Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  He was directing his own ‘WILL against war’ to the reform of his own country and to keeping it out of any European war. With his visit there in prospect, and with John Adams’s story fresh in his mind, he had become very conscious of his deep-rooted American identity. ‘I don’t have to try to be American,’ he told Hubert Creekmore in March 1939, and went on to claim that he ‘Could write the whole U.S. history (American hist) along lines of family migration; from the landing of The Lion, via Conn., N.Y., Wisconsin…to Idaho’. He implied too an association on his mother’s side with the first Adamses, because ‘a plantation named Weston’s’ had become their ‘Merrymount, Braintree, Quincy’, and that was tied up with ‘all I believe in or by’. But, he demanded, ‘is it possible to BE American in America today?’, given ‘the present state of the country, the utter betrayal of the American Constitution, the filth of the Universities, and the shitten system of publication whereby you can buy Lenin, Trotsky…Stalin for 10 cents and 25 cents, and it takes seven years to get a set of John Adams at about 30 dollars’. How was one to maintain ‘any view of what our forebears intended and what we damn well OUGHT to create’? Creekmore must have queried, Was he American?, and the answer was a furious ‘Yes, damn it, AMERICAN/ but the bloody country BITCHED. Shit in office/ our revolution was betrayed.’

  Pound had learnt that he had been elected to the United States’ National Institute of Art and Letters in January 1938, and while appreciating the ‘manifestly honorific’ intention, he immediately ‘exercised several privileges’, such as nominating ‘a few of the better writers’—among them Cummings, Eliot, Williams, Santayana, Hemingway, McAlmon, and Zukofsky. He asked Congressman Tinkham to have someone on his staff find out whether the institution had ‘any official standing’, and was informed that ‘Mr Tinkham seems to think that there is no organization in the country of its kind with a higher standing’. He was already thinking how he might mobilize the members who were writers as a potential force in the country; and he began by ‘driving for decent reprint of the gist of John Adams, Jeff/ Van Buren etc.’ as ‘the sort of thing an Institute could and should do’. There is no evidence that his efforts had any effect on the august body, which included many of his bêtes noires. He thought the distinguished editor Henry Seidel Canby who had been the one to inform him of his election needed to be ‘educated or drowned’; and, as he told Ford in January 1939, ‘the sap-headed nominating kummytee did not put [WCW’s] name with Walt Disney’s when it came to the annual recommendations’. Canby was moved to put it to Pound that ‘scurrilous attacks upon [the Institute’s] members was not the best means of elevating American culture’.

  Ford had been telling Pound for some time that since he was so sure he knew what was wrong with America’s universities he ought to come over and do something to put them right. Since the autumn of 1937 Ford had been writer and critic in residence at Olivet College in Michigan, a liberal arts college of 300 students and 45 faculty which hired him to be a high-profile presence and to teach whatever he liked in whatever manner he felt inclined to. Through 1938 he was trying to persuade Pound to accept a similar appointment at Olivet, telling him that he would find there ‘a working, model educational machine to play with’. ‘Does Olivet USE my text books?’, Pound wanted to know, to which Ford replied, ‘I do not approve of the use of text books’. Pound also asked, ‘Will he [i.e. the college president] GET a printing press…for the DISTRIBUTION of knowledge and ideas?’, and to that Ford answered, ‘They have already a press…But they probably would not print Mussolini-Douglas propaganda for you’. All Pound wanted in that regard, however, was that ‘they START by reprinting the necessary parts of John Adams and Jefferson’. Olivet was keen to have Pound, while he was merely rather pleased to be in demand, even if only by ‘a very small Western College’ inviting him ‘to profess in the wilderness’. In the end he would not take up the offer, evidently feeling that the college could not give him what he really aspired to, a position from which he could get his ideas across to the men who were running the country.

  His great idea was ‘a revival of American culture…as something specifically grown from the nucleus of the American Founders’. About February 1939 he isolated this nucleus in his Introductory Text Book (in four chapters), each chapter consisting of a single brief quotation from one of the Founders. First was John Adams, attributing ‘All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America’ to ‘downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation’. Next there was Jefferson’s statement of the right way to issue the national currency so that ‘no interest on them would be necessary or just’. Then Lincoln’s, ‘…and gave to the people of this Republic THE GREATEST BLESSING THEY EVER HAD—THEIR OWN PAPER TO PAY THEIR OWN DEBTS’. And finally, what had become for Pound the foundation stone of the Republic, Article I Legislative Department, section 8 of the Constitution of the United States, ‘The Congress shall have power: To coin money, [and] regulate the value thereof…’ A note declared, ‘The abrogation of this last mentioned power derives from the ignorance mentioned in my first quotation.’

  Pound was urging in 1939 that those four quotations, as comprising the ‘Fundamentals of American politico-economic history’, should be taught in all American universities as the basis of a true American culture. He wrote to his old teacher and friend at Hamilton, Joseph Darling Ibbotson, ‘I consider it utter treachery to ANY student, whether specializing in U.S. History or economics to allow him to leave college ignorant of the issues raise[d] in these FOUR quotations.’ And further, ‘I consider it a falsification of the supposed status of the college graduate, if said graduates are supposed to serve for the general lifting of public intelligence/ to serve as a corps for educating the public at large.’ That civic sense, that awareness of being a responsible individual in an organic social system, was also an essential part of the American culture Pound would have to grow again from its founding protagonists. But the fundamental necessity was that there should be a clear understanding of money, of how it is created, by whom controlled, and for whose benefit. Money is ‘the PIVOT of all social action’, he insisted, and ‘Only a race of slaves and idiots will be inattentive’ to it.

  He would say that his main aim in going to America had been to find out if it were ‘possible to restore American system of govt.’ His reputation was such though that when he arrived there was an expectation that he had come over to preach Fascism, and it was suspected that because he had travelled first class the Italian Government must have paid his fare. That was not in fact the case. It was Carlo Rupnik, a shipping and travel agent in Genoa, who arranged the return passage. He appears to have been something of a fixer—in January he had negotiated the safe passage through customs, with the aid of an influential friend, of the thirteen cases of Olivia Shakespear’s furniture and paintings. On 3 March he quoted minimum fares of $275 first class, and $155 tourist, adding that he was concerned to obtain the best available for Pound. The next day he wrote, ‘Saw again Mongiardino: he is considering your suggestions.’ Mongiardino was head of the Ente Provinciale per il Turismo, and Pound’s suggestions appear to have been about guided tours for Americans visiting Italy and specifically the province of Liguria—an idea he had been discussing with the editor of The Globe, a travel magazine published in Milwaukee. Mongiardino asked if he could count on an article for the Ente Provinciale’s ‘Weekly News’, but none is listed in Gallup’s bibliography. On the 17th Rupnik reported that ‘the “Ente Provinciale” is interested for you to obtain good conditions’; then on the 21st he was able to write that he had seen the traffic manager of the ‘Italia’ shipping line and that Pound was to have ‘un’ottima cabine di prima classe’, the very best, for which he was to pay as for second class. His cheque for $299, drawn on his account with the Jenkintown Bank and Trust Co. and payable to ‘ITALIA Soc. An. Navagazione, Genoa’, was dated 6 April 1939. One gathers that he had been upgraded thanks to a quiet word to the effect that he would give Italy a good write-up for Ame
rican tourists. ‘Will see you in a few days…about some work the “Ente” would like from you in the U.S.’, Rupnik had added; and Pound immediately sent him suggestions for ‘descriptive booklet say 8 pages’ which ‘COULD be got into GLOBE’. Nothing further was said about that; but in July, after his trip, Rupnik told Pound that Mongiardino and Magnini, the head of tourism in Italy, were going to be in Rapallo and wished to meet him to discuss details of what they hoped would be ‘an important collaboration’. It is clear that they were hoping for articles to promote tourism, though there is no record of his having actually written any.

  On the day before his departure Pound sent a note to Dorothy, by then in London, saying ‘He iz feelink deep-ressed at the idear of sailink to hiz country’, and then went out and played four sets of tennis. The next day, 13 April, once on board the Rex in Genoa, he was delighted by his ‘magnificent quarters full of gadgets, ventilation etc.’, though he was already finding ‘ammosphere of boat disintegrative’. He had brought along his Confucius and Mencius, ‘but whether can git to it I dunno’. He sent a postcard to his father, ‘Aboard in surroundings of UNrivald splendour.’ On the last day, the 19th, he wrote another to Homer, ‘very calm trip with all comforts & a bit of conversation’.

  When the ship docked in New York on the 20th the news reporters who came on board looking for a story found him and fired their questions at him. Gorham Munson had wired, ‘GIVE ECONOMIC BUT NOT POLITICAL VIEWS TO THE PRESS WHEN INTERVIEWED’, but Pound was eager to feed them what he regarded as good copy:

  ‘Will there be a war, Mr Pound?’

  ‘Nothing but devilment can start a new war west of the Vistula…. the bankers and the munitions interests [are] more responsible for the present talk of war than are the intentions of Mussolini.’

  ‘Mr Pound, you have met Mussolini…’

  ‘He has a mind with the quickest uptake I know of any man except Picabia.’

  ‘Who is Picabia?’

  ‘Picabia is the man who ties the knots in Picasso’s tail.’

  ‘Which writers do you think important now?’

  ‘The men who are worth anything today are definitely down on money—writing about money, the problem of money, exchange, gold and silver. I have yet to find a Bolshevik who has written of it.’

  ‘Mr Pound, who are your favourite poets in America today?’

  ‘I can name one poet writing today. I mean Cummings.’

  A reporter wrote in the New York Sun, ‘Literature…is now a minor theme in the Poundish symphony…immediately the talk turns to economics, propaganda, and to what he calls “left-wing Fascists” in Italy.’

  ‘Cummings’ was perhaps the first name that occurred to him because he had arranged to stay for a night or two in his apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. The Cummings were fond of him as he was of them, but he showed up in an obsessive, manic, state which they found hard to take. Cummings wrote to James Sibley Watson that his ‘Gargling anti-semitism from morning till morning doesn’t (apparently) help a human throat to sing’, and that he was ferociously uttering such ‘poopyawps and screechburps’ as ‘if you don’t know money you don’t know nothing’. They wondered if he were ‘a spy or merely schizo’; and felt also that he was ‘incredibly lonesome’.

  Two days later, on 22 April, he was in Washington and Congressman Tinkham’s secretary was making appointments for him, ‘10. 11. 12. 3.30’. He saw Congressman Voorhis of California who had been urging the government to take control of the nation’s credit on behalf of the people, and Voorhis booked him to see his senator. He saw Senator Bankhead of Alabama, the ‘stamp scrip bloke’. He had lunch with the Polish Ambassador, Count Potocki, and warned him against trusting England, and against the dangerous Winston Churchill. At the Library of Congress he lunched with the Librarian and with the heads of the music and Chinese divisions, and afterwards called up some of their Vivaldi scores. He was invited to the Japanese Embassy; and he persuaded the curator of the Japanese collection of the National Archives to put on for him a film with authentic soundtrack of the Noh play Awoi No Uye.

  Skipwith Cannell, a poet Pound had met in Paris before the First World War and had included in Des Imagistes, now had a government job in Washington and one day ‘found Pound wandering blindly around the administration buildings’. He invited him to Sunday dinner on 30 April, and Williams, who happened to be passing through, was there too. Williams, when he learnt Pound was coming over, had written to Laughlin, ‘I can hardly bear the thought of shaking hands with the guy…if he’s for that murderous gang he says he’s for.’ Yet when they met he hugged his old friend who seemed ‘very mild and depressed and fearful’, and they talked about the serious state of world affairs, though Williams thought Pound ‘somewhat incoherent’. The next day, 1 May, Pound dashed off a note to Homer, ‘Bill Wms here in Wash. yester.’, and, ‘I still keep on with Congrs. library, and the office buildings. etc.’

  Tinkham took him to lunch on the 3rd, and ‘fed me “diamond back terrapin Maryland style”’. On the 5th he arranged for Pound, as the grandson of Thaddeus Coleman Pound, to observe a session of the House of Representatives from a section of the public gallery reserved for members’ relatives, but there was nothing to interest or amuse him in that day’s proceedings—‘a very poor show’ he thought it, quite lacking in ‘fireworks’. He also had a pass issued by Senator N. C. Lodge Jr to admit him to the Senate Chamber on that day. By the 10th his ‘catch’, as he wrote to Dorothy, was two senators, the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, ‘and in evening 8 or 9 econ profs’. He had also put ‘Payne’, possibly one of the ‘econ profs’, ‘onto serious digging with Gesell in Congrs. Library’. Pound also wrote to Homer on 10 May, saying he had seen more senators, ‘Bridges, Lodge & then this A.m. DIES’, and had had ‘kind word from Borah in the corridor yester.’ He was ‘Now on way to Harvard’, and ‘further mail shd go co/ F. S. Bacon 80 Maiden Lane New York’—that was ‘Baldy’ Bacon’s office address, near Wall Street in the financial district.

  Henry Wallace later told Charles Norman that ‘Pound seemed normal enough when he called on me but rather pessimistic as to the future of the U.S.’—he ‘had some ideas as to proper economic organization but I have forgotten what they were’. They were probably the same ideas that Pound had laid out in a long article which the Capitol Daily ran on the 9th. In it, according to an ‘Editor’s Note’, the ‘noted American Poet-Economist’ presented ‘his views on a variety of subjects, but principally on the scrip money plan’, meaning Gesell’s stamp scrip. But Pound’s first point was that Fascism was not for America, the corporate state being an ‘un-American organization’, and that the tyranny Americans should fear was already present in their financial system.

  Pound did not go directly to Harvard but was around New York for a few days, staying at Frank Bacon’s home in Greenwich, Conn., outside the city, or with John Slocum, whom he knew as a friend of Laughlin’s. He phoned Marianne Moore and they met in person for the first time. He looked up Ford on the morning of the 12th—Ford was rather hurt that Pound had not been in touch sooner—and used Ford’s phone to arrange to meet Gorham Munson. At lunch with Munson at the Players Club on Gramercy Park he charmed his wife with recollections of Katherine Ruth Heyman, now her friend. Munson recalled for Charles Norman how everyone in the room was noticing Pound, a big man then in spite of all his tennis—he had weighed himself on the Rex at 207 pounds—in a baggy tweed suit, ‘a flaring white sport shirt’, no tie, and in animated conversation. He ‘talked about his stay in Washington’, but was ‘chary of names’, and he said, according to Munson, that he ‘did not think war was in the offing’.

  Ford would be sailing for France at the end of May, and on the 25th there was a farewell party for him in the Cummings’ top floor apartment. Pound was expected, along with Williams and the crowd of Ford’s New York admirers and supporters, but he failed to turn up. Before June was out Ford would be dead and buried in Deauville, and Pound would long regret the �
��fatigue that prevented my gittin’ to top floor in ’39’. He would pay generous tribute to Ford in an obituary in August, and would recall how he had been still, when he saw him last in New York, ‘a very gallant combatant for those things of the mind and of letters which have been in our time too little prized’, and how he had been ‘still pitching the tale of unknown men who had written the histoire morale contemporaine truthfully and without trumpets’.

  In mid-May Pound travelled up to Harvard where Jas. Laughlin was at last finishing his degree. He had told Pound shortly after his arrival from Italy that he had ‘suggested to the Harvards that they ask you to read Cantos and comment on them…it would be a good thing for this den of diddlers and doodlers to be told that matters economic constitute a fit subject for poesy’. The English Department asked him to give a reading in the semi-circular lecture theatre in Sever Hall, and (in Charles Norman’s words) ‘the steep rows of seats were occupied by undergraduates, with a sprinkling of faculty’. One of the undergraduates, John Clellon Holmes, later recalled for Norman that Pound ‘read sitting down’, and that he ‘seemed to read an extraordinarily long time on one breath, and then take a deep one…for the next few lines of poetry, and yet the voice was too soft to be heard, unless, as he did unexpectedly, he yelled’. The Department of Speech then asked Pound to make a recording for its Harvard Vocarium collection, so, as he reported the event to Olga, ‘he spent 2½ hours in abserlewtly airless room bellowing his cantos into a microphone…Wiff 2 kettle drums @ his disposal’. The bellowing in fact was only in the few places it is called for, as in the ‘bloody sestina’, ‘Altaforte’. His voice on the recording otherwise is strong, with a range from the gentle to the enraged, dominantly contemplative or meditative—especially in canto 17—but bardic, taking off from speech into chant, and producing the words as if to a notated score, keeping the time of the rhythm and observing the pitch and duration and weight of each syllable. One can hear the disciplines of musical composition in the writing. The drumming gives a backing of occasional reverberant thunder to ‘The Seafarer’, and of war music to ‘Altaforte’, and can be heard from to time in the background elsewhere, generally in connection with doom and death or denunciation—this last towards the close of canto 45—but Pound apparently sometimes became too engrossed in his text to remember the drums. Holmes, who was assisting at the recording, thought the effect of the drums ‘would have been magnificent with a rehearsal’.