VII

THE WRITER WITH whom Pound became most friendly during the autumn of 1909 was, in fact, a member neither of the Tour Eiffel group, nor of the Ford/Hunt circle. He was Frederic Manning, whom he had met back in January at Olivia Shakespear’s, and who, like himself, was still very much under the spell of the aesthetic tradition: Pound clearly felt more in tune with Manning’s backward gaze than with critics of the Edwardian status quo like Hulme, Flint, Lewis and Ford. Eliot would say of Manning, after his death, that he ‘had a style of writing, and a frame of mind, suited to a more cultured and better educated age than our own’, and his erudite elegance much appealed to Pound.¹²⁷ By the time Pound left London in March 1910, he told his parents that he and Manning were in agreement that they two were the only significant writers under thirty. Many years later Pound was to write that his relationship with Manning was ‘the first licherary ComPanionship in Eng/of Ez’.¹²⁸

Like Manning, Pound was now securely part of the Shakespear circle, and they saw each other frequently there. In October 1909, Manning invited Pound up to Edenham in Lincolnshire to spend a weekend with his guardian, Arthur Galton; although Galton was later to disapprove of Pound greatly, and Pound to scorn Galton for what he saw as his conservatism and stuffiness, all went well on this visit. Manning and Galton, he told his mother with unusual modesty, ‘probably know their latin literature much better than I do’, and were able to help him with advice for the early part of The Spirit of Romance.¹²⁹ Manning would never marry, and it has been suggested that he was gay: one biography of Manning is actually entitled The Last Exquisite, a phrase coined by T. E. Lawrence, with whom Pound also became friendly, who later commented, ‘Manning is a very exquisite person; so queer’.¹³⁰ Quite what he meant by that second adjective is uncertain; the modern meaning of queer was then only just coming into use. No one ever described Pound as exquisite, but at this stage he certainly admired Manning’s aestheticism, and enjoyed the retreat into the homosocial learned world of Edenham. Pound even copied out one of Manning’s poems that he particularly admired in a letter home, a quite unprecedented event, shortly afterwards sending the same poem to Ford to print in the English Review, with a note saying ‘Manning has … written this quite beautiful “Persephone” which I can praise without reservation’.¹³¹ Ford took the poem, which appeared in the December issue, and then printed in January a poem by Pound, accompanied by a note saying it was ‘written in reply to Manning’s “Korè”’ (another name for Persephone).¹³² Manning’s poem describes Persephone passing sadly through a beautiful, melancholy autumn countryside on her way to the underworld; it has a certain charm, very much in the nineties tradition, but what is most striking about it is that Manning describes Persephone as the ‘yearly slain’, a phrase Pound seized on for the title of his reply, ‘Canzon; the Yearly Slain’. Such a phrase strongly suggests that Manning must have been thinking of The Golden Bough, in which Sir James Frazer associates Persephone with the fertility rituals and myths that centred on the figure of the dying god, ‘who’, in Frazer’s words, ‘dies in winter to revive in spring’.¹³³ In 1909 only one volume (and it was to be revised) of the famous 12-volume third edition had been published; Manning had probably come across the second edition, which came out in 1900, and which, though not the bestseller that the third edition was to be, had been widely reviewed and read. Manning was deeply sceptical of the Catholicism in which he had been reared, and had no intention of embracing Galton’s Anglicanism, but he was widely read in anything to do with theology or philosophy, so it is not surprising that he knew Frazer’s ideas.

Pound might have already come across Frazer’s name through his reading of Yeats, who had quoted from the first edition of The Golden Bough, published in 1890, in the notes to The Wind among the Reeds, but Manning probably gave Pound his first real introduction to the work. Pound’s later poetry – like so much modernist writing – owed much to a set of ideas derived, albeit transformed, from Frazer. Frazer’s work appealed to the widespread fascination with the ‘primitive’ among artists and intellectuals at the period. If on the continent, Picasso, Matisse, Vlaminck and Kandinsky, among others, were already drawing on African and other kinds of non-Western art, in Britain Assyrian, Egyptian and African art would be vitally important in modernist visual art of the period just preceding the war, influential, for example, not just for Lewis, but also Jacob Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska; the Tour Eiffel poets were, of course, already looking to other cultures for fresh poetic forms, but Frazer did more than provide just one more source of exotic material. Frazer led writers such as Pound, and perhaps even more H.D., to a particular engagement with the world of myth that shaped much of their work, giving them new metaphors by which to frame their art, and from which to form a very specifically modernist aesthetics.

That Frazer’s work was significant for modernist writers has long been established (as well as Yeats, Pound and H.D., he was also important to Eliot, Lewis and Lawrence), but paradoxically all these modernists read ‘Frazer contra Frazer’, as Warwick Gould has put it.¹³⁴ They made of what they found in the capacious pages of The Golden Bough something very different from Frazer’s own convictions. What Pound believed was ‘essential to contemporary clear thinking’, as he would later describe Frazer’s work, was undoubtedly this creative misreading of his arguments.¹³⁵ Frazer himself approached his subject, as his subtitle put it, ‘a study of magic and religion’, from the viewpoint of a Victorian scientific rationalist. Like other anthropologists in the latter half of the nineteenth century, he was searching for a pattern of cultural evolution that would parallel the Darwinian biological one, using as evidence both investigations into the past and contemporary examples of ‘savage’ societies, seen as ‘survivals’ from an earlier stage of human development. Museum-based anthropologists were busy working out this evolutionary story in a material progression that they constructed from ‘savage’ through ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’ artefacts. For Frazer what mattered was what he called ‘mental anthropology’, a history of thought; he was an ‘armchair anthropologist’, as a younger generation, who placed fieldwork at the centre of the discipline, would scornfully put it: he used evidence from the classics, from histories, from travellers, from missionaries, from folklore, from the Bible, even on occasion from the newspapers. Armed with this plethora of miscellaneous facts, Frazer mapped out the sequence of human mental development as a movement from belief in magic, to religion, to a scientific view of the world. Central to both magic and religion, Frazer asserts, are fertility rituals designed to ensure the continuity of life. In The Golden Bough he charts particular motifs, in which the dying god is central, across Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian, Christian, Native American, Roman, Cambodian, Jewish, West African, Zulu and many more sets of myths and rituals. In fact, for all his flowing, golden prose – and Frazer was masterly in his evocations of the beauties or terrors of places to which he had never been – he is proto-modernist himself in his profusion of heterogeneous juxtapositions. The evolutionary narrative vanishes as he excitedly piles up comparisons from round the world and from all ages. When Eliot acknowledged the indebtedness of The Waste Land to Frazer, critics have assumed he was drawing attention to his use of Frazerian symbols, but equally, consciously or unconsciously, he uses this Frazerian technique of collage. Eliot’s text is fragmentary, fissured and jaggedly abrupt rather than woven together as Frazer’s is by his magisterial periods, but juxtaposition of the heterogeneous is the structural principle for them both, as it had earlier been for the imagists. It is not for nothing that The Waste Land has been described as a long imagist poem.

The subtext – not always so concealed – of this project was Frazer’s critique of Christianity. He wrote to his publisher before he brought out the first edition: ‘The resemblance of the savage customs and ideas to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is striking. But I make no reference to this parallelism, leaving my readers to draw their conclusions, one way or another.’¹³⁶ Frazer, however, does a fine line in irony, and any alert reader would see exactly what he was getting at. When his wife Lilly constructed the 1922 abridgment of The Golden Bough, which she did as a scissor and paste exercise, she literally cut out any controversial references to Christianity. These she felt, no doubt correctly, were not good for her husband’s career, but she thereby deprived his work of much of its edge. In Frazer’s original account, Christianity becomes just one of many mythic systems, but if to him that suggested the dubiousness of Christianity, to the modernists it proved the importance of the non-Christian myths. If to Frazer these myths, Christian and non-Christian alike, were based on pre-scientific and mistaken beliefs about the nature of fertility that the sound study of natural science rendered redundant, to them they embodied truths about the nature of existence, truths which had become lost by and large to modern civilisation, and which remained obscured in modern Christianity. Something similar was of course already being argued by the theosophists, who believed there was a deeper, older alternative truth about existence lost to modern rationalism, which could be discovered particularly in Eastern religion and philosophy. Some theosophists and occultists, such as Yeats himself, immediately recognised the relationship. According to Warwick Gould, the occult society in which Yeats was deeply involved, the Order of the Golden Dawn, increasingly absorbed and adapted Frazerian motifs.

Like many of their generation of artists and intellectuals, Pound, H.D., Hulme and Lawrence no longer accepted the rational, determined world of Victorian science, which came to them inseparably entwined with the belief in progress and the superiority of the modern world. The developmental metaphor that had been behind and structured so much nineteenth-century thought had ceased to make sense to them. Even Frazer himself, for all his claimed adherence to a progressive trajectory, shows considerable anxiety about the future of civilised society. Civilisation depended, he believed, on a small elite. It is, he lamented, ‘the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind’. There exists ‘a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society … unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture’, something that can only be considered as ‘a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move,’ he writes,

on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below … Now and then the polite world is startled by a paragraph in a newspaper that tells how in Scotland an image has been found stuck full of pins for the purpose of killing an obnoxious laird or minister, how a woman has been slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a girl has been murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade unseen.¹³⁷

Whether progress would continue or be undermined by this underlying savagery, he is unsure.

Though many of the modernists were quite as elitist in their way as Frazer, his view of the peasantry is a very different one from, for example, that of Yeats or Campbell, who went to the Irish peasants to learn what the modern world could no longer tell them, or from E. M. Forster’s, whose fiction at that very period depicted Italian peasants as full of the vitality and passion drained from contemporary society. (Their romanticised view is not of course necessarily any more to be relied upon than Frazer’s apprehensive disgust, though it was not primarily the peasantry who caused the volcanic eruption of carnage that was shortly to come.) That there was a ‘solid layer of savagery beneath the surface’ was accepted but not necessarily seen as alarming by the modernists, though for many of them modern civilisation was as fragile a crust as it was for Frazer. Yet Frazer’s fear of degeneration was widespread in the 1890s and the early twentieth century. What can progress can also decline. The linear metaphor itself had become a trap. Paradoxically, what the modernist writers took from Frazer, in spite of his intentions, was a way of escaping that linearity, through what Eliot, in an essay on Ulysses, was to call the ‘mythical method’.¹³⁸ The old myths could be read as maps of experience, which could explain the present in as illuminationg terms as they had originally explained the past. Repetition not development was the key. Joyce could use the mythic adventures of Ulysses to model a day in the life of Leopold Bloom. Eliot could use Greek myths, The Tempest, medieval quest literature, tarot cards, the Christ story and much more, all to give the same message of sterility and of diseased, violent sexuality in The Waste Land. H.D. could argue that Greek and Egyptian myth, Native American beliefs, Moravian religion, psychoanalytic theory all reveal a universal key which could unlock the mysteries of the psyche and explain the vicissitudes of twentieth-century history. Pound could bring together his early poets, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Homeric stories, his own version of Christianity, medieval theology, and Confucian wisdom in his voyage through the Cantos.

In short, Frazer – duly reinvented – helped Pound’s generation of writers to find an alternative to the narrative of Western progress, or indeed, decline; ‘the mythical method’ changed the relationship between past and present. In addition, for these young early twentieth-century writers, what Frazer added to the theosophists’ synthesis was his conviction that the central meaning behind these myths is anxiety over fertility, or, in human terms, sexuality. (One of Frazer’s more risqué passages is an extended comparison between Catholic celibate nuns and pagan sacred prostitutes; alternative versions of same thing, he argues, both illustrating that sexual practices are at the heart of religion.) Frazer’s third edition was to appear at the same time as the first translations of Freud into English were published. Like Freud (of whom, as it happened, Frazer strongly disapproved, although Freud was also a nineteenth-century scientific rationalist), Frazer argues that the truth of the human condition is hidden under a shallow layer of civilised conventions, and that this hidden truth centres on sexuality. That sexual desire is the most important constitutive element in human nature, the deep truth of our being, has been one of the most potent beliefs of the twentieth century, and still has power today, though the horrors of the Second World War were to make aggression or the will to power seem to some more meaningful alternatives, and post-structuralism in its various forms has steadily deconstructed those metaphors of surface and depth on which such beliefs rely. In the early part of the twentieth century, however, the power of the libido was the explosive revelation that exposed the hypocrisies of Victorian society.

Frazer was not equally influential for all these writers; Joyce, for example, although Eliot’s prime example of the mythical method, owed more to Vico’s theory of the cyclical nature of history than to Frazer, and Eliot himself was to revert to Christianity, though of these writers he was the one who most closely shared Frazer’s distaste for the ‘solid layer of savagery beneath’. H.D. was certainly influenced, though probably also owed much to the classicist/anthropologist, Jane Harrison (‘the great J.H.’ much admired by Virginia Woolf, whose ghost flits across the college grass in A Room of One’s Own). For Pound, Frazer confirmed his earlier fusion of the pagan gods and the troubadours’ Religion of Love. In his ‘Canzon: the Yearly Slain’, the ‘Yearly Slain’ is no longer Persephone but the God of Love, the figure who is so central for the Provençal and even more so for the early Italian poets, who were to become increasingly important to Pound over the next eighteen months. It is with the Cantos that the significance of the mythical method for Pound became most apparent, but Pound’s ‘Canzon’, which makes the troubadours’ God of Love a Frazerian dying god, although very different in form from his later work, was an indication of those further fusions to come.

Pound’s ‘Canzon: the Yearly Slain’, in fact, marked a turn in his development, though not only because of the Frazerian influence, and not in the short run for the better. The next two years were to see Pound move away from his earlier persona poems, with their vigour, their directness, their defiance, their evocation of speech. He would concentrate on producing in English the formal complexities first of Provençal poetry and then of Guido Cavalcanti’s sonnets. The form of ‘The Yearly Slain’ was derived from Arnaut Daniel: a seven-line stanza which has no rhyming lines, but each successive stanza has to rhyme line for line with the first, a form which places considerable demands on the ingenuity of the poet, but without offering the auditory rewards that rhyming within a stanza gives; the reader can only appreciate the scheme intellectually. Other canzoni use different if equally complex forms, but in them all the language that Pound uses is archaic, the conceits elaborate, and many of the symbols derivative. Individual images can be striking, some passages characteristically musical, but the overall effect is stilted and inert. Was Pound reacting against the whole tenor of the Tour Eiffel discussions, certainly against Hulme’s campaign for directness? One might almost hazard a guess that Pound was picking up on something he had found in ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, where Wilde praises Pre-Raphaelite poetic practice: ‘all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you find in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages.’¹³⁹ Perhaps having read this, Pound had decided to redouble his efforts to hone his art through a return to the complexities of Provençal and early Italian verse. Manning was writing similarly archaicisng poems, and his influence was no doubt significant. Yet perhaps, like Hulme and Flint and Campbell, even here Pound was trying to renew English poetry by the use of exotic, in this case exotically archaic, forms, as Flint had earlier implied. The Provençal and the other early Italian poets were after all the avant-garde of their day; the latter the dolce stil nuovo poets, writing in ‘the sweet new style’. Later Pound conceded that his use of the canzone form had been something of a mistake. ‘I have proved,’ he later wrote, ‘that the Provençal rhyme schemes are not impossible in English. They are probably inadvisable.’¹⁴⁰ He was to admit that no one can ever ‘learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.’¹⁴¹ Much of this period of intense antiquarianism coincided with his period out of England. It was not until after his return that a new phase in his development would begin.