The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  This liquid is certainlya

  property of the mind

  nec accidens est but an element

  in the mind’s make-up …

  Hast ′ou seen the rose in the steel dust

  (or swansdown ever?) so light is the urging, so ordered

  the dark

  petals of iron we who have passed over Lethe.

  In art and in human affairs there is a force corresponding to that which has given swansdown its beauty, and that force is virtù (“in the light of light is the virtù,” says the same Canto). Just as electromagnetism induces order in a pile of iron filings, so virtù induces order in the works of man. And like the magnet, or so the image leads us to believe, this virtù creates order by its presence alone, “by a sort of contagion without specific effort.”

  At this point, however, we come to a slight disparity in Pound’s idea of order. There is a strange phrase in his prose writings—strange, at least, if we set it beside this other one about “contagion”—and that phrase is “the will toward order.” Virtù is not the same thing as willpower, but for Pound it is the will that directs the force of virtù and in the last analysis, therefore, it is the will that is the agent of order. In the context from which I have taken the phrase, “the will toward order” refers to social order and to the men through whose will societies have developed and maintained their structures. But willpower plays a role in Pound’s aesthetic as well: “The greater the artist the more permanent his creation, and this is a matter of WILL,” he writes, a sentence that belongs beside Clark Emery’s explication: “Without Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Kungian order they dissipate themselves.” I am not, at this point, trying to address the validity of these ideas. I am only trying to point out that, for Pound, Confucian order is associated with two things, willpower and durability. The will is the agent of the forces of order, and durability is the consequence of its agency.

  We shall have more to say of political will in a later section of this chapter; at this point I want to offer a few remarks on the role of willpower in art. There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspension is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image. The materia must begin to flow before it can be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices—drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing—to suspend the will so that something “other” will come forward. When the material finally appears, it is usually in a jumble, personally moving, perhaps, but not much use to someone else—not, at any rate, a work of art. There are exceptions, but the initial formulation of a work is rarely satisfactory—satisfactory, I mean, to the imagination itself, for, like a person who must struggle to say what he means, the imagination stutters toward the clear articulation of its feeling. The will has the power to carry the material back to the imagination and contain it there while it is re-formed. The will does not create the “germinating image” of a work, nor does it give the work its form, but it does provide the energy and the directed attention called for by a dialogue with the imagination.

  Artists might be classified by the different weight given to these two phases of the work. Whitman or a prose writer like Jack Kerouac fall on the suspend-the-will side of the spectrum. Whitman begins to work by lolling on the grass. Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”—a list of thirty aphorisms—includes the following:

  Submissive to everything, open listening

  Something that you feel will find its own form

  Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

  No time for poetry but exactly what is

  In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

  Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.

  All these and one more—“Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better”—amount to an aesthetic of the imagination without the will, the “spontaneous bop prosody” of accepting the image as it comes. (Yeats’s trance writing would be another example, the one, in fact, that Kerouac credits as his model.) “Never revise” was Kerouac’s rule; he used to claim that he wrote the first draft of On the Road on a roll of teletype paper in a single two-week sitting, sniffing Benzedrine inhalers as he typed. Such writing is both more original and more chaotic than writing with a larger admixture of will. It is more personal and more of the moment. At its best it strengthens the imagination through trusting its primary speech and conveys that trust to the reader, along with the “crazy” energy that comes from unqualified transcription of image and experience, that is, from taking everything bestowed upon perception as holy.

  A writer with greater trust in the will works the text, turning the plasm of the moment into more durable gems. Such work has the virtues that come of revision—precision, restraint, intellectual consistency, density of images, coherence, and so forth. For a certain kind of author, Pound is correct, I think, to connect the presence of the will to the durability of the creation. Yeats, for example, may have cultivated his “spooks” and written in trances, but unlike Kerouac, he educated the will. He worked at his craft; he refined what the imagination gave him.

  I have gone into the issue of willpower a little because it is through this particular element in Pound’s Confucian side that we can come to understand the tension between fecundity and order. Pound’s work displays a curious incongruity: it is framed by clear declarations of erotic and spiritual ends which it does not achieve. There are moments of remarkable light in the Cantos, yes, but taken as a whole the poem scatters the very unity it set out to preserve (and the last lines of the last Canto read: “Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made”). Pound’s work is acerbic, impatient, argumentative, obsessed, and disappointed. The young man had written that he was “interested in art and ecstasy,” but the poem he came to write does not convey “the feeling of a soul in ascent”; it conveys the feeling of a soul in torment.

  Pound’s tone of voice in his prose writings offers a way to approach this incongruity. His shortness with something called “stupidity” seems particularly telling. The tone of voice of the man who wrote the ABC of Reading, for example, is that of a schoolmaster irritated by the ignorance of his pupils. The reader who approaches the book with sympathy begins to feel either like the dunce receiving the lecture or like the peeved schoolmaster set above the class. Either way, the sympathy is betrayed, the self divided. Eliot once asked Pound to write an explanation of Silvio Gesell’s economic ideas for The Criterion. Pound handed in his usual complaint about the thickheadedness of his audience. Said Eliot to Pound, “I asked you to write an article which would explain this subject to people who had never heard it; yet you write as if your readers knew about it already, but had failed to understand it.”

  If we return to Whitman for a moment, we may be able to triangulate the irritability these examples reveal. We have seen Pound’s “Religio”; Whitman’s is found in the original preface to Leaves of Grass:

  This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy…, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people …, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families…, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body …

  Contrast this passage with lines from the opening paragraph of Pound’s Guide to Kulchur: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man … to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom it is blamed. One may quite well be fighting
the same idiocy that he fought and where into his followers have reslumped from laziness, from idiocy …” The point may be well taken, but mark the underlying assumption, to wit, that culture will only stand up if we fight stupidity, idiocy, and laziness, as if culture were a slouching adolescent being sent to a military academy in Pennsylvania.

  I do not pretend that I can unravel the mare’s nest of Pound’s psychology in this one chapter, but I can proffer at least one intuition: what Pound is calling “stupidity” and “idiocy” and “laziness” should be associated with the erotic and, therefore, with the Eleusinian side of his temperament. As Whitman understood (and Pound, too, at times), one of the wellsprings of the creative spirit lies with “the stupid … crazy … uneducated” and idle. Fertility itself is dumb and lazy. Put it this way: unity—the unity of nature, or of “coitus … the mysterium,” or of the nous—is unwilled and unreflective. If we assume, therefore, that the only smart thought is reflective thought and the only active person is the willful person, fecundity itself will soon seem tinged with idiocy and laziness.

  It may seem odd, I realize, to speak of Pound’s irritation— or better, his frustration—with the erotic. But there it is. He has a clear sense of the value and power of that side of creative life, but he is also exasperated by its nature.

  In seeking to reconcile this disparity, I found myself led into imagining a fable about Pound as a young poet. Was there a time, I wondered, when Pound himself had this experience of “the soul in ascent”? Was there a Poundian epiphany, like Whitman’s or Ginsberg’s or like the moment when the young Eliot, walking in Boston, saw the street and all its objects turn to light? Such moments are rare, given only once or twice in a lifetime, and yet they serve as a fountain for a life’s work. Did Pound have one, and if he did, what happened afterward?

  In Pavannes and Divagations Pound paused to imagine how a myth might have come about, saying:

  The first myths arose when a man walked sheer into “nonsense,” that is to say, when some very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after bitter experience, perceiving that no one could understand what he meant when he said that he “turned into a tree,” he made a myth—a work of art that is,—an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words. The story, perhaps, then gave rise to a weaker copy of his emotion in others, until there arose a cult, a company of people who could understand each other’s nonsense about the gods.

  Let us set this rumination beside the first poem in Pound’s Personae:

  The Tree

  I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,

  Knowing the truth of things unseen before;

  Of Daphne and the laurel bow

  And that god-feasting couple old

  That grew elm-oak amid the wold.

  ′Twas not until the gods had been

  Kindly entreated, and been brought within

  Unto the hearth of their heart’s home

  That they might do this wonder thing;

  Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood

  And many a new thing understood

  That was rank folly to my head before.

  Certainly, it does no violence to the spirit of the work for us to imagine that there was a time Pound felt himself “turned into a tree” (or more simply, when he felt moved to the core of his being by the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere, or became suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous). Nor does it seem unlikely that, on feeling with his whole being the worth of his experience, he set out to labor in the service of that metamorphosis or that image or that light.

  Then: some “bitter experience.” They think he’s a liar. He discovers, in some way not hard to imagine, that what moves him the most has no currency in his age and homeland. Worse, it is under attack from all sides, ignored, belittled, and devalued. Ginsberg tells of such a reaction to his Blake vision:

  I tried to evoke the sensations of the experience myself, artificially, by dancing around my apartment chanting a sort of homemade mantra: “Come, spirit. O spirit, spirit, come. Come, spirit. O spirit, spirit, come.” Something like that. There I was, in the dark, in an apartment in the middle of Harlem, whirling like a dervish and invoking powers.

  And everybody I tried to talk to about it thought I was crazy. Not just [my] psychiatrist. The two girls who lived next door. My father. My teachers. Even most of my friends.

  Now in a society which was open and dedicated to spirit, like in India, my actions and my address would have been considered quite normal. Had I been transported to a streetcorner potato-curry shop in Benares and begun acting that way, I would have been seen as in some special, holy sort of state and sent on my way to the burning grounds, to sit and meditate. And when I got home, I would have been like gently encouraged to express myself, to work it out, and then left alone.

  That was 1948. Imagine Pound a half a century earlier! His moment of light would have come sometime before 1908. The turn of the century was hardly a time of great spiritual awakening in America. American mercantile expansion was at its height, running from China, where the Boxer Rebellion had just been put down, to a South America newly “freed” from Spain. A Rough Rider sat in the White House, and hardly a single great poet was alive and read on the American continent with the exception, I suppose, of Teddy Roosevelt’s preferred bard, Edwin Arlington Robinson. I do not mean to ascribe all of Pound’s bitterness to exterior sources, but even if his struggles are more aptly described as interior, we cannot say his countrymen offered him much solace.

  In any event, I was led to imagine a Poundian epiphany such as this in order to fill the gap, to make sense of the odd combination of erotic intent and divisive tone that we find in the work. The little story in Pavannes and Divagations caught my eye because it speaks of the bitterness of lost worth and of a spiritual knowledge that could not be passed along. And although the faith in fertility can be seen in flashes, it is bitterness and disappointment that live on the surface of Ezra Pound’s poetry.

  Like Whitman, Pound knew very well that he had not been born into a world receptive to the spirit of his art.

  In meiner Heimat

  where the dead walked

  and the living were made of cardboard.

  He never accepted the barrenness of his age, and there is no reason that he should have. But he never accepted, either, the limits of his ability to do anything about that barrenness. There is only so much that can be done to create fertile ground where none exists. Harmony may emanate from the unity of nature or the nous or the prince, but harmony cannot be imposed on those who are not ready to receive it. Electro-magnetism may trace a rose in iron filings, but it is powerless to induce order into sawdust. The forces of fertility have no power in certain situations, and it is in Pound’s response to that powerlessness, it seems to me, that we shall find the true roots of the tension between fecundity and order, imagination and will. Pound’s notion that we slump into “stupidity” from “laziness” implies its opposite, that we shall overcome it through hard work. Where Whitman senses that the ends of art call for long periods of idleness, Pound imagines that they might be accomplished through discipline and exertion. He is like a man who, unable to grieve upon discovering that his wife no longer loves him, becomes more and more aggressive in the dumb belief that love could be forced back into existence. Pound’s Confucian side is marked not only by willfulness, but by a willfulness exaggerated in direct proportion to his frustration with the powerlessness of the erotic.

  We can see some of this in Pound’s reading of history. In its barest formulation the idea of “Kungian order” seems like an anarchist ideal, order spread not by coercion but “by a sort of contagion.” In practice, however, those who are drawn to Confucius usually end up working for the state government (or running it). The proverbial advice in China is that during the years when a man is a civil servant he should study C
onfucius; later, when he retires, he should study Buddhism. Why? It seems that when Confucius turned inward he discovered the “right order” of a state bureaucrat (or maybe it was the bureaucrats who discovered him; either way, there is a connection). When the anarchist speaks of an inner, natural, noncoercive order, he does not suddenly leap to: “If the prince has order within him he can put his dominions in order.” He finds no prince at all, or at least not one with dominions to worry about. But Confucius did, and so did Ezra Pound.

  The prince that Pound found within, we must note, was one who loved poetry. “And Kung said …,” a Canto tells us, “‘When the prince has gathered about him / All the savants and artists, his riches will be fully employed.’” There was nothing in either history or politics that attracted Pound more than a ruler who liked art. He loved a “boss” who’d been to the mysteries, from Odysseus down to the Renaissance rulers (Malatesta, the Estes, the Medicis), from Jefferson—who first appears in Canto 21 with a letter asking a friend to find him a gardener who plays the French horn—to Napoleon, who gets a bow in Canto 43 for supposedly having said:

  “Artists high rank, in fact sole social summits

  which the tempest of politics can not reach.”

  And from Napoleon to Mussolini: “The Duce and Kung Fu Tseu equally perceive that their people need poetry …”

  But these are not just strong men. With the exception of Jefferson, they are also bullies. One cannot talk of these “princes” without talking of their overweening will. In the Odyssey Odysseus is plagued not by Trojans, after all, but by sleep, forgetfulness, animals, reveries, and women. He deals with these through violence, power, cunning, lies, seduction, and bravado. He whips his men who want to stay with the lotus-eaters; he takes Circe to bed at the point of a sword. When he gets home, he begins to put his affairs in order by murdering all the servant girls who’ve been sleeping with the suitors. He’s the Mussolini of the ancient world.