Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  No. Ezra was in earnest. This was one role he would play through to the curtain. As Carpenter’s account shows (and it is a genuinely moving one, even when it must move through this sort of material), Pound regretted his internment; he did indeed become a man on whom the sun has gone down (in a phrase from The Cantos); but he never really recanted; he never admitted he was wrong; he took courage from his fears to the end.

  What Pound was afraid to face (I feel) was the fact that he was not, himself, a self, that he was a bundle of borrowed definitions, including that of the poet. Carpenter quotes Wyndham Lewis’s accurate observation that Pound was “that curious thing, a person without a trace of originality of any sort” except the remarkable ability to wear a mask, adopt a tone. “When he can get into the skin of somebody else … he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot.” Leslie Fiedler has wondered whether Pound wasn’t principally a parodist, so dependent was he upon texts other than his own.

  I have to agree with Carpenter that the well-known “Portrait d’une Femme” is more nearly a picture of Pound himself than its ostensible model, Olivia Shakespear. The lady is seen as a still sea crossed by trading boats and awash with shipwrack and driftgifts. The poem concludes:

  For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,

  Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:

  In the slow float of differing light and deep,

  No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,

  Nothing that’s quite your own.

  Yet this is you.

  It is true (I think) that most of Pound’s best poetry is based upon the work of someone else, and stems from his ability to release another language into English. It was what made him such an excellent editor. Time and time again, in The Cantos, amid a barren and chaotic landscape, poetry miraculously blazes up, and at the bottom of that fire a Chinese classic like Li Ki, for instance, will be found fueling it, or some other distant text. With so little spring left in his own legs, he could still rebound beautifully from someone else’s words, because they—not love or landscape or the pleasures and problems of life—were his muse. Like lighter fluid’s flame, these phrases (where, paradoxically, Pound was at last pure Pound) consume themselves without leaving a scorch, mar, or any other trace on the page. Lines like these—flames like these—“lick.”

  This month are trees in full sap

  Rain has now drenched all the earth

  dead weeds enrich it, as if boil’d in a bouillon.

  In his role as a Modernist, Ezra Pound is a great disappointment. He was a minor master of collage, certainly a fundamental Modernist technique, but he valued content over form, message over manner; a lot of his best language was artificial, and, as in the lines above, almost purely decorative, as if it had to be torn from time and place before it could flutter at all: a lyrical oasis amid hate’s acrid heat. Pound championed many poets and novelists, but not for long, and not always with real understanding; he didn’t like much modern art despite his enthusiasm for Gaudier-Brzeska; and although he had a hand in the Vivaldi revival, and was linked in love with a musician, and composed an opera with which he paralyzed all available ears, he disliked Beethoven, is said to have been tone deaf, and took no part in the serious musical movements of his time, as either a listener or an advocate. Consigned by society to the periphery, he began to take an interest in, and choose, the peripheral, and like many American writers he began to fade, concerning himself more and more, as the years went by, with the crank he was turning.

  I suppose most of us want to make a difference. Pound wanted to make a real dent—not (I am afraid) because his dent would make a difference, but because it would make him. If poetry proved impotent, he would turn to prophecy, to politics, to dreams. If he could not act, he could at least assume the posture. So the dent he made was a stage dent, one which would do to advance the action of the play, but which was contained within the inconsequential frame of the stage. Poet/prophet: they were together in the old days, but they were two roles now, and neither paid.

  Humphrey Carpenter concludes his exemplary biography with, appropriately, fragments: a few summary pronouncements, none of them about money. The last is a word in the margin of the Nicomachean Ethics at a point in the Introduction where the translator is summarizing the Philosopher’s views. “The life of Action,” Horace Rackham writes, “has no absolute value: it is not part of, but only a means to, the End, which is the life of Thought,” and Pound’s marginal word is “Nuts.”

  What a lovely word game we could conclude these remarks by playing. It is a very American response—“Nuts!” It is what our generals say when they are surrounded by Germans and asked to surrender. It is what adolescents say when they mean “balls.” It is what people called Ezra, so they wouldn’t have to call him something else. It also involves just the right textual bollix, because for Aristotle pure act and pure thought are one and the same.

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  We live in a time, we’re told, of self-absorption. No longer is mankind the measure: me now metrics me. I envision a piece of blotting paper slowly blotting itself to oblivion. Certainly if tribes are more interesting than nations, sects more important than a common faith, and minorities major, then what could be more majorly minor than me: me, me, more me, as Joyce writes, me and mine and all that I have done. Yet self-regard has never been enough. We want the regard of others; they are to be looking as we look; we want them to be absorbed by the same self that absorbs us: see me see myself as you should see me; remember me when I’m a ghost; watch me turn myself into a book.

  The power to see ourselves as others see us is granted only to such disengaged observers as arrive from France by slow sail. Even my mirror puts just that bit of me before my gaze which I permit to fall there. I cannot see all round myself: not anywhere I walk or perch or if I quickly whirl about to come upon my rear and take it by surprise. I might as well be asleep to such sides of me as disappear out of the corners of my eyes. Nor is the ugliness of my gnarled feet evident anywhere within my skin where I alone can feel what splendid shape they’re in. I think I have a winning smile, but to those on whom my smile is so winsomely conferred, the slightly turned-down corners of its lips convey despair, disgust, disdain—I know not what uninvited attitude in addition—and invariably, if in tears, though I argue my happiness like William Jennings Bryan on behalf of God, the weeping will convict me of a lie, as far as mere onlookers are concerned; because we really believe in no other consciousness than our own, and must infer the contents of another’s mind from the perceptions which arrive in ours: from an overheard voice, its screams and groans and heavy breathing; from a body, its weight and posture; from someone’s gait, the swagger; and from the face, its signs. And to the groan don’t we affix our own ache, to another’s risen flesh our yearning, to the sly wink our own conspiratorial designs?

  It is safer by far, some say, to rely on behavior by itself to speak. History is something we catch in the act, and only acts have public consequences. Internal states are not even evidence, for pains can be imagined or misplaced, their groaning faked; better to see where the bone is broken or tooth decayed (John Dewey once argued that an aching tooth was not sufficient evidence of something anywhere amiss), and if I promise to give another all my love, it would be wise of the lucky recipient to wait and weigh what the offered love improves, and count what its solicitude will cost.

  Feelings are not a dime a dozen, but the price of eggs is eighty cents. Which, do you think then, really hatches chicks in the yard?

  Yes, as Aristotle insisted, the Good is what the Good Man does. Does the geologist need to infer an interior to his rock to read its past? Does the botanist really interrogate her plants? Does the zoologist attribute suffering to his frogs as he runs his scalpel round their gizzards? Why, we could weep a world of pain into a thimble and have hollow enough left over for a finger, since consciousness never struts and frets upon the stage, or occupies a locker in the dressing room.

  Biograp
hy, the writing of a life, is a branch of history. It requires quite a lot of labor, and therefore, when such a work is undertaken, one would expect the subject to be of some significance to history as a whole. Yet, except for the Encyclopedia of the Dead, as Danilo Kiš imagined it, where everybody’s obit is presently complete or in meticulous construction, the majority of mankind rest, as George Eliot wrote, in unvisited tombs, and have left behind them nothing of their former presence but perhaps a hackneyed scratch upon a stone. Futility is the presiding spirit at every funeral.

  Caesar’s assassins did not stab him with their souls. In Hades, their shades are not stained by the murdered man’s blood. That blood caked, that blood colored, only the blades.

  Biography, the writing of a life, is a branch of history, but a broken branch, snapped perhaps heartlessly from the trunk, at the moment when Montesquieu directed the historian’s eye to larger themes, and toward those general social aspects from which the individual’s traits, he believed, had more specifically sprung.

  Yet if my tooth aches, it is after all my ache, though you may be better informed than I of the swelling; if my heart is sore, that soreness is unique, though its heaviness does not even tremble the balance bar; if I am afraid, do not complacently say you share my fear and understand my state, for how can you know how I feel? isn’t that our unpleasant complaint? isn’t that how we reject so much sympathy—stale candy on a staler plate? since, to accomplish our death there are a thousand similar and similarly scientific ways, but inside that shutting down of the senses, there is a dread belonging to no one else even in the same sad medical shape; there is a large dread like an encountered rat, huge, as if fat as an idol, bearded like some ancient northern warrior, yet as indistinct in its corner, and as ineffectual as lint. We can’t make history out of that.

  Knowing has two poles, and they are always poles apart: carnal knowing, the laying on of hands, the hanging of the fact by head or heels, the measurement of mass and motion, the calibration of brutal blows, the counting of supplies; and spiritual knowing, invisibly felt by the inside self, who is but a fought-over field of distraction, a stage where we recite the monotonous monologue that is our life, a knowing governed by internal tides, by intimations, motives, resolutions, by temptations, secrecy, shame, and pride.

  Autobiography is a life writing its life. As if over? or as it proceeds? Biographies are sometimes written with the aid of the biographee, and these few are therefore open-ended too, centrally incomplete, for death normally does the summing up, the bell tolls for the tale beneath whose telling the deceased shall be buried, with the faith that he or she shall rise again on publication day, all ancient acts only pages then, every trait an apt description, every quality of character an anecdote, the mind squeezed within a quip, and the hero’s, or heroine’s, history headed, not for heaven, but the shelf.

  If we leap rapidly enough from one side of this insistence to its denial, from the belief that only I can know how I am to the view that only another can see me really, we can quickly persuade ourselves that neither self-knowledge nor any other kind is possible, and, so persuaded, sink dizzily to the floor. Of course, we might, by letting the two positions stretch out alongside each other and observing how these two kinds of information are of equal value and complementary, conclude that for a full account both the “in” and the “out” are needed. That was Spinoza’s solution. It is usually wise to do whatever Spinoza suggests.

  How does autobiography begin? With memory. And the consequent division of the self into the-one-who-was and the-one-who-is. The-one-who-is has the advantage of having been the-one-who-was. Once. The-one-who-was is furthermore at the present self’s mercy, for it may not wish to remember that past, or it may wish the-one-who-was was other than the one it was, and consequently alter its description, since the-one-who-is is writing this history and has the upper hand. Every moment a bit of the self slides away toward its station in the past, where it will be remembered partially, if at all; with distortions, if at all; and then rendered even more incompletely, with graver omissions and twists to the plot by the play of the pen, so that its text will no doubt be subsequently and inaccurately read, systematically misinterpreted and put to use in yet another version, possibly by a biographer bent on revising the customary view of you, and surrounding his selected subject with himself, as Sartre surrounded Genet, as a suburb surrounds a town and slowly sucks its center out.

  The autobiographer thinks he knows his subject, and doesn’t need to create a calendar of the kind the biographer feels obliged to compile, so she may boast she knows what her subject did on every day of his life beyond kindergarten and his first fistfight. He is likely to treat records with less respect than he should, and he will certainly not investigate himself as if he had committed a crime and ought to be caught and convicted; rather, he’ll be pleased he’s got his defense uttered early, because he understands that the biographer’s subjects all end in the pen. No, he will think of himself as having led a life so important it needs celebration, and as sufficiently skilled at rendering as to render it rightly. Certainly, he will not begin his task believing he has led a botched life and will now botch the botch. Unless, of course, there’s money in it, and people will pay to peer at his mistakes as they pay to enter the hermaphrodite’s tent at the fair—ladies to the left, please, then gents, thank you, there to the right, between the chaste screen of canvas. An honest autobiography is as amazing a miracle as a doubled sex, and every bit as big a freak of nature.

  The autobiographer tends to do partials, to skip the dull parts and circle the pits of embarrassment. Autobiographers flush before examining their stools. Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? to halo a sinner’s head? to puff an ego already inflated past safety? Who is smug enough to find amusement or an important human lesson in former follies? Or aspire to be an emblem for some benighted youngster to follow like the foolish follow the standard borne forward in a fight? To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster. Some, like Rousseau and Saint Augustine, capitalize on this fact and endeavor to hide deceit behind confession. Of course, as Freud has told us, they always confess to what their soul is convinced is the lesser crime.

  How often, in one’s second childhood, does one turn back to the first. Nostalgia and grief, self-pity and old scores, then compete to set the stage and energize each scene. Why is it so exciting to say, now that everyone knows it anyway, “I was born … I was born … I was born?” “I pooped in my pants, I was betrayed, I made straight A’s.” The chroniclers of childhood are most always desperate determinists. Here their characters were formed; because of this wound or that blow, some present weakness can be explained. And how often does that modestly self-serving volume wear its author out, or he becomes bored with his own past and forswears his later years. Sometimes, too, Fate cuts the cord, and the autobiographer dies in his bed of love, still high in the saddle of the self.

  Since it is considered unwise to wait to write your life till you’re entombed and beginning to show your bones, you may choose to do it ahead of time, as Joyce Maynard did, writing her chronicle of growing up in the sixties, Looking Back, at age eighteen. Why not? our criminals are mostly kids; kids constitute the largest chunk of our silliest, most easily swayed customers; and much of our culture is created for, controlled, and consumed by thirteen-year-olds. Willie Morris, having reached at thirty-two what the jacket flap calls “mid-passage,” paints, in North Toward Home, his cannot-be-called-precocious picture of the South.

  Many lives are so empty of interest that their subjects must first perform some feat like sailing alone around the world or climbing a hazardous peak in order to elevate themselves above mere existence, and then, having created a life, to write about it. As if Satan were to recall his defiance of God, his ejection from Heaven, his yearlong fall through the ether, and even his hot landing in a lake of fire for our edification. Stil
l, he didn’t do it just to make the News. Some choose to write of themselves merely as cavers or baseball players or actors or mountaineers, or create the biography of a business. Lives of crime are plentiful, as well as those of daring-dodaddies from the Old West. Others linger, like Boswells, at the edge of events, so that later they can say: “I was there, and there I saw King Lear go mad; I can tell you of a king who cursed, who cried, who called for his fool, who sat slowly down and sadly sighed.…” Nevertheless, by accident sometimes you will find yourself in an important midst, Saigon falling around your person like a tower of blocks, or, as fortune smiles, find that you have undertaken for the state some tasks that turned out more wellish than sickly; then an account of them, of how it felt to have grappled with Grendel, or smelled the Augean stables before Hercules swept them, or had the blood of an assassinated president sprayed over your shirt as you rode in his cavalcade; yes, then an account might be of value to future travelers who might not wish to go that way.

  We have well before us the apparently noble example of Bernal Díaz, who was a foot soldier in Cortés’s army. Annoyed by the incompetence of earlier authors, who spoke the truth “neither in the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end,” he wrote his own True History of the Conquest of New Spain, and prefaced his honestly unpretentious work with this simple statement: