He arranges the recording equipment on the balcony of Pound’s apartment. Inside it is too cramped, crowded with books, dark. Pound lounges back in a deckchair, occasionally stroking his beard. It’s cold, a jagged wind pouring down from the hills. He doesn’t seem to notice. — I’ve been introduced to the Boss — Il Duce — several times now, Pound says as Esmond checks levels and adjusts the microphone. — I’ve never met anyone who understood my poems so quickly. He seemed to feel them on an instinctive, primal level. He’s a soldier, of course, but he’s also an intellectual. People forget that here.
That evening they have dinner at the villa of the violinist Olga Rudge. Pound sits between their host and his wife, Dorothy. Esmond is exhausted, downcast, and the dining room is unheated and chilly. He’s not sure he can use any of his conversation with Pound. They’d sat and watched the sun sink over the hills and Pound had spooled out his theories on usury and Social Credit and the Jewish problem and Esmond had felt as if he were back listening to William Joyce address a rally in the East End. There was so little subtlety to his argument, so much anger. They talk about Hulme for a while. — He was a dear, dear friend, Pound says. — Thoroughly brutal. I miss him still. Throughout, Pound’s wife sits in silence, looking over sombrely at Esmond as if he might help her escape along his radio waves to Britain. He retreats to his room as early as he can.
He stands at his window and can see the castle on the bay, patches of darkness on the water where ships are moored, young people walking along the seafront arm-in-arm. He’d brought his novel with him, but he can’t write. Perhaps, he thinks, he’s not supposed to be a novelist. Perhaps novels won’t even be read in the years to come. Maybe his legacy, the thing to make his death less hollow, is the recordings. He imagines a shell whistling down on St Mark’s, he and Goad dragging archives down into the crypt. The best way to speak to the future, Goad is saying, is with brilliant ideas.
The next morning, as the train winds down the coast towards Pisa, he leans from the window of his carriage and sends the discs he’d cut with Pound the previous day spinning out to sparkle for a moment in the winter sunshine and then crash on the rocks below.
Telegram: 10/2/38
Wiring E Lowndes five thousand lire for purchase twelve advertising slots as per agreement at meeting in Milan 6 Feb STOP Viva Il Duce STOP Bianchi Automobiles and Bicycles 7 Via Nirone Milan
MINISTRY FOR POPULAR CULTURE
VIA VITTORIO VENETO, ROMA
10/3/1938
Dear Esmond,
I was delighted and honoured at the introduction Mr Goad gave to my short speech on Radio Firenze last week. I have already written to him directly and apologise that I haven’t been in touch with you earlier. I very much enjoyed meeting you in Rome and was delighted to discover so many points of shared interest. I am sure that Italy (and England) will thank the day that Esmond Lowndes took an interest in the rapprochement of our once-close nations.
You shouldn’t let the success of your radio enterprise distract you from what I feel certain is your true calling — as novelist. I was fascinated by our discussion about T. E. Hulme, whose work I did not know. You are right that it is hard to find literary figures of the correct type — perhaps harder in England than in Italy. Here we have Ungaretti and Pirandello and, of course, the late d’Annunzio, whose passing we mourn each day and whose legacy (notwithstanding his regrettable assessment of the Axis alliance) I am now working to assure.
I like the idea of using the novel, with its mutability, its openness and its place at the heart of middle-class life, to address historical figures, situating them in moments of great political unease. Of course this is not new — your George Eliot famously treated the life of our own Savonarola; Manzoni’s The Betrothed is one of the great historical novels (have you read it? I enclose a copy in any case). But what seems new to me in your idea is to claim a figure from the very recent past and to use him to illuminate the current political landscape. I look forward very much to reading In Love and War when it is published.
As you can imagine, with d’Annunzio’s death, I have been terribly busy. I will try, nonetheless, to make it to Florence before the heat of the summer strikes and, if you will humour me, I would be delighted to continue my musings on the state of contemporary Italian literature.
With warmest wishes,
Alessandro.
Telegram: 1/4/38
Received with thanks four hundred pounds STOP Impressive STOP Mosley
Early morning. Esmond is sitting at his desk in the studio. He can still smell Ada’s lavender perfume. Voices rise up from the stalls on the Piazza Santo Spirito. The sound of a street sweeper’s broom is like the whetting of long knives. He sits in thought for a few moments, scratches his fountain pen across his notebook. He leans back, looks carefully at the last page, and gives a thin smile. He has finished his novel. With a sigh, he gathers together the pile of notebooks, puts a sheet of paper in his Olivetti, extends two fingers, and begins to type.
There is no such thing as historical fact. It is likely, however, that our hero, Thomas Ernest Hulme, twelve days after his thirty-fourth birthday, was standing in front of the Royal Marine Artillery battery at Oostduinkerke Bad, two hundred yards from the slate flushness of the North Sea. Witnesses — Captain Henry Halahan RN, for instance — say that Hulme appeared lost in contemplation as the shells descended. He’d just begun a book on Epstein, so it may have been this that caused his wood-cut features to smudge over, his ears to close themselves against the whistle of the falling shells, fired from the 15-inch Leugenboom at Ostend. His comrades threw themselves into the trenches, into the gun pit of the Carnac battery. Hulme just stood there, gazing over towards the long barges on the Yser Canal.
We know what the explosion sounded like, at least to Hulme. He’d had enough near-misses during his time in Flanders to know that, as he wrote to Ursula Lowndes, ‘It’s not the idea of being killed that’s alarming, but the idea of being hit by a jagged piece of steel. You hear the whistle of the shell coming, you crouch down as low as you can, and just wait. It doesn’t burst merely with a bang, it has a kind of crack with a snap in it, like the crack of a very large whip.’ On the 28th September, 1917, though, Hulme didn’t crouch. He stood there, in a dreamy moment, and he was killed. When the smoke cleared, some of his comrades were bellowing, others emitting miserable groans. Hulme had simply disappeared. Not a scrap of clothing, nor a shred of that burly, lusty body was left.
Here we move further from the sham certainties of history, deeper into Hulme’s beloved speculations. For in that moment before death, between the whistle and the crack, we’d like to imagine his mind cycling back through his short, sharp life, falling now on the figure of Wyndham Lewis, hanging upside-down on the railings at Soho Square after a row over a girl, now on the crow-like visage of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, his dear friend, dead not yet two years, now on his lover Kate Lechmere’s cyanope smile. And as the shells plunge and shriek like buck-shot birds, we imagine his mind going back to the night when, aged nineteen, he was sent down from St John’s College, Cambridge.
It was late and the boathouse was on fire, the flames tonguing the black Cam. Two policemen wrung river water from their jackets, shaking their fists and whinnying while a college porter waved his feet in the air, his upper half wedged in a dustbin. A rower stood in the light of the flames, his singlet and shorts dark-spattered, one hand clasped to a bloody nose. Two girls sprawled on the bright grass, sobbing. Hulme was swimming in the dark water, pulling his long body through the velvet iciness of the river, because he knew he had gone too far, and he would not feel this water, this river, again. Under the moth-eaten blanket of the sky he swam, and he felt the vague grief of the night, and the ruddy face of the moon leant over the fence of trees that lined the river like a red-faced farmer, watching him. He swam on.