Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Pound played tennis with his host, Theodore Spencer of the English Department, and beat him; and he was startled by the scale and the contents of the new refrigerator in his home. He wanted to meet people in the Economics Department, not Spencer’s colleagues. He did meet the poet Archibald MacLeish, who was about to take up his appointment as Librarian of Congress, and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and he dined with the President of Harvard. He attended a music faculty concert featuring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and presented by Olga Rudge’s friend Nadia Boulanger. Laughlin had him to dinner, and there were parties for him, at which he was not at ease. He told Dorothy, ‘academic world orful—I mean at best. Only immature vitality can endure it. | legislators & nooz wypers so MUCH more alive | he wants to git OUT’.

  Laughlin motored him from Harvard to Yale, ‘across miles of Mass and Conn.’, and taking in the ‘Loomis homestead’. In New Haven he met up with a young James Jesus Angleton, no doubt then a member of the secretive Skull and Bones, who had introduced himself to Pound in Rapallo, and was now precociously starting a little magazine by the name of Furioso. Pound’s Introductory Textbook would be printed in its first number.

  In New York there was a note from Tinkham awaiting him in Bacon’s office, enclosing ‘letters of introduction to several persons in Boston whom you might find it interesting to see and to talk with’. There were letters introducing Pound as ‘the distinguished poet and economist’ to the governor of Massachusetts and to the editors of the Boston Herald and the Boston Evening Transcript—but it was too late for Pound to make use of them. Tinkham also promised to ‘try to arrange a definite appointment for you with Senator Borah’. Borah, as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, occupied a key position in American policy-making given the fraught international situation, and that must have made Pound especially determined to follow up the letters he had been sending him since 1933 by speaking to him in person.

  Apparently Pound had spent some hours, on two or three occasions, waiting in the senator’s outer office in the hope of getting in to see him, but without being admitted. At least that was the recollection forty years later of Charles E. Corker, who had been a junior assistant in Borah’s office in 1939. (Not only the inevitable distortions of time and self-serving subjectivity must be allowed for here, but also, as with so many post-war testimonies concerning Pound, the effect on people’s memories of his subsequent indictment.) Corker remembered Pound as ‘a flamboyant character actor… playing (or overplaying) Ezra Pound’, and that while he waited he spoke to him about economics and world politics and the important messages he had for Senator Borah. ‘I was puzzled as I still am’, Corker wrote in 1980, ‘to know whether he was crazy.’ He claimed that Borah too had thought him crazy after spending ‘perhaps 20 minutes’ with him—this must have been the ‘definite appointment’ arranged by Tinkham—and he was sure that Borah ‘did not take Pound’s political and “economic” messages seriously’. However, Corker seems not to have known that the senator and Pound would have been in complete agreement at least about keeping the United States out of a European war. What Pound would record of their meeting, in January 1942 after Pearl Harbor, was simply ‘I can still feel his hand on my shoulder as just before he was getting into an elevator in the Senate building, and I can still hear him sayin’: ‘“Well, I’m sure I don’t know what a man like you would find to DO here.”’

  On 22 May Pound arranged to have lunch with H. L. Mencken in the Restaurant Robert on West 55th Street, and to meet Mary Barnard there for tea. Mencken afterwards tried to have Pound appointed as a foreign columnist with the Baltimore Sun, but found there was no chance of that because the Sun strongly supported Roosevelt, while Pound’s view was rather that the President should be impeached for letting the banks control the currency. Mary Barnard was in New York writing and looking for work. Pound took her along to the Museum of Modern Art and introduced her to his sometime London protégée Iris Barry, who was Curator of MOMA’s Film Library, and put it to her that a job might be found for Mary in the Museum. Before they left he engaged Alfred Barr in a discussion of the merits of Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis and the desirability of his museum acquiring some examples of their work. Not long after Mary Barnard was invited by Iris Barry’s brother-in-law to become Curator of the Poetry Collection in the University of Buffalo’s Lockwood Memorial Library. ‘Pound’, she later wrote, had somehow brought about ‘the connection between me and the one job in the country that I was best fitted to do’. His initiative changed her life, and ‘something more like fate than chance seemed to be operating’.

  Miss Barnard, questioned in later years about Pound’s behaviour, decided the word for it was ‘punctilious’. And his ‘only eccentricities of dress were the wide collar and large, broad-brimmed black hat’. But he was carrying an odd brown paper parcel, and that, he explained, was his ‘overnight bag’—one gathers it contained his pyjamas, and that he had no fixed base in New York. Apparently he frequented the Museum of Modern Art in the day, and would then drop in on Tibor Serly, the Hungarian composer he had known well in Rapallo, and his wife would give him tea and Hungarian pastries—she even baked for him a ‘real old-fashioned home-made strawberry shortcake’, which, she said, ‘he enjoyed immensely’—but the Serlys are not named among those who put him up for the night.

  Louis Zukofsky was at Serly’s on one occasion, and there was what Zukofsky later termed, when Pound was on trial for treason, an ‘exchange of frankness [which] was accepted tacitly by both of us as a dissociation of values above personal bickering’. This had nothing to do with his being a Jew—‘I never felt the least trace of anti-Semitism in his presence’, Zukofsky affirmed. It had to do with Pound’s ‘political action’, by which Zukofsky must have meant his propagandist prose—he explicitly excepted his literary work and music, saying that ‘His profound and intimate knowledge and practice of these things still leave that part of his mind entire.’ But in the matter of politics, though he ‘did not doubt his integrity’, he believed ‘something had gone wrong’ in Pound’s head. When Pound, who had been listening to the radio, asked him ‘if it was possible to educate certain politicians’, Zukofsky replied, ‘Whatever you don’t know, Ezra, you ought to know voices.’ That was a profound, and profoundly sympathetic, act of dissociative criticism, in that it recognized Pound’s virtù, his poetic intelligence, and at the same time implied that, so far as Zukofsky could tell, it was damagingly inoperative in his political action.

  Zukofsky, like many others, was possibly unable to see past Pound’s endorsements of Mussolini and Fascism to the specific, economic, reasons behind those endorsements. One evening Pound invited the Cummings to dine with him at Robert’s and asked them to bring along Max Eastman and his wife. Eastman’s first impression was that Pound was ‘almost rolly-polly, and with lots of laughter in the corners of his eyes—nervously restless, however’. The Eastmans were hostile to Fascism, and Eastman asked, ‘Don’t you, as an alien, escape the regimentation which is the essence of it?’ Pound answered, ‘If a man knows how to do anything it’s the essence of Fascism to leave him alone—Fascism only regiments those who can’t do anything without it.’ Eastman dismissed that as ‘a sufficient measure of his intellectual acumen’, though he did find Pound ‘sweet and likeable withal’. But again, Eastman was seeking confirmation of what Fascism meant to him—regimentation—and not asking what Pound saw in it beyond that. With war in Europe likely, and the Axis the enemy of the political left, America’s intellectuals were not in a mood to hear any good spoken of Mussolini’s regime.

  Even though Pound was there with the explicit aim of getting America to be true to its own Constitution, and explicitly not to import Fascism, he had become too much identified with Fascism to be listened to. He had had a tuppenny pamphlet, ‘What Is Money For?’, printed by the British Union of Fascists in April, and this was the propaganda he was pressing upon his contacts in America. Its aim was to give ‘an absolutely clear conception
of money’ as the necessary foundation of ‘a sane and steady administration’. Under such headings as ‘Measure of Price’—‘Means of Exchange’—‘The Just Price’—‘The Quantity of Money’—‘Social Credit’—and ‘Usury’, Pound set out his now familiar definitions, explanations, and analyses, in clear terms and with next to no angry and abusive rhetoric. The simple message was that a democratic and humane financial system should serve the needs of the whole people, and Jefferson and Adams were invoked as having laid down the right principles. But when he came to consider the present situation in which those principles were being betrayed, usury having ‘become the dominant force in the modern world’, his citations were drawn from Lenin and Mussolini and Hitler, and his final sentence read, ‘USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of nations’. He may have put that in because it was the BUF who were printing his pamphlet; and he may have put in for their benefit a sentence about ‘Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers’ trying to obscure the clear principles. But he was obscuring his own message to America by that quite gratuitous anti-Semitic sentence, and by invoking as the exemplary leaders of the age the founders of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism. There was also his listing ‘among the worse than Jewspapers’, ‘the hired professors who misteach new generations of young, who lie for hire and who continue to lie from sheer sloth and inertia and from dog-like contempt for the well-being of all mankind’. That was unlikely to advance his ‘desperate attempt to educate the hist. & econ. depts.’ of the universities he visited. He mentioned only one person who had shown real interest in his pamphlet, the Jesuit head of Fordham University in the Bronx who taught political philosophy, and who was ‘keen on J. Adams [and] had read the B. U. Pamphlet 3 times before 10.30’. That made him ‘one of the serious characters I saw in U.S.’—one of the very few, Pound implied.

  Pound spent the night of 5 June with Williams at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey. Williams was about to publish a review of Guide to Kulchur in which, as other reviewers of that book had done, he would take issue with Pound’s support for Fascism and with his anti-Semitism. It was an ‘essential book’, he would say, with more good sense for a writer packed into it ‘than you will find in all the colleges of Christendom’. And yet for all its brilliance it was a failure, because ‘by its tests Mussolini is a great man’; and Pound’s failure and folly was to think him so. There was the same, wholly characteristic, balancing of the negative and the positive in the account he gave to Jas. Laughlin a day or two after Pound’s visit, and the same coming down in the end on the negative. Pound had ‘spread himself on the divan all evening and discoursed to the family in his usual indistinct syllables’, he wrote, and ‘at that it wasn’t bad, if you believed him’. But then, when pressed for a direct answer, as perhaps about the ‘the slaughter of innocent women and children’ at Guernica, he would avoid the question at issue, or argue it away ‘by the neo-scholasticism of a controlled economy program’. And yet ‘he does see the important faces and he does have some worthwhile thoughts and projects in hand’. Indeed, Williams admitted, ‘I like him immensely as always, he is inspiring and has much information to impart’. For all that, ‘the man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of Fascism out of his brain’.

  After spending the night with Williams Pound went up to Clinton in upper New York State, to Hamilton College, his alma mater, where he would stay for nearly a week, till the 13th. The College had asked if he would accept an honorary doctorate, and he had decided that giving a Commencement address could be ‘useful’, and that seeing ‘alumni etc.’ could be useful too. He would use the occasion to continue his campaign to get ‘Hamilton at least to try to educate a few men to participate in keeping the country from going any further down toward hell’. The college had a new president, William H. Cowley, and Pound had read a copy of his inaugural address ‘with increasing irritation’ because it did ‘NOT arrive at saying the Hamiltn/ graduate shd/ be a whole man EFFECTIVE IN the American social order of the TIME whereinto he graduates’; nor did it manifest ‘specific urge to restore American decencies and the aims of the Founders BITCHED and betrayed ever since 1866’. In March he had sent copies of his Introductory Textbook to Cowley and to members of the Hamilton Alumni Committee inviting their comments, while telling them that he suspected that ‘95% of present incumbents of American chairs either can not or dare not face the issues involved’. What he got back was the offer of an honorary doctorate, and he rather felt he was being fobbed off, at least that’s how he put it to his old friend ‘Stink’ Saunders who had been Professor of Agricultural and of General Chemistry in Pound’s time at Hamilton. Just before going up to Clinton to receive the degree he wrote to Saunders at whose home he would be spending his first night or two, ‘Ez axd [the President] a couple of leading questions & Cowley offered Ez a degree INSTEAD of answering ’em’.

  He arrived on Tuesday the 6th and the Commencement Exercises were to take place the following Monday. He got in quite a bit of tennis, playing some doubles matches with Saunders’s daughter Olivia as his partner. That is, he took up the net position, only on the middle line, and had her stand on the baseline to take the balls that got past him, few of which did, he being ‘such an agile and fiery tennis player’. When he served it was the same. Olivia Saunders remembered him, with remarkable restraint, as ‘the most individualistic partner I ever played with’, and that ‘We won easily’. The tennis, Pound told Olga, ‘has brought me down from 207 to 195 lb’.

  From the Thursday he was staying with the Edward Roots—Root had been a contemporary of his, and now taught the history and appreciation of art in the college. When Pound talked about Tinkham for President in place of Roosevelt, because he would keep the United States out of a European war, they let him know they were not isolationist and ‘felt that if war came we should get into it’, and after that Pound said ‘not a word about isolation’. They had ‘Dupont (gun family) to lunch’, without incident. After lunch Pound went out to take on ‘econ. & hist dept.’ in his ‘desperate attempt to educate’, but reported no success. He was, though, he told Dorothy, meeting state politicians and generating some sense of useful activity. One of these was perhaps Charles A. Miller, a trustee of Hamilton and also a guest in the house. He was head of the Utica Savings Bank, an expert on such banks, and had charge of Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and Pound talked to him about Douglas at such length that Mrs Root, by her own account, ‘finally had to interpose, saying: Charles must have his rest’. There was no mention in Pound’s letters, or in others’ recollections, of his literary, or musical, or artistic, interests, and no mention of his poetry except in the degree ceremony itself.

  It seems that Pound, at the Alumni Luncheon in the hall of Commons after the ceremony, spoke not as a poet but as a reformer. According to the report in the Utica Daily Press, ‘he advocated as required reading his own “Text Book”, a four-page leaflet attributing America’s ills to its currency program’, and regretted that it was not possible to purchase ‘the thoughts and writings of America’s founders as easily and cheaply as you can those of subversive propagandists’ such as Marx and Trotsky. He spoke after another of the day’s honorands, H. V. Kaltenborn, a well-known news commentator and the principal speaker. There had been, apparently, a gentlemen’s agreement that Kaltenborn would avoid contentious issues of international politics, but what he had to say, while innocuous enough to his audience, was to Pound highly provocative. ‘It is written in history’, he declared, ‘that dictatorships shall die, but democracies shall live’; and he spoke of the ‘doubtful’ alliance between Italy and Germany. Pound interrupted, demanding to know what he meant by ‘doubtful’, and went on to praise Mussolini and Fascism. Kaltenborn praised God ‘that in America people of varying points of view can still speak out’, but was then provoked in his turn into saying ‘how wrong it was to preach such anti-democratic doctrine within the confines of an American college’. Oli
via Saunders, who was in the balcony, told Charles Norman that ‘the situation almost got out of hand as both men were thoroughly irritated with the other’s point of view’, and a good deal of calming down by Professor Saunders and by President Cowley was needed before Kaltenborn was able to finish his address—which, by his own account, the alumni applauded ‘with unusual vigor’.

  Pound was unrepentant. He wrote to Olga that he had ‘About bust the commencement by heckling a s.o.b. that was spouting twaddle’; and he wrote in a letter to President Cowley that ‘Hamilton OUGHT to exist to combat that sort of [superficial twaddle] not to honour it’. Cowley had formally invited him to contribute to the Alumni Fund, and Pound was declining rather fiercely, on the grounds that ‘COLLEGES hate intellectual life and work against it’; that ‘To pay teachers of literature while the whole system trys to kill off the makers of fresh literature is just stupid’; and again, ‘I decline to give money and do not believe any money OUGHT to be give to any body of men who don’t know what money IS and who refuse (as you in conversation did) to show any curiosity as to its real nature OR to propagate teaching of that nature to at least an elite who COULD keep the nation from going to hell under usury and monetary idiocy.’ In his reply Cowley wrote: