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:
– above all and through everything a preoccupation with ‘problems of conduct’, as in the Ta Hio (digested in Canto 13);
– specifically, a concern for the ascendancy of intelligence over brute force;
– then that the intelligent should develop the sense of civic responsibility;
– and beyond that, the life of the spirit, or the divine states of mind which move men to benevolent and constructive action;
– with a concern always with ‘where have we got to now?’
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 unawake
ned. 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.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 13