John Tytell: Ezra Pound: The solitary Volcano. Bloomsbury 368 pp.
Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky ed.Barry Ahearn Faber 255pp
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Pound talks like no one else. His is almost a wholly original accent, the base of American mingled with a dozen assorted "English society" and Cockney accents inserted in mockery, French, Spanish and Greek exclamations, strange cries and catcalls, the whole very oddly inflected, with dramatic pauses and diminuendos. It takes time to get used to it, es-pecially as the lively and audacious mind of Pound packs his speech - as well as his writing - with undertones and allusions.
This was Pound described in London where he lived for twelve years after arriving aged 22 from America in 1908; the London years, he told Charles Olson forty years later, were "the high period" of his life.
Tytell shapes his biography into six sections corresponding to the six places Pound stayed in during his life: America ("An American Youth") 1885-1908; London ("Art for Art's Sake") 1908-1920; Paris ("The Heresy of Art") 1920-1924; Rapallo ("The Politics of Art") 1924-1945; Washington, St Elizabeth's Hospital ("The Bedlam of Art") 1945-1958; Rapallo ("The Silent Years") 1958-1972. Taking the average number of biography pages Tytell gives per year of Pound's life in each of these six location-sections, Tytell measures Pound's life as America 1; London 11; Paris 8; Rapallo just over 4; St Elizabeth's about three-and-a-half; and Rapallo again - three-quarters. This not only agrees with Pound's own reckoning as told Olson, but corresponds to Tytell's shaping of Pound's life as that of a tragic hero with apex of influence, and fall. He describes Pound, in the introduction that prefigures the course of the book and his conclusions, as "..an overly sensitive man who in the midst of a maelstrom had shouted terrible words, absurdly defending some ideal of free speech from a stage while the theater was burning." Pound's wartime Italian Fascist broadcasts were "an example of what might be called a negative susceptibility, a self-destructive capacity shared by a number of artists."
One can disagree with Tytell's interpretation here, but he gives you plenty of facts clearly enough for you to do so without feeling pressured to take the author's view. Certain specifics are noted in the development of Pound's poetic style: the important episode in 1911 when Pound brought Ford Madox Ford an advance copy of his Canzoni and Ford literally rolled on the floor laughing at the style with its attempt to learn, as Pound later recalled, "the stilted language that then passed for 'Good English' in the athritic milieu that held control of the respected British critical circles." A year later as European editor of Poetry he was writing to its main editor Harriet Monro in Chicago:-
Objectivity and again objectivity, and no expression, no hind-side-beforenesss, no Tennysonianness of speech - nothing, nothing, that you couldn't in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Every literaryism, every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.
By 1913 there was Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" in the March issue of Poetry. Tytell writes of Imagism: “Pound realised from the start that Imagism was a finite means to improve the line as a unit in poetry, to curtail the element of discourse in the poem as James had revised the old-fashioned omniscient narrat-ive control in the novel.”
The collection Cathay in 1915 Tytell sees as representing another technical advance towards the Cantos :"Cathay was an important step for Pound because it allowed him to integrate Imagist technique into a narrative structure." Of course the quoted paragraph at the opening of this review has relevance to the form of the Cantos - as have Pound's letters. The description of the London and Paris years are packed, though not clogged, with the artists and writers whom Pound knew; the book threads the different meeting places, magazines, rivalries. Pound's widespread influence on other writers is traced.It was Pound of course who persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish Eliot's Prufrock, and who edited The Waste Land down to the size in which it was published and became known; Eliot, on receiving the $2000 Dial award for the poem, "felt Pound should have received the prize as a recognition of his share in the making of the poem." The acknowledgments from other poets are quoted from their own words,like Joyce's recollection of Pound's help:
Ten years of my life have been consumed in correspondence and litigation about my book Dubliners. It was rejected by 40 publishers; three times set up, and once burnt. It cost me about 3,000 francs in postage, fees, train and boat fare, for I was in correspondence with 110 newspapers, 7 solicitors, 3 societies, 40 publishers and several men of letters about it. All refused to aid me, except Mr. Ezra Pound. In the end it was published, in 1914, word for word as I wrote it in 1905.
Marianne Moore and Wyndham Lewis also came into print via Pound. Friendship with Yeats, begun in London and continued in Paris and Rapallo, where Yeats visited Pound at home, saw the balance of influence tilt from the older to the younger man - though not enough, as far as Pound was concerned. But Yeats's early appreciation of Pound's criticism in their twenty-year relationship is quoted in a letter to Lady Gregory:-
He is full of the middle ages and helps me to get back to the definite and concrete away from modern abstractions. To talk over a poem with him is like getting you to put a sentence into dialect. All becomes clear and natural.
In Paris Hemingway befriended Pound, and later wrote that the poet taught him more about how to write than anyone else in his life. It was Pound "who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations." Sculptors taken up by Pound included Brancusi and Gaudier-Breszka, whose bust of Pound the poet took to Rapallo, and whose death in the Great War, Tytell implies, contributed to that change of direction when, as Pound recalled, "In 1918 I began an investigation of causes of war, to oppose same." This Tytell calls " the beginning of his disastrous turn from art to the sociology of power and propaganda."
The fourth section of the biography is, like the others, divided into smaller subsections separately titled. The opening subsection title, The Exile, both describes Pound's separation from America and the London-Paris cultural scenes, and refers to the magazine The Exile that Pound launched from Rapallo in 1927. The section describes Rapallo, the location of Pound's house, how he organised his day; Pound's declining reputation, his work on the Cantos; the visits of Yeats and others, the arrival of Basil Bunting to set up house nearby; the letters, three a day or more as the years passed, literally thousands being written from Rapallo during the Thirties: the increasing obsession with C.H. Douglas's theory of social credit, the increasing anti-semitism, the increasing commitment to fascism.
Different aspects of the development of this are previously recorded: Pound's father and grandfather's involvement in the physical making of money; anti- semitism in Pound's childhood home town, Wyncote; the anti-semitism of writers like Eliot, Lewis, Charles Maurras, or of important patrons like the lawyer John Quinn; the racial theories of Leo Frobenius; Pound's friendship in 1923 with
Lincoln Steffens, who transmitted to Pound his own enthusiasm for Mussolini. The extent of Pound's racialism and commitment to Fascism is made quite clear.His meeting with Mussolini (eulogised in the Cantos) his correspondence both with Mussolini and with economic advisers to Hitler; his work for fascist newspapers in Italy, England, Japan - one article having the title "The Jews, Disease Incarnate"; his use of the fascist calendar in his letters, signing one such letter (to James Laughlin) "Heil Hitler"; his polemical talks on Rome Radio during the war; his refusal to change his views when taken back to America, though disguising these from those who would have had him executed for treason; his relationships from hospital with people in the "Aryan League of America", and with the American neo-Nazi John Kasper, who affectionately addressed Pound in his letters as "Dear Boss."; his giving the Fascist salute - as a full-page photograph shows - as the ship taking him back to Italy in 1958 approached harbour; his appearance at the head of a neo-Nazi demonstration in Milan as late as 1962, the year of his 77th birthday.
William Carlos Williams - who first met Pound at college in 1903 - was enough influenced by Pound's advocacy of C.H. Douglas's "Social Credit" scheme to speak approvingly of it in 1936 ( see "Revolutions Revalued" in A Recognisable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists New Directions 1978); but fascist racialism was not for W.C.W. Tytell, stating that Williams's thirty- five years in medicine had made him a sharp judge of character, quotes a letter written by Williams to James Laughlin in 1939:
The man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of fascism out of his brain during the next few years, which I seriously doubt that he can do. The logicality of fascist rationalisation is soon going to kill him. You can't argue away wanton slaughter of innocent women and children by the neoscholasticism of a controlled economy program. To hell with a Hitler who lauds the work of his airmen in Spain and so to hell with Pound too if he can't stand up and face his questioners on that point.
The shift in Pound's focus from his arrival at Rapallo is at the centre of the new anthology in Faber's series of Pound's letters, those between himself and Louis Zukofsky. The young Marxist Jewish American (aged 23, Pound 19 years older) sent his "Poem Beginning 'The'" to Pound in Rapallo in 1927. "First cheering mss. I have recvd. in weeks, or months, or something or other," Pound wrote back. The poem duly appeared in the third issue of The Exile, an issue which also included Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium".
Pound decided, all the way from Italy, that it was time to organise a new young set of writers in New York:
I suggest that you form some sort of gang to INSIST on interesting stuff (books) <1.> being pubd promptly, and distributed properly.
2. simultaneous attacks in as many papers as poss. on abuses definitely damaging la vie intellectuelle.
Pound even offered to help pay for the meals of those who couldn't afford to meet in a cheap restaurant, which is where he suggested the new group should best meet up:
restaurant is best, better than studio where complication of host-guest relation arises. Nacherly O.K. to go down to Bill's once or twice if he'll have you.
as also the gordarm marital ammosphere of N.Y. Poesy Socierty !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dont be a society. Dont have officers and by laws. (not that I think this exhortation necessary ...)
You've got to have a busy man; lacking one busy by nature, some more contemplative spirit has to take on some of the functions.
"Bill" was Williams. Though Pound was a bit out of touch with what was going on in literary New York, his having Zukofsky and Williams meet up had important results: Zukofsky began helping Williams edit his poems, notably those that appeared in the collection "The Wedge" of 1944 (the collection whose introduction speaks of a poem as "a machine made of words").
Five years after Pound had been trying to organise a literary movement round Zukofsky in New York, he had become finally disinterested in such schemes. When Zukofsky wrote in 1933 proposing the formation of a group Writers Extant (that became in fact the Objectivist Press) Pound dismissed this curtlly: “Le personnel manque// fer yr/ proposed organisation. You ought to read C.H. Douglas.”
But before becoming thus disinterested he had, in 1931, obtained for Zukofsky the guest editorship of the Spring 1931 issue of Harriet Monroe's Poetry: Pound's excited response on hearing the news, and the torrent of advice he poured on Zukofsky - - a bit too much by the occasional crackle in Zukofsky's response - forms a letter sequence that is a highlight of the book (pp.45-59). As with all the best of Pound's letters, something of that flamboyant verbal character described in 1916 leaps off the page. Most of his correspondents felt driven feebly to emulate it in reply at some point; again, some Black Mountain writers, in their use of capital letters for instance, have turned what was energy into a cliché. But the original remains original.
Dear Zuk:
Wonners will nevuHH cease. I have just recd. nooz from Harriet [Monroe] that she is puttin you at the wheel for the Spring cruise.
I dunno whether in L'annonce fait a L.Z. she mentioned the foreflying occasions????
At any rate since it was a letter from donal mckenzie that smoked me up into writing Harriet the letter that awoke in her noble booZUMM the fire of enthusiasm that led her to let you aboard
I
wd. appreciate it if you wd. invite mckenzie to do one of the prose articles for the number and state his convictions as forcibly as possibl....
after which I see no reason
why you shdnt. add a editorial note saying why you disagree.
Poetry has never had enUFF disagreement INSIDE into own wall.
In the middle of a lively series of collocated points that includes what Pound sees as the difference between Zukofsky's position in 1931 and that of the Imagist group of 1913, he writes:
I do not think contributions from ANYone over 40 shd. be included; and preferably it shd. be confined to those under 30.
Three letters poured forth from Rapallo in two days. Zukofsky, after a comparatively flat reply to the sustained barrage of advice, responded item by numbered item to 39 of the points Pound raised. Regarding the prospective age of the contributors, and referring ("H & H") to Pound's recent appearance in the magazine Hound and Horn, he replied:
28. Think I'll have as good a "movement" as that of the premiers imagistes - point is Wm. C. W. of today is not what he was in 1913, neither are you if you're willing to contribute - if I'm going to show what's going on today, you'll have to. The older generation is not the older generation if it's alive & up - Can't see why you shd. appear in the H & H alive with 3 Cantos & not show that you are the (younger) generation in "Poetry." What's age to do with verbal manifestation, what's history to do with it, - good gord lets disassociate ijees - I want to show the poetry that's being written today - whether the poets are of masturbating age or the father of families don't matter.
In the letters the discussion on technical literary matters focusses on Zukofsky's defence of his major poem "A", and his evident irritation at Pound's failure to appreciate it (pp.112-113). But the reader looking for detailed explication will not find it: Zukofsky wanted Pound to take the lead in detailed criticism, and Pound refused: “Certain things can be remedied more or less by procedures known to yr/venbl/frien' but it wd. even better to remedy them by procedures evolved by L.Z. ipsissimo.”
What is interesting is that as early as 1930 Zukofsky perceived the basic shape of a poem which he did not finish until 44 years later:
Yes, as far as I'm concerned right now "A" will be <a> life-work. I don't see how else, if it's going to be 2 movements a summer and 17 more to go to complete the "epic" 24!
That it was a life-work, Pound disagreed. He thought the poem at that stage ("A" 1-7) needed a "top dressing" of influences removed. He also repeatedly criticised what he saw as a lack of lucidity in Zukofsky's style, and a too literal conception of the poem as a standard musical form in words. Yet by 1936 he wrote that he had enjoyed reading "A"-8, and when Zukofsky visited Pound in St Elizabeth's hospital in 1954 and presented him with a copy of the sequence Anew, Pound wrote to him that he thought Zukofsky had shaken off the influences of Eliot and Pound himself at last, and though "Zuk. on his own. not ALWAYS comprehensible" nonetheless "damn all I think yu have got yr/ own idiom/".
Certainly he had, and one that was profoundly to influence Creeley among others. But the men who met in 1954 were not the regular correspondents of twenty years earlier. The exchange of letters had been forcibly stopped during the war years never really to pick up again; and prior to its cessation in 1940 the dialogue had become dominated by Pound's attitudes to race and economics.
As the Thirties progressed Zukofsky, despite occasional racial insults from Pound, tried to argue rationally on economics. In 1936 he wrote:-
"Jewish internationalism" - there ain't no such thing & exists only in yr. mind tainted by Nazi bigotry - or some other infernal silliness beyond yr. sensible control. Might as well speak of Italian internationalism or French or whatever. Bankers internationalism is another matter - but that ain't confined to nations or dispersed nations: that exists, & that's what you want to wipe out.
Yet two years later, in a letter dated according to the Fascist calendar, Pound was asking Zukofsky if he would accept, along with Bunting, the dedication of Guide to Kulchur. Zukofsky told him if he wanted to dedicate his book to "a communist (me) and a British-conservative-antifascist-imperialist (Basil)" he could go ahead. A year later again and Zukofsky was reduced to asking Pound to drop politics altogether from his letters. But his basic loyalty to Pound he made clear:
...there is no use, the way I'm made up, reasoning with your convictions as they are now. If I'm good enough, I'll reach more fruitful ground. In your case, the best I can do is shut up. That does not mean I don't respect yr. integrity. I've gone on respecting it ever since you got yourself drowned in the batter of credit economics - at a loss <to myself> of every practical & helpful contact in U.S. & Europe. I don't regret it. From point of practical politics, I'm not ready and never will be to attack you before the public. Can't help it, if I start with a feeling like integrity. There are some things that are personal, & one can't build right, on them, as if they were not.
...I cannot see - tho I have made every attempt to understand social credit - that any good can come out of thinking that involves itself in a mess of "incarnation" etc such as Douglas has recently involved himself...
I enclose the first two stanzas of a canzone - knowing what you know about poetry is more than most of us know I'm not ashamed to send you uncompleted work, if you care to be bothered. The local small fry would no doubt accuse me of being a fascist for having lived with the Guido as basis day in & day out for the last two years. You will probably see how far gone I am on the Marx side of it, & attribute all my faults to the influence of his unenlightened use of language. But no matter if there's poetry in <it>, you'll still see it, I believe. Some insight a man never loses. - But let's not correspond about politics etc
As ever,
Z.
As Tytell describes, Zukofsky was only one of many writers who corresponded with or visited Pound after the war: these included Berryman, Lowell, Robert Duncan, Thornton Wilder, Conrad Aiken, Spender, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, MacDiarmid, Eliot, Olson, Ginsberg. It was to Ginsberg in Rapallo in 1967 that Pound, after stating his sense of failure regarding the Cantos, added "But the worst mistake I made was that stupid prejudice of anti-semitism. All along that spoiled everything."
Tytell's biography is a creditable achievement: it is occasionally a bit "high" in style (as in the description of Rapallo at the start of Part Two) but it reads easily as a whole, has been carefully and clearly constructed with much new research, and is a useful condensation of, and guide through, a very great many facts. The Pound-Zukofsky anthology on the other hand, is very expensive for its 96 letters with notes, introduction and biographical appendix; but any large library seriously concerned with Pound should have a copy.
There are people who find themselves unable to read Pound's work sympathetically knowing what he believed, wrote, and campaigned for - sometimes in the work itself. The reaction of such people is honest, understandeable and not at all to be discredited. But there are others antagonistic to the work whose reactions are not so honest. The "gargoyles" as Pound called them in London, those lovers of excessive adjectives and poetry of "boiled oatmeal consistency", have their successors still flourishing today, and the publication of these two books have given the opportunity once more for these sniffily to dismiss the poetry with the life. But the crux of the matter here is to be found, not in the life, but in the appraisal of the work of Pound and others that Zukofsky made in his 1930 essay "American Poetry 1920-1930" (reproduced in Prepositions, Rapp & Carroll 1967). Having quoted Pound's "A new cadence means a new idea," Zukofsky writes "The devices of emphasising cadence by arrangement of line and typography have been those which clarify and render the meaning of the spoken word specific." Sixty years on this advance in prosody still cannot be countenanced by some; while for others it is one reason they are grateful for Pound's literary achievement.