Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The long-running League of Nations Disarmament Conference was getting nowhere and Mussolini proposed in the summer of 1933 that Britain, the old enemies France and Germany, and Italy should make a pact to guarantee the peace of Europe for a decade. Lloyd George, who had been British Prime Minister when the League was set up, said to the Italian Foreign Minister, ‘Either the world follows Mussolini, or the world is doomed.’ The Pact of Four was signed in the Palazzo Venezia on 15 July. In October, however, Germany walked out of the Disarmament Conference, and a few days later withdrew from the League of Nations, thus, said Mussolini, scuppering all at once the Pact, the Conference, and the League. Hitler was determined to re-arm Germany and to prepare for all-out war. In November over 90 per cent of registered voters in Germany endorsed the withdrawal from Geneva and elected a single-party Nazi slate to the Reichstag.

  In the autumn of 1933 Mary Barnard, a young woman living in small-town Vancouver across the river from Portland, Oregon, desiring to learn how to write poems and considering that Pound ‘knew more about the technique of writing poetry than any other living poet’, sought out his address in Who’s Who and mailed a sample of her poems to him in far-away Rapallo. ‘How hard and for how long are you willing to work at it?’, came back his challenging response on a postcard. He advised her to study Greek metres since she knew Greek; and, more generally, to study ‘the MEDIUM, i.e. language and everything it consists of. consonants, vowels, AND the relative duration of the different sounds’—‘Get a metronome and learn HOW long the different syllables, and groups of them take’. ‘There aren’t any RULES’, was the only rule he laid down, but also, ‘work to a metric scheme/—when you can do it strictly, on yr/ head, dead, drunk or asleep, then you can begin loopin the loop and taking liberties with it’. When she showed that she was willing to work at writing in sapphics Pound put her in touch with Marianne Moore and with Williams, and sent her poems to Eliot for his Criterion, to the New English Weekly, and to some young poets in America and England whom he was encouraging to put together an anthology of new talent. A quarter of a century later Mary Barnard, by then an established poet and writer, would publish a musically sculpted translation of Sappho.

  ‘Do understand that at yr/ tender age’—this was Pound writing to Mary Barnard in January 1934—‘too much criticism is possibly worse than none.’ However, his ABC of Reading, then about to be published in England, ‘contains part of the lessons’, he told her. This ABC was written to develop and to simplify ‘How to Read’, his 1929 essay written for the New York Herald Tribune Books supplement. There he had begun by attacking both the American university system as he had experienced it at the University of Pennsylvania, and the general state of literary culture in England as he had found it in 1908–12 when he was young and eager to learn. What had been borne in on him, one gathers, is that the young must find out for themselves what they most need to know. ‘The teacher or lecturer is a danger’, he instructs his young readers in the ABC, because liable to be enforcing his own opinion. Criticism, his own especially, ‘shd. consume itself and disappear’, leaving its readers seeing the thing in question for themselves.

  The ABC of Reading is a wonderfully liberating, anti-academic, textbook. ‘Gloom and solemnity’, Pound declares on the first page, ‘are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.’ The joyful students in his book will be the ones who as they work through it grow in confidence in their own power to read and to write well. You do not need to know everything, Pound tells them, lifting one burden of scholarship; you need only to discriminate the best, the exemplary. And you do that by first-hand examination, by direct analysis and comparison, by actually listening to the sounds of words, and seeing the images they create, and thus apprehending their meanings. Melopoeia, the making of music in words, phanopoeia, the making of images in the mind, and logopoeia, ‘the dance of the intellect among words’, these are the means by which the common language is condensed and intensified into poetry. Pound presents as exhibits his selection of poems in which one or more of those qualities are at a peak of attainment, having previously warned ‘YOU WILL NEVER KNOW either why I chose them, or why they were worth choosing, or why you approve or disapprove of my choice, until you go to the TEXTS, the originals’. Enjoy the excitement of working it out for yourselves, he urges the students, and you won’t need to listen ‘to me or to any other long-winded critic’.

  As an incitement to study literature the book appeals mostly to the idealism of youth, and then a little also to its nihilism. ‘Literature is news that STAYS news’, Pound declares, meaning that the best of it carries news of what is perennially true of human nature and desire and fate. Its use for the individual is that it both eases the mind of the strain of our endemic uncertainty and ignorance about things, and positively feeds it as incitement to live more fully. Its usefulness to the state is in maintaining the energies and the efficient working of language upon which depend good government and civilization. After that, nearly at the end of the book, comes the bait for ‘The natural destructivity of the young’, a hint of the excitement and the fun of detecting and exposing ‘counterfeit work’ and ‘The hoax, the sham, the falsification’. The young can be instructed in this, Pound writes, while implying that they will go to it very readily. One thinks of young James Laughlin IV and his ‘complete exposure of Jeffers and Robinson’, and his gleeful ‘we debunk Stein (Toklas) in the current issue’.

  The winter series of Rapallo concerts are mentioned in ABC of Reading as an example of its method of examining musical compositions under laboratory conditions in order to discriminate the first-rate from the second-rate, with Debussy played after Corelli and J. S. Bach, or Ravel after Bach. ‘The point of this experiment is that everyone present at the two concerts now knows a great deal more about the…relative weight, etc., of Debussy and Ravel than they could possibly have found out by reading ALL the criticisms that have ever been written of both.’ Pound was also eager to introduce newly recovered early music. In March 1934 the Rapallo musicians premiered six of the sonatas by William Young (d. 1672) from the edition just published by W. Gillies Whittaker, and were looking forward to receiving freshly edited scores of Purcell and Dowland.

  ‘Nevuh hav bin so aktiv as in last 2 or 3 years’, Pound wrote in a letter to Agnes Bedford in April 1934, ‘probably incipient paranoia…vast economic correspondence’. He would tell Langston Hughes, ‘I spend about 95% of my energy at this typewriter trying to CREATE a REAL revolution’. To his old friend Viola Baxter Jordan he did also mention ‘wackin a tennis ball to keep me belly from bulgin’, and going ‘to the movies average of twice or more per week’, that being, after a hard day’s work, ‘Only way to STOP’.

  Along with the certainly rather paranoid economic outpourings—the paranoia not altogether unwarranted in the light of current events—Pound was being active as ever on his other fronts, as in shepherding the young who showed promise, and in attempting to keep his peers and his elders in order. To John Drummond, a student at Cambridge in England, he wrote that it was time for ‘a new heave by the young’, and that ‘If you people at Cam. can do anything in the way of a nucleus, I’ll do what I can to bring in the scattered and incongruous units of my acquaintance’. He told his respected elder Laurence Binyon that he had gone through his new verse translation of Dante’s Inferno ‘syllable by syllable’, and offered some very detailed notes on particular words and rhymes as collaborative criticism and encouragement. He was doubtful about ‘syntactical inversions’ in Binyon’s English, having a preference for the natural word order; and he noted that Dante was ‘definitely putting money-power at the root of Evil’. In June Yeats, on his last visit to Rapallo, asked Pound what he thought of the lyrics in something he had just written, The King of the Great Clock Tower, a brief play rehearsing an old romantic theme of his, and Pound, according to Yeats, ‘would talk of nothing but politics’, then returned his manuscript next day sayin
g the lyrics were ‘putrid’, and written in ‘Nobody language’ which was no good for drama. Pound told Bunting that he was finding it increasingly difficult to read ‘the buzzard’.

  A young Jewish Lutheran sculptor turned up broke in Rapallo in April 1934. This was Heinz Clusmann (1906–75), who renamed himself Heinz Henghes. He wanted to see Pound’s Gaudiers, and Pound took him in, fed him, put him up in what Laughlin described as ‘a large dog kennel’ on his roof-top terrace, found him some stone and tools from the cemetery stonecutter, and let him get to work. ‘New sculptor loose on roof, and marble dust dappertutto’, everywhere, Pound wrote by way of explaining the seal on the envelope of his letter to an American college student. (He was telling her what her generation should be up to.) Henghes had offered the seal, a little animal carving, to show what he could do; and had shown a drawing of a seated centaur which later became the New Directions’ very Gaudier-like book colophon. According to Laughlin, Pound persuaded Signora Agnelli, wife of the head of Fiat, to acquire some of his first works at a good price; and Henghes went on to become a successful sculptor and to win, after the war, prestigious commissions in London and New York.

  In the summer of 1934 Dorothy was as usual in England. Throughout August all her time was devoted to Omar, leaving her ‘unable to do or think anything but Omar’. ‘P.S. This family life seems curiously unreal—like an uneasy sleep,’ she wrote to Ezra. At the end of August he went up to Gais to collect Maria and take her down to Venice for ten days. ‘Child very good,’ he told Dorothy. He would write in the mornings, then take the Leoncina with him while he shopped with care for the best coffee, fruit, pastries, and cheese. Sometimes they would swim at the Lido. He bought her a violin so that her mother might teach her, but Olga insisted she must first learn solfège. The child remembered time hanging heavily that year in the enforced siesta in the small house where the intense music and talk were foreign to her and where it seemed that everything was to be done according to some unforgiving etiquette. She could not feel at home in its demanding order.

  Germany’s President and Head of State, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, died on 2 August 1934. The previous day Hitler’s cabinet had decreed Hitler his successor though it had no legal power to do so. Then it was announced that Hitler would combine in himself the offices of head of government and head of state and be known as Führer and Reichschancellor. In this usurpation he had the enthusiastic support of the heads of the armed forces, having assured them that their secret re-arming would be accelerated and that the Nazi private army, the SA or Brownshirts whose violence had brought him to power, would be disarmed. To back up that assurance his SS and Gestapo had massacred all the leading members of the SA in a bloody June purge. All members of the German armed forces now swore an oath of allegiance not to the German state but to its Führer, Adolf Hitler. On 19 August over 90 per cent of Germany’s registered voters endorsed his seizure of supreme power. At the Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress in early September he was acclaimed with frenzied adulation. William Shirer the American correspondent was there and could see that ‘whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions’.

  ‘Education by provocation, Spartan maieutics’, that was Samuel Beckett’s summary characterization of the essays in Make It New, and it would apply equally well to How to Read, ABC of Reading, and even to Cantos 31–41. There were reviewers who received Pound’s provocations as educative, and there were others who were goaded into reaction. The Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid made How to Read his book of the year; while F. R. Leavis, the fiercely serious academic critic, responded with How to Teach Reading (1932), giving it the acid subtitle ‘A Primer for Ezra Pound’. Although ABC of Reading was generally well received, the London Spectator dismissed it as a ‘bundle of prejudices’, ‘not very convincing as criticism and quite useless in the classroom’. Eda Lou Walton in the New York Times Book Review even found its tone ‘insulting’. The Times Literary Supplement praised the excellence of Pound’s criticism, but deprecated his ‘atrocious style’, his ‘affectations’, and his ‘arrogance’. As for the really Spartan challenge of Cantos 31–41, there was a tendency to discover that it was the poetry and not the reader that was failing to come to a clear consciousness. Pound ‘seems to have been stumped by the problem of combining poetry and economics’, reported Philip Rice Blair in the New York Nation; and Babette Deutsch, in the New York Herald Tribune Books, wrote that ‘The design is wanting’ for ‘these fragments Pound has shored against his ruins’. Then the English poet Rayner Heppenstall, writing in the New English Weekly, warned that Pound’s cantos in general were ‘a serious menace’, because of their influence on other poets. But that was as much as to admit that Pound was now, whether one was receptive to him or not, an important and influential presence as a poet and a literary critic. Still Pound would complain that editors refused to print his views on economics, and that publishers kept asking him instead for his autobiography, when he had no wish to look back and there was so much more to be done here and now.

  When young Laughlin, now ‘Jas’ to Pound, proposed that he spend some time in Rapallo—he had taken a long leave from Harvard—Pound wrote, ‘I have more bloody work than I can do | I damn well need assistance’, and then ‘unless you are DOING somfink in Paris, you might just possibly LEARN as much, get just as much eddikashun (without emission of bank paper) here as anywhere else’. A couple of days earlier he had been suggesting in a letter to Zukofsky ‘that some brat educate himself by PUTTING himself at the disposal of New Democracy/ to run my errands’, and ‘cat shit for the young if they can’t at least provide ONE active animal fit for training’. Laughlin would testify that in the two or three weeks he spent at his ‘Ezuversity’ in December of 1934 he ‘learned more that was useful about what mattered in literature than I did in four years at Harvard’. He also found how to make himself useful. He had been writing short stories, with some success, and was ‘trying very hard to write poetry’. Pound wasn’t interested in prose fiction, and was not impressed by his poetry. He advised Jas just before he left Rapallo to give up the writing and try something useful. ‘Go back and be a publisher,’ he said, so Laughlin went back and created New Directions and became the publisher of Pound and Williams and many other independents, and ‘never regretted obeying his edict’.

  Laughlin fondly recalled that the daily class usually met before lunch at Pound’s table at the Albergo Rapallo, and ‘began with Ezra going through his mail and commenting on the subjects raised in the day’s letters’—

  He had a huge correspondence from all over the world—he told me that postage was his largest expense. Economics were already his major concern in 1934, but there were letters from writers, from translators, from professors, from scholars of Chinese and the Renaissance, from monetary theorists, from artists, from Eliot, from Cocteau, from Hemingway—insulting letters, sycophantic letters…In every case there would be perceptive and witty comments from Ezra with anecdotes to fill in the background.

  Then ‘Pound would turn to more serious subjects—literature, history as he wished to revise it, poetics, the interpretation of aspects of many cultures’. All the time he would be speaking ‘in the colloquial’, with mimicry, and in a variety of accents and personae. The instruction would continue on their walks, and Laughlin remembered Pound explaining to him about the Eleusinian mysteries on one of the steep stone paths behind Rapallo.

  He observed how organized Pound was for his work: ‘So that he could easily find them, he hung his glasses and his extra glasses, his pencils, his pens, his scissors, and his stapler on strings from the ceiling over his desk’. He also observed how, ‘in the fury of composition’, ‘He would assault his typewriter with an incredible vigor…he couldn’t always take time to go all the way back to the left margin; he would slap the carriage and wherever it stopped that determined the indent.’

  Among the items Pound was beating out on his typewriter were those many letters to editor
s and hurried pithy articles campaigning for the economic revolution needed to save the United States from its financial system, and seeking to persuade Americans that there was much to admire in Mussolini’s Fascism. It was quite natural then that when the Italian Ministry of Press and Propaganda established a short-wave radio service beamed at the United States in the autumn of 1934 it should occur to Pound’s journalist friend Francesco Monotti to propose that he be invited to do a broadcast. Pound was excited by the possibility of an invitation. ‘I spose the keynote will be to giv me opinyum of Italy’, he wrote to Monotti, and then gave the references to a dozen recent letters and articles in which he had been insisting on the constructive element in Mussolini’s Fascism. He knew that at least one article had been seen by Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and head of the Ministry, ‘as we mentioned it over the telephone’ at the time. He hoped he would be able to go through the relevant pieces with Ciano ‘and pick the most useful 8 minutes’—it would have to be ‘condensed | gotter to be oratory or nuffink’. On 23 November he was sent the formal letter signed by Count Ciano inviting him ‘to make a short speech (8 minutes)’, and to record it in Rome on 10 December. ‘They pay nothing’, Monotti warned. Pound replied at once to Ciano, ‘greatly honoured by the invitation to speak to America, and will be in Rome… unless I drop dead on the railway platform running’. His first radio talk, and his only one until 1940, was transmitted on Friday, 11 January at midnight in Rome, 6 p.m. in New York, and was announced as ‘Conversazione di Ezra Pound su “Come il Duce risolve il problema della distribuzione”’. The talk was heard by William Bird who took it to be about ‘the economic triumph of Fascism’. But Pound received a note from the Ministry a few days after the broadcast, ‘don’t understand what you are driving at. Be specific.’