POUND REACHED GIBRALTAR on 23 March 1908. He had been there in 1902 with his parents and Aunt Frank, and two years before as the promising Harrison Fellow; this time he was by himself, and in disgrace. A pariah at home, he was now an alien abroad. It was a low moment. As he put it many years later, ‘my k-rear as a prof in the corn belt ended in smoak/ and DEEEspair of the future etc.’1 At least he was on dry land after the tribulations of an equinoctial crossing, and was able to tell his mother, in chilly pre-spring Philadelphia, that ‘Gibraltar is a delight of roses and wisteria’.2 Happily he was recognised (by that hair?) from his earlier visit by a Jewish guide, Yusuf Benamore, who took him under his wing. He later commented, ‘Life saved by Yusuf Benamore.’3 They visited a synagogue together; in 1910, in one of his periodic disputes with his mother over his church attendance, he would write that the only worship that had ever interested him ‘was a little synagogue in Gibraltar & San Pietro at Verona’, adding that ‘Most of the so-called Christian sects ought to be sued for breach of copyright’.4 At this stage, Pound appears to have been fairly free of anti-Semitism – more so than might be expected, not just in the light of his own later views, but because anti-Semitism was then so pervasive among East Coast Americans. There is nothing in his personal correspondence at that period to compare with the throwaway anti-Semitism of some of those who will appear later in this story, such as T. S. Eliot, John Quinn, Amy Lowell or John Gould Fletcher. Doubly ironically, in terms of Pound’s later fulminations against usury, Yusuf helped Pound to an extension of his funds by finding him someone who would give him interest on the $80 he had brought with him.
Pound did not stay long in Gibraltar. He had planned to earn money as a guide for visiting Americans, but that turned out not to be the easy option he had hoped: on his first – and last – attempt he found himself expected to look after four children. Never again. He moved on to Venice, where he also made desultory attempts to earn money. He was getting through his $80, and although he was still receiving payment from Wabash – sometimes rather delayed – he needed more. Some kind Americans bought him meals; others paid him to teach them Italian. But his main strategy was the most congenial: to make money by writing. He had been writing furiously since he arrived, and not only poetry. He sent home an article on Tangiers, which he had briefly visited again with Yusuf, asking his father to place it in a suitable magazine. He sent stories for his mother to type and sell. ‘In typing leave good triple space between the lines,’ he told her, ‘it is much easier on the editorial eye and consequently on the temper.’5 In his letters home, the imperative mood – and tone – was Pound’s favourite. Someone once said of Pound, ‘Ezra must have found very early in life that being a belligerent baby paid’.6 As far as his parents were concerned, it continued to pay. He had ideas for articles on figures on the Venetian scene for which his father was deputed to find a publisher: ‘Send Dad to Book News to talk up that “personalities” stunt … he can bluff better in person than I can on paper’.7 But he did not have much luck with his prose, and in addition, his stories bothered his parents – even the kindly Homer went so far as to say some of them seemed a bit ‘off’. Pound was cross. Like most of his poems, they were in the first person, but he told Homer with some irritation they were only characters, nothing to do with him, and he had no patience with his mother’s uneasiness about his language. ‘My dear mama … diction etc may not be exactly what you would have used, but most of it is carefully considered and used for purposes perhaps more clearly seen on the third reading than on the first … So even where you object I ask a fairly exact copy.’8 In any case, he insisted, ‘I am not a short story writer & do them as a matter of necessity’.9
His main project, and the only one which appears to have met with any success at all, was the decision to publish his first book of poems, compiled from poems written in the States, including some from Hilda’s Book, along with a few new ones. He had sent the manuscript to Thomas Mosher shortly before he left America, but Mosher wasn’t interested. So although in the long term he hoped to make money from his poetry, for now he decided to pay for the printing, though a return on his money was urgent. He put his mind to the problem: Venice marked not just the appearance of Pound’s first published book, but the start of his parallel life as literary impresario. For now, however, the latter role was an undercover job. Instructions poured home to his parents on advertising, cajoling, eulogising:
It pays to advertise, ergo spread this precious seed … It is poetry & of course not a popular work, but you neednt mention that fact … As you don’t know whats in the book you are expected for the present to say anything that will stir up advance orders. The Inquirer or Bulletin may note ‘Another University man in the Literary Field. Mr E.P. Sometime Fellow in U. Penn … a promising magazine writer, etc’ … You understand that what we want is one big hoorah of fore announcements & one more big hoorah of reviews. I give you & mother carte blanche to incite all our numerous family … You understand that what people think after they get the book is a secondary matter. What I want now is advance orders culled from general curiosity. The sale on pure & exalted literary merit will begin later …
Wham – Boom – Boom – cast delicacy to the wind for I must eat.
Of course I figure as the modest retiring man in all this.10
The role of modest violet, as he put it in another letter, was one that he was rarely to play again, but that parallel conviction of the need for self-promotion and the ‘pure and exalted literary merit’ of his work would endure. Homer as a young man had known the sentimental poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox – she had been quite sweet on him – and was urged to contact her: ‘a review from her would about keep me in “orzo” id est barley soup for a month’.11 ‘No vulgarity of publicity,’ he assured his parents, ‘need be shunned.’12 As Amy Lowell was later to comment: ‘Ezra is thoroughly American in his understanding of the value of advertisement’.13
Only 150 copies were to be printed in the hope that the book would sell out, and then be republished, this time at a publisher’s expense. The collection was originally to have been called La Fraisne, the title of the first full poem, spoken through a persona, though one more reminiscent of Yeats than Browning, a man driven mad by disappointment in love; it draws on a Provençal story, though with a note that suggests parallels with Yeats’ The Celtic Twilight. Though the pain of unrequited love is the principal theme of the Provençal poets, for all Pound’s indebtedness to them it is not one that often attracted him. His personae are generally in trouble for one reason or another, but only rarely because their love has been rejected. Even in this poem the crazed protagonist (we are told in the note he is the troubadour Miraut de Garzelas) finds happiness in mystical communion with nature: his bride is now ‘a pool of the wood’, who has for him ‘a great love/That is sweeter than the love of women/That plague and burn and drive one away’. The vocabulary and imagery is close to Yeats, but the flexibility of line-length and movement, the gradual breakdown of regular rhyme as Miraut begins to remember what drove him mad, all create a very different voice. It moves towards a free verse form, increasingly fragmented and disjointed: ‘… I do not remember … /I think she hurt me once but … /That was very long ago.’14 Pound’s note implies that Miraut has found ‘a peace great and of the woodland’, which comes when ‘the soul is exhausted of fire’, suggesting that he wanted the poem to be read as a tribute to the power of the artist’s imagination in the face of the world’s rejection, perhaps why he chose its title for the original name of the collection, but in the poem itself the resolution of Miraut’s pain is more ambiguous.15
Shortly before the book went to print, however, Pound heard that only a month after he had left America William Brooke Smith had died. He too had been planning to visit Europe that year, along with Sheeler and Schamberg; they went without him, discovering on that visit the Cubists and Fauvists, and seeing paintings by Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, an experience that transformed their work. Had Smith lived, he too could have made the same discoveries, and Pound might have felt the impact of the modernist movement rather earlier than he did. Pound was profoundly saddened by Smith’s death. He decided to dedicate this first book of poems to him, changing its name to A Lume Spento. The full title-page read, in the polyglot web of allusions that would be Pound’s hallmark:
This Book was LA FRAISNE (THE ASH TREE) dedicated to such as love this same beauty that I love, somewhat after mine own fashion. But sith one of them has gone out very quickly from amongst us it [is] given A LUME SPENTO (WITH TAPERS QUENCHED) in memoriam eius mihi caritate primus William Brooke Smith Painter, Dreamer of dreams.16
That last phrase comes from near the beginning of William Morris’ long poem, The Earthly Paradise, one of the poems Pound read with H.D., and may well have first met through Smith:
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
That sense of being out of sympathy with the times is echoed by the title, A Lume Spento, this time a phrase from Dante’s Purgatorio, where it refers to the funeral of the thirteenth-century Ghibelline leader, Manfred, who died excommunicate, hence buried ‘with tapers quenched’. Pound is suggesting a parallel between that excommunication and the ‘heretical’ religion of beauty, which he and Brooke Smith shared with those few ‘who love this same beauty that I love’. Pound associated the Albigensian heresy with the Provençal cult of love, as Pater and Swinburne did; like them he saw Simon de Montfort’s twelfth-century campaign to stamp out the Albigensians, a campaign which did indeed destroy the courts and castles where the Provençal poets had flourished, as one of history’s most horrendous examples of the persecution of the artist. The reference to that excommunicate burial, made at a particularly lonely moment in Pound’s life, is a way of construing those lovers of beauty as a tiny group of heretical exiles in a philistine society, as Pound was so often to see himself and his chosen few, ‘mine own kind that know, and feel/And have some breath for beauty and the arts’, as he had put it in ‘In Durance’.
By July 1908 A Lume Spento was published. In spite of Homer’s efforts it did not attract much comment, even though his erstwhile acquaintance Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote a few gushing words. A complimentary review appeared in the London Evening Standard and St James’s Gazette written by a ‘Venetian critic’. Humphrey Carpenter suggests this was Pound himself.17 It seems all too likely; one wonders if Pound knew that Whitman had done the same thing for Leaves of Grass. A Lume Spento was in its way an impressive collection for such a young poet, still only twenty-two. Pound would reprint fourteen of the forty-five poems, including ‘La Fraisne’, in his collected shorter poems in 1926. Already he had another notebook of poems for which he hoped to find a publisher, again some written in America and some in Europe. This set of poems was to have been called ‘San Trovaso’, after the quarter of Venice in which Pound lived for his last month or so there, but it was never published in its entirety, though a few of the individual poems appeared in later collections. On the whole these poems were a weaker group, identified by Pound even then as second division, though he was still to be put out by his failure to get them published. None appeared in the 1926 collection. The notebook, however, contains a curious and intriguing ‘essay’, as the index calls it, only about 300 words long. In it he writes:
All art begins in the physical discontent (or torture) of loneliness and partiality. It is to fill this lack that man first spun shapes out of the void. And with the intensity of this longing gradually came unto him power, power over the essences of the dawn, over the filaments of light and the warp of melody.18
Pound still held to his Blakean belief that art ought to be about ecstasy, yet in this little essay he is perhaps at times more open than he would usually be about the relationship of pain and art. Pound goes on to say that ‘Of such perceptions rise the ancient myths of the origin of demigods’, and explains that his poem ‘The Tree’ had been ‘an attempt to express a sensation or perception which revealed to me the inner matter of the Daphne story’: the transformation of pain, his torturous ‘loneliness and partiality’ into ecstatic ‘cosmic consciousness’. The word ‘partiality’ in the context appears to mean ‘desire’ or ‘love’: and Pound would insist that there was a close connection between poetic composition and desire, though for now he believed unfulfilled desire was probably best, at any rate for the production of art. Williams reported the problem back in Philadelphia in much less elevated terms: ‘We talked frankly about sex and the desire for women which we were both agonizing over. We were both too refined to enjoy a woman if we could get her. Which was impossible. We were too timid to dare. We were in agony most of the time.’19 In Venice, Pound was definitely aiming for sublimation: ‘Art and marriage,’ he ends, ‘are not incompatible but marriage means art death often because there are so few sufficiently great to avoid the semi-stupor of satisfied passion.’20 This was not going to be the problem with Pound’s own marriage, but he did not as yet have much insight into the complexities of marital relationships. The phrase ‘semi-stupor’ suggests he was not as yet free from Philadelphian suspicions of sexuality; perhaps his belief that unsatisfied desire was best for poets was a way of reworking sexual fears into aesthetic doctrine. Herbert Sussman suggests that Pater’s celebration of aesthetic pleasure is put in terms of intense but unfulfilled desire, as in his famous call ‘to burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy’. For Pater, male sexual potency was not, as Carlyle for one believed, to be sublimated into work and achievement, but passion to be cultivated for its own sake, though always contained; this he insists is what should be regarded as ‘success in life’. Pound may at this stage have gone along with this to some extent, though even then success for him necessitated the acquisition of fame as well as ‘the highest quality to your moments as they pass’.21
One of the poems in the San Trovaso notebook not published until after Pound’s death was a short poem called ‘Shalott’, alluding to Tennyson’s Lady, who is cursed to see the world only in her chamber’s mirror, weaving ‘the shadows’ into her web. Pound’s poem goes:
I am the prince of dreams,
Lord of Shalott,
And many other things long since forgot.
Oer land & sea
I roam where it pleaseth me
And whither no man knoweth
Save the wind that bloweth free.22
That gap in the last line is there in the original, and is perhaps Pound’s first experiment with using the visual appearance of a poem to add to the meaning. ‘Free’ becomes the key word. If Tennyson’s poem is about an imprisoned and doomed artist, Pound’s free spirit is a much more cheerful view of the poet, though, it is worth noting, just as solitary a one. However, in ‘Shalott’ he was now able once again to construct a defiantly carefree persona, who trusts his poetic drive, ‘the wind that bloweth’, to take him where he needs to be. He was shortly to decide that was London. Yet this brief poem appears immediately before the essay with its emphasis on the misery of isolation. Pound was in an emotionally tumultuous state. At one moment he felt so depressed he thought of dropping the proofs of A Lume Spento in the canal and giving up poetry altogether. He also copied out in the notebook the text of II Chronicles 14:11:
And Asa cried unto the Lord his God, and said, Lord, it is nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have no power: help us, O Lord our God; for we rest on thee, and in thy name we go against this multitude. O Lord, thou art our God; let not man prevail against thee.23
One could read this as an expression either of Pound’s confidence in his mission, or of his feeling that he was beleaguered and alone. He probably felt both.
While Pound was waiting for the printers to produce his book, he met up again with Kitty Heyman, who had come to Venice to perform, and set himself up as her agent, an arrangement which did not last long, probably because Pound was too busy promoting himself to have time efficiently to promote anyone else. Yet he could not afford just to sit in the Venetian sun; higgledy-piggledy Venice, no right angle in sight, a glorious maze rather than the oppressively orderly criss-cross of rectangles of Philadelphia, may have soothed his spirit, but he had brought his Presbyterian compulsions with him. Something had to be done about money. Pound’s letters to his parents are always largely concerned with what is of interest to him at that particular moment – what he is reading, writing, whom he has met – but a repeated refrain, or leitmotif, that appears regularly in his letters from Hamilton onwards, at any rate until 1910, was the request for funds, which would be balanced (strophe and antistrophe) by his latest tentative and unwilling plan to get an academic job. The letters from Venice are no exception. As well as asking for money, he told his parents of his applications, clearly dutiful but unenthusiastic, for university jobs back in the USA. Luckily he didn’t get them. But the prospect of a part-time position came up in London. ‘It was only a question of a year or so,’ he wrote home, ‘before I should have attempted to establish myself in London. And as events have always shaped themselves to hurry me along a bit faster than I should have moved myself, it may be that I am not to wait.’24 Above all, as he told them, he wanted to meet ‘Bill Yeats’.25 When he reached England he would learn that no one called Yeats Bill; he was Willie to his friends. But that was the least of what he had to learn. At the beginning of August 1908 he left for London.