Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  In mid-December they went down to Sicily and toured around over the next two months with a view to settling there. It had its interest, they decided, but wasn’t a place for them to live. Dorothy found plenty to paint, including an apparently passive Etna from Taormina, but the fleas made it hard to find somewhere to paint from. Yeats and his wife joined them for a couple of weeks in January. He and Pound tried out the acoustic of ‘the old out-of-door Greek theatre in Siracusa’, and Pound annoyed him by bellowing Sappho’s Greek and refusing ‘to spout English poesy’, because the ‘English verse wasn’t CUT’. In Palermo Pound borrowed Yeats’s typewriter and ‘typed to the end of XX’. He mentioned having got so far in a letter to Dr Saunders at Hamilton College. Saunders had wondered if he might return to America to lecture or as a visiting professor, and Pound was telling him there would not be enough money in that to warrant the loss of time. He thought he ‘ought to stick at’ his long poem, having for the moment ‘a certain amount of leisure & uninterruptedness to go on with’ it.

  In mid-February Pound was in Rome, and so too was Olga. Between her concert engagements they visited the zoo and looked at the lions until Olga expected their child would turn out to be a leoncino, a lion cub. Pound apparently ‘had a phobia’ against getting her a wedding ring, though when he was back in Rapallo he changed his mind about that, for appearance’s sake. He was at once supporting Olga in having the child, and maintaining the distance respectability demanded. She, accepting that, was seeking somewhere discreetly to lie up or to die in, as she put it, and wondering under what law it might be best to have the child, French, Swiss, or Italian. Pound advised against Monte Carlo because the US immigration quota for persons born in France could make it difficult to get into America in the case of war; but then, he added, there might not be another war ‘for forty years’. While in Rome he wrote to his mother that he was doing ‘a little general reading for the Florentine canto’; and he told his father that he was acting for the inventor of a new type of locomotive and wanted Homer to see if ‘Baldwins’ could be interested in buying it—it would depend on whether they could ‘buck the coal interest by a better type of non coal burning engine’. ‘Study the two last cantos I sent you’, he urged, referring to the anecdotes of the ways of big business in XVIII and XIX.

  He wrote to Olga from the Mignon on 4 March to ask her to find out the make of the electric heater in the friends’ apartment she had been lent in Rome. He and Dorothy were ‘In act of taking apartment, plumb on roof on sea front’. The address on the notepaper he had printed was ‘Via Marsala 12, int. 5’—their flat was on the fifth floor, at the top. There were a hundred steps or more to climb—it was in the contract that the lift did not work—but the small apartment’s narrow rooms gave on to a broad rooftop terrace looking south over the hill-enclosed bay to the open sea. At first they went on taking their meals at the Mignon, for ‘about 8 or 9 [dollars] a week, each’; but they soon settled into the routine of eating in the sociable café-restaurant of the Albergo Rapallo on the ground floor of the building. ‘Via Marsala 12, int. 5’, the flat on the roof above the Albergo, was to be the Pounds’ ‘permanent locale’ until they were evicted along with the other sea-front residents by the German military in 1943.

  The cantos continued. By 25 March Pound had ‘typed out most of seven cantos, taking it up to XXIII’. April was ‘mostly borasco’—the blustering cold wind from the north—‘very annoying as nothing to do but tennis’. About this time a new magazine called This Quarter and published in Paris dedicated its first number to ‘ EZRA POUND who by his creative work, his editorship of several magazines, his helpful friendship for young and unknown artists, his many and untiring efforts to win better appreciation of what is first-rate in art, comes first to our mind as meriting the gratitude of this generation’. However, Pound failed to praise the young editors in return and the dedication was withdrawn in the third number. At the beginning of June he told Agnes Bedford that he had just been on a ‘two weeks chase’ through Rimini, Cesena, San Leo, and Bologna. He didn’t say what he had been after, but that would have been when he had the handsomely bound A Draft of XVI Cantos celebrated as ‘a CAPOLAVORO magnifico’, a majestic masterpiece, by the Fascist Commandante dalla Piazza in Rimini, and when he personally presented a copy to the Malatestine library in Cesena.

  Olga Rudge, meanwhile, had been waiting out her time in Sirmione, trying to avoid acquaintances and gossip. ‘She hasn’t been so bored’, she wrote to Pound in their usual impersonal style, ‘since she was in her teens and nothing ever seemed to happen.’ ‘Where OFFICIALLY is she’, Pound asked, ‘I feel the reports shd. coincide.’ They needed to devise a cover story, in particular for Antheil who was organizing lucrative and prestigious concerts in America and could not understand why she would not commit herself. In early June Olga moved to Bressanone-Brixen in the Alto Adige and arranged to give birth in the hospital there. Then there was the problem of the name to go on the birth certificate for the father. It could not be ‘Ezra Pound’ since he was married to someone not the mother, and ‘N. N.’ for no name would brand the child for life. So Olga made up a marriage to one Arthur, the name of her brother killed in the war, and when Maria Rudge was born on 9 July 1925 she was declared for official purposes to be ‘figlia di Arturo’.

  Olga informed Pound that she had given birth to a ‘[leon]cina’, and he received the news with enthusiasm. It appears though that she had no clear idea of what to do with the child she had so much wanted. She was determined to resume her career as a violinist and could not, would not, look after the baby and bring it up herself, ‘having no talent that way’. Leaving it in a local orphanage seemed a way out, that was if the child survived. After ten days she wrote to Pound that she had not expected him to come, only ‘if you would like to see the child you had perhaps better come as it will probably not live—there is very little left of it…it just doesn’t catch on’. It would have been different, she was told, if she had consented to nurse. Then came the turn of fortune. ‘There is a contadina here whose child has died—who can nurse it a few weeks at least…I think it will go if it only gets a start—it looks very grim and determined.’ Maria was given into the care of the farming woman, Frau Johanna Marcher, and did begin to thrive. Pound arrived; the child, Frau Marcher, and her farm at Gais near Bruneck were approved; and it was settled that Maria would be fostered and brought up by the Marchers in the Pustertal mountain valley. Her parents would visit from time to time, descending like gods from their mysterious heaven with gifts and ordinances; but throughout her childhood it was, according to her own matchless account, her peasant Mamme and Tatte who nourished, loved, and formed her with generative humanity and wisdom.

  In September Olga was in Florence, doing serious exercises and dancing to recover her figure, and practising to resume playing at concert standard. On the 14th Pound mentioned to his parents that it was ‘D’s birthday…9 new plants fer the roof; funny lookin articles; not my province, herbage’. They had visitors through from Paris, Natalie Barney and Romaine Brookes, and Nancy Cunard. In October Dorothy and Olivia Shakespear went off to Perugia and Florence; while Pound went to Milan, to Modena for the Este library, and then on to Venice. From Venice he wrote to Dorothy that there were letters for her there, sent on no doubt with his from Rapallo, including ‘one from Egypt’. Olga sent him some Edelweis from the mountains and reported that ‘la mia leoncinina’ was doing well. She was in Paris through November and her concert on the 30th, as Pound heard from Natalie Barney, was ‘crowded and successful’.

  ‘Canti XXII to XXIII are about finished’, Pound told his mother at the end of October, ‘Am going on to XXIV etc.’ At the end of November he was thinking of cutting up his ‘Villon’ for a concert performance—he would become caught up over the next two or three months in thoroughly revising the score. He was also preparing for Liveright a definitive edition ‘of all Ezra Pound’s poems except the unfinished “Cantos”’, but ‘throwing out…the “soft” stuff, a
nd the metrical exercises’. The latter, he confessed, were ‘what I once bluffed myself into believing were something more than exercises but which no longer convince me that I had anything to say when I wrote ’em; or anything but a general feeling that it wuz time I wrote a pome’. Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound would appear, handsomely printed on good paper, in December 1926, with a second printing in February 1927, a third in January 1930, and a fourth in May 1932. The poet was becoming known and appreciated for what he had put behind him.

  Dorothy Pound sailed from Genoa for Cairo on the Esperia about 10 December, and was met there by ‘R’. Ezra was expecting Olga in Rapallo on the 11th—she would be with him for Christmas—and Eliot came for four days, having ‘at last escaped from Lloyds’ Bank’. To divert him Olga ‘played him the Bach Chaconne before breakfast’, and Pound took him to tea with Max Beerbohm. Dorothy, writing to Ezra from the ship, affected a footloose and fancy free gaiety; but in a letter from Cairo on the 20th she wrote, ‘At the heart of all this, I have had a couple of quarts d’heures of tragedy—which I knew I should find.’ ‘I hope you are all right’, she ended, ‘warm and not in too much confusion?’

  Pound had workmen in to decorate their flat in February, apparently because Olga had told him he ought to have it done up. He told her that he had ‘at last thought out a decorative scheme that he trusts will satisfy her fastidious taste’. In his letters to his father he mentioned more than once, as if not knowing what else to say about her being in Cairo, that Dorothy ‘seems to be enjoying pyramids’. He had received from her ‘one oriental drapery…emitting THE most enormous and foul stench of mice’, and had hung the shawl out on the terrazzo hoping ‘it will have disinfected itself by the time D. gets back’. It was still stinking though when Dorothy returned on 1 March, ‘somewhat worn by trip; or at least dessicated with Egypt’. She was ‘half ill’ for some weeks after getting back, and for that reason, Pound explained to Olga, he was unable to get to Milan to see her. ‘Troppo incommodo. Sorry.’, he had wired, to which she replied, ‘She is not pleased’. It might be his idea that a ‘maîtresse convenable’ should be ‘a convenient mistress’, but it was not hers. She confessed to ‘a coup de désespoir’ when he wouldn’t come; but then passed that off as perhaps an effect from ‘noting Muss’s acquisitions’ in an exhibition in Milan. She ‘thoroughly understands’, she wrote in fierce submission, ‘that nothing ever must be done to compromise him in the eyes of the U. T. C.’, the Rapallo tennis club. In the midst of that exchange Pound wrote in a notebook: ‘24/3/1926 // There exist paradisal states | not death their portal | nor death in them…’.

  Their letters resumed their usual topics: his music, her concerts; private jokes—as about the lioness who escaped from a circus and walked through Alessandria; news of Ford who had been in Rapallo, and had there received information he needed to complete ‘crucial part of the final spasm of Tietjens’, that is, exactly what it was that drove Tietjens mad in A Man Could Stand Up—. In April he wrote that he had nine cantos more or less finished—they would have been 17 to 25—‘but they don’t make a vollum’. He went on, ‘She suggest a nice simple and continuous subjeck of UNIVERSAL INTEREST, to run from 26 to 33,’ which would imply that he had it in mind to match the first major division of Dante’s one hundred cantos.

  In mid-May he mentioned to his mother that he had ‘just been down to Rome for four days, heard a lot of modern moozik’. In fact he had gone down for a concert in which Olga Rudge and the pianist Alfredo Casella played music by Satie and Ravel, and Pound’s own ‘Homage Froissart’, a piece for violin and piano he had completed in February at Livorno. By the end of May Olga and the Pounds were all three in Paris, Olga in the apartment her father still leased for her at 2 rue Chamfort on the Right Bank, and Dorothy and Ezra on the Left Bank in the Hôtel-Restaurant Foyot, rue de Tournon, just down from the Palais du Luxembourg. In June there was the riot of Antheil’s Ballet mécanique on the 19th; then on the 29th the concert performance of Le Testament, with Olga Rudge violin, before an audience invited by M. et Mme. Ezra Pound.

  The Pounds stayed on in Paris through August and September. On 11 September Pound wrote, ‘Dear Dad | next generation (male) arrived. | Both D. and it appear to be doing well.’ That was the first his parents knew of any ‘next generation’. It was Hemingway who had gone with Dorothy to the American hospital at Neuilly; but the next day Pound went to the Mairie there to register, ‘sur déclaration du père’, the birth of Pound, Omar, on 10 September 1926, to Ezra Pound, man of letters, and his wife Dorothy Shakespear. Omar would also be registered as a US citizen. On the 27th Pound himself was in the hospital, and sent Olga a note: ‘Have had small operation—My fambly leave hospital today about 2.30. He would be pleased to see her.’ He remained in the hospital for a week, having ‘all the possible taps, tests, analyses etc.’, and being told there was nothing wrong with him. He was just ‘completely exhausted’ and worn out, and was still in that state when he was back in Rapallo in October and ‘Damn glad’ to be there.

  It had been arranged that Omar would be looked after for the time being in Paris by Raymonde Collignon whom Pound had known as a young singer in London, and that Olivia would informally ‘adopt’ her grandchild in England. The following June Dorothy, with a nurse to accompany her, fetched him from Paris and placed him in the Norland Institute and Nurseries, 11 Pembridge Square, near Kensington Gardens. ‘Omar’s eyes give the show away badly’, she told Pound, ‘heaven help us’. Later the boy would live with a retired Norland nurse in the village of Felpham near Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast. Dorothy would spend time with him on her summer visits to England, but otherwise would be a rather absent parent. Young Omar would see his legal father only once, or possibly twice, until after 1945.

  Pound had sufficiently recovered from his ‘exhaustion’ in November to be thinking of bringing out a magazine of his own, to be known as The Exile. ‘Do you favour excluding all women writers?’, he asked Olga. His letters to her were all about her concert engagements and how she should be promoting her career, about the state of the sea and the weather in Rapallo, and about where he had got to with his cantos. He was with her in Rome in December, and again in February when she performed for Mussolini in private. In time the arrangement was that they would be together, usually in Venice, while Dorothy was away in England. Dorothy made it clear that she didn’t ‘see much fun in being alone in Rap. for long’, and especially did not fancy being stuck there while Ezra was away with Olga. Otherwise she seemed complaisant about their continuing relationship. The Rapallo apartment was adorned now with the Gaudier sculptures—‘Cat and Water Carrier contemplating the marble Embracers’—and with their Lewis and Gaudier drawings. Later there was the clavichord too, and eventually the Gaudier ‘Hieratic Head of E.P.’ would be mounted on the terrace, its stone eyes fixed upon the ever-varying sea.

  In these years at the end of the 1920s Pound was trying to persuade Olga to accept him as a ‘somewhat functional’ being, that is, as concerned only with the WORK in hand, and as NOT interested in personal feelings, neither his own nor those of others. When she was depressed about her playing or about never knowing when she might see him he would tell her, ‘I do not think life is possible if you stop to consider peoples’ personal feelings’; and besides, if he had the energy to reply to her desperate letters ‘he wd. putt it into his job’. ‘You have a set of values I don’t care a damn for’, he wrote to her at a critical moment in their relations, ‘I do not care a damn about private affairs, private life, personal interests’. He simply had no use and could see no use for the personal and the subjective at this time.

  That dismissal or denial of ‘personal feelings’ would go some way to explaining the personal predicament he had got himself into. In time it would prove to be the tragic flaw by which he would be undone in his private life. He had held to the conviction—it had appeared fundamental to his constitution—that the individual should be untrammelled by social conventions or by
narrow-minded laws. Yet he was now bound by law to recognize as his own the child that was not his; while in law he could not be recognized as the father of his own child. The consequent inner conflict, and his inability to acknowledge let alone resolve it, precisely because it was profoundly personal and subjective, could well account for the state of exhaustion he was in around the time of Omar’s birth.

  To keep up appearances, for Dorothy’s sake probably, his passionate relationship with Olga had to be hidden—though only the indifferent would have been unaware of it. That he had a daughter he was proud of had to be kept secret—it was some years before his own father found out, years more before his mother was told. Nothing could be allowed to disturb the bland conventional perception of the devotedly married Mr and Mrs Ezra Pound. Charles Norman was told by Mrs Willard Trask how she was struck by them at a dinner given by Ford in Paris in 1930. Pound was ‘very American, talking like an American, somewhat pompous’, while Dorothy was ‘absolutely beautiful, beautiful with authentic beauty’, and ‘such a lady’. The Pounds had sat ‘side by side on the sofa’, and ‘looked devoted’. That devotion, however, would have depended upon their leaving personal feelings aside. ‘The only reason people can live near each other is because they let each other ALONE,’ Pound had asserted to Olga.

  Ford had said to the Trasks ‘that Pound had told him once that Dorothy was the only woman he had ever met who could say anything, and it “would be all right, she was such a lady”’. Evidently Dorothy could do anything too and it would be all right, because she could do it with perfect manners and without showing any disturbing emotion. She could cuckold her husband, apparently with premeditation and cool determination, and in a manner which rather violently contravened the principles and the prejudices of her class. (‘A touch of the tarbrush’, people would signal to each other when Omar’s eyes gave the show away.) Pound may have been confused, confused even to the point of inner exhaustion, by her doing it without any apparent alteration of affection. But it had to be all right by his principle of not taking personal feelings into account, and of allowing others to do whatever they had to do provided they made no emotional demands upon him.