Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Monsieur répond qu’il est compositeur de musique

  et qu’il est nécessaire qu’il fasse du bruit.

  That he makes no more noise than habitually.

  From which it would appear that Pound took upon himself Antheil’s disturbing of the peace. There were no further proceedings.

  That Pound, in his usual way, was engaged on several fronts that autumn is evident in his letters, particularly those to Dorothy. She was in England from 7 October until the end of November 1923, sorting out her parents’ house with her mother, flat hunting with her, and accompanying her to stay with friends. On 20 October Pound reported: that he and Antheil were well on with their re-notation of Le Testament; that he had got his ‘violin stunt into some sort of shape’; that O. had played through Les Noces for him; that Léger had approved the section of canto XVI dealing with his account of Verdun, and Steffens had filled in some troublesome details about Petrograd. He might have mentioned also his involvement in the editing of a ‘vorticist film-experiment’ to be called Ballet mécanique with Léger, Man Ray, Antheil, and Dudley Murphy. In November, from the 22nd to the 29th, specimen pages of the de luxe edition of the first sixteen cantos were on show at Shakespeare & Company. And ‘Eliot turned up at 11 this a.m. on his way to 12 o’clock train’—this was on the 25th—‘There is a chance of [his] leaving the bank in Feb. if Bel Esprit can be revived’. On 10 December Homer wrote, ‘My Dear Son,…We would like to know who Olga is?…Now do tell us about OLGA??’ But about Olga Pound was not forthcoming—he would say only that she had an aunt or an uncle living in Wyncote.

  Ezra and Dorothy intended to leave Paris for Italy at the start of January 1924, but were delayed by Pound’s suffering an attack of appendicitis and being rushed into the American hospital at Neuilly. He did not have to be operated on, however, and was out again on 6 January. ‘Must stay on diet for a while’, he wrote to Homer, ‘Booked sleeper for Rapallo, tuesday a.m.’, i.e. the 8th. The printer’s setting copy for cantos I–VII and XII–XVI of A Draft of XVI Cantos is dated ‘6 Jan. 1924’, indicating that he gave Bird the final version of those cantos either on the day he left hospital, or on the Monday, his last full day in Paris that winter.

  They stayed in Rapallo, at the Hotel Mignon, or in the albergo at Monte Allegro 2,000 feet above the town, until about the middle of March, with Ezra feeling in need of a period of recuperation. There would be an important article on Antheil in the Criterion in April; and other material for Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony would be appearing in the transatlantic review over the coming months—though the ‘Notes for Performers, by William Atheling, with Marginalia Emitted by George Antheil’, were actually Agnes Bedford’s selections from Atheling’s New Age reviews. Pound appears to have been mainly resting, apart from composing a little music for violin.

  Ezra and Olga were exchanging love notes. ‘Darling…amor mio’, ‘mi spiace che non sei qui’, that from Pound, ‘I am sorry you aren’t by me’. And from Olga, ‘Caro—Inamoratissima’, ‘ti voglio vigliacco—e come!’, ‘I want you awfully, and how!’ Towards the end of February Pound invited Olga to come to Rapallo, ostensibly for further work on Le Testament, and, there being no room next door at the Splendide, booked her into the Mignon ‘for a few days’. Olga arrived, took in the situation, and immediately removed herself to the Monte Allegro albergo. After three days Pound sent up a message that he ‘had the miseries’ and wanted her, but was still too weak to climb the mountain; if she would walk down one day ‘for tea and toast’ after his game of tennis, he would walk part way back with her. She did not descend, so he had to climb up to her. After a week Dorothy followed; and Olga then left for Florence. Ezra and Dorothy remained up the mountain for a week or two before going back to the Mignon ‘& thence to interior’. Around 20 March Dorothy was writing from Rome to Ezra in Florence; and Pound was writing from Florence to his parents, ‘Am here—in palazzo. with huge rooms & bath—Musicians treated better than poets’. He had just finished a ‘new violin suite…for Olga’s London concert’, and had other music he wanted to do, but ‘Am not yet well enough to work at long stretch’. He was still in Florence on 10 April when he told his parents he had lunched with Berenson. By 24 April Olga was in London for her concert, another Rudge–Antheil affair, on 10 May. After the concert Olivia Shakespear wrote to Dorothy that ‘Ezra’s things…were liked by those I spoke to’. (The critics, it has to be said, were not impressed by what they heard of his Fiddle Music: First Suite.) Olivia had taken Olga to lunch at her Club, and thought her ‘a charming girl, and so pretty’.

  Once Olga was out of the way Dorothy rejoined Pound in Florence, and they spent some time together in Perugia and Assisi, though at the end of May Dorothy was in Rome again, and Pound was in Rapallo on his way to Paris.

  From Florence he wrote to Bird demanding the elimination of ‘superfluous rubbish’ from Strater’s designs, especially the ‘love knot in lower right hand corner’ of the initial page of ‘The Fourth Canto’, and the long tail on its capital P, and the extra scene across the top of the page. He had wanted Strater to be confined to the capitals, ‘Restricted space to intensify output’. As to the extra work he was asking of Bird, ‘As anybody who has ever made a good job of anything knows the last 2% of excellence takes more time than the other 98%. That’s why art and commerce never savvy one another.’

  1. Rudge/Antheil Concert poster, Aeolian Hall, London, 10 May 1924.

  While in Perugia he copied a number of secular songs from a fifteenth-century manuscript collection. In Assisi Dorothy was ‘doing sketches of frescos in church here. & of mountains’, while Pound was ‘reading large work on the Este’ of Ferrara. He would draw on that in cantos 20 and 24. By mid-May he was blocking out ‘a few more cantos’ and ‘beginning to want typewriter again = sign of awakening energy’. He was asking Homer for the low-down on US presidents, anything he might have picked up in Washington or from his Congressman father, Thaddeus C. Pound, ‘facts indicative of personality’, such as ‘Jefferson trying to get a gardener who cd. play the french horn in quartette after dinner’. That detail would go into canto 21, and some material Homer sent over would appear in canto 22. In June, when he was back in Paris, he mentioned that he ‘had just summarized Marco Polo’s note on Kublai Khan’s issue of paper currency’—that would start off canto 18. By the end of August he would have ‘another large wad of mss. for cantos, to go on with after Bill has got through printing the 16’.

  When Pound got back to Paris on 1 June Williams was there, winding up a six-month sampling of the seductions of Europe—‘Pagany’ as he called it in his wonderfully self-affirming fantasy account of the trip. Pound introduced him to his Paris—to Léger and his art, to Brancusi in his studio, to Natalie Barney’s salon, to Cocteau—and Williams, like one of Henry James’s American pilgrims, steadfastly saw that there was nothing there for the autochthonous American genius. Pound wanted to talk about music, ‘renaissance music, theory of notation, static “hearing”, melody, time’, and Williams as usual found it all suspect. He could credit Pound with an extraordinary sense of time, accruing from his fine ear for the musical phrase in verse, but remained convinced that he did not know one tone from another and had no natural musical ability or capability whatsoever. He wouldn’t have believed that in his compositions for Olga’s violin it was precisely the tones that could be got from the instrument that Pound was investigating.

  Olga performed some of Pound’s music at a private concert of ‘Musique Américaine: (Declaration of Independence)’ arranged by ‘M. et Mme. Ezra Pound’ in the Salle Pleyel on 7 July. On the programme were two of his renovations of fifteenth-century music from the Perugia manuscript, his Fiddle Music: First Suite, and a ‘Fanfare’ for violin and tambourine to provide an entrance for Antheil. Antheil’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano was performed, and then the première of his String Quartet. Pound’s pieces interested and pleased at least one critic, as specimens of ‘horizontal’ music. Antheil’s, to another cri
tic, provided ‘a gargantuan feast of cacophonies’. Williams was not in the audience, having elected to go champagne-tasting that weekend with William Bird who was a connoisseur of fine wine as of fine printing. But Joyce and Sylvia Beach and the two editors of the Little Review and Hemingway were there. Many in the audience, it was reported, went on immediately to the Dôme, their nerves in a shaken condition from ‘Mr Antheil’s hammer-blows on the piano’.

  Shortly after the concert Dorothy was in London with her mother, now at 34 Abingdon Court W8, to the south of Kensington High Street. Pound took himself off for a walking tour in the region of the Puy-de-Dôme, based on Ussel and visiting Châtelguyon for its ‘intestinal waters’. Back in Paris on 31 July he wrote to Dorothy that he was much better for the walk, ‘First day I was sickish, next day better, and then began to eat two large meals daily.’ A few days later he was hoping it was ‘not a bad sign’ that he was ‘taking pleasure in digestion’. On 15 August he reported that a ‘general survey at hospital’ had revealed that his appendix had gone down to nothing and he was perfectly well, but still too high-strung. His ‘general malaise’ was due to other causes. Dorothy responded with sympathy, and observed that he need not do any heavy work, only his cantos. Towards the end of August he did another walking trip, this time for six days in the Vienne around Poitiers. On this one at least Olga was with him. After it he told his parents, ‘My health seems OK at last.’ Dorothy wrote that she had been thinking of Italy for September, but ‘I shall keep my plans as fluid as possible…until I can definitely settle…I imagine it makes no difference to you?’ At the beginning of September she wrote that she was about to return to Paris, if that would not put him out; and Pound replied in his customary third person and with their ritual cat greeting, ‘Mao | He will be glad to see her. Will be at [Gare du] Nord at 4.5.’

  They had decided to give up the studio at 70bis and move permanently to Italy, departing early October. Pound had had ‘a special book case trunk constructed’ in July with a view to that move, and in August he had been disposing of unwanted books and periodicals. Olivia joined them in Paris on the 8th, and would be with them in Rapallo for the first month or so.

  In their final fortnight there was a distraction. The ‘melancholy man’ who lived across their courtyard and played better chess than Pound, an American poet and opium addict by the name of Ralph Cheever Dunning, fell ill and had no one to look after him, so Pound was kept busy taking the delirious poet to hospitals and finding doctors and dealers. His last act was to buy a cold-cream jar of raw opium from a Cherokee chief on the avenue de l’Opéra and leave it with Hemingway to give to Dunning if there was another emergency. Hemingway tells the story in A Moveable Feast as an instance of the great kindness Pound was capable of. (He also says that when the emergency did arise a deranged Dunning threw the jar back at him, and followed it up with several accurately aimed milk-bottles.) Pound’s reward was to discover that Dunning, though ‘not in the movement’, had written ‘a very fine book of poems during the last year’ which he recommended to Liveright before leaving Paris.

  He had gone to Paris in 1921, he said in an interview in 1956, because the life of the mind was there then, and the life of the literary mind in particular. But after 1924 the life of the mind was no longer in literature, ‘It was in thinking about civic order’—‘and nobody in Paris was doing any of that’. Italy had become the interesting place to be.

  1 Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972): born Dayton, Ohio; heiress to the fortune of the Barney Railroad Car Foundry; lived it up in Paris from the late 1890s, at 20 rue Jacob from 1909; a close friend of Remy de Gourmont, who named her ‘L’Amazone’; by Mauriac she was called ‘le pape de Lesbos’ on account of her much celebrated Sapphic affaires and writings; she combined hedonism with high seriousness, was generous in support of artists and the arts, and kept up a famous social and intellectual salon.

  2 This is the one that has been performed a number of times since Robert Hughes edited the score for performance and directed the world première of the complete work in Berkeley, California, in November 1971. See appendices for an outline of the opera and of the successive states of the score.

  3 George Antheil (1900–59): American pianist, composer, and iconoclast in the musical avant-garde in Paris in the 1920s—his Ballet mécanique (1926) provoked a famous riot. Admiring his demanding ‘short hard bits of rhythm hammered down, worn down so that they were indestructible and unbendable’ (GK 94–5)—Antheil’s Mechanisms (1923) would be one instance—EP promoted him as a Vorticist in music, and wrote Antheil and The Treatise on Harmony (1924) to present his thinking about Antheil’s and his own music. They drifted apart after 1933 when A. went to Hollywood to compose and direct background music for films. Published his autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, in 1945.

  4 The 1923/71 score calls for ten solo voices, chorus, and seventeen instrumentalists who among them play an unusually diverse lot of instruments: ‘nose-flute, flute and piccolo (one player), oboe, saxaphone, bassoon, trumpet (for two bars only!), horn, two trombones, mandolin, violin, cello, three contrebassi, a variety of drums (including six tympani), bells, “bass bells” (sic)…gongs, sandpaper, dried bones and a percussionist whistling’ (Robert Hughes).

  5 ‘Heaulmière’ in the 1926 version for voice and violin, in ‘simple though mixed meters’ (CPMEP 148 n. 10), is printed photographically from a score in Olga Rudge’s hand in GK 361–5.

  6 It appears that under this contract Pound received $500 in all. His translation of Édouard Estaunié’s L’Appel de la route as The Call of the Road was published by Boni & Liveright in November 1923, with the translator named as ‘Hiram Janus’. ‘Estaunié is a bad writer’ he told his mother in 1924, ‘couldn’t escape the translation but…got my year’s leisure to do the Malatesta’.

  7 The single sentence came in the context of Pound’s Bel Esprit initiative: ‘During his recent three months’ absence [from the bank] due to complete physical breakdown he produced a very important sequence of poems: one of the few things in contemporary literature to which one can ascribe permanent value’ (‘Credit and the Fine Arts’, NA 30.22 (30 March 1922) 284). The 1924 letter made a point about the notes—that the poem should be read without them. Of the poem itself it said only that it ‘seems to me an emotional unit’, and that its unity was from ‘intensity or poignancy of expression’ (‘A Communication’, 1924: A Magazine of the Arts 3 (1924) 97–8).

  8 William Bird (1888–1963): in 1922, while European Manager of Consolidated Press Association of Washington, DC, acquired a seventeenth-century Mathieu printing press in order to pursue an interest in typography and hand-printing, and set up his Three Mountains Press at 29 Quai d’Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris; entered into an association with Robert McAlmon and his Contact Editions, and gave Ford space from which to run his transatlantic review; published the ‘Inquest’ series of six small books edited by Pound, and Pound’s Antheil and The Treatise on Harmony (1924) and A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925). Printed nothing after 1925, and sold his press and Caslon Old Face type to Nancy Cunard who used it for her Hours Press.

  9 Olga Rudge (1895–1996), b. Youngstown, Ohio; educated in Europe from the age of 9, at first in England, then from 1910 at the Paris Conservatoire; her mother, a noted singer, made her home in London, then in Paris, at 2 rue Chamfort in the XVIth arrondissement, and took Olga into the musical and literary salons of Parisian society. By 1914 Olga was giving concert recitals in Paris, London, and other European cities and receiving excellent reviews. Antheil, when he first heard her play in 1923, considered her ‘a consummate violinist…with [a] superb lower register of the D and G strings’. In the 1930s she had a small house in Venice; an apartment in a house at Sant’Ambrogio above Rapallo; and spent much time in Siena as Secretary of the Accademia Chigiana. She was a principal performer in the concerts Pound organized in Rapallo between 1933 and 1939; catalogued in 1936, at Pound’s instigation, the 309 unedited instrumental pieces by Vivaldi in manu
script in Turin; co-founded the Centro di Studi Vivaldiani in Siena, and became a central figure in the Vivaldi revival. She was the mother of Pound’s daughter, and their intimate relationship endured for nearly sixty years, though it was lived out in discreet privacy until his last decade. In her own last years she was cared for by their daughter at Schloss Brunnenburg in the Italian Tyrol.

  2 : FROM RAPALLO, 1924–1932

  Human complications

  Olga Rudge wanted to conceive Ezra’s child; the more so, she would record in her later years, because Dorothy would not have a child. In mid-November 1924 she wrote in her diary, ‘piantato un figlio’, a son planted, though it would be a daughter she would give birth to the following July. Then, fifteen months after that, in September 1926, Dorothy did have a child, a son, but not by Ezra. He observed these ‘awkward human complications’, and refused to let them disturb his concentration on composing cantos. What he wanted was to conceive a vital form of mind and to impregnate at least America with it.

  For the next twenty years he would be working at that from Italy. He had been ‘rejuvinated by 15 years in going to Paris’, he told Lewis, and had now ‘added another ten of life, by quitting same’. He told his father that ‘the north side of the alps is an error, useful only to make one glad to get to this side’. Rapallo in mid-October was ‘empty and tranquil’; the sun was warm; he played tennis, having bought a new racquet; he loafed, and ‘D. bathed in the gulf yesterday’. Someone at the tennis club offered to build them a house, but he did not ‘want to settle just yet’. They had taken an extra room at the Mignon; and just about everything they needed, ‘save the clavicord and a few woiks of Aht’, was contained in their trunks and suitcases and the travelling book case. ‘Racquet, typewriter, bassoon’ were the ‘necessaries’ he thought worth mentioning. More cantos were on the way, with 18 and 19 in draft in November.