The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  As had been the case for the young Whitman, it was the trees that held this old man’s medicine. A yellow poplar stood near the creek, four feet thick at the butt and ninety feet high. “How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming … How it rebukes, by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper’d little whiffet, man …” The trees, like the animals, do not complain of lost love or unsatisfied desire. They celebrate themselves. Whitman began to fantasize about dryads and dream of trees speaking to him. “One does not wonder at the old story fables … of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength of them—strength …”

  Whitman hit upon the idea of exercising his limbs by bending young trees (“my natural gymnasia,” he called them). The first day he spent an hour pushing and pulling an oak sapling, thick as a man’s wrist and twelve feet high. “After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine.” He began to sing: “I launch forth in my vocalism; shout declamatory pieces, sentiments, sorrow, anger, &c, from the stock poets or plays—inflate my lungs and sing the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs …” All during the summer of 1876 he wrestled with the trees.

  Whitman’s nursing during the war had opened him to love. It changed his life. We find no relationships before the war like those he later established with Doyle or with Stafford: intense, articulated, and long-lasting. And yet, so opened he was also wounded. Something needing cure appeared in his blood. “To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.” It is the sadness of this life that Whitman could not cure himself with a human love. A baffled animal, he turned back to his trees in the end. But as he confides to us before he tells his tale of Timber Creek, “after you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains …” Beyond the sadness of this life lies its genius, that Whitman was able to find the give-and-take to heal him, to find a green-force to overcome the blood’s decay. He never married his unlettered boy, but he accepted virtue from an even more unlettered nature and gave it speech.

  * In the trajectory of Whitman’s life one can discern a tendency toward a more disincarnate spirituality. As an old man he wrote that Leaves of Grass was a collection of songs of the body and that he had thought of writing a second book to indicate that “the unseen Soul govern[s] absolutely at last.” And yet, he says, “It is beyond my powers,” adding that “the physical and the sensuous … retain holds upon me which I think are never entirely releas’d …”

  * When Whitman later tried to raise money for his work in the Civil War hospitals, a friend wrote to him from Boston: “There is a prejudice against you here among the ‘fine’ ladies and gentlemen of the transcendental School. It is believed that you are not ashamed of your reproductive organs and, somehow, it would seem to be the result of their logic—that eunuchs only are fit for nurses.”

  * The quahaug is the same one that appeared in the fantasy of the hungry soul: “Now do I talk of mine and his?—Has my heart no more passion than a squid or clam shell has?”

  * The poem from which these lines are taken is the one about which D. H. Lawrence made his perceptive comment, “Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life.” The remark is often quoted without its context so as to imply that Whitman is only a poet of death. But the context is the same as the one I am setting up here. “… Of the end of life,” says Lawrence, and he adds, “But we have all got to die, and disintegrate. We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live … Something else will come. ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.’”

  * To speak of procreation as a bestowal, Whitman is forced to abandon his habitual evenhandedness toward the sexes. The male self ejaculates sperm, the female gives birth to babies.

  * There are other “speech centers” in the self besides what Whitman is calling the soul. The intellect can speak—it can describe the known world, it can draw logical conclusions. But it cannot create speech for the mute. It is a gesture of the wakened soul to offer articulation to the speechless content of the self. “The talkers … talking the talk of the beginning and the end” cannot do it; only soul, imagination, muse, genius can do it.

  * When I speak of celebration, I do not mean that all our art must be a cheery affirmation. To utter sorrow and loss is also a responsive speech, and a form of celebration. I use the term broadly, of course, as when we speak of “celebrating” the anniversary of someone’s death. “Sadness, in order to sing, / Will have to drink black water,” says the Spanish poet José Luis Hidalgo. No one welcomes the black water of grief, but it too, when it comes, may be accepted and articulated. Spoken sorrow— or despair, or longing—descries the shape of the lost. We keep alive through speech the spirit of what we do not have; we survive, spiritually, by uttering the names of the dead and the names of what we need but cannot find. (There is little of this in Whitman, by the way. Only in Calamus and in some of the old-age poems do we feel him trying to name what he could not find. He is primarily a poet of praise, “I keep no account with lamentation,” he wrote early on. By that same token, however, some of his sorrow remained mute and some of his intensity never came to life).

  † In an account of a center serving the Jewish elderly in California, the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff offers the following observation about storytelling; “Stories are a renewal of the word, made alive by being spoken, passed from one to another, released from considerations of correctness and law … Rabbi Nechman of Bratzlav ordered that all written records of his teachings be destroyed. His words must be passed from mouth to mouth, learned by and in heart. ‘My words have no clothes,’ he said. ‘When one speaks to one’s fellows, there arises a simple light and a returning light.’”

  The oral tradition—stories, songs, poems passed from mouth to mouth— keeps the gift of speech alive. The poet Gary Snyder, asked in an interview why the oral tradition is so weak in the United States, answered: “Because of the stress on individual names and the emphasis on keeping a text pure.”

  Each of these preoccupations—the one a concern of the market, the other a concern of the academy—treats our art as proprietary works, not gifts.

  * This is one reason we cannot read an artist’s work by his life. We learn something when we read the life, of course, but the true artist leaves us with the uncanny sense that the experience fails to explain the creation.

  * As it is, for example, in Mao Tse-tung’s political aesthetic where “work in literature and art… is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party…”

  * Justin Kaplan, Whitman’s most recent biographer, says that Whitman’s symptoms suggest severe hypertension and, perhaps, mercury poisoning from overdoses of calomel.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ezra Pound and

  the Fate of

  Vegetable Money

  I • Scattered Light

  “The images of the gods,” wrote Ezra Pound, “… move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light.” But those who turn to face either the poetry or the political economy of Ezra Pound will find no such light to guide them there. Something has scattered it in all directions, and it is this scattering to which we shall have to address ourselves if we are to speak of Pound.

  Born in 1885, seven years before Whitman died, Pound grew up in the vicinity of Philadelphia, where his father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, briefly, Hamilton College in upstate New York. After graduation, Pound taught at Wabash College in Indiana, but not for long: his landlady one morning discovered an “actress” in his rooms and reported the discovery to the college authorities. They suggested that he marry the girl
or leave. He left. He left the country, in fact, and but for two brief visits did not return until the end of the Second World War, when the U.S. government flew him home to charge him with treason for having taken the side, vocally, of the Axis powers during the war.

  During the course of his long career (he did not die until 1972) Ezra Pound came to promulgate an elaborate economic theory and to write, among many other things, an eight hundred–page sequence of poems, the Cantos. In order to describe the work and fate of this poet we could tell either of these stories, the one about art or the one about politics. It is the politics that will receive most of our attention here, but by that emphasis we shall not be slighting the poetry entirely, for in telling one story we will be giving at least an outline of the other. They have the same plot, it seems to me: the playing out of an opposition in Pound’s own temperament between forces of fertility and forces of order, or, to use slightly different terms, between two powers of the soul, imagination and will. Several people have made this point, but I think Clark Emery was the first, putting it in the language that Pound himself might have used: “One of the tensions [in the Cantos] … is the effort to bring together the Eleusinian (or Dionysian) concept of natural fecundity and the Confucian concept of human order … Without Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Kungian order they dissipate themselves. Civilization occurs and maintains itself when the two forces—the striving and the ordering—approach equipoise.”

  “Before sewing one must cut,” the proverb says, and to begin our tale we must cut the pattern of these two forces, beginning with Eleusinian fecundity.

  Pound referred broadly to all polytheistic religions as “pagan,” and when he speaks of them he tends to speak of mystery, fertility, and procreation. His 1939 statement, “Religio,” reads:

  Paganism included a certain attitude toward, a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium.

  The other rites are the festivals of fecundity of the grain and the sun festivals, without revival of which religion can not return to the hearts of the people.

  A decade earlier he had written that “at the root of any mystery” lies what we now call “consciousness of the unity of nature.” The point is simple: nature’s fecundity depends upon its unity, and we shall not long enjoy the fruits of that fecundity if we cannot perceive the unity. The rituals of ancient mysteries were directed toward the apprehension (and therefore the preservation) of this unity.

  Pound is after something even broader than the fertility of the crops when he speaks of mystery, however. In a prose text he once described how a man can become “suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man’s individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright … molten glass that envelops us, full of light.” When Pound speaks of Eleusinian mysteries, he is speaking not only of the wheat whose recurrence bespeaks the fecundity of nature but also of this light that bespeaks the fecundity of the mind. Twitted once by Eliot to reveal his religious beliefs, Pound (after sending us to Confucius and Ovid) wrote: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy.” This “undivided light” occasions beauty in art, and vice versa— that is, beauty in art sets, or awakens, the knowledge of this light in the mind of man.

  Over and over in essays and in the Cantos, Pound tries to make it clear that fecundity can be destroyed by any dividing or splitting of the unity; in art and spiritual life the destructive force is a certain kind of abstraction.

  We find two forces in history: one that divides … and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery … There is the force that destroys every clearly delineated symbol, dragging man into a maze of abstract arguments, destroying not one but every religion.

  Before we go any further, I want to point out that this line of thought is of a piece with the central tenets of Imagism, that literary movement to which Pound’s name will be forever linked. “Go in fear of abstractions” was the cardinal Imagist injunction according to Pound’s own 1913 manifesto. “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete.” Pound was drawn to the study of Chinese written characters partly because they are image-writing, concrete speech. Pictograms “[have] to stay poetic,” he says, because their form itself prohibits the “maze” of abstractions that destroy the unity. He explains in the ABC of Reading:

  In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstractions.

  Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a “colour.”

  If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.

  And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth …

  But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of… a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?

  He puts … together the abbreviated pictures of

  ROSE CHERRY

  IRON RUST FLAMINGO

  Ezra Pound was essentially a religious poet. His cautions against abstraction in art serve the spiritual ends of the work; they are not merely advice on style. An Italian country priest once turned a corner of the temple of St. Francis in Rimini—the temple erected by that hero of the Cantos, Sigismondo Malatesta—to find the poet bowing to the stone elephants carved in the side of the building rather than to the “altar furniture.” Pound was an idolater in the old sense: he put himself in the service of images. One of the most remarkable things about the Cantos is Pound’s ability to convey a sense of the undivided light in concrete speech:

  rain beat as with colour of feldspar

  in the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it

  with a sky wet as ocean / flowing with liquid slate

  Such light is in sea-caves

  e la bella Ciprigna

  where copper throws back the flame from pinned eyes, the flames rise to fade in green air.

  And in old age:

  When one’s friends hate each other

  how can there be peace in the world?

  Their asperities diverted me in my green time.

  A blown husk that is finished

  but the light sings eternal

  a pale flare over marshes

  where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change …

  While teaching in Indiana, long before he had discovered Chinese written characters, Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams: “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means … of passing on that ecstasy to others.” In an essay on the art of fiction Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “the world of the fiction writer is full of matter”; fiction is an “incarnational art,” she says, full of “those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” I imagine Pound would have broadened the stroke: all art is incarnational, full of matter, and for the same reason, to make actual the mystery. Pound is right: some knowledge cannot survive abstraction, and to preserve this knowledge we must have art. The liquid light, the nous, the fecundity of nature, the feeling of the soul in ascent—only the imagination can articulate our apprehension of these things, and the imagination speaks to us in images.

  Confucius (or Kung Fu Tseu, as Pound usually has it) first appears in Canto 13. For the question of “Kungian order” the important lines are these:

  And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:

  If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him;

  And if a man have not order within hi
m

  His family will not act with due order;

  And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions.

  “The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius,” Pound had explained in his magazine, The Exile. “It consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people’s affairs.”

  Clark Emery speaks of a “tension” in the Cantos between Eleusinian fecundity and Confucian order, but I am not sure it is immediately apparent why any such tension should exist. Fecundity is not without order. Order inheres in all that is fertile in nature, and the liquid light of the nous, Pound tells us, induces order in those who perceive it.