2 : FROM RAPALLO, 1924–1932
Human complications
Olga Rudge wanted to conceive Ezra’s child; the more so, she would record in her later years, because Dorothy would not have a child. In mid-November 1924 she wrote in her diary, ‘piantato un figlio’, a son planted, though it would be a daughter she would give birth to the following July. Then, fifteen months after that, in September 1926, Dorothy did have a child, a son, but not by Ezra. He observed these ‘awkward human complications’, and refused to let them disturb his concentration on composing cantos. What he wanted was to conceive a vital form of mind and to impregnate at least America with it.
For the next twenty years he would be working at that from Italy. He had been ‘rejuvinated by 15 years in going to Paris’, he told Lewis, and had now ‘added another ten of life, by quitting same’. He told his father that ‘the north side of the alps is an error, useful only to make one glad to get to this side’. Rapallo in mid-October was ‘empty and tranquil’; the sun was warm; he played tennis, having bought a new racquet; he loafed, and ‘D. bathed in the gulf yesterday’. Someone at the tennis club offered to build them a house, but he did not ‘want to settle just yet’. They had taken an extra room at the Mignon; and just about everything they needed, ‘save the clavicord and a few woiks of Aht’, was contained in their trunks and suitcases and the travelling book case. ‘Racquet, typewriter, bassoon’ were the ‘necessaries’ he thought worth mentioning. More cantos were on the way, with 18 and 19 in draft in November.
In mid-December they went down to Sicily and toured around over the next two months with a view to settling there. It had its interest, they decided, but wasn’t a place for them to live. Dorothy found plenty to paint, including an apparently passive Etna from Taormina, but the fleas made it hard to find somewhere to paint from. Yeats and his wife joined them for a couple of weeks in January. He and Pound tried out the acoustic of ‘the old out-of-door Greek theatre in Siracusa’, and Pound annoyed him by bellowing Sappho’s Greek and refusing ‘to spout English poesy’, because the ‘English verse wasn’t CUT’. In Palermo Pound borrowed Yeats’s typewriter and ‘typed to the end of XX’. He mentioned having got so far in a letter to Dr Saunders at Hamilton College. Saunders had wondered if he might return to America to lecture or as a visiting professor, and Pound was telling him there would not be enough money in that to warrant the loss of time. He thought he ‘ought to stick at’ his long poem, having for the moment ‘a certain amount of leisure & uninterruptedness to go on with’ it.
In mid-February Pound was in Rome, and so too was Olga. Between her concert engagements they visited the zoo and looked at the lions until Olga expected their child would turn out to be a leoncino, a lion cub. Pound apparently ‘had a phobia’ against getting her a wedding ring, though when he was back in Rapallo he changed his mind about that, for appearance’s sake. He was at once supporting Olga in having the child, and maintaining the distance respectability demanded. She, accepting that, was seeking somewhere discreetly to lie up or to die in, as she put it, and wondering under what law it might be best to have the child, French, Swiss, or Italian. Pound advised against Monte Carlo because the US immigration quota for persons born in France could make it difficult to get into America in the case of war; but then, he added, there might not be another war ‘for forty years’. While in Rome he wrote to his mother that he was doing ‘a little general reading for the Florentine canto’; and he told his father that he was acting for the inventor of a new type of locomotive and wanted Homer to see if ‘Baldwins’ could be interested in buying it—it would depend on whether they could ‘buck the coal interest by a better type of non coal burning engine’. ‘Study the two last cantos I sent you’, he urged, referring to the anecdotes of the ways of big business in XVIII and XIX.
He wrote to Olga from the Mignon on 4 March to ask her to find out the make of the electric heater in the friends’ apartment she had been lent in Rome. He and Dorothy were ‘In act of taking apartment, plumb on roof on sea front’. The address on the notepaper he had printed was ‘Via Marsala 12, int. 5’—their flat was on the fifth floor, at the top. There were a hundred steps or more to climb—it was in the contract that the lift did not work—but the small apartment’s narrow rooms gave on to a broad rooftop terrace looking south over the hill-enclosed bay to the open sea. At first they went on taking their meals at the Mignon, for ‘about 8 or 9 [dollars] a week, each’; but they soon settled into the routine of eating in the sociable café-restaurant of the Albergo Rapallo on the ground floor of the building. ‘Via Marsala 12, int. 5’, the flat on the roof above the Albergo, was to be the Pounds’ ‘permanent locale’ until they were evicted along with the other sea-front residents by the German military in 1943.
The cantos continued. By 25 March Pound had ‘typed out most of seven cantos, taking it up to XXIII’. April was ‘mostly borasco’—the blustering cold wind from the north—‘very annoying as nothing to do but tennis’. About this time a new magazine called This Quarter and published in Paris dedicated its first number to ‘ EZRA POUND who by his creative work, his editorship of several magazines, his helpful friendship for young and unknown artists, his many and untiring efforts to win better appreciation of what is first-rate in art, comes first to our mind as meriting the gratitude of this generation’. However, Pound failed to praise the young editors in return and the dedication was withdrawn in the third number. At the beginning of June he told Agnes Bedford that he had just been on a ‘two weeks chase’ through Rimini, Cesena, San Leo, and Bologna. He didn’t say what he had been after, but that would have been when he had the handsomely bound A Draft of XVI Cantos celebrated as ‘a CAPOLAVORO magnifico’, a majestic masterpiece, by the Fascist Commandante dalla Piazza in Rimini, and when he personally presented a copy to the Malatestine library in Cesena.
Olga Rudge, meanwhile, had been waiting out her time in Sirmione, trying to avoid acquaintances and gossip. ‘She hasn’t been so bored’, she wrote to Pound in their usual impersonal style, ‘since she was in her teens and nothing ever seemed to happen.’ ‘Where OFFICIALLY is she’, Pound asked, ‘I feel the reports shd. coincide.’ They needed to devise a cover story, in particular for Antheil who was organizing lucrative and prestigious concerts in America and could not understand why she would not commit herself. In early June Olga moved to Bressanone-Brixen in the Alto Adige and arranged to give birth in the hospital there. Then there was the problem of the name to go on the birth certificate for the father. It could not be ‘Ezra Pound’ since he was married to someone not the mother, and ‘N. N.’ for no name would brand the child for life. So Olga made up a marriage to one Arthur, the name of her brother killed in the war, and when Maria Rudge was born on 9 July 1925 she was declared for official purposes to be ‘figlia di Arturo’.
Olga informed Pound that she had given birth to a ‘[leon]cina’, and he received the news with enthusiasm. It appears though that she had no clear idea of what to do with the child she had so much wanted. She was determined to resume her career as a violinist and could not, would not, look after the baby and bring it up herself, ‘having no talent that way’. Leaving it in a local orphanage seemed a way out, that was if the child survived. After ten days she wrote to Pound that she had not expected him to come, only ‘if you would like to see the child you had perhaps better come as it will probably not live—there is very little left of it…it just doesn’t catch on’. It would have been different, she was told, if she had consented to nurse. Then came the turn of fortune. ‘There is a contadina here whose child has died—who can nurse it a few weeks at least…I think it will go if it only gets a start—it looks very grim and determined.’ Maria was given into the care of the farming woman, Frau Johanna Marcher, and did begin to thrive. Pound arrived; the child, Frau Marcher, and her farm at Gais near Bruneck were approved; and it was settled that Maria would be fostered and brought up by the Marchers in the Pustertal mountain valley. Her parents would visit from time to time, descending like gods from their mysterious heaven with gifts and ordinances; but throughout her childhood it was, according to her own matchless account, her peasant Mamme and Tatte who nourished, loved, and formed her with generative humanity and wisdom.
In September Olga was in Florence, doing serious exercises and dancing to recover her figure, and practising to resume playing at concert standard. On the 14th Pound mentioned to his parents that it was ‘D’s birthday…9 new plants fer the roof; funny lookin articles; not my province, herbage’. They had visitors through from Paris, Natalie Barney and Romaine Brookes, and Nancy Cunard. In October Dorothy and Olivia Shakespear went off to Perugia and Florence; while Pound went to Milan, to Modena for the Este library, and then on to Venice. From Venice he wrote to Dorothy that there were letters for her there, sent on no doubt with his from Rapallo, including ‘one from Egypt’. Olga sent him some Edelweis from the mountains and reported that ‘la mia leoncinina’ was doing well. She was in Paris through November and her concert on the 30th, as Pound heard from Natalie Barney, was ‘crowded and successful’.
‘Canti XXII to XXIII are about finished’, Pound told his mother at the end of October, ‘Am going on to XXIV etc.’ At the end of November he was thinking of cutting up his ‘Villon’ for a concert performance—he would become caught up over the next two or three months in thoroughly revising the score. He was also preparing for Liveright a definitive edition ‘of all Ezra Pound’s poems except the unfinished “Cantos”’, but ‘throwing out…the “soft” stuff, and the metrical exercises’. The latter, he confessed, were ‘what I once bluffed myself into believing were something more than exercises but which no longer convince me that I had anything to say when I wrote ’em; or anything but a general feeling that it wuz time I wrote a pome’. Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound would appear, handsomely printed on good paper, in December 1926, with a second printing in February 1927, a third in January 1930, and a fourth in May 1932. The poet was becoming known and appreciated for what he had put behind him.
Dorothy Pound sailed from Genoa for Cairo on the Esperia about 10 December, and was met there by ‘R’. Ezra was expecting Olga in Rapallo on the 11th—she would be with him for Christmas—and Eliot came for four days, having ‘at last escaped from Lloyds’ Bank’. To divert him Olga ‘played him the Bach Chaconne before breakfast’, and Pound took him to tea with Max Beerbohm. Dorothy, writing to Ezra from the ship, affected a footloose and fancy free gaiety; but in a letter from Cairo on the 20th she wrote, ‘At the heart of all this, I have had a couple of quarts d’heures of tragedy—which I knew I should find.’ ‘I hope you are all right’, she ended, ‘warm and not in too much confusion?’
Pound had workmen in to decorate their flat in February, apparently because Olga had told him he ought to have it done up. He told her that he had ‘at last thought out a decorative scheme that he trusts will satisfy her fastidious taste’. In his letters to his father he mentioned more than once, as if not knowing what else to say about her being in Cairo, that Dorothy ‘seems to be enjoying pyramids’. He had received from her ‘one oriental drapery…emitting THE most enormous and foul stench of mice’, and had hung the shawl out on the terrazzo hoping ‘it will have disinfected itself by the time D. gets back’. It was still stinking though when Dorothy returned on 1 March, ‘somewhat worn by trip; or at least dessicated with Egypt’. She was ‘half ill’ for some weeks after getting back, and for that reason, Pound explained to Olga, he was unable to get to Milan to see her. ‘Troppo incommodo. Sorry.’, he had wired, to which she replied, ‘She is not pleased’. It might be his idea that a ‘maîtresse convenable’ should be ‘a convenient mistress’, but it was not hers. She confessed to ‘a coup de désespoir’ when he wouldn’t come; but then passed that off as perhaps an effect from ‘noting Muss’s acquisitions’ in an exhibition in Milan. She ‘thoroughly understands’, she wrote in fierce submission, ‘that nothing ever must be done to compromise him in the eyes of the U. T. C.’, the Rapallo tennis club. In the midst of that exchange Pound wrote in a notebook: ‘24/3/1926 // There exist paradisal states | not death their portal | nor death in them…’.
Their letters resumed their usual topics: his music, her concerts; private jokes—as about the lioness who escaped from a circus and walked through Alessandria; news of Ford who had been in Rapallo, and had there received information he needed to complete ‘crucial part of the final spasm of Tietjens’, that is, exactly what it was that drove Tietjens mad in A Man Could Stand Up—. In April he wrote that he had nine cantos more or less finished—they would have been 17 to 25—‘but they don’t make a vollum’. He went on, ‘She suggest a nice simple and continuous subjeck of UNIVERSAL INTEREST, to run from 26 to 33,’ which would imply that he had it in mind to match the first major division of Dante’s one hundred cantos.
In mid-May he mentioned to his mother that he had ‘just been down to Rome for four days, heard a lot of modern moozik’. In fact he had gone down for a concert in which Olga Rudge and the pianist Alfredo Casella played music by Satie and Ravel, and Pound’s own ‘Homage Froissart’, a piece for violin and piano he had completed in February at Livorno. By the end of May Olga and the Pounds were all three in Paris, Olga in the apartment her father still leased for her at 2 rue Chamfort on the Right Bank, and Dorothy and Ezra on the Left Bank in the Hôtel-Restaurant Foyot, rue de Tournon, just down from the Palais du Luxembourg. In June there was the riot of Antheil’s Ballet mécanique on the 19th; then on the 29th the concert performance of Le Testament, with Olga Rudge violin, before an audience invited by M. et Mme. Ezra Pound.
The Pounds stayed on in Paris through August and September. On 11 September Pound wrote, ‘Dear Dad | next generation (male) arrived. | Both D. and it appear to be doing well.’ That was the first his parents knew of any ‘next generation’. It was Hemingway who had gone with Dorothy to the American hospital at Neuilly; but the next day Pound went to the Mairie there to register, ‘sur déclaration du père’, the birth of Pound, Omar, on 10 September 1926, to Ezra Pound, man of letters, and his wife Dorothy Shakespear. Omar would also be registered as a US citizen. On the 27th Pound himself was in the hospital, and sent Olga a note: ‘Have had small operation—My fambly leave hospital today about 2.30. He would be pleased to see her.’ He remained in the hospital for a week, having ‘all the possible taps, tests, analyses etc.’, and being told there was nothing wrong with him. He was just ‘completely exhausted’ and worn out, and was still in that state when he was back in Rapallo in October and ‘Damn glad’ to be there.
It had been arranged that Omar would be looked after for the time being in Paris by Raymonde Collignon whom Pound had known as a young singer in London, and that Olivia would informally ‘adopt’ her grandchild in England. The following June Dorothy, with a nurse to accompany her, fetched him from Paris and placed him in the Norland Institute and Nurseries, 11 Pembridge Square, near Kensington Gardens. ‘Omar’s eyes give the show away badly’, she told Pound, ‘heaven help us’. Later the boy would live with a retired Norland nurse in the village of Felpham near Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast. Dorothy would spend time with him on her summer visits to England, but otherwise would be a rather absent parent. Young Omar would see his legal father only once, or possibly twice, until after 1945.
Pound had sufficiently recovered from his ‘exhaustion’ in November to be thinking of bringing out a magazine of his own, to be known as The Exile. ‘Do you favour excluding all women writers?’, he asked Olga. His letters to her were all about her concert engagements and how she should be promoting her career, about the state of the sea and the weather in Rapallo, and about where he had got to with his cantos. He was with her in Rome in December, and again in February when she performed for Mussolini in private. In time the arrangement was that they would be together, usually in Venice, while Dorothy was away in England. Dorothy made it clear that she didn’t ‘see much fun in being alone in Rap. for long’, and especially did not fancy being stuck there while Ezra was away with Olga. Otherwise she seemed complaisant about their continuing relationship. The Rapallo apartment was adorned now with the Gaudier sculptures—‘Cat and Water Carrier contemplating the marble Embracers’—and with their Lewis and Gaudier drawings. Later there was the clavichord too, and eventually the Gaudier ‘Hieratic Head of E.P.’ would be mounted on the terrace, its stone eyes fixed upon the ever-varying sea.
In these years at the end of the 1920s Pound was trying to persuade Olga to accept him as a ‘somewhat functional’ being, that is, as concerned only with the WORK in hand, and as NOT interested in personal feelings, neither his own nor those of others. When she was depressed about her playing or about never knowing when she might see him he would tell her, ‘I do not think life is possible if you stop to consider peoples’ personal feelings’; and besides, if he had the energy to reply to her desperate letters ‘he wd. putt it into his job’. ‘You have a set of values I don’t care a damn for’, he wrote to her at a critical moment in their relations, ‘I do not care a damn about private affairs, private life, personal interests’. He simply had no use and could see no use for the personal and the subjective at this time.
That dismissal or denial of ‘personal feelings’ would go some way to explaining the personal predicament he had got himself into. In time it would prove to be the tragic flaw by which he would be undone in his private life. He had held to the conviction—it had appeared fundamental to his constitution—that the individual should be untrammelled by social conventions or by narrow-minded laws. Yet he was now bound by law to recognize as his own the child that was not his; while in law he could not be recognized as the father of his own child. The consequent inner conflict, and his inability to acknowledge let alone resolve it, precisely because it was profoundly personal and subjective, could well account for the state of exhaustion he was in around the time of Omar’s birth.
To keep up appearances, for Dorothy’s sake probably, his passionate relationship with Olga had to be hidden—though only the indifferent would have been unaware of it. That he had a daughter he was proud of had to be kept secret—it was some years before his own father found out, years more before his mother was told. Nothing could be allowed to disturb the bland conventional perception of the devotedly married Mr and Mrs Ezra Pound. Charles Norman was told by Mrs Willard Trask how she was struck by them at a dinner given by Ford in Paris in 1930. Pound was ‘very American, talking like an American, somewhat pompous’, while Dorothy was ‘absolutely beautiful, beautiful with authentic beauty’, and ‘such a lady’. The Pounds had sat ‘side by side on the sofa’, and ‘looked devoted’. That devotion, however, would have depended upon their leaving personal feelings aside. ‘The only reason people can live near each other is because they let each other ALONE,’ Pound had asserted to Olga.
Ford had said to the Trasks ‘that Pound had told him once that Dorothy was the only woman he had ever met who could say anything, and it “would be all right, she was such a lady”’. Evidently Dorothy could do anything too and it would be all right, because she could do it with perfect manners and without showing any disturbing emotion. She could cuckold her husband, apparently with premeditation and cool determination, and in a manner which rather violently contravened the principles and the prejudices of her class. (‘A touch of the tarbrush’, people would signal to each other when Omar’s eyes gave the show away.) Pound may have been confused, confused even to the point of inner exhaustion, by her doing it without any apparent alteration of affection. But it had to be all right by his principle of not taking personal feelings into account, and of allowing others to do whatever they had to do provided they made no emotional demands upon him.
Even so, it was perhaps an error on his part to pay no attention to what might have driven Dorothy to act as she had. Given her previous determination not to have a child, and given the conventions by which she lived, it might have occurred to him that she had acted out of furious hurt and outrage, and that this child, conceived, to all appearances, in reaction to Olga’s having his child, was intended to cancel out that other child. There were the makings here of a Greek tragedy, only it would prove to be a tragedy in which the Fury wore the mask of the perfect lady, and in which the flawed hero would accept his fate without protest or self-pity, as if in a state of godlike detachment.
Saving the world by pure form
In the autumn of 1927 Pound was busy about many things. In September he sent off the twenty-seventh canto to John Rodker for his de luxe A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, and was already blocking in 28–30. He was making a ‘new American version’ of the ‘testament’ of Confucius, the Ta Hio—that went off in November to be published by the University of Washington Book Store in Seattle. He was trying to get together his thinking on Great Bass, or ‘how to RHYTHM’, and his thinking about the aesthetics of engineering machines; and he was studying the philosophy behind Guido Cavalcanti’s poems. He was writing ‘How to Read’, a new Poetics, ‘the summa of all I have learned about literchoor’. He was editing his own little magazine, The Exile. And he had time to converse with Joseph Bard about the meaning of the word paideuma in the work of Leo Frobenius, the German anthropologist; to play daily tennis, sometimes up to six sets in a session; and to go to the cinema—Rapallo by then had three, and Pound could ‘carry dissipation to THE howling limit, i.e. leaving bad one and finish the serrata at the other’.
Running through that seeming miscellany of activities was a constant preoccupation with the inner, shaping forms of things. This was not a new preoccupation, of course. The Imagiste complex and the dynamic forms of Vorticism were directed to the shaping of the mind and its world. But now Pound was concerning himself more explicitly with the forms of social and political life, as with the organization of work in a machine-shop, and of individuals in the state. He had always had the conviction, even in his idealizing youth, that the forms of art had, or should have, a social function, even a biological function. ‘Art for life’s sake’, was his cry, never ‘art for art’s sake’. Now he was seeking to engage his art with the public life of his time.
At the end of 1926 he had written to the editors of New Masses, an American Communist-affiliated magazine, saying that he had read five numbers ‘with a good deal of care’, and was prepared to be further educated by them, specifically on such matters as labour struggles, the Russian Revolution, and US dollar diplomacy. The editors headed his letter, over-hopefully, ‘POUND JOINS THE REVOLUTION!’ He did then contribute an article on how the workers on the factory floor might so orchestrate the noise of their machines as to give rhythm to their day and thus free themselves from the condition of robots. But he also sent a letter in which he protested against Hugo Gellert’s mistaking Brancusi for an ‘art for art’s sake’ aesthete just because his work was detached from wars and politics. Brancusi, he declared, ‘is trying to save the world by pure form’. To which Gellert replied in mockery, ‘“to save the world by pure form…” Tra la.’ He didn’t want to know, and Pound didn’t stop to explain, just how art which ‘has no political opinion’ could ‘save the world’.
Pound’s most revealing remark on that occasion was probably the extraordinary statement that ‘Art is part of biology’. That would have been intended to set art apart from political arguments and abstract ideas, and to set it with the genetic processes which sustain, conserve, and evolve individual and social organisms. In thus identifying art with the formative processes by which we live Pound might well have had in mind what de Gourmont had written about instinct in Physique de l’amour. Taking as an example the sphex, an insect which instinctively paralyses ‘with three perfectly placed stabs the cricket which is to feed its larvae’, de Gourmont argued that the ‘genius’ which enables the insect to do this must be ‘the sum of intellectual acquisitions slowly crystallised in the species’; or, as Pound later paraphrased it, ‘After the intellect has worked on a thing long enough the knowledge becomes faculty—There is one immediate perception or capacity to act instead of a mass of ratiocination.’ That was what Pound now wanted art to be doing, to be crystallizing useful intelligence into instinct, habit, custom, and tradition.
He found support for his thinking in the work of Leo Frobenius, particularly in Frobenius’ concept of the paideuma of a people or a culture. Pound understood that term to mean ‘the mental formation, the inherited habits of thought, the conditionings, aptitudes of a given race or time’; and these as ‘the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time’. A particular instance, in the case of America at the time of its revolution, would be the conviction that ‘All men are born free and equal’. The accumulated intelligence of enough people, crystallized in that formulation, had come to command instinctive assent and so had become an active principle in the conduct of the nation’s affairs.
For his own time, Pound declared in one of his editorial notes in The Exile, ‘the organizing thought is concerned with the emergence or the resurgence of the idea of a cooperative state’, that is, one constituted of consenting and cooperating individuals. The ‘18th century’, by which he evidently meant what came to be called the French Enlightenment, had found ‘the formula for the right amount of individual liberty compatible with civilized institutions: The right to do anything “que ne nuit pas aux autres”’, anything that does no harm to others. Now, in 1928, ‘We need possibly another fifty years of hard thought (and a lot of people busy at it) to find the true equation for the extent of state power compatible with civilization’. He noted that there was the ‘soviet idea’, as expressed in making banking a state monopoly; and the ‘Fascist idea’ as expressed in holding individuals in government responsible. Those, he said, were ‘interesting phenomena’; but his preferred idea, the one he was promoting in The Exile, was that ‘The republic, the res publica means, or ought to mean “the public convenience”.’ He would put that on his letterhead, ‘Res publica: the public convenience’. It was a variant of the idea of ‘government for the people’, and projected a government which both safeguarded the rights of the individual by its social justice, and served the common good through its public works—well-constructed buildings, roads, intelligent afforestation—and through fostering useful scientific discoveries and enduring works of art. Judged by these measures, however, the modern ‘capitalist imperialist state’—and it was clearly the American state that was foremost in Pound’s mind—‘will not bear comparison with the feudal order; with the small city states both republican and despotic’. Instead of being a convenience, therefore, it is ‘an infernal nuisance’.
For a model of the cooperative state Pound looked away to Confucian China, and to its governing idea as formulated in the Ta Hio, a work which he had translated, he said in 1927, in order to remedy ‘the present state of national and international imbecility’. He introduced his 1945 version with this note:
Starting at the bottom as market inspector, having risen to be Prime Minister, Confucius is more concerned with the necessities of government, and of govern-mental administration than any other philosopher. He had two thousand years of documented history behind him which he condensed so as to render it useful to men in high official position…
His analysis of why the earlier great emperors had been able to govern greatly was so sound that every durable dynasty, since his time, has risen on a Confucian design and been initiated by a group of Confucians. China was tranquil when her rulers understood these few pages. When the principles here defined were neglected, dynasties waned and chaos ensued. The proponents of a world order will neglect at their peril the study of the only process that has repeatedly proved its efficiency as social coordinate.
That is a remarkable recommendation given that, generally speaking, a paideuma would be culture-specific—it would be ‘the aptitudes of a given race or time’; yet Pound evidently considered the Confucian paideuma to be of universal utility, unlike the American Constitution or the Christian Ten Commandments.
Even more remarkable, when we come to consider the first chapter of the Ta Hio which is thought to preserve Confucius’ own words, is how few pages he needed to hold the crystallized intelligence of those two thousand years of documented history. It all comes down to seven brief paragraphs which set out, not the abstract principles of good government, but rather the method or process necessary to bring about good government. The development of a certain kind of intelligence is the key, specifically the intelligence which ‘increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results’, and which is at the same time ‘rooted in watching with affection the way people grow’. In its more advanced formulation the process is a continuous loop with constant feedback:
The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts [the tones given off by the heart]; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories.
When things had been classified in organic categories, knowledge moved toward fulfilment; given the extreme knowable points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with precision [the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally]. Having attained this precise verbal definition [aliter, this sincerity], they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having attained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when their states were well governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium.
From the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root.
That is the Confucian paideuma in its pure form, stripped of all particulars. There are no commands to do this and not do that; no indications of specific rights and wrongs; no moral teachings or required rites; no guidance at all on the practicalities of living and governing.
The only definite value is that there should be order throughout the empire. But then that would be not just any order, certainly not an order imposed from above or by force. It would be one which comes about when all the things of which the empire is constituted are in order; and that would be when all things are attuned to the individual heart’s tones. However, to translate that into the Christian principle of individual conscience would be misleading; and to associate it with Western individualism would be quite wrong. There is no suggestion of a Holy Spirit prompting the Confucian heart; nor is there any suggestion that the individual should be fulfilling his or her personal desires. No value is being accorded to the private life or to personal feelings and interests. The orientation of the Confucian paideuma is altogether away from the individual and towards the common good. The heart that is rectified in the process of intelligence grows to know and to be at one with others and with its world; and it thus comes to desire not its own private ends but the good of all. ‘Know and act thyself’ grows into ‘know and act according to the truth of all that you can know’.
It could be that in commending this Confucian ethic to the American and European ‘proponents of a world order’ Pound intended that it should act as a corrective to the contradictions and excesses of their individual-centred, Christian-sanctioned, and notionally democratic culture; a corrective, that is, to its making the individual everything, and nothing; to its putting private profit before public benefit, and putting corporate and national self-interest above considerations of natural justice and natural law. The challenge was even more radical than that, however, a challenge not merely to the democracies’ failures to live up to their idea but to the very foundations of that idea. The Confucian ethic has no place for any divine authority or revelation; nor does it vest authority in the state. And while it looks to the individual heart as the source of order, the desired order is not of or by or for the individual person, but of and by and for the whole people in harmony with the Cosmos. In canto 52 Pound will express that as ‘the abundance of nature | with the whole folk behind it’. Its order would be, if it were ever to be realized, one form of totalitarianism.
It would not be the same as the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism; ideally, indeed, it would be their opposite, since power would genuinely be with the whole people. But it probably would be anathema to the European and American democracies, because it did not value the individual person for his or her own sake. Yet Pound, who would define himself as a Jeffersonian democrat, would also practise that Confucian discipline. In Western terms, he would cultivate a mind attuned not to the human personality but to the Cosmos, to the ordered totality of the vital universe. He would be of a mind with Osiris, or Dionysos.
To be of such a mind means to see the world and to articulate one’s vision of it in ways that are strange to European thought. It means of course de-centring the ‘I’, the subjective, self-regarding self. Then it means, as Fenollosa observed in his essay on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, concentrating the attention upon particular, concrete things, and seeing them as acting themselves, or acting the forces that pulse through them; and then as acting upon and interacting with other things. It means seeing the natural processes going on in and through everything we take in, and going on too within ourselves. An adequate articulation of that vision must involve preserving the specific qualities of things while presenting them in their multilateral relations and interactions—in a total vision such as canto II is working towards.
That way of thinking which respects and seeks to follow the processes of nature both within and around us is quite contrary to the method which has made European thought so efficient in its determination to master nature. This was Darwin at work:
When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled grey; the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red grouse the colour of heather, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds in preserving them from danger.
So he proceeded by logic and reason from the particulars towards the general law of the survival of the fittest, and in the process refined out everything his eye had observed. The abstraction he was left with proved immensely powerful, but at the cost of removing the mind from the rich complexity of his birds and insects.
Pound deprecated such ‘talk of science as if it were a desiccation not an enrichment’, but then he was looking to science to provide ‘ways of thinking and thought instruments’ that would be adequate to the rich complexities of things. In the fourth and last number of The Exile he wrote:
We continue with thought forms and with language structures used by monolinear mediaeval logic, when the aptitudes of the human mind developed in course of bio-chemical studies have long since outrun such simple devices. By which I mean that the biologist can often know and think clearly a number of things he can not put in a simple sentence; he can dissociate things for which there is as yet no dissociated language structure.
And writing, he went on, should no longer pretend ‘that it cannot think (or express) perfectly comprehensible things that don’t happen to fit the syllogism’. In a related note he insisted that ‘Familiarity with the perceived complex of visual or sensuous data…must inevitably beget something more apt for its conveyance than is the simple monolinear sentence’. The challenge was to devise a ‘sentence’ that would hold together in the mind several things at once, or several aspects of a thing, without reasoning them into some single idea or line of argument. By 1930 he had become confident that ‘We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hyper-geometric amalgams.’ That was the form of sentence he was then constructing in his cantos, a sentence that was in the Confucian mode, and definitely not Aristotelian or Scholastic.
It was a mode of writing and a form of art designed to accord with the Confucian paideuma, that is, a mode and a form which would be true, not to an abstract idea, a theory, or an ideology, but to ‘human consciousness and the nature of man’, and to ‘the motions of “the human heart”’; and which would thus feed the mind, biologically, ‘as nutrition of impulse’.
A sextant for ‘A Draft of XXX Cantos’
A Draft of XXX Cantos, with initials in her Vorticist style by D[orothy] S[hakespear] P[ound], was published by Nancy Cunard at her Hours Press in Paris in August 1930, in an edition of 212 copies. It brought together and superseded John Rodker’s A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 ‘with Initials in red and black ink by Gladys Hynes’, published in London in September 1928 in an edition of 101 copies, and William Bird’s A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of some Length now first made into a Book ‘with Initials by Henry Strater’, published in Paris at his Three Mountains Press on the Île Saint-Louis in January 1925 in an edition of 90 copies.
All but six of the cantos had appeared in magazines—the exceptions being 14, 15, 16, 21, 25, and 26. Pound had wanted the hell cantos, 14 and 15, to be read with other cantos in order to bring them into proportion, and he may have felt the same about 16. The other three, dealing with Medici and Venetian matters, were completed by early September of 1927, up against Rodker’s deadline but still with time for magazine publication if Pound had wanted that. Apparently he did not, and again he may not have cared to have them read in isolation.
A Draft of XVI Cantos was Bird’s project, largely carried through while Pound was away from Paris, and Pound had very little say over the format and Strater’s designs. He saw the latter only after the blocks had been cut, and objected to Strater’s straying from the capitals down the margins. He called for more concentration and less ornamentation, but for reasons of expense the changes he wanted could not be made. Rodker’s A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 had exactly matched Bird’s format and even his paper, but this time the designs were done by Gladys Hynes (1888–1958) under Pound’s direction. Dorothy’s initials for A Draft of XXX Cantos, the plainest and cleanest cut of all, were no doubt done in even closer collaboration with Pound.
Pound delighted in having his cantos so magnificently printed. He was even more pleased that the de luxe editions enabled him to bypass commercial publishers and printers. It was inflation, he wrote later, which, ‘at the price of enormous human suffering’, had made it possible for a few years to escape their ‘stifling censorship’ and to print ‘books which AS BOOKS tried to equal those of Soncino and Bodoni as issued in the 1500’s and 1700’s’. That, and getting into print ‘difficult’ work for which the audience didn’t yet exist and which therefore would not interest a commercial publisher, were the positive gains. None of those concerned looked to make money from the ventures. In the case of Bird’s XVI Cantos, even if every one had been sold (which was far from being the case) of the five autographed copies on Imperial Japan paper at $100, and the fifteen on Whatman paper at $50, and the seventy on Roma paper specially watermarked at $25, then Bird and Pound would have received about $250 each after all expenses were met. That would have paid the rent on Pound’s Paris flat for several months, but not for all the years it had taken him to produce those cantos. There was too the serious loss of another kind, in the fact that the cost of these luxury editions put them out of reach of most of the few who would appreciate this launch of a new epic.
In its beginnings an epic was the foundation myth, the once and future story, of a tribe, a nation, a people. Ancient Greece had its Iliad and Odyssey and its classic tragedies; Rome had its Aeneid; mediaeval England had the Arthurian romances and the Mystery plays; Elizabeth’s England had Shakespeare’s histories; and England after the Civil War had Paradise Lost. Then the story changed, with Pilgrim’s Progress, and became concerned rather with the life of the individual than the fate of a people. England’s epic in the eighteenth century was Richardson’s Clarissa; and after that came Byron’s Don Juan and Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or The Growth of the Poet’s Mind, and next Browning’s Sordello. In the mid-nineteenth century, in a United States still inventing itself, Whitman felt the need to reconnect the individual poet with his people, and asserted that his experience must be the common, democratic experience of everyone in America. Pound went on from that to create an epic in which an individual poet would again tell the tale of the tribe, only his tribe would be all of humanity that one man could comprehend; and his tale would be not of himself but would be a universal story, and it would shape a future not for any one nation but for all. The Cantos of Ezra Pound would be the foundation myth of a universal civilization. The global order capitalism has been busily creating is quite possibly the antithesis of what he had in mind.
One way of finding one’s bearings in Pound’s epic is to use the ‘sextant’ which he added to Guide to Kulchur in 1952. This sextant consists of a list of books with brief indications of what he thought them good for. At the head were ‘the Four Books’ of Confucius and Mencius, these providing an all-sufficient guide, for ‘a man who really understands them’, ‘to all problems of conduct that can arise’. As ancillary to these he then named the Odyssey, for ‘intelligence set above brute force’; Greek tragedy for ‘rise of sense of civic responsibility’; and the Divina Commedia for ‘life of the spirit’. He also named Brooks Adams’s Law of Civilization and Decay as the ‘most recent summary of “where in a manner of speaking” we had got to half a century ago’. Those indications, taken together, provide an abstract of the major themes or preoccupations of the Cantos in general, and of A Draft of XXX Cantos in particular:
There are also of course the counter-themes: that there are muddy states of mind, irresponsible rulers, brutal wars; and that unenlightenment is the norm. The drama of this epic is the struggle of a few individuals throughout history to establish an enlightened order amidst and against blank apathy, malignant stupidity, rapacious greed, and jealous possessiveness, while (in Yeats’s words) ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity’.
The war at Troy lies behind the Cantos from the start as the archetypal instance of possessiveness leading to catastrophe. That was a war fought for possession of Helen, daughter of Zeus, and it ended with the total destruction of Troy. The spirits of those killed crowd about Odysseus in canto 1, ‘Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender. | Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads’. In canto 2 the old men of Troy foresee the doom being brought upon their city by its holding on to Helen, and an association is set up with the doom the sailors bring on themselves in blindly trying to seize Dionysos. The fate of Troy is evoked again at the start of canto 4, as striking the key-note of jealousy and possessiveness for that canto. Cantos 5 and 23 note the re-enactment of Troy in the Auvergne, when Pieire de Maensac ‘took off the girl…that was just married to Bernart [De Tierci]’. Eleanor of Aquitaine is perceived as another Helen in cantos 6 (and 7). To attempt to take possession of the life in others or in things is seen to be the prime cause of wars and the destruction of civilizations.
The intelligence to rise above possessiveness comes from being mindful of the divinity in things, as Acoetes and Tiresias are mindful of Dionysos. Then there is the Chinese king saying ‘“No wind is the king’s”’ in canto 4; and, in canto 6, there are Bernart de Ventadour absenting himself so that his lady may be set free, and Cunizza freeing her slaves. In the cantos dealing with more recent times, however, the gods exist only in the poet’s private phantasmagoria, as in ‘Gods float in the azure air, | Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed’. That passage in canto 3 is literary pastiche, wistfully expressing what the young poet would like to have seen in Venice or Sirmione in order to have a vision of the vital universe to set against the drear waste left behind by ‘heroic’ violence. Again, in canto 7, his ‘Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blur’ projects an image of naked beauty, of ‘Nicea’ moving before him in deathly post-war London. In his Renaissance Italy recognitions of the whole and the flowing are just as unlikely, and the consequence there too is a dearth of enlightened conduct.
Canto 12 brings in the world of the poet’s day—‘“where in a manner of speaking” we [have] got to’—with Baldy Bacon as a small-time Odysseus and ‘miraculous Hermes’ who knows the ways of the world and how to work them. ‘Baldy’s interest | Was in money business, | “No interest in any other kind uv bisnis,” | Said Baldy.’ He is a bustling comic hero in a canto which becomes a thoroughly Chaucerian account of money business. Baldy’s is a tale of making killings and going bust. In contrast, the tale of Dos Santos is a success story, the man who saw the chance that others missed and grew to be ‘a great landlord of Portugal’ by putting his all into fattening pigs. A third tale, the ‘Tale of the Honest Sailor’ told by John Quinn to a boardroom of bankers, turns on a comic inversion of the medieval connection of usury with sodomy. Persuaded that he has given birth to a son the formerly drunken sailor reforms and saves all his pay, buys a share in a ship then a ship of his own and eventually has ‘a whole line of steamers’, all to leave to his son. This story of honest virtue prospering by devoted saving and investing is aimed to show up the respectable bankers,
|
the ranked presbyterians, |
| Directors, dealers through holding companies, |
| Deacons in churches, owning slum properties, |
| Alias usurers in excelsis |
Here the tone is not comic. The bankers, ‘whining over their 20 p.c. and the hard times’, represent the complacent greed which would enslave Dionysos: or, in modern terms, the greed which changes producers into debt-slaves, and which restricts the distribution of ‘the abundance of nature’, by charging excessive rates of interest and generally pursuing private profit without regard for the common good. In canto 14, the first of the ‘hell cantos’, they are mentioned as ‘the perverts, who have set money-lust | Before the pleasures of the senses’.
‘Mr Pound’s Hell’, Mr Eliot objected in his notorious and yet very curious put-down in After Strange Gods, ‘is a Hell for the other people…not for oneself and one’s friends’. One must allow that Pound did not share his friend’s taste for damnation. More to the point, Eliot’s remark is a doubtless deliberate attempt to place Pound’s hell within his own Christian frame of reference, which Pound had very deliberately excised. The guide here is not Dante but Plotinus, and the sinners are those who offend against the light of intelligence, against the Nous. The first line of canto 14 is from the Inferno, ‘Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto’, I came into a place where the light had died out; but Pound does not go on with Dante to note ‘the carnal sinners’. Instead he follows Plotinus’ idea that evil is whatever is not animated and formed by the universal light and so falls away ‘in gloom and mud’, into endless dissolution and darkness. That makes hell in Pound’s vision the ‘last cess-pool of the universe’, an ‘ooze full of morsels, | lost contours, erosions’, ‘The slough of unamiable liars, | bog of stupidities’. In the ooze are the unenlightened, ‘politicians’, ‘Profiteers drinking blood’, ‘financiers’, ‘the press gang | And those who had lied for hire’, ‘slum owners, | usurers…pandars to authority’, ‘pets-de-loup…obscuring the text with philology’, ‘monopolists, obstructors of knowledge, | obstructors of distribution’. When the poet feels himself being sucked into that bog Plotinus, in the guise of Perseus, warns him to keep his eyes on the mirror-shield of Minerva, the shield in which the mind sees these things as they are reflected in the divine Mind. What saves him and can save the reader is the intelligence which sees through all the disgusting deliquescence to a clear and definite idea ‘of mental ROT’.
In canto 16 the poet gets out of that hell into a kind of Elysium where there are ‘the heroes, | Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello, | and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities’. There in ‘the quiet air’ he falls asleep in the grass by a pool and hears voices telling anecdotes of modern wars and revolution. In effect these voices give us the contemporary purgatory. Just as Pound’s hell represents the prevailing state of unenlightenment, so his purgatory represents the conditions of the relatively enlightened caught up in the absurdities and horrors of wars started and kept going by the unenlightened. He sees neither punishment nor purgation in this purgatory of war, simply an evil state of affairs that must be endured. And his heroes are not the conventional war-heroes. They are writers and artists, his friends Aldington, Gaudier, Hulme, and Lewis, and Fernand Léger, men of clear-sighted intelligence who fought as they had to without letting the passions of war cloud their minds. Their heroism is akin to that of Sigismundo, whose achievement was his Tempio in spite of all his warring, and that of his brother Novello who endowed Cesena with a library, a hospital, and a school.
2. ‘The XVIII Canto’, initial by Gladys Hynes, in A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928).
Cantos 18 and 19 go on with ‘where we have got to’, largely in the style of muck-raking journalism. The underlying issues here are civic responsibility, or rather, in 18, the civic irresponsibility of a one-man financial–industrial–military complex; and, in 19, the mysteries of who does control the economy and in whose interest. The point, for Pound, of Marco Polo’s account of Kublai Khan’s paper money, with which he opens canto 18, is that it gave the tyrant control of credit throughout his empire and that he used it to accumulate wealth for himself. That prefigures the contemporary monopolist ‘Zenos Metevsky’ who, having grown from selling arms to presiding over their manufacture, ‘was consulted before the offensives’; became ‘“the well-known financier, better known,” | As the press said, “as a philanthropist”’—the latter on account of his endowing ‘a chair of ballistics’; and, now ‘Sir Zenos Metevsky’, was ‘elected President | Of the Gethsemane Trebizond Petrol’, thus tying up in the modern way oil, the arms industry, big money, and political influence.
Canto 19 goes into the ways in which new inventions and other natural resources are controlled by vested interests, incidentally observing that an inventor doesn’t have to sell out to the corporation that means not to develop his patent. The suspect notion of a genuinely democratic and humane economic system is glanced at—Tómaš Masaryk of CzechoSlovakia, ‘the old kindly professor’ in the corner, believed in that, as did Douglas—and ‘the stubby fellow’ upstairs, Arthur Griffiths of Sinn Fein, agreed, but could not get his people to see it. ‘“Can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics”’, he said. In the background the Communist revolution is getting a mass of disillusioned soldiers moving. (Later, in canto 27, there is a song to put down ‘tovarisch’—‘the unit submerged in the mass’—who rose up ‘and wrecked the house of the tyrants’, then ‘talked folly’ and built nothing, ‘Laid never stone upon stone’. The trouble with the Russian Revolution, Pound would say, was that it could not be run from below—‘Things get done from the TOP’.)
It is a common mistake to assume that Pound looked back to the Renaissance as a golden age when constructive intelligence prevailed. 1 That is evidently not the case in the Malatesta cantos, where Sigismundo’s temple for Isotta and the pagan gods is achieved against the general current of his life and times. It is even more clearly not the case in canto 5, where ‘The light of the Renaissance shines in Varchi’, the objective historian ‘wanting the facts’, and not in the two Medici, the one, Lorenzo, murdering the other with terrible deliberation, and the victim, his cousin Duke Alessandro, holding ‘his death for a doom. | In abuleia’. It is worth bearing in mind that for Pound ‘the finest force’ of the Renaissance was ‘the revival’, in the writings of Lorenzo Valla and of Machiavelli, of ‘the sense of realism’.
Canto 24 (with part of canto 20) deals with Niccolò d’Este who owned and ruled Ferrara. The first page consists of entries in Ferrara’s ‘book of the mandates’ or state orders recording his young wife Parisina’s orders for payments to her jockey and for her shopping, and in particular 25 ducats for a green tunic embroidered with silver for her lord’s natural son, Ugo. We know from canto 20 that Niccolò, in his rage, will have both their heads cut off for their adultery and then become delirious with jealousy and grief. Yet he would give Ugo a state funeral; marry again and beget legitimate children; be praised as ‘Affable, bullnecked, that brought seduction in place of | Rape into government’, and for having on three occasions made peace in Italy. He knew how to keep his territory intact. Nevertheless he appears as a man dominated by his passions, and as intellectually and spiritually unawakened. In his youth he had made a sort of Renaissance grand tour, ‘in the wake of Odysseus’, ‘To Cithera (a.d. 1413) “dove fu Elena rapta da Paris”’, and to Jerusalem, everywhere having a good time as a tourist visiting a past that was dead, simply dead for him. In his mind there was no renaissance, no awakening to what had been and might be. And he left no enduring legacy. His statue and Borso’s were melted down in Napoleon’s time for ‘cannon, bells, door-knobs’; and Ferrara, it was said, had turned into a paradise for tailors and dressmakers.
The Medici are noticed, rather cursorily and very pointedly, in canto 21. They too believed in peace-making in Italy, for the reason that peace served their business interests better than war. Their business was banking, accumulating money, and extending credit to the rich and powerful not only in Italy but throughout all of Europe. In fact they were the inventors of modern loan capitalism, and their contribution to the development of high finance, though masked by their patronage of high culture, was of deeper and more lasting consequence for European civilization. They gave the example in the fifteenth century of how control of credit could bring with it effective control of public affairs, and it is this aspect of the Medici that the canto highlights. Far from being associated with the re-awakening evident, for instance, in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, they are shown bringing in the new rule of money. ‘“Keep on with the business”’, Cosimo’s father urged him, ‘“That’s made me, | And the res publica didn’t.”’ And young Lorenzo, when he inherited the business and effective control of the ‘res publica’, remarked that it was tough being the rich man of Florence if you did not at the same time own the state.
The latter part of this canto belongs to a completely different mental world from that of the Medici. It is made up of a rather hectic sequence of apparently random images, mostly natural images, and most of them charged with suggestions of ‘the discontinuous gods’, of Dionysos, Artemis, and Pallas Athene, an ‘Owl-eye amid pine boughs’. ‘Confusion’ is the apt comment, but with the emphasis ‘Confusion, source of renewals’. The passage is like a welling up of what has no place in the banking business, a return of the repressed in a confused dream. And as can happen in a dream one statement stands out, ‘“Damned to you Midas, Midas lacking a Pan!”’ King Midas, according to Ovid, being an initiate in the Orphic orgies, recognized old Silenus as a fellow member when he was brought to him in a drunken state, and entertained him well before conducting him to Dionysos, his foster-son. To reward Midas the god said he might have whatever he wished, and, out of his mind with greed, the king asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. When he discovered his mistake and confessed it the god removed the unnatural power, and Midas, now hating riches, spent his days with Pan in his groves and mountains. That tie with nature, the dream warns, is what the money-making Medici had lost.
Pound’s treatment of Renaissance Venice in cantos 25 and 26 is closely related to his treatment of the Medici and Nic d’Este. The great ‘BOOK OF THE COUNCIL MAJOR’ records petty regulations—‘1255 be it enacted; | That they musn’t shoot crap in the hall | of the council’—and another book records for posterity as if it were the wonder of all wonders that the Doge’s lioness gave birth to three cubs. Otherwise, what the Council mainly enacted through the fourteenth century appear to have been a series of improvements to the Doge’s palace, including building a grand new council hall for themselves ‘out over the arches’ by the Grand Canal. Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice which Pound would surely have known, says that the Doge’s palace was the focal building of Venetian culture as the Parthenon was of Athens, and that what it expressed was, first, that Venice was no longer governed by its best individual but by an oligarchy, and second that its public policy was determined only by commercial self-interest with religion playing no part. For those reasons Renaissance Venice, in Ruskin’s view, lost its creative energy around 1423 when the new council hall was first used, and thereafter fell into luxury and decadence. Pound’s vision of the palace with the new hall appearing to hang ‘baseless’ in the dawn mist could accord with that, if one reads the image as not just a fine aesthetic effect after Turner, but as declaring that the culture and government of Venice had no ground under it, no virtù, no individual genius, and no enlightened vision.
The central passage of canto 25 weaves together several themes, some new and some repeated from previous cantos, to make explicit what Venice lacked. ‘Sulpicia’, a minor Roman poet who sang out her love in clear direct speech, is introduced as a still living natural phenomenon, ‘green shoot now, and the wood | white under new cortex’. Then the art of a Gaudier is evoked, ‘“sculptor sees the form in the air | before he sets hand to mallet”’. Sulpicia again, now ‘As ivory uncorrupted’, sings to the man she loves ‘“Pone metum Cerinthe”’, put away fear Cerinthus—
| Lay there, the long soft grass, |
| and the flute lay there by her thigh, |
| Sulpicia, the fauns, twig-strong, |
| gathered about her; |
| The fluid, over the grass |
| Zephyrus, passing through her, |
| ‘deus nec laedit amantes’. |
—the god does no harm to lovers. Against that is heard ‘from the stone pits’, as from those who made over the Doge’s palace, ‘heavy voices’ saying,
| ‘Nothing we made, we set nothing in order, |
| ‘Neither house nor the carving, |
| ‘And what we thought had been thought for too long…’ |
Sulpicia’s song breaks in, now from the chorus of young fauns moving to the notes of a Pan pipe. The heavy theme resumes, ‘the dead words keeping form |…The dead concepts, never the solid, the blood rite’. At the end of the passage Sulpicia’s song of life leads back to the sculptor’s vision,
| And thought then, the deathless, |
| Form, forms and renewal, gods held in the air, |
| Forms seen, and then clearness… |
—as Aphrodite might be seen taking form in the sea, with the fluid waves holding that form, ‘as crystal’. But what Venice asked of its greatest painter Titian—so the canto continues—was to paint in the ‘fourth frame from the door on | the right of the hall of the greater council…The picture of the land battle’; and when he hadn’t fulfilled the commission after twenty years the Council asked for their money back. Canto 26 mainly documents the decline of Venice into sumptuous luxuria, dead concepts, cautious intrigues, and prosperous commerce, with the epitaph ‘And they are dead and have left a few pictures’.
The Venetian oligarchy are not made to appear evil, any more than are the Medici or the Este. All of them are credited with a preference for peace over war and for intelligence over brute force, even if for self-interested motives; also with having had some sense of civic responsibility, though again only so far as it served their own interests. But that self-servingness is their radical defect: they were not moved to serve the larger life of the spirit. Their famed Renaissance, therefore, was no renaissance at all from Pound’s point of view.
Where then in these cantos is the life of the spirit in evidence as the main motive of conduct? One thinks again of Acoetes in the mythopoesis of canto 2, attempting to open Pentheus’ eyes to energies beyond his comprehension; and of Bernart de Ventadorn’s song to free his lady of Eblis; and of Cunizza who lived in love, and who set free her slaves. But after Cunizza, that is, after the time of Cavalcanti and Dante, there is only Sigismundo’s odd and wonderful monument to his love for Isotta and to the gods. Otherwise, down to the present day, one finds only the poet’s own attempts to recreate the lost vision and motive.
In canto 29 some fun is had at the expense of this poet as a young and innocent student all at sea in his American milieu, a ‘Lusty Juventus’ sublimating his desire in ‘a burning fire of phantasy’, and not yet aware that actually it seeks fulfilment in the seemingly alien ‘biological process’. The young poet and his world are that far removed from the culture of Cunizza and Sordello, and from the fulfilment of his desire. But then the distance, the tension between the desire by which he lives and its possible paradise intensifies the desire and makes it the driving force of his poem. The poem must give form and substance to what he seeks but can find in his actual world only in hints and vestiges and fragments. He knows of a world that seems responsibly ordered, in Confucius’ China as caught in the mirror of Canto 13, but that is a world elsewhere governed by a different if complementary vision. His own world, that of the hell and the other contemporary cantos, has lost all coherence and is in the dark of ignorant passion. To remake it he must somehow grow into the role of Zagreus, lord of life in the world of the dead.
That is what canto 17 is about—or it is about the difference between the mind that is ever at the interpretation of the vital universe and the mind (such as that of Venice) in which the universe is not alive. This is the formal structure of the canto:
ll. 1–6 1st subject: ‘So that the vines burst from my fingers…IO ZAGREUS!’
ll. 7–12 response: Diana moving in the dawn woods with her hounds;
ll. 13–18 counter-subject: stone Venice, ‘marble trunks out of stillness’;
ll. 19–42 response: Cave of Nerea, seeing the principle of life even in stone by a ‘light not of the sun’ (meaning the light of the mind?);
ll. 43–55 development of 1st subject: Zagreus & Co. in full light;
ll. 56–7 the keynote image as central pivot: ‘the great alley of Memnons’ where the stone sings when the first light strikes it;
ll. 58–84 development of counter-subject: an alley of cypress, then stone Venice and its crafts by torch-light;
ll. 85–103 variation on the main theme: envisioning gods in their splendour;
ll. 104–12 repeat of counter-subject: the stone place, unliving and deadly;
l. 113 resolving chord: ‘Sunset like the grasshopper flying’—the live creature flares crimson for its moment in the air.
The whole canto is a musical composition of images and their tensile associations, formulated in firm rhythmic phrases, and organized into a complex which calls for contemplation, not monolinear explication. The ear, the inner eye, and the intelligence are all engaged here, and the contemplation needs to be just as active as the composition in envisioning and critically discriminating one image against another, the oak woods on the green slope against the forest of marble, the sea cave shaped and coloured by waves against the still waters reflecting ‘Dye-pots in the torch-light’. From this process a definite structure will emerge, amounting overall to a setting of natural energies against artefacts—against even beautiful artefacts. The canto itself asks to be taken not as an aesthetic object but as an act of mind, an act, that is, of the hearer’s and reader’s mind as much as of the poet’s. Further, this act is necessarily critical, judgemental, though not according to any code. The discriminations are based upon the simpler and fundamental preference for energies in action as against stasis, for ‘Zagreus’ against ‘arbours of stone’.
The final canto of the first thirty applies something of a reality check to that feeling for energies in action. It has Artemis/Diana damning things foul and ‘growne awry’, and complaining that because Pity preserves them ‘Nothing is now clean slayne | But rotteth away’. She would have only healthily growing trees in her forests, and would cut away all rotting and dead wood. In that spirit Venus (the canto implies) should not keep old Vulcan’s embers warm, but play with young Mars instead; and there is something terribly wrong in young King Pedro’s enthroning beside him his murdered and long dead bride.
Though she may seem opposed to life-giving Zagreus/Dionysos, ruthless Artemis would also serve the life-principle, as surgery, and antibiotics, do. Or, as in the hell and Metevsky cantos, satire and realist writing would. Pound found the idea expressed in a Confucian ideogram, hsin1, which brought together ‘the growing tree…the orderly arrangement above it, and the axe for cutting away encumbrance’, and which meant ‘to cut down wood, to renew, to renovate’. Pound read the ideogram as MAKE IT NEW and adopted it as his emblem.
Set with and/or against Venus and Pedro—how to discriminate here?—is the wicked Lucrezia Borgia, who was at least a force of nature in her time, manifesting (like Lorenzaccio de’ Medici in canto 5) a fearsome resolution. ‘Madame ῞ϒΛΗ’ she is called in the canto, that being the Greek, according to Pound, for ‘uncut forest, the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being’. Defective as she was in intellectual and spiritual virtue, a real mafiosa, Lucrezia had yet the virtue of crude energy. And that, even as it subsists in a jungle wilderness, was affirmed as the ‘Basis of renewal’ in canto 20 following Nic d’Este’s breakdown into delirium. This would suggest that the renewing energies of a renaissance are not primarily spiritual or intellectual but are from the raw basis of life.
Still, beyond the raw material of a Lucrezia there is the carving of it into intelligible forms, as in the cutting of letters for the printing of books—and as in the making out of such matters ‘something to think about | objects worth contemplation’.
Literary relations old and new
In January 1928 The Dial, in giving its annual Award to Pound, declared him ‘one of the most valuable forces in contemporary letters’. However Eliot, his old friend in letters, when invited to endorse the award was rather equivocal about Pound’s poetry and seemed intent on playing down its relevance. Under the heading ‘Isolated Superiority’, with his emphasis falling on the first of the two words, he granted that Pound was immensely influential, on account of his superior mastery of verse forms; and yet he had made no disciples, he claimed, because ‘one makes disciples only among those who sympathise with the content’, and with the ‘content’ of Pound’s poetry he himself was wholly out of sympathy, and so too, he appeared to assume, would be all the world. ‘I am seldom interested in what he is saying’, he wrote in his best putting down manner, ‘but only in the way he says it.’ Eliot knew perfectly well that this form/content dichotomy was untenable, that form, to be at all interesting, had to be the form of something of interest; but he was now attempting to criticize literature from the point of view of his Anglo-Catholic faith—in other words he was heresy-hunting—and what he was really after was ‘what does Mr Pound believe?’ Pound’s short answer to his inquisitor was, ‘read Confucius and Ovid’. In due course Eliot would declare him a heretic, a follower of alien gods, an outsider; and Pound would riposte that to return to the bosom of the one God of Judaeo-Christianity was to give up the struggle for enlightenment. Their differences now set such a distance between them intellectually.
Yet they were not personally estranged. Pound could tell the American agent for The Exile that he was ‘on the best possible personal terms with Eliot, though our literary camps do not coincide’. He even tried to persuade Williams to send Eliot ‘a nice little note of welcome’ upon his appointment as Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, hoping that opposition to what Eliot stood for ‘might be cordial and amiable’. ‘A difference of belief CAN among decent human beings be conducted’ with decency, he suggested. While he would have nothing to do with Eliot’s royalism and his Anglo-Catholicism, he could still recognize his literary discernment, ‘discriminating retroactive academicism’ though it might be, as solid enough to be worth rebelling against.
Wyndham Lewis also cast off Pound intellectually in these years and did all he could to denigrate him as a poet. In 1927, in his short-lived magazine The Enemy, and then in his book Time and Western Man, he put Pound down as a kind-hearted, well-meaning ‘revolutionary simpleton’. His poems, he declared, were parasitic upon a romanticized past with which Pound was too much in love; and Pound simply did not have the intelligence and the originality to be the revolutionary modernist he set up to be. Lewis registered that he had been always generous and graceful to him personally, and had helped him out financially. He might have made more of Pound’s unflagging support for and promotion of his work, as in recommending him in the strongest terms to the new Guggenheim Foundation in 1925, but then he no longer wanted to be associated with him as an artist or writer. Pound was to him now ‘an intellectual eunuch’. The charge that he was altogether bound up with the past and incapable of understanding the present, let alone of grasping the enduring forms of things, would have touched Pound where he was most ambitious as a poet. Yet he took no offence. When his father showed concern Pound advised him, ‘Don’t worry about Lewis—all large fauna shd. be preserved.’ And he could say to Williams in 1929 that ‘ole Wyndham getting out and kussing everyone (me included)’ showed a ‘healthy tendency’. His devotion to what he thought Lewis’s best interests was unaffected, and he continued to count him as one of the ‘large and vivid mental animals’ of his generation who had saved him from feeling that he lived in an intellectual desert.
There remained Joyce from his wartime vortex, and here it was Pound who became disaffected. He declined to sign a protest against the pirating of Ulysses in America on the ground that the protest should be directed, not against the unscrupulous publisher, but against the copyright and decency laws which gave him his opportunity. He may have been right in principle, but Joyce felt it as a personal disloyalty. More serious was Pound’s making nothing whatever of a fragment of Work in Progress Joyce had asked him to read. ‘Nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization’, was the verdict he promptly returned. And that remained his judgment upon what became Finnegans Wake. In 1933 he pronounced it deficient in awareness of what was going on in the contemporary world—in the operations, for example, of ‘the network of french banks and international munition sellers’—and to be therefore not the work of a great writer. ‘I never had any respect for his common sense or for his intelligence’, he wrote in a review published in Paris in 1931, ‘I mean general intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer’. Joyce, so far as Pound was concerned, was now history.
Pound’s relations with Yeats were at once closer and more antagonistic than with the men of his own generation. In 1928 Yeats and his wife, Dorothy’s close friend George, decided to spend much of each year in Rapallo and took an apartment there. ‘I shall not lack conversation’, Yeats reflected after an hour on Pound’s rooftop listening to his efforts to lay out the system of his ‘immense poem’. He seems to have felt a need to make up his mind about Pound, ‘whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I would quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection’. The affection shows in his account of going out with Pound into the seafront garden at night where Pound would call the cats of Rapallo and feed them bones and pieces of meat and relate each one’s history. Yeats’s narrative, however, turns to reflection upon the scene, and he thinks that really Pound has no fondness for cats but feeds them out of some general pity for the outcast and oppressed; and that same pity, or ‘hysteria’, he suggests, may be what inclines him in his criticism to become violent against injustice. In the same way there is a sceptical undercurrent subverting his account of Pound’s explanations of how he was structuring the cantos. The whole poem when complete, he reports, will ‘display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue’; but then he puts in a series of negatives, ‘There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse’, no ‘conventions of the intellect’ at all. A footnote draws in Lewis’s attack on Pound’s art in Time and Western Man, saying that it ‘sounds true to a man of my generation’ that ‘If we reject, [as Lewis] argues, the forms and categories of the intellect there is nothing left but sensation, “eternal flux”’. The footnote is qualified by the recognition that ‘all such rejections stop at the conscious mind’; but Yeats does not follow through to the corollary that there may be orders other than the conscious mind’s logic. By 1936 these reflections in Rapallo had hardened into unqualified judgements. ‘Ezra Pound has made flux his theme’, Yeats stated flatly in the Introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935, ‘plot, characterization, logical discourse, seem to him abstractions unsuitable to a man of his generation’. And in consequence, ‘Like other readers I discover at present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments.’ As for his work as a whole, Yeats now found ‘more style than form’ in it; and then that its sometimes noble style
is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion; he is an economist, poet, politician, raging at malignants with inexplicable characters and motives, grotesque figures out of a child’s book of beasts. This loss of self-control, common among uneducated revolutionists, is rare—Shelley had it in some degree—among men of Ezra Pound’s culture and erudition.
Yeats’s baffled account of the cantos shows how very far beyond his comprehension they were; but his views on both the cantos and Pound in general were becoming commonplace.
Pound was irritated by Yeats’s negativity towards his work to the extent of saying that Yeats would not know ‘a fugue from a frog’. He may also have been reassured by it. The true revolutionary finds confirmation of his project in the resistance it provokes. At the least he must accept that it is in the nature of things that those who stand by the established order will put down any nascent new order as disorderly; and that a liberation from convention will be felt by the conventional as a loss of control. Any genuine intellectual revolution will be, according to the received forms of reason and logic, irrational, illogical, and a menace to society. Only those who have a vital interest in changing the existing social and intellectual order are likely to respond positively to a radically new way of thinking.
Ford could accept in his breezy way that ‘Melopoeia, Phanopoeia and the rest of the screw-wrenches and claw-hammers of Mr Pound’s engineering bench are merely his formidable tools for monkeying with the screw-nuts of human consciousness’. That, after all, was what good writing did—monkeyed with human consciousness! It was Williams, though, almost alone of Pound’s friends and contemporaries, who really took up the radical challenge of the cantos fearlessly and without prejudice. He perceived that in them the intelligence was seeking to penetrate ‘a closed mind which clings to its power’, and that in order to do this it had to ‘move…away from the word as symbol toward the word as reality’. ‘The word as symbol’ would have been aimed at Yeats and at Eliot, and at one tendency of English poetry; and it would have been aimed through them at those habits of ‘logical discourse’ which serve to maintain the hold of the closed mind on language. Among those habits would be such preconceived ‘forms and categories of the intellect’ as Eliot’s ‘belief’, and Yeats’s ‘plot and character’. There would also be the poets’ habit of glancing off things in themselves into subjective associations, of thinking ‘what is it like’ and thus avoiding the challenge to observe exactly what it is and does; and there would be the related habit of thinking ‘what does it stand for’ and thus thrusting off into abstraction and generality. The opposing term, ‘the word as reality’, would have had behind it ‘the principal move in imaginative writing today’—Williams might as well have said in American writing—for which his own favoured formulation was ‘no ideas but in things’; and for which there was also Wallace Stevens’s ‘not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself’—Stevens’s ‘thing’ being invariably and overtly the thing in the mind; and of course there was Pound’s own ‘direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective’. This was a move to reform the language in poetry in order to free the mind from mediating preconceptions and conventions and to open it to a more direct apprehension of the facts of its world. Of necessity the process of forming a new intelligence of things involved breaking up the existing frame of mind.
Pound was far from being alone or ‘isolated’ in this intellectual revolution. Williams and Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, each in their own way, were committed to it. And a new generation of poets was going on from them in pursuit of ‘the revolution of the word’, some of them even as, loosely speaking, disciples of Pound. The most advanced of these was Louis Zukofsky. 2 Zukofsky submitted his deeply unconventional ‘Poem Beginning “The”’ for publication in The Exile in August 1927, and Pound accepted it immediately as ‘First cheering mss. I have recd. in weeks, or months’. That was the beginning of a warm and sustained literary relationship, in which Pound encouraged and gave confidence to Zukofsky as he went beyond Pound on his own line of invention, while Zukofsky was ready to acknowledge Pound as his father in poetry, as Browning had been Pound’s, without ever turning Oedipal on him. The basis of their relationship was a common understanding of what poets could and should be doing in their particular world and time.
In a review of cantos 1–27 published in 1929 Zukofsky took in his stride a number of things which other readers were balking at. There was the ‘problem’ of Pound’s mixing up times and places and persons without regard to where historians had shelved them, as in his shifting straight from Odysseus to Sordello, from Proteus to the Dogana’s steps in Venice, and from Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini to Baldy Bacon in New York. How was a reader supposed to know where he was! But to Zukofsky Pound could do this quite safely ‘because all new subject matter is ineluctably simultaneous with “what has gone before”’—that is, it is so in the mind thinking these things. In the mind, ‘the living them at once…is as much a fact as those facts which historians have labelled and disassociated’. The poet’s business, Zukofsky implied, was with the particular facts actually present to the mind, lived facts bound up with their historical and human contingencies yet still free from the arbitrary constructions of historians or of any other authorities. In the perspective of the poetic mind Dionysos might be nearer than Odysseus, and Confucius might be a contemporary. On a deeper level, an inferno, a purgatorio, and a paradiso could be realized as states of the intensely observing mind and be manifest ‘as hate, comprehension and worship rather than as religious geometry’; and these states, moreover, could be ‘continually intersecting’. It was evident to Zukofsky as to few others that it was those states of mind and those emotions—hate, comprehension, and worship—which were the driving force of the cantos, and the organizer of form in them. Certainly, he did not find them formless or incoherent. In the preface to his ‘Objectivists’ Anthology he judged them ‘the greatest poem of our time’. And he dedicated the anthology to Pound as ‘still for the poets of our time | the | most important’.
Pound did not want to ‘make disciples’. He wanted the new generation to ‘make it new’ in their own way, and as his influence grew he used it to urge the young to organize themselves and make their own revolution. In December 1931 he told Zukofsky to pay no attention to his doubts about whether A could be sustained as a long poem. ‘Every generation has to do something its granpap can’t quite make out’, he wrote, ‘If you think you are right, go ahead, and don’t listen to me or any of yr/ other damnd ancestors.’ He could see that Zukofsky was ‘working out a new musical structure’, ‘an abstracter kind of poesy than my generation went in for’, and that he needed to concentrate on his ‘own aesthetic’. ‘There is no REASON’, he wrote. ‘why I shd. be able to be any more use to you (as critic) 1930 to 1950 than yeats to me 1910 to 1930.’
At the same time he placed remarkable faith in Zukofsky as an editor of the new generation—remarkable because until then he had never trusted anyone’s judgement but his own. In the fall of 1930 he persuaded Harriet Monroe to have Zukofsky edit an ‘Objectivists’ number of Poetry. (After the event she noted how in ‘the arrogance of youth’ he had swept away all the poets she had celebrated in Poetry; yet she still bravely offered ‘the glad hand to the iconoclasts’ who had ‘resisted and overthrown’ numerous tyrannies, among them ‘the tyranny of the comma, the capital, the verb, the sentence, of syntax, so long sacrosanct’.) Pound ‘gave over to younger poets the space offered him’. He also lavished advice in a series of long letters—four in as many days in October—on what should and should not be included, all the while protesting that he did not want to ‘insert my point of view’. Zukofsky was urged to ‘produce something that…will stand against Des Imagistes’ and emphasize ‘progress made since 1912’; he should ‘give your decade’, ‘make it a murkn number’, and aim for ‘the DRIVE | or driving force or xpression of same’. ‘AND the verse used MUST be good. | preferably by men under 30.’
Pound was constantly telling young editors and writers to organize themselves into groups. ‘A group is very useful, for gathering information, etc., both enlightenment, and stimulus to action,’ he advised Zukofsky in August 1928. He was urging him to ‘form some sort of gang’ around the idea of getting interesting books printed and distributed ‘without too damnd much bother’ from commercial considerations; and, secondly, of mounting ‘simultaneous attacks in as many papers as poss. on abuses definitely damaging la vie intellectuelle’. ‘Find some cheap restaurant and dine together once a week’, he wrote; ‘make a NEW grouping’; ‘avoid tired and worn out personalities’, also ‘definite party men (like Mike Gold)’; ‘NOT too many women, and if possible no wives’; ‘got to have a busy man’; ‘must have some access to journals’—and so on, at length. ‘Always 60% of group duds’, he acknowledged, ‘but it don’t matter’. Zukoksky dutifully contacted some of Pound’s nominations, but no group materialized as a result. He, and the other Objectivists, were not group minded.
In these years Pound was in touch with any number of little and mostly fugitive magazines, with New Review (Americans in Paris), Blues (Mississippi), Contempo (North Carolina), Morada (New Mexico), New Masses (New York), Front (The Hague), Bifur (Paris), Variétés (Brussels), Stream (Melbourne), Midland (Iowa), Frontier (Montana); and with the ‘most solid’ of the small magazines, Hound and Horn (Cambridge, Mass.), which saw itself as a successor to The Dial. ‘Every generation or group must write its own literary program’, he told Charles Henri Ford, editor of Blues—and then asked him to print Pound’s own ‘Program’ as enclosed. However, he was not expecting the editor to agree with it. ‘My son’, he wrote to another editor, Lincoln Kirstein of Hound and Horn, ‘elucidate thine own bloody damn point of view by its contrast to others, not by trying to make the others conform.’ What he wanted was some definite point of view with the drive to make its impact. It was always time for some new ‘group move’ to be made, ‘to stir up the animals and in general put some life into the “corpse”’, i.e. into the US body politic and its culture.
Pound had his reasons for investing so much energy in advising, encouraging, and hectoring the editors of little magazines for very little measurable return. There was the ‘need for intellectual communication unconditioned by considerations as to whether a given idea or a given trend in art will “git ads” from the leading corset companies’. And there was the fact, as he had observed over twenty years, that
The work of writers who have emerged in or via [the impractical or fugitive] magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner. The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines.
Big magazines with their heavier ‘overheads’ could not ‘afford to deal in experiment’. There had to be little magazines if there was to be uncommercial new writing. The revolution depended on them.
Towards the end of 1926 Pound was considering starting up an independent little magazine of his own. He had a publicity card printed on which he declared,
EXILE will appear three times per annum until I get bored with producing it. It will contain matter of interest to me personally, and is unlikely to appeal to any save those disgusted with the present state of letters in England…
To Aldington he added that its existence would be justified by ‘mss.…which cdn’t appear elsewhere’. To John Price, who was helping to launch the magazine in America, he was more ambitious, telling him that his ‘new show ought to bring force to a focus’. He was thinking back to the ‘push that was in the ideogram: Joyce–Lewis–Eliot–E.P. in 1917’; but he had to admit that any force equivalent to that ‘“vortex” doth NOT at the present date yet appear’. That was on 12 January 1927. Just a week later he was persuaded ‘to go ahead AT ONCE’ by John Rodker’s ‘novel or “nouvelle”’, Adolphe 1920: ‘The Rodker is a definite contribution to literature, and it is the quality of that and nothing else that has decided me,’ he told Price.
Adolphe 1920 took up two-thirds of Exile no. 1 (‘primavera | 1927’), was continued in no. 2 (Autumn 1927), and concluded in no. 3 (Spring 1928). It gave one answer to Pound’s wondering what could be done in prose after Ulysses. Along with it Pound published in the four numbers of Exile quite a miscellany of other prose, most of it realism by Americans about Americans, with Robert McAlmon’s ‘Truer Than Most Accounts’ the longest and most impressive. No. 3 contained mainly verse: two of Yeats’s new poems, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Blood and the Moon’; Zukofsky’s long and strikingly innovative ‘Poem Beginning “The”’; a substantial part of Pound’s own ‘Canto XXIII’; and then, after these most advanced poems of the day, twenty-five pages featured R. C. Dunning’s finely crafted and charmingly old-fashioned prose and poems. William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter, a notebook sequence in verse and prose, took up forty pages of no. 4. There was more prose and verse from Zukofsky, poems by Carl Rakosi, and a piece by McAlmon on (and against) Gertrude Stein. The remaining forty-odd pages contained various editorial comments and short articles by Pound which he had had to hold over from the other numbers.
There had been no contributions from Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, or Ford; but then their work was appearing elsewhere. The justification of the short-lived magazine, on Pound’s own terms, would have been its publishing Rodker’s Adolphe 1920, Williams’s The Descent of Winter, and above all its introducing Zukofsky’s new poetic. Beyond that the remarkable thing is that Pound for once had no defining programme or principle in mind, and no idea of organizing a literary movement. His editorial choices do seem to have been governed simply by what interested him personally, namely realism both objective and subjective, experiment and innovation, and the condition of America. And his prose blasts, which one would expect to have been directed towards bringing his chosen forces into some particular focus or vortex, were directed instead towards other preoccupations and a distinctly non-literary agenda.
In the sphere of action
When he accepted the Dial Award in 1928 Pound said that it would have to be for his verse, since his prose was ‘mostly stop-gap; attempts to deal with transient states of murkn imbecility or ignorance’. ‘Occasionally one has to kick a traffic cop. (verbally)’, he had told John Price, ‘My verbal boot has cleared a few spaces. The “prose” if you want to call it that belongs to the sphere of action, not to “art and letters”.’ He had of course written no end of ‘critical prose’ in the sphere of ‘art and letters’ but that was intended simply ‘to make people think’. Now his ‘social or political prose’ was meant ‘to make people act’, like Lenin’s short and effective speeches which helped get the Russian Revolution going in 1917. Its function was to get across some basic, ‘root’ idea that would stir people into action, ‘preferably after they have been booted into thinking’, against the unenlightenment and oppression of the moment.
He was not unaware that such prose was a deflection, for the artist, into agitation and propaganda—a deflection, for him, from poetry into agitprop. In ‘Dr Williams’ Position’ (1928) he explicitly contrasted himself with Williams in this respect. Whereas he could not ‘observe the nation befouled by Volsteads and Bryans without anger’, or ‘see liberties that have lasted for a century thrown away for nothing…without indignation’, Williams could contemplate such things without feeling driven to immediate action. ‘Where I want to kill at once’, Pound wrote, Williams would meditate on his dissatisfactions and not be goaded into ‘ultra-artistic or non- artistic activity’.
Pound really did believe in the efficacy of indignation and disgust. ‘Improvements in human conditions are mainly due to disgust,’ he told a ‘lady from Omaha’ who appeared to be calling for a more tolerant disposition towards ‘public imbecility’. ‘America lacks it’, i.e. disgust, he lamented, ‘oh, abysmally lacks it!’ ‘Personally’, he declared, ‘I experience strong desire to annihilate certain states of mind and their protagonists.’ What that often meant in practice, however, was merely a rhetoric of cussing and calling out, as in this ‘lyric’ response to a request for his autograph from Judge Beals of the Supreme Court in the state of Washington:
| Damnation to bureaucrats |
| Damn the betrayers of the national |
| constitution. Hell take the |
| souls of Wilson & the flea-headed |
| Coolidge. |
| God DAMN those responsible |
| for copyright evils, passport |
| idiocy, red tape, |
| article 211 of penal code made |
| by gorillas for the further stultification |
| of imbeciles God DAMN all |
| those who take no active |
| part in eliminating these |
| evils. Damn those who |
| invade the private domain of |
| the individual directly or by |
| making of suffocating iniquitous laws. |
| against all these |
| maledictions & |
| major anathema |
| Ezra Pound | 7 May 1930 |
That is at least a handy summary of Pound’s pet hates in those years. Whether it had any effect on Judge Beals’s judgements is not, so far as I know, a matter of record. Nor is it recorded that the lady from Omaha was moved by Pound’s prose to a more active disgust at what he thought wrong with America.
‘A good state’, as Pound defined it in 1925, ‘is one which impinges least upon the peripheries of its citizens’; and its function ‘is to facilitate the traffic, i.e. the circulation of goods, air, water, heat, coal (black or white), power, and even thought; | and to prevent the citizens from impinging on each other’. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, he declared civilization to be impossible without an aristocracy; and ‘the duty of an aristocracy is to educate [the nation’s] plebs’. But this, he observed, aristocracies had regularly failed to do, thus bringing on their ‘own bloody destruction’, and leaving ‘the whole of woodenheaded humanity…to concentrate its efforts on production of another lot, equally piffling and light headed’. By 1930, still more paradoxically, he was looking for an individual leader to manage the state and maintain civilization:
THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass.
For example:…J. Q. Adams’ intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization…
Jefferson’s continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)
Apparently Pound considered the forcing of an enlightened programme on the mass of the people to be not tyrannous or oppressive. He may even have been implying that the failure to enforce enlightenment would have been due to allowing too much representation to the ignorant mass. ‘The democratic idea’, he had pointed out, ‘was not that legislative bodies shd. represent the momentary idiocy of the multitude.’ Yet that extreme way of stating the case might provoke one to reflect that ‘the democratic idea’ would not necessarily lead to the idea of ‘the great protagonist’ either; and further, that ‘the great protagonists’ in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.
In Pound’s mind, however, Mussolini was beginning to stand with Jefferson as a force for enlightened government. In November 1926 he remarked to John Price that ‘The more one knows of Mussolini the more one inclines to think Italy very fortunate, and the less credence one gives to hostile reports.’ That was a widely held view of Il Duce at that time. But then Pound’s previous remark has an odd inflection. ‘I don’t think the Fascio will object’, he wrote—object, that is, to his forthcoming magazine The Exile which he was discussing with Price. It is as if the shadow of Fascist censorship had crossed his mind, only without arousing his usual negative reaction to any form of censorship. The odd, uncalled for remark—uncalled for since the magazine was to be published in Paris, then Chicago, and was unlikely to be of any concern to the Fascio—is an indication of Pound’s disposition to think well of Mussolini and Fascism, and to be passive about things which, if he were to suspect them of America, would drive him to act out of anger and indignation.
He found plenty of reasons for taking the hopeful, positive view of Mussolini. He was impressed when Olga Rudge, after giving a private performance for Mussolini in 1927, reported that he played the violin himself, preferred the classic composers, and could talk intelligently about music. He was impressed too by Mussolini’s saying, ‘We are tired of government in which there is no responsible person having a hind-name, a front name and an address.’ That, ‘the raison d’être of Fascism’ for Pound, could be seen as at once an attack on faceless bureaucrats and their obstructive imbecilities, and an encouragement to individuals to act responsibly on their own authority, as the Rimini Commandante della Piazza had done in the matter of the library there. Mussolini’s style of leadership seemed to follow from that. In contrast with America’s ‘passport imbecility’, he had simply given ‘a comprehensive order re/ frontiers, to the effect that travellers were not to be subjected to needless annoyance’. More generally, Pound was moved to say in an interview with an Italian journalist that Mussolini’s ‘effective program, which includes land reclamation, the “battle for grain”, and the mobilization of the nation’s internal credit’, put him in mind of Thomas Jefferson; and that ‘Italy is the only country in the world…that can’t be governed better than it already is’. Altogether Pound was working towards the conclusion that Mussolini was, like Lenin and like Jefferson, a leader of the most effective type, ‘an opportunist with convictions’; or, as he would phrase it in 1933 in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, ‘an OPPORTUNIST who is RIGHT, that is who has certain convictions and who drives them through circumstance, or batters and forms circumstance with them’. By that date he would be convinced that Mussolini was contemporary Italy’s ‘great protagonist’.
It was the phenomenon of Il Duce, the effective leader of his people, that really engaged his increasingly enthusiastic support. But on occasion he would credit the Fascist Party with fulfilling the role of an aristocracy. In 1931, in ‘Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot’, a contribution to Samuel Putnam’s New Review, he equated aristocracy with a sense of responsibility. Capitalist democracy, he began, ‘does not, apparently favour the sense of responsibility or even ask for it in public servants’. In the most important matter of ‘the nation’s credit’, those who control it should, ideally, be ‘responsible to the nation’; but ‘the real complaint against “capitalism” is that an unjust proportion of this credit is diverted to the private use of usurpers and scoundrels’. That meant that power, in capitalist democracy, was with the Plutocracy; and the Plutocracy does not encourage ‘a greater degree of amenity or a higher critical selectivity in life and the arts’. Disgust with the failed state of democracy brought Pound to look favourably upon Communist Russia and Fascist Italy. ‘Possibly no other aristocracy in 1931 has so great a sense of responsibility as the new Russian “party”’, he wrote without irony, and although aware of ‘horrors reported’. (Those would have been the horrors of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan in which the Party’s Commissars ruthlessly forced through the collectivization of agriculture and the development of heavy industry at a terrible cost to both peasants and workers.) Elsewhere, he suspected, ‘the sense of responsibility…is confined to a few Italian Fascists and a few “god damned cranks”’. In his conclusion he effectively accepted, as the alternative to failed or corrupt democracy, a dictatorship of such aristocracies, as he had already in effect accepted the dictatorship of the great protagonist:
An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense.
Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.
Hindsight probes those terms and finds them dangerously empty of particular, defining instances. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini Pound would go some way to providing the needed particulars in the case of Italy, and to developing the implications of ‘the strongest’ and ‘the most wilful’ beyond a crude ‘might is right’. But did he know enough, and was he exercising his critical intelligence enough, to warrant his readiness to accept the dictatorship of those ‘aristocracies’ and of their leaders? He did know, when being critical of others, that ‘Thought, dogblast you, thought is made up of particulars, and when those particulars cease to be vividly present to the consciousness in the general statement, thought ceases and blah begins.’
A striking feature of that ‘Fungus’ article is the evident loss of faith in the power of creative intelligence to influence the government of the state. There is no invocation now of the aristocracy of artistic genius. Instead we are told simply that ‘Plutocracy does not favour the arts’, and that ‘The exploiter hates the intelligenzia (with reason)’, as if there was nothing more to be said about the function of intelligence under democracy. As for Fascism, there it would appear that the artist had been displaced by the activist. That impression is confirmed by the terms in which Pound approved of Marinetti in 1932. In a letter to Zukofsky he mentioned that he had ‘Had amiable jaw with Marinetti in Rome and have come back loaded with futurist and Fascist licherchoor.’ Marinetti had dedicated Futurism to the service of Mussolini’s Fascist regime, ‘the glorious advent’ of which, in Mussolini’s own words, ‘Futurism had prepared with twenty years of incessant artistic warfare consecrated in blood’. Pound recalled, in one of his notes in the Rapallo paper Il Mare, Marinetti’s standing up in the public gallery during a session of the Italian deputies in 1919 to denounce Francesco Nitti, the prime minister, ‘A nome dei Fasci di Combattimento, dei Futuristi e degli intelletuali’, and to accuse him in unparliamentary language of sabotaging the victory. Gabriele D’Annunzio had congratulated him on that action; and Pound, in 1932, while conceding that Marinetti was not an especially good writer, saluted him as ‘Marinetti activist’ and suggested that he was to be honoured for having gone beyond writing into the further dimension of action. That achievement connected him, in Pound’s thinking, with Lenin and Mussolini, ‘the two who in our day know how to “move” in the highest degree, who are masters of speech that goes into action’.
That was the condition Pound’s own prose aspired to in Italy—‘speech that goes into action’. He began relatively mildly with a series of ‘Appunti’—meaning ‘notes to the point’ or ‘precisions’—in L’Indice, a fortnightly literary paper published in Genoa; but by the time of his wartime ‘Radio Speeches’ broadcast on Rome Radio from January 1941 to July 1943 he would frequently be playing the violent demagogue.
The score or so ‘Appunti’ contributed to L’Indice in 1930 and 1931 were not on the whole political. Pound’s commission from the editor, Gino Saviotti, was to inform Italian readers about foreign literature and culture, and he did that by repeating his usual literary propaganda—on Lewis, Cocteau, Hemingway, Joyce; on the little magazines he was in touch with; and on such themes as the importance of realism and the need for international standards. Going on from that, he took it upon himself to tell Italian writers that they must learn to match the economy of English by cutting out all their unnecessary words, and that they should bring their work up to date by digesting the best in modern American and French writing. He was trying to do for Italian literature what he had tried to do for America in his London years. There was the difference though that rather than writing with the exasperation of an alienated exile he was establishing sympathetic relations with Fascist Italy. He told his interviewer in 1931 that he expected the surge of energy Fascism had unleashed to bring forth a new renaissance. He told his readers in L’Indice that ‘every reinvigoration of Italian’ must come from its origins in Latin; and he acknowledged his own debts to their Dante and Cavalcanti. He went so far as to say that had he been living in Italy in 1912 to 1924 he would have made common cause with the Futurists, at least on the need, in Italy, to clean out the dead past and to have a live contemporary perception precedent to the work of art. When his association with L’Indice ended in December 1931—the paper apparently ‘went bust’—he intensified his effort to play an active part in the literary and cultural life of Italy by getting a local vortex going in Rapallo.
With Gino Saviotti and half a dozen other collaborators, notably Basil Bunting, Pound organised a ‘Supplemento Letterario’ which appeared every other week as an insert in Rapallo’s weekly paper, Il Mare. For eight months, from August 1932 to March 1933, it was a two-page supplement, and then, from April to July 1933, was reduced to a single ‘Pagina Letteraria’. The promise that it would reappear in October 1933, after taking a summer holiday, ‘with, as always, the collaboration of the best Italian and foreign writers’, was not kept. In its first phase the ‘Supplemento’ was determinedly international, with contributions from and about Italian, French, Spanish, German, and American writers and writing, and could claim to be giving a local focus to the most innovative and avant-garde work of its time. Pound contributed occasional ‘Appunti’, and recycled his Little Review ‘Study of French Poets’ and his notes on Vorticism. In one of his ‘Appunti’ he asserted that Futurism, the best of which satisfied the demands of Vorticism, had to be the dominant art of ‘l’Italia Nuova’.
Pound had not given up his kicking against ‘murkn imbecility and ignorance’. Towards the end of 1930 he initiated a correspondence with US Senator Bronson M. Cutting (1888–1935) of New Mexico, a Progressive Republican who had ‘advocated the liberalization of federal laws governing censorship and copyright’. In fact in the debate in 1929–30 on censorship by the customs authorities Cutting had won ‘the reputation of being the most literate and cultured man in the Senate’. In the course of his argument he had observed that censorship was ‘a tool of tyranny’, and that it was ‘characteristic of the Fascist government of Italy, and equally characteristic of the Bolshevist government of Russia’. Pound made no comment on those points, but heartily agreed with him that it had no place in a free democracy. He wrote to Cutting to encourage him to move next against the censorship still exercised by the Post Office under ‘Article 211 of the Penal code’, the then current version of the 1873 Comstock Act which he described again as ‘made by gorillas for the further stultification of imbeciles’. Cutting needed no convincing that ‘the Baboon law…ought to be out of the criminal code altogether’. But he was a practical legislator in the real world of the democratic process, and had to accept that there was not ‘the slightest chance of eliminating it’. However, he saw ‘a tactical advantage in leaving the criminal feature, because in that shape it would go to the semi-liberal Judiciary Committee instead of to the hopeless Post Office Committee’. Even so, his amendment died on that occasion in the Judiciary Committee. ‘Don’t be too hopeful’, he had advised Pound, ‘It is hard running up against the organizations of canned virtue.’ He kept on patiently trying to build support for an amendment in the following years, though still without success.
Pound, impatient with the Senate’s complicated workings and with Cutting’s pragmatic step-by-step activism, was inclined to hold democracy itself responsible, on account of its electing illiterates to represent it. He had asked Cutting for ‘a list of the literate members of the senate’, and been given the names of just ten Senators, ‘& I suppose Dwight Morrow’. That confirmed his conviction, expressed in a letter written to Langston Hughes in June 1932, that while ‘the American govt. as INTENDED and as a system is as good a form of govt. as any, save possibly that outlined in the new Spanish [Republican] constitution’, it allowed, as it was currently practised, ‘the worst men in it to govern and…[lent] itself repeatedly to flagrant injustice’. In time that conviction would reduce itself to the outraged and absolute simplification which irrupts in canto 91, ‘Democracies electing their sewage.’
The pursuit of ‘theoretical perfection in a government impels it ineluctably toward tyranny’. Pound could see that in the petty tyranny of customs inspectors burning with the righteous moral fervour of the crusade to preserve the nation from foreign obscenities such as Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet he did not see it writ large in Bolshevist Russia and Fascist Italy. And he did not see that his own drive for a perfect system of government, with his absolute intolerance of the compromises and imperfections endemic in the democratic system, was impelling him ineluctably toward the embrace of tyranny. He had recorded in canto 8 how Plato the Idealist ‘went to Dionysius of Syracuse | Because he had observed that tyrants | Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to’; but had he taken the point of the story, that Plato found ‘he was unable to persuade Dionysius to any amelioration’?
The ameliorations Pound desired were on the whole enlightened. The trouble was not with his ideas in themselves but with his lack of realism as to how they might be put into effect. There was nothing undemocratic about his campaign for the abolition of censorship, of restrictive copyright laws, of passports and visas, and of anything else which acted as a barrier to the free passage of new invention. He supported the workers’ demand for a universal forty-hour week—something proposed by Italy in a meeting of the International Labour Organization in September 1932, and opposed (then as now) by the government and employers’ organizations of Great Britain. He was even more enthusiastically with those who called for a shortened working day of four or at most six hours, with no reduction in workers’ pay. This he regarded as the workers’ just dividend from advances in industrial productivity; and also, in the Depression, as a better remedy for unemployment than the dole. Again, observing that ‘We live in a plutocratic era, i.e. de facto governed by money, with a thin wash of democratic pretense’, he wanted to see the Federal Reserve Board ‘democratized’, so that the nation’s credit should serve public need rather than private profit. All of these ideas were in the spirit of Jeffersonian democracy.
He campaigned above all, occasionally in violent terms, for the study of the causes of war, ‘to prevent another slaughter by millions for the benefit of a few’. He identified the ‘two causes of war’ as ‘the fight for markets’, and ‘the specific interest of the ineffable lice who want to make money by selling guns and munitions’; and he demanded detective work to expose the men and the forces making for war. These things should be news, he insisted, and wrote his own findings into his Cantos as ‘news that STAYS news’.
The Cantos, of course, were not designed to have immediate effect in ‘the sphere of action’. They belong to that other sphere of art in which Pound was a master of his medium. But he was not a master of the medium of political action. He was a more or less isolated individual, without a power base, without an organization, with no place in nor any leverage upon any political institution, with no political or diplomatic standing, without even an effective platform from which to hold forth. His prose ‘Poundings’ were scattered ineffectually among small magazines and the letters columns of newspapers, or were addressed as private instigations to senators, editors, authors, to anyone who caught his attention.
The prose itself, his only instrument in the sphere of action, was often such as to antagonize rather than persuade. It was characteristically charged with anger, contempt, and the will to kill (verbally). ‘Certain kinds of mental slop, certain kinds of drivveling imbecility, do not survive…acquaintance with my better productions,’ he boasted in the New York Sun’s ‘The Bear Garden’ section under his own, possibly self-mocking heading, ‘That Messianic Urge’. At least one ‘public enemy’ did survive that attack, however, and counter-attacked the following week with a scornful dismantling of Pound’s person, works, and reputation. It was all in the spirit of a bear garden, full of ‘strife and tumult’, and signifying very little. Moreover, the more aggressive Pound became in his prose, the more applicable to himself was the distinction he made in a private letter to Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses. As against effective writing ‘where you are talking facts about what you know’, there was the quite distinct ‘mere blow off of egotism & irritation & impatience with everyone who don’t kowtow to your particular…set of ideas’. That was the sort of writing Pound could lapse into, and it was not the likeliest way to change or to improve anyone else’s mind, let alone to change the ways of governments.
The merely egotistical sounding off in Pound’s more impatient activist prose, and its tendency to use language as a blunt instrument, must have been due to his feeling disempowered, to his inability to get an objective grip upon such complex actualities as the democratic process under capitalism and to act effectively upon them. It sounds like the protest of the individual who feels he must speak out but cannot make himself heard in the crowd. And here perhaps we come upon the solution to the nagging paradox of Pound being a passionate advocate of individuality and of the freedom of the individual, and yet being at the same time disposed to think better of dictatorship than of democracy. The powerless individual may look to an all-powerful individual to do what he would if only he could, and to manage the intractable masses who don’t want to know what’s best for them. It is individuality itself, when driven to desperation or carried to excess, that is the fraught bond between the free individual and the dictator.
There is another paradox to be teased out, if it is not an irreducible contradiction. How could Pound be such a master of words in his art and yet so ill-use them in his activist prose? He was fully aware that ‘propagandist literature’ was not ‘serious literature’, and that it was only the latter which had the power to renovate minds and thence governments. He had defended Brancusi’s detachment from political action and insisted on the possibility of his saving the world ‘by pure form’. He insisted on that again in 1929 when he was translating Boris de Schloezer’s Igor Stravinsky for The Dial and was provoked into appending a striking note to the statement that ‘the classic work [of art] does not come back into life, its action remains purely aesthetic’. ‘So far as I can see’, he wrote,
the setting up of such an [art-made] order comes back upon life very violently. The assertion or presentation of such an order in itself being the strongest possible attack on human imbecility, and the most effective means of disgusting the auditor with the idiocy that the millions of ape-men accept.—E.P.
Now what is striking about this is the assertion of the power of pure art in the language of the crude propagandist. Even more striking is the attempt to conscript that power into the agitprop attack, as if the contemplative artist might after all be serving the murderous activist’s ‘ultra-artistic or non-artistic’ desires. Is it possible for the artist’s ‘rage for order’ to be at one with the activist’s rage to destroy whatever gets in the way of that order? They may have this in common, that both desire a right ordering of things. Yet their methods are so opposed that surely the negative must cancel out the positive, unless it be subordinated to the creative impulse. In the Cantos there is that subordination. But when one takes Pound’s writings as a whole, prose and poetry together, one is confronted by the unresolved coexistence in him of the will to create and the will to destroy. This has been seen as evidence of self-contradiction, even of a schizophrenic or split personality. We are accustomed to thinking in binary terms, either this or that, and have difficulty allowing for both at the same time. It is possible nevertheless to conceive of creation and destruction, or of the contemplative and the warring, as phases of the one life. I rather think that the evidence will increasingly require us to think of Pound as (like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita) willing both destruction and creation, as being both a destroyer and a maker. It is a problematic combination, and often a tragic one.
Cavalcanti: the intelligence of love
In the autumn of 1927, along with his other activities, Pound was deepening his understanding of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (1250–1300), and especially of the difficult ‘Donna mi prega’, a philosophical canzone defining the intelligence that is born of love. In mid-September Pound was in Venice and mentioned in a letter to Dorothy in London that he was working on ‘Guido’. In October he mentioned in a letter to Olga in Paris that he was working on ‘Guido’s philosophy’, and had been finding out, mostly from Étienne Gilson’s book on medieval philosophy, about ‘natural dimostramento’. That was a phrase in ‘Donna mi prega’, which Pound would make much of. If it meant, as he took it to mean, ‘proof by natural reason’ or even ‘proof by experiment’, or still further ‘biological proof’, then it would show that Guido’s mind was not subject to the authority of medieval theology and to the syllogisms of Aquinas, as his young friend Dante’s was. His thinking about love would have instead the authority of knowing it truly ‘from nature’s source’.
Pound was in Florence in November, studying early commentaries on Cavalcanti’s poetry in the libraries there, and ‘by miracle found and bought’ from Orioli for just 300 francs a copy of the 1527 (Di Giunta) first printed edition of his works. Shortly after he formed the intention of putting together a new edition ‘with full text in reproduction of original mss. etc.’ He submitted a proposal to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Gwyer for a book to have this title page:
Guido Cavalcanti | Le Rime | His Poems | Critical Text, with Translation and Commentary and Notes by | Ezra Pound | with a Partial Translation of the Poems by D. G. Rossetti | and with 48 Reproductions of the More Important Codices | Giving a Full Text of the Works in Facsimile…
‘Specimen pages were prepared’, Gallup notes in his Ezra Pound: A Bibliography, ‘but it soon became evident that Pound’s stipulations as to type-size and the inclusion of additional material would make the book much too expensive for Faber and Gwyer to undertake.’ The small Aquila Press in London then agreed to take it over and in spring 1929 announced ‘a monumental and definitive edition of the works of Guido Cavalcanti’.
Through 1928 and 1929 Pound worked away at his edition. In the libraries which held the early manuscripts—the Ambrosiana in Milan, the Capitolare in Verona, the Quirini Stampalia and the Marciana in Venice, the Riccardiana and Laurenziana in Florence, the Communale in Siena, the Vatican in Rome—he noted the variant readings and the explications of the various commentators. He marked up for the printer the translations of Cavalcanti in a 1908 Temple Classics edition of Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets—these were to go on the right-hand pages facing the originals. He translated ‘Donna mi prega’ for the first time, and devoted his commentary and notes to elucidating it. This new work, the translation and commentary, appeared in sections in the Dial in March and July 1928, and, with the addition of ‘Guido’s Relations’ (from the Dial of July 1929), became the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay in Make It New and Literary Essays. The photographic reproductions of the most important manuscripts were commissioned, and the printing of what was now to be called ‘The Complete Works of Guido Cavalcanti’ was begun. Fifty-six pages were type-set by hand in a truly ‘monumental’ format and printed off, and then, in the summer of 1930, the Aquila Press failed.
Pound recovered the five hundred or so sets of completed sheets, had the forty plates of reproductions printed off in Germany at his own expense, and paid Edizioni Marsano of Genoa to print the Italian text of Cavalcanti’s poems with the variant readings given as marginal glosses, and also to print the very detailed apparatus concerning the manuscripts. The new pages containing the Italian text were numbered 1 to 56, as were the fifty-six pages salvaged from the Aquila Press. Both sets of pages were bound with the apparatus (pages numbered I–XVI) and the plates (numbered 1 to 40) in stiff paper covers, clear red in colour, to make up the book published in January 1932 as Guido Cavalcanti Rime/Edizione rappezzata fra le rovine, that is, an edition patched together from the ruins. 3
David Anderson records that Rime received good reviews in England and the United States, while ‘Italian scholarly journals failed to show any interest’. In Italy, apparently, only Mario Praz wrote on it at any length, ‘and he ridiculed its disorderly appearance and suggested that Pound was not a good philologist’. Pound’s meticulous work on the manuscripts seems not to have been taken into account by later editors. Étienne Gilson, reviewing the work in Eliot’s Criterion, welcomed it warmly as a critical edition in his first paragraph, and then disagreed at length and fundamentally with ‘the general interpretation of Cavalcanti which is everywhere implied’ in it. He agreed that the ‘Canzone d’amore’ was very obscure; but he also thought certain parts more intelligible and simpler in the original than in Pound’s version, and that the translation sometimes bore ‘no relation whatever to the text’. As for Guido’s philosophy, he feigned ignorance of it while asserting that it must have been simply what ‘was commonly known and accepted by any man who had attended schools in his time’. In short, writing as an orthodox authority on Scholastic philosophy, he could not see and was not even interested by what Pound wanted to make of the ‘Canzone d’amore’.
Pound was attempting to recover that ‘very complicated structure of knowledge and perception, the paradise of the human mind under enlightenment’, which he believed ‘had run from Arnaut [Daniel] to Guido Cavalcanti’ but had been ‘hammered out of’ François Villon. The word ‘paradise’ in that sentence, it should be noted, is delimited by ‘knowledge and perception’ and by ‘the human mind’: it would be a paradise of the mind, not of an immortal soul.
At the time of his first immersion in Cavalcanti, in 1910–12, Pound had celebrated him as a supreme ‘psychologist of the emotions’. He particularly valued Guido’s keen understanding and precise expression
of pain itself, or of the apathy that comes when the emotions and possibilities of emotion are exhausted, or of that stranger state when the feeling by its intensity surpasses our powers of bearing and we seem to stand aside and watch it surging across some thing or being with whom we are no longer identified.
None of that is what the word ‘emotions’ would ordinarily bring to mind, especially not in the context of love poetry. Well, yes, the pain of love is a commonplace. ‘Apathy’, however, and even more ‘that stranger state’ point away from the commonplace to what Pound noted in Cavalcanti’s ‘psychological’ ‘Ballata XII’, that Guido, ‘Exhausted by a love born of fate and of the emotions’, turns away to an intellectual love born out of that first love, and in this intellectual love ‘he is remade’, becoming another person.
He is changed, as one might say after Eliot, from a man who suffers into a mind which contemplates. But without the initial and initiating emotions there would be no change. ‘It is only when the emotions illumine the perceptive powers that we see the reality’, Pound declared, and then added this further emphasis, ‘It is in the light of this double current that we look upon the face of the mystery unveiled.’ That it is a ‘double current’, with the emotions lighting up the perceptive powers and the clarified perceptions intensifying the emotions, means that the ‘new person’ formed of and by desire is the same lover only in a different state of being. It is not the orthodox case of the intellectual soul rising above the physical body. It is rather that the mind has come to know and to understand what the lover’s emotions have to tell of the nature of things. One might say that his emotions are what have made him intelligent. Pound, in Cavalcantian mode, would go further and say (with all that the words imply) that the intelligence that is born of love is the intelligence of creation itself.
What Pound had made of Cavalcanti in 1910–12 was most fully worked out at that time in the part of his own Canzoni which followed a mystic cult of love from its origins in the rites of Persephone at Eleusis, through the fin amor of Provence, to its culmination in the poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti. ‘The Flame’ in that volume was a celebration of what he then understood to be the rite by which a follower of that cult, rapt in the ecstasy of sunlit nature, might find a new identity in the light that is the life of the world, and so pass beyond the love of mortals. When he returned to Cavalcanti fifteen years later he came at him rather through his philosophy. It is important to note, however, that he was coming at the philosophy ‘not as platonic formulation…but as psychology’. He was pursuing still a paradisal state of consciousness to be attained through the refinement of love. But he could speak of it now as a ‘super-in-human refinement of the intellect’, thus implying that it was a state of mind to be entered into through philosophy; and yet at the same time he maintained that this Cavalcantian paradise had been lost in the philosophical speculations of Cavalcanti’s time. The only way to resolve the apparent contradiction is to conclude that for Pound the philosophy does not matter, as Eliot could say at the heart of East Coker, ‘The poetry does not matter.’ That is, the philosophy is a means to an end beyond itself, not what the mind should remain caught up in. It is the attainment of the paradisal state of mind that matters, not the mere thinking about it, instrumental as that may be.
In ‘Mediaevalism’ (1928), the first section of his ‘Cavalcanti’ essay, Pound set out to isolate the specific new quality or virtù which distinguished the medieval Tuscan poets from ‘the Greek aesthetic’ and also from the troubadours of Provence. The ‘Greek’ or ‘classic aesthetic’ he characterized as ‘moving toward coitus’ and ‘immediate satisfaction’. The troubadours had broken with that world by valuing ‘the fine thing held in the mind’ above ‘the inferior thing ready for instant consumption’. The Tuscan aesthetic went on from that to demand something more than the heartening image in the mind’s eye of the absent beloved. It cultivated ‘the residue of perception, perception of something which requires a human being to produce it—which may even require a certain individual to produce it.’ That involved ‘an interactive force’, and in that ‘interactive force’ was the Tuscan virtù.
But what exactly is this ‘interactive force’? One gathers that it has to do with the ‘Effect of a decent climate where a man leaves his nerve-set open, or allows it to tune in to its ambience’, as Pound had tuned in (one reflects) to his ambience at Sirmione. Then there is ‘The conception of the body as perfected instrument of the increasing intelligence’, that is, as a receptive instrument. And what is to be received is ‘the radiant world…of moving energies’, of ‘magnetisms that take form’; a world in which things are perceived as radiant energies, in which light moves from the eye, and in which ‘one thought cuts through another with clean edge’. At the back of this there is the idea of light as informing every living thing. Pound cites Gilson’s summary of the thinking of Robert Grosseteste (c.1170–1253) to the effect that light is an extremely rarefied physical substance which gives off of itself perpetually in every direction; and that it is the stuff of which all things are made, and their primal form. Pound read Cavalcanti’s ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto’, which he translated in canto 36 as ‘shineth out | Himself his own effect unendingly’, as identifying Love’s action with that of light; and thought it ‘quite possible that the whole of [“Donna mi prega”] is a sort of metaphor on the generation of light’. Love then, in the Canzone, is Light; and Light is Love, that which animates and moves desire and thence illuminates ‘the increasing intelligence’. The Canzone in Pound’s reading is altogether concerned with the formative action of light upon the mind in love, and with the mind’s interaction with it as it comprehends the light and reflects its shaping forms upon its world. At one point he questions the meaning of ‘intenzion’, asking does it mean ‘intention (a matter of will)? does it mean intuition, intuitive perception?’ He leaves the question open, but might well have answered it by referring to Dante’s line addressed to the spirits filled with love in his Paradiso, ‘Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete’—‘You who by understanding move the third heaven’. Those spirits are not only illuminated by the light of divine love but understand it, and understanding it they will its action upon their sphere.
Pound quite deliberately stops short of any suggestion of Dante’s paradise of beatified souls, as does Cavalcanti’s Canzone. Its light is wholly natural, and works to perfect nature, and particularly to perfect natural intelligence. There is no hint of an immortal soul or of an eternal heaven, nor indeed of a Deity; and with those foundations removed Dante’s whole system, and the entire Catholic system, would fall apart. One is in another mind-set; one is in, roughly speaking, the modern mind—which is, presumably, what Pound meant when he observed that Cavalcanti was ‘much more “modern” than his young friend Dante Alighieri, qui était diablement dans les idées reçues’. As if to emphasize that difference Pound looked not to Aquinas but to Arab philosophers to help explicate the more difficult technical terms of the Canzone. In his copy of Ernest Renan’s Averroës et l’Averroïsme (Paris, 1925) he particularly noted passages concerning the active intellect and the passive intellect and their relations. One might roughly transpose that into what Coleridge, defining Imagination in his very different world and time, called ‘the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’—that would be the active intellect—and the passive intellect would be its ‘repetition in the finite mind’ where it is ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception’. The Arab philosophers, in Renan’s account, sought the union of their receiving intelligence with the informing and shaping intelligence of the universe. One wrote, ‘the perfection of the rational soul is to reflect the universe’, meaning to reflect it by actively knowing its process. All agreed that this felicity was to be attained only in this life: there was no question for them of a paradise out of this world or anywhere save in the mind.
The mystical philosophy becomes very technical and specialized in Pound’s wrestling with the possible meaning of certain words in ‘Donna mi prega’, though what he was after was perhaps not so very far from his Imagiste mind ‘ever at the interpretation of this vital universe’, ‘the universe of fluid force…the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive’. By the time his Guido Cavalcanti Rime finally appeared he had had enough of ‘the active and passive intellect (possibile intelleto, etc.)’, and of trying to apprehend the Canzone by way of the vocabulary of medieval philosophy. That had entangled him in confusions and obscurities, and brought him to the conclusion that the mystery was not to be explained in words, or at any rate that ‘Verbal manifestation is of very limited use’. The trouble, he declared, is that one knows more than one ever puts into words, and that once one’s immediate knowledge gets into ‘the vain locus of verbal exchanges, it is damnably and insuperably difficult to get it thence into the consciousness’ where it can be contemplated and assimilated. The mind of Europe had lost in that way what Paganism knew, or at least ‘the ancient wisdom seems to have disappeared when the mysteries entered the vain space of Christian theological discussion’.
In 1931 Pound was recommending in his prose ‘that students trying to understand the poesy of southern Europe from 1050 to 1400 should try to open it’ using as the key, not the philosophy of the time, but instead the cult of Eleusis. That would explain, he suggested, ‘not only general phenomena but particular beauties in Arnaut Daniel or in Guido Cavalcanti’. As to what he meant by ‘the cult of Eleusis’, he gave the hint that at the root of the mystery was ‘consciousness of the unity with nature’, while pointing out that those words would be an empty formulation without the immediate intuition of the interaction. He also went so far as to translate a rather wordy sentence from an Italian brochure to the effect that ‘Paganism…not only did not disdain the erotic factor in its religious institutions but celebrated and exalted it, precisely because it encountered in it the marvellous vital principle infused by invisible Divinity into manifest nature’. Again he remarked that the idea was at once ‘“too well known”’ and ‘not in the least well known’. In an unpublished note he wrote, ‘Coition the sacrament…The door to knowledge of nature…shd/ be moment of highest maximum consciousness…enlightenment.’
Partly in despair of expressing through translation and explanation all that Cavalcanti meant to him Pound turned to setting a selection of his poems to be sung in the original. ‘The meaning can be explained’, he wrote, ‘but the emotion and the beauty can not be explained.’ They could, however, be brought ‘to the ear of the people, even when they can not understand it, or can not understand all of it at once’.
The idea of his composing another opera, this time with radio in mind from the start, seems to have come up when he was in Paris in May 1931 working with A. E. F. Harding of the BBC to adapt Le Testament for its radio production. That involved changing the ‘visual libretto into an audible one’. In Venice that summer the air was ‘full of radio…opry etc.’—he had heard a ‘very good Rigoletto’, he mentioned in one of his letters to Dorothy. When his Villon was broadcast on two successive evenings in October he listened to it on shortwave on both occasions in a Rapallo electrician’s kitchen, and learnt something of the limitations of the still relatively undeveloped medium. His next opera, he told Dorothy, ‘will be much clearer’, by which he meant much simpler musically, and better adapted to the frequencies that could be transmitted without excessive distortion or loss.
He had started sketching out music based on some of Cavalcanti’s ballate in September, and these sketches led to his composing in the latter half of October a set of four short Sonate ‘Ghuidonis’ for solo violin. That work was premiered by Olga Rudge in Paris in December. The melodies from the Sonate then went into the opera which was mainly composed between July and October 1932, with some final tidying up in June 1933. By then, however, Harding had been moved to another section of the BBC and the idea of a radio production lapsed. The score was put away, some in a suitcase under a bed and some among other manuscripts, and it was as good as lost until 1983, a full decade after Pound’s death and half a century after it was completed, when it was recovered, edited, and produced in a concert version by Robert Hughes.
The opera is not so interesting musically as the earlier Le Testament, and does not bring out, to my ear at least, much in the way of ‘the emotion and the beauty [that] can not be explained’. I find the interest to be rather in Guido’s psychology and in the way he lives out his ideas. The selection of his ballate, and the Canzone d’amore, present his developing states of mind; and these are so arranged as to trace out the course of his life. The attention is thus shifted from the philosophy to what it would mean to live by it.
The first love of youth is already behind Guido in the opera, his songs of commonplace desire left for others to sing in the streets. Love draws him now to serve the idea of Love, and drives him to seek to know and to understand what it is by analysing and meditating upon his own experience. So his love grows intellectual, and the opera builds to the ‘Donna me prega’ in which the lady must be Sophia, the intellect’s beloved. For her he defines the action of love as the process of universal light illuminating the mind. There was the light in a woman’s eyes which first roused his desire, and which then, treasured in the mind, has so lit up his understanding that it has brought him ‘into the clear light of philosophy’ where he sees into the mystery of being. In the final act, as he dies having committed himself to the Lady he has served, a Lady characterized by her ‘sweet intelligence’, it appears that his desire is entirely absorbed and satisfied in that intellectual vision. The audience is made aware, however, that his philosophical paradise is in his own mind only, and that it ceases with him. The light from Eleusis and from the troubadours of Provence has at once reached an extreme expression and has failed in him. His enlightenment has been without effect upon his world; and now, the opera concludes, the world will be given over to the vagaries of Fortune. 4
Pound’s Cavalcanti it would appear, is another of his isolated individuals of genius, another who sees the light others are impervious to but is unable to make it prevail. His new mind, his new forma mentis, did not set a renaissance going. All the same, being registered in his canzoni, it would outlast his and the time’s failings.
In 1932 and 1933 while he was finishing his Cavalcanti Pound was also sketching out two other compositions on related themes. The one he completed was a transformation into wordless music for solo violin of Dante’s ‘Al poco giorno’, a sestina expressing the condition of being locked in frustrated desire for a young woman who seems the figure of joyful Spring but towards the poet is unyielding stone. Pound at first draws contrasting melodies from the words but progressively takes off into a purely musical development of them to produce, in Robert Hughes’s judgement, his ‘most ambitious and advanced work for solo violin’. One may take the music to be a sympathetic yet critical response to Dante’s poem, treating it as the negative aspect of his sublimation of desire (as in La vita nuova); but the music remains beyond words, and mysterious.
The other work was a planned but never completed third opera, ‘Collis O Heliconii’. This was to feature, first, Catullus’ epithalamium, ‘Collis o Heliconii’ (Carmen LXI), with its repeated invocation ‘o Hymenaee Hymen, | o Hymen Hymenaee’ as the bride is brought to her man and the Roman marriage bed; and then Sappho’s ode (the one that begins ‘Poikilothron’) calling upon Aphrodite to light in the one Sappho loves a passion as ecstatic as her own. In Margaret Fisher’s apt formulation, the opera was to have been ‘a celebration of the sacrament’ following upon ‘the intellectualization of the sacrament’ in Cavalcanti and ‘the degradation of the sacrament’ in Le Testament. Pound’s not completing it will have had something to do with its presenting ‘no small technical problem’; but was probably due more to his being drawn out of music by his increasing activism. Some time in 1932 he told the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, ‘I live in music for days at a time.’ After 1933 those days were over.
Threads, tesserae
Olga Rudge told a story about Wanda Landowska, the renowned harpsichordist. Landowska had been interrupted in mid-sentence by the arrival of friends and a fuss about tickets, and had come back after a quarter of an hour and continued her sentence from where she left off. ‘Is it the working with different voices in the fugues etc. makes her able to keep all the threads in her hand separate and distinct?’, Olga wondered, ‘like in a way the cantos?’
Rapallo, in 1928, set Yeats thinking of ‘The little town described in the Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Keats as a matter of fact gave no description of his ‘little town by river or sea shore’; but he did place it, ‘emptied of [its] folk’ and silent and desolate as it is, in the deathless condition of the well-wrought urn. Yeats, who was feeling his mortality upon him, was in search of a quiet haven away from the strenuous life he had been leading as an Irish senator, ‘away from forbidden Dublin winters and all excited crowded places’, and he must have been hoping that in Rapallo he might be able to write his rage against old age into the stillness and silence of art. For him the mountains which surround the town appeared to ‘shelter the bay from all but the south wind’, and its houses were ‘mirrored in an almost motionless sea’. On his walk along the sea front he remarked ‘peasants or working people’ of the town, ‘a famous German dramatist’, and only ‘a few tourists seeking tranquillity’. He was glad to find ‘no great harbour full of yachts, no great yellow strand, no great ballroom, no great casino’, and relieved that ‘the rich carry elsewhere their strenuous lives’.
Pound appreciated other advantages of Rapallo, notably its being on the main railway line from Rome to Genoa and all places east, north, and west. It was easy to get away to Verona and Venice, to Austria, Germany, Switzerland, to Paris and London, or to go south to Siena and Florence or to Rome. It was convenient too for friends, fellow writers and artists, to stop off on their travels; and from time to time interesting new people would turn up on the sea front and in its cafés bringing news of what was being done in one metropolis or another. In 1927 Adrian Stokes was there ‘with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc.)’, and Pound read The Decline of the West ‘in return for tips on XV century’. He told his father that ‘As S. seems to mean by “The West” a lot of things I dislike, I shd. like to accept his infantine belief that they are “declining”’; but he was more taken by the Hungarian novelist Joseph Bard’s talk of Leo Frobenius and the concept of paideuma or culture-formation. Relying on such communications, and of course on international mails, Pound used Rapallo as a base from which to mount his energetic campaigns to reform the world. Rapallo, he told his mother, was ‘rapidly becoming the intellexshull centre of yourup’.
The small town seems not to have gone in for the manifestations of enthusiasm for Mussolini that were common elsewhere. McAlmon wrote in Pound’s Exile that ‘Italy then was maddening with rowdy, Fascistic, Italy-saving arrogance’ on the part of ‘her Mussolini-hypnotized town-toughs’. Mary and George Oppen saw something of that in Venice in 1932. As Mary Oppen recalled the incident, the Piazza San Marco suddenly filled with Black Shirts crying out, because Mussolini’s life had been threatened, ‘Il Duce—pericolo del morte’, and on the faces of the press of young men they could see ‘only a blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce’. So far as one can tell from Pound’s correspondence that did not happen in Rapallo. One does find other refractions of Fascism in his letters, as his mentioning to Dorothy in October 1931 that ‘evidently Vinciguerra and Lauro were sentenced to 15 years each…L. was drowned.’ Lauro de Bosis, a gifted young writer they had known in Paris, upon being sentenced to confino or internal exile flew over Rome dropping thousands of anti-Fascist leaflets then flew on out to sea and was not seen again.
Both Ezra and Dorothy were often on the move away from Rapallo and from each other. At the end of April 1928 Dorothy was in London and Ezra was on his way to Vienna. He stopped off to visit Mary in Gais and to give her a tiny violin from her mother. (Mary, not yet three, ‘banged it hard on the chicken coop, creating great fracas among the fluttering hens’.) George Antheil was in Vienna, giving well-received concerts and having his music published; Olga Rudge was there to play Mozart; and Pound was there encouraging her in her career and doing what he could to promote it and to get Antheil to promote it. An Antheil–Rudge American tour was in prospect. Also in prospect was a new Antheil production of Pound’s Le Testament, in Germany or possibly in Dublin. Neither that nor the American tour materialized.
One thing that did come out of the weeks Pound spent in Vienna was ‘the Mensdorff letter’, as Pound would call it. Count Albert von Mensdorff was European agent for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, and Pound persuaded him to write to his chairman in New York, Professor Nicholas Murray Butler, calling for an investigation of the causes of war. The ‘active forces toward war’ included, according to the letter, first, ‘the whole trade in munitions and armaments’; and secondly, ‘Overproduction and dumping, leading to trade rivalries’. The letter went on to ask for clarification of ‘The principles of international law as recognised by the decisions of the permanent international Court of Justice’, and then to ask the meaning of the unwillingness of the USA to adhere to that Court. The letter, with its very pertinent concerns, was politely acknowledged and ignored, to Pound’s lasting disillusionment with the Carnegie Endowment and its chairman.
Dorothy wrote from London that Kitty Heyman, who had been playing Scriabin there, had spoken ‘so warmly of Olga’. She wondered how Kitty could ‘play so well with all that mystic mist?!’ In Neumayer’s bookshop she had found a set of Morrison’s seven-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language and ‘would almost certainly get it’. Little Omar was a ‘very cheerful soul—not very demonstrative’; yet, given a photo of Ezra by Olivia, he had ‘kissed it passionately twice, so I suppose he has adopted you’. He ‘Can lay the lunch table!’—this at eighteen months—and was ‘very quick to learn with his hands: very preoccupied with my bag or box’. At the beginning of June Dorothy enquired of Pound, ‘Is Vienna now the centre of the world?’, and would he be returning to Rapallo?
Pound was in Rome at the end of September and through October of 1928 researching the Cavalcanti manuscripts in the Vatican library. Nancy Cunard was in Rome too, and sent a note to his hotel signed ‘Avril’, ‘Longing to see you…Do we dine early?’ Next morning there was another note from ‘Avril’: ‘No but really I never saw anyone get electrically drunk (you) and as for what I (head mouth stomach) this 9 a.m. feel no-one need discuss’. ‘Oh Ezra’, the note went on, ‘I’m not yet grounded enough in my new love life [with Henry Crowder] to be without certain whispers of need-company such day after-drunk days as this…when, where, where you?’
In October Olga Rudge seized a chance offered her to buy a small house in Venice. Calle Querini 252, San Gregorio, was in a quiet cul-de-sac not far from the Dogana and the church of Santa Maria della Salute. ‘Three matchboxes on top of each other’ was how it impressed one visitor. She raised the money by asking a good friend to pay a promised legacy in advance and asking her father for the rest. It was to be a place of her own, a private place for Pound to come to when he would. Only Pound just then was concentrating on his edition of Cavalcanti, and on his next cantos, and showed no enthusiasm for her project. Through the winter of 1928–9 Olga fell into an anxious depression and told him in one fierce letter after another how lonely and unhappy she was and unable to work at her violin through never knowing when she would see him if at all and feeling that he was casting her off for his legitimate wife. ‘Five minutes of lucidity’, Pound assured her, ‘ought to show you that when I have been with you I was by no means magnetized TOWARD anyone else, or wanting to get BACK to anyone.’ Then he added, ‘It is only when you are doing your own job that there can be any magnetism’. There he was not choosing ‘perfection of the work’ against ‘perfection of the life’; he was making the one the condition of the other. And it was in this moment of crisis, when Olga had written, ‘Caro, I beg you, if you can explain or help, to be quick—I am just about finished’, that he declared that his life would be impossible if he stopped to consider people’s personal feelings. Perhaps she should take a younger man as her lover, he considerately advised. In time the little house would become their ‘hidden nest’, but just then Olga’s heart was no longer in it.
In late March 1929 Pound left Rapallo and headed for Venice with the intention, he told Olga, of doing the beams, arches, and furniture of her casa. He did not tell her about his amour de voyage with a certain Miss Pamela Lovibond, though he did say something cryptic about having ‘calf on the brain’. Miss Lovibond, one gathers from his letters to her, was a young English woman who knew Greek as well as Italian, had an interest in art, and was travelling in Italy with her family. From Verona, where he was trying to get into the library to check Cavalcanti’s ‘l’aere tremare’, he wrote to Miss Lovibond at the Hotel Verdi in Rapallo, ‘Darling…If I don’t think you may arrive in Venezia on Wednesday—I am incapable of thinking anything, anyhow—except along complicated Machiavellian reasons that wouldn’t take in a mouse.’ His address in Venice would be ‘Seguso, | 779 Zattere’. That was a Pensione half a mile or so from Calle Querini—it was where Olga was staying while her house was made habitable. His next letter, to ‘Dearest Pam’, was forwarded from Rapallo to Brioni, a small island off the Istrian coast across the Adriatic, the Lovibonds having gone there without stopping in Venice. ‘Divine radiance lacking an address’, Pound wrote, ‘light of my life’, and signed off ‘il tuo intendido. | E.’ A few days later—it was now Thursday 4 April and he had evidently heard from the goddess—he had to tell her ‘can’t use telephone in open hall’, and nor could he disguise himself as a golfer in order to join her on Brioni. Golf, he believed, was what one did on Brioni. After that his ardour cooled rather rapidly. In a week it was ‘Darling: Adrian [Stokes] says he will show you Venice’, giving her Stokes’s Venice address; and a week later, ‘Dearest Pam’, his own next address would be the Hotel Foyot in Paris. Miss Lovibond wrote to him there from Venice, a letter which eventually reached him in London at the end of May, by which time she was back home in Surrey. They met for lunch ‘at Pagani’s up stairs’, and the glamour evidently had quite gone. The rest was a dozen friendly letters over the next three years, ending upon the note of a shared reminiscence of ‘the venerable William sitting on the front’ in Rapallo.
On 27 June that summer in London Mr and Mrs Ezra Pound invited a select audience ‘to an evening of Mozart at 26 New Cavendish St. W.1 (by kindness of Mrs P. G. Konody)’. Three sonatas for violin and piano were to be performed by Olga Rudge and Vladimir Cernikoff. On 8 July Pound consulted Edgar Obermer at 14 Gower St. WC 1 and was advised to take: an endocrine preparation for the parathyroid gland; daily injections of Pituitrin; courses of Atophon; also powders supplied by Obermer. As to diet, ‘cut down animal protein to a minimum—no reason to restrict sweets and starchy foods of all kinds—fluids, plenty of water; wine and all alcohol to be very occasional, a well-diluted whisky not objectionable’. Some at least of this regime Pound seems to have followed. The following May, finding it prohibited in Paris, he asked Dorothy to get him a repeat prescription of Pituitrin, two boxes of six ampoules, also Parathyroid pills, ‘and the anti-cold serum’. Dorothy, consulting Obermer on her own account, was diagnosed as having ‘poor circulation and a vile rheumaticy heredity’. In July she asked if there was any ‘Obermer medicine’ she could bring from London for Olga. ‘Thyro-manganese cachets’, Pound replied, to be mailed to Olga in Paris.
Earlier in the summer of 1929 when Pound was in Paris he had been with H.D. and Nancy Cunard’s Henry in a taxi, and according to H.D. who told Aldington who then told Brigit Patmore, Henry Crowder—a native Indian and Negro jazz musician—‘said “Pray Ezra”, and Ezra invented a long prayer about Jordan, and Henry kept shouting “Halleluiah”’. H.D. had had ‘a lovely time’, apparently, though she then wrote to her lover Bryher, who couldn’t stand Pound, that Pound was ‘so terribly ridiculous and grown fat’.
Homer Pound retired from the Mint in June 1928 at the age of 70. Ford, visiting ‘Ezra’s people’ the previous November, had found them ‘delightful—particularly the father: it was really like visiting Philemon and Baucis’. Ezra was looking forward to their retiring to Rapallo and had been looking at empty apartments for them and sending detailed advice on what household goods to bring and how to transport books and pictures. He had also offered Homer advice on investing in bonds: ‘If you are investing say 5000, put it in five different places…leaves one less disturbable by winds of political hogwash, wars pestilences etc.’ The elder Pounds sailed for England on 1 June 1929, and would have been greeted there by Pound and introduced to little Omar about whom they had heard so much in Dorothy’s letters. They went on to Rapallo to see what they thought of it and by September had decided they would take up permanent residence there and sell the Wyncote home. Isabel, Ford’s ‘Baucis’, wrote to a friend,
Wyncote is very lovely, but does not equal Rapallo (Italy). We now have a blue cottage amid the gray green olive trees where the birds sing, the sea chants, waves roam and splash and the mountains remain quiet, waiting for Mohammed to come to them. Flowers are in bloom in all the gardens, Narcissus, Japonica, Jonquils, Heliotrope etc. Oranges hang on their trees, we have lots of fruit, walnuts and almonds, and life goes very pleasantly.
When, in July 1930, Yeats and his wife decided to return to Dublin the Homer Pounds took over for a time their fine, modern apartment on the fourth floor of via Americhe 12.
In the last week of October 1929 the bottom fell out of the US stock market. For two years there had been feverish speculation in ‘securities’ and, when the boom turned to panic, investments and investors, banks and borrowers, were wiped out. The Wall Street Crash spread economic depression like a tsunami wave all round the globe. Banks foreclosed on mortgages and called in credits, primary producers and industries went bankrupt, demand for goods slumped, and mass unemployment spread. Bankers, economists, and politicians were all held responsible; and, by the more thoughtful, the self-regulating capitalist financial system was called in question. Thus the stage was set for the rise of national socialist political movements committed to state regulation of capitalist enterprise, and for the rise of another charismatic political leader.
Olga Rudge was fortunate to have bought her Venetian house just before the Crash since that was to leave her father hard up and unable to go on supporting her financially. She moved into the Calle Querini casa in August or early September 1929, and Pound was with her for the last two weeks of September. He then went to meet up with Dorothy at Brescia for a few days on Lago d’Iseo, and on his way confessed to Olga from Verona, rather in a tone of surprise and self-congratulation, that he had experienced a brief but ‘mos’ noble feeling of desolation’. He could assure her that, ‘filled with most noble sorrow for 45 minutes…[h]e was ready to take the next train to Zattere’. However, his librarian friend Dazzi had taken him to the Dodici Apostoli restaurant and his next experience was of the remarkable effect of ‘bird and booze’ on such sorrow.
In November Olga remarked, ‘it is a year and a half since anyone has seen the child, and as I have been in Italy most of that time it looks bad…I only want to be sure in most selfish manner that duty to offspring not going to lose mi amante.’ It was agreed that the Leoncina should be brought to Venice by Frau Marcher for a week or so in December, and that Pound should be there too. It was a great event for Frau Marcher, while the child remembered the kindness of ‘the Herr’, and how he ‘looked at me approvingly and hugged me’. Her clearest memory was of ‘leaning out of a gondola, splashing with my hands’. From Rapallo Pound wrote to Olga that he had told his father that he had a granddaughter, and that Homer was ‘duly and properly pleased’. It is likely though that Homer had known for some time. Father and son apparently agreed that Isabel would be too deeply shocked and should not be told of young Mary’s existence.
In January 1930 Olga, in freezing Paris, relapsed into despair and mentioned suicide. Pound wrote express that it was not the moment: ‘That she shd do this just as she reaches the quality of amore that she had wanted—no—ça serait trop bête’, it would be just too stupid. He followed that up with long daily letters remarkable for his attending to her situation and needs rather than to his own, and for his not insisting they each do their own independent thing without impinging upon the other. ‘She dont seem to understand when she gets inside him’, he wrote in one letter, adding ‘Which she did not at first’; then a few days and letters later, ‘she get it into her head that he dont want to go on without her either’, with the postscript, ‘e ti voglio bene, con amore; and not with any plain benevolenza’. Olga meanwhile was trying to tell him that what she loved was the god she discerned in him, and that she wanted her god incarnate—which was not to say that she thought him a god. He accepted that in his own terms, replying that if he was to be the centre of her universe, still his work remained the centre of him, and she should come to him ‘when she was feeling that she wanted to see him ed anche [and also] wanting to help him work’. He had already taken part of a ‘casa sulla montagna’ for her to come to. And from February 1930 Olga did make her own whenever she was in Rapallo the upper floor of casa 60 Sant’ Ambrogio, a peasant family’s house forty-five minutes’ walk above the town and overlooking the bay. They had come through the crisis of their relationship by breaking through to its core, and upon that it would now be durably established.
It was still though a relationship that could not speak its name, respectability dictating that they must not be seen together in the town, or at any rate that there should be no appearance of intimacy. Even, or perhaps especially, Homer and Isabel were kept in the dark about that. When Olga was in her casa Pound would walk up the hill of an afternoon. When Dorothy was away Olga might come down to Pound, but her meals would have to be sent up from the restaurant to the rooftop apartment, and if anyone called she would have to hide herself away.
In April Ezra and Olga were together in Paris, Pound correcting proofs of A Draft of XXX Cantos. From there he reported to Dorothy: ‘Uproarious evening with Joyces. Norah insisting on my swallowing 25 frs. worth of caviar—no expense to be spared.’
Dorothy had written, ‘Omar comes to tea today, Saturday’. Also that she and Olivia were thinking of going to Frankfort in May for Antheil’s Transatlantic. The readers of the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle were informed about the same time that Homer Pound and his son would be in Frankfort for the première of the opera. Homer’s main motive may have been to see his granddaughter en route. A photograph taken at the time shows a trinity of benevolently brooding grandfather, the poet as father reaching out to his daughter, and a sturdy small girl with a self-possessed but doubtful expression. On their way back from Frankfort, in Verona, Homer had Pound send Dorothy a postcard of the statue of Can Grande on his horse, for her to show Can Grande’s grin to Omar.
Antheil presented a copy of the vocal score of Transatlantic (The People’s Choice) to Pound with the inscription, ‘For Ezra, truest of all friends I dedicate this first of my really printed works…March 23, 1930’. The leading persons of the opera were Helen, Hector, Ajax, Jason, Leo, Gladys; the place was NY City; and the time ‘modern’. Bootleggers, gangsters, politicians, and crooks strutted and sang against a background of skyscrapers, transatlantic liners, jingling telephones, and newspaper bulletins. Act 3—twenty-seven scenes played on four simultaneous stages and a movie screen—opened with a street scene outside Hector’s HQ in a US Presidency campaign. Critics applauded, but it was noticed that Antheil’s music had become relatively conventional, and that the scoring was simpler ‘than, say, the followers of Wagner and Richard Strauss’.
Pound’s relations with America were as ever a mixup of love and hatred. A fundraising letter sent to him as an alumnus of Hamilton College provoked an outburst against its professors as pampered parasites upon ill-rewarded writers, and as never considering ‘the relation of literature to the state, to society or to the individual’. Yet he was pleased to recommend Zukofsky for an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). However, it was the America of the Founding Fathers that he was most in sympathy with. For the next decad of cantos he was casting about for biographies and letters and diaries of Jefferson and the Adamses. Did Zukofsky ‘know anything of the whereabouts of J. Quincy Adams’ diary’? and Martin Van Buren’s autobiography, ‘or maybe it’s a diary’? In April 1931 he was ‘swatting at’ John Adams in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, ‘but the “woiks” wd take 50 days at 100 pages per diem. // must invent some skimmier method’, he wrote to Dorothy. (He would acquire his own set of the Works and find his ‘skimmier method’ for digesting Adams into a decad of cantos in 1938.) As for contemporary America, it was getting on for twenty years since he was last there, and he knew of its Jazz Age and Prohibition Era only by report and through its repercussions in Paris. The young Oppens, in France and Italy to see how America looked from a distance, paid a visit to Pound in Rapallo before going home. In her autobiography Mary Oppen recalled Pound’s impressing upon them, ‘Read, study the languages, read the poets in their own tongues.’ Their message to him would have been, ‘You are too far away from your own roots…Go home.’ But he knew too well what to expect if he were to do that. The US authorities had recently seized a copy of A Draft of XVI Cantos and attempted to prosecute under the Comstock Act the bookseller who had imported it.
Yvor Winters, the American poet, critic, and academic who had arrived at a dogged belief in rhyme and set forms of verse and who had deplored Pound’s ‘abandonment of logic in the Cantos’, wrote to Pound from Palo Alto, ‘fifty years hence my name will be in better repute than yours’. Pound retorted that there were more forms of logic than Winters could imagine.
In mid-August 1931 Ford had run out of money and asked Pound if he could lend him a hundred dollars. Pound sent the hundred dollars at once. Neither mentioned the developing sterling crisis. Dorothy wrote from Sidmouth at the beginning of September, ‘The Child is a queer object: it’s very pretty: and chatterbox…. He has bought a little present for you.’ Later in the month she wrote that she was arranging the sale of some of her mother’s shares, the proceeds to be made over to Pound. It seems that Olivia Shakespear had been giving him £300 a year, and was now making over the capital which should bring in that amount. She would be leaving her estate to Omar, she had told Pound, but Dorothy was to have a life-interest.
Dorothy and Olivia became extremely concerned as to how the sterling crisis would affect the investments on which their incomes depended. The value of the pound was at that time fixed by its being notionally redeemable in gold. In fact it was propped up by foreign investments, and when foreign investors withdrew their money en masse in August and September the gold standard had to be abandoned and the value of sterling allowed to fall. Pound reported from Rapallo that hotels in France were giving only 85 or 90 francs to the pound instead of 123. In New York it was down from around $5 to $4.15. If it could be held at $4, he advised, there would be nothing for Olivia to worry about; and it was a blessing that Dorothy had money invested in America. But of course the English money which she transferred into lire for use in Italy would yield much less than before. ‘I dare say I could start doing the cooking again,’ Pound reflected.
He was less worried though than stimulated by the crisis, which he was finding ‘more exciting intellectually than Aug. 1914’. It showed that Douglas had been right about the nation’s credit, and that the value of the currency should be related not to gold but to productive work. Perhaps now people would take notice of Douglas, though it might need ‘a complete collapse [to] civilize the country’. In October he advised that it would be as well for Olivia to get 5 per cent of her capital out of England ‘as an insurance policy’, and to invest it in industrials in New York, such as ‘Detroit Edison’ and ‘Am/ Smelting and refining’. And if Parkyn, the family solicitor, could extract a thousand pounds out of Dorothy’s £8,000 capital she might ‘plug that into Italian electric’. Olivia let him know that it was all very well for him, a ‘man without a country’, to be advising her to get her money out of her country before it sank completely. Parkyn evidently shared her patriotic feelings. And Pound wrote to Dorothy, ‘I spent 12 years trying to save her dithering and dodgering hempire. I rubbed Keynes nose into Douglas etc. etc; AT A TIME WHEN it might have been some use’. In any case, ‘A completely crashed England etc// might get round to knowing what it needs/’.
Late one afternoon in early October 1931 Dorothy ‘ran into a terrific crowd of unemployed’ around Marble Arch at the top of Park Lane. The area was swarming with police and traffic was held up for miles. Then she ‘met ’em all marching along Wigmore [Street]: 1000s with police mounted and on foot’. ‘Rather awful’, was her reaction. Pound’s Villon was to be broadcast by the BBC later in the month. He would be paid just £50 for the two broadcasts, less tax at five shillings in the pound, less probably a further 25 per cent due to the devaluation of the pound. However, he did get his bust by Gaudier out of England that November, and eventually had it set up on his rooftop terrace in Rapallo.
‘When I can git on wif my pome, I ain’t so restless.’ Pound had explained himself thus to Aldington in 1927, and it was no doubt how he felt. Yet he was able to combine the still intensity of composition with a busily active life. In the years 1930, 1931, and 1932 he was much occupied with his Cavalcanti edition and opera; with the BBC production of Le Testament; with a host of little magazines; with correspondents ranging from Zukofsky to Senator Cutting; with putting together Profile, an anthology ‘of poems which have stuck in my memory’, and Active Anthology; and with preparing a comprehensive collected edition of his prose. There was also his hardly tranquil private life. With all that he made steady progress from canto 31, which he began drafting in the autumn of 1930, through to canto 41 completed some time in 1933. Cantos 31–3 were ready for publication in Pagany in the summer of 1931. That autumn he mentioned to Dorothy, almost as an aside in the course of advising and commenting upon the sterling crisis, ‘have now material for three more canti/…toward vol. 3 of folio’. He was evidently hoping then for a third de luxe edition to go on from 17–27, and suggested that Dorothy could be thinking at her leisure about doing the capitals for it. A year later he was ‘proceeding toward Canto XXXX’, and ‘dead with work’. Now, thanks to the intervention of Archibald MacLeish, he had a contract with an American firm, Farrar and Rinehart, for the publication of A Draft of XXX Cantos, to be followed by publication in England by Faber & Faber; and the same publishers would bring out Cantos XXXI–XLI in 1934 in England and 1935 in the United States. He was conscious, as he told Ford, that the growing poem was not yet a ‘shining example’ of ‘major form’ or ‘Form of the whole’.
Pound had been working at a collected edition of his prose writings from at least 1929, when the Aquila Press was going to bring it out after doing his Cavalcanti Rime. When Aquila failed, Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press thought about taking it on. In 1931 the newly formed firm of Hamish Hamilton asked for first refusal. Then young George and Mary Oppen, with Louis Zukofsky as their editorial adviser, set up as publishers from their rented farmhouse in the middle of a vineyard near Le Beausset, inland from Toulon on the road to Marseille. Calling themselves To, Publishers—‘To’, Zukofsky explained, ‘as we might say, a health to’—and using French printers with a scant knowledge of English, they published Zukofsky’s major ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, William Carlos Williams’s A Novelette and Other Prose, and then brought out the first of a projected twelve volumes of Pound’s prose. Paperbound, it was to sell relatively cheaply at $1 a copy, only there was no sales organization, and the Oppens’ capital ran out. In August 1932 George Oppen wrote to Pound, ‘There is no possibility of continuing To “under present conditions”.…I’ll have Darantière return your Ms. Registered.’ That was the end of the collected edition. In its place Faber & Faber published in September 1934 Make It New, a fined down selection of Pound’s major literary essays.
The collected edition could well have been a monumental mess. Pound’s idea, as he explained it to his mother in November 1927, was that the whole of his prose to date should be recast in such a way that ‘the until-now apparently random and scattered work all falls into shape, and one sees, or shd. see wot is related to wot, and why the stuff is not merely inconsequent notes’. How to Read had to come first as ‘a sort of pivot’ giving the central idea around which everything would fall into order. In accord with that the To Publishers volume, titled Prolegomena I, contained How to Read followed by ‘Part 1’ of The Spirit of Romance, i.e. chapters I–IV with the new chapter V, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’. After that, according to Pound’s outline for the twelve ‘Books’ of his ‘Collected Prose’, books III–V were to give his ‘Manifestos on reform of poetry and contemporary movements’ of 1912–18, drawn from The Egoist, New Age, Poetry, Little Review, etc.; and books VII–X would give the later prose of 1920–8. Instigations would be preserved as book VI, Indiscretions as book XI, and Ta Hio as the concluding book XII. In recasting the materials from periodicals Pound selected, revised, and corrected extensively, and also added a linking narrative and commentary. Altogether he assembled more than 1,653 pages. As the researcher leafs through them the words ‘megalomania’ and ‘doomed’ flit through the mind. Why fight past battles over again? And whatever happened to his principles of selection and condensation, to the economy of the luminous detail? Was it that his hates, his ‘instinct of negation’, knew no bounds? His readers in the 1930s had reason to be grateful that in Make It New and ABC of Reading (1934) he found a better way of getting across his provoking and instructive critical effort. 5
The two anthologies Pound put together at the start of the 1930s practised a different order of criticism, one that was affirmative and curatorial, and which did its work by presenting selected exhibits with a minimum of commentary. Profile: An Anthology Collected in MCMXXXI and published by Giovanni Schweiller in Milan in 1932 was, according to Pound’s note in Active Anthology, ‘a critical narrative’ attempting ‘to show by excerpt what had occurred during the past quarter of a century’. That was, in effect, to go back to his own arrival in London in 1908, and then to come forward to where he was now. He placed first Symons’s ‘Modern Beauty’ from the 1890s, then represented Ford, Hulme and Williams as preceding the Imagists, followed by ‘Imagist and post imagist additions’ (H.D., Aldington, and his own ‘Coming of War: Actaeon’); Eliot’s ‘Hippopotamus’ and ‘Burbank’, Marianne Moore and Mina Loy, a war poem by Donald Evans, and an extract from Mauberley, carried the narrative from ‘1915 to 1925’; and ‘1925 and after’ was represented by a rather mixed lot of individualities, including Cummings, Zukofsky, Dunning, Eliot (‘Fragment of an Agon’ from Sweeney Agonistes), and Bunting (‘Villon’). Rather tellingly, Zukofsky is the only one of the American Objectivists to feature in Profile. Pound would endorse Zukofsky’s ‘Objectivists’ Anthology as ‘the first effort to “clear up the mess” since my effort in or about 1913’. But at the same time he was dissociating himself from this new effort on account of its tendency to ‘a sort of neo-Gongorism, that is a disproportionate attention to detail at the expense of main drive’, or a tendency to be so attentive to language as to destroy ‘the feel of actual speech’. To balance or counter that failing Pound included in Profile a dozen pages of ‘proletarian’ verse from New Masses, among them several ‘Negro Songs of Protest’. It was as if he wanted to point up the direct voice of political consciousness as the missing element in Objectivism.
There is the same emphasis on the world in the word, on the signified rather than the signifier, throughout Active Anthology (1933). Reopening the volume after an interval Pound was pleased to find ‘something solid’ in Bunting’s poetry and Zukofsky’s, to which he had devoted respectively fifty pages (nearly a quarter of the whole) and forty-three pages; and to find that, after theirs, Marianne Moore’s twenty-one pages were ‘the solidest stuff in the Anthology’, and that Williams’s realism, to which he had given twenty-five pages, though ‘not so thoughtful’, had a ‘solid solidity’ comparable to Flaubert’s. Poetic realism then was what he had put on show, to the end, as he intimated in his preface, that a moribund Britain might see what it was missing. He did not mention Eliot among the solid contributors, although he had included ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ (from Sweeney Agonistes). Instead he spent most of his preface quarrelling with Eliot’s recently published Selected Essays 1917–1932 for conceding too much to a British literary bureaucracy which did not want live poetry and an active culture. ‘If I was in any sense the revolution’, he declared, then ‘I have been followed by the counter-revolution’. Louis Zukofsky saw it differently when he looked into the anthology in the much altered world of post-war America. ‘I must say I have never felt so inclined to admire Ezra’s perceptions’, he wrote to Williams in 1949, it having struck him that Pound had seen in his own work, and in Bunting’s and Williams’s, ‘a necessity’ that had not been apparent even to themselves at the time. ‘As a piece of criticism’, he wrote, ‘his anthology of 1933 emerges as a work of genius.’
In her letter from London on 11 September 1932 Dorothy mentioned that ‘We had Omar’s birthday yesterday—Cake and candles’. Parkyn, the family solicitor, had been in attendance, also Marquesita, a contralto famous as Lucy Lockit in The Beggars Opera, and there had been ‘presents all round’. In Rapallo Homer had reminded Pound that it was Omar’s sixth birthday.
In December 1932 Pound heard from Caresse Crosby that ‘Max Ernst is being sold at auction on Thursday; furniture, shoes, tableaux’. He immediately sent her 500 francs, all he had available, either to give to Ernst in cash so that his creditors could not get at it, or to buy up his pictures in the auction and let Ernst know that he could have them back whenever he wanted them for whatever Pound had paid.
The ‘Decennio’, the first decade of Fascist rule in Italy, was being celebrated in 1932–3, and F. Ferruccio Cerio, one of the editors of the ‘Supplemento Letterario’ of Rapallo’s Il Mare, drafted a scenario for a film treatment of the story of Italian Fascism, with the title ‘Le Fiamme Nere’, ‘The Black Flames’. Pound was called in to adapt the scenario to make it suitable for foreign distribution, and the scenario with his notes was privately printed in Rapallo in December 1932. Pound immediately went down to Rome and sent a copy in to Mussolini’s private secretary with a request for an audience with the Duce. He had sought one before in vain, but this time he was told that Mussolini would see him on 30 January of anno XI.
1 The fifteenth-century Renaissance rulers whose conduct is scrutinized in XXX Cantos are, besides Sigismundo Malatesta (1417–68): Niccolò III d’Este (1384–1441), and his son Borso (1413–71); and Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence (1389–1464), his son Piero (1416–69), and Piero’s son Lorenzo or Lauro (1449–92).
2 Louis Zukofsky (1904–78), poet and prose writer, born and mostly based in New York; EP published his ‘Poem Beginning “The”’ in The Exile no. 3 (Spring 1928), and put him in touch with WCW; in that year he began his long poem A; in 1931 formed the Objectivist group with George Oppen, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff; was involved with them in TO, publishers and Objectivist Press; edited An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932); completed A, a work of major significance, in 1975. Collected works: Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963, 1987), a critical study in parallel with A 1–24; All: the collected shorter poems 1923–1958 (1965, 1991); Prepositions: The collected critical essays (1967, 1981); A (1978); Collected Fiction (1990). A selection of his extensive correspondence with EP was published in 1987.
3 The patching showed in more than the numbering of the pages. The first part, a scholarly edition of the original texts of the sonetti and ballate, was in Italian, without facing English versions, except that Pound did insert new translations for five of the sonnets. In the second part a number of the remarks in the ‘Indice dei manoscritti’ and in the captions to the plates were in English because the printer had been given the manuscript prepared for the English edition. The third part, described on the contents page as ‘Frammenti dell’edizione bilingue’, presented first, in English, all but the final section of the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay of 1928–9, these thirty-six pages amounting to a scholarly edition of the canzone ‘Donna mi prega’ with translation and commentary. Then followed twenty pages of what was to have been the bilingual edition of the Sonnets & Ballate. Pound’s introduction to his 1910–12 translations was given here, followed by the first pages of the Sonnets, with his newly edited Italian text facing his early versions—even though he could admit that ‘my early versions of Guido are bogged in Dante Gabriel [Rossetti] and in Algernon [Swinburne]’ (LE 194). Rime ended with the Italian text of sonnet 6 facing a blank page.
4 See Appendix C for a more detailed account of the opera.
5 Make It New was published in September 1934 by Faber & Faber in a format matching that of Eliot’s Selected Essays (2nd edn., revised and enlarged, October 1934). It contained ‘Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions’ (1912) and ‘Arnaut Daniel’ (1920)—these classified as examinations of ‘speech in relation to music’; ‘Notes on Elizabethan Clasicists’ (1917), ‘Translators of Greek’ (1918), and ‘French Poets’ (1918)—these classified as examinations of speech; ‘Henry James and Remy de Gourmont’ (1918, 1919)—examinations of ‘General state of human consciousness in decades immediately before my own’; ‘A Stray Document’, reprinting the principles of Imagisme; and finally ‘Cavalcanti’ (1910/1931), ‘as bringing together all these strands, the consciousness, depth of same almost untouched in writing between his time and that of Ibsen and James’ (MIN 15). All of these studies, with the exception only of ‘French Poets’, were included in LE in 1954.