1938 Jan., EP elected to US National Institute of Arts and Letters. Mar., Germany annexes Austria in the ‘Anschluss’. July, Guide to Kulchur published by Faber. 29 Sept., British, French, and Italian prime ministers (Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini) meeting in Munich support Hitler’s demand that Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland be ceded to Germany. Chamberlain boasts that this ‘Munich Agreement’ has bought ‘peace in our time’. 2 Oct., death of Olivia Shakespear; EP in London for five weeks settling her affairs; Wyndham Lewis does his portrait now in the Tate. 9 Nov., Kristallnacht: Nazi pogrom in which hundreds of Jewish shops, houses, and synagogues are looted and burnt, and many Jews murdered. The Nazis decree that the Jews should collectively pay for the insured loss.
1939 28 Jan., death of W. B. Yeats at Cap Martin on the French Riviera. Mar., Hitler invades and occupies the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Apr., Italy annexes Albania. Apr., EP’s What Is Money For published by Greater Britain Publications. Apr.–June, EP goes to America in hope of persuading President Roosevelt to keep USA out of the looming European war. Awarded honorary doctorate by Hamilton College. 26 June, death of Ford Madox Ford at Deauville, France. Aug., EP contributing to Meridiano di Roma. 1 Sept., Germany invades Poland, thus setting off the Second World War. Nov., EP declares ‘my economic work is done’, prepares to write his paradiso.
1940 Jan., Cantos LII–LXXI [‘China’—‘John Adams’] published by Faber.
PART ONE : 1921–1932
1 : A YEAR IN PARIS, 1921–1924
Pound would not settle in Paris. It was too ‘northern’ for him, with its menace of cold and dark that shut one in on oneself. He would go away for months at a time, and then for good at the end of 1924, to the more benign south of France and to Italy where he could leave all his senses open to the ‘world of moving energies’ around him. The light and warmth of the Mediterranean climate made not only for better health, he found, but also for increased intelligence and finer perceptions. He wanted to have just one ‘solid year in Paris’, he told Williams, though in the event he extended his ‘year’ over nearly four.
After crossing from London in early January 1921 Ezra and Dorothy spent only ten days in Paris, and for most of that time Ezra was in bed with flu. They got away by train on the 18th and went down to Saint-Raphaël on the coast near Cannes. The town, according to Baedeker, had a thriving port and was a favoured winter resort offering some ‘well spoken of’ hotels and an ‘English Church (services in winter)’. The Pounds put up at one of the cheaper hotels near the station, l’Hôtel du Terminus et des Négociants. For the next three months Ezra ‘for the first time in years…had a real rest’ and wrote nothing, or so he told Ford. His typewriter was left behind in Paris. ‘Palm leaf hut on the beach’, he scrawled on a postcard to Alice Corbin Henderson in Santa Fe. His one duty was to write to Scofield Thayer telling him what he thought of each number of the Dial as it reached him, and offering unwanted suggestions and advice for future numbers. It is likely that his mind was on his Villon and his cantos, and that he did some composing of one or the other from time to time. But he admitted only to playing tennis, even to excess—‘five hours on tennis court’, and ‘hand in sling’ as a consequence. He made such an impression at the local tennis club that its members presented him with a silver ash tray when he was about to leave in April. Then it was ‘Paris next week & a plunge into gawd knows wot.—certainly a change of life’.
By April 10th Dorothy and Ezra were established on the Left Bank in a high two-roomed studio with ‘not much space’ but a pleasant balcony, in the Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais, 59 rue des Saints-Pères. Waiting for Ezra was a note from Thayer giving him his three months’ notice as foreign agent for the Dial. He accepted without further comment this ‘dismissal taking effect 1st July’. To Margaret Anderson of the Little Review he mentioned that the loss of the $750 a year salary would leave him with ‘no means of support visible or predictable’, but added that he remained grateful to Thayer for having ‘paid my rent for 15 months’. He would loyally work out his three months, and would continue to contribute a bi-monthly ‘Paris Letter’ until February 1923; but after that Thayer’s now settled hostility would put an end for some years to his connection with the Dial. The day after acknowledging his dismissal Pound resumed relations with the Little Review, and was soon planning ‘a special summer number’ to present ‘the active element here’. ‘There is the intelligent nucleus for a movement’, he enthused to Ford, ‘which there bloody well isn’t in England’.
The leading intelligence in the vortex Pound now tried to stir up in Paris would have been the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who struck him as living ‘in his atelier as a Dordoigne cavern sculptor may conceivably have lived in his rock-fissure’, content to do his work without apparently having any abstract ideas or theory about it. All his intelligence went into perfecting his creations. Pound, with his mind still running on the Vorticists, saw him ‘doing what Gaudier might have done in thirty years time’; only ‘Where Gaudier had developed a sort of form-fugue or form-sonata by a combination of forms’, Brancusi was committed to a ‘maddeningly more difficult exploration toward getting all the forms into one form’. His highly polished ovoids and birds were ‘master-keys to the world of form’, to the realm of pure geometric form freed from all accident; and to be caught up in contemplation of them was to approach ‘the infinite by form, by precisely the highest possible degree of consciousness of formal perfection’. It was a Paradiso in sculpture, a revelation of ‘the infinite beauty of the universe’. But the pleasure of it, Pound conceded, the world being as it was, would be ‘the rare possession of an “intellectual” (heaven help us) “aristocracy”’.
After Brancusi Pound would have mustered an advance guard of those ‘who have cast off the sanctified stupidities and timidities and are in defiance of things as they are’. Foremost among them he would have had Francis Picabia, as, in his Dadaist writings, ‘a sort of Socratic or anti-Socratic vacuum cleaner’ hoovering up ‘fustian and humbugs’; and then there would be Cocteau, Paul Morand, Guy-Charles Cros, and Blaise Cendrars, all of them as working away, each in his own individual fashion, at the necessary nettoyage, clearing away the accumulated rubbish of ‘the contemporary average mind’ and contending against its tyranny over the individual intelligence. Pound hoped to combine the resisters into some sort of movement, some sort of ‘civilization in the midst of the unconscious and semi-conscious gehenna’.
He wanted his special number of the now quarterly Little Review, ‘this new Brancusi, Cocteau, Picabia, me. etc. number’, to be ‘a clean break. = a wholly new burst of something the public don’t expect. = otherwise all my push goes to waste’. When it appeared as the ‘Autumn 1921’ number it included an essay on Brancusi by Pound, with twenty-four photo-illustrations of his sculpture; a translation, taking up nearly half the number, of Cocteau’s poem ‘Cap de Bonne Espérance’; a Dadaist essay by Picabia (who was named as Foreign Editor); and a squib from ‘Abel Sanders’, Pound’s Dada persona. Pound’s name was on the masthead along with those of Margaret Anderson and ‘jh’, and would remain there until 1925. But he did not appear again as a contributor, except fleetingly as ‘Abel Sanders’ the Dadaist, and his unpaid role was limited to advising, recommending, urging and criticizing. His influence and his agency were responsible in part at least for the more Parisian character the journal took on for a time, with Dada and Surrealism predominating, but it never became the organ of the ‘movement’ he had projected. Indeed his Paris vortex scarcely formed at all in the fast currents of that city’s modernisms.
Though that effort had only a passing effect it provides a clear image of how Pound was seeing his world in the early 1920s. The ‘average mind’, Pound wrote in one of his ‘Paris Letters’, ‘is our king, our tyrant, replacing [Creon] and Agamemnon in our tragedy’:
It is this human stupidity that elects the Wilsons and Ll. Georges and puts power into the hands of the gun-makers, demanding that they blot out the sunlight, tha
t they crush out the individual and the perception of beauty. This flabby blunt-wittedness is the tyrant.
And the individual who resisted that tyranny was in the predicament of Sophocles’ Antigone, standing alone ultimately against the amorphous mass of a ‘government’ in which power is concentrated ‘into the hands of the ignorant and the inept, the non-perceivers’. There, for Pound, was the basic struggle of the modern mind, the agon of its tragedy: ‘the struggle of an hereditarily hampered and conditioned individual against the state’.
The individual, Pound recognized on this occasion, had little or no power to fight back against the imbecile state, whose ‘power to do him evil…extends to his complete extermination’. (He would come to see his friend Upward’s suicide in 1926 as one instance of that; and he himself would be close to being sentenced to death by the state in 1945.) ‘Only by supreme genius’, he went on, ‘or more usually by luck, by the million to one chance can he do anything against lo stato.’ Even to escape its pressures and bondage required an ‘incalculable intensity of life, an intensity amounting to genius’; and, with that, a superlative awareness of ‘the passion for τὸ καλόν, fighting against tyranny, against lo stato, if that stato is corrupt’.
That more or less was how Pound dramatized his situation as a poet in Paris. He would be the individual artist of genius with a passion for τὸ καλόν, the eternal order, and he would contend against the tyranny of the commonly accepted order of things. ‘The function of poetry’, he declared in an irritated response to a questionnaire in Harold Monro’s Chapbook,
is to assert the existence of a world that Fleet Street cannot drop dung upon, over which the machinery of publishing has no control; into which usurers and manufacturers of war machinery cannot penetrate; into which the infamy of politicians, elected or hereditary, cannot enter and upon which expediency has no effect; against which the lies of exploiting religions, the slobberings of bishops, have no more influence than the bait of journalism or oppressions of the ‘purveyors of employment’.
Or shall we say: To assert an eternal order…
That tells us quite a lot about his hell, and nothing much about his paradiso. Yet it was a statement of his wholly serious intent to create in his epic, in its very different terms, his own version of Brancusi’s ‘universe…[his] Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms’.
In Brancusi’s ‘cavern of a studio’ Pound could find ‘a temple of peace, of stillness, a refuge from the noise of motor traffic and the current advertisements’. Otherwise he was compelled, as he put it for rhetorical effect, ‘to move about in a world full of junk-shops’, in the Paris of ‘well-known and advertised clap-trap’ with its ‘galleries full of pictures made obviously for the market’. In fact of course Paris was also in a ferment of new and uncommercial creation in all the arts; and Pound, as ever, was eagerly keeping up with it all. In April he saw Braque, though only for two minutes, and liked what he saw; he ‘met Picasso for first time on New Years eve’; by then he had moved to within a few doors from Fernand Léger and had come to know him and his work intimately. (Léger told him what the French soldiers thought of the recent war and he put that into canto 16.) Afternoons of high-voltage conversation ‘at Picabia’s with Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp’ kept him au fait with whatever the avant-gardes were up to in music, ballet, theatre, and film, as well as in art and literature. Cocteau, whose friendship and conversation Pound valued above most, seems to have had a hand or a light finger in everything that was going on. He collaborated with Picasso, Satie, and Diaghilev in Parade, and with Stravinsky in Oedipus Rex; he helped found the Jockey Club Bar—Pound, in his best Left Bank beret and attitude, appears in a photograph of the ‘founders’; he promoted the new music of Satie and ‘Les Six’, who included Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, and Darius Milhaud. Pound measured his own music against theirs and was not daunted. ‘Fortunately Satie’s Socrate is damn dull’, he confided to Agnes Bedford; and anyway he had a more ‘definite system’ than Les Six.
Probably his most privileged vantage-point for observing the artistic and intellectual life of Paris was at his good friend Natalie Barney’s salon with its Grecian Temple de l’Amitié in the small enclosed garden. 1 There American wealth united with Parisian sophistication, stylish unconventionality was de rigueur, and the only taboo was against ‘the average mind’ and its conventions The great scholar Salamon Reinach could be seen there, and the great poet Paul Valéry and the great novelist Proust, along with Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, one of Natalie’s lovers, and Le Prince Edward de Polignac with his wife Winaretta, an heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. And there, in the autumn of 1922, Pound would meet the very gifted young violinist Olga Rudge.
Dr William Carlos Williams, when Pound took him to tea with Miss Barney, was unsettled by her lesbian entourage and had to keep up his morale as a ‘primitive’ American male by going out ‘to take a good piss’, standing up. Pound himself had no problem at all with the varieties of sexual behaviour, and felt no need to assert his manhood in her salon. He saw in Natalie Barney simply a woman with the courage, independence, and intelligence to be what she was to the utmost; one who, in her own words which he liked to repeat, ‘got out of life, oh…perhaps more than was in it’. Their friendship extended to playing energetic tennis together.
Pound himself was much observed as he went about Paris, sometimes with insight and sympathy, often with little of either. Everyone saw ‘the velvet jacket and the open-road shirt’, the floppy artist’s beret and the ebony cane, and many thought of Byron or of Whistler and the late Aesthetes, and thought no further. Margaret Anderson, meeting for the first time the Little Review’s former foreign editor and longtime collaborator, sat in his studio for an hour in conversation and apparently took in not a word that he said. All she had to report from that meeting was ‘his high Rooseveltian voice, his nervousness, his self-consciousness’, and that ‘Ezra’s agitation was not of the type to which we were accustomed in America—excitement, pressure, life too high-geared’. For some he was always talking and talked too much. When he talked to Gertrude Stein about Japanese prints she was not amused and talked him down and later uttered her malicious mot that ‘he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not’. Then he fell out of her ‘favourite little armchair’ and broke it and she was furious and refused ever to see him again. But for Sylvia Beach ‘he mended a cigarette box and a chair’, skilfully, and did not talk about ‘his, or, for that matter, anyone’s, books’. She ‘found the acknowledged leader of the modern movement not bumptious’, and recorded that she ‘saw Mr Pound seldom’, because ‘he was busy with his work and his young poets’. One of the young poets was E. E. Cummings, who would recall half a lifetime later how ‘wonderfully entertaining’ Pound had been, and how ‘magically gentle’, during the whole of a walk one night from the rue Castiglione to the Place Saint-Michel. To Sisley Huddleston also Pound was ‘a good talker’. A Times correspondent and a connoisseur of the good life in Paris in the 1920s, Huddleston recorded ‘a vivacious evening’ in the restaurant next to the Bal Bullier at the top of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, one of many when ‘Ford, Pierre Loving, Pound and myself gaily played with ideas for hours’, with Pound ‘the merriest spirit of the party’.
Pound was observed in yet another light by Nancy Cox McCormack, an American sculptor who was in Paris then. When she first met Pound he was ‘accompanied by a slimly tailored, commanding young woman…[whose] entire personality bespoke the quality of an English lady’. Pound presented her as his wife, and she noticed that he ‘seemed to address [Dorothy] in all his conversation “as if he were in the habit of crystallizing his thinking through the intellectual channels of their mutual understanding”’. That striking recollection was recorded after she had become a close friend of them both, and may owe something to friendship. Still, it must qualify the general impression one is given that Dorothy and Ezra were now leading fairly sepa
rate lives. Pound is usually seen among other men, or with other women, and Dorothy is rarely in the picture. It is said that she did not enjoy being in Paris; and she spent months back in England with her own family and friends, as well as the months away in Italy with Ezra. There are accounts of Pound dancing, wildly, to rhythms only he could hear, but there is no mention of his dancing with Dorothy.
But then how could they dance together, given the way he danced? Caresse Crosby gave a vivid account of a night out with Pound in Paris in 1930 when ‘a brilliant band of Martinique players were beating out hot music’:
As the music grew in fury Ezra avidly watched the dancers. ‘These people don’t know a thing about rhythm’ he cried scornfully, and he shut his eyes, thrust forward his red-bearded chin and began a sort of tattoo with his feet—suddenly unable to sit still a minute longer he leapt to the floor and seized the tiny Martinique vendor of cigarettes in his arms, packets flying, then head back, eyes closed, chin out, he began a sort of voodoo prance, his tiny partner held glued against his piston-pumping knees.
The music grew hotter, Ezra grew hotter. One by one the uninspired dancers melted from the floor and formed a ring to watch that Anglo-savage ecstasy—on and on went the two, until with a final screech of [cymbals] the music crashed to an end. Ezra opened his eyes, flicked the cigarette girl aside like an extinguished match and collapsed into the chair beside me. The room exhaled a long orgasmic sigh—I too.
The sight of Pound dancing, according to Sisley Huddleston, was ‘one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life’.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 2
