Pound & H.D.

BOOK REVIEWS tially experiential, "the inescapable connection between living in a metropolis and the loss of totality, objectivity, permanence." Many of the essays in the collection are the fruits of work in progress and sometimes this gives them a tantalising sketchiness. Written by established and younger scholars of Ford from Britain, America, Australia and Italy, they provide a valuable insight into the current direction and scope of Ford studies. Inevitably, The Good Soldier and Parade's End provide the focus for many of the essays but there are, in Peel's essay on The Simple Life Limited, Home's essay on A Call and Cornelia Cook's essay on Ford's post-war fictional memoir No Enemy, valuable accounts of some of his less well-known works. The most obvious omission in the collection arises from the relative neglect of Ford's work of the 1930s, with the exception of a brief passage in W B. Hutchings's illuminating essay on Ford and Maupassant. Still one of his most underrated novels, The Rash Act, published in the mid-1930s, is a striking example of Ford's interest in the psychological effects of modernity, not least the hollowing out of identity in the wake of the Jazz Age. Published on behalf of the Ford Madox Ford Society, the collection is unashamedly an act of advocacy ; but, through the frame of modernity, the essays present a Ford who is at once more complex and more unsettling than most accounts of him suggest. ALISTAIR DAVIES __________________ University of Sussex Pound & H.D. Jacob Korg. Winter Love: Ezra Pound and H.D. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. χ+ 236 pp. $26.95 JACOB KORG'S GOAL in Winter Love is to demonstrate that the lives and poetry of Pound and H.D. were characterized by a continuing "dialogue" that began while the former was enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and that lasted until the latter died in 1961. Korg's thesis is by no means novel, for as he himself notes in the preface to his study, the notion that the two poets interacted in a "dialectical" fashion for most of their lives has been pointed out by other commentators, in particular Michael King and Susan Stanford Friedman. What Korg has done is to produce a type of bÃ-nate literary biography that traces the interrelated courses of both the complex personal relationship between the two writers and the "intermittent pattern of give-and-take" that defined their professional interaction. Although H.D. and Pound were actually romantically involved for a relatively short period of time, each 485 ELT 48 : 4 2005 remained, as Korg puts it, "an active figure in the imaginative life of the other" for many decades afterwards. The title of Korg's book alludes to H.D.'s Winter Love, the "Coda" she added to Helen in Egypt which serves as her ultimate attempt to confront and express "her tormented feelings for Pound," who appears in the guise of Odysseus. Those emotions were first aroused when she was a day student at Bryn Mawr and he a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and the two rapidly found themselves involved in a "love affair" that Korg figures as "a magic enclosure formed of affection and eroticism on the one hand, and reading and literary discussion on the other." The pair were "considered to be engaged," and Pound became "the first of a series" of controlling and "authoritative" men to whom H.D. initially attached herself as "disciple" or "lover," only to come to "distrust them" and finally to feel that she had been "rejected" or betrayed , a series that included Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, Cecil Gray, Havelock Ellis, Lord Downing, and Lionel Durand. As her first male mentor, Pound introduced his "Dryad" to an array of texts and ideas; as her "first lover," he enlivened her with kisses she would later describe employing the imagery of vitalism. Although their relationship was not consummated physically, more than a half century later H.D. would write in End to Torment that no subsequent experience had proved more significant than their initial embrace. The two poets' youthful dalliance, Korg avers, "imprinted" on...