Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Within her cave, Nerea,

  she like a great shell curved

  In the suavity of the rock,

  cliff green-gray in the far,

  In the near, the gate-cliffs of amber …

  Eventually form went one way and content another, the meter was thumped on a tub, and the message pasted like a label to the snake oil he was selling. When his work was right, it was as pure as a line drawn by Matisse. It possessed the pleasure of a sweet, long-empty song—monotonous, incantatory, sybaritic—descriptive of what was not, or was no longer, or had been at one time written of, and sounding as if it had been overheard while being whispered through the pages of the past like an echo from Nerea’s cave, as if it came from the touch of a bit of lonely beach to the lap of a spent wave.

  And the wave

  green clear, and blue clear,

  And the cave salt-white, and glare purple,

  cool, porphyry smooth,

  the rock sea-worn.

  No gull cry, no sound of porpoise,

  Sand as of malachite, and no cold there,

  the light not of the sun.

  In A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, Humphrey Carpenter has measured out Pound’s long, problematic life at about eleven pages per year. “Measure” is, I think, the right word. Differently than in many massive biographies, where the data sogs like the morning porridge into groddy heaps through which the author’s spoon can be seen to have faintly stirred, here the disposition that has been made of what is known about Pound is always orderly and clear, with a minimum of fatuous conjecture, especially of the psychological kind, untrammeled by idiosyncrasies of style or pushy charm of manner, and with an apt sense for the proper weight to be placed on each detail of the life so as to balance it against the others, including a fine understanding of the role of the work, its quality and meaning, as it bears upon that life or is a product of it.

  The course and character of Humphrey Carpenter’s narrative is so subtle yet unassuming that the reader only belatedly realizes with what calm and patient control the biographer has permitted the mud of his study to settle so that a figure may emerge, and how free for his own responses he has allowed the reader to feel, although Carpenter certainly makes, and makes known, his own estimates. This book’s covers do not enclose a volume of evasions and excuses, nor do they open on a courtroom or lead us to the analyst’s couch. The scholar’s high tone, averted eye, and carefully washed hands are not in evidence here; neither is the accusatory rant of the reactionary (with whom Ezra Pound had so much in common, in literary matters as well as political), and it is this splendid judiciousness—fair, lucid, calm, unflinching, complete—that distinguishes the biography, and quite beautifully enables A Serious Character, in Pound’s fine phrase about the proper aim of verse, “to cut a shape in time.”

  As I followed Carpenter’s account of Pound’s career, rereading the poetry at each point where the level of the Life reached it, my memories of all those initial meetings with the man in his letters, and the poet in his verse, accompanied me, just as I imagine similar recollections will flavor the pages of many readers of the biography. I remembered the stunning impression that the early poems made: their lyrical intensity, odd phrasing, original line breaks, exotic qualities, the unashamed “this is poetry” feel of it, the sudden intrusion of the colloquial—invariably electric—nevertheless a contemporary way of speaking, which was then bent into strange archaic shapes. We filled our mouths with his lines, heard the word with Ezra’s matchless ear, and listened to a noble, raucous, wrathful music.

  Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.

  You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!

  I have no life save when the swords clash.

  But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing

  And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,

  Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

  And in the letters I found a man my heart could hold close: exuberant, playful, dedicated, generous, and full of rage over all the right things. How he hated the Philistines—oughtn’t we all?—and hadn’t he shaken the dust of provincial America from his feet to walk the romantic paths of the troubador poets? hadn’t he shoveled the nineteenth century, that hated age with all its bourgeois ways, into the grave? and blown outmoded sentiments into smithereens, and commanded us, instead, to make it new? brash? fresh? right? true?

  And hadn’t Ezra Pound befriended the young and supported everything experimental? and gone out of his way to encourage quality, however various, in Frost, Eliot, Joyce, Ford, Lewis, Williams? And when T. S. Eliot had ceased to be an affront and become a façade, Ezra Pound was still rattling his chains—a ghost, perhaps, but with the power to affright. And when T. S. Eliot had thrown that simple and popular plainstyle about his shoulders like a shawl, and turned into a regular pundito—despicable in his respectability—Ezra had continued to be complex, dense, and disagreeable—an irregular bandito—doing what we were all supposed to be doing: distancing ourselves from the ruck, our hand against every hand that wasn’t thumbing its nose. So if you were not a friend and fan and follower of Ezra Pound, you were at the very least a simp and a lazily inactive enemy of art, and hence of all real advancement in man. It meant you were still in love with “that old bitch gone in the teeth / that botched civilization” we all took such easy advantage of, enjoyed, and gleefully rejected.

  So when, in 1949, the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry was awarded to The Pisan Cantos by a divided and distracted and courageous jury, how we all rushed to the freshly drawn front lines in order to spit ink at our enemies. If we had reservations (and I had a good many), we left them behind as though they were ploughs, while our weapons were seized like the throat of the foe. Pound shouldn’t have gotten the prize because The Pisan Cantos were, on the whole and with the exception of the now famous “Pull down thy vanity” passage, a chaotic and self-indulgent mess, and certainly not superior as a work to William Carlos Williams’s second Paterson volume, against which it chiefly contended. Yet Pound should have gotten the prize because that was the most powerful punch which could be thrown at the reactionary’s nose. However, he had given aid and comfort to the enemy … and what an enemy! But he was now most wrongly incarcerated, plopped into a loony bin, and unable to stand trial or further embarrass anybody, since we U.S.’ers had stooped to a ruse of the Reds and called him gone in the head. If our society was going to treat literature with an indifference both casual and profound, it had no business punishing any poet for what that poet said. Still, should we show sympathy for this traitor and anti-Semite whose vile hatreds rise from his verse like steam from fresh dung? Nevertheless, there are lines here and there, lines like feathers fallen from angels; there are heavenly tones, and places where the words pace as only Pound could pace them, back and forth, as someone in meditation; and surely there should be a prize for that.

  It is difficult to admit to a flaw in Flaubert, any lapse in late Cézanne, or to say that Schoenberg had perhaps not found the right way, or that certain magisterial albeit monotonous and soporific works of our Modern Movement were a mistake, a mistake worse than dreadful—merely dreary. It is difficult because the enemy is still out there, growing stronger with every so-called advance in the media, in the scoop-up profit of its enterprise and the passivity of the experience it provides, growing more Philistine, more commercial, more hopelessly “pop” during every advertising break, through every sappy sitcom minute.

  Humphrey Carpenter has sailed serenely between those who would now just as soon forget the Problem of Ezra Pound and those who, just as intently, would like to get the bastard. Carpenter has accomplished this not by being either mealymouthed or serpent-toothed, but by making certain that when he was confronted with an esthetic judgment, he made one, and when he was faced with a moral judgment, he made that; and by not harping or playing prosecuting attorney; and by not shoveling loads of unpleasantness under acts of generosity or rh
ymes of genius; by refusing every special plea; and, above all, by keeping calm. He sees through Ezra Pound without, on that account, failing to see him. It is a feat worthy of salute.

  In the United States, it can at present be taken for granted that a serious writer in almost every genre will be at least liberal. The “Poets for Reagan” T-shirt was a humorless joke. However, the camps of the early modernists in most of the arts (not in theater or architecture) were full of fascists, fascist sympathizers, and other lovers of on-time trains; there were many anti-Semites, sexists, denigrators of other races, upper-class apes and royalist snobs. The list is dismayingly long, shamefully familiar, and I shall not write it down. Although they may have taken over the esthetic left, their revolutionary fervor did not spell past the g in lives typically “bourgeois.” Writers had not yet gotten used to the fact that in contemporary society their presence, their opinions, their work and its quality, mattered not a whit. The state would not alter its course half a smidge whatever their ravings, and the writers deeply resented this indifference. Robert Frost was adored as much for his white hair and his aw-shucks country manners as he was for his cold-comfort country pomes. Inside Pound there was a fuming Ezra, inside Eliot a droning Elder Statesman, inside Faulkner a bag of South wind.

  We can follow, in Pound’s career, the classic course of the disease that arises from the continued sufferance of social disdain and unconcern: how it begins in this or that specific instance of rejection; how the poet starts to glory in the fact of it, to form his very self in terms of such an image; how he augments the facts by acting within that definition and earning further and confirming slights; and finally, how a theoretical raison d’être arrives, after the fact, indeed, but in time to justify one’s hostility as a perfectly honorable and adequate response to the connivance, animosity, and stupidity of the world.

  Ezra Pound called the Jews yitts. My father called them yids or kikes, and as much as I detested his thought and its hostile tone, and refused to listen to any more bitter jokes about President Rosenfeld, I grew used to it; it did not surprise or shock. (Pound referred to the president as “Jewsfeldt” and “Stinkie Roosenstein.”) Anti-Semitism was fashionable, and came in many cuts. There was the anti-Semitism of the snob, who viewed Jews with the faint distaste reserved for every nouveau riche and social climber; there was the economic anti-Semite, who associated the Jews with moneylenders and shylocks of all sorts, from simple shopkeepers to munitions czars; there was the religious Jew-hater, who still thought of them as Christ-killers; there was the political Jew-baiter, who felt they infiltrated the system secretly, seized control of it, and, in effect, went about poisoning wells; and there was the racial purist, the blood-taint anti-Semite, who feared, more than anything, the fouling of family lines and the mixing of races and was especially apprehensive about customs and qualities even faintly from the East. It was natural for these antagonisms to join and run together for a while like wild dogs, but they could separate too, and even snap at one another sometimes. Henry James’s anti-Semitism appears to have been mainly social, as we might expect, and T. S. Eliot’s was probably of the same kind; whereas Ezra Pound’s was principally economic and political. He certainly couldn’t care that they’d killed Christ.

  It was felt that even the safely assimilated Jew was wont to wear black beneath his gay party gear; that he had that funny skullcap to cover his nefarious thoughts; and that behind his practiced worldly smile was concealed a cunning Talmudic look. Jews slunk through society, clannish and conniving, in league with anything you didn’t like, secret emissaries of the East, supporters of Communism and revolution, and possessed of a guile gained over centuries of gulling the Gentile to get rich. Even in Hailey, Idaho, where there weren’t any, they knew that.

  The mind’s well-being was the well that was poisoned. One doesn’t own a little anti-Semitism as if it were a puppy that isn’t big enough yet to poop a lot. One yap from the pooch is already too much. Nor is saying “it was only social” a successful excuse. Only social, indeed … only a mild case. The mild climate renders shirtsleeves acceptable, loosens ties and collars, allows extremes to seem means, makes nakedness normal, facilitates the growth of weeds. Since the true causes of anti-Semitism do not lie with the Jews themselves (for if they did, anti-Semitism might bear some semblance of reason), they must lie elsewhere—so, if not in the hated, then in the hater, in another mode of misery.

  Rationalist philosophers, from the beginning, regarded ignorance and error as the central sources of evil, and the conditions of contemporary life have certainly given their view considerable support. We are as responsible for our beliefs as for our behavior. Indeed, they are usually linked. Our brains respond, as well as our bodies do, to exercise and a good diet. One can think of hundreds of beliefs—religious, political, social—which must be as bad for the head as fat is for the heart, and whose loss would lighten and enliven the spirit; but inherently silly ones, like transubstantiation, nowadays keep their consequences in control and relatively close to home. However, anti-Semitism does not; it is an unmitigated moral catastrophe. One can easily imagine how it might contaminate other areas of one’s mental system. But is it the sickness or a symptom of a different disease? Humphrey Carpenter’s levelheaded tone does not countenance Pound’s corruption. It simply places the problem plainly before us, permitting us our anger and our pity.

  Donald Hall’s luminous memoir of his meetings with Pound in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes reports that Pound repented of his anti-Semitism, calling it a mistake and a “suburban prejudice”; but the tone of that repentance is all wrong, suggesting that Pound had made some error in arithmetic on his tax forms which turned out to have unpleasant consequences. Anti-Semitism is not a “mistake,” or even a flaw, as if it left the rest of its victim okay and in good working order. Like racism, a little does more than go a long way; it goes all the way.

  Karl Shapiro, who had opposed giving the Bollingen Prize to Pound, wrote then that, in his opinion, “the poet’s political and moral philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standards as literary work.” I think, however, that, although the poetry has certainly been vitiated by something, the evidence of Carpenter’s Life is not that Pound’s anti-Semitism was responsible, but rather that a virulent strain of the mistrust of one’s own mind (a fear of thinking, like a fear of heights) and a habit of emotional disassociation were the chief culprits. Pound had no moral philosophy because he was incapable of the consecutive steps of thought, of the painstaking definition or systematic and orderly development of any idea. Carpenter wonderfully extracts and puts before us the faltering steps of Pound’s “argument” in his ABC of Economics, for instance, and they are the staggers of a drunk. He dismisses Guide to Kulchur, with good reason, as a disjunctive mélange of rant and bile. Disjunction is Pound’s principal method of design. If he saw the world in fragments, it was because he needed fragments, and because his psyche hated wholes.

  In a whole, the various parts might get in touch with one another. In a whole, the grounds for their meeting might be discovered and explored; but Pound preferred spontaneously combustible juxtapositions, ignitions that would take place without the need of connection, as if powder and flint would fire without a strike, or any spark.

  Pound took care never to interrogate the fragments themselves (because he might inadvertently treat them as wholes). He asked neither how they were constituted nor where they had been, just as he kept the pieces of his family in fragments: his wife, Dorothy Shakespear, in one place; his son as soon as possible in another; his mistress, Olga Rudge, in a third; their daughter in yet a fourth; and so on. He would seek out remote and relatively exotic figures to write about and translate (where he would not be so easily exposed, and where his cavalier way with data would go relatively unobserved). He perfected the snip system of quotation, and the snipe system of assault, never keeping to the field but darting about from concealment to concealment like an Indian. He created collages out of pieces
of his mind, his peeves, his helter-skelter reading; and he flitted from enthusiasm to enthusiasm like an angry bee, because his enthusiasms encouraged him to sip, to fly, to sting. He detested academics (many of whom he bamboozled just the same), and I suspect it was because they “dwelled.” They hung over and on to things; they wrung them like wash sometimes, leaving them flat and dry; but they did probe and pick and piece together. Pound wanted to treat most of his opinions as beyond question or analysis, beyond explanation, as if everyone ought to know what they were, and how they were, and why (Carpenter demonstrates this repeatedly); thus he protected the emptiness of his ideas from being discovered by keeping the lights in their rooms lit but never going in.

  The poet’s irascibility, his bullying, his bluster, his adoption of moral outrage, his name-calling, his simplifications, his omissions—how long the list is—work to keep the wondering, thinking, quizzing world at bay. If you are confident that four and four make eight, you may be bored if asked to prove it, but hardly angry and outraged. Vilification protects the self-evident from any self for whom it won’t be.

  It is always dangerous to define yourself, as Pound increasingly did, in terms of your beliefs: I am Catholic; I am an anarchist; I am a fan of the flat earth. An attack on them is an attack on you, and leads to war. You can fight for a cause and make it come about, but you can never make an idea come true like a wish, for its truth is—thank heaven—out of all hands. What could Pound do, built of opinions like a shack, but hate every wind?

  Pound’s letter-writing style (and then his public prose and then his poetry) exhibits the same traits. Hokey spellings, jokey down-home ruralities, punny inventions, undercut the seriousness of whatever’s said, even when it is cantankerous. Caps give weight to words which otherwise wouldn’t receive it, and offer directions to the understanding which could not be got from the sentences themselves, because neither feeling nor conviction arise from within this prose. It is all punched in from outside. Sentences often fail to complete themselves. The rattle of ideas is regularly broken by conceptual silences that open suddenly like fissures (the hiatus is more frequent than the comma), by leaps of thought that do not include the notion of a landing. Pound’s wartime broadcasts from Rome on the fascist radio (which were the basis for charges of treason later brought against him) were clad in such homespun that a few thought he had to be hoodwinking his sponsors.