Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  It was precisely within the ancient and traditional written language of Chinese poetry and thought that Pound was seeking the Confucian way of perceiving the world. James Laughlin, while he was with Pound in Rapallo, had noticed that ‘Most days after lunch he would go up to his bedroom’, lie down with a volume of Morrison’s big dictionary propped on a pillow on his stomach, and study ideograms with the help of Morrison’s analyses of their components. He was teaching himself to read the characters in the light of Fenollosa’s essay on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry—he had managed to get that ‘ars poetica’ republished by Nott in 1936. Then in the summer of 1937 when he was in Siena with Olga Rudge he tried the experiment of spending several hours each day studying without the aid of a dictionary Legge’s editions of the three classic Confucian texts and of the works of Mencius. Legge did provide both a translation and an exegetical commentary under the Chinese texts, but ‘When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it’, Pound recorded, ‘I had only the look of the characters…to go on from.’ On 4 August he wrote to Dorothy, who was as usual in England, that he was learning to read in the original, putting in four hours per day with ‘one hour on and one [hour] rest’. He told his Japanese correspondent Katue Kitasono that he could ‘read a good deal of ideogram (say as much as five year old infant in Japan or China)’. By the 15th he had got through Mencius, ‘and started Kung again’; a fortnight later he had ‘got to end of Analects on 3rd round’; and a week after that he was beginning on Mencius again. The result of going ‘three times through the whole text and having perforce to look at the ideograms and try to work out the unfamiliar ones from their bases’ was that he gained ‘a better idea of the whole and the unity of the doctrine’, and, most valuably, that he had ‘the constants’, the recurrent characters or components, ‘impressed on my eye’.

  He wrote up the experiment in an essay published in the Criterion the following year. Among the ‘constants’ impressed on his eye there was the ‘sign recurring and again recurring, of the man who stands by his word’; and also the character which combines the human being with the number two, signifying a life lived in relation to others and to the linked pair of earth and heaven, or humanity in its full scope. He saw ‘Man, man, man, humanity all over the page’; and ‘land and trees’; the ‘constant pageant of the sun, of process’; verbs ‘meaning CHANGE or MOVE’ and ‘RENEWAL’; and everywhere a doctrine of action. Mencius was asked, ‘What is the scholar’s business’, and answered in two characters which Legge translated as ‘To exalt his aim’. Pound saw in the second character ‘the scholar-officer sign, and its base the heart’, and read that as will, ‘definitely Dante’s directio voluntatis’. ‘No one with any visual sense can fail to be affected by the way the strokes move in these characters’, he wrote, ‘the twisted as evil, the stunted’, and ‘the radiant’ as in ‘the bright ideogram for the highest music’ or ‘the sign of metamorphosis’.

  The characters read in this way, as visible signs rather than as sounds, would serve, or so Pound believed, as ‘a door into a different modality of thought’, into a different way of perceiving and being in the world from that of Western capitalism. It avoided the Western way of thinking in abstractions and indefinite generalizations, and of speaking in words disconnected from anything in particular and so conveying and effecting nothing in particular. The Chinese written character ‘abstracts or generalizes in the known concrete’, it gives the universal in the particular, so spring is ‘the sun under the bursting forth of plants’, and male is ‘rice field plus struggle’. Moreover, as in those instances, it represents a world of active relations, ‘of things in action and action in things’, as Fenollosa put it. Written and read as a poetic language it preserves a direct experience of things and persons as they are, not just in themselves but in their interactions, and that, in Pound’s view, is the basis of Confucian wisdom in government.

  It meant that ‘at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature’, as European thought has tended to do. Because its intelligence was rooted in the total process of nature, it honoured all that is alive and growing, and ‘was for an economy of abundance’. In government it accepted responsibility for improving the whole social order—in Mencius’ words,

  an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that they shall have sufficient to serve their parents, and sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children: that in good years they shall be abundantly satisfied, and in bad years shall escape danger of perishing.

  Pound notes that ‘Mencius distinguishes a tax from a share’, and perceives that ‘a fixed tax on grain is in bad years a tyranny, a tithe proper, no tyranny’; also that ‘To treat the needy as criminals is not governing decently, it is merely trapping them.’

  But these ethical conclusions, Pound hastened to say, were simply what honest men everywhere would come to, if only they saw straight—

  The ‘Christian virtues’ are THERE in the emperors who had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than the body and eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so far as governing the people went, it begins with a livelihood, and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is sheer bunkum and rotten hypocrisy.

  Implicit there is Pound’s judgement that in his world the Christian virtues were not active in government. ‘The level of civilisation recorded in these ideograms’, he wrote, ‘is higher than anything in the near eastern tradition.’ He would describe himself indeed as ‘the citizen of a chaos which has long lacked a certain code of ideas and perceptions’. And since China’s civilization, proceeding always from a Confucian centre, had persisted for over five thousand or so years, and through all ‘the alternating periods of order and confusion’ of its historic process, it could well be, so Pound hoped, that the West, in studying the illuminating ideograms of Confucius and Mencius, might absorb what it needed to restore its own civilization to sanity.

  In a letter to Congressman Tinkham towards the end of November 1937 Pound mentioned that he had been ‘spending my spare time on Confusius and Mencius and can read more chinese than I cd/’. Tinkham wrote back, ‘I think you are intellectually wise to divert your mind from the present state of affairs by turning to Confucius and Mencius.’ Pound showed how little diverted he was by replying, ‘Am only doing Mencius because he is more explicit statement of where the Confucian ROOT (Ta Hio) sprouts in economics/ against usury, against tax ramp.’ Then in February 1938, wanting to do something useful, he suggested that Tinkham get him over to Harvard or Yale ‘to give a few lectures on Confucius and Mencius’. ‘With the light of two thousand years of Chinese history’, he reassured Tinkham, ‘there wd be NO NEED to allude to the present administration.’

  Tinkham had referred to ‘Great historical events…occurring in the Far east’, meaning the Japanese invasion of China—Shanghai had already been captured in November and Nanking fell in December—but Pound showed little or no concern for what was going on in contemporary China. He was more engaged at that moment by the classic anthology of poetry selected by Confucius which he had just received from Katue Kitasono—he had asked for ‘a cheap edition’ of the Odes in the original, meaning one that was ‘good, and clear but not fancy’. Pound’s China was a China of the mind, to be discovered only in the ancient writings attributed to Confucius and his followers. Shortly he would condense the Confucian history of China from its legendary first emperors up to about 1776 to make up his next decad of cantos. His translation of the Odes from the original ideograms would come much later, after the looming world war.

  Signor Mussolini speaks

  The London Morning Post of 21 August 1937 carried a report of a speech delivered by Signor Mussolini in Palermo the previous day at the conclusion of the naval manoeuvres. Half a million people were massed before him in the Humberto Forum with the Italian fle
et in the Bay of Palermo beyond them, and the Duce’s words were carried over the water by wireless. Throughout the length and breadth of Italy all activity ceased, buses came to a standstill, shops were closed, and the people crowded around the loudspeakers. The broadcast was transmitted to twelve nations in Europe, to South and Central America, and was translated into eighteen languages. And what Il Duce had to say was that there had been a great misunderstanding over the previous two years in the relations between Britain and Italy, that it was time for more cordial relations with France, and that Italy had no need to heed the League of Nations in Geneva. There was now a new reality to be taken into account, and that was the Berlin–Rome axis.

  To educate

  Dorothy wrote from London in September 1937, ‘So much prosperity here owing to munitions that Social Credit has sunk to a minimum of members.’ Earlier in the summer, from Nutcombe Heights Hotel in leafy Hindhead, Surrey, she had written, ‘The Child has about 700 stamps and knows a lot…Could you write his initials or summat on a small scrap of paper that we could paste into his yellow Kung?’ The ‘yellow Kung’ may have been the Stanley Nott edition of Ta Hio: The Great Learning, which was bound in yellow paper boards with a yellow-dust jacket—though Scheiwiller’s little book Confucius/Digest of the Analects was also in yellow paper wrappers. If it were the Ta Hio Omar, now 10, might have wondered about the meaning of certain remarks concerning the relations of sons and fathers, particularly in chapter IX where it is said that ‘To govern a state one must first bring order into one’s family’, and that ‘the man who, being incapable of educating his own family, is able to educate other men just doesn’t exist’.

  Pound was attending to his 12-year-old daughter’s education. Towards the end of September he brought her down by train from Bolzano to Venice, with a stopover in Verona, and she would recall him on the steps of the Romanesque church of San Zeno there, ‘looking at the bronze doors, and explaining, explaining, focusing his attention on some detail, wondering out loud’. Her own attention, she confessed, had been more on the presents he had bought her, ‘a tiny wristwatch and a pair of new shoes’—‘bring something beautiful for the signorina’, he had told them in the shoe shop.

  That autumn she was to enrol as a boarder at a convent school near Florence, the Istituto della Signora Montalve at La Quiete, but in Venice her father ‘seemed very eager to educate me himself’. He gave her Heine’s Buch der Lieder and would have her read to him from it, then take over and read the poems himself, so powerfully that the images became alive and the rhythm unforgettable. To broaden her mind, as she understood at the time, he took her about with him, to the Quirini Stampalia Library, to friends who were painters, musicians, poets, or into ‘a long, narrow second-hand bookshop at the end of the Calle Larga’. Some evenings friends came to hear Pound reading his cantos, and while he read there would be an intense stillness, a tableau of the poet and his listeners with only the sound of his voice, but the questions and long arguments that followed bored her. Some afternoons there were concerts, at which her mother played Vivaldi, or she would be practising for an evening concert. There were few idle moments. Even at the Lido there was ‘No loafing around on the beach; we were there to swim and to row and it was done with zest and speed.’ And on the vaporetto to and from the Lido, ‘If Babbo and I were alone, he would engage in conversation.’ He set her to writing in Italian—which she was still struggling to learn, German being the language of the Pustertal—an account of all she knew about life in Gais. ‘It was the content that mattered’, he told her, and where she could not find the words in Italian ‘he remedied by translating the “Storie di Gais” into English’. Indeed the proud father typed out his translation and sewed the pages to make a little book, which he sent to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, and to Kitasono who translated ‘the charming stories about Tyrol’ into Japanese and had them printed in December 1938 in ‘the most refined girl’s monthly in Japan’. Pound then hoped ‘that she wont get a swelled head’, and that making her debut in Japan ‘will have a civilizing effect on her’. ‘School hasn’t quite quenched her intelligence,’ he told Kitasono, ‘But of course impossible to tell whether she will ever be able to write anything again after having been taught Grammar etc/.’

  ‘Then a huge fuss broke out over a missal.’ That is, the girls were required to have a Latin–Italian missal, but Mary asked could she have a Latin–German one—she was ‘Mary’ now—and the nuns ordered one for her, and when it came it turned out to cost ‘almost three times as much as the Italian ones’. When Pound, who was paying Mary’s fees, received the bill, he wrote to the Mother Superior, ‘I take a very grave view of encouraging a child to spend money out of proportion to its probable expectations.’ There had been talk of only 30 lire for a missal but this one cost 87 lire—and ‘a book at this price is a luxury’—and ‘the lack of precise statement will do more to destroy any morality’—and ‘You will destroy any respect the child has for religion, if religion or the religious object is associated in the child’s mind with an action not scrupulously honest’—and so on. However, after explanations from the Mother Superior and contrition from Mary the Confucian parent was appeased. All was forgiven, but Mary was to pay off the 57 lire in instalments, ‘simply to get it into her head that one cannot be careless about 57 lire UNLESS one is much richer than she is’. Two things she should learn, that ‘I must always make myself clear’, and that ‘I must not spend money that is not there’: ‘Education is worth nothing unless one has these two habits.’

  In Venice on 29 October 1937, under the title ‘Omaggio ad Antonio Vivaldi’, Olga Rudge, with Giorgio Levi and David Nixon, performed a programme composed entirely of music from L’estro armonico, something that had probably not happened, Pound remarked, ‘since the days when Vivaldi himself conducted’. A Vivaldi Society was formed in Venice soon after, and Pound, noting this in Il Mare, pointed out that his Rapallo study group had been ‘the first to seek a revival of Vivaldi’s music’. And now, Olga Rudge reported, David Nixon was agitating to start an international Vivaldi society, with headquarters in Paris and herself as honorary secretary.

  The ‘Tigullian Musical Season’ for 1938 was opened by the New Hungarian Quartet on 21 January, with Honegger’s Quartet on the programme, along with Mozart, ‘Quartet to be decided’, Stravinsky’s ‘Concertino’, and a quartet by the unfamiliar Hungarian composer Sandor Veress. Then, ‘Starting [Tuesday] February 1 and continuing all week’, according to Pound’s announcement in Il Mare, ‘there will be a concert every evening, presenting twelve sonatas by Purcell contrasted and compared with music by Debussy and Hindemith, and with references to the important forms of the concerto as conceived by Vivaldi, and of the sonata as envisioned by Mozart’. The aim was ‘to present “the concept of the sonata for strings and keyboard” as it developed in the mind of Henry Purcell (1659–1695), who was among the finest English composers, a great unknown for us, equalled perhaps only by Dowland and Jenkins’. The Purcell sonatas had just been ‘brought to light’ and published in Paris by W. Gillies Whittaker, and this might well have been their first modern performance. The performers would be the usual distinguished local talent, ‘Olga Rudge and maestro Sansoni, violins’ and ‘the fine cellist Marco Ottone from Chiavari’. In the place of Gerhart Münch, however, he having decided at the last minute to remain in Germany, there would be the pianist Renata Borgatti, ‘the daughter of our distinguished fellow citizen Commendatore Giuseppe’, a famed Italian tenor. Pound, as William Atheling, had found her a ‘wooden’ accompanist to Olga Rudge back in 1920, but she had become a successful soloist performing throughout Europe, and Pound in an article in Il Mare had now nothing but praise for her ‘consistent development in musical understanding and intelligence’. She would be the pianist and Olga Rudge’s accompanist in both this season and the next and last in 1939.

  Meanwhile, since Münch could not come to Rapallo, Pound gave him a ‘PLAN of work’ to follow in Germany. ‘The first thing you do ANY
WHERE shd/ be to LOOK at the catalog/ of local library…and make note of manuscripts and old edtns/ of Vivaldi in it (if any)’—‘That ought to be first act after dumping luggage in hotel’. In Dresden he was to work direct on the manuscripts, going on from what he and Olga already had on film, so ‘Start next on page 160.’ Vera, whom Münch had just married, could do a lot if he were busy with other matters, for instance, she could ‘Look up and report to me on Leica reading machines | is there a cheap portable one.’ ‘The day is 24 hours long//,’ this letter concluded.

  Pound seems to have organized the whole Rapallo show himself, securing the musicians, doing the advance publicity and the programmes, writing up the concerts afterwards, no doubt making sure the Amici remembered the dates, then welcoming them on the evening, taking the money of those who were not subscribers, and sharing the takings among the performers. He was in every sense the animator of the season. At the same time, the regular concerts relied absolutely on Olga Rudge and her violin. But we are given another image of her dedication. After each concert she would return by herself in the dark up the hill to Sant’ Ambrogio, a climb that could take an hour. The cobbled mule-track was too stony for town shoes, and, doing as the peasant women did when they had been into town, she would put on the old espadrilles she had hidden at the foot of the salita on the way down, sling the violin-case on a strap over her shoulder, and carrying her ‘high-heeled golden or satin shoes and a music case in one hand and holding up the long evening gown with the other’, she would make her way by such light as came up from Rapallo or from the night sky. ‘Gee, I am tired sometimes,’ she said once to Mary, and ‘It’s awful when it rains, the violin is so sensitive.’