One mistake of the political mind is to underestimate the diversity and discontinuity of the psyche.
—Donald Hall, Remembering Poets
I could give you a verbal description of his character which would not be unjust to him, but what are such descriptions worth? A man’s character is his whole life.
—Goethe, Italian Journey
An artist’s statement is made in and by his work. His work is his biography, and the better the artist the more this applies.
—Ezra Pound. ‘Gaudier: A Postscript’
No critic has the right to pretend that he fully understands an artist.
—Ezra Pound, ‘Brancusi’
A biographer—a novelist, on oath.
—Leon Edel
Pound’s middle years, the most productive of his career, coincided with the two decades between the 1914–18 ‘Great War’, and the ‘Second World War’ of 1939–45. In the 1920s, and in Paris, Pound was among the leading figures of the avant-garde, along with Joyce, whose Ulysses was published there in 1922; and Picasso and Braque, and his more particular friends Brancusi and Picabia and Léger; and along with Stravinsky, and Satie, and Jean Cocteau. In that ambience he composed a musically inventive and emotionally intense opera, Le Testament [de Villon]; made an original contribution to the theory of harmony; and composed, following musical procedures, the first thirty cantos of his modern epic. Music was all important to him at that time. But so too was the imperative to promote advances in all the arts for the general betterment of society.
That concern was given a sharper focus by the severe economic depression brought on by the 1929 Wall Street Crash, a depression which continued, in America and Britain, through the 1930s. He found it infamous that the governments of those democracies should put saving the banks, and saving the financial system responsible for the crisis and the depression, before the welfare of their people. He held it as axiomatic that a democratic government should serve the interests of the whole people, not the interests of the few who controlled the nation’s wealth; more, he held it to be criminally irresponsible for a government to allow the nation’s credit to be in the hands of bankers and financiers who were free to use it for their private profit without regard for the public interest. At the same time, living now in Italy, he observed that Mussolini, in his Fascist and anti-democratic dictatorship, did provide for the welfare of his people, and did direct the banks to serve the nation’s needs. That led him to endorse Fascism in and for Italy, while urging the United States to live up to its own democratic Constitution. The forty cantos which he composed in the 1930s were predominantly concerned with economic and social justice, and with historical instances of good and bad banking and good and bad government. One entire decad was devoted to the example of Confucian China, and another to John Adams, the mind behind the American Revolution and the founding of its democracy. Those two blocks of cantos, the ‘China’ and the ‘John Adams’, are the keystones of his epic, and the most developed working out of his economic and political commitments in the 1930s. Those cantos, and those commitments, have not been well understood; but the time may have come for a better appreciation of Pound’s vision of the fundamental principles of a just society now that we are undergoing our own financial crisis and consequent economic and social ‘austerity’.
Things were not simple, politically and socially, in the 1930s; and Pound himself was not simple. Hindsight simplifies, but rarely clarifies. Complexities, confusions, and contradictions have to be reckoned with, as features of the time and of Pound. The paradox of his endorsing Mussolini’s Fascist economic programme, while taking his stand upon the Constitution of democratic America, might be matched by democratic America’s maintaining an undemocratic and anti-social financial system. Another self-contradiction would be America’s continuing discrimination against the descendants of its slaves while declaring that all men are born free and equal; and matching that might be Pound’s deploying the anti-Semitism endemic in America and Europe, and already turning murderous in Hitler’s Germany, as a weapon in his crusade for social justice. Altogether, Pound emerges in this account as a flawed idealist and a great poet caught up in the turmoil of his darkening time and struggling, often raging, against the current to be a force for enlightenment.
As I wrote in the preface to the first volume, Ezra Pound exists now in what he wrote, in his poetry, and also in all the thousands of pages of his published writings and the tens of thousands of pages of unpublished letters and drafts. That hoard is the form in which I have studied and contemplated him, and I have taken his words as the material and the medium of this portrait—as both what I have had to work from and what I have had to work with. Nearly everything that matters here has behind it some document—I have refrained from speculation, and I have ignored hearsay. My interest has been to weave the varied threads of Pound’s life and work into a patterned narrative, and to present the drama of this egregiously individual and powerful vortex in the stream of his language and culture.
A.D.M.
Alleins, June 2013.