1 : A YEAR IN PARIS, 1921–1924

Pound would not settle in Paris. It was too ‘northern’ for him, with its menace of cold and dark that shut one in on oneself. He would go away for months at a time, and then for good at the end of 1924, to the more benign south of France and to Italy where he could leave all his senses open to the ‘world of moving energies’ around him. The light and warmth of the Mediterranean climate made not only for better health, he found, but also for increased intelligence and finer perceptions. He wanted to have just one ‘solid year in Paris’, he told Williams, though in the event he extended his ‘year’ over nearly four.

After crossing from London in early January 1921 Ezra and Dorothy spent only ten days in Paris, and for most of that time Ezra was in bed with flu. They got away by train on the 18th and went down to Saint-Raphaël on the coast near Cannes. The town, according to Baedeker, had a thriving port and was a favoured winter resort offering some ‘well spoken of’ hotels and an ‘English Church (services in winter)’. The Pounds put up at one of the cheaper hotels near the station, l’Hôtel du Terminus et des Négociants. For the next three months Ezra ‘for the first time in years…had a real rest’ and wrote nothing, or so he told Ford. His typewriter was left behind in Paris. ‘Palm leaf hut on the beach’, he scrawled on a postcard to Alice Corbin Henderson in Santa Fe. His one duty was to write to Scofield Thayer telling him what he thought of each number of the Dial as it reached him, and offering unwanted suggestions and advice for future numbers. It is likely that his mind was on his Villon and his cantos, and that he did some composing of one or the other from time to time. But he admitted only to playing tennis, even to excess—‘five hours on tennis court’, and ‘hand in sling’ as a consequence. He made such an impression at the local tennis club that its members presented him with a silver ash tray when he was about to leave in April. Then it was ‘Paris next week & a plunge into gawd knows wot.—certainly a change of life’.

By April 10th Dorothy and Ezra were established on the Left Bank in a high two-roomed studio with ‘not much space’ but a pleasant balcony, in the Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais, 59 rue des Saints-Pères. Waiting for Ezra was a note from Thayer giving him his three months’ notice as foreign agent for the Dial. He accepted without further comment this ‘dismissal taking effect 1^st July’. To Margaret Anderson of the Little Review he mentioned that the loss of the $750 a year salary would leave him with ‘no means of support visible or predictable’, but added that he remained grateful to Thayer for having ‘paid my rent for 15 months’. He would loyally work out his three months, and would continue to contribute a bi-monthly ‘Paris Letter’ until February 1923; but after that Thayer’s now settled hostility would put an end for some years to his connection with the Dial. The day after acknowledging his dismissal Pound resumed relations with the Little Review, and was soon planning ‘a special summer number’ to present ‘the active element here’. ‘There is the intelligent nucleus for a movement’, he enthused to Ford, ‘which there bloody well isn’t in England’.

The leading intelligence in the vortex Pound now tried to stir up in Paris would have been the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who struck him as living ‘in his atelier as a Dordoigne cavern sculptor may conceivably have lived in his rock-fissure’, content to do his work without apparently having any abstract ideas or theory about it. All his intelligence went into perfecting his creations. Pound, with his mind still running on the Vorticists, saw him ‘doing what Gaudier might have done in thirty years time’; only ‘Where Gaudier had developed a sort of form-fugue or form-sonata by a combination of forms’, Brancusi was committed to a ‘maddeningly more difficult exploration toward getting all the forms into one form’. His highly polished ovoids and birds were ‘master-keys to the world of form’, to the realm of pure geometric form freed from all accident; and to be caught up in contemplation of them was to approach ‘the infinite by form, by precisely the highest possible degree of consciousness of formal perfection’. It was a Paradiso in sculpture, a revelation of ‘the infinite beauty of the universe’. But the pleasure of it, Pound conceded, the world being as it was, would be ‘the rare possession of an “intellectual” (heaven help us) “aristocracy”’.

After Brancusi Pound would have mustered an advance guard of those ‘who have cast off the sanctified stupidities and timidities and are in defiance of things as they are’. Foremost among them he would have had Francis Picabia, as, in his Dadaist writings, ‘a sort of Socratic or anti-Socratic vacuum cleaner’ hoovering up ‘fustian and humbugs’; and then there would be Cocteau, Paul Morand, Guy-Charles Cros, and Blaise Cendrars, all of them as working away, each in his own individual fashion, at the necessary nettoyage, clearing away the accumulated rubbish of ‘the contemporary average mind’ and contending against its tyranny over the individual intelligence. Pound hoped to combine the resisters into some sort of movement, some sort of ‘civilization in the midst of the unconscious and semi-conscious gehenna’.

He wanted his special number of the now quarterly Little Review, ‘this new Brancusi, Cocteau, Picabia, me. etc. number’, to be ‘a clean break. = a wholly new burst of something the public don’t expect. = otherwise all my push goes to waste’. When it appeared as the ‘Autumn 1921’ number it included an essay on Brancusi by Pound, with twenty-four photo-illustrations of his sculpture; a translation, taking up nearly half the number, of Cocteau’s poem ‘Cap de Bonne Espérance’; a Dadaist essay by Picabia (who was named as Foreign Editor); and a squib from ‘Abel Sanders’, Pound’s Dada persona. Pound’s name was on the masthead along with those of Margaret Anderson and ‘jh’, and would remain there until 1925. But he did not appear again as a contributor, except fleetingly as ‘Abel Sanders’ the Dadaist, and his unpaid role was limited to advising, recommending, urging and criticizing. His influence and his agency were responsible in part at least for the more Parisian character the journal took on for a time, with Dada and Surrealism predominating, but it never became the organ of the ‘movement’ he had projected. Indeed his Paris vortex scarcely formed at all in the fast currents of that city’s modernisms.

Though that effort had only a passing effect it provides a clear image of how Pound was seeing his world in the early 1920s. The ‘average mind’, Pound wrote in one of his ‘Paris Letters’, ‘is our king, our tyrant, replacing [Creon] and Agamemnon in our tragedy’:

It is this human stupidity that elects the Wilsons and Ll. Georges and puts power into the hands of the gun-makers, demanding that they blot out the sunlight, that they crush out the individual and the perception of beauty. This flabby blunt-wittedness is the tyrant.

And the individual who resisted that tyranny was in the predicament of Sophocles’ Antigone, standing alone ultimately against the amorphous mass of a ‘government’ in which power is concentrated ‘into the hands of the ignorant and the inept, the non-perceivers’. There, for Pound, was the basic struggle of the modern mind, the agon of its tragedy: ‘the struggle of an hereditarily hampered and conditioned individual against the state’.

The individual, Pound recognized on this occasion, had little or no power to fight back against the imbecile state, whose ‘power to do him evil…extends to his complete extermination’. (He would come to see his friend Upward’s suicide in 1926 as one instance of that; and he himself would be close to being sentenced to death by the state in 1945.) ‘Only by supreme genius’, he went on, ‘or more usually by luck, by the million to one chance can he do anything against lo stato.’ Even to escape its pressures and bondage required an ‘incalculable intensity of life, an intensity amounting to genius’; and, with that, a superlative awareness of ‘the passion for τὸ καλόν, fighting against tyranny, against lo stato, if that stato is corrupt’.

That more or less was how Pound dramatized his situation as a poet in Paris. He would be the individual artist of genius with a passion for τὸ καλόν, the eternal order, and he would contend against the tyranny of the commonly accepted order of things. ‘The function of poetry’, he declared in an irritated response to a questionnaire in Harold Monro’s Chapbook,

is to assert the existence of a world that Fleet Street cannot drop dung upon, over which the machinery of publishing has no control; into which usurers and manufacturers of war machinery cannot penetrate; into which the infamy of politicians, elected or hereditary, cannot enter and upon which expediency has no effect; against which the lies of exploiting religions, the slobberings of bishops, have no more influence than the bait of journalism or oppressions of the ‘purveyors of employment’.

Or shall we say: To assert an eternal order…

That tells us quite a lot about his hell, and nothing much about his paradiso. Yet it was a statement of his wholly serious intent to create in his epic, in its very different terms, his own version of Brancusi’s ‘universe…[his] Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms’.

In Brancusi’s ‘cavern of a studio’ Pound could find ‘a temple of peace, of stillness, a refuge from the noise of motor traffic and the current advertisements’. Otherwise he was compelled, as he put it for rhetorical effect, ‘to move about in a world full of junk-shops’, in the Paris of ‘well-known and advertised clap-trap’ with its ‘galleries full of pictures made obviously for the market’. In fact of course Paris was also in a ferment of new and uncommercial creation in all the arts; and Pound, as ever, was eagerly keeping up with it all. In April he saw Braque, though only for two minutes, and liked what he saw; he ‘met Picasso for first time on New Years eve’; by then he had moved to within a few doors from Fernand Léger and had come to know him and his work intimately. (Léger told him what the French soldiers thought of the recent war and he put that into canto 16.) Afternoons of high-voltage conversation ‘at Picabia’s with Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp’ kept him au fait with whatever the avant-gardes were up to in music, ballet, theatre, and film, as well as in art and literature. Cocteau, whose friendship and conversation Pound valued above most, seems to have had a hand or a light finger in everything that was going on. He collaborated with Picasso, Satie, and Diaghilev in Parade, and with Stravinsky in Oedipus Rex; he helped found the Jockey Club Bar—Pound, in his best Left Bank beret and attitude, appears in a photograph of the ‘founders’; he promoted the new music of Satie and ‘Les Six’, who included Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud. Pound measured his own music against theirs and was not daunted. ‘Fortunately Satie’s Socrate is damn dull’, he confided to Agnes Bedford; and anyway he had a more ‘definite system’ than Les Six.

Probably his most privileged vantage-point for observing the artistic and intellectual life of Paris was at his good friend Natalie Barney’s salon with its Grecian Temple de l’Amitié in the small enclosed garden. ¹ There American wealth united with Parisian sophistication, stylish unconventionality was de rigueur, and the only taboo was against ‘the average mind’ and its conventions The great scholar Salamon Reinach could be seen there, and the great poet Paul Valéry and the great novelist Proust, along with Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, one of Natalie’s lovers, and Le Prince Edward de Polignac with his wife Winaretta, an heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. And there, in the autumn of 1922, Pound would meet the very gifted young violinist Olga Rudge.

Dr William Carlos Williams, when Pound took him to tea with Miss Barney, was unsettled by her lesbian entourage and had to keep up his morale as a ‘primitive’ American male by going out ‘to take a good piss’, standing up. Pound himself had no problem at all with the varieties of sexual behaviour, and felt no need to assert his manhood in her salon. He saw in Natalie Barney simply a woman with the courage, independence, and intelligence to be what she was to the utmost; one who, in her own words which he liked to repeat, ‘got out of life, oh…perhaps more than was in it’. Their friendship extended to playing energetic tennis together.

Pound himself was much observed as he went about Paris, sometimes with insight and sympathy, often with little of either. Everyone saw ‘the velvet jacket and the open-road shirt’, the floppy artist’s beret and the ebony cane, and many thought of Byron or of Whistler and the late Aesthetes, and thought no further. Margaret Anderson, meeting for the first time the Little Review’s former foreign editor and longtime collaborator, sat in his studio for an hour in conversation and apparently took in not a word that he said. All she had to report from that meeting was ‘his high Rooseveltian voice, his nervousness, his self-consciousness’, and that ‘Ezra’s agitation was not of the type to which we were accustomed in America—excitement, pressure, life too high-geared’. For some he was always talking and talked too much. When he talked to Gertrude Stein about Japanese prints she was not amused and talked him down and later uttered her malicious mot that ‘he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’. Then he fell out of her ‘favourite little armchair’ and broke it and she was furious and refused ever to see him again. But for Sylvia Beach ‘he mended a cigarette box and a chair’, skilfully, and did not talk about ‘his, or, for that matter, anyone’s, books’. She ‘found the acknowledged leader of the modern movement not bumptious’, and recorded that she ‘saw Mr Pound seldom’, because ‘he was busy with his work and his young poets’. One of the young poets was E. E. Cummings, who would recall half a lifetime later how ‘wonderfully entertaining’ Pound had been, and how ‘magically gentle’, during the whole of a walk one night from the rue Castiglione to the Place Saint-Michel. To Sisley Huddleston also Pound was ‘a good talker’. A Times correspondent and a connoisseur of the good life in Paris in the 1920s, Huddleston recorded ‘a vivacious evening’ in the restaurant next to the Bal Bullier at the top of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, one of many when ‘Ford, Pierre Loving, Pound and myself gaily played with ideas for hours’, with Pound ‘the merriest spirit of the party’.

Pound was observed in yet another light by Nancy Cox McCormack, an American sculptor who was in Paris then. When she first met Pound he was ‘accompanied by a slimly tailored, commanding young woman…[whose] entire personality bespoke the quality of an English lady’. Pound presented her as his wife, and she noticed that he ‘seemed to address [Dorothy] in all his conversation “as if he were in the habit of crystallizing his thinking through the intellectual channels of their mutual understanding”’. That striking recollection was recorded after she had become a close friend of them both, and may owe something to friendship. Still, it must qualify the general impression one is given that Dorothy and Ezra were now leading fairly separate lives. Pound is usually seen among other men, or with other women, and Dorothy is rarely in the picture. It is said that she did not enjoy being in Paris; and she spent months back in England with her own family and friends, as well as the months away in Italy with Ezra. There are accounts of Pound dancing, wildly, to rhythms only he could hear, but there is no mention of his dancing with Dorothy.

But then how could they dance together, given the way he danced? Caresse Crosby gave a vivid account of a night out with Pound in Paris in 1930 when ‘a brilliant band of Martinique players were beating out hot music’:

As the music grew in fury Ezra avidly watched the dancers. ‘These people don’t know a thing about rhythm’ he cried scornfully, and he shut his eyes, thrust forward his red-bearded chin and began a sort of tattoo with his feet—suddenly unable to sit still a minute longer he leapt to the floor and seized the tiny Martinique vendor of cigarettes in his arms, packets flying, then head back, eyes closed, chin out, he began a sort of voodoo prance, his tiny partner held glued against his piston-pumping knees.

The music grew hotter, Ezra grew hotter. One by one the uninspired dancers melted from the floor and formed a ring to watch that Anglo-savage ecstasy—on and on went the two, until with a final screech of [cymbals] the music crashed to an end. Ezra opened his eyes, flicked the cigarette girl aside like an extinguished match and collapsed into the chair beside me. The room exhaled a long orgasmic sigh—I too.

The sight of Pound dancing, according to Sisley Huddleston, was ‘one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life’.

Nature, genius, and the state of the world

That genius is a force of nature, and that this force of nature is, or should be, the shaping power in human society, these were convictions Pound had long held. He had tried various ways of formulating them. He had invoked the myth of Isis and Osiris; he had invoked myth and science together to present Imagisme as the work of ‘germinal mind’ interpreting the vital universe and projecting its intellectual and emotional complexes into the minds of its readers; he had promoted Vorticism as manifesting the Dionysiac genius of the race in abstract forms which should have the same power to reveal order in the world as those of geometry or the equations of pure mathematics. Through all his various formulations he was seeking to bind together the creative workings of the mind and those of nature or the vital universe, and to conceive of them as not distinct the one from the other, but as driven by one and the same life force.

In 1921 he was speculating about a possible proof from natural science for his conviction that the mind was energized by the power of sex. He had previously found in de Gourmont’s study of the reproductive mechanisms and habits of insects, birds, and beasts, Physique de l’amour (1903), a ‘biological basis in instinct’ for the conception, which he had drawn from the love poetry of the troubadours and of Dante and Cavalcanti, ‘of love, passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation’. Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit, he repeated from Propertius, ‘our genius is a girl’s doing’; with the variation from the King of Navarre, ‘science and beauty are from refining love’, De fine amor vient science et beauté.

Some time after his return to Paris in 1921 he picked up a commission to translate Physique de l’amour for the New York publisher Horace Liveright, a ‘rush order’ carried through in June at the rate of ‘25 pages per diem’. ‘If I do it quick enough it will pay the rent’, he told Agnes Bedford; to Dorothy, then in London, he wrote on 23 July, ‘Speak not evil of Jews. Liveright has paid up already.’ As part of the commission he wrote ‘a supplementary chapter for U.S. edtn’, and this appeared at the end as ‘Translator’s Postscript’ to The Natural Philosophy of Love.

In this ‘Postscript’ Pound took off from Gourmont’s suggestion that ‘There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain.’ What if, he speculated, what if the ‘genital fluid’ of sexual reproduction functioned also as the ‘cerebral fluid’ of the image-making, form-projecting brain? ‘The individual genius’ might then be ‘the man in whom the new access, the new superfluity of spermatozoic pressure (quantitive and qualitative) up-shoots into the brain, alluvial Nile-flood, bringing new crops, new invention’. He went on to note

the similarity of spermatozoides and ovules and brain cells in their capacity to contain or project a form. That is to say, the spermatozoide compels the ovule to evolve along certain predetermined lines; the ovule receives the pattern and evolves. The brain-cell also holds an image; a generalisation may be considered as a superposition of such images.

And ‘creative thought’, the projection of the brain’s images and universal forms, ‘is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed’. ‘Genius’, Gourmont had written, ‘fecundates a generation of minds.’ That is, by implication, it compels the individual minds or the society which receives its pattern ideas, its seed-gestalten, ‘to evolve along certain predetermined lines’.

The science strikes us now as primitive. But had Pound known about DNA and the further advances in genetics he might well have used them in the same speculative fashion to underpin his argument that genius is a natural function and a function of nature, and that it acts as a formative, shaping power in its world. Behind his appeal to science, to Gourmont’s natural philosophy in this case, was his conviction, dating back to 1912 at least, that the utility of the poet to the world’s consciousness is ‘scientifically demonstrable’. And behind that lies the fundamental, and still revolutionary, conception that there is one life in all things in our universe, and that ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are one as ‘the human realm’ and ‘the natural world’ are one.

By March of 1922 Pound was happy to dismiss most of the scientific or pseudo-scientific postulates of his ‘Postscript’ as ‘various statements now antiquated’ and ‘speculations neither supported nor disproved’. He had discovered the relatively new science of the endocrine glands, and was speculating about a possible chemical basis of intelligence as suggested by Dr Louis Berman’s book The Glands Regulating Personality (1922). In place of the ‘genital fluid’ he now postulated the pineal gland as the source of image-making intelligence and original thought. From Berman he learnt that the pineal gland contains ‘cells filled with a pigment like that in the eye’s retina, and little piles of lime salt crystals’. He took this to indicate that it had to do with the sense of light, and with intelligence developed from seeing, specifically with the power of orderly visualization. He termed it the ‘gland of “lucidity”’, of ‘luminosity in vision’; and, again, the ‘gland of metamorphosis, of original thought’ and of ‘the new juxtaposition of images’—at the same time seeking the physical cause in the secretion of the lime salt crystals, ‘not as a slow effusion, but ejected suddenly into sensitised area [of the brain cells], analogy to the testes’.

These antiquated speculations are of interest now as background to Pound’s next canto. But they serve also to show just how far Pound would go in search of a basis in natural science for his idea of creative intelligence; and they give a measure of how very far he was from associating, as Yeats would, a poet’s inspiration with occult powers.

It must be noted in passing how Pound even while writing about originating genius was yet subject to the limited knowledge and the conventional prejudices of his time, for he held creativity, whether in sexual reproduction or in thought, to be the male function, and the female to be simply the passive receiver of his sperm or his intellectual gestalt. The female was allowed to be the conservatrix of useful instincts and traditions. But he could not see, though he did try to allow for a feminist view of the matter, that she was equipped for original creation. When he encountered original creativity in a woman, as in Marianne Moore or Mina Loy, or, initially, in H.D., he had to attribute it to the possibility that the ovaries did also have a ‘male’ function—something, he said, he could ‘hardly be expected to introspect’—or else to the possibility that ‘the ejection of lime salt particles in a female’ would free her ‘from the general confusions of her sex’.

Canto II: seeing the light

Pound’s next canto was published in the Dial in May 1922 as ‘Eighth Canto’, but later, with a different lead-in, it was placed definitively as canto ‘II’. Its centre is an epiphany, a visionary manifestation of Dionysos, the ancient Greek idea of the single force that drives all living things. As a son of Zeus Dionysos was associated with the divine light which is at once the light of life and the light of intelligence; and he was held to generate both the myriad forms of living beings and their powers to sense things and to make sense of their experience. He would figure then as the cause of our responsiveness to light and of the intelligence that is developed from seeing; thence of its power of orderly visualization, and of its further power of original thought (‘the new juxtaposition of images’). He would be active in the ‘germinal mind’ interpreting his vital universe.

Dionysos first appears in the canto as ‘a young boy loggy with vine-must’, suggesting the most common perception of him as the god that is in wine, and hence, in the eye of the drinker, appearing as ‘in his cups’. Later he is called ‘Lyaeus’ by the sailor who recognizes the god in him, a name given because wine (as Lemprière quaintly put it) ‘gives freedom to the mind’. Dionysos was in fact held to be a force for every kind of liberation. Bringing forth new life was seen as a liberation; shape-shifting and metamorphosis, as in the transformation of flower to fruit or grub to butterfly, were seen as liberations; to be rapt in ecstasy, from honeyed wine or in a visionary trance, was to be liberated from one’s ordinary self and the common world. In this latter aspect, as liberator from normal behaviour and custom and convention, he could change minds and perceptions and values and so threaten the established social order, sometimes comically, as in Pound’s ‘Salutation the Second’, sometimes tragically, as in The Bacchae of Euripides. Generous and potentially violent frère ennemi to Apollonian reason, Dionysos represented the fluid, ever-changing, interacting, and uncontrollable energies that give rise to and sustain every living thing and are confined by none.

Everywhere present he is yet unseen by the mind in its everyday state. In the canto the piratical sailors who come upon him see just a lad they can seize and sell into slavery. In The Bacchae young King Pentheus, intent on keeping order in Thebes and seeing him only as a trouble-maker and a misleader of the women of his city, thinks to shut him away in prison and to ban his orgiastic rites. Blind Tiresias who sees what is hidden from ordinary sight tells Pentheus that this Dionysos is a powerful god not to be denied and that all Thebes, even the king himself, should join in his dance of life. ‘You rely on force’, he tells him, ‘but it is not force that governs human affairs.’ Pentheus of course does not believe that. Blinded by his own powers, he continues to oppose them, fatally, to the god’s. His end is to be torn apart by the maenads, the god-possessed women led by his own mother. Euripides would have no one doubt that the god who liberates his followers and opens their eyes to his presence also destroys those who deny or resist his power.

Pound follows the emphasis of marvelling Ovid’s version of the god’s story, rather than that of moral Euripides. Instead of having Tiresias explain to Pentheus why he should recognize the god, he has Acoetes, the one sailor who saw the god in the young boy, attempt to make Pentheus see the danger he is in by reliving his own visionary experience. The wood of the ship comes alive in his telling—‘where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk, | And tenthril where cordage had been, | grape-leaves on the rowlocks’. The empty air becomes animate with crowding forms of Dionysos’ wild cats, lynxes, panthers, and leopards—

out of nothing, a breathing,

hot breath on my ankles,

Beasts like shadows in glass…

fur brushing my knee-skin,

Rustle of airy sheaths,

dry forms in the aether

And the god thus manifest assures Acoetes that from now he may worship at his altars ‘Fearing no bondage’. Pentheus, heedless of Acoetes’ testimony will attempt to bind the god.

The canto does not go into Pentheus’ doom. Its Dionysos, in this following the Homeric hymn and the archetypal idea, is the god of indestructible life. His law is not death followed by a possible transcendence but metamorphosis, unceasing change through successive forms of being. Thus his way of punishing the mindless greed of the sailors who think to catch and sell him is to transform them into fish—

Medon’s face like the face of a dory,

Arms shrunk into fins…

Fish scales over groin muscles

The ‘John Dory’ makes a fine-tasting dish and would be a much sought-after catch.

In its origins the story of Dionysos is archaic, as ancient and archaic as the tale of Odysseus calling up Tiresias from among the sunless dead. Pound said of the latter when discussing the Odyssey that ‘it shouts aloud that it is older than the rest’, that it belongs to ‘that island, Cretan, etc., hinter-time’. This is equally true of Dionysos, and yet Pound’s manner of treating the two stories could not be more different. In canto I he emphasized the remoteness of the rite, by intervening only as editor and translator, thus keeping his distance from it, and then by giving it a somewhat Anglo-Saxon stylization, as if placing it back in the heroic Dark Ages. But with Acoetes’ story he does everything possible to make it an immediate experience, vividly actual, even contemporary. He is not now the mere editor and translator of another’s book, but as it were Acoetes himself caught up in the very act of perceiving the god in his manifestations. In full sunlight he sees ‘the godly sea’ as Odysseus, in the dark of canto I, could not.

The entire canto, it now becomes apparent, is concerned with seeing the divine energies in the sea and elsewhere; or, to put it another way, it is concerned with the varieties of the visible and with the different kinds and degrees of vision. A seal is seen—‘Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash, | sleek head…lithe daughter of Ocean’—and there the vision shifts from the seen to the intuited and the mythical. There is a further development with ‘eyes of Picasso | Under black fur-hood’, a doubling, shifting, unfixable image. There are the seal’s eyes; and Picasso’s that had about them the look of a seal’s; and there is his artist’s eye for the precise line of its object, so that for a moment the eyes might be his vision of the seal’s. Thus sight comes alive to two or three different ways of seeing the world, with the archaic and the modern juxtaposed. Later, Tyro, in love with a river, is caught up by Poseidon—

Twisted arms of the sea-god,

Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,

And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them,

Glare azure of water, cord-welter, close cover.

It may be merely a myth of divine possession and generativeness, yet it is so fully visualized and so much a vision of known natural phenomena that the mind’s eye really sees and credits it, mythopoetically. In contrast, what follows is a naturalist’s objective observation—‘Snipe come for their bath, | bend out their wing-joints, | Spread wet wings to the sun-film’. Then the mind’s associations come into play upon such observations, as in seeing a rock as ‘Naviform’, shaped like a ship; and still more in ‘a wine-red glow in the shallows’. It may be only the algae that give that glow, but ‘wine-red’ to the responsive mind will suggest the hidden presence of Dionysos.

Between the visions of the ‘lithe daughter of Ocean’ and of Tyro there is a more extended passage presenting the very different vision the old men of Troy have of Helen, daughter of Zeus and cause of their war. Blind Homer, hearing their thin grasshopper voices, picks up their fear of her, their clear-sighted foreboding that Troy’s holding her from the Greeks is dooming the city to destruction. This both parallels and contrasts with the central episode of the canto. In both cases the capture of the divine being proves disastrous, but for the old men there is to be no liberating revelation. They can see how ‘like a goddess’ Helen is in her face and moving, but they cannot worship, overcome as they are by a wholly justified fear. She will be the destruction of Trojans and Greeks alike, for both have regarded her as a possession and a prize.

There is another parallel and contrasting passage following on directly from the central episode. This time we are invited to look down from the ‘naviform rock’ and to see ‘in the wine-red algae’ and the rose-pale coral a face and a ‘swimmer’s arms turned to branches’, and we are told that this was ‘Ileuthyeria, fair Dafne of sea-bords’, changed into coral as she fled some ‘band of tritons’. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Daphne, daughter of a goddess, is pursued by Apollo and changed into a laurel tree as he seizes her. Here the depth of the violence against nature is encoded in the unknown name, ‘Ileuthyeria’. It combines ‘Eleutheria’, Greek festivals of liberty, and ‘Eileithyia’, the Minoan goddess of childbirth—she who frees the child. It is as if an attempt to seize and ravish the life-force itself had turned her to stone.

The metamorphosis of ‘Ileuthyeria’ was Pound’s own invention, an act as we say of pure imagination, and it is a triumph of dramatic visualization. But is it also, from a scientific viewpoint, doing violence to the real nature of coral, which lives and grows, after all, by its own metamorphic process? Does the moral of the tale turn back on the Apollonian imagination and convict it of wanting too much to have its own way with nature?

The canto’s answer, if it gives one, is in its next moves. First there is this: ‘And So-Shu churned in the sea, So-Shu also, | Using the long moon for a churn-stick.’ So-Shu—‘a Chinese mythological figure’, or so Pound said for those who must ask—evidently imagines himself, possibly having drunk too much rice-wine, to be a divine being in a creation myth churning the sea into a butter from which to fashion earth and its creatures. That amounts to a drunken parody of the Dionysiac mystery. And the ‘also’ equates with it the imagination which would see, or half see, living coral as a fair Dafne in ‘ivory stillness’. So-Shu’s churning gives way to a variation upon the Tyro motif—

Lithe turning of water,

sinews of Poseidon

Black azure and hyaline,

glass wave over Tyro,

Close cover, unstillness,

bright welter of wave-cords

The ‘unstillness’ and the energy in every detail there go against the imagined ‘ivory stillness’, and also against So-Shu’s illusory churning.

The unfamiliar ‘hyaline’ can tease the mind’s eye into discovering more in the natural phenomena than it had looked for. From the Greek for glass it is applied, in Greek poetry, to the crystalline sea; and in modern anatomy and biology to translucent sinew or cartilage, and also to the membrane and vitreous liquid of the eye. In the phrase ‘Black azure and hyaline’—compare the earlier ‘blue-gray glass’, and think too of ‘eyes of Picasso’—it seems that the sea is being seen, fleetingly, as itself an eye taking in and reflecting back the light of heaven. That reciprocity mirrors the reciprocity of a light-illuminated world and an intelligent eye reflecting back upon it what it is making of it. The process of perception is then, when it is precisely focused on its object, a continuation of the process of light-energies in nature.

The motif of the naturalist’s observation is now repeated—‘Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints’—and there is then a modulation, as the evening star is seen (‘pallor of Hesperus’), into painterly discriminations against the fading light:

Grey peak of the wave,

wave, colour of grape’s pulp,

Olive grey in the near,

far, smoke grey of the rock-slide,

Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk

cast grey shadows in water

After that wonderfully interactive image as the light fails so too does the vision.

A discordant tower—it was explicitly a ‘Church tower’ when Pound drafted this passage at Sirmione—‘like a one-eyed great goose | cranes up out of the olive-grove’. Its one eye may be a clock face which tells the time and knows nothing of the process it measures; or it may be the Church’s dogma that there is only one God that makes it one-eyed. Either way, it is seen in the satiric mixed metaphor as if with double-vision. The canto closes in playful retort to monocular monotheism with the comedy of the double-natured fauns chiding Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god, and then the once metamorphosed frogs ‘singing against the fauns | in the half-light’. Fauns and frogs, variform though they are, seem to think that theirs is the only shape.

That coda looks back to the canto’s (revised) introduction:

Hang it all, Robert Browning,

there can be but the one “Sordello”.

But Sordello, and my Sordello?

Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.

So Shu churned in the sea.

The mock-protest encapsulates the painful lesson of his apprenticeship to Browning; while the rhetorical question would save his dignity by positing other possible Sordellos, the ‘real Sordello’ and the one he might invent. ‘Lo Sordels’, from ‘a manuscript in the Ambrosian library at Milan’, might be taken to settle the matter with a statement of fact: Sordello was from Mantua. That might satisfy the scholar-historian; and it might be as illusory as So-Shu’s trying to solidify the ocean. Are there not now as many Sordellos as there are perceivers of him; and is not Sordello compounded of all the recorded perceptions? It will be the burden of the canto that the One is manifold and that we need to be many-minded to comprehend it.

The canto, which at first sight can appear a simple succession of fragments, can now be seen to be organized as a musical composition. It has a main theme, and a counter-theme, both of them developed through a series of variations around the extended central episode. Simply stated, the theme has to do with the different modalities of seeing the sea of being and all that is in it; while the counter-theme has to do with the errors of false or one-eyed perception which can arise from and lead to possessiveness, repression, rape. In the development through the variations of the main theme there is a progression from myth, which opens the mind to what there might be in life, towards precise observation and analysis of its manifestations. The light and life-in-process of the universe, it is implied, are not occult but are evident to illuminated sense, as in the ‘Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk’.

‘Le Testament’ or Pound’s Villon: in the dark

Canto (meaning, in Italian, ‘I sing’ as well as ‘a chant or song’) signals an aspiration to compose words into music, and certainly canto II is as musical as words alone can be. Its method of composition is that of music, and so too is its way with words. In the dimension of the meanings and resonances of words and images it works as music does by accords and dissonances and progressions. In the dimension of sound it makes melodies of the tones of vowels, while the consonants, shaping the weights and durations of the syllables, help define the tempo and rhythm. Most striking to the ear is the recurrent double-beat, coming twice or even three times in many lines, and pulsing at varying intensities throughout the canto. It sets a definite overall measure, and yet each line has its own measure, so that a seemingly complete freedom for change and variation coexists with that constant though shifting pulse, rather as in an Indian raga.

Pound had been working intensively on the music in words in the months before completing that canto. He had brought with him to Paris some preliminary draft settings of Villon’s poetry, and in April of 1921 he resumed work on composing his opera, Le Testament. ‘Will probably send you my first scrawls sprawls, for criticism in a few days,’ he wrote to Agnes Bedford on 5 May. By the 16th he had ‘done 116 pages of something that looks, at 1st glance, like an orchestral score’. But he was having to ask elementary questions. ‘Cello is I believe written in same clef as the troubadour stuff in original mss.??? No.? That clef is only half tone lower than mod. treble??’ And again, ‘have a vague suspicion that cello ought to be about three notes lower than voice to sustain it, and that bass viol ought to be about an octave below…possibly it should be two octaves, save that I want to use that cellarage for definite purposes’.

He needed Agnes Bedford’s trained musicianship because he didn’t know how to write down music as it was then written; but at the same time the music he had in his head was not that of a modern trained musician and he did not want it to sound as if it were. It was more nearly related to the modes of Arab and of Provençal and medieval music than to Satie or Stravinsky. ‘My ignorance is deeper than Erebus, and really my chief hope,’ he told Bedford, meaning that it would leave him free to stick to his own principles. Foremost among those was to admit nothing ‘that interferes with the words, or with the utmost possible clarity of impact of words on audience’. Hence no ‘chord-harmony’, no orchestration of several instruments to build up and blur a note with their ‘very different overtones’, and no developed ‘instrumental counterpoint’. He meant to constrain his singers to sing the music in the words, and to use the instruments of his orchestra very sparingly just to support and enforce that music. His problem would be to get his performers to understand that he was not ‘setting words to music | BUT | setting music to words’, and that ‘the music is simply an emphasis on the meaning and shape of Villon’s words’. Another thing, though he called Le Testament an opera he did not want it sung by voices developed to sing nineteenth-century Grand Opera; he wanted ‘tough, open-air singing’, or that of a music hall or cabaret singer such as Yvette Guilbert, singing that would concentrate not so much on the notes as on the sound and rhythm of the words. Getting across the ‘emotive contents’, he would call that, or, alternatively, ‘Inducing emotional correlations’.

In July, on the 10th, Dorothy who was with her parents in London, asked, ‘What the devil does this mean “Op. I revision is at p. 67” in your letter?’ Pound replied on the 14th that it was ‘a musical work now at p. 119’. Then Agnes Bedford was over in Paris ‘for a few days’, and on the 23rd Pound was wondering whether she would ‘have time to work on the opera’. (In his next letter he mentioned that he had ‘succeeded in dancing the tango on the sabath’ for the first time in his life, ‘at Bullier—with that Herald reporteress whom I met at Miss Beaches’.) Bedford probably had no choice in the matter of the opera, and a few days later they were ‘Chewing into op. mostly 4–6 hours per day’, with ‘orchestral climax and final 6 part song to tackle’. ‘Ezra sang and beat out the rhythm’, Bedford later recalled, ‘and also picked out the tunes on [Natalie Barney’s] piano while he sang them.’ She particularly remembered how he ‘sang each of the parts of the concluding canon separately, and it all fitted together’—‘A miracle,’ she thought. On 6 August they were still at work, now ‘up to as much as 8 and 9 hrs per diem’, and Pound was hoping that ‘A.B. may hang on for another week’. By the 10th, though, he was able to tell Natalie Barney that he had ‘got through worst of my struggle’ and was ‘eternally grateful for the piano’. The same day he wrote to Dorothy that he had devised ‘nice contrapuntal hurdy gurdy of trombone, cello, bassoon, for “Pere Noé” [the drunkards’ song], running against jazz’. Finally, on 2 November 1921, he wrote to Bedford that the opera was finished.

In fact it was only the first, Pound–Bedford version, that had been completed. A second, Pound–Antheil version, was to follow in 1923. ² Pound met Antheil, then a very young musical prodigy, in mid-1923 and was delighted to secure his approval of his orchestration of the opera. ‘I naturally think him a genius,’ he wrote to his parents between jest and earnest, ‘Nobody but a genius COULD approve of my orchestration.’ ³ That autumn, in two months up to ‘11 o’clock Dec. 31’, he had Antheil go over the work, under his direction, re-noting ‘it all with highly fractional notation == bars all sorts of lengths from ¹/₈ to ¹⁷/₃₂—⁷/₁₆ etc.’ Antheil ‘made no attempt to understand the words’, Pound later told Bedford, ‘Simply took down the stuff as [I] hummed it.’

Robert Hughes observed that ‘The most salient feature’ of the Pound–Antheil version was ‘its use of micro-rhythms’ and ‘fractional metrics’—these were even more elaborate and more irregular than in Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps (1913) and L’Histoire du soldat (1918). For example, these are the measures in bars 74–86 of the ballade of the old woman regretting the time when she was young and beautiful:

Pound’s orchestration was similarly fractional, calling for the vocal line to be supported (‘generally at the interval of the unison or octave’) after this fashion: in bars 74 and 75 by flute, oboe, bassoon, and horn; in 76 by bassoon and tambour (each a single note); by cello and contrabasse in 77; in 78 (‘Auquel’) by oboe, bassoon, and drum; at 79 it is oboe, drum, cello, and contrabasse; at 80 and 81 just cello and contrabasse; 82–5 (‘A qui’) have solo flute accompaniment; in 86 the cello plays a single note. Hughes found that this fragmenting of the vocal line among a group of instruments, ‘a klangfarbenmelodie technique similar in concept to Webern’s’—though evidently arrived at quite independently by Pound—is ‘the dominant instrumental concept’ of the opera as a whole.

Pound was deploying his varied musical resources ⁴ to give emphasis to the specific shape, tone, time, and resonance of each scrupulously assayed phrase and word and syllable. In bars 74–86 past feelings are revived one upon another: a yielding to the memory of having once really loved, a simple statement of how much she had loved, a softening regret (or is it remorse?) that she also did for her man. Through the following forty bars (eleven lines of the verse) all the distinct feelings making up the complex of a helpless love for a heartless pimp are rendered with immediacy and intensity: a core of inner calm from knowing she would have done anything for him, even though he cared only for what she brought him; the pain of having abased herself to his abuse; and the self-disgust, the sense of profound self-betrayal, at having made love not with but for him with lecherous gluttons. All this is in the words, but it is there as music is in the written score. It is only in the performance of the music, in the singer’s interpretation of it, that we hear the tender and sardonic and self-lacerating overtones and undertones of the withered whore’s memories and are moved to responsive insight.

There is no sunlight in this work, and no glimpse of a sunlit world timeless in its time. There is not a single image to give confidence in the life-force. Time here is irresistibly destructive, nothing but a passing away of life’s energies and loves and a bringing on of physical decay and death. A song celebrating the vine associates it not with Dionysos but with Noah, acclaiming him as the first to plant a vineyard. The revelling singers would have known that in Genesis 9 he next drinks of the wine and falls into a drunken stupor, as they are doing. They then invoke Lot who in his drunkenness mated with his own daughters. Before their counter-rhythmic, dissonant clamour, which dies away into mere incoherence, there has been much articulate rage and regret, grief and cynical realism, disillusion and horror, the full gamut of lacerating emotions from bleak disappointment with life through memory’s torments to the turning in despair to the vanities of church, brothel, and tavern. The only resolution, if that is what it is, comes in the final concord of the several voices singing in harmony of their dissolution on the gibbet.

This final chorale is at once ruthlessly realistic and out of this world. The hung corpses ask for pity from their fellow beings and mercy from God; but the burden of their singing is of how their flesh has rotted and been pecked away by magpies and crows, of how the rain has scoured and cleansed them and the sun dried out and blackened them, and now they are simply bones swinging in the wind. ‘Pray God absolve us all’ is their refrain, meaning ‘forgive us our sins’. But this is not the terrified crying of Villon’s mother imagining the pains of hell. These voices are beyond fear and terror, almost beyond expectation of either heaven or hell, though their voices rise to that plea for absolution. The most profound conviction in their harmonies is of the solemn reality of physical dissolution, which they accept as their state with simple humility, and in that is their purgation and their peace. The effect is of a poignantly compassionate and humane catharsis.

Pound’s Villon, like his Rihaku, his Propertius, and his Mauberley, is a register of the mental and moral condition of his time. His specific virtù, to Pound’s mind, was that, along with having ‘neither optimism nor breadth of vision’, he had no illusions and was ‘able to realize his condition, to see it objectively’. This is the Villon who somehow distilled into his occasional ballades an impersonal and universal vision of his life ‘in this bordello of a world where we belong’ (En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat), while otherwise filling out his long last will and testament with a very personal and mordant settling of old scores and with complaints of his poverty and many misfortunes. Pound was not interested in his personal life and character, but only in bringing out the specific vibrations and resonances of his virtù.

What further characterized Villon for Pound was that, unlike Dante, he ‘lacked energy to clamber out’ of his hell on earth, his inferno terrestre. This was represented, in the dramatic frame which Pound sketched in 1959 for the second BBC radio production, by Villon’s not moving as his friends urge him to flee the scene to escape imminent arrest. In the opera itself the lack of energy or will to rise above the condition of the gutter is all pervasive, and emerges as the dominant and unifying concept.

Immobility and depersonalization are the main features of Pound’s notes for a minimalist staging, one that anticipates late Beckett. The scene, according to his notes, is ‘Church—St Julien les Pauvres | bordello built in between buttresses | right, The Prison | left, tavern with two very poor tables’. The principal soloists were to have the upper half of their faces masked, apart from La Beauté (Rose in the 1971 score), or else to have make-up ‘stylized to the utmost’. The notes insist on ‘The general immobility of most of the play’, and especially of Villon who, stage centre, should be ‘completely immobile from start to finish’ with ‘eye fixed on window of La Beauté, in bordello’. Beauté should have ‘no change of expression save in eyes. Maximum of non-attention and observation’. La Heaulmière, she who was once the beautiful armouress or helm-maker, ‘has a nervous swinging of the arms—from left to right, right to left’, but only while she sings. Villon’s mother, while she sings, has ‘a certain jerkiness’. The brothel-keeper—‘Pornoboskos’ in Pound’s notes—‘oscillates but does not move, save for jerking thumb over shoulder’, as he sings his drunken aria about his whore, Fat Margot, at the end of which he passes out. Only two minor soloists have some moves: the Priest crosses from church to brothel as he sings a snatch of a carpe diem; the Gallant ‘enters bordello, Beauté closes the window…[he] staggers out stabbed, sings Je renaye amours, crashes left, back of stage’. In the ‘Père Noé’ drunken chorus, however, there is, in absolute contrast with the rest of the work, a ‘general hurley burley…maximum confusion’. In the silence following that, ‘back drop is raised showing Les Pendus’—whose sextet, ‘Frères Humains’, then comes from the (presumably now unlighted) soloists, male and female, who have not moved. Thus the staging, with the notable exception of the drunken chorus, at once dramatizes the fixed state of Villon and his world, and does nothing to distract from the action of the words being sung into the minds of the audience. The drama is all in the mind’s ear.

Greek drama has been proposed as a model for Pound’s Le Testament, also the Japanese Noh, the latter especially because it is essentially music-drama. A nearer model, and one more appropriate to Villon’s fifteenth century, would be the medieval morality play such as Everyman. But then Pound’s is a morality without the wicked tempters and the guardian angels. It presents simply the doomed life of a world without the grace of enlightenment, and with no way out except through the absolution of death. ‘Villon’, Pound wrote in 1934, ‘the first voice of a man broken by bad economics’,

represents also the end of a tradition, the end of the mediaeval dream, the end of a whole body of knowledge, fine, subtle, that had run from Arnaut to Guido Cavalcanti

This ‘very complicated structure of knowledge and perception, the paradise of the human mind under enlightenment’, had been ‘hammered out’ of Villon, Pound implied, not by his sins, but by the decadence of the Church and by the ‘bad economics’ which placed no value on his genius and so drove him to a life of poverty and crime and dissoluteness. He was ‘The hardest, the most authentic, the most absolute poet of [his] France’, of a France which had ‘lost the increment of intelligence’. Le Testament presents, as does Dante’s Inferno, the hell of those who have lost ‘the paradise of the human mind’.

A new theory of harmony

Composing his Testament was one thing, and getting a hearing for it quite another. ‘It will be twenty years before they will stand it’, Antheil said to Pound, but, as it turned out, it would be nearly fifty years before there was a performance in which the music sounded as they had written it. The forever changing, unpredictable, micro-rhythms presented difficulties exceeding even Stravinsky’s measures, and performers in the 1920s and 1930s found them simply unplayable. Besides, Pound had no standing among professional musicians and their patrons in Paris, and had to make do with small resources and scarce opportunities.

Two of the lesser songs, Ythier’s ‘Mort, j’appelle’ and the Gallant’s ‘Je renye amours’, were sung by the tenor Yves Tinayre to Olga Rudge’s solo violin in the course of an Antheil–Rudge concert at the Salle Pleyel on 8 July 1924. Those two songs were engraved and printed for ‘private circulation only’ in 1926, with a note that ‘The violin accompaniment was written for the concert and makes no attempt to condense or to represent the orchestration intended for use in the opera’. The measures were indeed greatly simplified.

Pound’s next move was to plan a ‘by invitation’ concert performance. He mentioned to Agnes Bedford at the end of November 1925 that he was ‘thinking of cutting up Villon for concert’, with Tinayre as Heaulmière, one other male voice, and violin and harpsichord accompaniment. Around the turn of the year he was ‘having another fit of work (bordering on insanity)’ on Le Testament, and was excitedly reporting his discovery that a ⅝ bar ‘seems to be MY nacherl measure’. He thought that that was what he must have been hunting for through Antheil’s ‘indubitably earnest endeavour to ascertain the duration of the notes’, and now that he had found it Antheil’s fractional notation seemed to him excessive, a ‘hypercalculus’ which would drive a singer to take ‘refuge in the comparative simplicity of Einstein’s hexagonal theorem of the indivisibility of abstract space by french mutton’. The ⅝ bar seemed ‘to fit a good deal of the Heaulmière’, and to throw the emphasis where he wanted it, on the front of the bar; and ‘for the earlier numbers’ it was ‘the GREAT LIGHT’. ⁵ By March 1926 the seven or eight numbers selected for ‘the June show’—among them Heaulmière, Bozo, ‘Père Noé’, and ‘Frères humains’—had been ‘tentatively at least, laid out largely in ⅝’. And that was how it was performed, for an audience of three hundred or so guests in the Salle Pleyel at 9.15 in the evening of 29 June 1926. ‘Paroles de Villon’, read the invitation from ‘M. et Mme. Ezra Pound’, ‘Arias and fragments from an opera…Musique par Ezra Pound’. Yves Tinayre, who sang most of the arias, wore a shawl over his head and assumed a cracked old woman’s voice for La Heaulmière. Robert Maitland, a ‘REAL BASS barrel tone’, sang Bozo. Olga Rudge’s violin provided the main accompaniment, except for ‘Père Noé’ where a harpsichord and trombones contributed to the row and Pound himself played a kettle-drum. For Bozo there were the two drunken trombones (or ‘bumbones’). ‘Frères humains’ was sung as a duet in two-part harmony accompanied by the ensemble. It was all very very far from the opera as Pound had conceived and composed it in 1923, but ‘At any rate’, he told Agnes Bedford, ‘have now got a notation that is practicable & that seems right’.

Many years later, in 1951 or thereabouts, Pound told Peter Russell that the Antheil score was ‘a curiosity, due to inexperience and Antheil’s total ignorance of language and articulation of same’. Possibly he should have added that he himself had been carrying to its extreme his idea of reproducing the virtù, the very vibrations of Villon’s voice. After all he did not have, could not have had, an absolute knowledge of how Villon’s language of fifteenth-century Paris had been pronounced. In spite of that, and in spite also of his readiness to simplify the notation in order to make the opera playable, it is the 1923 version that is now being performed and recognized as a wholly original and significant invention in twentieth-century music. R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and musicologist, called it ‘an unduplicated little masterpiece of musical composition’; and in 2003 Richard Taruskin the Stravinsky scholar wrote in the New York Times that it ‘constitutes Ezra Pound’s slim sound claim to musical immortality’.

Antheil celebrated Pound’s music in 1924 as ‘a grand liberation’ from ‘the developments of music during the last three or four hundred years’. An article in the Paris Times of 29 June 1924, evidently inspired if not actually written by one or the other of them, was more specific, proclaiming Pound’s ‘renovation of XVth century music’, and declaring boldly that his opera ‘has abolished harmony’. The laws of harmony in modern Western music lay down which notes may follow, or not follow, a given other note. Pound abolished those laws by declaring that as a matter of fact any note could follow any other note provided that the correct time-interval between them was observed. In The Treatise on Harmony (1924) he remarked that ‘the element grossly omitted from all treatises on harmony’, until that moment, was ‘the element of time…of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation’. He then laid down his new, liberating axiom:

A SOUND OF ANY PITCH, or ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, MAY BE FOLLOWED BY A SOUND OF ANY OTHER PITCH, OR ANY OTHER COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for ANY SERIES OF SOUNDS, CHORDS OR ARPEGGIOS.

Because of this insight and what lies behind it Pound’s slight and informal treatise is, in the judgement of R. Murray Schafer, one of ‘the three contributions to the science of harmony’ in the first half of the twentieth century, the other two being Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre and Schenker’s Harmonielehre. Like Schenker, Schafer observed, Pound was ‘retrieving an ancient conception of musical composition’ in emphasizing the horizontal progression as against the vertical and relatively static, post-Bach conception of harmony which, in Pound’s uncompromising phrase, made music ‘like steam ascending from a morass’. ‘No modern book’, Schafer wrote, ‘so cogently forces us to see harmony as a study in movement.’ At the same time, as Margaret Fisher notes, unlike Schoenberg whose ‘12-tone system’ imposed ‘rigid rules of intervallic patterning for atonal construction’, Pound, ‘by allowing for any sequence of pitches’, was creating ‘an open system that could and did accommodate older music techniques as well as newer methods’.

The openness and freedom of Pound’s system depended upon the proper gauging of ‘time intervals’; and that in turn depended upon the ear’s ability to hear a note’s time or duration as well as its pitch. A sounded note is measurable as so many vibrations per second, bass notes being of lower and slower frequencies, treble of higher and faster frequencies; moreover, what is heard as pitch actually arises from the vibrations of the note. As the vibrations are rhythmic and the basis of rhythm, and as the specific timing or rhythm of the note determines its pitch, it can be said that pitch is primarily rhythm. Back in 1910 Pound had asserted that ‘music is…pure rhythm; rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation in rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these varied rhythms’. In 1933 he would advise Mary Barnard that ‘the difficulty in WRITING music…is in the RHYTHM NOT in pitch…[in] the DURATION of the note’. That of course was why he had had Antheil re-notate Le Testament, to register as precisely as possible the durations and rhythms of Villon’s words.

Pound’s theory and practice become still more innovative and challenging when the overtones of notes are brought into play, and the physics and mathematics of the science of acoustics have to be invoked to explain the development which he termed ‘Great Bass’. This, according to Robert Hughes, was ‘a logical idea whose time had come’, and which Pound came to by following through the implications of his first axiom. Along with abolishing the established sense of harmony he abolished the well-established custom of composing within the range of a particular key, as in Mozart’s Sonata in C major (K545) or Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1940). In its place he proposed a new form of composition based on taking a fundamental bass note and observing the range of frequencies or ‘overtones’ generated from it. ‘In its simplest operation’, Hughes and Fisher explain,

Great Bass posits a lowest common denominator (below the hearing range of sixteen cycles per second) which in its multiplication determines and governs the principal elements of musical composition—rhythm, harmony, and structure, and to some extent, melody.

The theory is founded upon ‘the natural divisions of sound waves into tones and their overtones’, and upon the organic ratios or proportions in the relations of tone and overtones. It assumes that all the elements of a composition have a natural relation to each other within their ‘relationship to a fundamental rhythmic base’. If then a composer ‘employs a chord that does not belong to the family of ratios of the work’s “great bass”, the music will “brace and strain” against an anticipation of…a chord that is within the multiplication of Great Bass’—and which of course may be deliberately withheld, as in ‘Dame du ciel’.

‘Let us say that music is a composition of frequencies’, wrote Pound in his Treatise, getting down to the simplest, most basic and universal truth of music, and implying thereby some far-reaching and not at all simple consequences. The frequencies are the given, just there in the sounds things naturally make when struck or stroked or otherwise sounded. For them to be composed into some kind of harmony takes an ear which can distinguish one sound very precisely from another and a mind which can combine distinct sounds according to their natural relations. Pound would go on to speculate that it should be possible to bring into harmony all the noises thrown up in a factory or machine-shop, if only their diverse frequencies were accurately measured and the appropriate time-intervals observed; and this, he suggested, would make a positive difference to the physical and mental health of the workers. A harmonious composition of frequencies, after all, is made up of measured energies organized and given direction in accord with their natural rhythms, moving energies which are at once in and of the natural world and in and of the mind. It is that which would make music, as Pound thought, ‘perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe’. So he could write of the ‘order-giving vibrations’ of the mind that ‘is close on the vital universe’; and say that ‘The magic of music is in its effect on volition’. He would have found support for these ideas in the ‘treatise on music’ in Li Ki, the ancient Chinese book of rites and ceremonies, which stated that music is both the expression and the cause of harmonies within the individual, and in all relations from those between individuals up to those between the state and heaven. In line with that, as Michael Ingham has observed, Pound’s theory of Great Bass with its ‘prescription for just organic proportion is…resonant with the Confucian idea that the central tone from which all others are measured, if ill chosen, will foment chaos in society, and, if correctly chosen, stimulate order and harmony’.

Perhaps it needs to be re-emphasized following those ideal conceptions that Pound’s idea of harmony is concerned with moving energies, not with static states. So far as harmony implies coherence with wholeness or completeness these qualities are to be looked for, as in the ongoing process of the Cosmos, in the actual ordering and composing of the music, and of the individual being, and of the state. In the light of his new theory we have to learn to think of the composing as a process and not as aspiring to a perfected final state. Its wholeness will be in its inclusiveness, in how much of the totality of a given world can be brought into harmony; and harmony here is another term for the coherence of moving energies (vibrations) in their just relations. Its end, to which there is no end, is to bring the mind and the mind’s little world into accord with the Cosmos in its process.

Back in 1917 Pound had written of the importance of ‘main form’ or ‘major form’ in musical composition, and that idea has proved helpful in grasping how in his cantos the disparate details are generated by a ‘main concept’ and are held together by their relations and interactions. The theory of Great Bass may be seen as a more technical, more purely musical development of the idea, with a fundamental tone in the place of ‘a central main concept’, and with the overtones in their just interrelations and interactions in place of the disparate but interrelating ‘details’ or ‘materials’. Does this more developed theory apply equally to the cantos? It would be a possibility, given that pure music and the music of words are alike compositions of vibrant energies in process. But is there in a canto that basis, that fundamental word or verbal rhythm, from which all else flows? It is at the least a possibility worth looking out for.

Year 1 of a new era: kaleidoscope

‘Honoured Progenitor’, Pound began a letter to his father in February 1921, while in his relaxed mood at Saint-Raphaël, ‘The proof that I know something about economics lies in the fact that I lead considerably more of a life than Rockefeller and Morgan…& do extremely little that I wdnt do if I had a ballance equal to theirs.’

In Paris he rejoiced in the sense that ‘nobody seems to feel responsible for anyone else’s taste’. ‘Even I’, he wrote in his ‘Paris Letter’ dated ‘September, 1921’, with a nod to how differently he had felt and behaved in London, ‘Even I have not tried to improve any one’s mind since I got here.’

His sense of his liberties extended to not feeling at all responsible for Joyce and Lewis and Eliot. In May 1921 he wrote in a letter to John Quinn, ‘I can’t go on valeting for Lewis as I was ready to do while he was under stress of Military necessity.’ Nor could he be expected ‘to support him in a bid for the British picture market’, any more than he could be expected ‘to enthuse over Eliot’s becoming a Times reviewer’. And Joyce was altogether ‘off my hands’, being now very well looked after by Miss Weaver and other patrons and helpers.

Pound would not have been himself though if he had not continued to care about others and about the state of the world. He exercised his freedom to please himself quite dutifully.

He had not given up on saving Eliot from his bank. He went on doing what he could to get Lewis into the revived Little Review and to set up contacts which might lead to exhibitions of his work. Lewis thanked him by asking to be left alone. Joyce expected him to be as busy as ever about getting his, Joyce’s, work published, as Pound reported to Dorothy in August 1921. At this moment it was the French translation of Portrait of the Artist. Joyce was ‘again fairly well, very so from his humour’, and ‘longly conversational last evening, re greeks, Newman, eyes, french and german languages etc.’ In the following summer, however, he was suffering from painful iritis and Pound arranged for Dr Louis Berman, the endocrinologist, who was just then in Paris, to examine him. Berman had ‘Joyce’s head X-rayed [and] found three dental abcesses under the diseased eye’, and warned that he could go blind if they weren’t fixed at once. Joyce, though, put off having his teeth attended to, saying ‘he wanted “two months complete rest first”’. Pound gave up, reflecting, as a Confucian, that it ‘is J.J.’s head, and…his own affair’.

In the same letter to Dorothy in August 1921, in the midst of asking her to thank the now sadly neglected Allen Upward for sending a copy of his just published autobiography, and the mentions of how his opera was coming on and what this person and that had said about it, and the report of his conversation with Joyce, etc., Pound took time out to give a thought to Miss Weaver’s ‘solitary life’ and his fear that she might be ‘giving out under the strain’ of it. Do have her to tea, he urged Dorothy, and introduce her to Agnes Bedford when she returned to London, and ‘O.S. also might assist’. Just the exchange of a few words occasionally might do her good—‘No use in having her go melancholy mad, after all her nobilities and utilities’.

Pound went over to London early in October, about the 8th or 9th, and stayed for eight days with Olivia Shakespear in Brunswick Gardens. On Monday the 10th he wrote back to Dorothy in Paris, ‘Pried up the edge of the tragic veil yesterday and felt justified in coming over. | Hope you aren’t worrying.’ Whose the ‘tragic veil’, and why Dorothy might worry, I do not know. He may have gone over to see what he could do for Mrs Bride Gould-Adams (née Scratton), with whom he had shared the wish ‘to build a dream over the world’ in his early years in London, and who was trapped in a bad marriage. She would be with him in Paris and Verona in 1922, and in 1923 he would agree to be cited as co-respondent to enable her to obtain a divorce. During his week in London Pound invited Ford and Stella to lunch on the Friday; went up to Oxford to see Yeats, whom he found ‘somnolent’, on the Thursday; and on the Wednesday evening saw Eliot, who had been ‘at last ordered away for three months’ of complete rest and appeared ‘rejuvinated at prospect’. On the Tuesday he had attempted, in a hotel infested by British undercover police, to persuade Sinn Fein’s Arthur Griffith to found the new Irish Free State upon Douglas’s Social Credit, and had been told, ‘can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics’.

Eliot’s nerves were bad, or so ‘a nerve specialist’ had told him when consulted about his ‘feeling very nervous and shaky’ and having ‘very little self-control’—apparently he had ‘greatly overdrawn [his] nervous energy’. ‘Tom has had a rather serious breakdown’, was how Vivien put it to Scofield Thayer, adding that she had ‘not nearly finished [her] own nervous breakdown yet’. About the end of Pound’s week in London Eliot went down with Vivien to Margate, the seaside resort on the north Kent coast, and stayed there for a month at the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville. Though advised to write nothing, he did do ‘a rough draft of part of part III’ of the long poem he was struggling to finish. Then he went on to Lausanne, on the way spending a few days in Paris where he saw Pound on 18 November, and leaving Vivien there at the Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais. In Lausanne Dr Roger Vittoz, the ‘best mental specialist in Europe’, confirmed that his ‘nerves’ were ‘a very mild affair, due, not to overwork, but to an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction’. Eliot particularly marked the ‘paragraph concerning “Aboulie”, want of will’, in his copy of Dr Vittoz’s book, Traitement des psychonévroses par la rééducation du contrôle cérébral (1911; 3rd edn., Paris, 1921). The diagnosis relieved his anxiety that there might be something wrong with his mind, and the re-educative exercises left him feeling well enough to work on his long poem. When he left Lausanne on 2 January 1922 he had drafts for the whole work ready to show to Pound in Paris. There he rejoined Vivien, who was in quite a bad way on her own account, and stayed on for a fortnight, this time in Hôtel Bon Lafontaine in the same street as Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais.

The Pounds had moved out of the latter hotel about the end of November, and were now renting for £75 a year what seemed to Vivien Eliot ‘a most exquisite Studio’ at 70bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, up from the Luxembourg Gardens and near the intersection of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Boulevard du Montparnasse. The studio was one of several reached down a passage beside no. 70, on the ground floor, with a ‘serre’ or glass-walled conservatory fronting a courtyard in which there were a few trees and ‘a mouldering plaster statue’ of Diana with a hunting hound. Inside, behind the conservatory, there was the Studio, the one habitable room; behind that was a ‘dressing room’, and a small ‘ex-kitchen’ which they used as a box-room; and, up some stairs, there was a small ‘lounge room’ or bedroom. Pound cooked over an alcohol lamp in the main room, and cooked even better than he had in London, according to Lewis.

December and January were busy months for Pound. He told Thayer that he was ‘in the midst of plumbers, gasistes, fumistes, stovistes, building furniture, and trying to clean the walls of this atelier, untouched since anterior decade’. The ‘cheminée’ was being ‘rebuilt at landlord’s expense’ and a new ‘poêle Godin’ put in to heat the main room. He nailed undressed boards together to construct tables and chairs, and made them firm by the simple efficiency of a design that had been known in ancient China, each immoveable joint three sides of a cube formed by three boards fixed at right angles to each other. A low tea-table was painted scarlet; the chairs had slung canvas seats, and one was large enough for bulky Ford to feel stranded in. Dorothy was out of action with a whitlow on her left forefinger and was in hospital for a few days in December.

Eliot probably presented his ‘new poem in semi-existence’ to Pound on 3 January. That evening Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Horace Liveright, the young New York publisher, met over dinner. It was Liveright who had commissioned Pound’s translation of Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour, and who had just published his Poems 1918–1921. He was in Paris for six days and he and Pound were seeing each other every day, Liveright looking to Pound to introduce him to new talent, and Pound seeking a publisher for his modern movement. Both were eager to work together. Liveright offered to publish in the USA Ulysses and Eliot’s as yet inchoate poem, as well as Pound’s next collection of poems; and he made a contract with Pound which would ‘take care of his rent…for the next two years’. In return for a non-repayable advance of $500 a year Pound was to translate French books of Liveright’s choosing, but would not be expected ‘to undertake more than one thousand dollars worth of translating in any one year’, and would not be asked to put his name to his translation of any work he considered ‘a disgrace to humanity or too imbecile to be borne’. ⁶

By 16 January, when Eliot returned to London, Pound had twice gone over his drafts and had, as Eliot later put it, turned them ‘from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem’. The drafts had been accumulating over some years and Eliot, in his exhausted state, was unable to distinguish the good from the bad, while Pound, virtually at a glance, saw what needed to be cut away in order to bring forth The Waste Land, the archetypal modern poem. He was able to do that by virtue of his own ‘technical mastery and critical ability’, as Eliot would say, and because he was ‘a marvellous critic [who] didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself [but] tried to see what you were trying to do’. Exactly how he delivered Eliot’s poem to him is on display in Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of ‘the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound’. Where the writing lacked fresh invention in perception and rhythm he struck it out ruthlessly, as with the whole of the seventy lines of satirical couplets in the manner of Rochester or Pope at the start of the draft of ‘The Fire Sermon’; and where it became ‘O.K.’, as at ‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation’, he wrote ‘STET’ or ‘Echt’, the real thing, and moved on. He cut the episode of the typiste and ‘young man carbuncular’ from seventy lines of over-stuffed rhyming quatrains to just forty lines, removing the stuffing with no regard for the conventions of the form, and thus transformed it into a passage of concentrated realism. When he read the final part, which had come seemingly spontaneously to Eliot in Lausanne, he wrote on the manuscript ‘OK from here on I think’; and when he saw the typed version a little later he left it alone apart from noting half a dozen small corrections. Altogether Pound’s was a unique feat of releasing what had new life in it from the mess of materials in which it might otherwise have been stillborn.

What Pound did for The Waste Land was all the more remarkable given that he had very mixed feelings about it. He celebrated it, in a private letter to Felix Schelling, as ‘the justification of the “movement”, of our modern experiment, since 1900’; and he wrote to Thayer that ‘it is as good in its way as Ulysses in its way—and there is so DAMN little genius, so DAMN little work that one can take hold of and say “this at any rate stands, and makes a definite part of literature”’. He also felt challenged by it, and felt that it exposed his own shortcomings, especially by its realism and its registration of the modern world. In a self-deprecating verse ‘squib’ sent to Eliot in January he put down his own poems for omitting ‘realities’; and that judgement appears to lie behind this remark to John Quinn,

About enough, Eliot’s poem, to make the rest of us shut up shop. I haven’t done so; have in fact knocked out another Canto (not in the least à la Eliot, or connected with ‘modern life’).

His new canto would have been the ‘Eighth Canto’ which became canto II, and which might well stand as the antithesis to The Waste Land.

Beyond the sense of being challenged there appears to have been a profound dismay at what Eliot had done, a sense that his ‘justification’ of the modern movement had actually set it back. The only public evidence of this is in the first line of his next set of cantos, ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’, a critical allusion to one of the closing lines of The Waste Land, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. It is in the drafts of these ‘Malatesta cantos’ that we will discover, when we come to them, exactly what Eliot’s poem meant to Pound at the time, and how his own genius responded to it. It will become apparent that he saw it as an all too powerful statement of Eliot’s aboulie in the face of the prevailing realities, and as tending to paralyse the constructive, civilizing will which he himself wanted to mobilize, and which he thought it the main function of poetry to mobilize. Pound never said anything directly critical of The Waste Land, but then his nearly absolute public silence about the poem, once it is registered, must declare some profound reservation or inhibition. It was his way to proclaim just as widely and forcefully as he could the virtues of the literature and the art he believed necessary to the advance of civilization. He was about to boost Ulysses in both French and English. But on The Waste Land, the justification of our modern effort, I can find almost nothing in his published prose; apart, that is, from one sentence in a New Age article in 1922 and a letter in a little magazine in 1924, and in both cases his endorsement of the poem amounts to shelving it. ⁷ He did virtually place it on the library shelf among the old volumes when he told Quinn privately that he considered Eliot ‘as good as Keats, Shelley or Browning’. More interesting than that judgement, though, is Pound’s having become preoccupied for quite some time after January 1922 with the paradox that while The Waste Land was a work of genius, it was yet one which threatened to negate what he held to be the essential work of genius. He would resolve the contradiction by attacking it from both sides, that is, by attempting to release Eliot from the bank so that he might write in spite of his aboulie, and by finding the way to affirm constructive will in his own poem.

In mid-January 1922 Yeats was in Paris to help bring the Irish diaspora together in support of the new provisional government of the Free State at their International Irish Race Congress. Pound, who attended on Yeats while he was in Paris, thought his effort at political propaganda, in a speech on the Abbey theatre and John Synge, was ‘affable, but no impact’. But he had a ‘pleasant dinner’ with Desmond Fitzgerald ‘and some of the other Provisional lights’. Those he met would all shortly be caught up in civil war in Ireland.

Joyce’s Ulysses, which Pound had assisted into print in instalments in the Little Review and the Egoist, appeared at last in full on 2 February 1922, published in Paris by Sylvia Beach under the imprint of Shakespeare & Co. Ulysses was ‘“out” triumphantly’, he wrote to Alice Henderson in March, ‘Record sale for one day was 136 last Tuesday’. By mid-February Pound had read through all of its ‘732 double sized pages’, and he immediately set about proclaiming it a great work. ‘All men should “Unite to give praise to Ulysses”’, he trumpeted at the start of his next ‘Paris Letter’ for the Dial. He wanted it to be read as ‘an epoch-making report on the state of the human mind in the twentieth century’, and one which exposed to the withering light of unblinking intelligence all its mind-numbing banalities and clichés, all its paralysing fixed ideas, all its inertias and gangrenes of spirit. As such it was the culmination of the tradition that ran from Rabelais through Cervantes to Flaubert; and it was the answer to the prayer, in one of his Little Review ‘pavannes’, for hell to ‘spew up some Rabelais’

to define today

In fitting fashion, and her monument

Heap up to her in fadeless excrement.

That was the ‘public utility’ of prose realism, in Pound’s scheme of things, to analyse and flush away all that negated the constructive, desire-driven work of genius; and Joyce had produced ‘le roman réaliste par excellence’, a new Inferno and ‘a great work of Katharsis’. It was a purge for the period in which ‘the whole occident [was] under the domination of capital’, and surely meant the end of the ‘age of usury’. And it had, as Pound recalled in 1938, a special significance for him:

The katharis of Ulysses, the joyous satisfaction as the first chapters rolled into Holland Place, was to feel that here was the JOB DONE and finished, the diagnosis and cure was here. The sticky, molasses-covered filth of current print, all the fuggs, all the foetors, the whole boil of the European mind, had been lanced.

Pound must have felt that with the modern inferno done once and for all he could go on from it to build in poetry a possible paradise.

He certainly saw Joyce’s bringing the old era to its end as opening the way for him to begin upon the new. Pound could name the exact moment at which the old era, the Christian era as he was calling it then, had definitely ended—it was ‘midnight of the 29–30 of October (1921) old style’. That was when Joyce finished writing Ulysses; and the 30th happened also to be Pound’s own birthday. In the calendar which he drew up for the new era that day was declared the Feast of Zagreus, or of Dionysos in his manifestation as lord of life in the world of the dead. ‘Year 1 p.s.U.’—that is, post scriptum Ulysses—began from there. Ulysses belonged to the past which it monumentalized, not to the age in prospect. The era ‘p.s. U.’ was to be the era of The Cantos of Ezra Pound; and it is, in these mythopoetic terms, as Zagreus more than as Odysseus that we should look for him in them.

‘I am afraid Eliot has merely gone to pieces again’, Pound told Thayer on 10 March 1922, ‘Abuleia…’. By the 12th he was busy orchestrating a campaign to get him out of the bank. In one of several letters he hammered out on his typewriter on that day he outlined his strategy to Alice Corbin Henderson:

Eliot works in a bank, but the poems do not get written and the world is thereby the poorer.

He broke down completely this winter. HAD to have three months off, in which he did very possibly the most interesting 19 page poem in the language.…

He then went back to his bank, and has since got steadily worse. It is the greatest WASTE in contemporary letters.

Joyce has now a permanent subsidy…Eliot ought to have the same.

…

Pas de blague. Something has got to be done. I pro<po>se turning Eliot into a limited liability company. With his poor health and wife, the minimum necessary is £300 per year (1500 bones). I propose to divide this into 30 guarantees of 50 dollars.

Aldington and I start the show with one share each, the pledge is annual for life, or for as long as Eliot needs it.

I can see about 20 shares. God knows where the remaining ten are to come from.

‘I don’t want him to write anything but poetry’, he explained in a letter to Aldington sent the same day. A few days later he told him that Natalie Barney had given the scheme a name, Bel Esprit, and was giving it her support. In fact her residence at 20 rue Jacob was the ‘official seat, birth place and address’ of the scheme, and Miss Barney had become a full partner in it. There would be a prospectus in French, headed by an engraving of a pillared temple, and the aim would include helping Paul Valéry as well as Eliot. Pound, possibly at Quinn’s instigation, had an appeal slip in English, with the heading BEL ESPRIT, printed by John Rodker in London ‘for private circulation only’. ‘In order that T. S. ELIOT may leave his work in Lloyd’s Bank and devote his whole time to literature, we are raising a fund…’, was how it began. But to Agnes Bedford he declared, ‘We are saving civilization’; and to Aldington, ‘We are restarting civilization.’

Eliot’s particular case had become the occasion for Pound to campaign for a general cause. In a letter to Williams on 18 March he named others who might be released once Eliot had been freed; and stated the motive behind Bel Esprit as ‘“Release of energy for invention and design” acc[ording to] best economic theories’, by which he meant Douglas’s Social Credit. He developed that idea in an article in the New Age at the end of March, ‘Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application’, and returned to it in his Dial ‘Paris Letter’ dated as ‘October, 1922’.

The best economist, to Pound’s mind, would be one who started from the principle that a society’s primary resource is its intelligence, that is, its best informed and most creative individuals. Such an economist would recognize that the arts are of public utility, and should be kept up. And that can be done at small cost, Pound would insist, given a cheap attic and cheap daily salt bread, since there were only a ‘few dozen artists and writers now capable of producing anything of interest’, and since all they really needed was their independence and leisure in which to work as they pleased and without interruption. Modern democracy, however, he would then say, ‘has signally failed to provide for its best writers’; and its market-based economy ‘as applied to the arts has NOT worked’, ‘the worst work usually bring[ing] the greatest financial reward’. In short, ‘there is no functioning co-ordinated civilization in Europe’ capable of selecting and supporting the best new work. There was a time ‘when the individual city (Italian mostly) tried to outdo its neighbour in the degree and intensity of its civilization, to be the vortex for the most living individuals’. Once, in the fifteenth century, there was ‘a man in a small town who had Pisanello, Pier Francesco, and Mino da Fiesole all working for him at one time and another’. Now, though, ‘The individual patron is nearly extinct’; ‘The rich are, with the rarest exceptions, useless’; and ‘One cannot wait until the masses are “educated up” to a fine demand’, there being ‘no sign whatever that they are tending in that direction’. Quality in the arts, Pound concluded, had become a luxury which only a few had the taste for. It was up to those few then, he argued, to get together to pay for it, and so ‘to establish some spot of civilization’, some vortex of intelligence. But will they do that, he demanded, or would they ‘continue to sponge on the artist’?

In a long letter to John Quinn in July, much of it about Bel Esprit, he wrote ‘we have now 21 out of the thirty subscriptions’, though some were ‘rather shaky’. His list included, as well as Aldington, Miss Barney, and himself: Romaine Brooks, Miss Barney’s friend; May Sinclair; Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and his wife; Eliot’s wealthy friend Sidney Schiff; Robert McAlmon, the American writer who had married H.D.’s lover Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher; and Quinn, who was down for 6 shares ‘(or 7 on condition Liveright be excluded)’. Williams, who in his reply to Pound’s letter had exclaimed ‘What the hell do I care about Elliot’, had nevertheless sent in $30, possibly as a first payment towards a $50 share; and Dorothy was ‘ready to pay up to £10/ in any year’ for any member who defaulted.

‘For me my £10 a year on Eliot is an investment,’ Pound explained to Quinn, ‘I put this money into him, as I wd. put it into a shoe factory if I wanted shoes,’ or, ‘Better simile, into a shipping company, of say small pearl-fishing ships, some scheme where there was a great deal of risk but a chance of infinite profit.’ ‘What wouldn’t one give if one could have kept Keats alive a year or two more;…he was just getting his technique.’

Eliot had schemes of his own in hand. On 12 March, the day Pound began spreading word of Bel Esprit, Eliot wrote to him about two of them. There was the matter of his negotiations with Liveright and the Dial to find how much they would pay for The Waste Land. And there was the matter of the new quarterly review he was going to bring out, ‘to raise the standard of thought and writing in this country’. It would have Lady Rothermere’s money behind it; but the venture would be impossible, he told Pound, ‘without your collaboration’.

‘Willing to do anything for you personally’, was Pound’s immediate reply, but, as for England, he couldn’t see it having anything to do with any future civilization. Only if an English review absolutely guaranteed to provide Eliot with enough to get him out of the bank and let him devote his entire time to literature could he be interested in it. ‘Rather odd your writing just at this time,’ he added, alluding to his own scheme which he had not been going to mention until it was working. (Yet his article about Bel Esprit in the New Age at the end of the month, about which he was altogether coy in this letter, was going to name Eliot as the first beneficiary.)

Towards the end of May Eliot, still complaining of his own ill health and exhaustion and of Vivien’s persistent ailments, went to Lugano for a fortnight’s holiday, and from there he travelled down to Verona to meet up with Pound. By his account they talked of the endocrine glands and Pound suggested that Vivien might be helped by Berman. They talked of Bel Esprit, and Eliot came away feeling that the scheme was in too ‘nebulous’ a state for him to commit himself to it. He felt indeed that the whole thing was ‘unsatisfactory’, lacking ‘a dignified committee’, lacking definite assurances concerning ‘income, tenure and security’, and all too likely to embarrass him personally.

By Pound’s account they drew up ‘in manuscript’, in Verona’s Café Dante, ‘a literary program’ for Eliot’s review—now to be called The Criterion, a title suggested by both Vivien and Pound independently—but the programme, he would later complain, ‘was neither published nor followed’. In the absence of the manuscript there is no knowing what he thought they had agreed on.

In July Dorothy passed on to Eliot in London the equivalent of $200 raised by the Authors Club of New York in response to Pound’s appeal. Pound told Harriet Monroe that ‘with two lump gifts, the £300 for the first year is either in hand or promised’. Eliot, however, told Pound that £300 a year was not enough for him to live on. (In a letter to Sydney Schiff he would say in effect that salt bread and a cheap attic might suffice for those—such as Pound?—‘who are accustomed to small and precarious incomes’, but in his circumstances he needed ‘more money and more security’.) He would not discourage Pound’s finding out how much he could raise—£600 would not be ‘a penny too much’—but nor would he pledge himself to accept the terms of Bel Esprit. As for The Criterion, he had decided, he informed Pound—possibly referring here to the Verona programme—‘not to put any manifestoe in the first number, but adopt a protective colour for a time until suspicion is lulled’. He would play possum.

At the end of July Eliot put Pound’s name down in his Criterion circular as a future contributor; and asked that the name of Lloyd’s Bank should be deleted from Pound’s Bel Esprit circular. ‘I cannot jeopardise my position at the Bank before I know what is best,’ he wrote. Nor did he like having his private circumstances publicized. In fact, ‘If this business has any more publicity I shall be forced to make a public repudiation of it and refuse to have anything more to do with it.’ In November, however, he asked Pound if he could get him the Bel Esprit money without the condition that he leave the bank immediately. He wanted to get free of Lady Rothermere, and needed money to buy the Criterion from her. ‘If you and I could get the Criterion into our own hands’, he wrote, ‘it would be the thing of our lives.’

Pound replied at once that ‘NO periodical could be the “thing of our lives”’, and advised, ‘You jess set and hev a quiet draw at youh cawn-kob’. He thought Eliot must be mad to be proposing to pay money for a loss-making review of which he was the only asset. Eliot protested that he was ‘not thinking of buying the Criterion’; that he had not yet received the 10,000 francs Lady Rothermere had got an American in Paris to pledge; and that he would ‘leave the Bank as soon as I have such guarantees—for my life or for Vivien’s life—as would satisfy a solicitor’.

On the 16th a short article appeared in the Liverpool Post, ostensibly about The Waste Land which had just appeared in the first number of The Criterion, but mainly about Bel Esprit—which it considered an excellent scheme if that poem was its product. The account of Bel Esprit followed Pound’s circular fairly accurately, except in implying that it had enabled Eliot to write The Waste Land; and, more offensively, in relating ‘an amusing tale’ that two years before Eliot’s friends had raised £800 so that he might devote himself solely to literature, and the joke was that he had taken the money but stayed on at the bank. Eliot was not amused, consulted his solicitors and a King’s Counsel about this ‘libellous falsehood’, and on 30 November the Liverpool Post published his letter denying everything in the tale of £800, and adding that he had not ‘received any sum from Bel Esprit’, and that the scheme had neither his consent nor his approval.

That was the public repudiation he had threatened, and it was the end of Bel Esprit, publicly at least. Eliot, however, did accept such sums as were contributed to it, the last recorded being in July 1923. When he left Lloyds Bank, in 1925, it was to become a Director in the firm of Faber & Gwyer, publishers, later Faber & Faber. He edited The Criterion, and was The Criterion, until he brought it to an end in 1939, Pound contributing irregularly throughout its existence. There would be no break, but they were set on diverging paths.

In ‘The Hollow Men’, the poem that followed on from The Waste Land, Eliot would contemplate the shadow that falls between an ideal and the real world. Pound, however, was not haunted by the failure of Bel Esprit to impact upon Eliot’s hard-headed sense of realities. In the Dial in November he reaffirmed with some passion his radical ideal of restarting civilization by releasing artistic energies from the routines of capitalist society. This time he did not associate the scheme with Eliot, only saying that he had been ‘entoiled in three months of private controversy’ on account of it. He did not reveal that the intended beneficiary had inconveniently insisted on having a life beyond the production of poetry, and had proved unwilling to be released from the bank if that meant giving up the style of life the bank enabled him to afford. The fact was that at its first trial the scheme had been nullified by Eliot’s cautious adherence to the very system it was designed to counter. Pound did not address that directly, but nor did he surrender his will to change the world.

A renaissance man

On Good Friday, 14 April 1922, a postcard signed ‘D. Pound’, but apparently in John Rodker’s hand, was posted in Siena to Margaret Anderson of the Little Review, announcing Pound’s death and informing her that two photos of his death-mask were on their way to her. Pound himself had just written to Homer,

Dear Dad, If you hear a rumour of my demise | please DO NOT | contradict it…I want a little repose…I shall rise again at a suitable time. Possibly in six weeks.

He wrote to John Quinn to much the same effect, ‘I shall be dead to the world.’ The Little Review, however, although at that moment enthralled by Dada, declined to play along, and Jane Heap inserted into the spring issue, instead of the death-mask—in fact a life-mask taken by Nancy Cox McCormack—a dour note refusing to be hoaxed by ‘some phoney death masks’. Pound, in a letter dated by his new pagan calendar, ‘13^th Athene, Annus Primus’, drew their attention to the date on the postcard and chided them for having ‘no respect for precedent’.

Ezra and Dorothy had left Paris at the end of March to spend three months travelling in Italy. They reached Genoa, after a ‘not exactly restful’ trip, on the 29th; on the 31st went on to Carrara, where there are the great marble quarries; were in Siena for at least the ten days of 4–14 April, and may have gone by bus to Florence. They moved on to Perugia—they were there on the 23rd—and Pound visited Assisi, Cortona, and Spoleto, partly in search of a good place for his parents to retire to. His mother had mentioned that they were thinking of retiring to California, and Pound, afraid that if they did he would never see them again, was intent on persuading them to retire instead to Italy. He also visited Ancona, Rimini, and Ravenna on the Adriatic coast with that in mind, and with a new canto in mind. He was in Venice on 4 May—apparently back in Perugia on the 6th—and in Venice again on the 22nd and the 28th. In early June he met Eliot in Verona, and for the rest of that month he and Dorothy were at Sirmione on Lake Garda. They returned to Paris via Milan, and were back at 70bis rue Notre Dame des Champs on 2 July.

From Sirmione he had written to Quinn on 20 June that he had ‘had busy spring’ and had ‘blocked in four cantos—(Including the “Honest Sailor”, which I hope I haven’t spoiled)’. The ‘Tale of the Honest Sailor’, which he had from Quinn, features in canto 12, along with the financial adventures of Frank Bacon—‘cuban pennies Bacon’—an old New York friend who would turn up in Paris as if on cue on 13 July. He was also ‘At work on the “Hell” canto, chiefly devoted to the English’. By the 29th he had ‘4, probably 5, cantos blocked out’, two of them—most likely the ‘Honest Sailor’ and ‘Hell’ cantos—‘unprintable—dealing with modern life’. Once back in Paris he wrote that he had ‘five cantos blocked out’, and was ‘about ready for the vacation I did not take in Italy’.

A busy summer followed, with Dorothy away in England from 13 July until 7 September. He had to finish off translations, for a London publisher, of Paul Morand’s Ouvert la nuit and Tendres Stocks, short fictions which he had praised for looking with a clear eye at the wreckage of Europe. (The publisher would reject his translations in August, their reader having objected among other things to Pound’s ‘vulgar American’ style, though Morand himself, whose English was good, had approved his work. Still Pound was paid the £25 due to him.) On Tuesday 11 July ‘Mr Ezra Pound, Mr Tami Koumé and Capt. J. Brinkley’ invited a select company ‘to tea at Mr Pound’s Studio…To see some paintings by Tami Koumé’. As well as Frank Bacon, Berman ‘the gt. gland sleuth’ was in Paris in July; and Wyndham Lewis, who found Pound receiving a boxing lesson in his studio from the nonchalant tough guy Ernest Hemingway. Pound was blue-pencilling Hemingway’s adjectives in return. Sibley Watson of the Dial, who was passing through on his way to Vienna to see ‘the surgeon who does Steinach’s operation’, thought Pound looked ‘pretty unhealthy’, though Pound himself said he was ‘feeling damn fit’, and was playing tennis with Hemingway to prove it. He had urged Watson to publish ‘Obsequies’, a story by Bride Scratton, telling him that she ‘will never write again unless now encouraged’. (Her story evidently appealed to Eliot, who published it in The Criterion in April 1923.) Throughout the summer months people came flooding through his studio, Rodker, Etchells of the Vorticists, Hilda Aldington with her mother, ‘Kitty Heyman with two flappers in tow’, the Dean of Hamilton College with family—fifty-six visitors in one week in August. At the start of that month he set about commissioning a number of fifty-page booklets which would be published by Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press on the Île Saint-Louis and would indicate ‘the state of prose after Ulysses, or the possibility of a return to normal writing’. He approached Ford, Williams, and Hemingway as writers who would ‘tell the truth about moeurs contemporaines’. (He would also include Bride Scratton’s stories under the title England.) In September he began some sort of affaire with Nancy Cunard, Lady Cunard’s now grown up and very liberated daughter, and for a time was one of her occasional and more passionately desired lovers. There was the ongoing ado about Bel Esprit. And above all there were the ‘blocked out’ cantos to be worked up.

‘I don’t at present see that I shall get around to any music this summer’, he told Dorothy in July, ‘There is a lot of Sig. to do’. ‘Sig.’ was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417–68), once lord of Rimini, now the subject of the first of the five new cantos Pound had brought back from Italy ‘in rough draft’. He had thought that canto might ‘swell out into two’, but in fact it would grow through a year of intensive reading in Paris and research in Italian archives into a suite of four. They would be published in the fourth number of the Criterion in July 1923 as ‘Malatesta Cantos. (Cantos IX to XII of a Long Poem)’, and would subsequently become cantos VIII–XI.

The first draft, handwritten at Sirmione, begins with the bold declaration, ‘I have sat here for 44,000 years | yes precisely’, thus asserting a commanding overview of human culture from its notional beginnings, and outdoing Eliot’s Tiresias who could claim only to have seen and foresuffered the sad vanity of sexual desire since his Theban times. The following lines place the speaker in present-day Verona, at the very moment, as will appear in a later draft, of Pound’s recent meeting there with Eliot. Then comes a proclamation of Pound’s new era: ‘& the world began again | last October’; and that is rhymed, as it were, with Sigismondo’s reviving the old pagan gods in Rimini, ‘& the Tempio—in October’. The rest of this draft sketches in the vicissitudes of Sigismondo’s career as a condottiere, a soldier of fortune, who sold his outstanding military skills to one city state after another and had lost most of his own minor state by the end, with the Popes after his lands and the Medici bank against him; and who yet, in spite of his warring, his shifting allegiances, his powerlessness when dealing with the major powers of Venice and Milan and the Papacy, in spite of his defeats and disgraces, did succeed in having a Gothic church transformed by some of the best artists of his age into a Renaissance temple adorned with inspired ‘pagan’ bas-reliefs to the greater glory of himself and his adored Isotta. He thus, as historians have remarked, ‘embodied the renaissance’—that is the key statement of this draft—‘having some sense of life | no morals, infinite heroism | & a respect for tradition’. Later, in Guide to Kulchur, Pound would stress his combination of individualism and representativeness, writing that ‘Malatesta managed against the current of power’ ‘all that a single man could’, and that his ‘Tempio Malatestiano is…a cultural “high”’ and ‘perhaps the apex of what one man has embodied in the last 1000 years of the occident’.

In an early typescript draft, probably done in July soon after Pound’s return to Paris, Sigismondo’s achievement is attributed to ‘the urge to refound the world’; and that urge is connected with a ‘gai saber’, a cult of love, such as existed in the troubadours’ Provence, with the implication that it was his love of Isotta, his lifelong mistress and third wife, that moved him ‘to refound the world’. Evidently what interested Pound in Sigismondo was that he was a ‘bhloomin historic character’—that is, not a fantasy but someone who had actually lived, loved, and acted in a particular world and time—someone who could ‘be used as illustration of intelligent constructivity’, and whose life also afforded ‘a certain boisterousness and disorder to contrast with his constructive work’. He represented on a heroic scale the qualities Pound was finding admirable, in October 1922, in the poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio after he had seized Fiume in a grand coup de théâtre which heralded Mussolini’s March on Rome, ‘some sort of vigour, some sort of assertion, some sort of courage, or at least of ebullience that throws a certain amount of remembered beauty into an unconquered consciousness’. ‘The Malatesta cantos’, he would declare in Guide to Kulchur, ‘are openly volitionist, establishing…the effect of the factive personality, Sigismundo, an entire man’.

In the typescript draft of July 1922, however, the affirmation of Sigismondo’s ‘urge to refound the world’ only goes to show up both Eliot and Pound as helpless and hopeless to do anything about their own disintegrating world. ‘These fragments you <T.S.E.> have “shelved”’, is the first line of this draft; and the next line points to Sigismondo’s contrasting action in stealing marble slabs from a church in Ravenna and having them carved with pagan gods for his temple, to stand ‘Against his ruin and [his] house’s ruin…Fragments against his ruin’. Eliot and Pound sit by the Roman arena in Verona as they had sat ‘on the Roman mound’ at Excideuil three years before, and Eliot, perhaps both then and now, identifies with Dante’s image of Arnaut Daniel purging himself of earthly desire in the fire of Purgatory; while Pound identifies rather with Dante’s image of Bertrans de Born in Hell, a stirrer-up of strife with head divided from heart. Pound thinks of them as in another age, Eliot with ‘soild lace cuff’, and himself ‘lifting sedan chairs, preparing the revolution |…& never learning’. The sense of futility and decay is generalized: ‘Things run, and run to the worse’—‘Byzance, the empires gone, slide[s] to nothing here in the marsh drift, | Caesarea, gone, roof deep in the marsh.’ Against that, Pound recalls the enduring splendour of the tomb of the Byzantine empress Galla Placidia at Ravenna, which he had visited in May, and where he had seen in the gold mosaic of its walls ‘the souls, | gonads in organdy, rose-flakes in the arid darkness’; and had seen how the gold gathered to itself ‘against the gloom’ the yellow sunlight penetrating the alabaster panes. He recalls also the magnificent tomb Sigismondo had raised to his divine Isotta at the heart of the Tempio which he had visited in Rimini. But as for the live woman who is with him in Verona, ‘Ti’, later identified as the divorcing Bride Scratton but for the moment ‘Galla’s hypostasis’, she will have no such setting. Yet the mood of despondency is not absolute. Even the circus in the arena, and ‘Ti’, and Eliot with his bitter drink, can be seen as ‘sprouts in the loam’; and the draft ends upon living things, ‘a wing exists for a moment and goes out, | flame intermittent, | an emerald lizard peers through the border grass’. Those images may promise a basis for renewals, not of course from the flying grasshopper and the lizard in themselves, but from the power of the mind to so perceive them. But the contradiction remains, between Sigismondo’s magnificent monument, and Galla Placidia’s, and the apparent failure in Pound and Eliot, in the modern movement, of the urge to refound the world.

Perhaps the mood behind that July draft is summed up in another typescript fragment:

Chien de metier,

hopelessness of writing an epic

Chien de metier

hopelessness of building a temple

Chien de métier, a lousy line of work to be in, or something to that effect. Still, the hopelessness of writing an epic must be tempered by the knowledge that Sigismondo did ‘build his temple’. Even though it was unfinished and roofless when he had to abandon the reconstruction in 1461, at least, Pound would assert in Guide to Kulchur, he did register his concept, and ‘There is no other single man’s effort equally registered’. Eliot might cynically regard human history as simply an ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy’; but for Pound it had the positive use of showing what was humanly possible, and so of encouraging, inciting to, constructive effort.

That fragment points up something else which is fundamental to the final version of the Malatesta cantos, something which critics tend to miss. The virtù of Pound’s Sigismondo is not to be found in his often violent and morally dubious career as a condottiere—indeed as a man of action he is merely typical of his often violent and morally dubious times, and is shown to have achieved by his deeds nothing of lasting significance. His virtù, in Pound’s rendering, his ‘intelligent constructivity’, is all in his ‘building a temple’. It is by that alone that he ‘cut his notch…registered a state of mind, of sensibility, of all-roundness and awareness’. That is the aspect of Sigismondo with which Pound equated his own will to write an epic, with the implication that it is by a temple, or an epic, that civilization will be begun again.

Yeats wrote to Pound from Ireland in August 1922 about being ‘shut in by battles’, though he was nevertheless ‘contented and busy’ in his tower. He would have been working on his ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, brooding on how the grace and beauty of an ancestral house might come from ‘Some violent bitter man, some powerful man’. In October, after months of sometimes violent civil disorder in Italy, Mussolini marched his forces on Rome and was appointed by the King to resolve the crisis of government by initiating the Fascist new order. Pound did not register the event—‘Life was interesting in Paris…nobody bothered much about Italy.’ Besides, a friend in Milan had assured him, when asked ‘What is this fascio?’, that ‘there was nothing to it’. In October Lincoln Steffens was in Paris talking of how the Russian Revolution had been prepared by propaganda, by getting the word ‘revolution’ into the minds of the people, and by Lenin’s short speeches at the critical moment, and Pound listened to him with intense interest and put the essential facts of that history into canto 16, setting it against testimonies to the crass and savage absurdities of the late wasteful war.

Pound did not desire a revolution—‘JE NE VEUX PAS, non je ne veux pas de révolution’, he had insisted in 1921. He knew, in his ‘measured moments’, or so he told Felix Schelling in July 1922, ‘that all violence is useless (even the violence of language…)’. But how to decide where the border lay ‘between strong language and violent language’? There were, after all, certain ‘excrements’ it was imperative to destroy, for instance ‘all British journalism’. Hence, one may conclude, the strong language of the ‘Hell’ cantos. Then there was Christianity to be overthrown:

Christianisme: malgré qu’il ne soit plus la croyance de l’homme pensant européen, il n’y a pas une seule coutume, loi, convention ni de l’Europe, ni de l’Amérique qui ne soit pourrie à cause de cette base—totem de tribu SHEENY, Yid, taboo, pourriture…monotheos.

MONOtheism, l’idée la plus crûment et immaturément idéologue, intellectuelle, maladivement cérébraliste, idée la moins fondée, la moins prouvée qui ait jamais été avalée par ⅜ de la race humaine.

[Christianity: in spite of its being no longer the belief of thinking Europeans, there is not one custom, law, convention of Europe or America which is not rotten from this root—this tribal totem of SHEENY, Yid, taboo, corruption…monotheos.

MONOtheism, the crudest and immaturest ideological intellectual idea, morbidly cerebralist, the least well-founded, least proven idea ever to have been swallowed by ⅜ of the human race.]

Even allowing for the fact that this appeared only in a supplement to Picabia’s small Dada magazine 381, and allowing too for what was then current on the streets of New York, ‘SHEENY, Yid’ must strike us now as transgressing into violence. And why drag in race at all when it is religion that is in question, if not to charge up the attack on monotheism with the emotion of race prejudice. With hindsight one can read there an early warning of what would become a disastrous habit in his later propaganda. At the same time Pound was quite able to express his strong views in straight terms, as in the letter to Harriet Monroe in which he protested against ‘Damn remnants in you of Jew religion’ because of her trying to keep her readers in ignorance of the fact that he did ‘NOT accept…the dregs of the Xtn superstition’, ‘refuse[d] to accept ANY monotheistic taboos whatsoever’, and considered ‘the Hebrew scriptures the record of a barbarian tribe, full of evil’. He wanted her to let it be known that he considered ‘the Writings of Confucius, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses the only safe guides in religion’. Hence canto 13, beginning ‘Kung [or Confucius] walked | by the dynastic temple’. Hence his approval of Sigismondo’s Tempio with its many pagan divinities, and its honouring Isotta’s divinity. In his combining a will to construct a paradiso in words with occasional violent verbal transgressions Pound was not unlike his Sigismondo.

In early August 1922 Pound was ‘reading up historic background for Canto IX’, and he kept at that all the way through to December, by which time he had ‘got three of the Malatesta cantos into some sort of shape’. He called up books in the Bibliothèque Nationale—his seat was 58^ter when he called up a volume in Latin of Sigismondo’s court poet Basinio published in Paris in 1538. He looked out particularly for references to documents and primary sources, and noted in which archives they were to be found. There were in Milan, for example, letters from Sigismondo to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan; and in Rimini there was an unpublished chronicle of Sigismondo’s campaigns written by one Broglio who had been with him in the wars. He wrote to antiquarian book dealers in Milan, Florence, and Rimini in search of materials, and was invoiced by Ulrico Hoepli of Milan for five volumes, one of them Giovanni Soranzo’s Pio II e la politica italiana nella Lotta contro i Malatesti (1457–1463). From that work he drew a number of details in the Malatesta cantos, among them the exact intemperate insults to which Sigismondo and Count Federigo d’Urbino descended at a meeting intended to make peace, ‘“Te cavero la budella del corpo!”’—equivalent to (in a different vernacular) I’ll have your guts for garters—and the response from the Count, ‘“Io te cavero la corata a te”’, And I’ll pluck out your giblets!

On 30 December 1922 Pound was issued a new United States passport valid for ‘Literary work and travel’ in all countries. His occupation was given as ‘Correspondent’. His personal description was: age 37 years; height 5 feet 10½ inches; forehead: broad; eyes: gray green; nose: straight; mouth: moustached; chin: bearded; hair: light; complexion: fair; face: oval. He used his new passport at once to go into Italy, and was there from early January to mid-April 1923.

For the first four or five weeks Ezra and Dorothy were in Rapallo, at the Hotel Mignon, Pound ‘chewing along on Malatesta’ and playing tennis with a young American called Strater, and Dorothy doing some drawing. For a week or so in February they were joined by Hemingway and his wife Hadley, and the four of them toured Sigismondo’s old battlefields in Tuscany, such as Rocca Sorano near Siena. ‘Geographical verification’, Pound called that, ‘cross country in wake of S. M. to see how the land lay’. The Pounds went on down to Rome, where Ezra wanted to verify details in ‘documents preserved in the Vatican concerning Rimini and other towns of central Italy’, and they were there from 17 February to 1 March. On the 2nd he was in the archives in Florence consulting La Guerra dei Senesi col conte di Pitigliano, which he would cite with shelf mark in canto 10. At that point Dorothy asked Stella Bowen, who was with Ford and their daughter at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the Riviera, to spend a fortnight travelling with her in Italy while Pound was visiting libraries and archives, and then began a complicated sort of dance with postcards from Pound to Dorothy in Perugia or Assisi or Siena crossing postcards from Dorothy to Pound in Cesena or Rimini or Fano, etc. Dorothy was settled back in the Hotel Mignon in Rapallo from the 18th, while Ezra kept on the move until they met up again in Milan in early April.

He had thought the Malatesta cantos as good as done, yet March 1923 was his most intense and concentrated spell of research for them in all the towns with Malatesta archives or associations. On the 7th he was in Bologna, where, on the 8th, he had a ‘Somewhat full day. Three libraries—all voluble—and amiable’. On the 9th he went on to the State Archive in Modena; and on the 10th he was in Cesena, in the splendid library founded by Malatesta Novello in 1452. There he was assisted by the very amiable young librarian Manlio Dazzi who took him that evening to a concert ‘of the highest quality’. (Dorothy was in Assisi on the 10th, where there was to be a ‘Big fascist meeting tomorrow’.) On the 13th Pound was in Rimini, and cursing because the library was ‘closed at least until the 20^th as the damn custode has flu’, and he was forced to go on, with a sense of laboriously filling in time, to San Marino, Pennabilli—where he stayed at the Albergo Ristorante Malatesta—then Pesaro, Fano, Urbino on successive days, and at last back to Rimini on the 20th where he appreciated the comfort of the Palace Hotel for a full week.

He did get into the library this time because his hotel-keeper, who happened also to be a founding member of the local Fascio, and a Commandante della Piazza charged with keeping order in the town, had taken it upon himself to see to it that Il Poeta was able to do what he had come for. Just before going to the library on the 21st Pound scribbled to Dorothy, ‘Hotel-keeper ready to sack the place and have up the mayor if it isn’t open; he is a noble fascist’. Evidently the mayor did have to be called in, since at the end of the week Pound told Dorothy that the Reggio Commissario, the mayor, had ‘descended on the librarian (who may die of the shock). Very sympatique the Gran Cordone.’ Pound was not only very grateful, as what researcher wouldn’t be, but also deeply impressed by this evidence of a new energy and civic sense in Italy. He was ready to believe his hotel-keeper’s insistence that it was out of devotion to Mussolini that he had had the old library unlocked.

After Rimini Pound was in Ravenna on the 28th and 29th, then in Venice on the 30th and 31st. Everywhere he was making notes; checking details he already had from printed books against the original documents; struggling with his untrained eye to decipher the Renaissance manuscripts, getting some words wrong; and constantly shaping the materials (far more than he would use) with a view to fitting them into a canto. By the time he finished off the four Malatesta cantos, back in Paris in the latter half of April, his 1922 drafts had undergone a radical transformation.

Pound did have other things to think about while travelling around Romagna. Nancy Cunard was also on the move in Italy, on a separate trajectory, but hoping they might arrange to coincide. When he was in Rimini she wrote from Positano in the south that she was reserving April for him, and could they not meet, with or without Dorothy, in the north somewhere? Pound’s reply has not survived, but there is reason to suppose he was not tempted. Then there was Bride Scratton’s impending divorce. Dorothy wrote that she had not heard from her mother ‘since ever’, and was there any ‘divorce news’ she might have seen? In his letter to her of 21 March Pound said he knew of nothing new since Bride had told him ‘it wd. be some time in April’, and he expected ‘the matter will be attended to with whatever decorum is possible’. Pound’s being named as co-respondent may have been the reason for Dorothy’s staying on in Italy when he returned to Paris. On 27 April 1923 she was issued in Rapallo with an authorization to be a sojourning foreigner.

Pound sent off the Malatesta suite to the Dial on 24 April, but when he learnt that publication there was subject to Thayer’s veto he withdrew the manuscript. (A formal rejection letter on Thayer’s behalf was sent to him all the same.) Eliot had accepted the four cantos sight unseen for simultaneous publication in the Criterion, and they did appear there in July 1923. They appeared, however, without the opening allusion to The Waste Land, ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’, Eliot having objected to it ‘strongly on tactical grounds’. His reason was that people were already too ‘inclined to think that we write our verses in collaboration’, though it is much more likely that the allusion would have been read as a calculated riposte to Eliot’s poem.

One remarkable thing about the finished suite is that all reference to the meeting in Verona has disappeared, and so too has the peculiarly personal and discouraged mood associated with it. Moreover, all that remains of the splendour of ‘Galla’s rest’ is one isolated and now cryptic line, ‘In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it’. The self-regarding material, and the reflection of the helpless alienation from modern decadence of the beauty-seeking individual, these have been altogether squeezed out. At the same time the account of Sigismondo’s life and works has been greatly extended and built up from the objective documents and the contemporary records and eye-witness reports so that he is viewed, Cubist fashion, from a variety of angles and points of view. And here the rhetorical assertions of Sigismondo’s embodying the Renaissance and being driven by the ‘urge to refound the world’ have been squeezed out. There is no direct statement at all of those grand claims which Pound makes in his prose for Sigismondo and for his Tempio. Thanks to his having gone over the ground and sweated in the archives he had no need now to imagine or to invent anything, and no need to assert anything on his own account. He had recovered the objective poetic self, so painstakingly developed through the experiments of ‘Near Perigord’ and the early trial cantos, which he had lapsed out of in the first, post-Verona, draft; that is, he had become again simply the active intelligence of his materials, simply the maker of his poem, and neither a propagandist nor a hapless revolutionary.

His Sigismondo is now primarily the condottiere, the magnificent mercenary, a fighting man with no clear aim in his going to war to serve others’ strategies, an action man putting himself at the mercy of those others and of the fortunes of war. There is just one letter, in canto 8, showing him as the enlightened patron participating—that is how Pound had encouraged John Quinn to view a patron’s role—in a master painter’s creation; and that letter, written from the field of war while he was besieging Cremona in the Venetian interest, is interleaved as it were between an ingratiating letter to his Florentine master of the moment and the cold record of Florence’s terms for taking him on. Similarly interleaved in the latter half of the canto is brief mention of Gemistus Plethon, the Byzantine Platonist whose advocacy of a return to classical polytheism lay behind Sigismondo’s incorporating the classical gods into his Tempio. At the exact centre of the canto is a single verse from a love song Sigismondo wrote for Isotta, and this is given in Pound’s translation a most musical measure which sets it utterly apart from the documentary style it briefly interrupts. In its invocation of the pagan ‘spirits who of old were in this land’, and its directing them to ‘awaken | The summer within her mind’, it represents what moved him to build the Tempio. But there will be only one other recognition of that prime cause in the entire suite. Though it is structurally at the heart of the canto, and evidently at the heart of Sigismondo’s private life, it appears to have not the least effect on his life as a condottiere nor on the ways of his world. He must report immediately to Florence that Venice has taken him on ‘At 7,000 a month’ etc. Then follows an elaborate description of the festival he staged in Rimini for the newly married Francesco Sforza, with whom Sigismondo was just then allied; and that amounted to nothing more than the usual grand parade and fashion show, with the ironic additions that Francesco’s great pleasure on that occasion was fishing, and that he was on his way to a war in which he would receive ‘an excellent hiding’. War, not love, is what keeps Sigismondo and his world in a perpetual whirl.

From the last lines of canto 8 until half way through canto 9 Broglio the chronicler takes up the story, in the style of ‘one damned thing after another’:

And ‘Florence our natural ally’, as they said in the meeting

for whatever that was worth afterward

And he began building the TEMPIO,

And Polixena, his second wife, died.

And the Venetians sent down an ambassador…

In the tally of what Sigismondo did and what others did to him one episode stands out, his night-raid ‘with more than an hundred | two wheeled ox carts’ to carry away ‘marble, porphyry, serpentine’ from the ancient basilica in Ravenna. Otherwise the upshot is, ‘And the jobs getting smaller and smaller’. The second half of canto 9 consists of extracts from eight of the fifty letters found when the Sienese seized his postbag in 1454. All of the extracts concern affairs back home in Rimini, and while they mostly report how the building of the Tempio is progressing, their main effect is to give an impression of how Sigismondo is regarded in his own court, of how things are ordered there, and of how his absence is felt. The canto ends with a coda, ‘The ideograph’, as Pound called it in one typescript, giving the essence of Sigismondo’s life and works: ‘that “he lived and ruled”’, and loved to distraction Ixotta degli Atti, who was worthy of his love, ‘“and built a temple so full of pagan works”’. This carries the more weight for coming not from Pound, nor the sympathetic Broglio, but from the papal denunciation of Sigismondo.

Cantos 10 and 11 continue the chronicle of Sigismondo’s failing career. Much of canto 10 is given over to the papal condemnation and excommunication, some of it in Latin capitals, as if graven in marble, and all of it throwing at him every sin and crime in the book. It was, as historians now recognize, an exercise in character assassination, most of the charges being trumped up and the whole thing being politically motivated; but the dirt stuck for centuries, and the great Burckhardt accepted as ‘the verdict of history’ that Sigismondo embodied a ‘disinterested love of evil’ and was indeed guilty of ‘murder, rape, adultery, incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason’, and so forth and so forth. Pound for his part treats the speech for the prosecution as overblown ‘bunkum’, and moves on to Sigismondo’s surviving being burnt in effigy as ‘God’s enemy and man’s enemy’, and surviving more direct attempts on his life. In one battle, the first episode in canto 11, he even defeats the papal forces which outnumber his ten to one in cavalry and have twice as many footsoldiers. He won that battle, Pound implies, by putting into the minds of his men the potent image of the eagle that ‘lit on his tent pole’ and telling them, ‘The Romans would have called that an augury’. But the rest of the canto shows him steadily losing the war, forced to sign away most of his towns, and with his luck and his strength deserting him. He sits in the unfinished church—referred to thus as what it had been, ‘the chiexa’, not as the ‘Tempio’—‘noting what was done wrong’. Anecdotes illustrative of his humanity and intelligence, and of his popularity with his people, fill up the vacuum of his wasted last years. The final image of the once fearsome condottiere is of his entering into a solemn contract about some practical joking. In these two cantos Isotta is never mentioned.

The Malatesta suite ends upon the note of humane comedy, with Sigismondo neither a tragic figure, nor an idealized one. He is certainly not, as some have taken him to be, a simple celebration of ‘the factive personality’, if that means, as some have taken it to mean, the man who gets things done with all necessary violence. The fact is that his making, in Pound’s portrayal, is all in his effort to build a fitting monument to his love; and that effort, shown more as a struggle than as an achievement, is pretty well eclipsed throughout the latter two cantos. Pound’s Sigismondo has much in common with his Bertrans de Born, the persona bafflingly but apparently completely split between his love of a woman and his love of war. These cantos have much in common also with the Cathay and Propertius and Mauberley portraits, in that each of them exhibits a maker, an individual of genius, registering a concept of constructive love while being ultimately subdued to the antithetical ethos of his time. Some would see Sigismondo as a prototype of Mussolini, not without reason; but then he would be also a forefiguring of what was to be Mussolini’s fate when his vision of a new society was compromised and undone by violent political and military action. Again, one could read in him a forefiguring of Pound’s own fate, when he lost his centre ‘fighting the world’.

Pound wanted to bring about a renaissance, to recover such a vision of the universe alive as would move men of good will to make a paradise on earth. Sigismondo Malatesta afforded a case study of what a man possessed of the vision which brought about a renaissance in Italy in the fifteenth century had actually achieved under the conditions then prevailing. The historical records, when Pound took them fully into account, spoke overwhelmingly of his failure, and the Malatesta cantos faithfully reflect that. In Pound’s own terms too Sigismondo was a failure, in that his active life was not on the whole directed by his enlightened vision. And yet Pound could write, under the frontispiece to Guide to Kulchur, that he was ‘a failure worth all the successes of his age’. He could discount the record of his life because Sigismondo had realized his vision in an enduring creation. Even the seal reproduced as frontispiece, a mere ‘wafer of wax…between two surfaces of paper in a letter from the young Salustio Malatesta’, could still, in 1938, convey ‘the thoroughness of Rimini’s civilization in 1460’.

That is a profound indication of the orientation of Pound’s mind. Committed as he was, as an artist, to working in and making the best of his actual world, to realizing a ‘paradiso terrestre’ in spite of the shambles of war and the hells of aboulie and obstruction, it was nevertheless in enduring works of art that he placed his ultimate faith. That the vision would not often, and never lastingly, direct human affairs—the universal lesson of history—is a truth he appears to have accepted without question. He concentrated, as an artist, on the forms in which the vision could be kept alive in the mind. But then he was not only and not always the artist.

Life and times: 1923–1924

In early May 1923 Their Imperial Britannic Majesties King George V and Queen Mary made an official five-day state visit to Italy, during which the King bestowed the Order of the Bath upon Signor Mussolini and thus, in the press and the popular mind, set the British seal of approval upon his Fascist regime.

Pound, in Paris in May, would not visit Gurdjieff at his Institute out at Fontainebleau, even though Gurdjieff’s Persian soup was of peerless delicacy, and nor would he visit Orage while he was there, holding as he did to the view that ‘Confucius [is] about as good a guide as one can want in this vale of imbecilities’.

William Bird ⁸ was proposing a ‘de looks edtn. of Malatesta’ from his Three Mountains Press, and Henry Strater was already ‘at work on special capitals’ for it. Very soon it was to be

a dee looks edtn of my Cantos (about 16 of ’em, I think) of UNRIVALLED magnficence. Price 25 dollars per copy, and 50 and 100 bones for Vellum and illuminateds.

It is to be one of the real bits of printing; modern book to be jacked up to somewhere near level of mediaeval mss. No Kelmscott mess of illegibility. Large clear type, but also large pages, and specially made capitals.

Not for the Vulgus. There’ll be only about 60 copies for sale; and about 15 more for the producers.

Several of those sixteen cantos had yet to reach their final state.

In June Pound was ‘doing a canto on Kung’, using ‘Pauthier’s french translation of the Four Books; and a latin translation of the Odes’. Confucius’ ‘idea of beginning in the middle, i.e. on oneself is excellent’, he told Homer, thinking of what ‘Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves’:

If a man have not order within him

He can not spread order about him;

And if a man have not order within him

His family will not act with due order;

And if the prince have not order within him

He can not put order in his dominions.

And Kung gave the words ‘order’

and ‘brotherly deference’

And said nothing of ‘the life after death’.

All that, Pound wrote to Homer, was ‘The exact reverse of Christianchurchism’. The contrasting ‘Hell’ cantos which came next were his ‘portrait of contemporary England, or at least Eng. as she wuz when I left her’—that was how he described them to Lewis; and to Ford he said they were, ‘THE STATE of ENGLISH MIND in…the post war epotch’. He wanted to show why the British Empire was in a state of disorder and ‘DECOMPOSITION’, and wrote of politicians as arseholes who talk through their arseholes, and of preachers as ‘vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk, | waving the Christian symbols’. Those terms, he would maintain to Ford, were ‘the nearest thing to the exact word attainable’.

Dorothy’s solicitor father, Henry Hope Shakespear, was gravely ill in June and died in early July. Dorothy was with her mother in England until about the middle of August. She told Ezra on black-bordered notepaper not to come for the funeral, expressing no particular feeling—it was Olivia who wrote that ‘it has all been fearfully painful’—but being concerned about papers to be signed and having to wait three months ‘to know for certain about money matters’. She hoped ‘to be able to settle some’ money on Ezra, ‘and perhaps extract a lump for B. Esprit (incognito)’.

On 27 June Ezra mentioned to Dorothy that he had ‘had O. Rudge play over [his] opera arias on violin; and am dining with her tonight’; on 17 July, ‘The Rudge has taken “permanence” at cinema, instead of substituting for other violin’; and on 7 August, ‘Olga played over some of the Villon’. ⁹ Those signs of growing familiarity masked a rapidly developing intimacy. On 6 June ‘O.R.’ had sent Pound a petit bleu by the Pneumatique—Paris’s system of sending messages written on blue paper by pneumatic tube between local post offices to be then delivered by messengers on bicycle—‘Mi rencusi tanto—ma impossibile per oggi’. They generally wrote to each other in Italian, and that was to say, ‘So very sorry—not possible today’. On 6 July she sent another, ‘Caro, Aspetto te…O.’, ‘Dear one, expecting you’. In August Olga and Ezra went walking together in the Dordogne, ‘25 kilometers a day with a rucksack’, and visited Ventadour, Ussel, and villages pictured but not identified in Olga’s 1923 photograph album.

Dorothy was with her mother at Lewiston Manor on 21 July, ‘trying not to panic’: ‘I wonder how much of my life I ought to devote to her’, she mused to Pound, ‘I thought I was just evolving a little freedom.’ By 9 August she knew that ‘Father left everything to Olivia’, who had said she would increase Dorothy’s allowance. Shortly after that she was in Paris again. ‘Our combined intake is now probably more than yours,’ Pound told his mother at the end of August.

In mid-July he was ‘rewriting the first three cantos; trying to weed out and clarify’ for the ‘edtn. de LOOKS’. ‘I have now a sense of form that I hadn’t in 1914,’ he told Dorothy, and ‘WITH sense of form, very difficult to get it all in’. He had a draft of the first three done by 1 August. He then wanted, in order to revise canto VI, a small booklet of historical documents about Henry Plantagenet and Louis VII of France which he had left with Agnes Bedford. Around 18–24 August he was working ‘on 16^th, i.e. 5^th after Malatesta’—though he would be still working on that in October.

Nancy Cox McCormack who had been sculpting a portrait of Mussolini in Rome was in Paris again this summer and eager to pass on her impression that Il Duce was ‘a creative force evolving and directing the beginnings of a renaissance’. Pound’s interest was aroused. ‘To clear up what I said the other day’, he began a letter to her dated 15 August 1923,

it would be quite easy to make Italy the intellectual centre of Europe; and that by gathering ten or fifteen of the best writers and artists.…I shouldn’t trust anyone’s selection save my own. There is no use going into details until one knows if there is or could be any serious interest in the idea; that is to say, if the dictator wants a corte letteraria; if he is interested in the procedure of Sigismundo Malatesta in getting the best artists of his time into Rimini, a small city with no great resources. I know, in a general way, the fascio includes literature and the arts in its programme; that is very different from being ready to take specific action.

You have to avoid official personages, the deadwood of academies, purely pedagogical figures. The life of the arts is always concentrated in a very few individuals; they invent, and the rest follow, or adapt, or exploit.

Italy has an opportunity now…Germany is busted, England is too stupid, France is too tired to offer serious opposition; America is too far from civilization…

Pound had speculated, back in January 1915, that the Quattrocento renaissance had come about ‘because the vortices of power coincided with the vortices of creative intelligence’. Now he was beginning to dream that the twentieth-century renaissance he had been looking for might flow from a coming together of Mussolini and himself. His efforts to arrange a meeting with Il Duce came to nothing, however. He would meet the man of power only once, and that not until January 1933, and then to no evident effect.

Young George Antheil came onto the Paris scene in June 1923, with a reputation from his recent German tour of causing ‘uproars, fiascos, and hostile demonstrations’, a reputation to recommend him to the Dada element, to Satie, and to Pound. He had come for the première of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Pound at once wanted to hear his music, and took him to Natalie Barney’s to play hours of it for him on her piano. He was impressed by the ‘demoniac temperament’ apparent in the playing, and—prompted by Olga Rudge—asked him to compose a violin sonata or two for her. A brief notice in the Chicago Tribune of a concert on 11 December suggests his manner of playing: ‘Hitting the piano keys with his wrist and palm as well as with his fingers, Mr George Antheil…drew from the instrument strange barbaric sounds and created a sensation’. He had set off ‘a riot of enormous dimensions’ in October when he performed three of his compositions—Sonata sauvage, Airplane sonata, and Mechanisms—as a curtain-raiser for the opening night of the Ballets Suédois at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Pound would recall how the theatre ‘turned into bedlam five minutes after Antheil was at the piano’, and would hint that in the bedlam his own voice ‘could be heard above all others [comparing] the intelligence of the French public to that of sucklings’, while Satie sat next to him applauding. He would present Antheil as ‘The Cagney of music’, and write that he ‘rose from an atmosphere of “gangsters”, the “tough guy”, the police hoodlum, perhaps the only composer today who has been able to become an “honorary member of the Paris police”…because of the warm sympathy he inspired, during a night of cheerful company with some characters out of a thriller, in the chief of the metropolitan police’.

More or less amusing, more or less boisterous riotousness following deliberate hard drinking was a feature of Paris in the 1920s, more especially on the part of the expatriate Americans and British. It is in the atmosphere, and is sometimes the main matter, of the Left Bank memoirs of the survivors; and it is a significant element in Hemingway’s Fiesta (1927), in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), and in the early novels and stories of Jean Rhys. There were always dancing and drinking parties. Ford Madox Ford, while he was in Paris with Stella Bowen from September 1923, threw regular parties, and theirs are refracted in Jean Rhys’s writings along with her ungrateful relationship with Ford. Then too there were always the cafés and bars. Writers and artists living in cheap hotels or cramped flats naturally did as Parisians do and met up there. Pound is occasionally noticed, in the Left Bank memoirs, in a group in a café; though more usually he is seen passing swiftly in the street by someone seated at a table. Jimmy the Barman of The Dingo, one of the centres of expatriate existence in Fiesta, had him down as a careful drinker, a ‘white winer’ who didn’t touch the hard stuff.

Basil Bunting turned up in Paris that summer, young, broke, an original poet in the making, and sustained in that effort by the example of Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius. He first saw Pound ‘playing a swashbuckling kind of chess’ in a café. Some time later he got himself ‘locked up for a colossal drunk’ during which he had mistaken his hotel, tried to break down the door to a room not his own, jumped into bed with the concierge, and rebelliously and with violence to a gendarme resisted arrest. Pound got to hear of this and found him next morning reading Villon amongst the night’s catch ‘of petty thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, pimps’ in the grande salle of the Paris court, where, as he was quite aware, Villon had awaited his trial. Having heard his story Pound rushed away to get him an avocat. A day or two later Bunting sent Pound a note, from ‘Prison de la Santé, Don[jon] 9, Cellule 16’, asking that it be said in his defence that the violence he admitted to; but as to the charge of ‘Carrying arms’, his knife was simply ‘to sharpen my pencils & to cut bread & cheese when I eat my lunch in the Luxembourg or the Tuilleries’. He got two weeks, then worked as a barman at the Jockey Club until Pound introduced him to Ford and had him taken on as assistant editor and dogsbody for Ford’s transatlantic review. Bunting would identify with Villon in the first of his poems to be preserved, ‘Villon’ (1925), a ‘sonata’ upon his own imprisonments, primarily his imprisonment for refusing to bear arms in the late Great War.

Ford’s new review, a monthly, had as its ‘Administrateurs’, Messieurs Ford, Pound, Quinn, and Bunting. It would run only from January to December of 1924, but would publish a good deal that would outlast its moment: Ford’s own Some Do Not, the first part of Parade’s End; versions of Pound’s ‘Kung’ and ‘Baldy Bacon’ cantos; an extract from Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’; Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans; stories by Hemingway—who succeeded Bunting as assistant editor in January, and did what he could to subvert Ford’s internationalism by giving preference to Americans. The review was largely financed by John Quinn, who was photographed with Ford and Joyce (and the Diana) in the courtyard of 70bis in October of 1923. It was his only meeting with Joyce for whom he had done so much for so little thanks, and with Ford, and his last with Pound. He was already in pain from the undiagnosed cirrhosis which would kill him next July.

The combination of Antheil, a piano, and Pound tended not to make for harmony. It appears that Pound had a piano installed in his studio so that Antheil and Rudge could rehearse for their 11 December concert in the Salle du Conservatoire. They were to perform two pieces for unaccompanied violin by Pound, one his transcription of the twelfth-century melody of Faidit’s ‘Plainte pour la Mort du roi Richard Cœur de Lion’, the other his own ‘Sujet pour violin (resineux)’; and they were to première Antheil’s first and second sonatas for violin and piano. A Bach gavotte would be played between Pound’s pieces, and Mozart’s ‘Concerto en la majeur’ between Antheil’s—presumably in the spirit of ‘compare and contrast’. Antheil’s sonatas, according to Irving Schwerke writing in the Chicago Tribune, required ‘strenuous exertions’ on the part of both performers and ‘imposed a severe strain on the naked tympanum’, the ‘copious draught of sound’ being, for some, ‘“music” pure and absolute’, for others ‘degenerate noise and crash’. In the rehearsals in Pound’s studio the ‘noise and crash’ dimension so disturbed the Swedish neighbours overhead that they complained to the police. To his father, Pound frankly admitted that ‘George was making hell’s own merry noise’. But when summoned before the Commissaire de Police, as he gleefully reported to William Bird,

He discussed the sins of Scandinavians at length,

also their propensities to dance above his head at three

a.m.

he pointed out that the Scandinavians also had a

piano, ils ne sont pas des musiciens mais ils

jouent au piano.

After some discussing M. le Commissaire wrote:

Monsieur répond qu’il est compositeur de musique

et qu’il est nécessaire qu’il fasse du bruit.

That he makes no more noise than habitually.

From which it would appear that Pound took upon himself Antheil’s disturbing of the peace. There were no further proceedings.

That Pound, in his usual way, was engaged on several fronts that autumn is evident in his letters, particularly those to Dorothy. She was in England from 7 October until the end of November 1923, sorting out her parents’ house with her mother, flat hunting with her, and accompanying her to stay with friends. On 20 October Pound reported: that he and Antheil were well on with their re-notation of Le Testament; that he had got his ‘violin stunt into some sort of shape’; that O. had played through Les Noces for him; that Léger had approved the section of canto XVI dealing with his account of Verdun, and Steffens had filled in some troublesome details about Petrograd. He might have mentioned also his involvement in the editing of a ‘vorticist film-experiment’ to be called Ballet mécanique with Léger, Man Ray, Antheil, and Dudley Murphy. In November, from the 22nd to the 29th, specimen pages of the de luxe edition of the first sixteen cantos were on show at Shakespeare & Company. And ‘Eliot turned up at 11 this a.m. on his way to 12 o’clock train’—this was on the 25th—‘There is a chance of [his] leaving the bank in Feb. if Bel Esprit can be revived’. On 10 December Homer wrote, ‘My Dear Son,…We would like to know who Olga is?…Now do tell us about OLGA??’ But about Olga Pound was not forthcoming—he would say only that she had an aunt or an uncle living in Wyncote.

Ezra and Dorothy intended to leave Paris for Italy at the start of January 1924, but were delayed by Pound’s suffering an attack of appendicitis and being rushed into the American hospital at Neuilly. He did not have to be operated on, however, and was out again on 6 January. ‘Must stay on diet for a while’, he wrote to Homer, ‘Booked sleeper for Rapallo, tuesday a.m.’, i.e. the 8th. The printer’s setting copy for cantos I–VII and XII–XVI of A Draft of XVI Cantos is dated ‘6 Jan. 1924’, indicating that he gave Bird the final version of those cantos either on the day he left hospital, or on the Monday, his last full day in Paris that winter.

They stayed in Rapallo, at the Hotel Mignon, or in the albergo at Monte Allegro 2,000 feet above the town, until about the middle of March, with Ezra feeling in need of a period of recuperation. There would be an important article on Antheil in the Criterion in April; and other material for Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony would be appearing in the transatlantic review over the coming months—though the ‘Notes for Performers, by William Atheling, with Marginalia Emitted by George Antheil’, were actually Agnes Bedford’s selections from Atheling’s New Age reviews. Pound appears to have been mainly resting, apart from composing a little music for violin.

Ezra and Olga were exchanging love notes. ‘Darling…amor mio’, ‘mi spiace che non sei qui’, that from Pound, ‘I am sorry you aren’t by me’. And from Olga, ‘Caro—Inamoratissima’, ‘ti voglio vigliacco—e come!’, ‘I want you awfully, and how!’ Towards the end of February Pound invited Olga to come to Rapallo, ostensibly for further work on Le Testament, and, there being no room next door at the Splendide, booked her into the Mignon ‘for a few days’. Olga arrived, took in the situation, and immediately removed herself to the Monte Allegro albergo. After three days Pound sent up a message that he ‘had the miseries’ and wanted her, but was still too weak to climb the mountain; if she would walk down one day ‘for tea and toast’ after his game of tennis, he would walk part way back with her. She did not descend, so he had to climb up to her. After a week Dorothy followed; and Olga then left for Florence. Ezra and Dorothy remained up the mountain for a week or two before going back to the Mignon ‘& thence to interior’. Around 20 March Dorothy was writing from Rome to Ezra in Florence; and Pound was writing from Florence to his parents, ‘Am here—in palazzo. with huge rooms & bath—Musicians treated better than poets’. He had just finished a ‘new violin suite…for Olga’s London concert’, and had other music he wanted to do, but ‘Am not yet well enough to work at long stretch’. He was still in Florence on 10 April when he told his parents he had lunched with Berenson. By 24 April Olga was in London for her concert, another Rudge–Antheil affair, on 10 May. After the concert Olivia Shakespear wrote to Dorothy that ‘Ezra’s things…were liked by those I spoke to’. (The critics, it has to be said, were not impressed by what they heard of his Fiddle Music: First Suite.) Olivia had taken Olga to lunch at her Club, and thought her ‘a charming girl, and so pretty’.

Once Olga was out of the way Dorothy rejoined Pound in Florence, and they spent some time together in Perugia and Assisi, though at the end of May Dorothy was in Rome again, and Pound was in Rapallo on his way to Paris.

From Florence he wrote to Bird demanding the elimination of ‘superfluous rubbish’ from Strater’s designs, especially the ‘love knot in lower right hand corner’ of the initial page of ‘The Fourth Canto’, and the long tail on its capital P, and the extra scene across the top of the page. He had wanted Strater to be confined to the capitals, ‘Restricted space to intensify output’. As to the extra work he was asking of Bird, ‘As anybody who has ever made a good job of anything knows the last 2% of excellence takes more time than the other 98%. That’s why art and commerce never savvy one another.’

1. Rudge/Antheil Concert poster, Aeolian Hall, London, 10 May 1924.

While in Perugia he copied a number of secular songs from a fifteenth-century manuscript collection. In Assisi Dorothy was ‘doing sketches of frescos in church here. & of mountains’, while Pound was ‘reading large work on the Este’ of Ferrara. He would draw on that in cantos 20 and 24. By mid-May he was blocking out ‘a few more cantos’ and ‘beginning to want typewriter again = sign of awakening energy’. He was asking Homer for the low-down on US presidents, anything he might have picked up in Washington or from his Congressman father, Thaddeus C. Pound, ‘facts indicative of personality’, such as ‘Jefferson trying to get a gardener who cd. play the french horn in quartette after dinner’. That detail would go into canto 21, and some material Homer sent over would appear in canto 22. In June, when he was back in Paris, he mentioned that he ‘had just summarized Marco Polo’s note on Kublai Khan’s issue of paper currency’—that would start off canto 18. By the end of August he would have ‘another large wad of mss. for cantos, to go on with after Bill has got through printing the 16’.

When Pound got back to Paris on 1 June Williams was there, winding up a six-month sampling of the seductions of Europe—‘Pagany’ as he called it in his wonderfully self-affirming fantasy account of the trip. Pound introduced him to his Paris—to Léger and his art, to Brancusi in his studio, to Natalie Barney’s salon, to Cocteau—and Williams, like one of Henry James’s American pilgrims, steadfastly saw that there was nothing there for the autochthonous American genius. Pound wanted to talk about music, ‘renaissance music, theory of notation, static “hearing”, melody, time’, and Williams as usual found it all suspect. He could credit Pound with an extraordinary sense of time, accruing from his fine ear for the musical phrase in verse, but remained convinced that he did not know one tone from another and had no natural musical ability or capability whatsoever. He wouldn’t have believed that in his compositions for Olga’s violin it was precisely the tones that could be got from the instrument that Pound was investigating.

Olga performed some of Pound’s music at a private concert of ‘Musique Américaine: (Declaration of Independence)’ arranged by ‘M. et Mme. Ezra Pound’ in the Salle Pleyel on 7 July. On the programme were two of his renovations of fifteenth-century music from the Perugia manuscript, his Fiddle Music: First Suite, and a ‘Fanfare’ for violin and tambourine to provide an entrance for Antheil. Antheil’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano was performed, and then the première of his String Quartet. Pound’s pieces interested and pleased at least one critic, as specimens of ‘horizontal’ music. Antheil’s, to another critic, provided ‘a gargantuan feast of cacophonies’. Williams was not in the audience, having elected to go champagne-tasting that weekend with William Bird who was a connoisseur of fine wine as of fine printing. But Joyce and Sylvia Beach and the two editors of the Little Review and Hemingway were there. Many in the audience, it was reported, went on immediately to the Dôme, their nerves in a shaken condition from ‘Mr Antheil’s hammer-blows on the piano’.

Shortly after the concert Dorothy was in London with her mother, now at 34 Abingdon Court W8, to the south of Kensington High Street. Pound took himself off for a walking tour in the region of the Puy-de-Dôme, based on Ussel and visiting Châtelguyon for its ‘intestinal waters’. Back in Paris on 31 July he wrote to Dorothy that he was much better for the walk, ‘First day I was sickish, next day better, and then began to eat two large meals daily.’ A few days later he was hoping it was ‘not a bad sign’ that he was ‘taking pleasure in digestion’. On 15 August he reported that a ‘general survey at hospital’ had revealed that his appendix had gone down to nothing and he was perfectly well, but still too high-strung. His ‘general malaise’ was due to other causes. Dorothy responded with sympathy, and observed that he need not do any heavy work, only his cantos. Towards the end of August he did another walking trip, this time for six days in the Vienne around Poitiers. On this one at least Olga was with him. After it he told his parents, ‘My health seems OK at last.’ Dorothy wrote that she had been thinking of Italy for September, but ‘I shall keep my plans as fluid as possible…until I can definitely settle…I imagine it makes no difference to you?’ At the beginning of September she wrote that she was about to return to Paris, if that would not put him out; and Pound replied in his customary third person and with their ritual cat greeting, ‘Mao | He will be glad to see her. Will be at [Gare du] Nord at 4.5.’

They had decided to give up the studio at 70bis and move permanently to Italy, departing early October. Pound had had ‘a special book case trunk constructed’ in July with a view to that move, and in August he had been disposing of unwanted books and periodicals. Olivia joined them in Paris on the 8th, and would be with them in Rapallo for the first month or so.

In their final fortnight there was a distraction. The ‘melancholy man’ who lived across their courtyard and played better chess than Pound, an American poet and opium addict by the name of Ralph Cheever Dunning, fell ill and had no one to look after him, so Pound was kept busy taking the delirious poet to hospitals and finding doctors and dealers. His last act was to buy a cold-cream jar of raw opium from a Cherokee chief on the avenue de l’Opéra and leave it with Hemingway to give to Dunning if there was another emergency. Hemingway tells the story in A Moveable Feast as an instance of the great kindness Pound was capable of. (He also says that when the emergency did arise a deranged Dunning threw the jar back at him, and followed it up with several accurately aimed milk-bottles.) Pound’s reward was to discover that Dunning, though ‘not in the movement’, had written ‘a very fine book of poems during the last year’ which he recommended to Liveright before leaving Paris.

He had gone to Paris in 1921, he said in an interview in 1956, because the life of the mind was there then, and the life of the literary mind in particular. But after 1924 the life of the mind was no longer in literature, ‘It was in thinking about civic order’—‘and nobody in Paris was doing any of that’. Italy had become the interesting place to be.

¹ Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972): born Dayton, Ohio; heiress to the fortune of the Barney Railroad Car Foundry; lived it up in Paris from the late 1890s, at 20 rue Jacob from 1909; a close friend of Remy de Gourmont, who named her ‘L’Amazone’; by Mauriac she was called ‘le pape de Lesbos’ on account of her much celebrated Sapphic affaires and writings; she combined hedonism with high seriousness, was generous in support of artists and the arts, and kept up a famous social and intellectual salon.

² This is the one that has been performed a number of times since Robert Hughes edited the score for performance and directed the world première of the complete work in Berkeley, California, in November 1971. See appendices for an outline of the opera and of the successive states of the score.

³ George Antheil (1900–59): American pianist, composer, and iconoclast in the musical avant-garde in Paris in the 1920s—his Ballet mécanique (1926) provoked a famous riot. Admiring his demanding ‘short hard bits of rhythm hammered down, worn down so that they were indestructible and unbendable’ (GK 94–5)—Antheil’s Mechanisms (1923) would be one instance—EP promoted him as a Vorticist in music, and wrote Antheil and The Treatise on Harmony (1924) to present his thinking about Antheil’s and his own music. They drifted apart after 1933 when A. went to Hollywood to compose and direct background music for films. Published his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, in 1945.

⁴ The 1923/71 score calls for ten solo voices, chorus, and seventeen instrumentalists who among them play an unusually diverse lot of instruments: ‘nose-flute, flute and piccolo (one player), oboe, saxaphone, bassoon, trumpet (for two bars only!), horn, two trombones, mandolin, violin, cello, three contrebassi, a variety of drums (including six tympani), bells, “bass bells” (sic)…gongs, sandpaper, dried bones and a percussionist whistling’ (Robert Hughes).

⁵ ‘Heaulmière’ in the 1926 version for voice and violin, in ‘simple though mixed meters’ (CPMEP 148 n. 10), is printed photographically from a score in Olga Rudge’s hand in GK 361–5.

⁶ It appears that under this contract Pound received $500 in all. His translation of Édouard Estaunié’s L’Appel de la route as The Call of the Road was published by Boni & Liveright in November 1923, with the translator named as ‘Hiram Janus’. ‘Estaunié is a bad writer’ he told his mother in 1924, ‘couldn’t escape the translation but…got my year’s leisure to do the Malatesta’.

⁷ The single sentence came in the context of Pound’s Bel Esprit initiative: ‘During his recent three months’ absence [from the bank] due to complete physical breakdown he produced a very important sequence of poems: one of the few things in contemporary literature to which one can ascribe permanent value’ (‘Credit and the Fine Arts’, NA 30.22 (30 March 1922) 284). The 1924 letter made a point about the notes—that the poem should be read without them. Of the poem itself it said only that it ‘seems to me an emotional unit’, and that its unity was from ‘intensity or poignancy of expression’ (‘A Communication’, 1924: A Magazine of the Arts 3 (1924) 97–8).

⁸ William Bird (1888–1963): in 1922, while European Manager of Consolidated Press Association of Washington, DC, acquired a seventeenth-century Mathieu printing press in order to pursue an interest in typography and hand-printing, and set up his Three Mountains Press at 29 Quai d’Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris; entered into an association with Robert McAlmon and his Contact Editions, and gave Ford space from which to run his transatlantic review; published the ‘Inquest’ series of six small books edited by Pound, and Pound’s Antheil and The Treatise on Harmony (1924) and A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925). Printed nothing after 1925, and sold his press and Caslon Old Face type to Nancy Cunard who used it for her Hours Press.

⁹ Olga Rudge (1895–1996), b. Youngstown, Ohio; educated in Europe from the age of 9, at first in England, then from 1910 at the Paris Conservatoire; her mother, a noted singer, made her home in London, then in Paris, at 2 rue Chamfort in the XVIth arrondissement, and took Olga into the musical and literary salons of Parisian society. By 1914 Olga was giving concert recitals in Paris, London, and other European cities and receiving excellent reviews. Antheil, when he first heard her play in 1923, considered her ‘a consummate violinist…with [a] superb lower register of the D and G strings’. In the 1930s she had a small house in Venice; an apartment in a house at Sant’Ambrogio above Rapallo; and spent much time in Siena as Secretary of the Accademia Chigiana. She was a principal performer in the concerts Pound organized in Rapallo between 1933 and 1939; catalogued in 1936, at Pound’s instigation, the 309 unedited instrumental pieces by Vivaldi in manuscript in Turin; co-founded the Centro di Studi Vivaldiani in Siena, and became a central figure in the Vivaldi revival. She was the mother of Pound’s daughter, and their intimate relationship endured for nearly sixty years, though it was lived out in discreet privacy until his last decade. In her own last years she was cared for by their daughter at Schloss Brunnenburg in the Italian Tyrol.