Ezra Pound and the Sphinx

'The fan' in popular culture is something of a psychological
weakling, an individual with insufficient faith in their own persona.
We all have our cathartic moments; for Arthur Koestler it was the rise
of Stalinism, for George Orwell the Spanish Civil War, and for myself
the reading of E Fuller Torrey's biography of Ezra Pound. Until
recently I had believed in Ezra. I worshipped his angular head in
Wyndham Lewis' 1939 portrait. Indeed, were it not for my sensible wife
our first-born would have had the tag Ezra somewhere in his glorious
moniker.

I was I think initially attracted to Pound's audacity as a
self-publicist, particularly during his London period and generally the
period of Personae. In fact one of his few great poetic legacies is
Imagism, embodying the utmost honesty, the connection with real
traditional pre (and as Pound hoped, post!)-bourgeois language, and
each word to be charged with intense meaning:
From A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet (1908):

Fat Pierre with the hook gauche-main,
Thomas Larron 'Ear-the-less',
Tybalde and the armouress
Who gave this poignard its premier stain
Pinning the Guise that had been fain
To make him a mate of the 'Haute Noblesse'
And bade her be out with ill address
As a fool that mocketh his drue's disdeign.

For a vociferous self-declared elitist, Pound achieved a great deal in
bringing poetry closer to mere mortals. Proponents of modernism can
look to him as their spiritual forebear, though perhaps as a kind of
commissar (which he would have appreciated) rather than a laureate such
as TS Eliot, whom Pound championed and was instrumental in bringing to
prominence. It is grist to all our mills that Eliot had terrible
trouble getting The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock published in the
'States. And yet it
was I think Pound's adoption of a quasi-political role as proselytiser
for modernism that marked the onset of his premature poetic senility.
His poems for Blast! carry some of the hallmarks of the weakness that
critics would cuttingly highlight in the 'twenties and 'thirties:
From Salutation the Third (1914):

Let us deride the smugness of 'The Times': GUFFAW!
So much for the gagged reviewers
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;
These who objected to newness,
Here are their tombstones.

It was almost as if his proximity to the great success of friends like
Yeats and Eliot served to sap his inspiration.

Pound's most prominent legacy is political racism and anti-Semitism,
and sadly it is the legacy that continues to outshine his poetic
achievements. As an adjunct to this is the compelling suggestion that
the man was, like Nietzsche, to all intents and purposes insane for a
large part of his life. Pound's poetic faculties seemed to undergo some
kind of incremental greenhouse effect as he reached middle age, and
reviews of his Cantos of this period reflected this. Economics and
infamously, 'race' and its link to culture, were thus simply new,
unthreatening pasture for his embattled literary mind to graze over.
His theories on sexuality suggest that Pound had already begun to lose
his mind in the early 'thirties. In Torrey's description: 'In coitus an
"upspurt of sperm" stimulates the brain to produce intelligence,
wisdom, creativity.'

Similarly, his ridiculous economic assertions, chiefly that nothing in
life could not be solved with economics, fitted well with the growing
image of a once iconic figure decaying into poetry's second division.
Ironically for Pound his political development had a marked effect upon
his poetry. His Cantos of this period simply did not grab the attention
in the manner of his earlier work. It was almost as if Pound was going
through the motions, continuing to write poetry simply because he was a
'poet':

From Canto 37:

4 to 5 million balance in the national treasury
Receipts 31 to 32 million
Revenue 32 to 33 million
The Bank 341 million, and in deposits
6 million of government money
(and a majority in the Senate)
Public money in control of the President

And from Canto 45:

WITH USURA
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no grain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning

These Cantos were at best mildly interesting, no more, no less; at
worst irritating. His subject matter appeared somewhat inane and
eccentric; delivered without verve or passion, the stuff of dry Social
Credit seminars.

True, the rhetoric of his other work, his aesthetic style and his
radical vernacular turns of phrase were somehow hugely appealing:

For example, from Kongo Roux (1921):

'totem de tribu SHEENY, yid, taboo'

And from his personal correspondence with Wyndham Lewis (1939):

'I hav bin TOLD that it is 'necessary' to go FIRST CLAWSS to Amurika if
anything is to be accomplished. Waaal wot have I got to SELL, that wd /
[would] justify this eggspence?'

Yet how much literary skill and application did it really take to
produce such work?
And in the end, one cannot subsist for long simply on substituting K
for C.

Anti-Semitism was psychologically appealing at a particular stage in
Pound's career, the aesthetic 'fit' was perfect. His utterances and
actions towards his peers at this time were not the products of a
rational mind, rather a mind driven by brutal adolescent emotion. His
Jew-baiting brings to mind Eliot's Anglo-catholicism: a political
position, a statement of his belief in political reaction, not evidence
of a belief in the core supernatural message of Christianity. How could
Eliot believe simultaneously in Christian salvation and produce works
like The Hollow Men? Like Eliot the agnostic who sings hymns to keep
his spirit up, it is possible that Pound did not seriously believe his
own words. The Pound of the Italian broadcasts is more a man laughing
hysterically at his own inevitable fall from grace, or alternatively an
unhappy individual lashing out at nebulous and conveniently mysterious
targets.

Alternatively, when one examines his rhetoric still closer, we find the
great seer and visionary expressing the worst kind of social envy
disguised as ideology, gutter hatred worthy of a shopkeeper putschist
and his malodorous prissy wife, a kind of modern-day witch craze: the
Jews stopped me getting a professorship, the Jews wouldn't publish my
poems, it is the Jews' fault I can't afford a yacht:

"I have been for two years in a boil of fury with the dominant
usury?that keeps good books out of print, and pejorates
everything"

There is a third possibility - that Pound was merely a more honest
version of the archetypal writer within all of us. Why, after all, does
anyone write? The answer is the drive to be remembered after death.
Writing is in effect a form of intense narcissism and
self-congratulation, or perhaps the embodiment of all our personal
malice and rage at the world for not taking us seriously enough. What
is manifest in Pound's psyche during this period is his envy of more
talented friends such as Yeats and Eliot. Would his anti-Semitic
broadcasts have taken place if he and not Yeats had won the Nobel
Prize? Very likely not - in fact his anti-American bile over Rome radio
could be traced back virtually to his earliest forays into public
literary culture, and his disgrace in being dismissed from two
successive teaching posts back home.

We can think of him alongside one erstwhile peer, George Orwell; in
being perhaps emblematic of two opposing impulses during this dark
period in the history of the west. Orwell praises the essential
equality and intellectual honesty of the American mindset, while Pound
detests it. In turn Pound as rapped with contempt for the working man
('malleable mud') and seeks to recreate the elitism of civilizations
long since dead, through the medium of, to coin a phrase of Orwell's,
"castor oil and rubber truncheons". Orwell can see with dread the
freedom of the working man disappearing inexorably and battles against
it, finally synthesizing his anti-totalitarianism in 1984. From America
to Italy via Germany and back again; two men charging headlong in
opposite directions.

There is I think something hugely irritating about Pound's increasingly
ignominious life, the life of the self-declared seer and prophet who in
his younger years lived largely off cheques from mum and dad. In the
'thirties Rapallo in Italy happened to be his adopted home so he
automatically and miraculously foretold it's future as the capital of a
European cultural renaissance or the epicentre of a cultural
revolution. Oddly the Rome-Berlin Axis' achievement of a new
renaissance had to be accompanied by piles of bodies, an imperative
which makes fascism seem all the more macabre. Fascists could enthuse
on Dante and Beethoven and then proceed directly to 'liquidating' an
entire village. What is inescapable is that Ezra Pound participated in
this process, however innocuous his contribution. Morally he is a
murderer. Despite Pound's hotly debated talents, to all who feel any
emotion whatever for the fifty million who died during the '39-'45 war
Pound assuredly deserved the firing squad. Yet in avoiding this
fittingly poetic end he committed, following his arrest for treason in
1945, the ultimately shameful volte-face. Gone was the arrogant swagger
of the unrepentant fascist, Pound now enlisted the help of his literary
buddies; the old boy network of Harvard and Yale cronies; essentially
his liberal, fair-minded, democratic friends he had formerly scorned
and treated so badly, in achieving a confinement on grounds of
insanity. A legal team which believed in the rule of law over force and
strength and embodying everything that Pound had over the preceding
twenty years professed to loathe, finally conspired to save his life.
It is darkly ironic that Pound had thundered against a western
civilization that supposedly denigrated the arts yet in the end
conspired to accept mercy simply because he was a well-known poet. This
is indeed a shameful outcome, a clear example of old-boy networking at
its worst: what crime did the executed Lord Haw Haw commit that Pound
did not?

In any case, even if such efforts had been absent one can almost
imagine a jury accepting the insanity plea purely on the basis of his
radio transcripts. The words were so incoherent, so clearly the product
of a mind twisted with irrational rage, and in the end aesthetically
disgusting, they could only be the work of a lunatic:

Broadcast on 7th December 1941(note the date):

"God knows I have loathed Woodie Wilson, and I don't want to see more
evil done to humanity than was done by Woodrow codface?I do NOT want my
compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go git slaughtered to keep up
the Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in
Shanghai."

At the time of Pound's arrest Orwell suggested that he may be a
'spurious writer'. In the 'fifties Pound himself may have begun to
consider this possibility, and was compelled to write to TS Eliot for
solace and reassurance.

I too have had my fascist moments. I had decided I wanted a bust of
myself in the middle of a desert somewhere, an utterly lifeless,
geometrically flat wasteland. Secretly, in his most private moments, I
think this was essentially Pound's purpose in life. Picture him, there,
his fine flawless hepatic head carved in solid ebony, and larger than
the Sphinx, in the middle of the Abyssinian desert.

Shortly before the second world war, indeed around the same time as
that Lewis portrait, Pound's old friend Ford Maddox Ford offered to get
him a quiet teaching job in Michigan, with few real responsibilities
and a lot of free time to pursue his writing. He should have taken it.
Poor Ezra did not appreciate that culture is a human construct.
Civilization is the product of humanity, including the children that
Pound neglected and the millions of innocent souls condemned to death
and torture by his glorious European revolution. He did not acquit
himself well in the years following his public disgrace, and at the
height of the segregation controversy he delivered vignettes of venal
racism that would have shamed a Carolina Klansman.

'Mediocrity', as Pound would no doubt have condemned it, is having in
Chesterton's words "a house, a wife and a baby". Mediocrity is
simplicity, and probably constitutes the bulk of the subject matter for
death - bed repentances. I wonder what Pound said on his.