161, 175, 206, 250 Dent, Edward, 160±1, 169±71, 175, 182, 197, 206, 225, 284 n5 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 169±70 Disher, M. Willson, 116±17, 223, 264 DobreÂe, Bonamy, 124, 225, 241 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 104, 142, 178, 180, 186, 193, 202, 204, 209 Drinkwater, John, 3, 36, 54±5, 93, 96±7, 101±2, 105±7, 109, 116, 125, 133, 192, 205, 212±15, 222, 234, 237, 250, 257, 285 n Dunne, J. W., 256±7 Egoist, The, 99, 144, 159±61, 187, 190, 268 Eliot, T. S.: at PB, 3, 153, 213, 229, 242, 245, 252; HM's `rejection' of early poems, 153±4, 169, 175, 187, 282±3 n31; HM gives reading of `Prufrock', 123, 169; meets HM, 206; opinions of HM's work, 5, 156, 169, 187±8, 192, 214, 220, 242±3, 246, 259, 261±2; reads at PB, 213; The Waste Land and HM, 156, 219, 222, 224, 260 n; unable to open PB, 234; gratitude to HM, 241; Criterion, 205, 240±1, 242; Criterion Club, 240, 251, 257±8; contributions to Chapbook, 209, 216, 223, 241; introduces HM to Joyce, 249; and HM's death, 257, 259; friendship with AK, 130, 260±3; mentioned, 16±17, 39, 190, 198, 205, 231 Eliot, Vivien(ne), 206, 222, 229, 234, 260±1 Ellis, Vivian Locke, 124 Elton, Godfrey, 126 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 16±17, 26, 35, 46, 57, 63, 130, 188, 260 n Empson, William, 261 Epstein, Jacob, 1, 117, 131, 135±6, 140, 264 Fabian Society, 42±4, 84, 124, 169 Farjeon, Eleanor, 226 Farr, Florence, 122, 270 Fenton, Violet, 39, 63±4, 68 Ficke, Arthur Davison, 28, 31, 39, 41±2, 44±5, 48, 53±4



Index 293

Figgis, Darrell, 102 Fitzroy, The, 246±8, 253, 256 Flecker, James Elroy, 108, 126, 155, 159±60, 212, 240 Fletcher, John Gould, 97, 104, 114, 124, 175, 186, 204, 210, 242, 280 n10 Flint, Frank Stuart, friendship with HM: 5, 103±4, 186, 248, 254, 259, 261; pioneer Modernist, 93, 98±9, 161; PR article on French poets, 97, 104±5; personality, 104, 251; at PB parties, 120, 131, 142, 145±6, 153±4, 197, 225; contributions to PD, 125; Cadences (PB), 169, 187; called up, 191; contributions to Chapbook, 204, 206, 209, 223; Otherworld (PB), 226; and Criterion Club, 241, 251±2, 257; HM's executor, 286±7 n1; mentioned, 1, 42 n, 118, 135, 141, 184, 212, 240 Flying Fame, The, 134, 137±8 Ford, Ford Madox, 1, 93, 95, 101, 125, 141±2, 155, 201, 209, 211±12, 216, 223±4 Forel, August, 180, 183 Forster, E. M., 1, 16, 202, 225±6 Fowler, Ethel, 226 Fraser, Claud Lovat, 124, 134, 137±8, 149, 170, 179±80, 183, 187, 194, 201, 204, 206, 217, 236±7 Freeman, John, 190 Frost, Robert, 1, 116±17, 120, 124, 126, 131, 134±5, 157, 175, 245 Futurism, 132, 135±7, 141±4, 197 Galsworthy, John, 235, 237, 270 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 116±17, 143 Geddes, Patrick, 124, 208 Gee, Collingwood, 81±3 `Georgian', meanings of, 96±7, 173; HM's uses of, 86, 190, 208, 220, 222; `neo-Georgian', 208 n Georgian poetry / poets, 4±5, 96±7, 102, 106±8, 125, 133, 141, 143, 145, 154, 175, 178, 187 n, 200, 204, 211, 214, 250, 264, 271; origins, 32, 54±5, 60, 96, 152 Georgian Poetry: i (1912), 96, 107±9, 175, 261; ii (1915), 156, 169, 171, 175, 187±8; iii (1917), 190, 192±3; iv (1919), 201, 205±7; v (1922), 222±3; `vi' (1933), 231, 261 Georgian Society, 207±8 Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson: published by Samurai Press, 47, 54±5; influence on HM's poetry, 54±5, 60, 86; and PR, 93,

98±9, 101; a founder-Georgian, 96±7, 106±8, 222; Pound on, 100; arrives in London, 102; helps HM find premises, 105, 262; tenant at PB, 109, 116, 131; PB readings, 122±3, 213; absent from PD and Chapbook, 125, 205; quarrel with HM, 132±4, 145, 155; pioneer war poet, 152; war service, 170, 198; AK on, 212; HM on, 214, 244; AK meets brother, 249; on Brooke Memorial Committee, 250 Gillett, Eric, 116±17, 143±6, 212 Ginner, Charles, 2, 231 Goldring, Douglas, 126, 201, 204, 208±9, 214, 224 Gooch, Sir Daniel (1st Bt), 9 Gooch, Sir Daniel (`Curly', 3rd Bt), 11±12, 33±4, 38, 205, 212±13, 217 Gooch, Lancelot, 25, 118, 166, 212, 217 Gooch, Mary Winifred (Lady Gooch, `May', neÂe Monro, HM's sister), 6, 11±12, 25, 33±4, 38, 40±2, 52, 69, 86, 105, 175, 212±13, 217, 256, 264 Gooch, Phyllis, 25, 212 Gore-Booth, Eva, 229 Gosse, Edmund, 92±3, 140, 171, 189, 197, 209 Gould, Gerald, 42 n, 142, 197, 207, 210 Grant, Joy, x, 164 Granville-Barker, Harley, 46, 189, 223 Graves, A. P., 167, 171 Graves, Robert, 1, 54, 190, 205, 223±5, 238, 251; Over the Brazier (PB), 167, 175 Green, Romney, 42, 44, 48±9, 51±3, 56, 69±70, 77±9, 85, 95, 98, 115, 118, 124±5, 131, 234, 236, 264 Grigson, Geoffrey, 238 Gross, Otto, 72±3 Guest, Haden, 44 Gurney, Ivor, 206 Guthrie, James, 43, 47, 69, 98, 115, 160, 169 Gwyther, Geoffrey, 171 Haeckel, Ernst, 27, 41 Halliday, F. W., 183, 197 Hamnett, Nina, 247 Hardy, Thomas, 126, 152, 171, 175, 224, 240 Helston, John, 131, 254±5, 259 Henley, W. E., 60 Heretics, the, 108, 143, 223, 225 Herron, George, 82, 84, 124



294 Index

Hesse, Hermann, 62, 73±4 Hewlett, Maurice: urges HM to return to England, 85; promotes Before Dawn, 85±6; enquires about mill, 89; takes HM to Poets' Club, 93; disapproves of Arundel, 95; contributor to PR, 97; advises HM about PR, 101, 103; at PB, 122, 140, 145±6, 152±3, 194, 201; contributor to PD, 126, 131, 135; declines to meet Marinetti, 136; friendship with AK, 128, 134, 151, 158, 162, 184, 210; and war, 148, 155, 189; criticises HM, 214; mentioned, 92, 99, 104, 169, 175 Hill, George, 239, 247 Hodgson, Ralph, 97, 123±4, 131, 134±5, 137±8, 145±6, 149, 161, 168, 187, 198, 201, 205, 212, 259, 263 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 250 Hueffer, F. M.: see Ford Hulme, T. E., 3, 4, 93, 99, 102±5, 108, 111, 117, 124±6, 131, 135, 140±1, 143, 149, 161, 191, 201 Huxley, Aldous, 201, 208±9 Imagism/Imagists, 97±8, 104±5, 125, 141±2, 146, 159, 161, 169, 186±7, 204, 208, 215 Ingram, Kenneth, 202, 206 Ireland, John, 173 Irvine, Dr, 218±19 Jackson, Holbrook, 43±4, 262 James, Miss, 180, 194 Jones, David, 226, 242 Joyce, James, 237, 249, 268 Jung, C. G., 62, 72, 219 Kate (maid), 26, 31, 39, 63±4, 68, 84 Kauffer, Edward McKnight, 224±6, 234, 236, 241, 254 Keats, John, 12, 19, 22, 25, 30, 47, 57, 221, 257; HM's portrait of, 16±17, 39, 82, 116, 257 Klemantaski, Alida: see Monro, Alida Komai, Gonoske, 171, 234 Konody, Paul, 197 Kramer, Jacob, 224, 225 n Kreymbourg, Alfred, 224 Kyle, Galloway, 69±70, 81, 92±3, 98±100, 103±4, 107, 109±10, 125, 144 n, 172, 194, 214±15, 270±2

La LignieÁre (Gland), 58±9, 61, 63, 68, 70±1, 222, 236 Lawrence, D. H., 4, 73, 79, 95, 97, 107, 116, 122, 126, 133, 175, 193, 204, 253 Lawrence, Frieda, 72, 193 Lee, Rupert, 101 Lee, Vernon (Viola Paget), 82±4 Lewis, Percy Wyndham, 1, 136, 140 n, 143±4, 155, 191, 204, 224, 226, 254 Lincoln's Inn, 13±14, 18, 75, 221, 266 Lindsay, Vachel, 213 Lloyd George, David, 185±6, 248 Lomer, Sydney, 202 Lorimer, Emilia, 103, 120, 271 Lowell, Amy, 1, 115, 120, 126, 134, 146, 152±3, 155, 161, 169, 186, 207 Ludwig, Emil, 90 Lunn, Arnold, 226 Lyall, Archibald, 259 Macaulay, Rose, 126 Mackenzie, Ian, 179, 188, 194, 198, 284 n5 Macnamara, Francis, 122, 131 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 36±7 Malleson, Miles, 212, 223±4, 229, 262 Mallory, George, 131 Mann, Thomas, 61 Manning, Frederic, 216 Mansfield, Katherine, 124 Margary, Peter John (HM's grandfather), 8±9, 268±9 Marinetti, F. T., 123, 132±3, 135±6, 142±4, 159, 161, 213, 264 Marsh, Edward, 3±4, 54, 86, 95±7, 101±2, 106±7, 109, 116, 122±3, 125, 131, 133, 136, 142, 144±5, 148, 156, 160±1, 167, 169, 175, 184, 189±90, 197, 204, 206±7, 223, 231, 250, 261 Masefield, John, 5, 97, 190; The Everlasting Mercy, 96, 99, 124±5 Mathews, Elkin, 33, 38, 93, 105±6, 133, 169, 187, 271, 281 n12 Maude, Anthony, 19, 21 Maude, Aylmer, 44 McCarthy, Lillah, 46, 253, 287 n4 McDonald, Percy, 160, 169, 176±8 Mew, Charlotte, 167±8, 171, 183, 190, 204, 210, 212, 216, 224, 238, 240; The Farmer's Bride (PB), 175 Meyerstein, E. H. W., 259, 287 n2 Meynell, Francis, 124, 212



Index 295

Meynell, Mrs Gerard, 152 Miles, Eustace, 51±2, 270 Millay, Edna St Vincent, 213 Milton, John, 12, 19, 28, 30, 123, 223 Monkhouse, Allan, 183 Monro, Alida (neÂe Klemantaski, HM's second wife): meets HM, 128±9; early life, family, 130, 139, 193; political opinions, 130, 185±6, 194; friendship with Hewlett, 128, 134, 151, 158, 162, 184, 210; relationship with HM, 130, 132±5, 138±41, 158±9, 162, 167±8, 170±1, 173, 182±4, 188±9, 190±2, 198±9, 202±4, 210, 229, 240, 242; repels advances from other people, 140±1, 168, 180±1; work at PB, 134, 140, 159±60, 225; readings, 122, 129, 140, 167, 171, 175, 223, 232, 235, 242; and Wickham, 133, 153, 171; and Nigel Monro, 139, 159, 190, 239±40; influence on HM's poems, 156, 179, 188; weekends with HM, 139, 158, 173, 196, 248; at Red Lion Sq., 162; friendship with Mew, 167, 238, 240; manages PB in wartime, 177±183, 186, 190, 193, 211; at Mecklenburgh Sq., 180, 186, 193±4; at Millman St., 194; and HM's homosexuality, 140, 181, 188, 191±2, 218; and animals, 182, 196, 219±20, 263; and HM's drinking, 184±5, 218, 229, 247±8, 252±3, 256; in air raid, 196; work for Chapbook, 209, 211±12; marries HM, 210; at Villa des Oliviers, 210±11, 216; at Heathcote St., 217, 235±6; patch on lung, 220; at Sidlesham, 228±9, 236, 263; sequel to Georgian Poetry, 231, 261; moves PB, 236±7; at Selsey, 210; and Gibson, 249; confides in Ottoline, 247, 253, 262; and HM's last illness and death, 256±60; friendship with Eliot, 187, 260±1; closes PB, 262; death, 263; mentioned, 3, 5±6, 15, 26, 37, 85, 114, 131, 142, 148, 161 Monro, Arthur Russell (HM's brother), 6, 9±10, 80 Monro, Charles (HM's cousin), 14, 19, 266 Monro, Dorothy (neÂe Browne, HM's first wife, later Mrs George Hill): engaged to HM, 18±19; hockey, 22±3; relationship with HM, 22, 24, 33±5, 40, 46, 65±6, 68±9; marries HM, 25±6; in Ireland, 26±7, 30±1; attempts to share HM's interests, 28±9, 32, 34, 36, 40, 42, 74, 189;

Nigel born, 28; operations, 29, 63; return to England, 32; to Haslemere, 38; first separation, 51±2, 56; with HM on Riviera, 63, 65±6, 74±6; final separation, 66±7; later contacts with HM, 79, 95±6, 118, 131, 143, 148, 184, 240, 247; admires Before Dawn, 86; helps with PB, 115; HM's later feelings for, 129, 158, 182, 239, 256; AK's attitude to, 141, 189, 190±1; divorce proceedings, 69, 166±7, 175, 182; alimony, 220±1, 246; Maurice returns, 239; at HM's funeral, 259; death, 263 Monro, Rev. Edward (HM's great-uncle), 8, 267 Monro, Edward William (HM's father), 6±9, 96 n, 245 Monro, Emily (neÂe Nugent, HM's aunt) 7, 142, 221, 249, 268 Monro, Frederic Robert D'Oyly (HM's cousin and solicitor), 177, 210, 240, 259, 268 Monro, Harold Edward: 1879±1908 ancestry, 6±9, 266±9; birth (14 March 1879), 9; at Radley, 9±11; at Cambridge, 13 -17; engaged, 18; law student, 13±14, 18±20; to Ireland, 19±20; land agent, 19±21, 29, 51; marries Dorothy, 25±6; early interest in bookselling, 27, 105; son born, 28; leaves Ireland, 31; plans Samurai, 35±6; to Haslemere, 38±9; meets Wells, 43±5; Samurai convenor, 44±5, 48±9, 52±3; to Upper Ifold, 48; quarrel with Maurice, 48, 50; first separation from Dorothy, 51 1908±11 walks Paris±Milan, 57±9; Florence, 59±61, 77, 79±85, 139; starts Ìmpressions', 60±1; psychoanalysed, 62; final separation, 66±7; poems about sex, 73±4, 78±9; at Monte Verita, 74, 76±80, 132; meets Arundel, 81±3; mill house, Ascona, 73±4, 88±90, 134, 198, 229, 264±5 1911±14 returns to England, 91; agreement with Poetry Society, 92±3; launches PR, 94±5; rents Malting House, Great Canfield, 95; mother remarries, 96; founds PB, 105, 109, 119; founderGeorgian, 106; loses PR, 109±10;



296 Index

launches PD, 125; meets AK, 128±9; quarrel with Gibson, 132±3; publicises Futurism, 135±7, 142±4 1914±18 volunteers as messenger, 147; pioneer war poet, 149±50, 152; and Eliot's early poems, 153±4, 175, 187; suspends PD, 154; rejects Thomas's poems, 157±8; rents Beake cottage, Rayleigh, 158; Special Constable, 159; divorce proceedings, 69, 166±7, 175, 182; rents Chestnuts Farm, Woodham Ferrers, 170; joins army, 176; Manchester, 181±6; Ripon, 194±6; desk jobs, 196±7; demobilised, 199 1919±32 revives PB and launches Chapbook, 200±1; breakdown, 206; buys Villa des Oliviers, Cap Ferrat, 208±9; marries AK, 209±10; first attacks of amnesia, 210, 222; cricket, 212; sister dies, 217; rents 19 Heathcote St., Bloomsbury, 217±8; sees psychiatrist, 218; Arundel marries, 228; rents Long Farm, Sidlesham, 229; last Chapbook, 229±31; eye trouble, 232; moves PB, 234±5; mother dies, 235; rents Crablands, Selsey, 240; assists Eliot, 240±1; `Plough affair', 247; treasurer, Brooke Memorial Committee, 250±1; death (16 March 1932), 258; funeral, 259 Personal attributes achievement, 3±5, 96, 113, 128, 155, 171, 232, 259±60; appearance, 3, 7, 13, 87, 201, 235; character, 6±7, 13, 43, 46, 71, 124, 176, 238, 262; diaries, 31, 57, 84, 117±18, 129; diet, 35, 37, 52, 61±2; dreams, 9, 42, 62, 64±5, 191±2, 218±19, 242, 244, 256±7; drinking, 8, 13, 33, 38, 40, 64±5, 75±7, 80±1, 118, 125, 157, 168, 184±5, 200, 203±4, 217±8, 221±2, 226±7, 229, 232±3, 240, 247±8, 251±3, 256; and the earth, 68, 78, 88±9, 127, 135, 138, 151, 156, 212, 243, 254; finances, 7, 29, 96 n, 220 n, 235, 279 n5; and the future, 4, 55±7, 69, 75, 88±9, 135, 144, 198, 228, 243; and Georgianism / Georgians, 3±5, 55, 60, 97, 106±7, 125, 133, 155±6, 207±8, 214±15, 220, 222±3, 261; health, 12, 19, 37, 58, 191, 194, 196,

198, 206, 232, 236, 248±9, 252, 256±8, 283 n33; homosexuality, 3, 10±11, 16, 62, 75±7, 80, 89±90, 140, 150±1, 181, 183, 202±3, 218; lectures, 17, 55±6, 61, 69±70, 102, 108, 129, 223, 225, 232, 240, 254; and Modernism / Modernists, 5, 39, 98±9, 102, 104±5, 108, 111, 125, 141±2, 148, 155±6, 169, 205, 209, 241, 248, 261; notebooks, 197±8, 202, 221±2, 226±7, 255±6; and the poetry of the future, 4, 16±17, 46, 69±70, 91, 94, 98, 102±3, 107, 125±7, 215, 224; HM's poetry, characteristics of, 12, 54±5, 60, 73, 86, 111, 174, 206, 211; readings, 43, 77, 79, 120±3, 125, 171, 175, 178, 189, 224, 232; and religion, 22, 24, 33, 35±7, 40±9, 64, 87, 127, 244±5; and the soul, 27, 41±3, 46, 78, 102, 164, 166, 242; walks, 14, 57±9, 74, 89, 125 Works (books) Before Dawn (Poems and Impressions), 4, 17, 60±1, 64, 85±8, 91±3, 101, 108, 128, 135, 156, 173, 208, 243; (Impressions), 60, 63, 83, 88, 92, 102; Children of Love, 156±7, 187; The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage, 60, 68, 70, 83, 198; Collected Poems, 261±2; The Earth for Sale, 242±4; The Evolution of the Soul, 41±2, 51, 96; Judas, 36, 50, 55, 70, 79, 83, 85; One Day Awake, 223; Poems, 33, 38; Proposals for a Voluntary Nobility, 41; Real Property, 14, 206, 219±20, 222; Some Contemporary Poets, 213±16; Strange Meetings, 187±9, 192; Trees, 158, 163±6, 169±70, 172±3, 187; Twentieth Century Poetry, 249±50 Works (selected individual poems, *unpublished) Àspidistra Street', 185; `Bitter Sanctuary', 246, 257; `Carrion', 150±1; `Child of the Earth', 188; *`Cophetua' (play), 37, 45±6, 63±4, 102, 139; `Coronilla', 34, 66, 182, 188, 231; *`The Death of Jehovah', 3, 68, 77, 79±80, 139, 183, 194, 198, 220, 224, 227, 244±5; `Dog', 201, 220; `Don Juan in Hell', 73, 87; `Dream Exhibition of a Final World', 228; `The Earth for Sale', 243; `The Empty House', 113, 235; `Field Excursion', 203; `The Garden',



Index 297

Monro, Harold Edward: (contd) 203±4, 219; `Goldfish', 198, 207, 219; `Go Now, Beloved', 68±9, 128±9; `Great City', 111, 156; `Great Distance', 229; `Hearthstone', 156±7; *`His Positions', 151; `Holy Matrimony', 228; Ìntrospection', 219, 222; *Ìnvitation (to A. d. R.)', 71, 88±90; `Journey', 172; `Lake Leman', 61; `Lament in 1915', 147, 163, 187±8; `The Last Abbot', 77, 87±8; `London Interior', 111±12, 156; `Man Carrying Bale', 206±7, 219; `Midnight Lamentation', 243; `Milk for the Cat', 156±7, 188, 202 n, 246; `Natural History', 21, 239; Òn the Destruction of the Foundling Hospital', 254; Òverheard on a Saltmarsh', 110±11, 138, 156±7; `Paradise', 87; `The Poets Are Waiting', 148; `Real Property', 179, 219; `Retreat', 149; `Rumour', 239; `The Sickroom', 256; `Silence Between', 243; `Soldier', 149; `Solitude', 183, 188; `Spring', 205±6; *`The Springtide', 73±5, 77±8, 88, 151, 166, 173; `The Strange Companion', 156±7; `Strange Meetings', 128, 158, 174, 181, 187, 194; `Suburb', 156, 222; *`The Superman', 45; `To Tolstoi', 73, 87; `Two Visions', 57, 64±5, 73, 86±7; Ùnknown Country', 203, 222; `The Virgin', 79, 87; `Week- End', 158, 173±4, 187; `Winter Solstice', 242; `Youth in Arms', 149±52, 157, 167 Monro, Dr Henry (HM's grandfather), 7±9, 268 Monro, Mary Winifred (`May', HM's sister): see Gooch, Mary Winifred Monro, Nigel Harold Maurice Russell (HM's son), 28±32, 38, 52, 63±6, 68, 74±7, 79, 85, 96, 105, 116, 118, 132, 139, 142, 145, 147±8, 159±60, 190, 198, 220, 235, 239±40, 247, 256±7, 259, 261, 263±4, 287 n8 Monro, Russell Henry (HM's uncle), 7, 8, 10±11, 25, 33, 221, 245, 249, 264, 268 Monro, Sophia (Arabel Sophia, neÂe Margary, later Mrs Albert Callwell, HM's mother): 6±13, 17±18, 20, 24, 26, 29±30, 38, 42, 52, 57, 76, 96, 105, 139, 142±3, 145, 147, 159, 162, 178±9, 184,

188, 196, 198, 217, 219, 229, 234±6, 250, 268 Monro, Theodore Russell, 8±9, 268 Monro, Dr Thomas (HM's great-great-grandfather), 8, 266±7 Monroe, Harriet, 4, 122, 127, 144 n, 225 Monte Verita: see Ascona Moore, G. E., 173±4 Moore, Thomas Sturge, 97, 122, 142, 208, 234, 241, 262 More, Thomas, 57 Morley, Frank, 251±2 Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 1, 21, 131, 229, 240, 247, 253, 260, 262 Morris, William, 26, 42, 114 Muir, Edwin, 231 Munro, Hector Hugh (`Saki'), 268±9 Murray, Gilbert, 32, 45±6, 56, 92, 123, 160, 262, 270 Murray, Harold, 42 n, 48±9, 52 Murry, John Middleton, 95, 102, 110, 124, 207±8, 214, 220 Nash, John, 201 Nash, Paul, 1, 67, 138, 169, 174, 201, 209, 211, 224, 226, 229, 230±1 Nesbitt, Cathleen, 122, 145 Nevinson, C. R. W., 1, 136, 143, 170, 197, 226 Nevinson, Henry, 259 New Age, The, 44, 55, 103±4, 108, 128 n Newbolt, Henry, 92±4, 97, 119±20, 122±3, 125, 140, 142, 152, 155±6, 220, 262 New Numbers, 133, 144, 160 Nichols, Robert, 190, 192±3, 197 Nicholson, John Gambril, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 45, 64, 68, 72, 123, 135, 137, 243, 260 n Noyes, Alfred, 144±5, 214, 227, 229 Oedenkoven, Henri, 71±2, 76, 198 Ogden, C. K., 108, 160±1, 225 Orage, A. R., 43 Oreste (HM's servant), 76, 80, 84 Ould, Hermon, 146, 238±40, 250, 254, 257 Owen, Wilfred, 1, 22, 54, 91±2, 97, 117, 150, 167, 171±2, 192, 195 n, 198, 207, 271 Palmer, Mrs (PB housekeeper), 160, 177, 179, 182, 185, 190±1, 193 Palmer, Herbert, 245



298 Index

Pass, Leonard, 16±17, 30±1, 39, 41 Patmore, Brigit, 217 Pearsall Smith, Logan, 95 Pecorini, John, 135, 251±2 Pepler, Hilary, 53, 262 Phillips (Dorothy Monro's lover), 66, 68, 74±6, 79, 239 Phillips, Stephen, 16, 109, 125, 270 Plarr, Victor, 93, 97, 125, 135, 142 Playfair, Nigel, 197 Plomer, William, 246 Plough, The, 247, 250, 253 Plowman, Max, 124, 271 Pocock, Guy, 17, 28, 31, 39, 41 Poetry (Chicago), 4, 99, 144, 154, 183 Poetry and Drama, 110, 116, 118, 120, 125±6, 128, 133, 135, 137±8, 140±1, 143±5, 148, 151±2, 154±5, 157±8, 160, 200, 205, 241, 260 Poetry Bookshop: 35 Devonshire St., 1±3, 105, 109, 111±17, 119±20, 127, 133±4, 231, 235, 238, 264; 38 Great Russell St., 234±6, 260, 262, 264; aims and origins, 7±8, 22, 32, 47, 54, 71, 85, 105±7, 127, 138; finances, 105, 187, 211, 225, 237, 254±5; other poetry bookshops, 138, 201, 210; parties, 120, 131, 197, 201, 225, 229, 254, 261±2; readings, 118±23, 129, 136, 146, 152±3, 155, 161, 167±9, 171, 175, 178±9, 186, 193, 196±7, 213, 218, 224±5, 237, 240, 242, 245, 254, 257, 260; residents, 109, 116±17, 171±2; staff, 116, 160, 173, 177, 186, 225, 237; in wartime, 148, 167, 179, 183, 186, 190, 193±4 Publications: books, 108±9, 143±4, 161, 175, 179±80, 187, 200, 226, 262±3; broadsides, 155, 174; chapbooks, 137, 155±7, 159±60, 167, 169, 175, 187, 200; Christmas cards, 226, 240; rhyme sheets, 137±8, 178, 183, 200±1, 217, 226, 234, 263, 381 n12 see also Chapbook, The; Georgian Poetry; Poetry and Drama Poetry Review, The, 54, 92±104, 106±9, 125, 144±5, 205, 214, 260, 265, 270±2 Poetry Society, 69±70, 81, 92±3, 98, 100, 103±4, 107, 109, 120, 125, 205, 209, 270±1 Poets' Club, 93, 102, 125, 128, 135±6, 209 Pound, Ezra: in London, 93; relationship with HM, 94, 103,124; opinion of HM, 94, 96, 98, 100, 103, 105, 123, 140,

142, 154, 197, 213, 250, 262; at PB, 1, 117, 213, 248; and PR, 97, 99, 101, 108, 271; and PD, 125, 145; HM reads poems, 108, 120±1; rhyme sheet, 138; amends poem by HM, 157 n; HM's opinion of, 148, 186, 192, 248; promotes Eliot's poems, 154, 187; disillusion with England, 201, 212±13; and Chapbook, 223±4; HM visits in Paris, 226; Canzoni, 93; Catholic Anthology, 156, 169; Cavalcanti translation, 103; Des Imagistes, 5, 141, 143, 169, 217, 226; Lustra, 175; `Prolegomena', 97, 99; mentioned, 39, 135, 152, 155, 159, 205, 208, 241, 260 Prentis, Terence, 222, 224, 229, 240, 252 Quennell, Peter, 250 Radley (St Peter's College, Radley), 6, 8±11, 18, 142, 225, 227, 268 Raverat, Gwen, 159 Ravilious, Eric, 242 Rawnsley, W. F., 103, 271 Read, Herbert, 204, 224±5, 229, 241, 251±2 Reade, Winwood, 28, 130 Rhys, Ernest, 93, 95, 121±2, 125±6, 152, 197 Rodker, John, 282 n18 Rosenburg, Isaac, 172, 197, 282 n18 Ross, Robert, 95, 269 Rothenstein, William, 175, 240 Rowat, Mrs, 162, 191, 247, 253 Royde-Smith, Erica, 193 Royde-Smith, Naomi, 131 Russell, Bertrand, 43, 169±70, 178 Russell, Rollo, 43 Russell, Sir William (HM's great-grandfather), 8, 268 Russolo, Luigi, 143 Rutherston, Albert, 206, 223, 224, 226 Sabin, Arthur Knowles, 46±7, 49±54, 69±70, 85±6, 92, 95±6, 98±9, 105, 109, 115, 118, 125, 131, 156, 169, 267 Sackville-West, Vita, 239 Samurai order, 29, 35, 43±5, 48±9, 52±3, 241, 244 Samurai Press, 39±44, 46±7, 53±5, 68, 96, 200, 239 Sassoon, Siegfried, 1, 54, 147, 152, 172, 175, 190, 194, 196, 213, 229, 251 Schell, Sherrill, 135



Index 299

300 Index

Tagore, Rabindranath, 131, 167 Tchaikovsky, Vera, 111, 122, 128, 131, 133, 159, 168±9, 180, 264 Tennyson, Charles, 75 Tessimond, A. S. J., 225 Thomas, Edward: friendship with HM, 69, 79, 85, 93, 104, 109, 124±5; opinions of HM's work, 70, 86, 92, 111; contributions to PD, 125±6, 145, 155; war service, 149, 161, 189; HM refuses poems, 157±8, 187; poems read at PB, 193; mentioned, 1, 54, 118, 135, 142, 167, 175, 201 Thorold, Algar, 83, 123, 159

Tolstoy, Leo, 26±7, 37, 44, 69, 73, 76 Tomalin, Ruth, x, 263 Trench, Herbert, 145 Turner, Reggie, 95 Turner, W. J., 190, 193, 204±5, 212, 224 Untermeyer, Louis, 162 Vandenborght, M., 250±1 Van Volkenburg, Nellie, 80±1, 101, 131, 145 Verhaeren, Emile, 171 Vernon, W. F., 44, 48±9, 52 Vines, Sherard, 117, 197, 210, 252, 256 Vorticism, 144, 155, 161 Wadsworth, Edward, 143 Waidberg (Zurich), 61, 65, 69, 71±2, 77, 89 Watson, William, 185±6, 253 Watt, Basil Harry, 3, 92, 101, 105, 109, 116, 126, 131, 133±4, 140, 142, 144 n, 145, 149, 151, 161, 163±4, 188±9, 217, 242 Waugh, Alec, 3, 122, 178, 201, 204, 206, 209, 212, 222 n, 259 Waugh, Arthur, 259 Webb, Beatrice, 44 Wells, H. G., 4, 29, 34±5, 37, 40±1, 43±5, 48±53, 59, 62, 69, 71, 74, 83±4, 86, 91, 124, 147, 228, 244 Wellesley, Lady Dorothy, 239 West, Rebecca, 207 Whichelo, Tom, 202, 259 White, Ethelbert, 224 Wickham, Anna, 3, 126, 144 n, 153, 159±60, 171, 175, 224±5, 233 Wilde, Oscar, 10, 75, 95, 117 n Wilkinson, Arthur, 225, 240 Wilkinson, Cuthbert, 95 Wilkinson, Louis, 10, 16, 18 Wilson, T. P. Cameron (`Jim'), 142, 149, 169, 176, 189, 197, 200 Winzer, Charles, 138, 170, 201, 210, 226 Wolfe, Humbert, 201, 220, 224, 237, 240, 262 Woolf, Virginia, 95, 130, 175, 239 Wordsworth, William, 14, 86, 152, 174, 214 Yeats, W. B., 1, 5, 93, 95, 101, 111, 116, 122±4, 131, 142, 156, 166, 169, 171, 175, 202, 208, 262 Yorke, Dorothy, 193, 202



Scott Moncrieff, Charles, 284 n5 Searle, Phyllis, 115 Seeger, Alan, 149 Seymour, William Kean, 250 Shanks, Edward, 118, 122 126, 131, 145±6, 148±9, 156, 159±60, 167, 170, 175, 179, 186, 197, 204±5 Shaw, George Bernard, 33, 42 n, 44, 51, 69, 196, 210, 235 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 4, 22, 28±31, 34, 40, 51, 82, 120±3, 127, 152, 178 Sheriff, R. C., 245 Shove, Fredegond, 169±70 Shove, Gerald, 170, 225 Simpson, Henry, 128 Sinclair, May, 234 Sitwell, Edith, 1, 197, 205±6, 212±13, 224±5, 255±6, 259, 262 Sitwell, Osbert, 1, 114, 197, 201, 204±6, 212, 224±5, 262, 284 n7 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 197, 201, 206, 231, 224±5 Skilton, J. H., 42 n, 44, 48±9, 51±3 Smythe, Alfred, 100, 271 Sorley, Charles, 171, 174 Spati, Marie, 75±7, 85, 162, 171, 177, 179 Spender, Stephen, 251, 261±2 Spurgeon, Caroline, 193 Squire, J. C., 42 n, 122±3, 135, 142, 152, 175, 190, 205±6, 208±9, 212, 214, 224, 231 Stephens, James, 105 Storer, Edward, 93, 131, 135 Straus, Ralph, 17±18, 39, 42±4, 48±9, 53, 69, 85, 92, 197, 212 Swinburne, A. C., 4, 17, 23, 39, 43, 86, 121, 197, 260 n, 268

Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age

Art of the Gawain-poet: New Edition

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The New Environmental Age

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