V

POUND HAD, MEANWHILE, turned to some other prose, reworking the articles on American culture that he had drafted back in the States and that were to appear as ‘Patria Mia’. He had asked his father to send those drafts on to him the previous November, but had been in no hurry then to leave the subject of Provençal poetry. Now, just under a year later, after his new engagement with the contemporary world, the moment had come. They appeared weekly in the New Age from the beginning of September until mid-November: since they were largely already written, Pound could deliver them with remarkable speed, although there were added references, anecdotes and poetic theories that postdated his American visit. The articles’ ostensible subject was a quasi-ethnographic account of present-day America and its inhospitable climate for the arts; their subtext was a justification of his own presence on this side of the Atlantic, and he was now able to quote Henry James, from their spring meeting, on the inevitability of expatriation for the American artist. He recounts fresh experiences, since his return to Britain, of the inanities of American magazine editors, including the rejection of ‘Portrait d’une Femme’: ‘Of course,’ he writes, ‘art and prosperous magazines are eternally incompatible, for it is the business of the artist to tell the truth whoever mislike it, and it is the business of the magazine editor to maintain his circulation.’¹²⁶ This enmity between art and the commercial world would remain a core tenet for Pound, and finding a way of promoting what he saw as art without relying on the market became one of the central drives in his life. What was wrong with the United States, he argued, was not that there was no talent or what he calls ‘artistic impulse’, but that production was controlled by commercial market forces. Promising poets are told by editors: ‘Dear Mr——, Your work, etc., is very interesting, etc., etc., but you will have to pay more attention to conventional form if you want to make a commerical success of it.’¹²⁷

Pound’s insistence that good art and commercial success are incompatible, a favourite modernist assertion, is a romantic but dubious one, and Pound’s own attitude to the economics of his profession was very contradictory.¹²⁸ At the same time as he was denouncing commercialism in the New Age, he was writing to his father, explaining that he would soon be receiving a heap of circulars for Poetry and instructing him, ‘Devote yr. self to booming the same as my screw will depend in part on the circulation.’¹²⁹ Shortly he would be writing home to describe his life as ‘a few teas, and the old ringaround with wire-pulling concealed’.¹³⁰ Pound’s preferred source of funding was the support of rich patrons, and later he would be impressively successful in securing these for others, if rarely for himself. In ‘Patria Mia’ his contention is that the United States is an essentially medieval society, still in the Dark Ages: what it needs is a renaissance, and the Renaissance, of course, had as its economic base the great Italian patrons. When no patron was forthcoming, Pound’s alternative method was to rally as many people as possible (again family and friends) to make small contributions to what he thought were good causes (like Poetry, for example), rather like the principle Harriet Monroe had used herself. One wonders if his model here (and very possibly that of Monroe) was the funding of missionary societies, which were entirely dependent on the faithful for survival. Missionary societies in Britain and America had vast turnovers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and voluntary contributions must have been the foundation for the Italian mission for which Homer and Isabel worked. Pound would have known the method well; perhaps he added to his missionary spirit, missionary economics.

Pound, it should be noticed, is not attacking American mass culture produced by monopoly capitalism, but, as he puts it, ‘the appalling fungus of our “better magazines”’.¹³¹ Their editors claim to represent cultured and educated standards, but in reality, according to Pound, favour the bland, the homogenised, the conventional and the out of date. Most, he alleges, judge by the standards of the 1870s, when American poetry was dominated by Boston gentility, and they fear ‘the vital and renovating strata of letters more than they would fear beri-beri and the noisesomest pestilences’.¹³² Pound’s heated polemics make one suspect him of exaggerating, but when one thinks of the bowdlerised form in which Emily Dickinson’s verse was published at that time, rhymes and punctuation tidied up, striking images toned down, the whole a travesty, he was perhaps justified. ‘There is practically no one in America,’ Pound asserts, ‘who knows good work from bad – no such person, I mean, who is part of the system for circulation.’ Pound was going through a rapid process of what Stephen Greenblatt has taught us to call ‘self-fashioning’.¹³³ The arbiter of taste, in opposition to the craven, tasteless editors, was to be himself, and he would set himself up from now on as the iron judge of artistic merit. These magazine editors had the power to decide what has cultural status, but they promoted ‘bad art’. Pound would present the world with what was good. His battle was not with ‘the public’, but with those in positions of power who had more access to the public than he did. From now on Pound would struggle for a position of authority and control in the literary world. He wanted the power of those editors, he wanted to achieve an artistic putsch, to become what we might now think of as a culture Tsar or, given his later hero-worship of Mussolini, a culture Boss: Aldington in his memoirs frequently referred to Pound simply as the Duce.

Pound had come to realise – and it was one of the most important lessons of his visit home – that the quality of literature in any place or any period is not simply due to the talent of a number of isolated writers, but that literary works come out of ‘the system for circulation’, what Pierre Bourdieu would famously describe as a ‘field of cultural production’; editors, publishers, critics, agents all play their part in controlling what kind of work is available to read.¹³⁴ Given the paucity of patrons, he would have to break into the cultural marketplace and stake out new territory. Hence the number of little magazines that Pound would be associated with over the years in his efforts to change the literary map: Poetry, the New Freewoman, the Egoist, the Little Review, the Dial and many more. His one-time protégé Eliot would make modernism canonical through his editorship of the Criterion and his position at Faber & Faber. Later Pound’s disciple James Loughlin would set up the publishing house of New Directions to publish Pound and others of whom Pound approved. Both Pound and Eliot worked tirelessly as critics, and Pound acted as unpaid agent to a host of new writers, and, at one stage, artists. ‘Patria Mia’ makes explicit that his desire is to seize control of the field of literary production from these despised editors and their errant judgement.

In his assumption, however, that there are absolute standards of good and bad art that admit of no qualification, and that he knows what they are, Pound precisely mirrors the conservative views of the editors he condemns. Many educated people at the time would have agreed, but for most of them these standards were based on the traditional notion of an upper class with a cultured and correct taste. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, there had been repeated efforts by artists like the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes, or intellectuals like Arnold and Pater, to wrest the arbitration of standards of beauty away from an elite social class to an elite composed of artists, or, in Arnold’s terms, from the ‘Barbarian’ aristocracy and the ‘Philistine middle classes’ to ‘men of culture’, who appreciate ‘sweetness and light’.¹³⁵ Pound displayed little interest in Arnold, yet just as much as Arnold – or the magazine editors – he is sure that he knows what comprises good taste, but like Arnold he thinks the judgements should be made, if not by ‘men of culture’, by a ‘man of culture’, viz. himself. Not for nothing would he later produce the uncompromising Guide to Kultur.

More radical artists than Pound would soon begin to question the whole category of art. In March of the following year, Marcel Duchamp presented his famous urinal at the Armory Show, throwing the whole notion into question. Peter Bürger has argued that only those who, like Duchamp, subvert the institution of art should be considered avantgarde, in which case Pound, like H.D., Aldington and Eliot, whom they were yet to meet, could never be thought of as avant-garde, for none of them ever gave up their belief in the importance of art. But none of them was solely concerned with aesthetics, with art for art’s sake. Pound, as they all did, sees the quality of art and wider social conditions as intimately connected. In ‘Patria Mia’, when he writes about the coming of an American Risorgimento, he does not mean an artistic renaissance alone. ‘A Risorgimento,’ he writes, ‘implies a whole volley of liberations; liberations from ideas, from stupidities, from conditions and from tyrannies of wealth or of army’.¹³⁶ Pound believed that censorship of what could and could not be said, the hypocrisy of the cloak of public respectability, corrupted culture, and he was undoubtedly right. One might wish he had been more aware of other of his society’s ills, such as social injustice, or that he had been as alert to the impoverishment of factory workers as to that of artists, but the fact remains that he saw an artistic and a social mission as one. That was why he believed it was essential the artist should ‘tell the truth whoever mislike it’. He continued to share Orage’s view that reviving the arts would produce a better society, though with no clear view of how that would work.

For Pound, the enemy of good art and of the healthy society that would flow from it was chiefly the present literary establishment, in England as well as America, though he blamed the comfortably off middle classes in general. In a footnote he asserts, having condemned the English Poetry Society for making itself ‘ridiculous’ – he doesn’t say how, but no doubt because they had objected to Harold Monro’s inclusion of poets like himself in Poetry Review – that ‘Poetry is not a sort of embroidery, cross-stitch, crochet, for pensionnaires, nor yet a post-prandial soporific for the bourgeoisie. We need the old feud between the artist and the smugger portions of the community revived with some virulence for the welfare of things at large.’¹³⁷ If Pound, like other modernists, feared that ‘art’ as they understood it would be swept away by increasing commercialisation and conformity, it was the ‘smugger’, well-heeled classes that would be to blame. Yet in the autumn of 1912 he was still optimistic that he could lead the public to accept his judgements, writing to Harriet Monroe that ‘[his] own belief is that the public is sick of lukewarm praise of the mediocre’, though he realises it will take time, as ‘Good art can’t possibly be palatable all at once’.¹³⁸ Even that limited optimism was to wane.

Pound was putting ‘Patria Mia’ together with much relish; penning a fiery attack was much more agreeable to him than labouring at careful description, and he decided he could simply recycle the abandoned and unfinished Gironde publishing what he had done so far jointly with ‘Patria Mia’, as ‘Studies in Mediaevalism Past and Present’. In fact, the next year he amalgamated ‘Patria Mia’ with a sequel that appeared in the New Age the following summer, ‘America: Chances and Remedies’, and sent them off to an American publisher, Ralph Fletcher Seymour, a friend of Harriet Monroe, and the publisher of Poetry for the first four years of its existence. The manuscript was somehow mislaid, and only turned up again almost forty years later – perhaps appropriately enough, given Pound’s by then obsession with economics – in some packages of old accounts.

‘Patria Mia’ was an immediate success; on 2 October 1912 he wrote to his mother that the editor was saying ‘Best stuff on America since … etc.’. He was, he said, ‘feeling more gay & irresponsible than I have for some months’.¹³⁹ By the time Pound had pronounced Aldington and H.D. members of the cénacle imagiste, he had become much more hopeful again about his literary career. In his new role of foreign correspondent for Poetry he had already achieved a small portion of power in the literary world that he had not possessed earlier in the summer. Imagism was as yet a fledgling school, but Poetry would give him a chance to launch his movement. As he gleefully told his mother, the magazine would give him a grip on things for the future. In addition, his place in literary London appeared secure. He was able to give his friend Williams’ work a puff in the October American issue of Poetry Review, printing seven of the poems which would be included in a collection that he would persuade Elkin Mathews to publish the following year, and writing an introductory note that he described to Dorothy as ‘a masterpiece of tactful iniquity’.¹⁴⁰ Yeats was increasingly relying on his companionship as a fellow-poet. (They would have a brief row later in the autumn, when Pound attempted, as he saw it, to improve some of Yeats’ poems on their way to Harriet, but it blew over swiftly.) His friendship with Ford had completely recovered from the Geissen episode, and to his great pleasure Ford was now expressing admiration for his more recent poetry. In spite of the equivocal reviews for the Cavalcanti translations, he had a sufficient number of discriminating admirers to claim to be a poet of some standing. And when Ripostes was published on 5 October 1912 it attracted, at any rate in some quarters, a better critical reception than Canzoni.

Yet if his niche in what Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production carried status, it produced comparatively little income; he had symbolic capital, in Bourdieu’s terms, but not economic. Dorothy’s parents were certainly unimpressed. Presumably Pound had told them not long after his return of the fall in his fortunes, because in mid-September Olivia wrote him a chillingly frank letter, saying it was now quite impossible for Dorothy to marry him. Pound had already agreed, or perhaps even offered, to see less of her, and Olivia said firmly that once a week was all she would allow. For one thing, she complained, it had been extremely inconvenient keeping two days a week free for Pound’s visits the previous winter (a comment which gives an intriguing insight into the arrangements for those visits: Olivia obviously felt she had to be present in the house but must make sure no other guests were). Even more importantly, she wrote, Dorothy must have a chance to meet other people, because it was imperative that she married somebody, as Olivia really couldn’t bear ‘this feminine life practically à deux for ever’, and needed her out of the way. Should Hope die, she said with unvarnished candour, it would be particularly necessary, because in that case Olivia would probably marry again (did she have her eye on Yeats?) and Dorothy ‘wd be very much de trop’. She had nothing against him in himself, she assured him: ‘If you had £500 a year I should be delighted for you to marry her (no nonsense about waiting 5 years etc.) but as you haven’t, I’m obliged to say all this – as her mother I can’t see it any other way – I’ve seen too much of girls wasting their lives on men who can’t marry them, & they generally end up by being more or less compromised demivierges.’ Dorothy can’t, she insists, go about with him ‘American fashion – not till she is 35 and has lost her looks’.¹⁴¹

Pound was appalled by this mercenary cynicism, as he would soon tell his father, but for now he said nothing to his parents about his problems. At twenty-eight, he must have felt that, as a son-in-law, his gifts should outweigh his lack of wealth; art was more important than money. For now, however, he accepted Olivia’s restrictions, though when he passed the edict on to Dorothy, as Olivia had asked him to do, on the grounds that it took a ‘surgical operation’ to get Dorothy to mention Pound to her, Dorothy simply replied: ‘Once a week be hanged – – – Which of many reasons that might be, is given?’, a comment which suggests that Pound had not yet mentioned his loss of income to her.¹⁴² Pound did not appear to fret over-much about his restricted access. Perhaps he was having too good a time with Aldington and H.D. to care. One of his epigrams written to entertain Aldington might indeed be thought to indicate a lessening of ardour: ‘As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,/When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,/So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,/O my much praised but not-altogether-satisfactory lady’.¹⁴³ When Yeats saw this in the American Magazine, the Smart Set, in December 1913 he certainly feared that it meant Pound was losing interest in Dorothy, not realising it had been written over a year before. But Pound sent ‘The Bath Tub’ to Dorothy for her to read, which would have been very tactless even for Pound if he had thought she would take it personally. There is no evidence she did, and Pound’s subsequent actions suggest that she had no need to do so.

By the time Dorothy returned to London, probably on 9 October, Pound’s financial position had plunged further towards disaster. He had heard Swift & Co. had gone bankrupt; his £100 a year contract was null and void. On the 10th he wrote to his father, telling him that his patron was dead, had in fact been dead for some months, and Swift liquidated. ‘None of this bothers me much,’ he assured him, ‘as I can by now look out for myself.’ The problem was Dorothy’s family, who had insisted they break off the engagement and were planning for Dorothy to be ‘sold off in the society fashion’. ‘You being a human being,’ he told his father, ‘would find it hard to understand the Englishness of things. I’ve been sick of the whole damn crew for some time.’¹⁴⁴ What he suggests is that he bring Dorothy back to the States and that they should live with his parents. He would find something to do, and promised that this time, unlike last, he would stay. Considering that for the last five weeks his articles in the New Age had spelt out with some fervour his reasons for refusing to live in America, this was an indication of how desperate he was feeling, though whether he was driven to this point by romantic passion, or sheer outrage at the way the Shakespears were behaving, is hard to gauge. Dorothy, however, anxious to follow the proprieties as best she could even in the circumstances of an elopement, would only agree if Isabel invited her. Homer was to cable either ‘Come’ or ‘Don’t’, and then both of them were to write to Dorothy care of himself. ‘It wont,’ he explained ‘be any too easy for her to take such a full plunge into the dark – not after the way she has been brought up.’¹⁴⁵ Pound sent a separate letter to his mother, reminding her of the struggle she had had with her genteel family when she first suggested marrying Homer. Isabel ought to understand. They wouldn’t be worse off than Isabel and Homer when they first married: ‘don’t believe you regret it much,’ he added.¹⁴⁶

Homer and Isabel had mixed feelings about this; they were continually trying to persuade Pound to come back, even for a visit, so the possibility of a permanent return must have delighted them. They were, however, thrown by the absence of any reference to marriage, though Pound later reassured his father, a little huffily, that ‘Naturally I should have arrived duly and legally united. You needn’t have been alarmed on that score.’¹⁴⁷ That was early December. By then, he tells them, ‘the situation has cleared’, so he would not be returning. The owner of Swift & Co. had been arrested in Tangiers, and it was settled that Pound should have £25 a quarter for the next twelve months, and then a one-off payment of £65.

Although Pound remained on personal good terms with Olivia, the Shakespears’ attitude to the marriage probably contributed considerably to a changed attitude to England that begins to emerge in his writing from that autumn. In the place of his very Anglophile sentiments in 1909, he would develop a deep contempt for general English culture, different from, but equal to, that he felt for America. He thought, indeed, as far as marriage arrangements were concerned, that for once American mores were far superior. Had he read Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, House of Mirth, which he undoubtedly had not, he would have realised that there were sections of American society where daughters were sold off in much the same fashion, if for a great deal more. As it was, he appears to have had the Shakespears at least partly in mind when in ‘Patria Mia’ he for once compares American morality favourably with British: ‘So far as I can make out,’ he wrote there on 31 October, ‘there is no morality in England which is not in one way or another a manifestation of the sense of property. A thing is right if it tends to conserve an estate, or to maintain a succession, no matter what servitude or oppression this inflict.’ In America, ‘Our presumption is that those things are right which give the greatest freedom, the greatest opportunity for individual development to the individual, of whatever age or sex or condition’.¹⁴⁸ Rare praise for his country, which would not often be repeated, though the attacks on England would continue in the new year, when Orage asked him to write a companion series to ‘Patria Mia’ on England, which Pound entitled ‘Through Alien Eyes’. It is worth writing about America, he says there, ‘with what The New Age calls “moral indignation”’, because it might do some good, but he has no such hope of England, with its obsession with ownership, of which the acquisition of its Empire is the apotheosis. ‘The Englishman,’ he says, ‘has the sense of property – of his own property. It has made his empire; made it as fanaticism made the empire of the Crescent … The emphasis which the British subject can put on the possessive pronoun strikes us transpontines as at once hateful and barbaric. In the world of flowing phenomena how comes it that this otherwise quiet person can burst into violence with a my house, my this, my that.’ In England, he said, he was ‘perched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire’; his little circle of literary friends in ‘Kensington and its environs’ were

carried on the back of a very large and very sickly elephant … London … is like Rome of the decadence, so far, at least as letters are concerned. She is a main and vortex drawing strength from the peripheries.

Thus the finest authors … are all foreigners.¹⁴⁹

In illustration, he cites Yeats, James, Hudson and Conrad. No doubt he hoped others might include himself.