Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The mystical philosophy becomes very technical and specialized in Pound’s wrestling with the possible meaning of certain words in ‘Donna mi prega’, though what he was after was perhaps not so very far from his Imagiste mind ‘ever at the interpretation of this vital universe’, ‘the universe of fluid force…the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive’. By the time his Guido Cavalcanti Rime finally appeared he had had enough of ‘the active and passive intellect (possibile intelleto, etc.)’, and of trying to apprehend the Canzone by way of the vocabulary of medieval philosophy. That had entangled him in confusions and obscurities, and brought him to the conclusion that the mystery was not to be explained in words, or at any rate that ‘Verbal manifestation is of very limited use’. The trouble, he declared, is that one knows more than one ever puts into words, and that once one’s immediate knowledge gets into ‘the vain locus of verbal exchanges, it is damnably and insuperably difficult to get it thence into the consciousness’ where it can be contemplated and assimilated. The mind of Europe had lost in that way what Paganism knew, or at least ‘the ancient wisdom seems to have disappeared when the mysteries entered the vain space of Christian theological discussion’.

  In 1931 Pound was recommending in his prose ‘that students trying to understand the poesy of southern Europe from 1050 to 1400 should try to open it’ using as the key, not the philosophy of the time, but instead the cult of Eleusis. That would explain, he suggested, ‘not only general phenomena but particular beauties in Arnaut Daniel or in Guido Cavalcanti’. As to what he meant by ‘the cult of Eleusis’, he gave the hint that at the root of the mystery was ‘consciousness of the unity with nature’, while pointing out that those words would be an empty formulation without the immediate intuition of the interaction. He also went so far as to translate a rather wordy sentence from an Italian brochure to the effect that ‘Paganism…not only did not disdain the erotic factor in its religious institutions but celebrated and exalted it, precisely because it encountered in it the marvellous vital principle infused by invisible Divinity into manifest nature’. Again he remarked that the idea was at once ‘“too well known”’ and ‘not in the least well known’. In an unpublished note he wrote, ‘Coition the sacrament…The door to knowledge of nature…shd/ be moment of highest maximum consciousness…enlightenment.’

  Partly in despair of expressing through translation and explanation all that Cavalcanti meant to him Pound turned to setting a selection of his poems to be sung in the original. ‘The meaning can be explained’, he wrote, ‘but the emotion and the beauty can not be explained.’ They could, however, be brought ‘to the ear of the people, even when they can not understand it, or can not understand all of it at once’.

  The idea of his composing another opera, this time with radio in mind from the start, seems to have come up when he was in Paris in May 1931 working with A. E. F. Harding of the BBC to adapt Le Testament for its radio production. That involved changing the ‘visual libretto into an audible one’. In Venice that summer the air was ‘full of radio…opry etc.’—he had heard a ‘very good Rigoletto’, he mentioned in one of his letters to Dorothy. When his Villon was broadcast on two successive evenings in October he listened to it on shortwave on both occasions in a Rapallo electrician’s kitchen, and learnt something of the limitations of the still relatively undeveloped medium. His next opera, he told Dorothy, ‘will be much clearer’, by which he meant much simpler musically, and better adapted to the frequencies that could be transmitted without excessive distortion or loss.

  He had started sketching out music based on some of Cavalcanti’s ballate in September, and these sketches led to his composing in the latter half of October a set of four short Sonate ‘Ghuidonis’ for solo violin. That work was premiered by Olga Rudge in Paris in December. The melodies from the Sonate then went into the opera which was mainly composed between July and October 1932, with some final tidying up in June 1933. By then, however, Harding had been moved to another section of the BBC and the idea of a radio production lapsed. The score was put away, some in a suitcase under a bed and some among other manuscripts, and it was as good as lost until 1983, a full decade after Pound’s death and half a century after it was completed, when it was recovered, edited, and produced in a concert version by Robert Hughes.

  The opera is not so interesting musically as the earlier Le Testament, and does not bring out, to my ear at least, much in the way of ‘the emotion and the beauty [that] can not be explained’. I find the interest to be rather in Guido’s psychology and in the way he lives out his ideas. The selection of his ballate, and the Canzone d’amore, present his developing states of mind; and these are so arranged as to trace out the course of his life. The attention is thus shifted from the philosophy to what it would mean to live by it.

  The first love of youth is already behind Guido in the opera, his songs of commonplace desire left for others to sing in the streets. Love draws him now to serve the idea of Love, and drives him to seek to know and to understand what it is by analysing and meditating upon his own experience. So his love grows intellectual, and the opera builds to the ‘Donna me prega’ in which the lady must be Sophia, the intellect’s beloved. For her he defines the action of love as the process of universal light illuminating the mind. There was the light in a woman’s eyes which first roused his desire, and which then, treasured in the mind, has so lit up his understanding that it has brought him ‘into the clear light of philosophy’ where he sees into the mystery of being. In the final act, as he dies having committed himself to the Lady he has served, a Lady characterized by her ‘sweet intelligence’, it appears that his desire is entirely absorbed and satisfied in that intellectual vision. The audience is made aware, however, that his philosophical paradise is in his own mind only, and that it ceases with him. The light from Eleusis and from the troubadours of Provence has at once reached an extreme expression and has failed in him. His enlightenment has been without effect upon his world; and now, the opera concludes, the world will be given over to the vagaries of Fortune. 4

  Pound’s Cavalcanti it would appear, is another of his isolated individuals of genius, another who sees the light others are impervious to but is unable to make it prevail. His new mind, his new forma mentis, did not set a renaissance going. All the same, being registered in his canzoni, it would outlast his and the time’s failings.

  In 1932 and 1933 while he was finishing his Cavalcanti Pound was also sketching out two other compositions on related themes. The one he completed was a transformation into wordless music for solo violin of Dante’s ‘Al poco giorno’, a sestina expressing the condition of being locked in frustrated desire for a young woman who seems the figure of joyful Spring but towards the poet is unyielding stone. Pound at first draws contrasting melodies from the words but progressively takes off into a purely musical development of them to produce, in Robert Hughes’s judgement, his ‘most ambitious and advanced work for solo violin’. One may take the music to be a sympathetic yet critical response to Dante’s poem, treating it as the negative aspect of his sublimation of desire (as in La vita nuova); but the music remains beyond words, and mysterious.

  The other work was a planned but never completed third opera, ‘Collis O Heliconii’. This was to feature, first, Catullus’ epithalamium, ‘Collis o Heliconii’ (Carmen LXI), with its repeated invocation ‘o Hymenaee Hymen, | o Hymen Hymenaee’ as the bride is brought to her man and the Roman marriage bed; and then Sappho’s ode (the one that begins ‘Poikilothron’) calling upon Aphrodite to light in the one Sappho loves a passion as ecstatic as her own. In Margaret Fisher’s apt formulation, the opera was to have been ‘a celebration of the sacrament’ following upon ‘the intellectualization of the sacrament’ in Cavalcanti and ‘the degradation of the sacrament’ in Le Testament. Pound’s not completing it will have had something to do with its presenting ‘no small technical problem’; but was probably due more to his being drawn out of music by his increasing activism. Some time in 1932 he
told the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, ‘I live in music for days at a time.’ After 1933 those days were over.

  Threads, tesserae

  Olga Rudge told a story about Wanda Landowska, the renowned harpsichordist. Landowska had been interrupted in mid-sentence by the arrival of friends and a fuss about tickets, and had come back after a quarter of an hour and continued her sentence from where she left off. ‘Is it the working with different voices in the fugues etc. makes her able to keep all the threads in her hand separate and distinct?’, Olga wondered, ‘like in a way the cantos?’

  Rapallo, in 1928, set Yeats thinking of ‘The little town described in the Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Keats as a matter of fact gave no description of his ‘little town by river or sea shore’; but he did place it, ‘emptied of [its] folk’ and silent and desolate as it is, in the deathless condition of the well-wrought urn. Yeats, who was feeling his mortality upon him, was in search of a quiet haven away from the strenuous life he had been leading as an Irish senator, ‘away from forbidden Dublin winters and all excited crowded places’, and he must have been hoping that in Rapallo he might be able to write his rage against old age into the stillness and silence of art. For him the mountains which surround the town appeared to ‘shelter the bay from all but the south wind’, and its houses were ‘mirrored in an almost motionless sea’. On his walk along the sea front he remarked ‘peasants or working people’ of the town, ‘a famous German dramatist’, and only ‘a few tourists seeking tranquillity’. He was glad to find ‘no great harbour full of yachts, no great yellow strand, no great ballroom, no great casino’, and relieved that ‘the rich carry elsewhere their strenuous lives’.

  Pound appreciated other advantages of Rapallo, notably its being on the main railway line from Rome to Genoa and all places east, north, and west. It was easy to get away to Verona and Venice, to Austria, Germany, Switzerland, to Paris and London, or to go south to Siena and Florence or to Rome. It was convenient too for friends, fellow writers and artists, to stop off on their travels; and from time to time interesting new people would turn up on the sea front and in its cafés bringing news of what was being done in one metropolis or another. In 1927 Adrian Stokes was there ‘with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc.)’, and Pound read The Decline of the West ‘in return for tips on XV century’. He told his father that ‘As S. seems to mean by “The West” a lot of things I dislike, I shd. like to accept his infantine belief that they are “declining”’; but he was more taken by the Hungarian novelist Joseph Bard’s talk of Leo Frobenius and the concept of paideuma or culture-formation. Relying on such communications, and of course on international mails, Pound used Rapallo as a base from which to mount his energetic campaigns to reform the world. Rapallo, he told his mother, was ‘rapidly becoming the intellexshull centre of yourup’.

  The small town seems not to have gone in for the manifestations of enthusiasm for Mussolini that were common elsewhere. McAlmon wrote in Pound’s Exile that ‘Italy then was maddening with rowdy, Fascistic, Italy-saving arrogance’ on the part of ‘her Mussolini-hypnotized town-toughs’. Mary and George Oppen saw something of that in Venice in 1932. As Mary Oppen recalled the incident, the Piazza San Marco suddenly filled with Black Shirts crying out, because Mussolini’s life had been threatened, ‘Il Duce—pericolo del morte’, and on the faces of the press of young men they could see ‘only a blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce’. So far as one can tell from Pound’s correspondence that did not happen in Rapallo. One does find other refractions of Fascism in his letters, as his mentioning to Dorothy in October 1931 that ‘evidently Vinciguerra and Lauro were sentenced to 15 years each…L. was drowned.’ Lauro de Bosis, a gifted young writer they had known in Paris, upon being sentenced to confino or internal exile flew over Rome dropping thousands of anti-Fascist leaflets then flew on out to sea and was not seen again.

  Both Ezra and Dorothy were often on the move away from Rapallo and from each other. At the end of April 1928 Dorothy was in London and Ezra was on his way to Vienna. He stopped off to visit Mary in Gais and to give her a tiny violin from her mother. (Mary, not yet three, ‘banged it hard on the chicken coop, creating great fracas among the fluttering hens’.) George Antheil was in Vienna, giving well-received concerts and having his music published; Olga Rudge was there to play Mozart; and Pound was there encouraging her in her career and doing what he could to promote it and to get Antheil to promote it. An Antheil–Rudge American tour was in prospect. Also in prospect was a new Antheil production of Pound’s Le Testament, in Germany or possibly in Dublin. Neither that nor the American tour materialized.

  One thing that did come out of the weeks Pound spent in Vienna was ‘the Mensdorff letter’, as Pound would call it. Count Albert von Mensdorff was European agent for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, and Pound persuaded him to write to his chairman in New York, Professor Nicholas Murray Butler, calling for an investigation of the causes of war. The ‘active forces toward war’ included, according to the letter, first, ‘the whole trade in munitions and armaments’; and secondly, ‘Overproduction and dumping, leading to trade rivalries’. The letter went on to ask for clarification of ‘The principles of international law as recognised by the decisions of the permanent international Court of Justice’, and then to ask the meaning of the unwillingness of the USA to adhere to that Court. The letter, with its very pertinent concerns, was politely acknowledged and ignored, to Pound’s lasting disillusionment with the Carnegie Endowment and its chairman.

  Dorothy wrote from London that Kitty Heyman, who had been playing Scriabin there, had spoken ‘so warmly of Olga’. She wondered how Kitty could ‘play so well with all that mystic mist?!’ In Neumayer’s bookshop she had found a set of Morrison’s seven-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language and ‘would almost certainly get it’. Little Omar was a ‘very cheerful soul—not very demonstrative’; yet, given a photo of Ezra by Olivia, he had ‘kissed it passionately twice, so I suppose he has adopted you’. He ‘Can lay the lunch table!’—this at eighteen months—and was ‘very quick to learn with his hands: very preoccupied with my bag or box’. At the beginning of June Dorothy enquired of Pound, ‘Is Vienna now the centre of the world?’, and would he be returning to Rapallo?

  Pound was in Rome at the end of September and through October of 1928 researching the Cavalcanti manuscripts in the Vatican library. Nancy Cunard was in Rome too, and sent a note to his hotel signed ‘Avril’, ‘Longing to see you…Do we dine early?’ Next morning there was another note from ‘Avril’: ‘No but really I never saw anyone get electrically drunk (you) and as for what I (head mouth stomach) this 9 a.m. feel no-one need discuss’. ‘Oh Ezra’, the note went on, ‘I’m not yet grounded enough in my new love life [with Henry Crowder] to be without certain whispers of need-company such day after-drunk days as this…when, where, where you?’

  In October Olga Rudge seized a chance offered her to buy a small house in Venice. Calle Querini 252, San Gregorio, was in a quiet cul-de-sac not far from the Dogana and the church of Santa Maria della Salute. ‘Three matchboxes on top of each other’ was how it impressed one visitor. She raised the money by asking a good friend to pay a promised legacy in advance and asking her father for the rest. It was to be a place of her own, a private place for Pound to come to when he would. Only Pound just then was concentrating on his edition of Cavalcanti, and on his next cantos, and showed no enthusiasm for her project. Through the winter of 1928–9 Olga fell into an anxious depression and told him in one fierce letter after another how lonely and unhappy she was and unable to work at her violin through never knowing when she would see him if at all and feeling that he was casting her off for his legitimate wife. ‘Five minutes of lucidity’, Pound assured her, ‘ought to show you that when I have been with you I was by no means magnetized TOWARD anyone else, or wanting to get BACK to anyone.’ Then he added, ‘It is only when you are doing your own job that there can be any magnetism’. There he was not choosing ‘perfecti
on of the work’ against ‘perfection of the life’; he was making the one the condition of the other. And it was in this moment of crisis, when Olga had written, ‘Caro, I beg you, if you can explain or help, to be quick—I am just about finished’, that he declared that his life would be impossible if he stopped to consider people’s personal feelings. Perhaps she should take a younger man as her lover, he considerately advised. In time the little house would become their ‘hidden nest’, but just then Olga’s heart was no longer in it.