REVIEW OF BOOKS
Douglas Dunn on the revalued Pound
The reputation of Ezra Loomis Pound, late Parisian dandy from Haley, Idaho, outcastcum-traitor and overhauler of twentiethcentury poetry; is the most perplexing and unresolved in modern letters. In terms of his personality, his arrogance and aptitude for getting people's backs up, it is easy to see why this should be so; and his political decisions, his broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini, and his anti-semitic and antiblack prejudices, offend even those inclined to admire him, greatly complicating recognition of what he achieved In poetry and criticism. One is, in a way, thankful for the dire associations Pound's beliefs in economics and history led him to make. Robert Lowell's view of what is usually thought Of as having corrupted Pound as a man and poet is a voice of sanity in a Wilderness of automatic outcries and unconsidered dismissals:
Pound's social credit, his Fascism, all these various things, were a tremendous gain to him; he'd be a very Parnassian poet without them. Even if they're bad beliefs — and some were bad, some weren't, and some were just terrible, of course — they made him more human and
rnITore to do with life, more to do with the -times. ,f.
tLowell's remarks are quoted in a note to the concise and valuable introduction Eric Homburger has written to Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage*, a selection of British and American reviews that plots the reception of Pound's books. A few years ago, Mr Homburger wrote an essay called Ezra Pound and the Ostriches,' a plea for readers to see Pound whole, lamenting the touching up of Pound's text and pointing out the innocuousness of Pound's wartime broadcasts as selected by Olga Rudge in If This Be Treason, but bringing to our attention a slab of anti-semitic horror Which was also broadcast. Pound was also Probably mad, "part way between socalled paranoid schizophrenia or dementia Praecox, paranoid type, and true paranoia," while the Pisan Cantos, written under great stress while incarcerated, do not differ in method from those written before or after. Questions have been asked; answers, though rarely offered, have been as varied as they have been unsatisfactory.
*Ezra Pound: The ,Critical Heritage edited Regan by Eric Homburger (Routledge and Paul £6.50) Pound's life is the boldest in outline of any modern artist. For what he did, and wrote, he suffered. In Canto 76, he writes "As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill from the wreckage of Europe." One can hardly fail to be moved by this, to warm to his struggle, to feel ashamed that one does so. Appropriately enough, the 'problem of Pound' can be illuminated by some pertinent decisions he made in his criticism, in particular his brilliant essay The Serious Artist.' There, he says " . it takes a good deal of talking to convince a layman that bad art is ',immoral.' And that good art, however ' immoral ' it is, is wholly a thing of virtue. Purely and simply, that good art can NOT be immoral." Such thoughts could be debated for hours; and they were, at the time of Pound's Bollingen prize. Pound was probably defending his own work; that same year (1913), his ' Contemporania ' poems had been thought too near the bone, and from the very start he had been against 'the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry ': I would shake off the lethargy of this our time, and give For shadows — shapes of power, For dreams men.
"Admittedly, much of his earlier work was littered with quaintness, what J. C. Squire was to call pollyglottery ' and heavy incrustations of verbiage.' But H. L. Mencken recognised Pound's complaint, and with journalistic wit, wrote: "Ninetenths of our living makers and singers it would seem are women, and fully twothirds of these women are ladies. The result is a boudoir tinkle in the tumult of the lyre." Now vigour in a time of lethargy can seem immoral (just like lethargy in a time, like ours, of hack and meaningless vigour). Pound demanded change by both example and precept, and from the beginning his reputation was controversial, encroaching — like that of the artists of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition — on an area where art seems to be totally opposed to the established notions of how life ought to be lived, because new, strange, unfamiliar and 'difficult.' Men of goodwill, philistines, and 'serious artists' began what could be called the War of Facile Jibes; the ceasefire has not yet been declared — critics, adverse to what they are, too stupid to understand, still arrange lines of poetry to look like prose for the sake of a cheap laugh, as they did with Pound.
Having acquired that kind of reputation — a reputation based on reviews as much as readership, as a table itemising the sales of Pound's books, and printed by Mr Homburger, shows — it is hardly surprising that no matter how great the importance of his work to later critics, or what the real magnitude of Pound's wartime sins, the man and his work should still be seen in the light of a selfgenerating, perpetual controversy. It is palpably wrong to gloss over Pound's Fascism; separation of ' content ' from ' artistry ' cannot be endorsed, although this mistake has been made by many. 'Artistry' is important; but with a poet whose techniques are generally misunderstood, emphasis falls heavily on the content.' Much of what Pound said is offensive; much of the Cantos is difficult. In an anti-intellectual age erudition is infuriating, it seems, in poetry; and few readers feel their minds enlivened by a poem about economics, the 'resurrection of Italy,' the decline of the United States from the beliefs of its founders. On the other hand, a great deal of the writing has a realism and sweep of the greatest beauty. Much else is diagnosis and 'delineation of ugliness' as Pound saw it; and, as Pound said, "beauty and the delineation of ugliness are not in mutual opposition."
Vitalism is Pound's primary motive. Lustra is the book from which it can be dated. There, his writing is free of archaisms and superfluities. Probably his liberation of line and syntax can be ascribed to his reading of Corbiere and Laforgue. Certainly, much of his interest in Propertius arose from his belief that Propertius had done for Latin what Laforgue had done for French. He is against self-oppression, against 'emotional anaemia'; and, in the Cantos, this is enlarged to the oppression of populaces and states by Money, by the way it is created and controlled and distributed by banks, and by its falseness as a reflection of the true wealth of a nation (" Taxes are not abundance "). Chief among monetary evils has been spelt as USURA; now, in Pound's brief forward to his Selected Prose 1909-1965, a note dated July 4, 1972 (significant), it has been corrected to AVARICE. That, of course, does not alter the way the Cantos deal with economics; his note has the flavour of recantation, like that remark to Allen Ginsberg printed in the Evergreen Review: "But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-semitism." And of the Cantos, he said to Daniel Cory, "It's a botch."
Pound's reputation has not suffered from his own regrets. An industry is at stake — Pound's Cantos are in the bank, and academic usury has a high rate of interest. Another thing is that some critics and poets say or imply that Pound was right in his economics, that he showed who was actually making a profit out of war. Pound drifts towards the liberal establishment as easily as towards cryptoFascists inclined to believe 'poor Benito' had good intentions because Pound said he had. No detectable interest in the Social Credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas has followed, although these seem to me both interesting and respectable.
William Cookson includes in Selected Prose* twenty-five contributions on the subject of 'Civilisation, Money and History.' Among these are 'ABC of Economics,' 'What is Money For? ', 'A Visiting Card' and 'Gold and Work,' material that can help clear up much of what Pound meant in the Cantos: but in voicing the hope that someone might write more about this aspect of the poem, he seems to be unaware of a reasonable and book-length study of just that, Vision Fugitive by Earle Davis. In his introduction, Cookson is right to say that Pound was for social justice in economic matters and that, even if mistaken, such a subject is good enough for poetry. Pound was a Utopian, a visionary of real Arcadias with sewers, art, architecture, economics, and government. One of the most counterpointed statements in the Cantos is "Le paradis n'est pas artificiel."
Reading the reviews by later critics, one notices that although serious attempts were made to come to grips with Pound, few writers paid attention to the valuable back-up provided by Pound's writing on economics. This material seems to have been ignored or unknown. A critic like Randall Jarrell could sum up the Cantos as "less a poem containing history' than a heap containing recollections, free associations, obsessions," and not seem to care about the form these obsessions took. Jarrell might refer to Pound's career as "the extraordinary misuse of extraordinary powers," but he was more than conscious of what they could do. On a basis of Lustra (one of the most marvellous books in modern poetry), Cathay, Mauberley, Homage to Sextus Propertius and Near Perigord, Pound would stand as a great poet. And that is not the 'critical cosiness' Donald Hall, in his reprinted review, thinks it is. But it is always to the Cantos Pound's enthusiasts refer. Everything else is an easy overture: only initiates can applaud at the end. Few of the critics in Mr Homburger's selection rhapsodise over the whole corpus of Pound; *Ezra Poundls Selected Prose /9094965 edited by William Cookson (Faber £6.00) very little is said about his ideas. The emphasis is on technique and method, on the ' success ' of the ' poetry '; his thought is made to seem insignificant, or reprehensible or both; only Delmore Schwartz had the strength of purpose to write on 'Ezra Pound and History.' But a book which contains writing by so various and distinguished a cast could hardly fail to be interesting. Two essential writers, through no fault of Mr Homburger's, are missing. They are T. S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner, no less.
There are lapses in Mr Cookson's choice. Pound's important essay Vorticism ' (not in Literary Essays) is still fugitive. Also, given the nature of the book, one looks in vain for anything from 'Jefferson and / or Mussolini.' Perhaps it was just too obvious. The emphasis, we are told, is on " the unity and integrity of Pound's concerns." From the tone and substance of his introduction, Mr Cookson can, with confidence, be numbered among the ostriches. "It is important to distinguish between German Fascism and Italian Fascism," he says, and quotes something Pound wrote in 1932 condemning Hitler's "sickly and unpleasant parody of fas cism." Some attempt is made to whitewash Pound's anti-semitism; but it is mis leading, and perhaps, from a man like Cookson who knows so much about Pound, deliberately misleading, to quote a remark from 1935: "Usurers have no race. How long the whole Jewish people is to be sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not. . . . " And yet, in the Cantos, Pound talks of ' kikes ' and ' beaneries,' while in 'A Visiting Card' he finds the Nazi revolution as mysterious and as interesting as the Italian, and talks about the racial domination' of Jews, 'the judaic-plutocratic monopoly,' 'the Jewish poison' in T. S. Eliot's Christianity, ' judaeocracy,' the kind of writing that dates from the Blast 1914 version of 'Salutation the Third.'
For Pound, the difference between Italian Fascism and German Fascism was that Mussolini's ideal was based on an economy with usury, the German ideal on 'good breeding, eugenics,' and Pound mentions this last without disapproval. Pound seems not to have known, or to have ignored, as Mr Cookson seems to do, that both Mussolini and Hitler were tnore interested in a foreign policy of tanks and soldiers than 'distributive justice.' Cookson writes: "It cannot be denied whether one agrees with Pound's view at this time or not, that his stand was in accordance with the principles of the founders of the American nation. . . . " I object to this 'it cannot be denied' approach. It cannot be denied that Pound thought so; but there is more to American history than the economic notions of John Adams. We can do without Mr Cookson's massive faith; like most disciples, he is the impresario of a ghost.
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