Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  That fragment points up something else which is fundamental to the final version of the Malatesta cantos, something which critics tend to miss. The virtù of Pound’s Sigismondo is not to be found in his often violent and morally dubious career as a condottiere—indeed as a man of action he is merely typical of his often violent and morally dubious times, and is shown to have achieved by his deeds nothing of lasting significance. His virtù, in Pound’s rendering, his ‘intelligent constructivity’, is all in his ‘building a temple’. It is by that alone that he ‘cut his notch…registered a state of mind, of sensibility, of all-roundness and awareness’. That is the aspect of Sigismondo with which Pound equated his own will to write an epic, with the implication that it is by a temple, or an epic, that civilization will be begun again.

  Yeats wrote to Pound from Ireland in August 1922 about being ‘shut in by battles’, though he was nevertheless ‘contented and busy’ in his tower. He would have been working on his ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, brooding on how the grace and beauty of an ancestral house might come from ‘Some violent bitter man, some powerful man’. In October, after months of sometimes violent civil disorder in Italy, Mussolini marched his forces on Rome and was appointed by the King to resolve the crisis of government by initiating the Fascist new order. Pound did not register the event—‘Life was interesting in Paris…nobody bothered much about Italy.’ Besides, a friend in Milan had assured him, when asked ‘What is this fascio?’, that ‘there was nothing to it’. In October Lincoln Steffens was in Paris talking of how the Russian Revolution had been prepared by propaganda, by getting the word ‘revolution’ into the minds of the people, and by Lenin’s short speeches at the critical moment, and Pound listened to him with intense interest and put the essential facts of that history into canto 16, setting it against testimonies to the crass and savage absurdities of the late wasteful war.

  Pound did not desire a revolution—‘JE NE VEUX PAS, non je ne veux pas de révolution’, he had insisted in 1921. He knew, in his ‘measured moments’, or so he told Felix Schelling in July 1922, ‘that all violence is useless (even the violence of language…)’. But how to decide where the border lay ‘between strong language and violent language’? There were, after all, certain ‘excrements’ it was imperative to destroy, for instance ‘all British journalism’. Hence, one may conclude, the strong language of the ‘Hell’ cantos. Then there was Christianity to be overthrown:

  Christianisme: malgré qu’il ne soit plus la croyance de l’homme pensant européen, il n’y a pas une seule coutume, loi, convention ni de l’Europe, ni de l’Amérique qui ne soit pourrie à cause de cette base—totem de tribu SHEENY, Yid, taboo, pourriture…monotheos.

  MONOtheism, l’idée la plus crûment et immaturément idéologue, intellectuelle, maladivement cérébraliste, idée la moins fondée, la moins prouvée qui ait jamais été avalée par ⅜ de la race humaine.

  [Christianity: in spite of its being no longer the belief of thinking Europeans, there is not one custom, law, convention of Europe or America which is not rotten from this root—this tribal totem of SHEENY, Yid, taboo, corruption…monotheos.

  MONOtheism, the crudest and immaturest ideological intellectual idea, morbidly cerebralist, the least well-founded, least proven idea ever to have been swallowed by ⅜ of the human race.]

  Even allowing for the fact that this appeared only in a supplement to Picabia’s small Dada magazine 381, and allowing too for what was then current on the streets of New York, ‘SHEENY, Yid’ must strike us now as transgressing into violence. And why drag in race at all when it is religion that is in question, if not to charge up the attack on monotheism with the emotion of race prejudice. With hindsight one can read there an early warning of what would become a disastrous habit in his later propaganda. At the same time Pound was quite able to express his strong views in straight terms, as in the letter to Harriet Monroe in which he protested against ‘Damn remnants in you of Jew religion’ because of her trying to keep her readers in ignorance of the fact that he did ‘NOT accept…the dregs of the Xtn superstition’, ‘refuse[d] to accept ANY monotheistic taboos whatsoever’, and considered ‘the Hebrew scriptures the record of a barbarian tribe, full of evil’. He wanted her to let it be known that he considered ‘the Writings of Confucius, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses the only safe guides in religion’. Hence canto 13, beginning ‘Kung [or Confucius] walked | by the dynastic temple’. Hence his approval of Sigismondo’s Tempio with its many pagan divinities, and its honouring Isotta’s divinity. In his combining a will to construct a paradiso in words with occasional violent verbal transgressions Pound was not unlike his Sigismondo.

  In early August 1922 Pound was ‘reading up historic background for Canto IX’, and he kept at that all the way through to December, by which time he had ‘got three of the Malatesta cantos into some sort of shape’. He called up books in the Bibliothèque Nationale—his seat was 58ter when he called up a volume in Latin of Sigismondo’s court poet Basinio published in Paris in 1538. He looked out particularly for references to documents and primary sources, and noted in which archives they were to be found. There were in Milan, for example, letters from Sigismondo to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan; and in Rimini there was an unpublished chronicle of Sigismondo’s campaigns written by one Broglio who had been with him in the wars. He wrote to antiquarian book dealers in Milan, Florence, and Rimini in search of materials, and was invoiced by Ulrico Hoepli of Milan for five volumes, one of them Giovanni Soranzo’s Pio II e la politica italiana nella Lotta contro i Malatesti (1457–1463). From that work he drew a number of details in the Malatesta cantos, among them the exact intemperate insults to which Sigismondo and Count Federigo d’Urbino descended at a meeting intended to make peace, ‘“Te cavero la budella del corpo!”’—equivalent to (in a different vernacular) I’ll have your guts for garters—and the response from the Count, ‘“Io te cavero la corata a te”’, And I’ll pluck out your giblets!

  On 30 December 1922 Pound was issued a new United States passport valid for ‘Literary work and travel’ in all countries. His occupation was given as ‘Correspondent’. His personal description was: age 37 years; height 5 feet 10½ inches; forehead: broad; eyes: gray green; nose: straight; mouth: moustached; chin: bearded; hair: light; complexion: fair; face: oval. He used his new passport at once to go into Italy, and was there from early January to mid-April 1923.

  For the first four or five weeks Ezra and Dorothy were in Rapallo, at the Hotel Mignon, Pound ‘chewing along on Malatesta’ and playing tennis with a young American called Strater, and Dorothy doing some drawing. For a week or so in February they were joined by Hemingway and his wife Hadley, and the four of them toured Sigismondo’s old battlefields in Tuscany, such as Rocca Sorano near Siena. ‘Geographical verification’, Pound called that, ‘cross country in wake of S. M. to see how the land lay’. The Pounds went on down to Rome, where Ezra wanted to verify details in ‘documents preserved in the Vatican concerning Rimini and other towns of central Italy’, and they were there from 17 February to 1 March. On the 2nd he was in the archives in Florence consulting La Guerra dei Senesi col conte di Pitigliano, which he would cite with shelf mark in canto 10. At that point Dorothy asked Stella Bowen, who was with Ford and their daughter at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the Riviera, to spend a fortnight travelling with her in Italy while Pound was visiting libraries and archives, and then began a complicated sort of dance with postcards from Pound to Dorothy in Perugia or Assisi or Siena crossing postcards from Dorothy to Pound in Cesena or Rimini or Fano, etc. Dorothy was settled back in the Hotel Mignon in Rapallo from the 18th, while Ezra kept on the move until they met up again in Milan in early April.

  He had thought the Malatesta cantos as good as done, yet March 1923 was his most intense and concentrated spell of research for them in all the towns with Malatesta archives or associations. On the 7th he was in Bologna, where, on the 8th, he had a ‘Somewhat full day. Three libraries—all voluble—and amiable’. On t
he 9th he went on to the State Archive in Modena; and on the 10th he was in Cesena, in the splendid library founded by Malatesta Novello in 1452. There he was assisted by the very amiable young librarian Manlio Dazzi who took him that evening to a concert ‘of the highest quality’. (Dorothy was in Assisi on the 10th, where there was to be a ‘Big fascist meeting tomorrow’.) On the 13th Pound was in Rimini, and cursing because the library was ‘closed at least until the 20th as the damn custode has flu’, and he was forced to go on, with a sense of laboriously filling in time, to San Marino, Pennabilli—where he stayed at the Albergo Ristorante Malatesta—then Pesaro, Fano, Urbino on successive days, and at last back to Rimini on the 20th where he appreciated the comfort of the Palace Hotel for a full week.

  He did get into the library this time because his hotel-keeper, who happened also to be a founding member of the local Fascio, and a Commandante della Piazza charged with keeping order in the town, had taken it upon himself to see to it that Il Poeta was able to do what he had come for. Just before going to the library on the 21st Pound scribbled to Dorothy, ‘Hotel-keeper ready to sack the place and have up the mayor if it isn’t open; he is a noble fascist’. Evidently the mayor did have to be called in, since at the end of the week Pound told Dorothy that the Reggio Commissario, the mayor, had ‘descended on the librarian (who may die of the shock). Very sympatique the Gran Cordone.’ Pound was not only very grateful, as what researcher wouldn’t be, but also deeply impressed by this evidence of a new energy and civic sense in Italy. He was ready to believe his hotel-keeper’s insistence that it was out of devotion to Mussolini that he had had the old library unlocked.

  After Rimini Pound was in Ravenna on the 28th and 29th, then in Venice on the 30th and 31st. Everywhere he was making notes; checking details he already had from printed books against the original documents; struggling with his untrained eye to decipher the Renaissance manuscripts, getting some words wrong; and constantly shaping the materials (far more than he would use) with a view to fitting them into a canto. By the time he finished off the four Malatesta cantos, back in Paris in the latter half of April, his 1922 drafts had undergone a radical transformation.

  Pound did have other things to think about while travelling around Romagna. Nancy Cunard was also on the move in Italy, on a separate trajectory, but hoping they might arrange to coincide. When he was in Rimini she wrote from Positano in the south that she was reserving April for him, and could they not meet, with or without Dorothy, in the north somewhere? Pound’s reply has not survived, but there is reason to suppose he was not tempted. Then there was Bride Scratton’s impending divorce. Dorothy wrote that she had not heard from her mother ‘since ever’, and was there any ‘divorce news’ she might have seen? In his letter to her of 21 March Pound said he knew of nothing new since Bride had told him ‘it wd. be some time in April’, and he expected ‘the matter will be attended to with whatever decorum is possible’. Pound’s being named as co-respondent may have been the reason for Dorothy’s staying on in Italy when he returned to Paris. On 27 April 1923 she was issued in Rapallo with an authorization to be a sojourning foreigner.

  Pound sent off the Malatesta suite to the Dial on 24 April, but when he learnt that publication there was subject to Thayer’s veto he withdrew the manuscript. (A formal rejection letter on Thayer’s behalf was sent to him all the same.) Eliot had accepted the four cantos sight unseen for simultaneous publication in the Criterion, and they did appear there in July 1923. They appeared, however, without the opening allusion to The Waste Land, ‘These fragments you have shelved (shored)’, Eliot having objected to it ‘strongly on tactical grounds’. His reason was that people were already too ‘inclined to think that we write our verses in collaboration’, though it is much more likely that the allusion would have been read as a calculated riposte to Eliot’s poem.

  One remarkable thing about the finished suite is that all reference to the meeting in Verona has disappeared, and so too has the peculiarly personal and discouraged mood associated with it. Moreover, all that remains of the splendour of ‘Galla’s rest’ is one isolated and now cryptic line, ‘In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it’. The self-regarding material, and the reflection of the helpless alienation from modern decadence of the beauty-seeking individual, these have been altogether squeezed out. At the same time the account of Sigismondo’s life and works has been greatly extended and built up from the objective documents and the contemporary records and eye-witness reports so that he is viewed, Cubist fashion, from a variety of angles and points of view. And here the rhetorical assertions of Sigismondo’s embodying the Renaissance and being driven by the ‘urge to refound the world’ have been squeezed out. There is no direct statement at all of those grand claims which Pound makes in his prose for Sigismondo and for his Tempio. Thanks to his having gone over the ground and sweated in the archives he had no need now to imagine or to invent anything, and no need to assert anything on his own account. He had recovered the objective poetic self, so painstakingly developed through the experiments of ‘Near Perigord’ and the early trial cantos, which he had lapsed out of in the first, post-Verona, draft; that is, he had become again simply the active intelligence of his materials, simply the maker of his poem, and neither a propagandist nor a hapless revolutionary.

  His Sigismondo is now primarily the condottiere, the magnificent mercenary, a fighting man with no clear aim in his going to war to serve others’ strategies, an action man putting himself at the mercy of those others and of the fortunes of war. There is just one letter, in canto 8, showing him as the enlightened patron participating—that is how Pound had encouraged John Quinn to view a patron’s role—in a master painter’s creation; and that letter, written from the field of war while he was besieging Cremona in the Venetian interest, is interleaved as it were between an ingratiating letter to his Florentine master of the moment and the cold record of Florence’s terms for taking him on. Similarly interleaved in the latter half of the canto is brief mention of Gemistus Plethon, the Byzantine Platonist whose advocacy of a return to classical polytheism lay behind Sigismondo’s incorporating the classical gods into his Tempio. At the exact centre of the canto is a single verse from a love song Sigismondo wrote for Isotta, and this is given in Pound’s translation a most musical measure which sets it utterly apart from the documentary style it briefly interrupts. In its invocation of the pagan ‘spirits who of old were in this land’, and its directing them to ‘awaken | The summer within her mind’, it represents what moved him to build the Tempio. But there will be only one other recognition of that prime cause in the entire suite. Though it is structurally at the heart of the canto, and evidently at the heart of Sigismondo’s private life, it appears to have not the least effect on his life as a condottiere nor on the ways of his world. He must report immediately to Florence that Venice has taken him on ‘At 7,000 a month’ etc. Then follows an elaborate description of the festival he staged in Rimini for the newly married Francesco Sforza, with whom Sigismondo was just then allied; and that amounted to nothing more than the usual grand parade and fashion show, with the ironic additions that Francesco’s great pleasure on that occasion was fishing, and that he was on his way to a war in which he would receive ‘an excellent hiding’. War, not love, is what keeps Sigismondo and his world in a perpetual whirl.

  From the last lines of canto 8 until half way through canto 9 Broglio the chronicler takes up the story, in the style of ‘one damned thing after another’:

  And ‘Florence our natural ally’, as they said in the meeting

  for whatever that was worth afterward

  And he began building the TEMPIO,

  And Polixena, his second wife, died.

  And the Venetians sent down an ambassador…

  In the tally of what Sigismondo did and what others did to him one episode stands out, his night-raid ‘with more than an hundred | two wheeled ox carts’ to carry away ‘marble, porphyry, serpentine’ from the ancient basilica in Ravenna.
Otherwise the upshot is, ‘And the jobs getting smaller and smaller’. The second half of canto 9 consists of extracts from eight of the fifty letters found when the Sienese seized his postbag in 1454. All of the extracts concern affairs back home in Rimini, and while they mostly report how the building of the Tempio is progressing, their main effect is to give an impression of how Sigismondo is regarded in his own court, of how things are ordered there, and of how his absence is felt. The canto ends with a coda, ‘The ideograph’, as Pound called it in one typescript, giving the essence of Sigismondo’s life and works: ‘that “he lived and ruled”’, and loved to distraction Ixotta degli Atti, who was worthy of his love, ‘“and built a temple so full of pagan works”’. This carries the more weight for coming not from Pound, nor the sympathetic Broglio, but from the papal denunciation of Sigismondo.

  Cantos 10 and 11 continue the chronicle of Sigismondo’s failing career. Much of canto 10 is given over to the papal condemnation and excommunication, some of it in Latin capitals, as if graven in marble, and all of it throwing at him every sin and crime in the book. It was, as historians now recognize, an exercise in character assassination, most of the charges being trumped up and the whole thing being politically motivated; but the dirt stuck for centuries, and the great Burckhardt accepted as ‘the verdict of history’ that Sigismondo embodied a ‘disinterested love of evil’ and was indeed guilty of ‘murder, rape, adultery, incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason’, and so forth and so forth. Pound for his part treats the speech for the prosecution as overblown ‘bunkum’, and moves on to Sigismondo’s surviving being burnt in effigy as ‘God’s enemy and man’s enemy’, and surviving more direct attempts on his life. In one battle, the first episode in canto 11, he even defeats the papal forces which outnumber his ten to one in cavalry and have twice as many footsoldiers. He won that battle, Pound implies, by putting into the minds of his men the potent image of the eagle that ‘lit on his tent pole’ and telling them, ‘The Romans would have called that an augury’. But the rest of the canto shows him steadily losing the war, forced to sign away most of his towns, and with his luck and his strength deserting him. He sits in the unfinished church—referred to thus as what it had been, ‘the chiexa’, not as the ‘Tempio’—‘noting what was done wrong’. Anecdotes illustrative of his humanity and intelligence, and of his popularity with his people, fill up the vacuum of his wasted last years. The final image of the once fearsome condottiere is of his entering into a solemn contract about some practical joking. In these two cantos Isotta is never mentioned.