Books: Neo-Orthodox Gadfly

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF T. E. HULME (233 pp.)—Alun R. Jones—Beacon Press ($4.50).

When T. E. Hulme died, a friend recalled, "half the women in London went into mourning." Sex was only one of the ardent hobbies pursued by Thomas Ernest Hulme, a brilliant young English intellectual who seemed to take all knowledge for his hobby. When a burst of shellfire killed Hulme on the Western Front in 1917, he was just 34, and had been successively a poet, philosopher, self-proclaimed political reactionary, militarist, and pet lion of his own literary salon. A huge, indolent man of lightning intelligence and wit who combined a Prussian officer's bearing with a contagious charm, Hulme was perhaps best described by his sculptor friend Jacob Epstein when he wrote: "He was capable of kicking a theory as well as a man downstairs."

It was his theory-kicking that made him a figure with impact. Still relatively unknown, he basks in the shadows of the men he influenced: T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Epstein, et al. In a model of graciously written, cleanly organized scholarship, Hull University Lecturer Alun R. Jones has produced a definitive critical biography that places Hulme where he belongs, as one of the shapers of 20th century consciousness.

Tilting with Bobbies. By English standards, Hulme was a hick. He came from a Staffordshire farm family, though his father relished playing the Victorian county squire. Hulme affected to despise the Establishment though he adopted its manner. Once, when a policeman objected to his making water in a Soho Square gutter, Hulme haughtily asked: "Do you know you are addressing a member of the middle classes?" The bobby apologized.

Another tilt with the law proved more serious. Hulme was sent down from Cambridge for punching a policeman. He left town astride a coffin in an undergraduate mock funeral. Disowned by his family, he spent eight months roughing it across Canada. The vast sky and the flat horizon-reaching grasslands left him with a numbing sense of oppression, "the fright of the mind before the unknown" that he came to believe "created not only the first gods, but also the first art."

The first art Hulme created when he returned to London in 1908, at the age of 25, was imagist poetry. Hulme preached the primacy of the image, since he believed that man's only sure grasp of reality was through analogy and metaphor. Though his disciple Ezra Pound gave the school its name and became its chief panjandrum, it was Hulme who wrote the first imagist verse, including what T. S. Eliot has called "two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language." Sample:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded;

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.