Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  In late March 1929 Pound left Rapallo and headed for Venice with the intention, he told Olga, of doing the beams, arches, and furniture of her casa. He did not tell her about his amour de voyage with a certain Miss Pamela Lovibond, though he did say something cryptic about having ‘calf on the brain’. Miss Lovibond, one gathers from his letters to her, was a young English woman who knew Greek as well as Italian, had an interest in art, and was travelling in Italy with her family. From Verona, where he was trying to get into the library to check Cavalcanti’s ‘l’aere tremare’, he wrote to Miss Lovibond at the Hotel Verdi in Rapallo, ‘Darling…If I don’t think you may arrive in Venezia on Wednesday—I am incapable of thinking anything, anyhow—except along complicated Machiavellian reasons that wouldn’t take in a mouse.’ His address in Venice would be ‘Seguso, | 779 Zattere’. That was a Pensione half a mile or so from Calle Querini—it was where Olga was staying while her house was made habitable. His next letter, to ‘Dearest Pam’, was forwarded from Rapallo to Brioni, a small island off the Istrian coast across the Adriatic, the Lovibonds having gone there without stopping in Venice. ‘Divine radiance lacking an address’, Pound wrote, ‘light of my life’, and signed off ‘il tuo intendido. | E.’ A few days later—it was now Thursday 4 April and he had evidently heard from the goddess—he had to tell her ‘can’t use telephone in open hall’, and nor could he disguise himself as a golfer in order to join her on Brioni. Golf, he believed, was what one did on Brioni. After that his ardour cooled rather rapidly. In a week it was ‘Darling: Adrian [Stokes] says he will show you Venice’, giving her Stokes’s Venice address; and a week later, ‘Dearest Pam’, his own next address would be the Hotel Foyot in Paris. Miss Lovibond wrote to him there from Venice, a letter which eventually reached him in London at the end of May, by which time she was back home in Surrey. They met for lunch ‘at Pagani’s up stairs’, and the glamour evidently had quite gone. The rest was a dozen friendly letters over the next three years, ending upon the note of a shared reminiscence of ‘the venerable William sitting on the front’ in Rapallo.

  On 27 June that summer in London Mr and Mrs Ezra Pound invited a select audience ‘to an evening of Mozart at 26 New Cavendish St. W.1 (by kindness of Mrs P. G. Konody)’. Three sonatas for violin and piano were to be performed by Olga Rudge and Vladimir Cernikoff. On 8 July Pound consulted Edgar Obermer at 14 Gower St. WC 1 and was advised to take: an endocrine preparation for the parathyroid gland; daily injections of Pituitrin; courses of Atophon; also powders supplied by Obermer. As to diet, ‘cut down animal protein to a minimum—no reason to restrict sweets and starchy foods of all kinds—fluids, plenty of water; wine and all alcohol to be very occasional, a well-diluted whisky not objectionable’. Some at least of this regime Pound seems to have followed. The following May, finding it prohibited in Paris, he asked Dorothy to get him a repeat prescription of Pituitrin, two boxes of six ampoules, also Parathyroid pills, ‘and the anti-cold serum’. Dorothy, consulting Obermer on her own account, was diagnosed as having ‘poor circulation and a vile rheumaticy heredity’. In July she asked if there was any ‘Obermer medicine’ she could bring from London for Olga. ‘Thyro-manganese cachets’, Pound replied, to be mailed to Olga in Paris.

  Earlier in the summer of 1929 when Pound was in Paris he had been with H.D. and Nancy Cunard’s Henry in a taxi, and according to H.D. who told Aldington who then told Brigit Patmore, Henry Crowder—a native Indian and Negro jazz musician—‘said “Pray Ezra”, and Ezra invented a long prayer about Jordan, and Henry kept shouting “Halleluiah”’. H.D. had had ‘a lovely time’, apparently, though she then wrote to her lover Bryher, who couldn’t stand Pound, that Pound was ‘so terribly ridiculous and grown fat’.

  Homer Pound retired from the Mint in June 1928 at the age of 70. Ford, visiting ‘Ezra’s people’ the previous November, had found them ‘delightful—particularly the father: it was really like visiting Philemon and Baucis’. Ezra was looking forward to their retiring to Rapallo and had been looking at empty apartments for them and sending detailed advice on what household goods to bring and how to transport books and pictures. He had also offered Homer advice on investing in bonds: ‘If you are investing say 5000, put it in five different places…leaves one less disturbable by winds of political hogwash, wars pestilences etc.’ The elder Pounds sailed for England on 1 June 1929, and would have been greeted there by Pound and introduced to little Omar about whom they had heard so much in Dorothy’s letters. They went on to Rapallo to see what they thought of it and by September had decided they would take up permanent residence there and sell the Wyncote home. Isabel, Ford’s ‘Baucis’, wrote to a friend,

  Wyncote is very lovely, but does not equal Rapallo (Italy). We now have a blue cottage amid the gray green olive trees where the birds sing, the sea chants, waves roam and splash and the mountains remain quiet, waiting for Mohammed to come to them. Flowers are in bloom in all the gardens, Narcissus, Japonica, Jonquils, Heliotrope etc. Oranges hang on their trees, we have lots of fruit, walnuts and almonds, and life goes very pleasantly.

  When, in July 1930, Yeats and his wife decided to return to Dublin the Homer Pounds took over for a time their fine, modern apartment on the fourth floor of via Americhe 12.

  In the last week of October 1929 the bottom fell out of the US stock market. For two years there had been feverish speculation in ‘securities’ and, when the boom turned to panic, investments and investors, banks and borrowers, were wiped out. The Wall Street Crash spread economic depression like a tsunami wave all round the globe. Banks foreclosed on mortgages and called in credits, primary producers and industries went bankrupt, demand for goods slumped, and mass unemployment spread. Bankers, economists, and politicians were all held responsible; and, by the more thoughtful, the self-regulating capitalist financial system was called in question. Thus the stage was set for the rise of national socialist political movements committed to state regulation of capitalist enterprise, and for the rise of another charismatic political leader.

  Olga Rudge was fortunate to have bought her Venetian house just before the Crash since that was to leave her father hard up and unable to go on supporting her financially. She moved into the Calle Querini casa in August or early September 1929, and Pound was with her for the last two weeks of September. He then went to meet up with Dorothy at Brescia for a few days on Lago d’Iseo, and on his way confessed to Olga from Verona, rather in a tone of surprise and self-congratulation, that he had experienced a brief but ‘mos’ noble feeling of desolation’. He could assure her that, ‘filled with most noble sorrow for 45 minutes…[h]e was ready to take the next train to Zattere’. However, his librarian friend Dazzi had taken him to the Dodici Apostoli restaurant and his next experience was of the remarkable effect of ‘bird and booze’ on such sorrow.

  In November Olga remarked, ‘it is a year and a half since anyone has seen the child, and as I have been in Italy most of that time it looks bad…I only want to be sure in most selfish manner that duty to offspring not going to lose mi amante.’ It was agreed that the Leoncina should be brought to Venice by Frau Marcher for a week or so in December, and that Pound should be there too. It was a great event for Frau Marcher, while the child remembered the kindness of ‘the Herr’, and how he ‘looked at me approvingly and hugged me’. Her clearest memory was of ‘leaning out of a gondola, splashing with my hands’. From Rapallo Pound wrote to Olga that he had told his father that he had a granddaughter, and that Homer was ‘duly and properly pleased’. It is likely though that Homer had known for some time. Father and son apparently agreed that Isabel would be too deeply shocked and should not be told of young Mary’s existence.

  In January 1930 Olga, in freezing Paris, relapsed into despair and mentioned suicide. Pound wrote express that it was not the moment: ‘That she shd do this just as she reaches the quality of amore that she had wanted—no—ça serait trop bête’, it would be just too stupid. He followed that up with long daily letters remarkable for his attending to her s
ituation and needs rather than to his own, and for his not insisting they each do their own independent thing without impinging upon the other. ‘She dont seem to understand when she gets inside him’, he wrote in one letter, adding ‘Which she did not at first’; then a few days and letters later, ‘she get it into her head that he dont want to go on without her either’, with the postscript, ‘e ti voglio bene, con amore; and not with any plain benevolenza’. Olga meanwhile was trying to tell him that what she loved was the god she discerned in him, and that she wanted her god incarnate—which was not to say that she thought him a god. He accepted that in his own terms, replying that if he was to be the centre of her universe, still his work remained the centre of him, and she should come to him ‘when she was feeling that she wanted to see him ed anche [and also] wanting to help him work’. He had already taken part of a ‘casa sulla montagna’ for her to come to. And from February 1930 Olga did make her own whenever she was in Rapallo the upper floor of casa 60 Sant’ Ambrogio, a peasant family’s house forty-five minutes’ walk above the town and overlooking the bay. They had come through the crisis of their relationship by breaking through to its core, and upon that it would now be durably established.

  It was still though a relationship that could not speak its name, respectability dictating that they must not be seen together in the town, or at any rate that there should be no appearance of intimacy. Even, or perhaps especially, Homer and Isabel were kept in the dark about that. When Olga was in her casa Pound would walk up the hill of an afternoon. When Dorothy was away Olga might come down to Pound, but her meals would have to be sent up from the restaurant to the rooftop apartment, and if anyone called she would have to hide herself away.

  In April Ezra and Olga were together in Paris, Pound correcting proofs of A Draft of XXX Cantos. From there he reported to Dorothy: ‘Uproarious evening with Joyces. Norah insisting on my swallowing 25 frs. worth of caviar—no expense to be spared.’

  Dorothy had written, ‘Omar comes to tea today, Saturday’. Also that she and Olivia were thinking of going to Frankfort in May for Antheil’s Transatlantic. The readers of the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle were informed about the same time that Homer Pound and his son would be in Frankfort for the première of the opera. Homer’s main motive may have been to see his granddaughter en route. A photograph taken at the time shows a trinity of benevolently brooding grandfather, the poet as father reaching out to his daughter, and a sturdy small girl with a self-possessed but doubtful expression. On their way back from Frankfort, in Verona, Homer had Pound send Dorothy a postcard of the statue of Can Grande on his horse, for her to show Can Grande’s grin to Omar.

  Antheil presented a copy of the vocal score of Transatlantic (The People’s Choice) to Pound with the inscription, ‘For Ezra, truest of all friends I dedicate this first of my really printed works…March 23, 1930’. The leading persons of the opera were Helen, Hector, Ajax, Jason, Leo, Gladys; the place was NY City; and the time ‘modern’. Bootleggers, gangsters, politicians, and crooks strutted and sang against a background of skyscrapers, transatlantic liners, jingling telephones, and newspaper bulletins. Act 3—twenty-seven scenes played on four simultaneous stages and a movie screen—opened with a street scene outside Hector’s HQ in a US Presidency campaign. Critics applauded, but it was noticed that Antheil’s music had become relatively conventional, and that the scoring was simpler ‘than, say, the followers of Wagner and Richard Strauss’.

  Pound’s relations with America were as ever a mixup of love and hatred. A fundraising letter sent to him as an alumnus of Hamilton College provoked an outburst against its professors as pampered parasites upon ill-rewarded writers, and as never considering ‘the relation of literature to the state, to society or to the individual’. Yet he was pleased to recommend Zukofsky for an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). However, it was the America of the Founding Fathers that he was most in sympathy with. For the next decad of cantos he was casting about for biographies and letters and diaries of Jefferson and the Adamses. Did Zukofsky ‘know anything of the whereabouts of J. Quincy Adams’ diary’? and Martin Van Buren’s autobiography, ‘or maybe it’s a diary’? In April 1931 he was ‘swatting at’ John Adams in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, ‘but the “woiks” wd take 50 days at 100 pages per diem. // must invent some skimmier method’, he wrote to Dorothy. (He would acquire his own set of the Works and find his ‘skimmier method’ for digesting Adams into a decad of cantos in 1938.) As for contemporary America, it was getting on for twenty years since he was last there, and he knew of its Jazz Age and Prohibition Era only by report and through its repercussions in Paris. The young Oppens, in France and Italy to see how America looked from a distance, paid a visit to Pound in Rapallo before going home. In her autobiography Mary Oppen recalled Pound’s impressing upon them, ‘Read, study the languages, read the poets in their own tongues.’ Their message to him would have been, ‘You are too far away from your own roots…Go home.’ But he knew too well what to expect if he were to do that. The US authorities had recently seized a copy of A Draft of XVI Cantos and attempted to prosecute under the Comstock Act the bookseller who had imported it.

  Yvor Winters, the American poet, critic, and academic who had arrived at a dogged belief in rhyme and set forms of verse and who had deplored Pound’s ‘abandonment of logic in the Cantos’, wrote to Pound from Palo Alto, ‘fifty years hence my name will be in better repute than yours’. Pound retorted that there were more forms of logic than Winters could imagine.

  In mid-August 1931 Ford had run out of money and asked Pound if he could lend him a hundred dollars. Pound sent the hundred dollars at once. Neither mentioned the developing sterling crisis. Dorothy wrote from Sidmouth at the beginning of September, ‘The Child is a queer object: it’s very pretty: and chatterbox…. He has bought a little present for you.’ Later in the month she wrote that she was arranging the sale of some of her mother’s shares, the proceeds to be made over to Pound. It seems that Olivia Shakespear had been giving him £300 a year, and was now making over the capital which should bring in that amount. She would be leaving her estate to Omar, she had told Pound, but Dorothy was to have a life-interest.

  Dorothy and Olivia became extremely concerned as to how the sterling crisis would affect the investments on which their incomes depended. The value of the pound was at that time fixed by its being notionally redeemable in gold. In fact it was propped up by foreign investments, and when foreign investors withdrew their money en masse in August and September the gold standard had to be abandoned and the value of sterling allowed to fall. Pound reported from Rapallo that hotels in France were giving only 85 or 90 francs to the pound instead of 123. In New York it was down from around $5 to $4.15. If it could be held at $4, he advised, there would be nothing for Olivia to worry about; and it was a blessing that Dorothy had money invested in America. But of course the English money which she transferred into lire for use in Italy would yield much less than before. ‘I dare say I could start doing the cooking again,’ Pound reflected.

  He was less worried though than stimulated by the crisis, which he was finding ‘more exciting intellectually than Aug. 1914’. It showed that Douglas had been right about the nation’s credit, and that the value of the currency should be related not to gold but to productive work. Perhaps now people would take notice of Douglas, though it might need ‘a complete collapse [to] civilize the country’. In October he advised that it would be as well for Olivia to get 5 per cent of her capital out of England ‘as an insurance policy’, and to invest it in industrials in New York, such as ‘Detroit Edison’ and ‘Am/ Smelting and refining’. And if Parkyn, the family solicitor, could extract a thousand pounds out of Dorothy’s £8,000 capital she might ‘plug that into Italian electric’. Olivia let him know that it was all very well for him, a ‘man without a country’, to be advising her to get her money out of her country before it sank completely. Parkyn evidently shared her patriotic feelings. And Pound wrot
e to Dorothy, ‘I spent 12 years trying to save her dithering and dodgering hempire. I rubbed Keynes nose into Douglas etc. etc; AT A TIME WHEN it might have been some use’. In any case, ‘A completely crashed England etc// might get round to knowing what it needs/’.

  Late one afternoon in early October 1931 Dorothy ‘ran into a terrific crowd of unemployed’ around Marble Arch at the top of Park Lane. The area was swarming with police and traffic was held up for miles. Then she ‘met ’em all marching along Wigmore [Street]: 1000s with police mounted and on foot’. ‘Rather awful’, was her reaction. Pound’s Villon was to be broadcast by the BBC later in the month. He would be paid just £50 for the two broadcasts, less tax at five shillings in the pound, less probably a further 25 per cent due to the devaluation of the pound. However, he did get his bust by Gaudier out of England that November, and eventually had it set up on his rooftop terrace in Rapallo.

  ‘When I can git on wif my pome, I ain’t so restless.’ Pound had explained himself thus to Aldington in 1927, and it was no doubt how he felt. Yet he was able to combine the still intensity of composition with a busily active life. In the years 1930, 1931, and 1932 he was much occupied with his Cavalcanti edition and opera; with the BBC production of Le Testament; with a host of little magazines; with correspondents ranging from Zukofsky to Senator Cutting; with putting together Profile, an anthology ‘of poems which have stuck in my memory’, and Active Anthology; and with preparing a comprehensive collected edition of his prose. There was also his hardly tranquil private life. With all that he made steady progress from canto 31, which he began drafting in the autumn of 1930, through to canto 41 completed some time in 1933. Cantos 31–3 were ready for publication in Pagany in the summer of 1931. That autumn he mentioned to Dorothy, almost as an aside in the course of advising and commenting upon the sterling crisis, ‘have now material for three more canti/…toward vol. 3 of folio’. He was evidently hoping then for a third de luxe edition to go on from 17–27, and suggested that Dorothy could be thinking at her leisure about doing the capitals for it. A year later he was ‘proceeding toward Canto XXXX’, and ‘dead with work’. Now, thanks to the intervention of Archibald MacLeish, he had a contract with an American firm, Farrar and Rinehart, for the publication of A Draft of XXX Cantos, to be followed by publication in England by Faber & Faber; and the same publishers would bring out Cantos XXXI–XLI in 1934 in England and 1935 in the United States. He was conscious, as he told Ford, that the growing poem was not yet a ‘shining example’ of ‘major form’ or ‘Form of the whole’.