There can be no doubt though that he was genuinely struggling to bring about a just society. And he really did believe that the principles of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence were made new in Mussolini’s speech in the Piazza before Milan Cathedral ‘on the 6th of October anno XII (1934)’, when the Duce promised to resolve ‘the problem of the distribution of wealth, so that we will no longer experience the illogical, paradoxical and cruel fact of poverty in the midst of abundance’. Pound understood that to mean ‘No more an economy putting the accent on individual profit, but an economy concerned for the interest of the whole people (interesse colletivo)’. That made the Fascist dictator, in Pound’s view, the proponent of a higher social justice, and a shining example to the United States.
Making music of history: ‘Cantos 31–41’
Here is another paradox. In his cantos, even when dealing with those same matters of economics and banking in the United States and in Italy, Pound was able to write in a manner totally opposed to that of his agitprop prose. In the cantos there are no urgings to instant action, no raging animosities, no generalizations and abstractions. Instead there are great heapings up of demonstrative detail, whole phalanxes of particulars; and readers are not told what to think but—often to their dismay—are required to discover their own reactions and to draw their own conclusions from the data laid out before them. They find themselves in an absolutely different mental world, though of course it is objectively the same world, only the mind perceiving it has altered in its way of operating. Now it is intent on what is to be known and understood rather than on what is to be done, and the aggressive mentality of the activist wielding a range of fixed ideas against the enemies of society gives way completely to its opposite, the open intelligence of the poet about its proper work.
‘An epic is history set to music’, Pound noted about 1936, meaning, presumably, that the poet would be studying the facts of history with a mind sensitive to their harmonies and discords, and intent on discriminating their values, their moral or ethical overtones, and on composing them into a pattern to appease the humane rage for order.
‘Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’ Behind that lies the principle of le mot juste; but for the poet there is more to it than the accurate word; there must be justice also in the arrangement of the words and in their tones and rhythms. That sort of justice, the natural justice of language, does not come naturally. It was as much as he could do, it was like forging pokers, Pound told another young poet, Mary Barnard, ‘to get economic good and evil into verbal manifestation, not abstract, but so that the monetary system is as concrete as fate and not an abstraction’.
It is demanding work for the poet, and even more so for the reader. This is what the readers of the New York little magazine called Pagany had to contend with in the summer of 1931:
Tempus loquendi,
Tempus tacendi.
Said Mr Jefferson: ‘It wd. have given us
time.’
‘modern dress for your statue…
‘I remember having written you while Congress sat at Annapolis,
‘on water communication between ours and the western country,
‘particularly the information…of the plain between
‘Big Beaver and Cuyahoga, which made me hope that a canal
‘…navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. You must have had
‘occasion of getting better information on this subject
‘and if you wd. oblige me
‘by a communication of it. I consider this canal,
‘if practicable, as a very important work.
T. J. to General Washington, 1787
…no slaves north of Maryland district…
…flower found in Connecticut that vegetates when suspended in air….
…screw more effectual if placed below surface of water.
Those details at the opening of canto 31 are all, apart from the Latin lines, from the historical record, mostly from the ‘ten fat volumes’ of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson which Eliot had been given by his father and had passed on to Pound. The whole canto in fact is made up of snippets of the known history of the American Revolution and its times, and so too are the following three cantos. They are composed of what Jefferson actually said and wrote, and of what his friends and fellow founders of the United States of North America, Madison and John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the rest, actually said and wrote. Pound invented nothing, put no words into their mouths. What he did was to select passages, or, more often, phrases, from their correspondence with each other and from their journals or state records, and set them down item by item. Sometimes the source and context is indicated, but often not; and how one item might relate to another is left to the reader to fathom.
Many readers, if not most, give up and write off the poem as a ragbag stuffed at random with odd scraps out of unfamiliar books. An early reviewer of Cantos XXXI–XLI in the New York Nation amused himself with the conceit of Mr Pound taking correspondence courses in such subjects as ‘History of the U.S. Treasury from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the Original Documents)’ and making notes diligently on small pieces of paper which a gust of wind scattered over the hills about Rapallo, and which he then picked up and sent to the printer as he found them. Seventy years on and J. M. Coetzee, the distinguished novelist, critic, and then member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, still felt able to assure the seriously cultured readers of the New York Review of Books that The Cantos is ‘a great ruin…built out of fragments’ and best ‘quietly dropped’, apart from ‘a handful of anthology pieces’. The only alternative, according to one determined scholar, William M. Chace, would be an immense labour of dogged source-hunting and explication. The sources must be known before any sense can be made of a canto, he insisted, while recognizing the very real risk of thus burying the poem beneath a mountain of prosing exposition. That way one might well be turning a ragbag into a dustheap.
Pound firmly dismissed the ragbag reaction in an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1968, and at the same time he raised the possibility of an unprosaic approach. ‘They say they are chosen at random, but that’s not the way it is’, he said, ‘It’s music. Musical themes that find each other out.’ He had evidently attempted to explain this to Yeats, but without much success. ‘Can impressions that are in part visual, in part metrical, be related like the notes of a symphony,’ Yeats had queried sceptically in the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), or ‘has the author been carried beyond reason by a theoretical conception?’
One would have to allow that a music made of words will have quite different possibilities and conditions as compared to a music of sound only. Its resonances and its accords and discords will arise as much from the meanings and associations of the words and images as from their melody and rhythm. It would be a music of the whole mind at work. Thus there is an intellectual chord in the first two lines of canto 31, A time of speaking, | A time of silence. The resonant phrases are from Ecclesiastes, and they go with the Preacher’s exhortation, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’ Speak, act, while you have time in this world of vanities, is the Preacher’s message. Jefferson’s saying ‘It wd. have given us time’ rhymes with that, and with both time and speaking, not to the ear but to the understanding. A feeling for the time is there again in ‘“modern dress for your [i.e. Washington’s] statue”’. Speaking and acting in time modulates in the following lines through ‘remember having wri
tten you…water communication…information…a canal | navigation…better information…a communication of it…T. J. to General Washington, 1787’. Those lines compose an ‘intellectual complex’ or vortex and generate a general idea of constructive communications at a particular moment in time. The reader makes out their idea precisely by attending to ‘musical’ relations over and above the straight sense of Jefferson’s prose. The last two lines of the extract are another instance of themes finding each other out. Jefferson’s insight, that the newly invented ship’s screw will be ‘more effectual if placed below surface of water’, first accords (as a matter of scientific interest) with the curious flower ‘that vegetates when suspended in air’; and then plays off against it, visually, and also intellectually since the screw is a product not of vegetable nature but of human invention and insight. All that is an effect quickly passed over, and yet the pair of lines encapsulates an enlightened culture out of which came the discovery that would prove to be a major contribution to navigation. Things not syntactically connected can link up thematically.
When they do so link up they are likely to yield more than their surface meaning. Two lines can specify a culture at a certain moment; a dozen and a half lines can define the virtù of Thomas Jefferson. In Pound’s view, as he expressed it in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Jefferson was the shaping force in the American Revolution, guiding and governing it ‘by what he wrote and said more or less privately’, especially in ‘conversation with his more intelligent friends’, and with his influence lasting through to Van Buren’s presidency. ‘He canalized American thought by means of his verbal manifestations’—and that is what Pound has him doing in cantos 31 to 33. His Jefferson exhibits, in the detail of his private correspondence as much as in drafting the Declaration of Independence, a highly developed ‘civic sense’, characterized by a rational direction of will towards what will be useful and beneficial to the new Union, and by unwavering contempt for ignorance and error, especially in unelected heads of state and aristocrats. He stands, in effect, as the inventor of the new American paideuma.
A major theme running through canto 31 is that the basis of Jefferson’s revolution is intelligence in all its senses: first the gathering of accurate intelligence about whatever needs to be known; then the intelligence that carries sound knowledge into practice; and beyond these, enlightenment about the ends of government. The counter-theme, in Jefferson’s and John Adams’s observations, is a general lack of intelligence in the way Europe’s kings and governments manage their affairs. The theme is taken up and developed in canto 32, beginning with this statement of it, ‘“The revolution,” said Mr Adams, | “Took place in the minds of the people”.’ In the next canto he will add, ‘and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of the fifteen years…before Lexington’. That is a quite radical revision of the usual perception of how the American states freed themselves from British rule. The War of Independence, 1776 and its battles, all of that is eclipsed by ‘“Took place in the minds of the people”’, where the overthrow of monarchical government is registered in the democratic ‘“minds [plural] of the people [collective singular]”’. At the heart of canto 32 is a setting off against each other of the new mind of America and the old European mind. Jefferson would civilize the Indians, but not in ‘the ancient ineffectual’ way of religious conversion—
The following has been successful. First, to raise cattle
whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property…
arithmetic to compute that value, thirdly writing, to
keep accounts, and here they begin to labour;
enclose farms, and the women to weave and spin…
fourth to read Aesop’s Fables, which are their first delight
along with Robinson Crusoe. Creeks, Cherokees, the latter
now instituting a government.
That is of course a purely eighteenth-century, patriarchal, and un-Native American model of civilization. One might even call it European, if it were not that the monarchical European way, in Jefferson’s view, was ‘to keep [the people] down’
by hard labour, poverty, ignorance,
and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings
as that unremitting labour shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus
barely to sustain a scant life. And these earnings
they apply to maintain their privileged orders in splendour and idleness
to fascinate the eyes of the people…as to an order of superior beings
In fact these ‘superior beings’ behaved as ‘cannibals’ eating their own people. Worse, having always their own way meant they never had to think about anything, ‘and thus are become as mere animals’—
The successor to Frederic of Prussia, a mere hog
in body and mind, Gustavus and Joseph of Austria
were as you know really crazy, and George 3d was in
a straight waistcoat.
‘A couple | of shepherd dogs, true-bred’ would be more worth importing from Europe, as being likely to prove more intelligent and more useful for any rational purpose.
Canto 33 states its general theme in its opening lines, with John Adams writing to Jefferson in November 1815—a few months after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo—that all despotisms, whether monarchical, aristocratical, oligarchical, or of ‘a majority of a popular assembly’, are ‘equally arbitrary, bloody, | and in every respect diabolical’. Jefferson had observed this in his own fashion in 1779, in the case of a quartermaster who failed in his duty to distribute to the troops the resources plentifully available in the country. Whether the possessor of wealth and power be ‘baron, bojar or rich man matters very little’, Adams remarked, implying that private interest would always win out over public service. The canto moves through various instances of that to come to Marx’s account, in Das Kapital, of how the diabolical factory-owners of England ruthlessly exploited child labour while denouncing the ineffectual factory inspectors ‘as a species of revolutionary commissar pitilessly sacrificing the unfortunate labourers to their humanitarian fantasies’. The final self-serving despotism is that of the American Federal Reserve banks—this is in Senator Brookhart’s time, in 1931, the year in which the canto was written—and the bankers’ manipulation of the public credit for private gain and their insider dealing marks the extent of the betrayal from within America of Jefferson’s democratic revolution.
Canto 34 goes back in time to the beginnings of that betrayal. Pound condensed into seven printed pages Allan Nevins’s 575-page Diary of John Quincy Adams (1928), a selection from the twelve large volumes of The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848, published by Charles Francis Adams between 1874 and 1877. John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), son of John Adams, spent his entire life in the public service, as a diplomat in Europe (1794–1816), and at home as senator, Secretary of State to President Monroe (1817–25), President (1825–9), and representative in Congress (1829–48). Throughout his last twenty years in the House he worked tirelessly, and of course unsuccessfully, for the abolition of slavery in the Southern states. Pound thought that ‘the new or then renascent CIVIC sense’ of John Adams and Jefferson ‘reached its highest point in John Quincy Adams’. The canto demonstrates that, and demonstrates also that both as President and in Congress he failed to win consent to his enlightened policies.
This is a large and ambitious canto and its composition is worth pausing over. Pound began by working through, possibly ‘skim-reading’, the Nevins abridgement of the Diary, and copying fragments onto a ‘Blocco Rapallo’ notepad. He then typed up from the notepad a first draft, occasionally altering the wording or phrasing, but keeping to the order of the excerpts and including nearly all of them. The whole canto was almost there in the earliest notes. Some further revising of the first typescript and then of a second typescript, apart from adding some telling details (such as ‘“The fifth element: mud.” said Napoleon’), was simply intent
on clarifying the sense and refining the music of sound and rhythm. The canto can be divided into three main sections or movements, the first covering Adams’s time as a diplomat in Russia and Paris (1809–16); the second his return to America and service as Secretary of State and President; and the third his twenty years as representative for Massachusetts.
Analysis of the first movement reveals how Pound was composing his fragments into a form of music. (Underlinings and other markings, bold type for key words, have all been added; also the dividing spaces, apart from the space after ‘Journal de l’Empire’.)
Evidently it is necessary to possess or to be willing to acquire a little historical knowledge. Beyond that, reading the canto involves distinguishing one item from another, discriminating the bearing of each one, then making out their relations and interactions as the organization of the particular details builds the dramatic contrast between Adams’s will to civilized order and Napoleon’s barbaric—the mention of Tamburlaine is not accidental—will to power.
The common reader is entitled to say, ‘I can’t read it, that’s not my way of reading.’ The critic, if willing and able to read it musically, will quite properly question the utility and the validity of this way of thinking. But one thing that cannot justly be said is that the writing lacks form and makes no sense. Far from being a random ragbag those pages are thoroughly organized by an intensely active intelligence, only that intelligence is making out the meaning of things in an original and still unfamiliar mode. We are accustomed to the re-orderings of our ways of perceiving the world in the visual arts and in music, but we do find it more difficult when it comes to words to venture beyond the reliable disciplines of hard-learned grammar, syntax, and logic. But there it is, whoever would read The Cantos must risk a new way of ordering things in the mind, one which might lead to an unconventional understanding of the world.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 24