Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The Malatesta suite ends upon the note of humane comedy, with Sigismondo neither a tragic figure, nor an idealized one. He is certainly not, as some have taken him to be, a simple celebration of ‘the factive personality’, if that means, as some have taken it to mean, the man who gets things done with all necessary violence. The fact is that his making, in Pound’s portrayal, is all in his effort to build a fitting monument to his love; and that effort, shown more as a struggle than as an achievement, is pretty well eclipsed throughout the latter two cantos. Pound’s Sigismondo has much in common with his Bertrans de Born, the persona bafflingly but apparently completely split between his love of a woman and his love of war. These cantos have much in common also with the Cathay and Propertius and Mauberley portraits, in that each of them exhibits a maker, an individual of genius, registering a concept of constructive love while being ultimately subdued to the antithetical ethos of his time. Some would see Sigismondo as a prototype of Mussolini, not without reason; but then he would be also a forefiguring of what was to be Mussolini’s fate when his vision of a new society was compromised and undone by violent political and military action. Again, one could read in him a forefiguring of Pound’s own fate, when he lost his centre ‘fighting the world’.

  Pound wanted to bring about a renaissance, to recover such a vision of the universe alive as would move men of good will to make a paradise on earth. Sigismondo Malatesta afforded a case study of what a man possessed of the vision which brought about a renaissance in Italy in the fifteenth century had actually achieved under the conditions then prevailing. The historical records, when Pound took them fully into account, spoke overwhelmingly of his failure, and the Malatesta cantos faithfully reflect that. In Pound’s own terms too Sigismondo was a failure, in that his active life was not on the whole directed by his enlightened vision. And yet Pound could write, under the frontispiece to Guide to Kulchur, that he was ‘a failure worth all the successes of his age’. He could discount the record of his life because Sigismondo had realized his vision in an enduring creation. Even the seal reproduced as frontispiece, a mere ‘wafer of wax…between two surfaces of paper in a letter from the young Salustio Malatesta’, could still, in 1938, convey ‘the thoroughness of Rimini’s civilization in 1460’.

  That is a profound indication of the orientation of Pound’s mind. Committed as he was, as an artist, to working in and making the best of his actual world, to realizing a ‘paradiso terrestre’ in spite of the shambles of war and the hells of aboulie and obstruction, it was nevertheless in enduring works of art that he placed his ultimate faith. That the vision would not often, and never lastingly, direct human affairs—the universal lesson of history—is a truth he appears to have accepted without question. He concentrated, as an artist, on the forms in which the vision could be kept alive in the mind. But then he was not only and not always the artist.

  Life and times: 1923–1924

  In early May 1923 Their Imperial Britannic Majesties King George V and Queen Mary made an official five-day state visit to Italy, during which the King bestowed the Order of the Bath upon Signor Mussolini and thus, in the press and the popular mind, set the British seal of approval upon his Fascist regime.

  Pound, in Paris in May, would not visit Gurdjieff at his Institute out at Fontainebleau, even though Gurdjieff’s Persian soup was of peerless delicacy, and nor would he visit Orage while he was there, holding as he did to the view that ‘Confucius [is] about as good a guide as one can want in this vale of imbecilities’.

  William Bird 8 was proposing a ‘de looks edtn. of Malatesta’ from his Three Mountains Press, and Henry Strater was already ‘at work on special capitals’ for it. Very soon it was to be

  a dee looks edtn of my Cantos (about 16 of ’em, I think) of UNRIVALLED magnficence. Price 25 dollars per copy, and 50 and 100 bones for Vellum and illuminateds.

  It is to be one of the real bits of printing; modern book to be jacked up to somewhere near level of mediaeval mss. No Kelmscott mess of illegibility. Large clear type, but also large pages, and specially made capitals.

  Not for the Vulgus. There’ll be only about 60 copies for sale; and about 15 more for the producers.

  Several of those sixteen cantos had yet to reach their final state.

  In June Pound was ‘doing a canto on Kung’, using ‘Pauthier’s french translation of the Four Books; and a latin translation of the Odes’. Confucius’ ‘idea of beginning in the middle, i.e. on oneself is excellent’, he told Homer, thinking of what ‘Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves’:

  If a man have not order within him

  He can not spread order about him;

  And if a man have not order within him

  His family will not act with due order;

  And if the prince have not order within him

  He can not put order in his dominions.

  And Kung gave the words ‘order’

  and ‘brotherly deference’

  And said nothing of ‘the life after death’.

  All that, Pound wrote to Homer, was ‘The exact reverse of Christianchurchism’. The contrasting ‘Hell’ cantos which came next were his ‘portrait of contemporary England, or at least Eng. as she wuz when I left her’—that was how he described them to Lewis; and to Ford he said they were, ‘THE STATE of ENGLISH MIND in…the post war epotch’. He wanted to show why the British Empire was in a state of disorder and ‘DECOMPOSITION’, and wrote of politicians as arseholes who talk through their arseholes, and of preachers as ‘vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk, | waving the Christian symbols’. Those terms, he would maintain to Ford, were ‘the nearest thing to the exact word attainable’.

  Dorothy’s solicitor father, Henry Hope Shakespear, was gravely ill in June and died in early July. Dorothy was with her mother in England until about the middle of August. She told Ezra on black-bordered notepaper not to come for the funeral, expressing no particular feeling—it was Olivia who wrote that ‘it has all been fearfully painful’—but being concerned about papers to be signed and having to wait three months ‘to know for certain about money matters’. She hoped ‘to be able to settle some’ money on Ezra, ‘and perhaps extract a lump for B. Esprit (incognito)’.

  On 27 June Ezra mentioned to Dorothy that he had ‘had O. Rudge play over [his] opera arias on violin; and am dining with her tonight’; on 17 July, ‘The Rudge has taken “permanence” at cinema, instead of substituting for other violin’; and on 7 August, ‘Olga played over some of the Villon’. 9 Those signs of growing familiarity masked a rapidly developing intimacy. On 6 June ‘O.R.’ had sent Pound a petit bleu by the Pneumatique—Paris’s system of sending messages written on blue paper by pneumatic tube between local post offices to be then delivered by messengers on bicycle—‘Mi rencusi tanto—ma impossibile per oggi’. They generally wrote to each other in Italian, and that was to say, ‘So very sorry—not possible today’. On 6 July she sent another, ‘Caro, Aspetto te…O.’, ‘Dear one, expecting you’. In August Olga and Ezra went walking together in the Dordogne, ‘25 kilometers a day with a rucksack’, and visited Ventadour, Ussel, and villages pictured but not identified in Olga’s 1923 photograph album.

  Dorothy was with her mother at Lewiston Manor on 21 July, ‘trying not to panic’: ‘I wonder how much of my life I ought to devote to her’, she mused to Pound, ‘I thought I was just evolving a little freedom.’ By 9 August she knew that ‘Father left everything to Olivia’, who had said she would increase Dorothy’s allowance. Shortly after that she was in Paris again. ‘Our combined intake is now probably more than yours,’ Pound told his mother at the end of August.

  In mid-July he was ‘rewriting the first three cantos; trying to weed out and clarify’ for the ‘edtn. de LOOKS’. ‘I have now a sense of form that I hadn’t in 1914,’ he told Dorothy, and ‘WITH sense of form, very difficult to get it all in’. He had a draft of the first three done by 1 August. He then wanted, in order to revise canto VI, a small booklet of historical documents about Henry
Plantagenet and Louis VII of France which he had left with Agnes Bedford. Around 18–24 August he was working ‘on 16th, i.e. 5th after Malatesta’—though he would be still working on that in October.

  Nancy Cox McCormack who had been sculpting a portrait of Mussolini in Rome was in Paris again this summer and eager to pass on her impression that Il Duce was ‘a creative force evolving and directing the beginnings of a renaissance’. Pound’s interest was aroused. ‘To clear up what I said the other day’, he began a letter to her dated 15 August 1923,

  it would be quite easy to make Italy the intellectual centre of Europe; and that by gathering ten or fifteen of the best writers and artists.…I shouldn’t trust anyone’s selection save my own. There is no use going into details until one knows if there is or could be any serious interest in the idea; that is to say, if the dictator wants a corte letteraria; if he is interested in the procedure of Sigismundo Malatesta in getting the best artists of his time into Rimini, a small city with no great resources. I know, in a general way, the fascio includes literature and the arts in its programme; that is very different from being ready to take specific action.

  You have to avoid official personages, the deadwood of academies, purely pedagogical figures. The life of the arts is always concentrated in a very few individuals; they invent, and the rest follow, or adapt, or exploit.

  Italy has an opportunity now…Germany is busted, England is too stupid, France is too tired to offer serious opposition; America is too far from civilization…

  Pound had speculated, back in January 1915, that the Quattrocento renaissance had come about ‘because the vortices of power coincided with the vortices of creative intelligence’. Now he was beginning to dream that the twentieth-century renaissance he had been looking for might flow from a coming together of Mussolini and himself. His efforts to arrange a meeting with Il Duce came to nothing, however. He would meet the man of power only once, and that not until January 1933, and then to no evident effect.

  Young George Antheil came onto the Paris scene in June 1923, with a reputation from his recent German tour of causing ‘uproars, fiascos, and hostile demonstrations’, a reputation to recommend him to the Dada element, to Satie, and to Pound. He had come for the première of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. Pound at once wanted to hear his music, and took him to Natalie Barney’s to play hours of it for him on her piano. He was impressed by the ‘demoniac temperament’ apparent in the playing, and—prompted by Olga Rudge—asked him to compose a violin sonata or two for her. A brief notice in the Chicago Tribune of a concert on 11 December suggests his manner of playing: ‘Hitting the piano keys with his wrist and palm as well as with his fingers, Mr George Antheil…drew from the instrument strange barbaric sounds and created a sensation’. He had set off ‘a riot of enormous dimensions’ in October when he performed three of his compositions—Sonata sauvage, Airplane sonata, and Mechanisms—as a curtain-raiser for the opening night of the Ballets Suédois at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Pound would recall how the theatre ‘turned into bedlam five minutes after Antheil was at the piano’, and would hint that in the bedlam his own voice ‘could be heard above all others [comparing] the intelligence of the French public to that of sucklings’, while Satie sat next to him applauding. He would present Antheil as ‘The Cagney of music’, and write that he ‘rose from an atmosphere of “gangsters”, the “tough guy”, the police hoodlum, perhaps the only composer today who has been able to become an “honorary member of the Paris police”…because of the warm sympathy he inspired, during a night of cheerful company with some characters out of a thriller, in the chief of the metropolitan police’.

  More or less amusing, more or less boisterous riotousness following deliberate hard drinking was a feature of Paris in the 1920s, more especially on the part of the expatriate Americans and British. It is in the atmosphere, and is sometimes the main matter, of the Left Bank memoirs of the survivors; and it is a significant element in Hemingway’s Fiesta (1927), in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), and in the early novels and stories of Jean Rhys. There were always dancing and drinking parties. Ford Madox Ford, while he was in Paris with Stella Bowen from September 1923, threw regular parties, and theirs are refracted in Jean Rhys’s writings along with her ungrateful relationship with Ford. Then too there were always the cafés and bars. Writers and artists living in cheap hotels or cramped flats naturally did as Parisians do and met up there. Pound is occasionally noticed, in the Left Bank memoirs, in a group in a café; though more usually he is seen passing swiftly in the street by someone seated at a table. Jimmy the Barman of The Dingo, one of the centres of expatriate existence in Fiesta, had him down as a careful drinker, a ‘white winer’ who didn’t touch the hard stuff.

  Basil Bunting turned up in Paris that summer, young, broke, an original poet in the making, and sustained in that effort by the example of Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius. He first saw Pound ‘playing a swashbuckling kind of chess’ in a café. Some time later he got himself ‘locked up for a colossal drunk’ during which he had mistaken his hotel, tried to break down the door to a room not his own, jumped into bed with the concierge, and rebelliously and with violence to a gendarme resisted arrest. Pound got to hear of this and found him next morning reading Villon amongst the night’s catch ‘of petty thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, pimps’ in the grande salle of the Paris court, where, as he was quite aware, Villon had awaited his trial. Having heard his story Pound rushed away to get him an avocat. A day or two later Bunting sent Pound a note, from ‘Prison de la Santé, Don[jon] 9, Cellule 16’, asking that it be said in his defence that the violence he admitted to; but as to the charge of ‘Carrying arms’, his knife was simply ‘to sharpen my pencils & to cut bread & cheese when I eat my lunch in the Luxembourg or the Tuilleries’. He got two weeks, then worked as a barman at the Jockey Club until Pound introduced him to Ford and had him taken on as assistant editor and dogsbody for Ford’s transatlantic review. Bunting would identify with Villon in the first of his poems to be preserved, ‘Villon’ (1925), a ‘sonata’ upon his own imprisonments, primarily his imprisonment for refusing to bear arms in the late Great War.

  Ford’s new review, a monthly, had as its ‘Administrateurs’, Messieurs Ford, Pound, Quinn, and Bunting. It would run only from January to December of 1924, but would publish a good deal that would outlast its moment: Ford’s own Some Do Not, the first part of Parade’s End; versions of Pound’s ‘Kung’ and ‘Baldy Bacon’ cantos; an extract from Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’; Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans; stories by Hemingway—who succeeded Bunting as assistant editor in January, and did what he could to subvert Ford’s internationalism by giving preference to Americans. The review was largely financed by John Quinn, who was photographed with Ford and Joyce (and the Diana) in the courtyard of 70bis in October of 1923. It was his only meeting with Joyce for whom he had done so much for so little thanks, and with Ford, and his last with Pound. He was already in pain from the undiagnosed cirrhosis which would kill him next July.

  The combination of Antheil, a piano, and Pound tended not to make for harmony. It appears that Pound had a piano installed in his studio so that Antheil and Rudge could rehearse for their 11 December concert in the Salle du Conservatoire. They were to perform two pieces for unaccompanied violin by Pound, one his transcription of the twelfth-century melody of Faidit’s ‘Plainte pour la Mort du roi Richard Cœur de Lion’, the other his own ‘Sujet pour violin (resineux)’; and they were to première Antheil’s first and second sonatas for violin and piano. A Bach gavotte would be played between Pound’s pieces, and Mozart’s ‘Concerto en la majeur’ between Antheil’s—presumably in the spirit of ‘compare and contrast’. Antheil’s sonatas, according to Irving Schwerke writing in the Chicago Tribune, required ‘strenuous exertions’ on the part of both performers and ‘imposed a severe strain on the naked tympanum’, the ‘copious draught of sound’ being, for some, ‘“music” pure and absolut
e’, for others ‘degenerate noise and crash’. In the rehearsals in Pound’s studio the ‘noise and crash’ dimension so disturbed the Swedish neighbours overhead that they complained to the police. To his father, Pound frankly admitted that ‘George was making hell’s own merry noise’. But when summoned before the Commissaire de Police, as he gleefully reported to William Bird,

  He discussed the sins of Scandinavians at length,

  also their propensities to dance above his head at three

  a.m.

  he pointed out that the Scandinavians also had a

  piano, ils ne sont pas des musiciens mais ils

  jouent au piano.

  After some discussing M. le Commissaire wrote: