The Book of Lost Books (38 page)

Ezra Loomis Pound

{1885–1972}

THE BOOKMAN
FOR July 1909 announced that Ezra Pound, whose collection
Personae
had just been published, had already destroyed considerably more than he had written, his “faculty for self-criticism” having incinerated “two novels and three hundred sonnets.” As always with Pound, his customary bluster concealed a grainy irritant of truth. Apart from a slender pamphlet
A Quinzaine for This Yule,
the only work available to the English-reading public was
A Lume Spento,
a volume privately printed in Venice and currently malingering in A. R. Orage's bookshop. The earliest work of the man who would transform twentieth-century poetry cannot be described more accurately than by Walter de la Mare's later phrase “patchoulied fallalaries.”

He told friends that he wrote a Petrarchan sonnet every morning, and immediately ripped it up. By such regular technical exercise, he built up the formidable metrical skills that are evident in his later work. Fiction, however, was more troublesome. Two short stories, “La Dogesa's Necklace” and “Genoa,” were certainly sent to the American magazine
Smart
Set,
but it declined to publish them and the sole copies disappeared. Pound claimed to lack the “feminine power of endurance” that was necessary for full-length novels, but he was sufficiently astute to realize that the five chapters he wrote of one were just an “interminable beginning,” and “damn bad.”

At the time he was dallying with prose narrative he had little to write about anyway. He knew he was a great poet, but he had not written any great poetry yet. He was a talented, if bumptious, American in Europe who had been bullied at university, listlessly engaged a few times, and thrown out of a teaching job at Wabash College, Indiana, on account of bohemian philanthropy toward a wintering circus performer. A publicist without a product, but a very effective self-promoter nonetheless, he was assiduously courting the great and the good of London, making more impact with his shock of hair than with the shock of the new. Ezra was distinctly ersatz, a charge that would be flung at him repeatedly.

His patient mother helpfully suggested he might make his fortune by writing an epic poem about the Wild West—a
Billythekidiad—
but Pound was already cultivating a disdainful, dismissive tone toward most things American. He was, however, planning an epic. As early as 1904, he had been struck by his tutor, Joseph Ibbotson, talking about Bentley's edition of Milton and the germ of an idea of a “forty-year epic.” At the time, he was more enthused about writing a trilogy of plays about the thrice-married, ostentatiously obscure tenth-century Lady Marozia. It is not known if he even started the work; but recondite pieces of Italian history would also find their place in his eventual epic. She herself is mentioned, very much in passing, in Canto XX.

The first installment,
A Draft of XXX Cantos,
finally appeared in 1930, once Pound had left England. He spent the rest of his life writing it, and to this day, its ending, if it has one, is uncertain.
The Cantos
resembled his working method for short stories, as he outlined it to his father—“I write them in the first person of any character that comes into my head & say anything I can think of that might make them sell”—and, although personal financial benefit was hardly the raison d'être of the work, the nature of money would become a major theme.

At the outset, Pound seemed at ease with the open, unresolved structure of
The Cantos.
He told James Joyce it was “an endless poem, of no known category, Phanopoeia or something or other, all about everything.” The range of subject matter is vast: Sigismundo Malatesta, “a failure worth all the successes of his age”; Confucius; the rise of usury in a hellish rendition of modern London; Captain Acoetes (whom, for a while, Pound considered for the narrator of
The Cantos,
“only I dont see how I cd. get
him
to Bayswater”) telling of the voyage of the god Dionysos; Pound's grandfather Thaddeus and his railway schemes; scraps of all of Ezra's obsessions from the troubadours to the Eleusinian Mysteries to Anglo-Saxon to social credit. The languages veer between erudite quotation, semimystical transfiguration, and crackerbarrel antics. As with the radio, the reader could only “tell who is talking by the noise they make”: as on an untuned radio, a crackle of interference allowed only snatches of the voice through.

If there is a theme, it is perhaps indicated by the title. The “canto” division was used by Dante for his
Divine Comedy,
and Pound's
Cantos
seem like a godless, unlaughing, unforgiving version of absolute judgment. As T. S. Eliot realized, Pound's Hell “consists of other people.” He himself was exempt from the condemnations and punishments. He was not a fellow sufferer, but the implacable judge.
The Cantos,
like
The DivineComedy,
opens descending into Hell, although this inferno is typified by liberalism, capitalism, warmongering, and cultural desiccation. As Pound wrote more of
The Cantos,
the inferno-to-paradise undercurrent strengthened: a later volume was called
Thrones
in imitation of Dante's blessed spirits, and was a movement toward the heavenly. “I've been around a bit, and know Paradise when I see it,” he claimed.

Unfortunately, he saw it in Fascism. Pound moved to Italy in 1925, and found in Mussolini the rise of a cultural superhero who could remedy many of the ills against which he was painstakingly raging. His ever more incoherent theories about money supply, economic stagnation, and cultural rejuvenation made him deeply susceptible to the balmy palliatives of Fascist rhetoric. As he waged a private war against “usury,” he segued seamlessly into pitiably predictable anti-Semitism. He started to broadcast for the Italian government, lauding Mussolini and fulminating against the pernicious Americans.

The Cantos themselves reflected this: paper money was only a symbol for wealth, and just as Pound's brief-lived, self-christened phase of Imagism had forgone lazy metaphors and easy similes in poetry, he now fulminated against the phoniness of banknotes. Monetary philosophy and fiscal metaphysics became the circulating medium of the poetry. The poems became so obscure and personal that even the Fascist government, on receipt of a letter outlining his pet theories and including copies of his poetry, was inclined to view his utopia as “the botched plan of a nebulous mind devoid of any sense of reality.” Nevertheless, they allowed him to broadcast his opinions. At the time, one of them involved the idea that the USA should cede Guam to the Japanese in exchange for three hundred film reels of Noh drama.

As the Allies advanced, Pound gave himself over to them. He was kept in a cage, exposed to the sun, and surrounded by barbed wire at a compound near Pisa and gradually assembled his Cantos for that period. “Pull down thy vanity,” he says in Canto LXXXI, though the reader is unsure whether this refers to his captors or is the sudden impinging of regret. He was transferred to America to stand trial for treason, and, after a plea of insanity, spent twelve years in an asylum, St. Elizabeth's, where acclaimed poets and deluded racists would sit at his feet.

It was there that he won, in 1949, the Bollingen Poetry Prize for the
Pisan Cantos,
those “insane and verified ravings of a confessed madman,” as Radio Moscow put it. Though
The Cantos
contain multitudes, at least Pound's belief that he was going to learn Georgian to speak to Stalin was omitted. He did not write much, but mused on what this ever-swelling epic actually meant. The Dante parallel warped, but did not change. Cantos I to L were “a detective story. Looking around to see what's wrong.” The rest would be his glimpses of an ideal city, a perfect order: but, on the page, it rarely appeared except as shuffled snippets of outré information.

When he was released in 1958, Pound was already the center of reverential academic interest in the phenomenon of
The Cantos,
as well as scalding asides about the politics contained therein. On one hand, the playwright Arthur Miller denounced his work as “sheer obscenity,” while on the other Hugh Kenner cautioned his team of prepublication readers not to emend Pound's frequent misspellings, since they might be ruining some yet-to-be-got joke.

Scholars read the fragmentation of the poem as a reflection of its time, as a reflection of his mind. Pound himself had counterpoised the “principle of order / vs split atom,” and various interpretations posited chaotic descent, Dantean voyage, and autobiographical confession as the way to read
The Cantos,
even when the project was unfinished. The poem was not, however, heading for a glorious conclusion. Armageddon and Utopia vacillated as closure. Exhausted, broken, and ill, Pound welcomed the poet and critic Donald Hall, saying, “You—find me—in fragments.”

Excerpts from some mental vision of the finished Cantos were scribbled down: “Let the Gods forgive what I / have made,” “To be men not destroyers.” With the lines “Her name was Courage / & is written Olga,” he transfigured his mistress; “These lines are for the / ultimate CANTO / whatever I may write / in the interim.” The poem has different endings depending on the editor's assessment of these final utterances. The final sputtering-out of
The Cantos
was, in a way, prefigured by Malatesta's maxim “
tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi
”—a time to speak, a time to be silent.

The Cantos
remains a challenge to contemporary poetry, a labyrinth of meanings and methods, a gauntlet thrown down to those who think poetry should be easy. Its difficulties are not just problems caused by Pound's idiosyncratic hoard of knowledge, but lie in facing the density and ambiguity of that period. Whatever Pound's mendacious and idiotic beliefs, his poem resists final solutions.

Allen Ginsberg had managed to hear a recantation of Pound's anti-Semitic and anti-democratic prejudices, a change corroborated in some of his final letters, where, in a searing realization, he saw avarice, not usury, as the aboriginal sin, and saw his hate-filled broadcasts as an example of the small-mindedness he had always claimed to abhor. But as for the poem, this irruption of truthfulness came too late for his stricken powers to express it. His own epitaph on the interminable, unfinishable
Cantos
is a stark monosyllable: “botched.”

Thomas Stearns Eliot

{1888–1965}

NINETEEN TWENTY-FOUR did not look as if it would be any better a year for T. S. Eliot than 1923, or '22, or '21 had been. Although his poem
The Waste Land
had been published in 1922 and won the Dial Prize for the best work published that year, reviewers still tended to stress its difficulty, claiming it to be “ensorcelled mazes” and “labyrinths utterly.” With the help of Ezra Pound, the poem had been unearthed from the much longer draft entitled
He Do the Police in Different Voices,
Eliot having managed to edit it during his recuperation from a mental breakdown in 1921. A similar crisis was narrowly averted in 1922. The following year, his wife, Vivien, came close to death; her psychological and physical illness had, in part, precipitated his own.

In 1924 Eliot had spent seven years working for Lloyds Bank, using his linguistic skills to read not Jules Laforgue's Symbolist poetry, but Continental financial reports. Solvency came at a price, and Pound had been soliciting patrons and friends to raise enough money for Eliot to leave the bank. In addition to the quotidian business of business, he had taken on the onerous responsibility of editing
Criterion
magazine. In only a year, a position would become his at the publishers Faber & Gwyer: such a prospect seemed inconceivably remote at the time. Eliot was writing little, though the title of his 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” would supply any biographically inclined critic with sufficient material to deduce how he viewed his time with Lloyds.

Readers of the
Harvard College Class of 1910 Quindecennial Report,
published in 1925, would have been forgiven for thinking that Eliot had reached some accommodation between the spheres of avant-garde poetics and monetary exchange rates, for, among his publications, they would have seen
Literature and Export Trade.
Writing to his bibliographer in 1936, Eliot claimed that the title was either a “small leg-pull of my own” or the result of some misunderstanding on the part of the alumni-report editors. At the time, he was writing articles for the monthly in-house magazine
Lloyds Bank Economic Review
on foreign currency movements. The articles in the journal were anonymous, and Eliot teased that only “internal evidence” might distinguish his own contributions from those of the previous post-holder, and the successive one. In economic theory, as in poetry, the extinguishing of the self seemed paramount. Suffice it to say that, to date, no one has uncovered any Lloyds reports on the inflation of the deutschmark that contain anything like “Present expenditure and past investment are both perhaps dependent on future predicted rates, in order for their risks to be sufficiently evaluated,” or “Between the outlay and the return falls the Shadow of an unstable international market, still recovering from the recent war.”

Since
Literature and Export Trade
was never, it seems, even a possibility, should we mourn its absence? Pound embroiled himself in the worst excesses of the period through his hastily conceived notions of economics, and it might be salient to show that Eliot's more measured understanding inoculated him against enthusing over social credit or legal tender with built-in obsolescence. Similarly, if
Literature and Export
Trade
had examined how the differing literary markets in America and Britain operated, or how the importation of experimental foreign literature influenced writers in a way that then had an impact back onto the original culture, it would have been intriguing.

But as it is,
Literature and Export Trade
is most likely two fingers flicked by a bored and depressed writer at the relentlessly mundane profession he reluctantly espoused. The existence of just a title permits a modicum of insight and a plethora of possibility.