Books: The Sightless Seer

EZRA POUND (493 pp.)—Charles Norman—Mocm/7/on ($6.95).

“Personae,” the word with which Ezra Pound titled his first book of poems, originally meant masks. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, who is 75 this week, has worn many. There is Pound the poet, critic, scholar and esthetic perfectionist. There is Pound the economic crank, anti-Semite and Fascist apologist. There is Pound the expatriate bohemian, the discoverer, friend, advocate and ally of Eliot and Joyce, who got them into print. He begged, wheedled, scolded, scandalized others and scanted himself to secure bread-and-but ter money for them and for many another subsequently famed writer. In that role he was, as Horace Gregory once called him, “a minister of the arts without portfolio.”

To reveal the man behind the masks and to place the poet among his peers is an urgent task, but Critic Charles Norman (The Magic-Maker: e. e. cummings) has not done it. His book is a triumph of industry and a signal display of disorganization, a patchwork—letters, reminiscences, vignettes—of incoherent research. Apart from a few candid shots of its subject, the book is significant only because it treats Pound seriously and heralds the work that will treat him definitively. It is a reminder that he cannot be written off and must, more and more, be written about. Pound’s reputation, largely self-besmirched, has fallen so low that it has indeed no place to go but up.

After Yeats. “Old Ez,” as he calls himself, has spent so many years in voluntary exile—London, Paris, Rapallo—that it is easy to forget him as an American. His ancestors came over on the same boat as Roger Williams. Two hundred of them fought in the Revolutionary War, and the towns of Weston in Massachusetts and Connecticut are named after them. Ezra was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, grew up in Wyncote, Pa., attended Hamilton College, and got an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He had sound taste even then. At 18, he told his friend William Carlos Williams that Yeats was the greatest living poet, and began wearing pince-nez because Yeats did.

Young Pound developed a lasting eruditer-than-thou attitude, but he also had a large, unmanageable streak of naivete that would derange his life. As a French and Spanish instructor at Wabash College in 1907, he went out late one night and ran into a stranded burlesque girl, hungry and shivering in the winter streets. He fed her, brought her back to his rented room. and let her sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor. When his landladies, two spinster sisters, found out about it, Pound was fired. This episode triggered his departure for London via Venice.

In London. Pound headed for the salons in his “stage poet” mask — green billiard-cloth trousers, pink coat, blue shirt, an immense sombrero, a Mephistophelean red-blond beard and a single turquoise earring. An even better attention-getting device was Personae, published in 1909, in which he first struck the tone of most modern Anglo-American poetry — spare, objective, unornamented, elliptic. Dante, the medieval troubadours, and his pet hate-love Whitman had been his tutors, but he had done the homework of craftsmanship. (In one undergraduate year he had written a sonnet a day.) Though stripped for action, many of Pound’s lines still retained the lilt of romance. In An Immorality, he wrote :

Sing we for love and idleness,

Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land,

There is naught else in living,

And I would rather have my sweet,

Though rose-leaves die of grieving,

Than do high deeds in Hungary

To pass all men’s believing.

Il Miglior Fabbro. Doing well in verse for himself never deflected Pound from doing good for the verse of others. It seems incredible now, but Pound had to nag Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine, for half a year before she would print T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prujrock. For Eliot, Pound also undertook the most consequential task of editing in 20th century poetry: he cut The Waste Land in half. Eliot, who dedicated it to Pound with the words il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman), has written : “I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably: yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue penciling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound’s critical genius.”

In the mid-20s when Eliot was on the verge of a second breakdown and still clerking in a bank, Pound was so infuriated by his friend’s lot that he tried to rally 30 people who would donate $50 each to help support a proven artist for one year, beginning with Eliot. Pound put up the first $50 himself. To appreciate the selflessness of the gesture at the time, one had only to enter Pound’s stark Parisian flat. There, Dorothy Shakespear Pound, an English girl Ezra had married in 1914, served tea on a wooden packing case, and guests sat on chairs Pound had built. A solitary spoon passed from hand to hand.

The Silly Samaritan. The good Samaritan became the silly Samaritan in the Depression ‘305. An increasingly unstable Ezra ranted about usury and Jewish bankers and murkily expounded Social Credit, whose chief feature was printing currency backed by goods rather than gold. His infatuation with Mussolini is hard to ex plain, except that Pound shared something of the Duce’s peacock strut. They met only once, in 1933, and Mussolini told Pound that he found his Cantos amusing. Old Ez launched into some crackpot scheme for growing Brazil nuts, the Duce frowned, and a flunky brought the great confrontation to an abrupt end. The rest became the tawdry story of Pound’s anti-U.S. wartime radio diatribes from Rome, the abortive U.S. treason charges against him, and his confinement as a mental case, of sorts, in Washington’s St. Elizabeths Hospital, from which he was freed in 1958 to return to Italy.

The question of whether Ezra Pound will occupy the footnotes or the chapter headings of future literary history depends, as Biographer Norman concludes, on the poetic merits of the Cantos, a monumental 40-year-long work in progress that has now consumed more writing time than Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past combined. The Cantos are concerned with all history, 20th century history, Pound’s personal story, and an eclectic sampling of all he has read. In effect, it is the poetical twin to Finnegans Wake. In sections laden with socio-economic bafflegab, multilingual word play and telegraphic truncations of meaning, the Cantos might as well be Finnegans Wake as far as most readers are concerned. But many of these poems are as water-clear as gin, and just as powerful. The Pisan Cantos, in which humility is cloaked in a language of Biblical authority, are already recognized as modern masterworks:

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made

grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be

thy place

Pull down thy vanity . . .

No Answer. After his fitful, feverish life, Pound is not resting. He lives in his son-in-law’s medieval castle in the Italian Alps, completed Canto No.111 last Christmas, and hopes to push the count to 120. Apart from romping with his grandchildren, he fires Menckenesque letters around the world, and his talk, as he once said, is still “like an explosion in an art museum.” He is scarcely a hero, but as minister without portfolio of the arts he has served more gallantly than most, and he has never had any truck with “the almost-good and the not-quite dead.”

Once an Italian journalist asked him about his tragically flawed character: “How is it that you, who merited fame as a seer, did not see?” Ezra Pound could not answer.