T. E. Hulme’s ways of seeing

T. E. Hulme, 1912

By ALAN JENKINS

T. E. Hulme, whose writings from and about the trenches of the First World War are discussed at length in this week’s Commentary by Patrick McGuinness, is one of the most fascinating might-have-beens that the war left in its wake. Hulme is not known principally as a poet of war, or perhaps even as a poet at all – despite having written, according to T. S. Eliot, “two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language”, and arrived first at the poetic “do’s” and “don’ts” that Ezra Pound took over and christened “Imagisme” (everything then was better in French).

In his lifetime Hulme was admired by Eliot and others for his essays and lectures on art and aesthetics, and for polemical writings in which he excoriated the “romantic” and “liberal” belief in Progress. To this he opposed what he called the “classical” or “religious attitude”: not dependent on organized religion but essentially “a belief in Original Sin”, in the limitations and imperfectibility of man. Only through discipline and order could human nature approach “something fairly decent”. Nevertheless, Hulme thought it self-evident that all men are equal, and that democracy, however repugnant he found it in some ways, was worth defending.  In championing the work of avant-garde artists such as Jacob Epstein or David Bomberg his overriding concern was to make their art intelligible to anyone, the man in the street included.

Hulme’s friend (and sometime rival in love) Wyndham Lewis recalled that all his life, Hulme retained his “nagging, nasal, north-country voice” which induced in his listener “an overwhelming sensation of the cussedness of things”. Cussedness was very much Hulme’s style, along with truculence in argument and, on occasion, a relish for physical violence. (He is said to have carried around a knuckle-duster made for him by the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.)  When war came Hulme was clear that it was a necessity, if a “stupid” one: fighting wars was, he said, “as useless and as necessary as repairing sea-walls”.  This kind of Stoic pessimism served him well as an infantry private. Where other poets and artists saw in war the destruction of everything they held dear, Hulme saw his world-view and his beliefs vindicated.

He was wounded, recovered and returned to the Front as an officer in the Royal Marine Artillery. This ought to have been safer than life as an infantryman, but there was never any question of not returning to the fighting at all. “From time to time”, as Hulme put it, “great and useless sacrifices become necessary, merely that whatever precarious ‘good’ the world has achieved may just be preserved.”

Hulme made the ultimate sacrifice in September 1917, blown to bits by a direct hit from a shell. He was thirty-four. He had by then put his Imagist precepts to good use in his remarkable poem “Trenches: St Eloi” (which you can hear in the latest episode of TLS Voices) . Pound claimed to have transcribed and “abbreviated” it from Hulme’s conversation; it may in fact have been dictated by Hulme to his lover Kate Lechmere. He had also addressed a number of virulently erotic and moving letters to Lechmere – it was on these that I based a poem, “The Jumps”, that appeared in 1914: Poetry remembers, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (life might be mostly dull routine, Hulme thought, but “Poetry comes with the jumps, cf love, fighting, dancing”).

To his Staffordshire relatives, he sent the more restrained, but bracingly unillusioned series of despatches that were published long after his death as “Diary from the Trenches”.  Eliot thought that Hulme’s mind ought to be “the twentieth-century mind”; it wasn’t, nor is it likely to be the twenty-first-century one either. But the writings he left in verse and prose, however fragmentary, are not just one of the more distinctive legacies of a long-past avant  garde;  they suggest ways of seeing and thinking that still seem far in advance of their time, and perhaps ours.