Faber Finds

This month we’re thrilled to reissue Robert Ferguson’s superb biography The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme. It’s a remarkable thing that Hulme remains such a marginal figure in English letters: if the works are not numerous they are highly noteworthy, and the life should be of interest to anyone with a pulse. No-one is more keenly aware of this than Robert Ferguson, of course; and Robert has very kindly written the following for us as a primer for those coming new to the Hulme oeuvre:

“T. E. Hulme was an English aesthetician, literary critic, philosopher and poet, self-taught in all these disciplines. He was born in Endon, Staffordshire in 1883 and educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme Grammar school. He spent a year at St John’s College, Cambridge before being sent down for brawling. Returning to the same college some years later as a mature student he was again sent down, this time for conducting an erotic correspondence with the teenage daughter of a wealthy stockbroker who was a fellow member of the Aristotelian Society. Hulme was a restless, turbulent young man, as curious to know about sex as about the history of philosophy. He was handy with his fists too and once settled a disagreement with the painter Wyndham Lewis by hanging him upside down by the turn-ups of his trousers from the railings in Soho Square. He was, according to Jacob Epstein, ‘as capable of kicking a theory as well as a man downstairs when the occasion demanded.’

Hulme lived mainly in London. He was a charismatic personality and a circle quickly grew up around him that included Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, the English poet and translator F.S.Flint, Jacob Epstein, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) In 1908 he founded the Poets’ Club, and between them Hulme, Flint and Pound developed a theory of poetry which placed stress on the need for verse to be clear, economical, objective and concrete in detail. Hulme’s own small production of verse – which for T.S. Eliot contained ‘some of the finest short poems in the English language’ – observes his own strictures unforgettably:

Above the quiet dock in midnight,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

Hulme joined up at the outbreak of the Great War. Unlike many of his intellectual contemporaries he was a militarist with cogent reasons for believing in the urgent necessity of fighting the war. Direct experience of life in the trenches did not change his views. It makes him a unique and unfashionable figure among English poets and cultural personalities of the First World War, and is probably one reason why his name is so often passed over in silence. He did not glorify war but saw it as a tragic necessity. During lulls in the fighting he wrote and sent home articles opposing the pacifism of, among others, Bertrand Russell. He also wrote letters and kept a diary. Early in 1915 he was wounded in action at St Eloi and sent back to England to convalesce. He re-enlisted and was killed at Flanders in September 1917 at the age of 34.

Of all the literary interests of my youth Hulme is perhaps the one that remains most enigmatic and interesting to me. At unexpected times I still find myself contemplating some of his more striking aphorisms:

‘Philosophy is about people in clothes, not about the soul of man’.

‘Why grumble because there is no end discoverable in the world? There is no end at all except in our own constructions’.

To the romantic, Rousseauian view of the human spirit as a bottomless well that is infinite in its capacity for good things Hulme opposed his own ‘imagist’ vision in which he compared it, rather, to a bucket, that can only be filled so full. A hundred years on from his death his critique of romantic idealism remains entirely salutary.”

Robert Ferguson, Oslo