Authors: Lewis Hyde
The Gift (36 page)
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 out, 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:
“There has never been a product like this before,” exclaimed Mr. [James W.] Johnston [Union’s marketing vice president], who noted that not only would it deliver higher profit margins than conservative underwear, but it would also react better to advertising and “for the first time add children’s influence to the purchasing decision” for underwear. He’s talking about making ‘gimmes’ out of the young set …
Mr. Johnston … was later to say, “Advertising is not necessary to sell the product, because it’s a powerful product, but advertising is necessary to establish it as a permanent part of the children’s culture.”
In a slightly different market, researchers for the nation’s second largest fast-food chain, Burger King, discovered that one out of every three times a family goes out for some fast food, it’s the child who chooses the brand. Apparently, when the weary father comes home and the tired mother says “Let’s eat out,” the father says “Someplace cheap,” and then they do what the children say. Retail sales in this market were $14.5 billion in 1977, so in that year the desires of children directed the spending of about $5 billion.
In 1977 Burger King developed a character—a magician named Burger King—in an attempt to lure hungry children away from McDonald’s, represented by a clown named Ronald McDonald. Burger King also bankrolled a “giveaway” program in which they “gave” the children of the nation $4 million worth of little toys. “It’s a tangible reward to the kid for switching his affections from Ronald to the King,” said the Burger King vice president for marketing. Burger
King was prepared to spend $40 million a year on advertising if they found their magician could attract and hold the kids’ affections.
Several things characterize both of these advertising campaigns. First, each company seeks to turn a profit by marketing an image. Not just any kind of image, either. Magicians, clowns, and men and women with superpowers appeal to children in part because children are powerless and seek to release themselves from that burden through the imagination, and in part because super people are the stuff of fairy tale and myth. Secondly, this form of marketing uses gift decoys. Burger King’s “giveaway” toys are technically bribes, not gifts. Sales rely on keeping these categories confused, however, for the intent is to use the bonding power of gifts to attach children to a product. The bond is not used, that is, for the increase that comes of gift exchange but for market profits. Finally, these campaigns are directed toward children because children are not as cynical as adults; they are more easily stirred by archetypal imagery and less likely to abstract themselves from emotional ties. Moreover, the child is needed to make an emotional appeal to the adult, the source of the cash. The profit depends on this formula: an innocent and imaginative child plus a parent with money plus an affectionate tie between the two. The people who marketed Underoos sold them in supermarkets rather than clothing stores because children more often accompany their mothers to the market and the whole promotional strategy would fall apart if this third thing, the bond between the parent and the child, was missing at the moment of the sale.
Usury in its ancient sense refers to rationalizing the increase and reciprocity of gift exchange so that it becomes a precondition of commerce that both principal and increase return to the original “owner” of the good. With this rationalization the emotional and spiritual increase of commerce is
lost, though the material may remain. The sin of usury is to separate goodwill from its vehicle. The usurer rents what should be a gift (or sells what should be a gift). Usury in this sense appears, therefore, whenever someone manages to convert a gift situation into a profit situation. Moreover, the usurer finds it in his interest to blur the distinction between the commodity mode and the gift mode so that the former may profit by the energy of the latter. In short, he converts erotic energy into money, goodwill into profit, worth into value.
The usurer is not really a comrade
or
a stranger because he makes his living by changing back and forth. On TV he ingratiates himself with the children in the morning to increase his profit margin when the mothers go out for food in the afternoon. He is different in kind from the simple merchant who may have no real interest in the well-being of your family but who at least gives sugar for sugar, salt for salt. The usurer settles for no such equilibrium. He’s in the “juice trade,” say the crooks in Chicago. He turns the juice of life (fantasy and affection in this case) into money.
Burger King and Union Underwear are modern usurers. The affections of children are drawn toward the market with a combination of counterfeit gifts and images that have a taproot in emotional life and the imagination. Then the child’s awakened desire is brought to bear on the affectionate tie to an adult who, because it is an emotional bond, will be more apt to suspend judgment, enter the gift mentality, and part with the cash. In fine, the usurer seeks out the bonds of affection and the liveliness of the imagination to move his own product for his own profit. When this system works, when kids “switch their affections” to a new product, when the profits are high enough to pay the advertisers and the promo men and the royalties of the comic-book companies, then the images are kept “alive” with advertising and they become “a
permanent part of the children’s culture.” (Advertising is the “culture” of a commodity civilization and the images are kept “alive” as long as they turn a profit—usually about a year.)
But what is the fate of affection and imagination if, whenever we are drawn in their direction, we must pass a stranger collecting tolls?
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.
Once goodwill has been separated from its vehicles, matter will increase without spirit. Objects will begin to appear that carry no social or spiritual feeling, though they are the product of human hands.
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman.
It gnaweth the thread in the loom.
We may address ourselves to Imagism in slightly different terms now. If, in turning toward the imagination, you begin with Pound’s demand for concrete speech (and with the spiritual ends of that demand), or if you begin with William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things,” or with T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative,” and if the date on the calendar is 1914, you are in a fix. For when all exterior objects can be sold at will, when usury has found a home even in the family food and clothing, then the objects of the outer world can no longer carry the full range of emotional and spiritual life. Feeling and spirit mysteriously drain away when the imagination tries to embody them in commodities. Certainly this is part of the melancholy in those poems of Eliot’s in which men and
women are surrounded by coffee spoons and cigarettes but cannot speak to one another.
The Waste Land
could be a gloss on Marx’s declaration that “the only comprehensible language which we can speak to each other … is not that of ourselves, but only that of our commodities and their mutual relations.” The imagination senses that packs of cigarettes or cafeteria trays are not emanations of
eros.
Some spirit other than the creative spirit attended to their manufacture. There is a line of modern poets who have continued to work with such materials, accepting (or not feeling) the limited amount of emotional and spiritual life in the poem. But another group of modern poets—and Eliot and Pound belong here—admitted the tension of lost life to their writing, allowing the missing vitality to disturb the surface of the poem. And some of these artists turned outward, drawn toward those ideologies that promised to limit the domain of the commodity. They undertook, in short, the redemption of the imagination, and their task led them, willy-nilly, into politics. Poets as disparate in temperament as Pound, Neruda, and Vallejo all began with a strong pull toward “thinking in images”; all found themselves brought up short, and all turned toward politics.
Before we go much further, however, we must tell two more anecdotes in which Ezra Pound gives a gift—two stories that take us a step closer to the style in which this particular poet moved from poetry to political economy.
In the late 1920s, W. B. Yeats, “forbidden Dublin winters” by his health, stayed a season in Rapallo, the Italian town where Pound and his wife had finally settled. The two men were not at ease with each other. Unsure of his own work for the moment, Yeats showed a new verse play to Pound, who returned it with a one-word comment written across the front: “Putrid!” Pound would talk nothing but politics. In
A Vision
, Yeats recalls their evening walks:
Sometimes about ten O’Clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm-trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats. He knows all their histories—the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed it; that fat grey cat is an hotel proprietor’s favourite, it never begs from the guests’ tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell off, a whirling ball of claws and fur, and now avoid each other.
Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for cats—“some of them so ungrateful,” a friend says—he never nurses the cafe cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own.
Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organise the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power. I examine his criticism in this new light, his praise of writers pursued by ill-luck, left maimed or bedridden by the War …
Yeats sensed a touch of coldness in Pound’s generosity. The gift does not move out of simple compassion here, but out of a desire of some oppressed part of the soul to come to power. And Yeats would untangle these threads, for charity will not survive when the good politician sells it for power. Power and generosity can sometimes live side by side, but that harmony is a delicate balance, a rare resolution. In politics—and Yeats wants to mark this in Pound as well—affection and generosity usually lose their autonomy and become the servants of power.
In Saul Bellow’s novel
Humboldt’s Gift
, Charlie Citrine reflects on power and poets, thinking of the American attitude toward its self-destructive artists. He lists our dead—Edgar Allen Poe, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman—and comments:
This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet’s testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the
best
of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”
The paragraph confuses two sorts of power. The “power” that draws the trees toward song is not the “power” that sends men to the moon, any more than the “energy” in Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight” is the same as the one in “the energy crisis.” But, of course, this is the confusion of the age. We wake up to it every morning. It is a modern drama in which a man of frustrated compassion begins to trade his compassion for power. Yeats sensed in Pound’s politics the same tension we addressed in the poetry: a will to power born of a frustrated compassion begins to acquire a life of its own and live apart from that compassion.
