Ezra Pound: Poet
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The Pounds had moved out of the latter hotel about the end of November, and were now renting for £75 a year what seemed to Vivien Eliot ‘a most exquisite Studio’ at 70bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, up from the Luxembourg Gardens and near the intersection of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Boulevard du Montparnasse. The studio was one of several reached down a passage beside no. 70, on the ground floor, with a ‘serre’ or glass-walled conservatory fronting a courtyard in which there were a few trees and ‘a mouldering plaster statue’ of Diana with a hunting hound. Inside, behind the conservatory, there was the Studio, the one habitable room; behind that was a ‘dressing room’, and a small ‘ex-kitchen’ which they used as a box-room; and, up some stairs, there was a small ‘lounge room’ or bedroom. Pound cooked over an alcohol lamp in the main room, and cooked even better than he had in London, according to Lewis.
December and January were busy months for Pound. He told Thayer that he was ‘in the midst of plumbers, gasistes, fumistes, stovistes, building furniture, and trying to clean the walls of this atelier, untouched since anterior decade’. The ‘cheminée’ was being ‘rebuilt at landlord’s expense’ and a new ‘poêle Godin’ put in to heat the main room. He nailed undressed boards together to construct tables and chairs, and made them firm by the simple efficiency of a design that had been known in ancient China, each immoveable joint three sides of a cube formed by three boards fixed at right angles to each other. A low tea-table was painted scarlet; the chairs had slung canvas seats, and one was large enough for bulky Ford to feel stranded in. Dorothy was out of action with a whitlow on her left forefinger and was in hospital for a few days in December.
Eliot probably presented his ‘new poem in semi-existence’ to Pound on 3 January. That evening Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Horace Liveright, the young New York publisher, met over dinner. It was Liveright who had commissioned Pound’s translation of Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour, and who had just published his Poems 1918–1921. He was in Paris for six days and he and Pound were seeing each other every day, Liveright looking to Pound to introduce him to new talent, and Pound seeking a publisher for his modern movement. Both were eager to work together. Liveright offered to publish in the USA Ulysses and Eliot’s as yet inchoate poem, as well as Pound’s next collection of poems; and he made a contract with Pound which would ‘take care of his rent…for the next two years’. In return for a non-repayable advance of $500 a year Pound was to translate French books of Liveright’s choosing, but would not be expected ‘to undertake more than one thousand dollars worth of translating in any one year’, and would not be asked to put his name to his translation of any work he considered ‘a disgrace to humanity or too imbecile to be borne’. 6
By 16 January, when Eliot returned to London, Pound had twice gone over his drafts and had, as Eliot later put it, turned them ‘from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem’. The drafts had been accumulating over some years and Eliot, in his exhausted state, was unable to distinguish the good from the bad, while Pound, virtually at a glance, saw what needed to be cut away in order to bring forth The Waste Land, the archetypal modern poem. He was able to do that by virtue of his own ‘technical mastery and critical ability’, as Eliot would say, and because he was ‘a marvellous critic [who] didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself [but] tried to see what you were trying to do’. Exactly how he delivered Eliot’s poem to him is on display in Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of ‘the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound’. Where the writing lacked fresh invention in perception and rhythm he struck it out ruthlessly, as with the whole of the seventy lines of satirical couplets in the manner of Rochester or Pope at the start of the draft of ‘The Fire Sermon’; and where it became ‘O.K.’, as at ‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation’, he wrote ‘STET’ or ‘Echt’, the real thing, and moved on. He cut the episode of the typiste and ‘young man carbuncular’ from seventy lines of over-stuffed rhyming quatrains to just forty lines, removing the stuffing with no regard for the conventions of the form, and thus transformed it into a passage of concentrated realism. When he read the final part, which had come seemingly spontaneously to Eliot in Lausanne, he wrote on the manuscript ‘OK from here on I think’; and when he saw the typed version a little later he left it alone apart from noting half a dozen small corrections. Altogether Pound’s was a unique feat of releasing what had new life in it from the mess of materials in which it might otherwise have been stillborn.
What Pound did for The Waste Land was all the more remarkable given that he had very mixed feelings about it. He celebrated it, in a private letter to Felix Schelling, as ‘the justification of the “movement”, of our modern experiment, since 1900’; and he wrote to Thayer that ‘it is as good in its way as Ulysses in its way—and there is so DAMN little genius, so DAMN little work that one can take hold of and say “this at any rate stands, and makes a definite part of literature”’. He also felt challenged by it, and felt that it exposed his own shortcomings, especially by its realism and its registration of the modern world. In a self-deprecating verse ‘squib’ sent to Eliot in January he put down his own poems for omitting ‘realities’; and that judgement appears to lie behind this remark to John Quinn,
About enough, Eliot’s poem, to make the rest of us shut up shop. I haven’t done so; have in fact knocked out another Canto (not in the least à la Eliot, or connected with ‘modern life’).
His new canto would have been the ‘Eighth Canto’ which became canto II, and which might well stand as the antithesis to The Waste Land.
Beyond the sense of being challenged there appears to have been a profound dismay at what Eliot had done, a sense that his ‘justification’ of the modern movement had actually set it back. The only public evidence of this is in the first line of his next set of cantos, ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’, a critical allusion to one of the closing lines of The Waste Land, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. It is in the drafts of these ‘Malatesta cantos’ that we will discover, when we come to them, exactly what Eliot’s poem meant to Pound at the time, and how his own genius responded to it. It will become apparent that he saw it as an all too powerful statement of Eliot’s aboulie in the face of the prevailing realities, and as tending to paralyse the constructive, civilizing will which he himself wanted to mobilize, and which he thought it the main function of poetry to mobilize. Pound never said anything directly critical of The Waste Land, but then his nearly absolute public silence about the poem, once it is registered, must declare some profound reservation or inhibition. It was his way to proclaim just as widely and forcefully as he could the virtues of the literature and the art he believed necessary to the advance of civilization. He was about to boost Ulysses in both French and English. But on The Waste Land, the justification of our modern effort, I can find almost nothing in his published prose; apart, that is, from one sentence in a New Age article in 1922 and a letter in a little magazine in 1924, and in both cases his endorsement of the poem amounts to shelving it. 7 He did virtually place it on the library shelf among the old volumes when he told Quinn privately that he considered Eliot ‘as good as Keats, Shelley or Browning’. More interesting than that judgement, though, is Pound’s having become preoccupied for quite some time after January 1922 with the paradox that while The Waste Land was a work of genius, it was yet one which threatened to negate what he held to be the essential work of genius. He would resolve the contradiction by attacking it from both sides, that is, by attempting to release Eliot from the bank so that he might write in spite of his aboulie, and by finding the way to affirm constructive will in his own poem.
In mid-January 1922 Yeats was in Paris to help bring the Irish diaspora together in support of the new provisional government of the Free State at their International Irish Race Congress. Pound, who attended on Yeats while he was in Paris, thought his effort at political propaganda, in a speech on the Abbey theatre and John Synge, was ‘affable, but no impact’
. But he had a ‘pleasant dinner’ with Desmond Fitzgerald ‘and some of the other Provisional lights’. Those he met would all shortly be caught up in civil war in Ireland.
Joyce’s Ulysses, which Pound had assisted into print in instalments in the Little Review and the Egoist, appeared at last in full on 2 February 1922, published in Paris by Sylvia Beach under the imprint of Shakespeare & Co. Ulysses was ‘“out” triumphantly’, he wrote to Alice Henderson in March, ‘Record sale for one day was 136 last Tuesday’. By mid-February Pound had read through all of its ‘732 double sized pages’, and he immediately set about proclaiming it a great work. ‘All men should “Unite to give praise to Ulysses”’, he trumpeted at the start of his next ‘Paris Letter’ for the Dial. He wanted it to be read as ‘an epoch-making report on the state of the human mind in the twentieth century’, and one which exposed to the withering light of unblinking intelligence all its mind-numbing banalities and clichés, all its paralysing fixed ideas, all its inertias and gangrenes of spirit. As such it was the culmination of the tradition that ran from Rabelais through Cervantes to Flaubert; and it was the answer to the prayer, in one of his Little Review ‘pavannes’, for hell to ‘spew up some Rabelais’
to define today
In fitting fashion, and her monument
Heap up to her in fadeless excrement.
That was the ‘public utility’ of prose realism, in Pound’s scheme of things, to analyse and flush away all that negated the constructive, desire-driven work of genius; and Joyce had produced ‘le roman réaliste par excellence’, a new Inferno and ‘a great work of Katharsis’. It was a purge for the period in which ‘the whole occident [was] under the domination of capital’, and surely meant the end of the ‘age of usury’. And it had, as Pound recalled in 1938, a special significance for him:
The katharis of Ulysses, the joyous satisfaction as the first chapters rolled into Holland Place, was to feel that here was the JOB DONE and finished, the diagnosis and cure was here. The sticky, molasses-covered filth of current print, all the fuggs, all the foetors, the whole boil of the European mind, had been lanced.
Pound must have felt that with the modern inferno done once and for all he could go on from it to build in poetry a possible paradise.
He certainly saw Joyce’s bringing the old era to its end as opening the way for him to begin upon the new. Pound could name the exact moment at which the old era, the Christian era as he was calling it then, had definitely ended—it was ‘midnight of the 29–30 of October (1921) old style’. That was when Joyce finished writing Ulysses; and the 30th happened also to be Pound’s own birthday. In the calendar which he drew up for the new era that day was declared the Feast of Zagreus, or of Dionysos in his manifestation as lord of life in the world of the dead. ‘Year 1 p.s.U.’—that is, post scriptum Ulysses—began from there. Ulysses belonged to the past which it monumentalized, not to the age in prospect. The era ‘p.s. U.’ was to be the era of The Cantos of Ezra Pound; and it is, in these mythopoetic terms, as Zagreus more than as Odysseus that we should look for him in them.
‘I am afraid Eliot has merely gone to pieces again’, Pound told Thayer on 10 March 1922, ‘Abuleia…’. By the 12th he was busy orchestrating a campaign to get him out of the bank. In one of several letters he hammered out on his typewriter on that day he outlined his strategy to Alice Corbin Henderson:
Eliot works in a bank, but the poems do not get written and the world is thereby the poorer.
He broke down completely this winter. HAD to have three months off, in which he did very possibly the most interesting 19 page poem in the language.…
He then went back to his bank, and has since got steadily worse. It is the greatest WASTE in contemporary letters.
Joyce has now a permanent subsidy…Eliot ought to have the same.
…
Pas de blague. Something has got to be done. I pro
Aldington and I start the show with one share each, the pledge is annual for life, or for as long as Eliot needs it.
I can see about 20 shares. God knows where the remaining ten are to come from.
‘I don’t want him to write anything but poetry’, he explained in a letter to Aldington sent the same day. A few days later he told him that Natalie Barney had given the scheme a name, Bel Esprit, and was giving it her support. In fact her residence at 20 rue Jacob was the ‘official seat, birth place and address’ of the scheme, and Miss Barney had become a full partner in it. There would be a prospectus in French, headed by an engraving of a pillared temple, and the aim would include helping Paul Valéry as well as Eliot. Pound, possibly at Quinn’s instigation, had an appeal slip in English, with the heading BEL ESPRIT, printed by John Rodker in London ‘for private circulation only’. ‘In order that T. S. ELIOT may leave his work in Lloyd’s Bank and devote his whole time to literature, we are raising a fund…’, was how it began. But to Agnes Bedford he declared, ‘We are saving civilization’; and to Aldington, ‘We are restarting civilization.’
Eliot’s particular case had become the occasion for Pound to campaign for a general cause. In a letter to Williams on 18 March he named others who might be released once Eliot had been freed; and stated the motive behind Bel Esprit as ‘“Release of energy for invention and design” acc[ording to] best economic theories’, by which he meant Douglas’s Social Credit. He developed that idea in an article in the New Age at the end of March, ‘Credit and the Fine Arts: A Practical Application’, and returned to it in his Dial ‘Paris Letter’ dated as ‘October, 1922’.
The best economist, to Pound’s mind, would be one who started from the principle that a society’s primary resource is its intelligence, that is, its best informed and most creative individuals. Such an economist would recognize that the arts are of public utility, and should be kept up. And that can be done at small cost, Pound would insist, given a cheap attic and cheap daily salt bread, since there were only a ‘few dozen artists and writers now capable of producing anything of interest’, and since all they really needed was their independence and leisure in which to work as they pleased and without interruption. Modern democracy, however, he would then say, ‘has signally failed to provide for its best writers’; and its market-based economy ‘as applied to the arts has NOT worked’, ‘the worst work usually bring[ing] the greatest financial reward’. In short, ‘there is no functioning co-ordinated civilization in Europe’ capable of selecting and supporting the best new work. There was a time ‘when the individual city (Italian mostly) tried to outdo its neighbour in the degree and intensity of its civilization, to be the vortex for the most living individuals’. Once, in the fifteenth century, there was ‘a man in a small town who had Pisanello, Pier Francesco, and Mino da Fiesole all working for him at one time and another’. Now, though, ‘The individual patron is nearly extinct’; ‘The rich are, with the rarest exceptions, useless’; and ‘One cannot wait until the masses are “educated up” to a fine demand’, there being ‘no sign whatever that they are tending in that direction’. Quality in the arts, Pound concluded, had become a luxury which only a few had the taste for. It was up to those few then, he argued, to get together to pay for it, and so ‘to establish some spot of civilization’, some vortex of intelligence. But will they do that, he demanded, or would they ‘continue to sponge on the artist’?
In a long letter to John Quinn in July, much of it about Bel Esprit, he wrote ‘we have now 21 out of the thirty subscriptions’, though some were ‘rather shaky’. His list included, as well as Aldington, Miss Barney, and himself: Romaine Brooks, Miss Barney’s friend; May Sinclair; Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and his wife; Eliot’s wealthy friend Sidney Schiff; Robert McAlmon, the American writer who had married H.D.’s lover Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher; and Quinn, who was down for 6 shares ‘(or 7 on condi
tion Liveright be excluded)’. Williams, who in his reply to Pound’s letter had exclaimed ‘What the hell do I care about Elliot’, had nevertheless sent in $30, possibly as a first payment towards a $50 share; and Dorothy was ‘ready to pay up to £10/ in any year’ for any member who defaulted.
‘For me my £10 a year on Eliot is an investment,’ Pound explained to Quinn, ‘I put this money into him, as I wd. put it into a shoe factory if I wanted shoes,’ or, ‘Better simile, into a shipping company, of say small pearl-fishing ships, some scheme where there was a great deal of risk but a chance of infinite profit.’ ‘What wouldn’t one give if one could have kept Keats alive a year or two more;…he was just getting his technique.’
Eliot had schemes of his own in hand. On 12 March, the day Pound began spreading word of Bel Esprit, Eliot wrote to him about two of them. There was the matter of his negotiations with Liveright and the Dial to find how much they would pay for The Waste Land. And there was the matter of the new quarterly review he was going to bring out, ‘to raise the standard of thought and writing in this country’. It would have Lady Rothermere’s money behind it; but the venture would be impossible, he told Pound, ‘without your collaboration’.
‘Willing to do anything for you personally’, was Pound’s immediate reply, but, as for England, he couldn’t see it having anything to do with any future civilization. Only if an English review absolutely guaranteed to provide Eliot with enough to get him out of the bank and let him devote his entire time to literature could he be interested in it. ‘Rather odd your writing just at this time,’ he added, alluding to his own scheme which he had not been going to mention until it was working. (Yet his article about Bel Esprit in the New Age at the end of the month, about which he was altogether coy in this letter, was going to name Eliot as the first beneficiary.)