The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  To give Pound his due, we must add that although his heroes are men of the developed will, he goes to some lengths to distinguish goodwill from bad. When he tells us that “the greater the artist the more permanent his creations, and this is a matter of WILL,” he does add that “it is also a matter of the DIRECTION OF THE WILL …” Goodwill lifts us up and bad will pulls us down. And Pound took his heroes to be men of goodwill. “Perhaps,” remarks Emery, “it does not oversimplify to say that [in the Cantos] good and evil are a matter of directio voluntatis, with money-power … representing the most powerful leverage for evil will.”

  The problem with this dichotomy is that it omits another form of evil: the use of the will when the will is of no use. Such evil is usually invisible to a willful man. Goodwill can fight bad will, but only in those cases where will is called for in the first place. At times when the will should be suspended, whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Or to put it more strongly: at such times all will, no matter its direction, is bad will. For when the will dominates, there is no gap through which grace may enter, no break in the ordered stride for error to escape, no way by which a barren prince may receive the virtù of his people, and for an artist, no moment of receptiveness when the engendering images may come forward.

  Any artist who develops the will risks its hegemony. If he is at all wary of that sympathy by which we become receptive to things beyond the self, he may not encourage the will to abandon its position when its powers are exhausted. Willpower has a tendency to usurp the functions of imagination, particularly in a man in a patriarchy. Yeats’s shopworn formula—that “rhetoric is the will doing the work of the imagination”—refers to such a state, for when the will works in isolation, it turns of necessity to dictionary studies, syntactical tricks, intellectual formulae, memory, history, and convention—any source of material, that is, which can imitate the fruits of imagination without actually allowing them to emerge. Just as there are limits to the power of the erotic, so there are limits to the power of the will. The will knows about survival and endurance; it can direct attention and energy; it can finish things. But we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower. We cannot stay awake on willpower. Will may direct virtù but it cannot bring it into the world. The will by itself cannot heal the soul. And it cannot create.

  Pound seems to have felt deeply the limits of the erotic, but I’m not so sure he felt the limits of willpower. Long portions of the Cantos—particularly those written in the decade 1935–45—are rhetorical in Yeats’s sense. The voice is full of opinion without erotic heat, like an old pensioner chewing his disappointed politics in a barbershop. The history cantos, in particular—all the material about China and the long portrait of John Adams—are deadly dull, never informed with the fire, complexity, or surprise that are the mark of living images. They are 2 percent poetry and 98 percent complaint, obsession, and cant theory, what Whitman called “talk.” Working out of “good will” alone, the poem becomes mired in time, argument, and explanation, forgetting the atemporal mystery it set out to protect.

  I don’t receive a shilling a month, wrote Mr. Adams to

  Abigail

  in seventeen

  74 June 7th. approve of committee from the several

  colonies

  Bowdoin, Cushing, Sam Adams, John A. and Paine

  (Robert)

  ‘mope, I muse, I ruminate’ le personnel manque we have not men for the times Cut the overhead my dear wife and keep yr / eye on the

  dairy

  non importation, non eating, non export, all bugwash

  but until they have proved it

  in experiment no use in telling em.

  Local legislation / that is basic /

  we wd. consent in matters of empire trade, It is by no means essential to trade with foreign nations at all

  as sez Chas Francis, China and Japan have proved

  it …

  Etcetera, etcetera. The talk goes on for two hundred pages before we come to real poetry again in the “Pisan Cantos.”

  And where were the “Pisan Cantos” written? Pound stayed in Italy during the Second World War, making radio broadcasts denouncing the Allies; when the war was over, the U.S. Army captured him and locked him up in an army jail near Pisa. They treated him horribly: they kept him outdoors in a wire-mesh cage with the lights on; they allowed no one to speak with him. He had a breakdown. In short, they broke his will. He was forced to walk backward, out of pride into sympathy. “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. / Pull down thy vanity …” He was shoved toward an inner life again, out of his mechanical opinions, and the poems return to poetry for a while.

  II • Durable Treasure

  Pound once wrote to Louis Zukofsky: “My poetry and my econ are NOT separate or opposed. Essential unity.” To illustrate the connection and by so doing to move into the economics, I want to retell some old anecdotes about Pound and his fellow modernists. No one seems to deny that Ezra Pound could be arrogant and autocratic at times, but we have several remarkable testimonies to a gentler side of his personality as well. All of them bespeak a connection between art and generosity.

  T. S. Eliot took a boat to London shortly before the First World War. He was working on a doctoral thesis. He had written some poems, most of which had been lying in a drawer for several years. Pound read them. “It is such a comfort,” he wrote to Harriet Monroe, “to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar.” He sent “Prufrock” to Poetry magazine and midwifed it into print, refusing to let Monroe change it, refusing even to give her Eliot’s address so she might, as he put it, “insult” him through the mails with suggested alterations.

  In 1921 Eliot left the manuscript of The Waste Land with Pound, and Pound went through it with his red pencil. He thought it was a masterpiece. And why should its author not go on writing such masterpieces? Well, he was working as a clerk in Lloyd’s Bank in London and didn’t have the time. Pound decided to free him. He organized a subscription plan called “Bel Esprit.” The idea was to find thirty people who could chip in fifty dollars each to help support Eliot. Pound chipped in, as did Hemingway, Richard Aldington, and others. Pound threw himself into it, hammering the typewriter, printing up a circular, sending out a stream of letters. (In the end, not enough subscribers were found and Eliot was embarrassed by the show. The publicity may have helped to draw the $2,000 Dial prize to him in 1922, however.)

  A quarter of a century later Eliot wrote a portrait of his sponsor:

  No one could have been kinder to younger men, or to writers who … seemed to him worthy and unrecognized. No poet, furthermore, was, without self-depreciation, more unassuming about his own achievement in poetry. The arrogance which some people have found in him, is really something else; and whatever it is, it has not expressed itself in an undue emphasis on the value of his own poems.

  He liked to be the impresario for younger men, as well as the animator of artistic activity in any milieu in which he found himself. In this role he would go to any lengths of generosity and kindness; from inviting constantly to dinner a struggling author whom he suspected of being under-fed, or giving away clothing (though his shoes and underwear were almost the only garments which resembled those of other men sufficiently to be worn by them), to trying to find jobs, collect subsidies, get work published and then get it criticised and praised.

  When W. B. Yeats showed Pound one of James Joyce’s poems, Pound wrote to Joyce, then living in Italy, and before long he’d reviewed Dubliners and arranged for The Egoist to print A Portrait of the Artist, both serially and in book form. Joyce had earned his keep in Italy by teaching English, and he tried to do the same when he later moved to Zurich with his wife and children. By then he was writing Ulysses. Pound’s efforts to place the art at the center of Joyce’s labors were unflagging. He prevailed upon Yeats to squeeze £75 out of the Royal Literary Fund for Joyce, and he mailed him £25 of his own money as well, sa
ying it came from an anonymous donor. He got the Society of Authors to send Joyce £2 a week for three months.

  When the two men finally met in Paris, Joyce arrived thin as a rail, wearing a long overcoat and tennis shoes. Pound, on his return to London, sent a package back across the Channel which, when Joyce finally untangled its string cocoon, revealed a collection of used clothes and a pair of old brown shoes.

  Finally, as Wyndham Lewis tells it,

  Ezra Pound “sold” the idea of Joyce to Miss Harriet Weaver. Subsequently that lady set aside a capital sum, variously computed but enough to change him overnight from a penniless Berlitz teacher into a modest rentier; sufficiently for him to live comfortably in Paris, write Ulysses, have his eyes regularly treated and so forth. These rentes were his—I know nothing beyond that—until he had become a very famous person: and the magician in this Arabian Nights Tale was undoubtedly Ezra.

  There are other stories with similar plots—Hemingway, Frost, Blunt, Cummings, Zukofsky, and others. In 1927 the $2,000 Dial award went to Pound himself. He invested the money (or put it in the bank) at 5 percent and gave away the interest. He sent some of the money to John Cournos, writing: “Investment of Dial prize is due to yield about one hundred bucks per annum. The first 100 has already gone, discounted in three lots, one ten guinea s.o.s. earlier this week … I think you better regard the enclosed as advance payment for something to be written for Exile, when the skies are clearer.” Pound’s magazine, The Exile, was itself a fruit of this award.

  Wealth that came to Pound left him in the service of art. As Hemingway wrote in a little “Homage to Ezra”:

  We have Pound … devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide.

  No one failed to mention this part of Pound’s spirit. It is a cornerstone of his way of being. Each anecdote has a simple structure: from the “Bel Esprit” to the old brown shoes we have a man who responds with generosity when he is moved by art. True worth, for such a person, inheres in the creative spirit, and the objects of the world should move accordingly, not to some other, illusory value. Pound’s essay “What Is Money For?” begins with its own answer: money is “for getting the country’s food and goods justly distributed.” The title could as well have been “Why Have No Proper Shoes Been Distributed to James Joyce?” In approaching Pound’s economic theories, it seems to me that our work will be most fruitful if we use these anecdotes as a backdrop, if we see his work as an attempt to find a political economy that would embody the spirit they reveal. Pound sought a “money system” that might replicate, or at least support, the form of value that emanates from creative life. He cared for neither Marxism nor bourgeois materialism because, he felt, neither held a place for the artist. He was attracted to the theories of an Englishman—Major C. H. Douglas—because Douglas was one of the first, according to Pound, “to postulate a place for the arts, literature, and the amenities in a system of economics.” During the 1930s Pound printed his economic ideas in a series of “Money Pamphlets”; in one of them he describes two different kinds of bank—one in Siena and one in Genoa—the first built “for beneficence” and the second “to prey on the people.” The last line of his analysis reads: “The arts did not flourish in Genoa, she took almost no part in the intellectual activity of the renaissance. Cities a tenth her size have left more durable treasure.”

  The point for the moment is not that Pound was either right or wrong about the Bank of Siena or about Major Douglas, but simply that Pound’s money theories, at least at the start, were addressed to the situation of the artist and the liveliness of culture. Something had happened after the Renaissance, he felt, that ate away at art and made it less likely that an artist would have a decent pair of shoes. In Canto 46 we find the date 1527—the time, roughly, of the Peasants’ War, Luther’s sermons on Deuteronomy, and Thomas Müntzer’s martyrdom—and with that date the line: “Thereafter art thickened, thereafter design went to hell.” The changes that the end of the Middle Ages brought to political economy (and to religion and philosophy) are for Pound the touchstone for an explanation of the shift in the sense of value. To explain the whole, Pound focused on the post-Reformation reemergence of usury.

  Canto 45

  With usura hath no man a house of good stone

  each block cut smooth and well fitting

  that design might cover their face,

  with usura

  hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

  harpes et luz

  or where virgin receiveth message

  and halo projects from incision,

  with usura

  seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines

  no picture is made to endure nor to live with

  but it is made to sell and sell quickly

  with usura, sin against nature,

  is thy bread ever more of stale rags

  is thy bread dry as paper,

  with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

  with usura the line grows thick

  with usura is no clear demarcation

  and no man can find site for his dwelling.

  Stonecutter is kept from his stone

  weaver is kept from his loom

  WITH USURA

  wool comes not to market

  sheep bringeth no gain with usura

  Usura is a murrain, usura

  blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand

  and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo

  came not by usura

  Duccio came not by usura

  nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin′ not by usura

  nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted.

  Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio

  Praedis, Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.

  Not by usura St. Trophime

  Not by usura Saint Hilaire,

  Usura rusteth the chisel

  It rusteth the craft and the craftsman

  It gnaweth the thread in the loom

  None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;

  Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered

  Emerald findeth no Memling Usura slayeth the child in the womb

  It stayeth the young man’s courting

  It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

  between the young bride and her bridegroom

  CONTRA NATURAM

  They have brought whores for Eleusis

  Corpses are set to banquet at behest of usura.

  The poem is written out of a late medieval sensibility. We have covered this ground before. As with any scholastic analysis, Pound begins with the Aristotelian “usura, sin against nature” and, following the traditional natural metaphor, declares that if such “unnatural value” rules the market, all other spheres of value will decay, from human courtship and procreation, through craft, art and, finally, religion. In an early canto, the young Pound on a visit to Italy sees the “Gods float in the azure air”; when “azure hath a canker by usura,” the spirits themselves have sickened.

  The poem may have a medieval argument, but it’s a modern poem. I want to offer one example of twentieth-century usury here, so as to recall the argument of our earlier chapter and set it in its present frame. By “usury” Pound usually means an exorbitant rent on the loan of money; other times he simply means any “charge for the use of purchasing power.” But Pound also connects usury to the life of the imagination, and it is in that link that we must look for its real import. It’s the spirit of usury we want to ferret o
ut, not the percentages that appear on loan applications.

  I take as my examples of the spirit of modern usury two cases of the marketing of commodities to children. For many years Philip Dougherty wrote a fascinating column on advertising for the New York Times. In one of these columns he tells us that in 1977 the Union Underwear Company (the makers of BVD’s and Fruit of the Loom) set out to increase their profits in the children’s market. The company’s researchers found that the children of the United States wear out 250 million pairs of underwear a year. At the going price, $2.25 a pair, the annual market is almost $600 million. With this in mind, the company hired an advertising agency that in turn contracted with a series of comic-book companies for the use of their characters (Spider-Man, Superwoman, Superman, Archie, Veronica, and so on). Images or insignia of these characters were printed on the underwear, now renamed “Underoos” and repriced at $4.79 a pair, more than double the regular price. The Times columnist reports: