Ezra Pound: Poet
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Towards the end of May Eliot, still complaining of his own ill health and exhaustion and of Vivien’s persistent ailments, went to Lugano for a fortnight’s holiday, and from there he travelled down to Verona to meet up with Pound. By his account they talked of the endocrine glands and Pound suggested that Vivien might be helped by Berman. They talked of Bel Esprit, and Eliot came away feeling that the scheme was in too ‘nebulous’ a state for him to commit himself to it. He felt indeed that the whole thing was ‘unsatisfactory’, lacking ‘a dignified committee’, lacking definite assurances concerning ‘income, tenure and security’, and all too likely to embarrass him personally.
By Pound’s account they drew up ‘in manuscript’, in Verona’s Café Dante, ‘a literary program’ for Eliot’s review—now to be called The Criterion, a title suggested by both Vivien and Pound independently—but the programme, he would later complain, ‘was neither published nor followed’. In the absence of the manuscript there is no knowing what he thought they had agreed on.
In July Dorothy passed on to Eliot in London the equivalent of $200 raised by the Authors Club of New York in response to Pound’s appeal. Pound told Harriet Monroe that ‘with two lump gifts, the £300 for the first year is either in hand or promised’. Eliot, however, told Pound that £300 a year was not enough for him to live on. (In a letter to Sydney Schiff he would say in effect that salt bread and a cheap attic might suffice for those—such as Pound?—‘who are accustomed to small and precarious incomes’, but in his circumstances he needed ‘more money and more security’.) He would not discourage Pound’s finding out how much he could raise—£600 would not be ‘a penny too much’—but nor would he pledge himself to accept the terms of Bel Esprit. As for The Criterion, he had decided, he informed Pound—possibly referring here to the Verona programme—‘not to put any manifestoe in the first number, but adopt a protective colour for a time until suspicion is lulled’. He would play possum.
At the end of July Eliot put Pound’s name down in his Criterion circular as a future contributor; and asked that the name of Lloyd’s Bank should be deleted from Pound’s Bel Esprit circular. ‘I cannot jeopardise my position at the Bank before I know what is best,’ he wrote. Nor did he like having his private circumstances publicized. In fact, ‘If this business has any more publicity I shall be forced to make a public repudiation of it and refuse to have anything more to do with it.’ In November, however, he asked Pound if he could get him the Bel Esprit money without the condition that he leave the bank immediately. He wanted to get free of Lady Rothermere, and needed money to buy the Criterion from her. ‘If you and I could get the Criterion into our own hands’, he wrote, ‘it would be the thing of our lives.’
Pound replied at once that ‘NO periodical could be the “thing of our lives”’, and advised, ‘You jess set and hev a quiet draw at youh cawn-kob’. He thought Eliot must be mad to be proposing to pay money for a loss-making review of which he was the only asset. Eliot protested that he was ‘not thinking of buying the Criterion’; that he had not yet received the 10,000 francs Lady Rothermere had got an American in Paris to pledge; and that he would ‘leave the Bank as soon as I have such guarantees—for my life or for Vivien’s life—as would satisfy a solicitor’.
On the 16th a short article appeared in the Liverpool Post, ostensibly about The Waste Land which had just appeared in the first number of The Criterion, but mainly about Bel Esprit—which it considered an excellent scheme if that poem was its product. The account of Bel Esprit followed Pound’s circular fairly accurately, except in implying that it had enabled Eliot to write The Waste Land; and, more offensively, in relating ‘an amusing tale’ that two years before Eliot’s friends had raised £800 so that he might devote himself solely to literature, and the joke was that he had taken the money but stayed on at the bank. Eliot was not amused, consulted his solicitors and a King’s Counsel about this ‘libellous falsehood’, and on 30 November the Liverpool Post published his letter denying everything in the tale of £800, and adding that he had not ‘received any sum from Bel Esprit’, and that the scheme had neither his consent nor his approval.
That was the public repudiation he had threatened, and it was the end of Bel Esprit, publicly at least. Eliot, however, did accept such sums as were contributed to it, the last recorded being in July 1923. When he left Lloyds Bank, in 1925, it was to become a Director in the firm of Faber & Gwyer, publishers, later Faber & Faber. He edited The Criterion, and was The Criterion, until he brought it to an end in 1939, Pound contributing irregularly throughout its existence. There would be no break, but they were set on diverging paths.
In ‘The Hollow Men’, the poem that followed on from The Waste Land, Eliot would contemplate the shadow that falls between an ideal and the real world. Pound, however, was not haunted by the failure of Bel Esprit to impact upon Eliot’s hard-headed sense of realities. In the Dial in November he reaffirmed with some passion his radical ideal of restarting civilization by releasing artistic energies from the routines of capitalist society. This time he did not associate the scheme with Eliot, only saying that he had been ‘entoiled in three months of private controversy’ on account of it. He did not reveal that the intended beneficiary had inconveniently insisted on having a life beyond the production of poetry, and had proved unwilling to be released from the bank if that meant giving up the style of life the bank enabled him to afford. The fact was that at its first trial the scheme had been nullified by Eliot’s cautious adherence to the very system it was designed to counter. Pound did not address that directly, but nor did he surrender his will to change the world.
A renaissance man
On Good Friday, 14 April 1922, a postcard signed ‘D. Pound’, but apparently in John Rodker’s hand, was posted in Siena to Margaret Anderson of the Little Review, announcing Pound’s death and informing her that two photos of his death-mask were on their way to her. Pound himself had just written to Homer,
Dear Dad, If you hear a rumour of my demise | please DO NOT | contradict it…I want a little repose…I shall rise again at a suitable time. Possibly in six weeks.
He wrote to John Quinn to much the same effect, ‘I shall be dead to the world.’ The Little Review, however, although at that moment enthralled by Dada, declined to play along, and Jane Heap inserted into the spring issue, instead of the death-mask—in fact a life-mask taken by Nancy Cox McCormack—a dour note refusing to be hoaxed by ‘some phoney death masks’. Pound, in a letter dated by his new pagan calendar, ‘13th Athene, Annus Primus’, drew their attention to the date on the postcard and chided them for having ‘no respect for precedent’.
Ezra and Dorothy had left Paris at the end of March to spend three months travelling in Italy. They reached Genoa, after a ‘not exactly restful’ trip, on the 29th; on the 31st went on to Carrara, where there are the great marble quarries; were in Siena for at least the ten days of 4–14 April, and may have gone by bus to Florence. They moved on to Perugia—they were there on the 23rd—and Pound visited Assisi, Cortona, and Spoleto, partly in search of a good place for his parents to retire to. His mother had mentioned that they were thinking of retiring to California, and Pound, afraid that if they did he would never see them again, was intent on persuading them to retire instead to Italy. He also visited Ancona, Rimini, and Ravenna on the Adriatic coast with that in mind, and with a new canto in mind. He was in Venice on 4 May—apparently back in Perugia on the 6th—and in Venice again on the 22nd and the 28th. In early June he met Eliot in Verona, and for the rest of that month he and Dorothy were at Sirmione on Lake Garda. They returned to Paris via Milan, and were back at 70bis rue Notre Dame des Champs on 2 July.
From Sirmione he had written to Quinn on 20 June that he had ‘had busy spring’ and had ‘blocked in four cantos—(Including the “Honest Sailor”, which I hope I haven’t spoiled)’. The ‘Tale of the Honest Sailor’, which he had from Quinn, features in canto 12, along with the financial adventures of Frank Bacon—‘cuban pennies Bacon’�
�an old New York friend who would turn up in Paris as if on cue on 13 July. He was also ‘At work on the “Hell” canto, chiefly devoted to the English’. By the 29th he had ‘4, probably 5, cantos blocked out’, two of them—most likely the ‘Honest Sailor’ and ‘Hell’ cantos—‘unprintable—dealing with modern life’. Once back in Paris he wrote that he had ‘five cantos blocked out’, and was ‘about ready for the vacation I did not take in Italy’.
A busy summer followed, with Dorothy away in England from 13 July until 7 September. He had to finish off translations, for a London publisher, of Paul Morand’s Ouvert la nuit and Tendres Stocks, short fictions which he had praised for looking with a clear eye at the wreckage of Europe. (The publisher would reject his translations in August, their reader having objected among other things to Pound’s ‘vulgar American’ style, though Morand himself, whose English was good, had approved his work. Still Pound was paid the £25 due to him.) On Tuesday 11 July ‘Mr Ezra Pound, Mr Tami Koumé and Capt. J. Brinkley’ invited a select company ‘to tea at Mr Pound’s Studio…To see some paintings by Tami Koumé’. As well as Frank Bacon, Berman ‘the gt. gland sleuth’ was in Paris in July; and Wyndham Lewis, who found Pound receiving a boxing lesson in his studio from the nonchalant tough guy Ernest Hemingway. Pound was blue-pencilling Hemingway’s adjectives in return. Sibley Watson of the Dial, who was passing through on his way to Vienna to see ‘the surgeon who does Steinach’s operation’, thought Pound looked ‘pretty unhealthy’, though Pound himself said he was ‘feeling damn fit’, and was playing tennis with Hemingway to prove it. He had urged Watson to publish ‘Obsequies’, a story by Bride Scratton, telling him that she ‘will never write again unless now encouraged’. (Her story evidently appealed to Eliot, who published it in The Criterion in April 1923.) Throughout the summer months people came flooding through his studio, Rodker, Etchells of the Vorticists, Hilda Aldington with her mother, ‘Kitty Heyman with two flappers in tow’, the Dean of Hamilton College with family—fifty-six visitors in one week in August. At the start of that month he set about commissioning a number of fifty-page booklets which would be published by Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press on the Île Saint-Louis and would indicate ‘the state of prose after Ulysses, or the possibility of a return to normal writing’. He approached Ford, Williams, and Hemingway as writers who would ‘tell the truth about moeurs contemporaines’. (He would also include Bride Scratton’s stories under the title England.) In September he began some sort of affaire with Nancy Cunard, Lady Cunard’s now grown up and very liberated daughter, and for a time was one of her occasional and more passionately desired lovers. There was the ongoing ado about Bel Esprit. And above all there were the ‘blocked out’ cantos to be worked up.
‘I don’t at present see that I shall get around to any music this summer’, he told Dorothy in July, ‘There is a lot of Sig. to do’. ‘Sig.’ was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417–68), once lord of Rimini, now the subject of the first of the five new cantos Pound had brought back from Italy ‘in rough draft’. He had thought that canto might ‘swell out into two’, but in fact it would grow through a year of intensive reading in Paris and research in Italian archives into a suite of four. They would be published in the fourth number of the Criterion in July 1923 as ‘Malatesta Cantos. (Cantos IX to XII of a Long Poem)’, and would subsequently become cantos VIII–XI.
The first draft, handwritten at Sirmione, begins with the bold declaration, ‘I have sat here for 44,000 years | yes precisely’, thus asserting a commanding overview of human culture from its notional beginnings, and outdoing Eliot’s Tiresias who could claim only to have seen and foresuffered the sad vanity of sexual desire since his Theban times. The following lines place the speaker in present-day Verona, at the very moment, as will appear in a later draft, of Pound’s recent meeting there with Eliot. Then comes a proclamation of Pound’s new era: ‘& the world began again | last October’; and that is rhymed, as it were, with Sigismondo’s reviving the old pagan gods in Rimini, ‘& the Tempio—in October’. The rest of this draft sketches in the vicissitudes of Sigismondo’s career as a condottiere, a soldier of fortune, who sold his outstanding military skills to one city state after another and had lost most of his own minor state by the end, with the Popes after his lands and the Medici bank against him; and who yet, in spite of his warring, his shifting allegiances, his powerlessness when dealing with the major powers of Venice and Milan and the Papacy, in spite of his defeats and disgraces, did succeed in having a Gothic church transformed by some of the best artists of his age into a Renaissance temple adorned with inspired ‘pagan’ bas-reliefs to the greater glory of himself and his adored Isotta. He thus, as historians have remarked, ‘embodied the renaissance’—that is the key statement of this draft—‘having some sense of life | no morals, infinite heroism | & a respect for tradition’. Later, in Guide to Kulchur, Pound would stress his combination of individualism and representativeness, writing that ‘Malatesta managed against the current of power’ ‘all that a single man could’, and that his ‘Tempio Malatestiano is…a cultural “high”’ and ‘perhaps the apex of what one man has embodied in the last 1000 years of the occident’.
In an early typescript draft, probably done in July soon after Pound’s return to Paris, Sigismondo’s achievement is attributed to ‘the urge to refound the world’; and that urge is connected with a ‘gai saber’, a cult of love, such as existed in the troubadours’ Provence, with the implication that it was his love of Isotta, his lifelong mistress and third wife, that moved him ‘to refound the world’. Evidently what interested Pound in Sigismondo was that he was a ‘bhloomin historic character’—that is, not a fantasy but someone who had actually lived, loved, and acted in a particular world and time—someone who could ‘be used as illustration of intelligent constructivity’, and whose life also afforded ‘a certain boisterousness and disorder to contrast with his constructive work’. He represented on a heroic scale the qualities Pound was finding admirable, in October 1922, in the poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio after he had seized Fiume in a grand coup de théâtre which heralded Mussolini’s March on Rome, ‘some sort of vigour, some sort of assertion, some sort of courage, or at least of ebullience that throws a certain amount of remembered beauty into an unconquered consciousness’. ‘The Malatesta cantos’, he would declare in Guide to Kulchur, ‘are openly volitionist, establishing…the effect of the factive personality, Sigismundo, an entire man’.
In the typescript draft of July 1922, however, the affirmation of Sigismondo’s ‘urge to refound the world’ only goes to show up both Eliot and Pound as helpless and hopeless to do anything about their own disintegrating world. ‘These fragments you
g the alabaster panes. He recalls also the magnificent tomb Sigismondo had raised to his divine Isotta at the heart of the Tempio which he had visited in Rimini. But as for the live woman who is with him in Verona, ‘Ti’, later identified as the divorcing Bride Scratton but for the moment ‘Galla’s hypostasis’, she will have no such setting. Yet the mood of despondency is not absolute. Even the circus in the arena, and ‘Ti’, and Eliot with his bitter drink, can be seen as ‘sprouts in the loam’; and the draft ends upon living things, ‘a wing exists for a moment and goes out, | flame intermittent, | an emerald lizard peers through the border grass’. Those images may promise a basis for renewals, not of course from the flying grasshopper and the lizard in themselves, but from the power of the mind to so perceive them. But the contradiction remains, between Sigismondo’s magnificent monument, and Galla Placidia’s, and the apparent failure in Pound and Eliot, in the modern movement, of the urge to refound the world.
Perhaps the mood behind that July draft is summed up in another typescript fragment:
Chien de metier,
hopelessness of writing an epic
Chien de metier
hopelessness of building a temple
Chien de métier, a lousy line of work to be in, or something to that effect. Still, the hopelessness of writing an epic must be tempered by the knowledge that Sigismondo did ‘build his temple’. Even though it was unfinished and roofless when he had to abandon the reconstruction in 1461, at least, Pound would assert in Guide to Kulchur, he did register his concept, and ‘There is no other single man’s effort equally registered’. Eliot might cynically regard human history as simply an ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy’; but for Pound it had the positive use of showing what was humanly possible, and so of encouraging, inciting to, constructive effort.