Finding a Form (24 page)

Karl Shapiro, who had opposed giving the Bollingen Prize to Pound, wrote then that, in his opinion, “the poet’s political and moral philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standards as literary work.” I think, however, that, although the poetry has certainly been vitiated by something, the evidence of Carpenter’s
Life
is not that Pound’s anti-Semitism was responsible, but
rather that a virulent strain of the mistrust of one’s own mind (a fear of thinking, like a fear of heights) and a habit of emotional disassociation were the chief culprits. Pound had no moral philosophy because he was incapable of the consecutive steps of thought, of the painstaking definition or systematic and orderly development of any idea. Carpenter wonderfully extracts and puts before us the faltering steps of Pound’s “argument” in his
ABC of Economics
, for instance, and they are the staggers of a drunk. He dismisses
Guide to Kulchur
, with good reason, as a disjunctive mélange of rant and bile. Disjunction is Pound’s principal method of design. If he saw the world in fragments, it was because he needed fragments, and because his psyche hated wholes.

In a whole, the various parts might get in touch with one another. In a whole, the grounds for their meeting might be discovered and explored; but Pound preferred spontaneously combustible juxtapositions, ignitions that would take place without the need of connection, as if powder and flint would fire without a strike, or any spark.

Pound took care never to interrogate the fragments themselves (because he might inadvertently treat them as wholes). He asked neither how they were constituted nor where they had been, just as he kept the pieces of his family in fragments: his wife, Dorothy Shakespear, in one place; his son as soon as possible in another; his mistress, Olga Rudge, in a third; their daughter in yet a fourth; and so on. He would seek out remote and relatively exotic figures to write about and translate (where he would not be so easily exposed, and where his cavalier way with data would go relatively unobserved). He perfected the snip system of quotation, and the snipe system of assault, never keeping to the field but darting about from concealment to concealment like an Indian. He created collages out of pieces of his mind, his peeves, his helter-skelter reading; and he flitted from enthusiasm to enthusiasm like an angry bee, because his enthusiasms encouraged him to sip, to fly, to sting. He detested academics (many of whom he bamboozled just the same), and I suspect it was because they “dwelled.” They hung over and on to things; they wrung them like wash sometimes, leaving them
flat and dry; but they did probe and pick and piece together. Pound wanted to treat most of his opinions as beyond question or analysis, beyond explanation, as if everyone ought to know what they were, and how they were, and why (Carpenter demonstrates this repeatedly); thus he protected the emptiness of his ideas from being discovered by keeping the lights in their rooms lit but never going in.

The poet’s irascibility, his bullying, his bluster, his adoption of moral outrage, his name-calling, his simplifications, his omissions—how long the list is—work to keep the wondering, thinking, quizzing world at bay. If you are confident that four and four make eight, you may be bored if asked to prove it, but hardly angry and outraged. Vilification protects the self-evident from any self for whom it won’t be.

It is always dangerous to define yourself, as Pound increasingly did, in terms of your beliefs: I am Catholic; I am an anarchist; I am a fan of the flat earth. An attack on them is an attack on you, and leads to war. You can fight for a cause and make it come about, but you can never make an idea come true like a wish, for its truth is—thank heaven—out of all hands. What could Pound do, built of opinions like a shack, but hate every wind?

Pound’s letter-writing style (and then his public prose and then his poetry) exhibits the same traits. Hokey spellings, jokey down-home ruralities, punny inventions, undercut the seriousness of whatever’s said, even when it is cantankerous. Caps give weight to words which otherwise wouldn’t receive it, and offer directions to the understanding which could not be got from the sentences themselves, because neither feeling nor conviction arise from within this prose. It is all punched in from outside. Sentences often fail to complete themselves. The rattle of ideas is regularly broken by conceptual silences that open suddenly like fissures (the hiatus is more frequent than the comma), by leaps of thought that do not include the notion of a landing. Pound’s wartime broadcasts from Rome on the fascist radio (which were the basis for charges of treason later brought against him) were clad in such homespun that a few thought he had to be hoodwinking his sponsors.

No. Ezra was in earnest. This was one role he would play
through to the curtain. As Carpenter’s account shows (and it is a genuinely moving one, even when it must move through this sort of material), Pound regretted his internment; he did indeed become a man on whom the sun has gone down (in a phrase from
The Cantos
); but he never really recanted; he never admitted he was wrong; he took courage from his fears to the end.

What Pound was afraid to face (I feel) was the fact that he was not, himself, a self, that he was a bundle of borrowed definitions, including that of the poet. Carpenter quotes Wyndham Lewis’s accurate observation that Pound was “that curious thing, a person without a trace of originality of any sort” except the remarkable ability to wear a mask, adopt a tone. “When he can get into the skin of somebody else … he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot.” Leslie Fiedler has wondered whether Pound wasn’t principally a parodist, so dependent was he upon texts other than his own.

I have to agree with Carpenter that the well-known “Portrait d’une Femme” is more nearly a picture of Pound himself than its ostensible model, Olivia Shakespear. The lady is seen as a still sea crossed by trading boats and awash with shipwrack and driftgifts. The poem concludes:

It is true (I think) that most of Pound’s best poetry is based upon the work of someone else, and stems from his ability to release another language into English. It was what made him such an excellent editor. Time and time again, in
The Cantos
, amid a barren and chaotic landscape, poetry miraculously blazes up, and at the bottom of that fire a Chinese classic like
Li Ki
, for instance, will be found fueling it, or some other distant text. With so little spring left in his own legs, he could still rebound beautifully from
someone else’s words, because they—not love or landscape or the pleasures and problems of life—were his muse. Like lighter fluid’s flame, these phrases (where, paradoxically, Pound was at last pure Pound) consume themselves without leaving a scorch, mar, or any other trace on the page. Lines like these—flames like these—“lick.”

In his role as a Modernist, Ezra Pound is a great disappointment. He was a minor master of collage, certainly a fundamental Modernist technique, but he valued content over form, message over manner; a lot of his best language was artificial, and, as in the lines above, almost purely decorative, as if it had to be torn from time and place before it could flutter at all: a lyrical oasis amid hate’s acrid heat. Pound championed many poets and novelists, but not for long, and not always with real understanding; he didn’t like much modern art despite his enthusiasm for Gaudier-Brzeska; and although he had a hand in the Vivaldi revival, and was linked in love with a musician, and composed an opera with which he paralyzed all available ears, he disliked Beethoven, is said to have been tone deaf, and took no part in the serious musical movements of his time, as either a listener or an advocate. Consigned by society to the periphery, he began to take an interest in, and choose, the peripheral, and like many American writers he began to fade, concerning himself more and more, as the years went by, with the crank he was turning.

I suppose most of us want to make a difference. Pound wanted to make a real dent—not (I am afraid) because his dent would make a difference, but because it would make him. If poetry proved impotent, he would turn to prophecy, to politics, to dreams. If he could not act, he could at least assume the posture. So the dent he made was a stage dent, one which would do to advance the action of the play, but which was contained within the inconsequential
frame of the stage. Poet/prophet: they were together in the old days, but they were two roles now, and neither paid.

Humphrey Carpenter concludes his exemplary biography with, appropriately, fragments: a few summary pronouncements, none of them about money. The last is a word in the margin of the
Nicomachean Ethics
at a point in the Introduction where the translator is summarizing the Philosopher’s views. “The life of Action,” Horace Rackham writes, “has no absolute value: it is not part of, but only a means to, the End, which is the life of Thought,” and Pound’s marginal word is “Nuts.”

What a lovely word game we could conclude these remarks by playing. It is a very American response—“Nuts!” It is what our generals say when they are surrounded by Germans and asked to surrender. It is what adolescents say when they mean “balls.” It is what people called Ezra, so they wouldn’t have to call him something else. It also involves just the right textual bollix, because for Aristotle pure act and pure thought are one and the same.

W
e live in a time, we’re told, of self-absorption. No longer is mankind the measure: me now metrics me. I envision a piece of blotting paper slowly blotting itself to oblivion. Certainly if tribes are more interesting than nations, sects more important than a common faith, and minorities major, then what could be more majorly minor than me: me, me, more me, as Joyce writes, me and mine and all that I have done. Yet self-regard has never been enough. We want the regard of others; they are to be looking as we look; we want them to be absorbed by the same self that absorbs us: see me see myself as you should see me; remember me when I’m a ghost; watch me turn myself into a book.

The power to see ourselves as others see us is granted only to such disengaged observers as arrive from France by slow sail. Even my mirror puts just that bit of me before my gaze which I permit to fall there. I cannot see all round myself: not anywhere I walk or perch or if I quickly whirl about to come upon my rear and take it by surprise. I might as well be asleep to such sides of me as disappear out of the corners of my eyes. Nor is the ugliness of my gnarled feet evident anywhere within my skin where I alone can feel what splendid shape they’re in. I think I have a winning smile, but to those on whom my smile is so winsomely conferred, the slightly turned-down corners of its lips convey despair, disgust, disdain—I know not what uninvited attitude in addition—and invariably,
if in tears, though I argue my happiness like William Jennings Bryan on behalf of God, the weeping will convict me of a lie, as far as mere onlookers are concerned; because we really believe in no other consciousness than our own, and must infer the contents of another’s mind from the perceptions which arrive in ours: from an overheard voice, its screams and groans and heavy breathing; from a body, its weight and posture; from someone’s gait, the swagger; and from the face, its signs. And to the groan don’t we affix our own ache, to another’s risen flesh our yearning, to the sly wink our own conspiratorial designs?

It is safer by far, some say, to rely on behavior by itself to speak. History is something we catch in the act, and only acts have public consequences. Internal states are not even evidence, for pains can be imagined or misplaced, their groaning faked; better to see where the bone is broken or tooth decayed (John Dewey once argued that an aching tooth was not sufficient evidence of something anywhere amiss), and if I promise to give another all my love, it would be wise of the lucky recipient to wait and weigh what the offered love improves, and count what its solicitude will cost.

Feelings are not a dime a dozen, but the price of eggs is eighty cents. Which, do you think then, really hatches chicks in the yard?

Yes, as Aristotle insisted, the Good is what the Good Man does. Does the geologist need to infer an interior to his rock to read its past? Does the botanist really interrogate her plants? Does the zoologist attribute suffering to his frogs as he runs his scalpel round their gizzards? Why, we could weep a world of pain into a thimble and have hollow enough left over for a finger, since consciousness never struts and frets upon the stage, or occupies a locker in the dressing room.

Biography, the writing of a life, is a branch of history. It requires quite a lot of labor, and therefore, when such a work is undertaken, one would expect the subject to be of some significance to history as a whole. Yet, except for the
Encyclopedia of the Dead
, as Danilo Kiš imagined it, where everybody’s obit is presently complete or in meticulous construction, the majority of mankind rest, as George
Eliot wrote, in unvisited tombs, and have left behind them nothing of their former presence but perhaps a hackneyed scratch upon a stone. Futility is the presiding spirit at every funeral.

Caesar’s assassins did not stab him with their souls. In Hades, their shades are not stained by the murdered man’s blood. That blood caked, that blood colored, only the blades.

Biography, the writing of a life, is a branch of history, but a broken branch, snapped perhaps heartlessly from the trunk, at the moment when Montesquieu directed the historian’s eye to larger themes, and toward those general social aspects from which the individual’s traits, he believed, had more specifically sprung.