Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Pound had been working at a collected edition of his prose writings from at least 1929, when the Aquila Press was going to bring it out after doing his Cavalcanti Rime. When Aquila failed, Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press thought about taking it on. In 1931 the newly formed firm of Hamish Hamilton asked for first refusal. Then young George and Mary Oppen, with Louis Zukofsky as their editorial adviser, set up as publishers from their rented farmhouse in the middle of a vineyard near Le Beausset, inland from Toulon on the road to Marseille. Calling themselves To, Publishers—‘To’, Zukofsky explained, ‘as we might say, a health to’—and using French printers with a scant knowledge of English, they published Zukofsky’s major ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, William Carlos Williams’s A Novelette and Other Prose, and then brought out the first of a projected twelve volumes of Pound’s prose. Paperbound, it was to sell relatively cheaply at $1 a copy, only there was no sales organization, and the Oppens’ capital ran out. In August 1932 George Oppen wrote to Pound, ‘There is no possibility of continuing To “under present conditions”.…I’ll have Darantière return your Ms. Registered.’ That was the end of the collected edition. In its place Faber & Faber published in September 1934 Make It New, a fined down selection of Pound’s major literary essays.

  The collected edition could well have been a monumental mess. Pound’s idea, as he explained it to his mother in November 1927, was that the whole of his prose to date should be recast in such a way that ‘the until-now apparently random and scattered work all falls into shape, and one sees, or shd. see wot is related to wot, and why the stuff is not merely inconsequent notes’. How to Read had to come first as ‘a sort of pivot’ giving the central idea around which everything would fall into order. In accord with that the To Publishers volume, titled Prolegomena I, contained How to Read followed by ‘Part 1’ of The Spirit of Romance, i.e. chapters I–IV with the new chapter V, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’. After that, according to Pound’s outline for the twelve ‘Books’ of his ‘Collected Prose’, books III–V were to give his ‘Manifestos on reform of poetry and contemporary movements’ of 1912–18, drawn from The Egoist, New Age, Poetry, Little Review, etc.; and books VII–X would give the later prose of 1920–8. Instigations would be preserved as book VI, Indiscretions as book XI, and Ta Hio as the concluding book XII. In recasting the materials from periodicals Pound selected, revised, and corrected extensively, and also added a linking narrative and commentary. Altogether he assembled more than 1,653 pages. As the researcher leafs through them the words ‘megalomania’ and ‘doomed’ flit through the mind. Why fight past battles over again? And whatever happened to his principles of selection and condensation, to the economy of the luminous detail? Was it that his hates, his ‘instinct of negation’, knew no bounds? His readers in the 1930s had reason to be grateful that in Make It New and ABC of Reading (1934) he found a better way of getting across his provoking and instructive critical effort. 5

  The two anthologies Pound put together at the start of the 1930s practised a different order of criticism, one that was affirmative and curatorial, and which did its work by presenting selected exhibits with a minimum of commentary. Profile: An Anthology Collected in MCMXXXI and published by Giovanni Schweiller in Milan in 1932 was, according to Pound’s note in Active Anthology, ‘a critical narrative’ attempting ‘to show by excerpt what had occurred during the past quarter of a century’. That was, in effect, to go back to his own arrival in London in 1908, and then to come forward to where he was now. He placed first Symons’s ‘Modern Beauty’ from the 1890s, then represented Ford, Hulme and Williams as preceding the Imagists, followed by ‘Imagist and post imagist additions’ (H.D., Aldington, and his own ‘Coming of War: Actaeon’); Eliot’s ‘Hippopotamus’ and ‘Burbank’, Marianne Moore and Mina Loy, a war poem by Donald Evans, and an extract from Mauberley, carried the narrative from ‘1915 to 1925’; and ‘1925 and after’ was represented by a rather mixed lot of individualities, including Cummings, Zukofsky, Dunning, Eliot (‘Fragment of an Agon’ from Sweeney Agonistes), and Bunting (‘Villon’). Rather tellingly, Zukofsky is the only one of the American Objectivists to feature in Profile. Pound would endorse Zukofsky’s ‘Objectivists’ Anthology as ‘the first effort to “clear up the mess” since my effort in or about 1913’. But at the same time he was dissociating himself from this new effort on account of its tendency to ‘a sort of neo-Gongorism, that is a disproportionate attention to detail at the expense of main drive’, or a tendency to be so attentive to language as to destroy ‘the feel of actual speech’. To balance or counter that failing Pound included in Profile a dozen pages of ‘proletarian’ verse from New Masses, among them several ‘Negro Songs of Protest’. It was as if he wanted to point up the direct voice of political consciousness as the missing element in Objectivism.

  There is the same emphasis on the world in the word, on the signified rather than the signifier, throughout Active Anthology (1933). Reopening the volume after an interval Pound was pleased to find ‘something solid’ in Bunting’s poetry and Zukofsky’s, to which he had devoted respectively fifty pages (nearly a quarter of the whole) and forty-three pages; and to find that, after theirs, Marianne Moore’s twenty-one pages were ‘the solidest stuff in the Anthology’, and that Williams’s realism, to which he had given twenty-five pages, though ‘not so thoughtful’, had a ‘solid solidity’ comparable to Flaubert’s. Poetic realism then was what he had put on show, to the end, as he intimated in his preface, that a moribund Britain might see what it was missing. He did not mention Eliot among the solid contributors, although he had included ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ (from Sweeney Agonistes). Instead he spent most of his preface quarrelling with Eliot’s recently published Selected Essays 1917–1932 for conceding too much to a British literary bureaucracy which did not want live poetry and an active culture. ‘If I was in any sense the revolution’, he declared, then ‘I have been followed by the counter-revolution’. Louis Zukofsky saw it differently when he looked into the anthology in the much altered world of post-war America. ‘I must say I have never felt so inclined to admire Ezra’s perceptions’, he wrote to Williams in 1949, it having struck him that Pound had seen in his own work, and in Bunting’s and Williams’s, ‘a necessity’ that had not been apparent even to themselves at the time. ‘As a piece of criticism’, he wrote, ‘his anthology of 1933 emerges as a work of genius.’

  In her letter from London on 11 September 1932 Dorothy mentioned that ‘We had Omar’s birthday yesterday—Cake and candles’. Parkyn, the family solicitor, had been in attendance, also Marquesita, a contralto famous as Lucy Lockit in The Beggars Opera, and there had been ‘presents all round’. In Rapallo Homer had reminded Pound that it was Omar’s sixth birthday.

  In December 1932 Pound heard from Caresse Crosby that ‘Max Ernst is being sold at auction on Thursday; furniture, shoes, tableaux’. He immediately sent her 500 francs, all he had available, either to give to Ernst in cash so that his creditors could not get at it, or to buy up his pictures in the auction and let Ernst know that he could have them back whenever he wanted them for whatever Pound had paid.

  The ‘Decennio’, the first decade of Fascist rule in Italy, was being celebrated in 1932–3, and F. Ferruccio Cerio, one of the editors of the ‘Supplemento Letterario’ of Rapallo’s Il Mare, drafted a scenario for a film treatment of the story of Italian Fascism, with the title ‘Le Fiamme Nere’, ‘The Black Flames’. Pound was called in to adapt the scenario to make it suitable for foreign distribution, and the scenario with his notes was privately printed in Rapallo in December 1932. Pound immediately went down to Rome and sent a copy in to Mussolini’s private secretary with a request for an audience with the Duce. He had sought one before in vain, but this time he was told that Mussolini would see him on 30 January of anno XI.

  1 The fifteenth-century Renaissance rulers whose conduct is scrutinized in XXX Cantos are, besides Sigismundo Malatesta (1417–68): Niccolò III d’Este (1384–1441), and his son Borso (1413–71);
and Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence (1389–1464), his son Piero (1416–69), and Piero’s son Lorenzo or Lauro (1449–92).

  2 Louis Zukofsky (1904–78), poet and prose writer, born and mostly based in New York; EP published his ‘Poem Beginning “The”’ in The Exile no. 3 (Spring 1928), and put him in touch with WCW; in that year he began his long poem A; in 1931 formed the Objectivist group with George Oppen, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff; was involved with them in TO, publishers and Objectivist Press; edited An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932); completed A, a work of major significance, in 1975. Collected works: Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963, 1987), a critical study in parallel with A 1–24; All: the collected shorter poems 1923–1958 (1965, 1991); Prepositions: The collected critical essays (1967, 1981); A (1978); Collected Fiction (1990). A selection of his extensive correspondence with EP was published in 1987.

  3 The patching showed in more than the numbering of the pages. The first part, a scholarly edition of the original texts of the sonetti and ballate, was in Italian, without facing English versions, except that Pound did insert new translations for five of the sonnets. In the second part a number of the remarks in the ‘Indice dei manoscritti’ and in the captions to the plates were in English because the printer had been given the manuscript prepared for the English edition. The third part, described on the contents page as ‘Frammenti dell’edizione bilingue’, presented first, in English, all but the final section of the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay of 1928–9, these thirty-six pages amounting to a scholarly edition of the canzone ‘Donna mi prega’ with translation and commentary. Then followed twenty pages of what was to have been the bilingual edition of the Sonnets & Ballate. Pound’s introduction to his 1910–12 translations was given here, followed by the first pages of the Sonnets, with his newly edited Italian text facing his early versions—even though he could admit that ‘my early versions of Guido are bogged in Dante Gabriel [Rossetti] and in Algernon [Swinburne]’ (LE 194). Rime ended with the Italian text of sonnet 6 facing a blank page.

  4 See Appendix C for a more detailed account of the opera.

  5 Make It New was published in September 1934 by Faber & Faber in a format matching that of Eliot’s Selected Essays (2nd edn., revised and enlarged, October 1934). It contained ‘Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions’ (1912) and ‘Arnaut Daniel’ (1920)—these classified as examinations of ‘speech in relation to music’; ‘Notes on Elizabethan Clasicists’ (1917), ‘Translators of Greek’ (1918), and ‘French Poets’ (1918)—these classified as examinations of speech; ‘Henry James and Remy de Gourmont’ (1918, 1919)—examinations of ‘General state of human consciousness in decades immediately before my own’; ‘A Stray Document’, reprinting the principles of Imagisme; and finally ‘Cavalcanti’ (1910/1931), ‘as bringing together all these strands, the consciousness, depth of same almost untouched in writing between his time and that of Ibsen and James’ (MIN 15). All of these studies, with the exception only of ‘French Poets’, were included in LE in 1954.

  PART TWO : 1933–1939

  Think of your own work. Nothing else matters,

  we have been mad with crusading.

  —EP to Alice Corbin Henderson, 5 May 1916

  3 : A DEMOCRAT IN ITALY, 1933

  Il Poeta meets Il Duce

  Signor Benito Mussolini was now in his own person, by law, the supreme law-maker of Italy, and as such was known as Capo del Governo; more, he was by both law and popular assent capo of the nation, its head and leader, Il Duce. Though formally subject to the King, and only to the King, he ruled much as kings had ruled before there were republican revolutions. He went so far as to claim to embody mystically the State and the People as kings were once held to do; and the Italian people for the most part, rather than holding him answerable to themselves, put their faith in him and loved and followed him as if he were indeed the incarnation of the nation’s spirit.

  Yet it was by a republican, even a socialist, revolution that Mussolini had come to such singular power. His position was altogether a cornucopia of contradictions. And it was by virtue of those contradictions that this son of a village blacksmith had managed to unite in himself an Italy which just ten years before had been breaking down into anarchy as the old ruling class proved powerless to contain the rising but still weak forces of Communism and socialism. It had been a dogfight lacking a top dog until Mussolini seized absolute power by a combination of calculated violence, inspired opportunism, ruthless suppression of opponents and dissenters, and acute political insight amounting to genius. The cartoon versions of him as a puffed up buffoon or thick thug are good for anti-Fascist propaganda, but are otherwise simply ridiculous. He was a man to be taken very seriously. In the ten years since the King had appointed him to form a government in October 1922 he had seen off the opposing parliamentary parties by parliamentary process, so that his Fascist party, having full control of the state, in effect became the state; and he had purged his party of its violent and criminal elements once they had served their turn, and then subordinated its at-first independent regional leaders to his will, so that he now stood over and above his party and personally ran the state. At the same time he had replaced trade unions, employers’ organizations, and professional bodies with Fascist organizations, effectively incorporating all classes and kinds of workers into the Fascist project; along with that he had required of all teachers, university professors, and public servants an oath of loyalty to the state; and he had set up Fascist institutions to organize and direct all intellectual, cultural, sporting, and leisure activities. He had thus brought into being not only the idea but a partial realization of a totalitarian state, one in which all its consenting members and all its activities should be bound together as in a single entity with one mind, one purpose, one will, and that mind, purpose, and will his own. That was the idea of the Fascist emblem taken over from ancient Rome and emblazoned everywhere in Mussolini’s new Italy: thin rods each weak in itself but of great strength when cut and shaped by the axe of lawful authority and bound tightly together.

  Mussolini was still generally perceived, in 1933, as a benevolent dictator, that is as one exercising his all-encompassing authority to promote a better order in Italy. The great Decennale Exhibition in Rome had some major reforms to celebrate, beyond getting the trains to run on time. The Fascist social and welfare provision for workers was ahead of even that of New Zealand: there were already in force an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, guaranteed work and continuity of employment, regulation of the work of women and children, compulsory TB and sickness and accident insurance, provision for old age, and workers’ representation alongside employers in the new Fascist corporations. Then there was a vast programme of public works, ‘whose crowning glory was the draining of the malaria-infested, largely uninhabited Pontine Marshes to the south of Rome which emperors, popes, kings and the odd prime minister had all tried and failed to make habitable’. Millions of hectares of once waste land were brought into cultivation. There was new housing; new towns were built and old ones, especially Rome itself, were renovated. New roads were constructed, including Europe’s first motorway, and new bridges and aqueducts. ‘The great Public Utilities of the State’, Mussolini could claim, ‘railroads, mail, telegraph, telephone’ had been made to function efficiently, and even ‘the Italian Bureaucracy, proverbially slow, has become eager and agile’. Not only did the trains run on time but they ran faster, thanks to the electrification of the railway network. And still there were people, Mussolini observed, who ‘whine because there is efficiency and order in the world’.

  His new ‘efficiency and order’ did involve a good deal of regimentation. ‘The citizen in the Fascist State’, Mussolini had declared, ‘is no longer a selfish individual to whom is given the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity.’ Put another way, the Fascist individual would find his fulfilment in transcending his personal desires and living within and for the state. Fascism was austerely, religiously, anti-individualistic and an
ti-democratic, and indeed rather despised capitalist democracy as having failed—perhaps terminally in the 1929 Crash—through allowing excessive freedom to the selfish individual. At the same time Fascism was not against private property or private wealth, the former being accepted as making for social stability; and capital being welcomed as ‘an increasingly important actor in the drama of production’, on condition that it be deployed not for private profit but in the collective interest as determined by the Fascist state.

  It was held to be in the collective interest that Italy should become strong among the industrially advanced, capitalist nations; but it was also held to be in its collective interest to solve the problem of the unequal distribution of wealth and ‘to end the cruel fact of poverty in the midst of abundance’, a socialist aspiration. This synthesis of capitalism and socialism was Mussolini’s ‘Third Way’. Fascism was to supersede the economic liberalism of capitalism, by regulating and directing the economy in the national interest; and it was to supersede the Marxist Leninist form of socialism by not abolishing private property and not nationalizing the means of production. That said, it was on good terms with capitalists and capitalism; and at enmity with Communism—its own Communists were regarded as enemies of the state and were the most liable of its dissenters to be sent into exile or imprisoned. Hence the bitterness of Communist critiques of Fascism; and hence the early friendliness of the capitalist democracies to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.