Ezra Pound: Poet Read online

  EZRA POUND: POET

  EZRA POUND: POET

  A Portrait of the Man and his Work

  II : THE EPIC YEARS 1921–1939

  A. DAVID MOODY

  ‘Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique’ (Péguy)

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  FOR JOANNA

  CONTENTS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  PREFACE

  CHRONOLOGY

  PART ONE : 1921–1932

  1. A Year in Paris, 1921–1924

  Nature, genius, and the state of the world—Canto II: seeing the light— Le Testament or Pound’s Villon: in the dark—A new theory of harmony—Year 1 of a new era: kaleidoscope—A renaissance man—Life and times: 1923–1924

  2. From Rapallo, 1924–1932

  Human complications—Saving the world by pure form—A sextant for A Draft of XXX Cantos —Literary relations old and new—In the sphere of action—Cavalcanti: the intelligence of love—Threads, tesserae

  PART TWO : 1933–1939

  3. A Democrat in Italy, 1933

  Il Poeta meets Il Duce—Revolutionary economics—Making music of history: Cantos 31–41 —Note: A historian, the Bank Wars, and the New Deal

  4. Things Fall Apart, 1933–1937

  To spread order about him—The turning point: 1935–1936—‘The boss knows his business’—Music, money, cantos— The Fifth Decad: against Usura—The form and pressure of the time

  5. Ideas of Order, 1937–1939

  ‘Immediate need of Confucius’—Signor Mussolini speaks—To educate—Anschluss—Going wrong, thinking of rightness—Czechoslovakia sacrificed—Comings and goings—The end of Czechoslovakia—Two books for governors: (1) cantos 52–61—Two books for governors: (2) cantos 62–71

  6. Alien in America

  Appendices

  A. Outline of Pound’s Le Testament or Villon

  B. A brief history of Le Testament or Villon

  C. Outline of Cavalcanti. A sung dramedy in 3 acts

  D. ‘Huey, God bless him’, an unpublished article (1935)

  E. The founding of the Bank of England, and the US National Banking Act

  ABBREVIATIONS

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  View of Rapallo. Postcard sent by Pound to Olivia Shakespear, 6 March 1925, with note: ‘arrows show flat, mostly roof’ endpapers

  1. Ezra Pound in Rapallo, 1920s

  2. Ezra Pound at his desk in his Paris studio, 1922

  3. James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, John Quinn, in Pound’s studio, 1923. Ford and Quinn are on chairs made by Pound

  4. Olga Rudge, violinist, c.1923

  5. George Antheil and Olga Rudge, Paris, 1923

  6. Olga Rudge, c.1923

  7. Ezra Pound, 1920s

  8. Dorothy Pound, c.1930

  9. Ezra Pound in Vienna, 1930 (Photo: Bill Brandt)

  10. Pound on the tennis court, Rapallo, 1926

  11. Ezra Pound on the rooftop terrace of his apartment, Rapallo, 1930s (Photo: Arnold Genthe)

  12. Basil Bunting in caricature by Gubi, Il Mare 13 August 1931

  13. Louis Zukofsky, 1933

  14. W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Harvard, 1932

  15. James Laughlin, 1930s

  16. Maria Rudge, Homer Pound, Ezra Pound, Gais, 1930

  17. Maria Rudge and her father, Venice, 1935

  18. Maria Rudge and her mother, Venice, 1935

  19. Dorothy Pound, 1930s

  20. Ezra Pound, 1930s

  21. Pound in his Rapallo apartment, c.1938, with Gaudier Brzeska sculptures (Cat and Embracers), and with Wyndham Lewis’s Red Duet (1914) on wall (Photo: Arnold Genthe)

  22. Olga Rudge, 1930s

  23. Pound arriving New York, April 1939

  FIGURES

  1. Rudge/Antheil Concert poster, Aeolian Hall, London, 10 May 1924

  2. ‘The XVIII Canto’, initial by Gladys Hynes, in A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928)

  3. Invitation to Pound’s series of lectures, ‘An Historic Background for Economics’, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, March 1933

  TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

  ABC of Economics (1933) in gists

  Exhibits from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long

  PREFACE

  One mistake of the political mind is to underestimate the diversity and discontinuity of the psyche.

  —Donald Hall, Remembering Poets

  I could give you a verbal description of his character which would not be unjust to him, but what are such descriptions worth? A man’s character is his whole life.

  —Goethe, Italian Journey

  An artist’s statement is made in and by his work. His work is his biography, and the better the artist the more this applies.

  —Ezra Pound. ‘Gaudier: A Postscript’

  No critic has the right to pretend that he fully understands an artist.

  —Ezra Pound, ‘Brancusi’

  A biographer—a novelist, on oath.

  —Leon Edel

  Pound’s middle years, the most productive of his career, coincided with the two decades between the 1914–18 ‘Great War’, and the ‘Second World War’ of 1939–45. In the 1920s, and in Paris, Pound was among the leading figures of the avant-garde, along with Joyce, whose Ulysses was published there in 1922; and Picasso and Braque, and his more particular friends Brancusi and Picabia and Léger; and along with Stravinsky, and Satie, and Jean Cocteau. In that ambience he composed a musically inventive and emotionally intense opera, Le Testament [de Villon]; made an original contribution to the theory of harmony; and composed, following musical procedures, the first thirty cantos of his modern epic. Music was all important to him at that time. But so too was the imperative to promote advances in all the arts for the general betterment of society.

  That concern was given a sharper focus by the severe economic depression brought on by the 1929 Wall Street Crash, a depression which continued, in America and Britain, through the 1930s. He found it infamous that the governments of those democraci
es should put saving the banks, and saving the financial system responsible for the crisis and the depression, before the welfare of their people. He held it as axiomatic that a democratic government should serve the interests of the whole people, not the interests of the few who controlled the nation’s wealth; more, he held it to be criminally irresponsible for a government to allow the nation’s credit to be in the hands of bankers and financiers who were free to use it for their private profit without regard for the public interest. At the same time, living now in Italy, he observed that Mussolini, in his Fascist and anti-democratic dictatorship, did provide for the welfare of his people, and did direct the banks to serve the nation’s needs. That led him to endorse Fascism in and for Italy, while urging the United States to live up to its own democratic Constitution. The forty cantos which he composed in the 1930s were predominantly concerned with economic and social justice, and with historical instances of good and bad banking and good and bad government. One entire decad was devoted to the example of Confucian China, and another to John Adams, the mind behind the American Revolution and the founding of its democracy. Those two blocks of cantos, the ‘China’ and the ‘John Adams’, are the keystones of his epic, and the most developed working out of his economic and political commitments in the 1930s. Those cantos, and those commitments, have not been well understood; but the time may have come for a better appreciation of Pound’s vision of the fundamental principles of a just society now that we are undergoing our own financial crisis and consequent economic and social ‘austerity’.

  Things were not simple, politically and socially, in the 1930s; and Pound himself was not simple. Hindsight simplifies, but rarely clarifies. Complexities, confusions, and contradictions have to be reckoned with, as features of the time and of Pound. The paradox of his endorsing Mussolini’s Fascist economic programme, while taking his stand upon the Constitution of democratic America, might be matched by democratic America’s maintaining an undemocratic and anti-social financial system. Another self-contradiction would be America’s continuing discrimination against the descendants of its slaves while declaring that all men are born free and equal; and matching that might be Pound’s deploying the anti-Semitism endemic in America and Europe, and already turning murderous in Hitler’s Germany, as a weapon in his crusade for social justice. Altogether, Pound emerges in this account as a flawed idealist and a great poet caught up in the turmoil of his darkening time and struggling, often raging, against the current to be a force for enlightenment.

  As I wrote in the preface to the first volume, Ezra Pound exists now in what he wrote, in his poetry, and also in all the thousands of pages of his published writings and the tens of thousands of pages of unpublished letters and drafts. That hoard is the form in which I have studied and contemplated him, and I have taken his words as the material and the medium of this portrait—as both what I have had to work from and what I have had to work with. Nearly everything that matters here has behind it some document—I have refrained from speculation, and I have ignored hearsay. My interest has been to weave the varied threads of Pound’s life and work into a patterned narrative, and to present the drama of this egregiously individual and powerful vortex in the stream of his language and culture.

  A.D.M.

  Alleins, June 2013.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1921 Jan., after two week in Paris to Saint-Raphaël; back to Paris 10 April. Works on opera Le Testament de Villon. Translates Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour—published in 1922 as The Natural History of Love. Dec., Poems 1918–21, including cantos IV–VII, published in New York. EP and DP take studio at 70 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris VI.

  1922 3 Jan., T. S. Eliot in Paris with The Waste Land ‘in semi-existence’; EP edits the manuscript and transforms ‘a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem’. Joyce’s Ulysses published in Feb. by Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Pound’s ‘Eighth Canto’, later revised as canto II, published in Dial in May. Mar. begins ‘Bel Esprit’ scheme with Natalie Barney to raise a fund for Eliot and other writers. Apr.–June, travelling in Italy; drafting canto 12 and ‘Hell cantos’; early drafts towards Malatesta cantos. Back in Paris begins affaire with Nancy Cunard; declares himself ‘a Confucian’ to John Quinn; meets William Bird, whose Three Mountains Press will publish several of his works. 30 Oct., Mussolini forms government following Fascist ‘March on Rome’. Nov., The Waste Land appears in Dial.

  1923 Jan.–Apr., in Italy; walking tour there with Hemingway in Feb.; researching and writing Malatesta cantos, to be published as ‘Cantos IX–XII of a Long Poem’ in Eliot’s Criterion in July. Indiscretions published by Three Mountains Press. In Paris, meets the violinist Olga Rudge (OR) in Natalie Barney’s salon. June, meets George Antheil, with whom he radically revises the score of Le Testament. Transatlantic Review, edited in Paris by Ford with assistance by Basil Bunting—EP promotes and aids the journal. Aug., walking tour in Dordogne with OR. Oct., Bride Scratton, whom EP first met in London in 1910, divorces her husband, naming him as co-respondent.

  1924 Jan.–May, EP and DP tour Italy looking for permanent home there. June, William Carlos Williams in Paris. Oct., EP and DP leave Paris for Italy, first to Rapallo, then in Dec. to Sicily until Feb. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony published by Three Mountains Press.

  1925 Jan., A Draft of XVI Cantos published by Three Mountains Press. Mar., EP and DP now settled in Rapallo. 9 July, birth of daughter Mary in the Italian Tyrol, child of EP and OR. Child to be fostered and brought up there in local farming family.

  1926 June, Le Testament concert version performed in Paris. 10 Sept., birth of Omar Pound in Paris, son of Dorothy. Child to be fostered in Norland Nurseries and brought up in England. Dec., Personae, The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound published in New York.

  1927 EP begins to edit and publish his little magazine, Exile (four issues). Oct., studying Guido Cavalcanti and his philosophical context.

  1928 EP receives 1927 Dial award for poetry. EP’s translation of the Confucian Ta Hio, or The Great Learning published by the University of Washington Bookstore. May, EP in Vienna for Antheil/OR concert; writes ‘Mensdorf letter’. July, EP’s translation of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’ with commentary in Dial. Sept., A Draft of The Cantos 17–27 published by John Rodker in London. Oct., OR buys small house in Calle Querini, Dorsoduro, Venice. Nov., Selected Poems, ed. TSE, published by Faber & Gwyer. W. B. Yeats takes apartment in Rapallo. Dec., EP completes his edition of Cavalcanti.

  1929 1 June, EP’s parents sail from New York for London, then go on to Rapallo, where they decide to settle. 24 Oct., Wall Street Crash sets off the Great Depression of the 1930s.

  1930 May, to Frankfurt for première of Antheil’s opera Transatlantic (The People’s Choice); there meets Leo Frobenius. Aug., A Draft of XXX Cantos published by Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press. EP now working on cantos 31–5. Nov., begins writing to US Senator Bronson Cutting. OR begins renting upper floor of Casa 60, Sant’ Ambrogio, above Rapallo.

  1931 26, 27 Oct., BBC broadcasts Le Testament. Dec., How to Read published by Desmond Harmsworth in London.

  1932 Jan., EP’s Guido Cavalcanti/Rime published by Edizioni Marsano, Genoa. May, EP’s Profile/An Anthology collected in MCMXXXI published by Giovanni Scheiwiller, Milan. Aug., EP completes Cavalcanti (‘a sung dramedy in 3 acts’). Begins to contribute to Il Mare, Rapallo’s local newspaper. An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, ed. Louis Zukofsky, is dedicated ‘To Ezra Pound who…is still for the poets of our time the most important’.

  1933 30 Jan., EP granted interview with Mussolini. 30 Jan., Hitler becomes Reichschancellor of Germany. Feb., EP writes Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Begins correspondence with Congressman George Tinkham of Massachusetts. 21–31 Mar., EP gives series of 9 lectures at Milan’s Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, under general title ‘An Historic Background for Economics’, and beginning with ‘Why or how a poet came to be drawn into economic discussion’; the fourth lecture was on ‘Economic ideas of the
early and constructive American presidents: Jefferson’; the fifth on ‘John Quincy Adams’; and the sixth on ‘Martin Van Buren’; the final lecture was on ‘What literature has to do with it—The function of good writing in the State’. Apr., ABC of Economics—‘a concise introduction to “volitionist economics”’—published by Faber & Faber. [Not the text of the Milan lectures.] June, first annual Rapallo concert series organized by EP. July, OR becomes secretary to Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. Oct., EP’s Active Anthology published by Faber & Faber. Nov., starts writing to Senator William Borah of Idaho.

  1934 Feb., EP as ‘Alfie Venison’, ‘The Charge of the Bread Brigade’, the first of the ‘Alfred Venison’ songs of social protest. May, EP’s ABC of Reading published by Routledge, London. Aug., EP circulates his Volitionist Economics questionnaire. Aug., Hitler proclaimed Führer. Sept., EP’s Make It New/Essays published by Faber & Faber. Oct., Eleven New Cantos/XXXI–XLI published by Farrar & Rinehart, New York.

  1935 Jan., EP’s first radio broadcast to USA—next will be in Jan. 1941. May, Social Credit: An Impact published by Stanley Nott, London. July, Jefferson and/or Mussolini/L’idea statale/Fascism as I have seen it/…Volitionist Economics published by Stanley Nott. Sept., Nazi Germany promulgates ‘Nuremberg Laws’ depriving German Jews of their citizenship and further restricting their civil rights. Oct., Italy invades Abyssinia.

  1936 Jan., EP and OR promote Vivaldi revival. Feb., canto 45, ‘With Usura’, published in English Social Credit magazine Prosperity. July, Spanish Civil War begins. Nov., Germany and Italy form their ‘Axis’. Dec., EP sends cantos 42–51 to Faber.

  1937 Feb., EP’s Polite Essays published by Faber. Feb.–May, writes Guide to Kulchur. The first chapter published in June by Giovanni Scheiwiller in Milan as Confucius/Digest of the Analects. June, The Fifth Decad of Cantos published by Faber. July, Sino-Japanese war begun by Japan’s invasion of northern China.