The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Ezra Pound schooled himself “to write an epic poem which begins ‘In the Dark Forest,’ crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light …” In his vision of the form of the Cantos, there was to be a descent into hell followed by an ascent with error burned away, “bathed in alkali, and in acid.” But Pound did not return from the underworld.

  In Virgil’s story of the founding of Rome, Aeneas, too, makes a descent into hell. After the war with the Greeks, Aeneas is buffeted about the Mediterranean until he beaches at Carthage, where Dido, the queen, falls in love with him. They spend one happy season together, but in the spring Aeneas grows restless and sets sail for Italy, abandoning his love. Dido is brokenhearted. She kills herself for grief. The Trojans can see the light of her funeral pyre as they slip over the horizon.

  Once he has returned to Italy, a sibyl offers to guide Aeneas into Hades so that he may speak with his dead father. As they cross the river Styx, he sees Dido’s ghost. But she won’t look at him; she turns her head away, still resentful over his betrayal. Aeneas pushes on to find his father, whose prophecy tells him how he will establish the city of Rome.

  The Aeneid is the myth of the founding of a patriarchal urban culture. In the background lies an erotic connection cut off by politics. The love affair is destroyed for the sake of empire, and the feminine figure is left as a suicidal, unredeemed, and restless ghost. Aeneas’s descent into hell is meant not to heal that wound but to seek out the father and his advice about government.

  Ezra Pound’s father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. If a man wanted to know if his gold was real or just fool’s gold, Homer Pound would weigh it and drill it and tell him the truth. The most luminous memory from Pound’s childhood concerns a time his father took him to visit the mint. In the enormous basement vaults, four million silver dollars lay where their sacks had rotted. “They were heaving it into the counting machines with shovels bigger than coal shovels. This spectacle of coin being shovelled around like it was litter— these fellows naked to the waist shovelling it around in the gas flares—things like that strike your imagination.”

  Like Aeneas, Pound descended into hell on the side of the father. A memory of eros lingers in the background. There had been a desire to live with those “who thought copulation was good for the crops.” There was a man who had once turned into a tree. There was a gifted man, moved by the undivided light of Eleusis, who brought his consciousness forward to the Renaissance and who, wary of the centuries of usury that followed, descended into the underworld to try to bring that gift out again in its clarity. But this was a modern man, living at the height of the patriarchies, wary of his own emotions, classic by temperament, and given to willfulness. He chose the via voluntatis. Rather than revalue the gift through affirmation, he undertook the hopeless task of changing the nature of money itself. And so he met no Tiresias in hell. He met no boy lover, nor did he see the face of the beloved. He met, instead, his own devil, a Hermes/Jew whom he chose to fight man to man: he fought bad money with good money, bad will with goodwill, politics with politics, and avarice with power, all in the name of generosity and the imagination.

  In 1961 Pound fell into silence. For the last eleven years of his life he rarely spoke. When visitors would come to his apartment, he would shake hands and then, while the others chatted, sit in silence or disappear upstairs. Toward the beginning of these years a newspaper reporter came to see him. “Where are you living now?” the man asked. “In hell,” replied Pound. He never came up. He lost his voice.

  In October of 1967 Allen Ginsberg visited Pound in Italy. Pound was eighty-two; he had been in his silence for six years. Ginsberg spent several days with him during which Pound hardly spoke at all and Ginsberg told him stories— told him about his Blake vision and drug experiences and Buddhism and what was happening in America. He chanted sutras for Pound and played him phonograph records of Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles, and Ali Akbar Khan. On the third of these days, in a small Venetian restaurant with a few friends, Ginsberg having been told that Pound would respond to specific textual questions about the Cantos, they finally began to talk. Ginsberg later recalled part of the exchange:

  [I explained] how his attention to specific perceptions … had been great help to me in finding language and balancing my mind—and to many young poets—and asked “am I making sense to you?”

  “Yes,” he replied finally, and then mumbled “but my own work does not make sense.” … “A mess,” he said.

  “What, you or the Cantos or me?”

  “My writing—stupidity and ignorance all the way through,” he said. “Stupidity and ignorance.”

  [Ginsberg and the others objected, Ginsberg concluding:] “Williams told me … in 1961—we were talking about prosody … anyway Williams said, ‘Pound has a mystical ear’—did he ever tell you that?”

  “No,” said Pound, “he never said that to me”—smiling almost shyly and pleased—eyes averted, but smiling, almost curious and childlike.

  “Well I’m reporting it to you now seven years later— the judgment of the tender-eyed Doctor that you had a ‘mystical ear’—not gaseous mystical he meant—but a natural ear for rhythm and tone.”

  I continued explaining the concrete value of his perceptions. I added that as humor—HUMOR—the ancient humours—his irritations, … against Buddhists, Taoists and Jews—fitted into place, despite his intentions, as part of the drama … “The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment—it was the intention of Desire we all respond to—Bhakti—the Paradise is in the magnanimity of the desire to manifest coherent perceptions in language.”

  “The intention was bad—that’s the trouble—anything I’ve done has been an accident—any good has been spoiled by my intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things—” Pound said this quietly, rusty voiced like an old child, looked directly in my eye while pronouncing “intention.”

  “Ah well, what I’m trying to tell you—what I came here for all this time—was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion …, [my] perceptions have been strengthened by the series of practical exact language models which are scattered thruout the Cantos like stepping stones—ground for me to occupy, walk on—so that despite your intentions, the practical effect has been to clarify my perceptions—and, anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?”

  He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

  “I do,” he said—“but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of antisemitism, all along, that spoiled everything—” …

  “Ah, that’s lovely to hear you say that …”*

  Later, Ginsberg and the others walked Pound back to his apartment. At the door, Ginsberg took him by the shoulders and said, “I also came here for your blessing. And now may I have it, sir?”

  “Yes,” nodded Pound, “for whatever it’s worth.”

  In the history of the creative spirit in America, this encounter seems as significant as the day, thirty-five years before, when Pound handed the Cantos to Mussolini. For here the Jew—or rather, the Buddhist Jew (for he has left the judge behind)—came to exchange a blessing with the bitter servant. There were Jews who thought that Pound should have been put to death for his broadcasts during the war. But that would have been no more of a solution than the killing of the Jew in the fairy tale. Rather than fighting devils with devils, Ginsberg managed to change the form of the drama itself, and a light suddenly fell from a window no one had noticed. The story of our poetry need not be finished in one man’s life. Ginsberg calls the light out of Pound’s labor; the forces of decay will strip away the “stupidity and ignorance.” The servant of the gift may yet regain his voice and feel, with each word that leaves his body, his own worth return to him as undivided light.

  * “But this/… is entertaining.”

  * All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, an
d for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Muslim; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are “the Jews of Spain.” On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for trade, though of course he couldn’t be trusted.

  This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out—or murdered—when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Yankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915–16. The “outsider” is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.

  * Here we have another reason why Hermes is both the god of trade and of thieves. A commerce in commodities involves the trick of symbolic exchange.

  * His repeated call for state sovereignty and his prohibition on foreign money in the homeland both seem tribal to me. (If you begin with such tribal nationalism, however, you soon must have either complete isolation or a double standard for dealing with strangers. With what can only be called the wisdom of Moses, Pound arrives at the latter solution: “A country CAN have one currency for internal use, and another for home and foreign use.”)

  * If we ask what’s to keep tricky financiers from getting themselves appointed as price commissioners, Pound replies: “No part or function of government should be under closer surveillance, and in no part or cranny of government should higher moral criteria be ASSURED.” Men of super goodwill will watch the men of goodwill who set the just price.

  Pound was very sharp when it came to spotting crooks in the banking business, but he was a little dull when it came to crimes of power, order, and efficiency.

  * In formulating a modified permission to practice usury, the reformers revived the Mosaic law, and in that sense they brought the Jew into the Church. That, at any rate, was how Pound saw it; he was of the opinion, for example, that Calvin was really a Jew: “that heretical scoundrel Calvin (the alias of Cauein, or Cohen, philo-usurer).”

  * One of Pound’s last pieces of writing was a clarification: “Re USURY. I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”

  Conclusion

  It has been the implication of much of this book that there is an irreconcilable conflict between gift exchange and the market, and that, as a consequence, the artist in the modern world must suffer a constant tension between the gift sphere to which his work pertains and the market society which is his context. Such, at any rate, were my assumptions when I began to write. I not only placed creative life wholly within the gift economy, but I assumed that the artist of enduring gifts would be one who managed to defend himself against all temptations to commercialize his calling.

  My position has changed somewhat. I still believe that the primary commerce of art is a gift exchange, that unless the work is the realization of the artist’s gift and unless we, the audience, can feel the gift it carries, there is no art; I still believe that a gift can be destroyed by the marketplace. But I no longer feel the poles of this dichotomy to be so strongly opposed. In working out the details of the chapter on usury, in particular, I came to understand that gift exchange and the market need not be wholly separate spheres. There are ways in which they may be reconciled, and if, like the Jews of the Old Testament, we are a community that deals with strangers, or if, like Ezra Pound, we are artists living in a market society, it is the reconciliation we must seek. One of the lessons of Pound’s life, certainly, is that there is little to be gained by a wholesale attack on the market. We can sometimes limit the scope of its influence, but we cannot change its nature. The market is an emanation of logos, and logos is as much a part of the human spirit as eros is; we can no more do away with it than Pound could keep Hermes out of his head—or out of Europe.

  The reader may remember that in order to introduce the idea of usury I imagined a tribe with a boundary drawn around it. In the center of the tribe, goods circulate as gifts and reciprocity is positive. Outside the tribe, goods move through purchase and sale, value is reckoned comparatively, and reciprocity is negative. I initially described the permission to usure as a permission to establish the boundary between these two spheres, to declare an outer limit to the circle of gift exchange. And in earlier, more polemical versions of the chapter I set out to strengthen that boundary, insisting (as Pound insists) that the creative spirit will be wounded if it is not carefully protected from the spirit of stranger trade.

  But as I brought this argument into the modern world, my own ideas underwent a bit of a re-formation. I began to understand that the permission to usure is also a permission to trade between the two spheres. The boundary can be permeable. Gift-increase (unreckoned, positive reciprocity) may be converted into market-increase (reckoned, negative reciprocity). And vice versa: the interest that a stranger pays on a loan may be brought into the center and converted into gifts. Put generally, within certain limits what has been given us as a gift may be sold in the marketplace and what has been earned in the marketplace may be given as gift. Within certain limits, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.

  During the sixteenth century, Protestant churchmen began the still-unfinished work of defining these “certain limits.” The Reformation refined the terms of the reconciliation between the two spheres by articulating degrees of reciprocity. The Old Testament (along with the Koran, most tribes, and Ezra Pound) does not differentiate well between degrees of negative reciprocity. Everything is usury. But post-Reformation morality differentiates. There is usury, but there is also interest. The problem is not “Can gift and commodity coexist?” but “To what degree may one draw from the other without destroying it?” From the point of view of the market, the white man has a point when he complains about Indians who refuse to invest capital: there can be no market if all wealth is converted into gifts. And from the other side, the Indians have a point when they resist the conversion of all gifts to commodities: there is a degree of commercialization which destroys the community itself. But between these two extremes lies a middle ground in which, sometimes, eros and logos may coexist.

  I posed a dilemma at the beginning of this book: How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market? Modern artists have resolved this dilemma in several different ways, each of which, it seems to me, has two essential features. First, the artist allows himself to step outside the gift economy that is the primary commerce of his art and make some peace with the market. Like the Jew of the Old Testament who has a law of the altar at home and a law of the gate for dealing with strangers, the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor to starve his belly reserves a protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he allows himself some contact with the market. And then—the necessary second phase—if he is successful in the marketplace, he converts market wealth into gift wealth: he contributes his earnings to the support of his art.

  To be more specific, there are three primary ways in which modern artists have resolved the problem of their livelihood: they have taken second jobs, they have found patrons to support them, or they have managed to place the work itself on the market and pay the rent with fees and royalties. The underlying structure that is common to all of these—a double economy and the conversion of market wealth to gift wealth—may be easiest to see in the case of the artist who has taken a secondary job, some work more or less unrelated to his art—night watchman, merchant seaman,
Berlitz teacher, doctor, or insurance executive … The second job frees his art from the burden of financial responsibility so that when he is creating the work he may turn from questions of market value and labor in the protected gift-sphere. He earns a wage in the marketplace and gives it to his art.

  The case of patronage (or nowadays, grants) is a little more subtle. The artist who takes a second job becomes, in a sense, his own patron: he decides his work is worthy of support, just as the patron does, but then he himself must go out and raise the cash. The artist who manages to attract an actual patron may seem to be less involved with the market. The patron’s support is not a wage or a fee for service but a gift given in recognition of the artist’s own. With patronage, the artist’s livelihood seems to lie wholly within the gift-sphere in which the work is made.

  But if we fail to see the market here, it is because we are looking only at the artist. When an artist takes a second job, a single person moves in both economies, but with patronage there is a division of labor—it is the patron who has entered the market and converted its wealth to gifts. Once made, the point hardly needs elaboration. Harriet Shaw Weaver, that kindly Quaker lady who supported James Joyce, did not get her money from God; nor did the Guggenheims, nor does the National Endowment for the Arts. Someone, somewhere sold his labor in the marketplace, or grew rich in finance, or exploited the abundance of nature, and the patron turns that wealth into a gift to feed the gifted.