Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Mars meaning, in that case, order

  That day was Right with the victor

  mass weight against wrong

  Carlyle, in his Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, had seen Napoleon’s ‘brilliant Italian campaigns’ in that light, as inspired by ‘a faith in Democracy’ and as an assertion of the enlightened spirit of the French Revolution against the ‘Austrian Simulacra’. Yet Italy had then come under Napoleon’s empire, and the best Zobi had to say about that was that when Napoleon was forced out in 1814 at least Ferdinando Habsburg ‘got back a state free of debt | coffers empty | but the state without debt’.

  And still Tuscany and Italy were not free. With Napoleon exiled to Elba the Congress of Vienna was called to put Europe back together again, and the four great powers, Austria and England, with Prussia and Russia, met to carve it up between them and to restore it to its pre-revolutionary state.

  England and Austria were for despots with commerce

  considered

  Put back the Pope but

  reset no republics: Venice, Genova, Lucca

  and split up Poland in their soul was usura

  and in their hand bloody oppression

  While they were still negotiating Napoleon escaped from Elba, gathered an army again, and ‘for a hundred days [hope spat] against hell belch’, that is, until his final defeat at Waterloo. ‘The force which he challenged’, so the argument runs in Christopher Hollis’s The Two Nations, a work which Pound read with approval, ‘was the force of usury’; and the victory of that force ‘laid finally in the dust the great hope of the world’s freedom from the empire of usury’.

  The restored monarchies of Europe, Hollis explains, were now ‘weighed down by a burden of debt which made their creditors the effectual masters of policy’. In this analysis, the Napoleonic wars which culminated in the battle of Waterloo had given the bankers who financed them—Hollis names the Rothschilds—the opportunity to become the dominant power in Europe, and to put down the power of the people.

  This interpretation, which differs radically from the generally received story, is the key not only to this canto’s treatment of Napoleon, but also to Pound’s understanding of most of the world’s wars from 1815 through the American Civil War to 1939–45. The conflict for him is always between the true values of democracy and the interests of finance, with the latter too often triumphant. He saw the nineteenth century as ‘the century of usury’, the century in which ‘the revolution born of the Leopoldine reforms in Tuscany, and quite manifest in the Jeffersonian process’ in America, was betrayed by men so ‘steeped from the cradle in usurious preconceptions’ that they knew not what they did in following the dictates of finance. So Wellington, when he drove Napoleon’s army out of Spain, ‘was a jew’s pimp | and lacked mind to know what he effected’. And at Waterloo, implicitly, he carried the day for usura, for Geryon.

  ‘Mind’ is a major motif of the canto: the revolution ‘took place in the minds of the people’; it was betrayed and defeated by minds in ‘darkness and blankness’, and by minds in which ‘was stink and corruption’ of usura. Then there is what Zobi wrote in 1850 as if to account for the failure of the 1848 revolution, ‘Italy ever doomed with abstractions…By following brilliant abstractions’. Pound endorses that with an example—

  Not, certainly, for what most embellishes il sesso femminile

  and causes us to admire it, they wrote of Marie de Parma

  [Napoleon’s] widow.

  But isn’t ‘a jew’s pimp’ an abstraction, and a far from brilliant one? And that nasty little charge of prejudice, doesn’t it make for ‘darkness and blankness’? That is street-corner rant, not the poet’s way to make a revolution in the mind. The lapse goes with the rapid shifting of the mind, in the attack on England and Austria, away from the few really telling facts, such as ‘split up Poland’, to the rhetorical abstraction, ‘in their soul was usura’. Further, there is nothing in particular to make the mind see Napoleon standing for Hope ‘against hell belch’. That is another cryptic abstraction, a possibly illuminating one this time, but for want of some defining detail the mind is likely to be left blank and in the dark. After all, Napoleon in 1815 was not an obvious representative of the spirit of the French Revolution.

  As Pound said often enough, intelligence is particular, it needs the impress, the direct knowing of things both subjective and objective. There is a deep, Dantescan kind of knowing in ‘hell belch’, if only the intelligence is engaged at that point. It would help engage it if there were more fact to inform the impassioned rhetoric. The new republics in northern Italy were handed back to the Austrian empire. The splitting up of Poland, as Jerome J. McGann has recalled, meant bloody oppression for the Polish patriots whom England had promised to support in their struggle to get free from Russian and Austrian control. McGann also helpfully informs us that ‘Wellington was the key English figure’ in bringing back the old European order at the Congress of Vienna; and that he had not only driven the French out of Spain, but had agreed, at the Congress of Verona in 1822, to the suppression of ‘the newly fledged Spanish patriotic revolution’ and the betrayal of the Spanish nationalists to the restored French Bourbons. If these betrayals of revolutions and reforms are not brought to mind effectively the hellish language will lack warrant and sound as empty rant.

  The canto closes on a suddenly personal note. ‘Lalage’s shadow moves in the fresco’s knees’, and she, Lalage, ‘is blotted with Dirce’s shadow’. In classical literature ‘Lalage’ would imply a courtesan or mistress; and Dirce was a woman who imprisoned and tormented her husband’s former wife Antiope when she became pregnant, not knowing that Zeus was the father and thinking her husband unfaithful. Her trying to blot out Antiope and her child would rhyme with the canto’s concern with peoples oppressed and denied justice and independence. The final lines cut from the troubling shadows to the calm light casting them: ‘dawn stands there fixed and unmoving | only we two have moved’.

  The opening of canto 51 takes off from that into a snatch of song from the Tuscan poet and precursor of Cavalcanti and Dante, Guinicelli:

  Shines

  in the mind of heaven God

  who made it

  more than the sun

  in our eye.

  Guinicelli’s canzone, like Cavalcanti’s Canzone d’amore, is concerned with the working of the light of the divine intelligence in the human heart and mind in the form of love—a preoccupation unlikely to have been brought to the reader’s mind for some time. The next line returns us to where we were, ‘Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon’—a line repeated from canto 34, where it was connected with ‘la sottise de Moscou’, his thoroughly unintelligent invasion of Russia.

  There follows a reprise of canto 45, ‘With usury has no man a good house’, only condensed to half the number of lines, now in simple current English, and in a quieter, reflective tone. The devastations caused by usury are not so much preached against as stated as plain fact. There is passion still in the words, but the rhythm has lost its assurance, its power, and the sense of the good things in nature and art is much subdued. This is canto 45 with its counter theme muted.

  New matter is introduced in lines 33–50, from The Art of Angling by Charles Bowlker, a very popular work first published in 1758, revised and reprinted many times through the next hundred years, and regarded by fly fishermen as a classic of their craft. Pound has abbreviated Bowlker’s description of two artificial trout flies, one of them the ‘Blue Dun’:

  A starling’s wing will give you the colour

  or duck widgeon, if you take feather from under the wing

  Let the body be of blue fox fur, or a water rat’s

  or grey squirrel’s. Take this with a portion of mohair

  and a cock’s hackle for legs.

  The other fly, the ‘Granham’, requires ‘Hen pheasant’s feather’, ‘Dark fur from a hare’s ear’, ‘a green shaded partridge feather’, ‘grizzled yellow cock’s hackle’, �
��harl from a peacock’s tail’, and it ‘can be fished from seven a.m. | till eleven; at which time the brown marsh fly comes on’ and ‘no fish will take Granham’. To one very persuasive critic, Robert Demott, these artificial flies are ‘examples of traditional craftsmanship and artistry which have withstood usury for centuries and continue to do so’. They require precise observation and accurate imitation of nature, for their creator must copy exactly the tiny insects which are the staples of the trout’s diet in order to lure it into mistaking the artificial fly for the live insect. Demott invites us to see the skilled fly tyer and fly fisherman as a hero of the cantos, in harmony with nature, and the antithesis of the usurer. The Companion to the Cantos goes along with that, asserting that ‘since fly-fishing is an art that depends on nature’s increase…it has none of the destructive effects of usury, which is CONTRA NATURAM’.

  The canto itself declares, ‘That hath the light of the doer, as it were | a form cleaving to it’; and adds in Latin, from the same source in Albertus Magnus, words to the effect that the adept intellect in apprehending the works of God takes in with them the creative light, that is, the form cleaving to them, and day by day recreates that form. The idea is cognate with the philosophy in Guinicelli’s canzone, and in Cavalcanti’s. It would seem just here to make the creating of artificial flies a repetition as it were of God’s creating the living swarm. It would regard ‘the doer’ as truly like the Prime Doer, and truly in union with the being and becoming of nature.

  Is this then what they have come to, those moments of ‘consciousness of unity with nature’ in the rites of Dionysos and Circe-Aphrodite and Adonis, to the craft of ‘factitious bait’? Well, when Eva Hesse questioned Pound about the passage in 1959 he told her,

  trout rise to artificial fly | no nutriment

  vide description, cocks hackle, great art in

  devising fish-bait by non-aesthetes,

  very high degree of craftiness

  METAPHOR (cf/ AriStotl) on apt use of

  for USURA

  That is, for Pound himself in 1959 the passage exemplified not craft but craftiness, craft turned against nature. And indeed, at the simplest level, doesn’t the passage represent a nature morte, and quite lack any apprehension of the life in things? Imagine the bench heaped with all those dead birds and beasts the fly tyer needs to have by him, and his having an eye only for the bits and pieces of them he can use. Then there is his luring the trout with a fraudulent imitation of its food. If this crafty art is to be thought of as an imitation of the action of all-creating love it can only be as a bold parody, or an outright fraud. It can only be Geryon, ‘twin with usura’, who would claim that for it. Geryon is named as the speaker later in this final passage, but the whole passage from ‘That hath the light of the doer’ must be in his voice.

  If the passage is not taken that way the reader will be in even greater difficulty with the other item which is said to have ‘the light of the doer’ about it—

  Thus speaking in Königsberg

  Zwischen die Volkern erzielt wird

  a modus vivendi.

  —‘between the peoples may be achieved a modus vivendi’. It was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and close associate, who spoke those words in a radio broadcast on 8 July 1934. Pound, in a note made some years later, took his meaning to be that a ‘system of living together should not be beyond the capacity of…the four main racial groups in Europe’, i.e. German, Italian, French, and English. It was of course not apparent at the time that Nazi Germany was talking peace while secretly preparing for war, nor that it was at that very moment plotting the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss and the annexation of his country. (Dollfuss was killed, on 25 July, but the Nazi takeover was prevented that year.) Only later did it become clear that Hess’s talking peace was a fraud. He was not spreading divine light, but doing the work of Geryon who sings in the following lines, ‘I pay men to talk peace.’

  Dante’s Geryon, the figure of Fraud, is ‘the savage beast with the sting in its tail that breaks through walls and weapons and pollutes the whole world’; and ‘His face is the face of a just man’. He is associated with the usurers who are being punished among the fraudulent in the lower region of the Inferno for doing violence to both nature and art. Virgil has previously explained to Dante that as ‘Nature takes her course from the Divine Intellect, and from its art’, and as human art follows nature and ‘is, as it were, the grandchild of the Deity’, then the usurer, in disdaining the way of Nature and her bounty, sins against God, nature, and art. Pound’s Geryon is clearly from the Inferno, and when the allusion is tracked back to Dante’s cantos 11 and 17 it becomes evident that Pound’s canto is following Dante’s lead, that it is in a sense ‘written over’ that part of the Inferno. It is his pit of hell, and the lowest point in his epic.

  The utmost fraud of Geryon-Usura would be to put over the unproductive counterfeit as a godlike product of nature and art. The true meaning of ‘The light of the DOER, as it were a form cleaving to it’, is ‘an ACTIVE pattern, a pattern that sets things in motion’, constructively—something not to be found in this canto. This Geryon is ‘merchant of chalcedony’, and that means, if we catch the echo of Revelation 21: 19, that he is in the business of selling off the foundations of the temple of the new Jerusalem.

  On the title page of The Fifth Decad of Cantos, and again on the last page after this canto, Pound set the Chinese characters chêng4 ming2 . According to Karlgren’s Analytic Dictionary, ming2 is what is called out in the dark, and in combination with chêng4 , meaning ‘upright, correct, just’, it signifies speaking one’s own identity honestly—not cloaking oneself in darkness—and also correctly identifying what is in darkness. It is close to the Ta Hio’s Confucian ideal that the precise verbal definition of nature and of human nature is the basis of good government. One could think of it as a variation upon the Flaubertian and Fordian ideal of le mot juste, the word that does justice. Pound maintained that a truly enlightened perception and articulation of the things that concern us is the only sure defence against usurious fraud and injustice.

  The form and pressure of the time

  The idea becomes real only in action, Pound held to that. But did he allow for all that might get in the way of the idea in practice? Did he allow enough for the complexities and contradictions of the time, for proper uncertainties and necessary compromises, and for his own susceptibility to certain of its pressures? To call things by their right names, to discriminate honestly and accurately, that is an excellent idea; but when the things in question are as instant and as opaque as current events tend to be, the judgement is likely to be partial, and right action difficult to determine. Faced with a decision to go to war, or to change the terms of trade or of the social contract, who can see at once all that is involved? We fall back on prepared positions, on our principles and fixed convictions; or we accept what we are told by those who ought to know the facts.

  Pound distrusted general principles and established convictions as unlikely to do justice to the particular case. He maintained the awkwardly humane view that the individual should not be oppressed by the majority, and further, that the truth is in the particular rather than in the general case. He advocated his ideogrammic method of piecing together the significant, the luminous details into ‘a sufficient phalanx of particulars’, that image implying an organization of the mind that would go into right action. It was ‘a new mode of thought’, he wrote, which ‘would eliminate certain types of imbecility, in particular the inaccessibility to FACT glaringly lit up in 1935 by the peril of world conflagration caused by the type of mind which festered in the ideologues’ who hold with fanaticism ‘an abstract received “idea” or “generality”’ and ‘who NEVER take in concrete detail’. By mustering the facts he would save the world from destruction by the ideologues, and by those who more or less blindly went along with them. Yet in that darkening time, in haste to keep up with menacing events and to counter the blatant contradictions of high p
rinciples by low conduct, he too could rush to judgement upon a conviction of what must be the case rather than upon a sufficient grasp of the details. And then mere opinion, or propaganda, or banal prejudice, could stand in for accurate perception and make an ideologue of him also.

  In December 1936 Edward VIII, just a few months after being crowned King of England and Defender of the Faith, was compelled to abdicate the throne. He wanted to marry an American divorcée and the British Establishment would not allow it. According to its strict conventions, being a commoner without wealth or title, a foreigner, and, most damning of all, a divorced woman, made Mrs Simpson simply unacceptable as the consort of the titular head of the nation and defender of its faith. The King, told that he must choose between marrying Mrs Simpson and his duty to the nation’s morals, chose Mrs Simpson and a life of luxury abroad as Duke of Windsor. Before his coronation, as Prince of Wales, Edward had visited South Wales and expressed sympathy with the unemployed miners and their hungry families, and the people at large had liked him for that. Now the Communists and the Fascists and the Social Creditors and others who resented the dominance of the conservative establishment argued that the real reason for the enforced abdication was Edward’s sympathizing with the poor and the unemployed, and that at bottom it was part of the general conspiracy of the ruling class against their people. Basil Bunting, who was back in England at the time, told Pound—even though he was (according to Zukofsky) ‘a British-conservative-antifascist-imperialist’—that he was convinced that it was on account of Edward’s speech in South Wales that Prime Minister Baldwin had made him abdicate. And Pound built that ‘fact’ into an article about the absolute evil being worked against the starving millions in England by Baldwin and the all-powerful bankers, and about Edward Windsor’s being now in a better position to oppose that evil ‘than he ever could have done on a throne surrounded with flummydiddles and gold braid and flunkies’—