Glenn Hughes Develops his Theme

A Work in Progress
48

We see Glenn Hughes teaching a small class in Denny Hall in the 1930s.  Gone are multi-media effects, instead there is chalk and blackboards.  On one of the blackboards is a triangle with names associated with the three vertices.  Aldington, Theseus and Catullus' H.D. Ariadne and Lesbia; Ezra Pound, Dionysius/Bacchus, Caesar

“Myth adapts.  While the key motifs stay the same, new tales are continually being told, founded on series of events, broadly considered, which are seen repeated again and again.  For example, Orpheus having to plead for the life of his beloved Eurydice; and, a man loving a woman and subsequently losing her.  Either the woman is unattainable due to some circumstance or, very often, it may seem as if the man has betrayed the woman.  He might disobey the gods like Orpheus and turn back to look at Eurydice as they are about to emerge from the underworld, or, having enjoyed her favors, as did Theseus with Ariadne, he could just decide to travel on, leaving her on the shore of a Greek island.   In the play I’ve written, the young Catullus wanting to try his hand at soldiery, leaves behind a Lesbia who felt as betrayed as did Eurydice and Ariadne before her.  Aldington had to leave H.D. to go into the British Army.  He volunteered when he was about to be conscripted.  He left his wife distraught from the loss of their still-born child.  By the time he came back from the war he had another love and she was pregnant by another man.”

Lesbia’s slaves are displaying another coverlet.  This has an embroidered scene showing Theseus fighting the Minotaur and escaping afterwards by spooling up Ariadne’s thread until he emerges into sunlight again.

Next Episode (Denny Hall)

We see Glenn Hughes lecturing again – this time to a larger audience in the 1050s.  He uses colored view foils. 

 “Catullus breaks off from writing the story of Jason and the Argonauts and the marriage of Peleus and takes us by way of an embroidered coverlet into the story of Theseus and Ariadne, in particular to Ariadne abandoned on the beach at Naxos by Theseus, not the outcome she was expecting.  She had helped Theseus slay the Minotaur.”   

hen we see H.D. abandoned on Dover Beach in the moonlight by a quiet sea listening to the dull roar of artillery across the English Channel and watching the far glow of war above the far dark horizon.  

Glenn Hughes again: 

“Now Ariadne was rescued by Dionysius, God of wine and song.  Aldington would be the first to tell you that Cecil Gray, the man who got H.D. pregnant, was a poor substitute for Dionysius, or Bacchus.  Cecil Gray wanted nothing to do with the child he had fathered.   What of Aldington’s honor?  He thought the child should be named for Gray not Aldington.  But this was not the only reason for their separation.  Aldington now had another lover who was not repelled by his pent-up ardor as H.D. had been.”  

Here we see Aldington and Arabella Yorke  

“You’ll find all of this in her poems and letters.  As it happens, Aldington and H.D. will be rescued by Artemis, personified by Winifred Ellerman, otherwise known as Bryher.   This was a modern deus ex machina, but nobody recognized it as such.   Like a God, Bryher swept in and took H.D. away from poverty, away from being Richard Aldington’s responsibility into the world of servants and children’s nurses.  Now here is Lesbia, another Ariadne abandoned by her lover, an archetype perhaps Catullus does not recognize, but Virgil will confirm some fifty years later, when he will have Aeneas abandon Dido in Carthage.”

The movie shows Catullus on a ship departing across a lake, Theseus (same actor) on a ship departing from Naxos, Aldington (same actor) once more leaving H.D. in the French hotel room to go party with Nancy Cunard.  

 

Then we see Lesbia on the lake shore watching Catullus/Theseus departures and hear H.D.’s incantation from the poem Calypso: 

“O you clouds

here is my song

man is clumsy and evil

a devil

O you sand

this is my command

drown all men in breathless suffocation

then they may understand

O you winds

beat his sails flat

shift a wave side-ways

that he suffocate

O you waves

run counter to his oars…” 

“Then, another deus ex machina, Lesbia is approached by a Dionysian-like figure, one of the illustrious Metelli family, accompanied by musicians and attendants carrying food and wine.  We soon see Lesbia and Metellus having a sensuous feast on the lake shore.  Metellus will marry Lesbia and give her the status of Roman Consul’s wife.  Aldington will write a poem about her linking her to Caesar”.

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

Ananke

A Work in Progress 
47

Episode (Trenches in WW1)

We are in a dugout.  Shells are falling overhead.  Richard Aldington is writing his love poem for H.D., Ananke, by candlelight.  We hear it being recited, interspersed by explosions and the whine of falling shells.  We hear and see images of trench warfare superimposed on images of Lesbia, meadows, streams, marshes and scented uplands, blossoms on fruit trees, bees visiting flowers.  Finally, we hear warning cries of “Gas!” and see Aldington putting on a gas mask and going up to the trench.

Ananke

In bitter sorrow and despair

I said unto my love:

‘All the far meadows, the cool marsh

And scented uplands I have searched

For blossom pleasant to the gods;

I have begged just ripened fruits

From all the pitying tree-nymphs,

Have gathered many honey-combs,

Poured wine,

Poured milk,

Poured all my words, in vain-

For yet the implacable gods

Turn their untroubled faces

Austerely from me,

Yet the cold envious wind

Whispers that no man born

Tricks the wide-open eyes of Fate’.

And seeing the pallor of her cheek,

Her fear tormented eyes and tremulous hands,

I turned aside

To check the desperate tears burning my eyes;

Then came to her again, smiling,

And kissed her lips,

Saying no word save this:

‘Do not despair’.

But yet 

I have not seen here since that day.

Richard Aldington

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                    2025

Whatever the Weather 
       for Helen Carr

A Work in Progress
46

When Helen points out heroes from Troy’s parapet 

we’re transported by words that have weathered 

inspired by muses that knew the Achaeans

that inspired our predecessors’ poets all

Helen Carr’s book: The Verse Revolutionaries

was where Donal discovered Glenn Hughes

located in Paris in 1929 pre-crash

among the literary set gathered in Paris then

A Moveable Feast describes that time

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms

Aldington’s Death of a Hero, two novels

written in Paris were published that year

Glenn Hughes, a visiting academic with a grant

To cover expenses while researching Imagism

For his anthology Stanford University Press 

will publish in 1931 was there in Paris

his wife and child living in Aldington’s English cottage

while Aldington was attending to his affairs

with women while writing his first novel

and for a few fleeting hours re-uniting with H.D.

which she confided to Hughes in a letter 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Songs of South London

A Work in Progress 
45

Of Esaw, Mabel, their second son Donal,

and the Street where they lived...


                       

                          1. 

                       Dawn

A path that led from a country churchyard

became a footpath over the fields

to a stile where Donal sat and watched

the sun tip up the night's dark shields

through clodded dirt he heard the footpath

resonate   thickened with composted leaves

suggesting earth's accretion

how from all things natural beauty leaves

rain divided evenly about the stile

sunlight pared through cloud

a rainbow arched above the hedge

song thrushes sang out loud.

                           2.

                         Esaw

          Esaw's a lonely old man

          who ain't dipped his end in

          to any of that honey

          for a long  long time

          He sits on the steps

          of tenement dreams

          a waif on the edge

          of an extinct happiness

          remembering how it was

          when he talked Mabel in

          to the twenties

          when men enraged

          had marched and sung

          and he was fired twice

          for fighting

          The Fusiliers took him in

           took him to India

           he brought back brass trays

           boars tusks    pictures of the Taj Mahal.

           Esaw just sits

           a soft spoken old man

           his glass eye matched to his brown

           One day in the desert at Frenchmen's Hell

           he was blown up by a mine

           and the Ministry insisted on sending him false ones

           but the eyes they sent were always the wrong color

           Remembering how it was

           when he talked Mabel on

           to his motorbike

           and they went to Box Hill

           He sits on the steps of tenement dreams

           of piano playing in Peckham pubs

           getting Mabel to give him back rubs

           No one pays him any mind

           or the men who lie

           in the gutter beside

           drunk a century ago

                        3

                    Mabel

            Mabel was a barmaid

            when Esaw first his eyes laid

            on her charms

            her face    her arms

                   eyes that ogle

                   eyes that leer

                   men in braces

                   sipping beer

             Smiling Mabel seemed to hear

             a voice proclaim her prowess

             Esaw swung around to glare

             decided it was just a dare

             (saw that William was not there)

             While his fellows discussed the track

             spilt beer on the counter started to tack

             Esaw wondered

             if he'd lost the knack

                   eyes that ogle

                   eyes that leer

                   men in braces

                   sipping beer 

             Was William with her that other night

             when Esaw was coming home by bike

             and saw him in the early light

             in Mabel's street    suspicious like

             Esaw was a working man

             when Mabel first to smile began

             at him alone    a special smile

             that lasts    and last    and lasts a man

             eyes that ogle           eyes that behold

             eyes that leer            eyes that bind

             men in braces           a man and a woman

             sipping beer              growing old and kind

                                4

                  Ballad of The Street

              This ballad spans the many years

              that Donal tramped the Street...

              listened to her many tales

              who knew so many by their feet

              A widow lived by Myatt's Fields

              in Calais Gate    off Cormont Road

              her life was bleak as week by week

              she bore a heavy load

              Three kids were left her

              when her husband died

              one could walk    two could run

              The street could tell you which one lied

              about hiding apples in a jug

              or who drank the Christmas brandy

              which one broke his mother's heart

              which one brought her candy

              They lived in roomy Calais Gate

              the best flats for miles around

              so well built that from outside

              you couldn't hear a sound

              She wished they had stayed in Brixton

              where a motor bike was class

              not found themselves amongst

              the motorized top brass

              But homes for wounded heroes

              were provided at low rent

              so Esaw and Mabel got

              a flat from heaven sent...

              Servants bells the children rang

              when they pretended to be swank

              lots of room for silver spoons

              and trees outside    not streets that stank

              Home from the wars the soldiers came

              and motor-cycles roared

              like Esaw they tuned their Nortons'

              and pretended to be Lords

              Now William owned an Anglia

              which he drove with leather gloves

              he parked it in the City

              if you please...

              In the war he'd been a warden

              patrolling Calais Gate

              keeping watch for fires on rooftops

              from next to Mabel's grate

              Now his wife patrolled in turn

              looking for her man...

              as Sergeant Esaw once looked for him

              when he heard they were holding hands

              The street had seen it coming

              seen it develop over time

              watched Esaw   Mabel   Bill   and Doris

              acting out their mime

              Poor Esaw didn't last long

              he had a stroke one New Year's Eve

              then Bill resumed his visits

              fooled the kids with makebelieve

              But Doris wasn't fooled at all

              nor were the kids for long

              she paced outside their windows in the cold...

              Then the street knew what was wrong

              The kids were growing up fast

              to Bill they didn't take too kind

              especially when Doris

              accosted them outside

              This tale went on for many years

              before the play was done...

              and the world of childish make believe

              had several lives undone

              Now that is what divorce is for

              The Street told Donal primly

              It's wrong for a man to womanize

              before his wife so openly

             Some good advice I give to you

             who live in the world of faces

             It is the type of tread a person has

             leads to such bad consequences.

                     5

      Donal Solipsist

      Damned cold

      beside the window

      he sat up in his bed

      & he said to himself

      Donal   he said

      you're getting the thin end

      of the wedge

      The moon was grey

      under the big tent

      like a one spot dab of light

      on the deserted stage

      of a darkened theatre

      Moon swimming in a mirror

      & Donal sat in bed

      thin DAMNED COLD he said

      & WHITE

      with a yellowed whiteness

      very pale thin

      swaying buds of sun against white

      he was he said

      COLD

                     6

      While Washing Windows

When Donal worked as a window cleaner

equipped with a bucket and a bag of rags

he'd work awhile then stop and ponder

the streaks on the glass that were drying fast

Window cleaning    work all poets should try

so many moments of calm to savor

visions of the innermost eye

As once when a stranger to her darkened room

he watched her brow against the pane

touch the streetlight's glow

Remembering how her silhouette

pressed sodium yellow to the brain

he'd squeeze his sponge for another wipe

then start to work again.

                     7

          Candles

Black night studded by streetlights

streetlights running in chains

at a window pane a forehead touched

pressed despair into the brain

Eyes tilt down the running streets

streetlights like Cavafy's candles

candles for the years passing

and in the darkness    no moon

Come let us do the arithmetic of cities

the counting of souls

male and female

with an abacus count two

A soul saved is one

a soul lost is zero

binary one and binary zero

alive is one    dead is zero

Do you hear wind chimes tinkling?

ghosts are registering the dead

the dead silenced cells in your brain

cells that dissolve in sound

"Come on love

come round the corner

come and hug me

come and squeeze me

hold me tight

on the building site

Mind that shovel

mind the puddle

come on love

let's have a cuddle

Use that mug

that white tin mug

that lies there in the pool

See    it's full of lifetime's sludge

swirl it round and read our future

aches and pains and useless drudge

oh throw it at the concrete mixer".

                    8

      Said the Street

      "You came back then

      after all you said

      about people who live here

      being common    ill bred"

Yes, I came back

Donal said,

and now I abhor

envious mean-spirited people I meet

      "You came back then

      but not to forgive

      or to be one with us

      not to live and let live"

Yes    I came back

but to visit    not stay

not to be one with you

feeling pinched every day

      "Oh Donal    dear Donal

      for me you won't fall"

Your body of rubble

and muck municipal

      "Oh Donal    darling Donal

      love your lover's lane

      your old street loves you

      lie down with her again"

He slipped into bed

eyes rimmed with red

soft his eyelids closing

watched the lamp shade

soar   then glide

its movement hypnotizing

inhaled the anesthetic air of bed

his mind swam buoyant

blood bubbling with oxygen

the ceiling like a skin

opening it pores

& breathing in

               9

Street:

Ah Donal dear, wait until you're a bit older

you'll find yourself a nice girl and settle down

you haven't been in love yet have you?

not really in love      well go get yourself

a nice girl    get married    have children

Donal:

Nah nah     wot I want is a mistress

so I can get IT regular

Street:

Ooh    that's all you think about - bleeding sex

but I never get any of it DO I...you never give ME

anything DO YOU

Donal:

Wot!  you want me to lie down   give you

a bit of finger down the drain

'ere you are then    how's that?

tickles you up a bit does it

garn you randy old bitch     get your knees up

                 10

          Pivot    

Close your eyes

take convalescense

somewhere at summer solstice

a man may stand on his shadow

courage  don't weep

though a million cells broken

the moon shines in puddles

there is water in the womb

          *

Lens swivels

world spins

world turns over

sand drops down the glass

laughing knockabout tumbledown jest

in ramshackle kitchens of ramshackle rooms

while the wind shuddered once

windows trembled

the halflife of happiness halving itself

Hurry

          *

At 9B, below footsteps in a street

in dark shadows of limitless recess

rafia matting fraying under bare feet

sitting at a table    drunk to excess

writing poetry without great success

red lamplight in the windows of a door

melancholy guitar    its strings caress

an urban wilderness    bricks for the poor

          *

Because mingled strands of our thoughts

rewound themselves to a slip knot

that lay easy

because words framed lies

cars collided in mid sentence

sounds queued up for the ear

and the ear ignored them

preferring a simpler vibration

of blood

because each day swallowed more

from the stock in the cellar

that may soon empty because of grapes

left un-plucked on the vine

because lovers made love

on creaking brass bedsteads

and by-product rubbers got thrown

into a cardboard box under the bed

rhat month may have been a record number of lies

                11

Lines: Anti-Beckett

He who propels life forward to death

moaning by day and by night

to blind tides and deaf skies

pushing a wheelchair towards us

We hide from the knowledge in his eyes

for we want life to go on forever

and the sun to be always shining

and even if it rains      

we want a rainbow

                12

          END

Stopping at the milestone

in Kent's dull dawn

looking back Donal

counted miles he had gone

no sign he had been

in those streets so long

 Richard M Russell © Dick Russell

                             2025

Glenn Hughes starts to explain

A Work in Progress 
44

While some music is heard an audience assembles at the Penthouse Theater at the University of Washington.  Thomas Campion’s My Sweetest Lesbia is a suggestion.  The Director may wish the musicians to not play this piece pretentiously but animate it with brio.

An actor will shimmer onto the stage sheathed in a bedspread which another actor will unwrap.  Both are ballet dancers.  When unwrapped the bedspread becomes a screen revealing an image like that described by Catullus in his poem about a wedding.  Only this screen will depict first the marriage of Aldington and H.D. pictured on the pavement standing outside the registry office in Kensington, London and then H.D. abandoned with her child like Ariadne on the beach of a Greek island where Dionysius (Bacchus) will come to her rescue.

The dancers wrap up the screen and exit.

Enter Glenn Hughes.  He stands next to a double bed with rumpled sheets in a hotel room near the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris.   The room is high enough that through the window near the bed the tops of trees in a small square below can be seen.

 Babette Hughes enters through the audience.  She goes straight to the bed, feels the warmth on the sheets and looks at her husband.   

“I was wining and dining Hilda Doolittle.  (At this point, the camera will traverse to the window where Babette on stage is looking out of the window down to the square below, watching the diners on the sidewalk by the bistro).  

“Down there, we had lunch at the bistro.  Where’s Mary Anne? 

(Unexpectedly, Glenn’s young wife Babette had materialized in Paris when he thought she was living at Aldington’s cottage in England with their child).

Cut to the UW classroom in Denny Hall where Glenn Hughes taught drama classes

Glenn Hughes: “She had already written a poem entitled Eurydice, (behind him is a blackboard where Hughes has chalked a triangle and written names at the three points) and once I met her, I knew that she, herself, was the subject of the poem.   For H.D., as all poets called her, had been as much spiritually crushed by Richard Aldington, her husband, as Eurydice escaping from death had been crushed by Orpheus, almost as if she had been living in Hell.”  

We hear H.D. reciting from her poem Orchard with a tender imploring voice while we see a younger H.D. and Aldington alone in a cherry orchard: 

“O rough hewn god of the orchard

I bring you an offering…

these fallen hazel-nuts

stripped late of their green sheaths

grapes, red purple

their berries dripping with wine…

I bring you as offering.”  

Then we hear H.D. reciting, as if about to pronounce a curse, from her poem Envy, while we see a young soldier just back from duty in France and desperate with battle rage violently copulating with his wife:  

“I envy you your chance of death, how I envy you this…though you clasp me in an embrace that is set against my will, and rack me with your measure, effortless yet full of strength, and slay me…” 

“She had then been abandoned by Aldington, who wanted a life of promiscuity, not responsibility.”  Here we see H.D. with a baby and Aldington walking away.  He hesitates, turns back and looks at her, then goes on his way.  H.D. is reciting from her poem Eurydice: 

“…why did you turn back…? why did you turn?  why did you glance back?  why did you hesitate for that moment?  why did you bend your face caught with the flame of the upper earth above my face?”

Next Episode (Historic Denny Hall)

We now see Glenn Hughes giving a lecture.  

“I was working on getting to know those Imagist poets I’d come in search of.  We had crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner in order to meet, among others, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington.   They were all to be found there in 1929 in the year of the Great Crash on Wall Street.  It was May 1929.  The crash was still months away.   H.D. was a married woman, although she lived mostly in Switzerland with a long-time lesbian lover and a series of male lovers.  Besides Eurydice she reminded me of Lesbia.  Lesbia, as the great Roman poet Catullus described her, was bold and vivacious.  You could also see that in H.D. if you got on her wavelength.  She liked to look fragile to the outside world, but inside she was sparkling with joy.   She was like Calypso once you had entered her sacred space.  You could never leave until she let you go.  H.D.’s husband, like Catullus, who wrote about Lesbia in the time of the First Triumvirate, was a poet.  But H.D. and Aldington, had been separated for 10 years.  He was in Paris too, a big bluff fellow, carrying on a very public friendship with Nancy Cunard while Nancy Cunard conducted her own affair with an American jazz musician.   Who was Lesbia?  A gentleman never tells!  But you will have already guessed, because you’ve accessed the syllabus, that she tormented Catullus.  And it was easy for me to see that the story of Lesbia and Catullus might not be so different than that of H.D. and Aldington.”  

Babette Hughes has left the stage and Lesbia enters, dressed as a high-born Roman woman of the time of Catullus.  She has two slaves with her and commands them to show her the next coverlet on the bed.  It depicts two lovers kissing by a lake shore while some old men look on.

Next Episode (Lake Garda and Paris)

A Roman Villa on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy where Catullus is reciting a bitter poem written on a scroll to Lesbia, who is kissed in public while elders pass by with disapproving stares.   

“I had long thought that Lesbia and Catullus were a Roman version of the great Greek poets Sappho and Alcaeus.  Now, I realized H.D., and Aldington were interchangeable with them, just as Sappho could have been with H.D. and Aldington, Alcaeus.  The two modern poets, H.D. and Aldington, had been married just before World War 1.  They lost their own child when it was still born.  This was in May 1915, a week or so after the Germans brought America into the war by torpedoing a passenger ship, Lusitania, causing immense death.  They separated soon thereafter.  She'd had a child by another man.  She could not bear the man Aldington had become as a result of fighting the Germans in France.  It was as if he was French-poxed by trench warfare.  

H.D. and Aldington were two poets in a series that began with Eurydice and Orpheus.  In all of them the men abandoned their women.  But the modern poets were destined to meet again in Paris.”  

We now see Glenn and Babette above the Parisian square  watching Richard Aldington and H.D. (the same actors as Catullus and Lesbia) having an intimate meal below.   Their hands touch on the table.  They rise and walk across the square beneath the trees and enter the hotel.  Glenn and Babette are seen hiding in the stairway when Aldington and H.D. pause to kiss in the doorway before entering the bedroom.

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025