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Ezra with his wife Dorothy Shakespear whom he met in London
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Portrait of the poet as a young man
John Calder reviews a study of Ezra Pound’s early years and suggests that the madness that overcame him later in life may have been there from the beginning
Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920. By A David Moody.
Oxford University Press £25.
THERE is no doubt that Ezra Pound was one of the most important poets of the 20th century.
But, although his position in history is secure, he has sadly fallen far out of fashion and is little read or taught, unlike TS Eliot, who dedicated The Waste Land to him and called him “Il miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman).
It is not the politics that can be blamed. Although Pound disgraced himself by opting for fascism and spent the Second World War in Italy, for which he was nearly shot, it must be said that Eliot was just as right-wing, anti-semitic and admiring of French fascistic intellectual thought as Pound was of Mussolini.
Indeed many of the most eminent literary figures of the past century moved to the extreme right or nearly, and they included Wyndham Lewis, Celine, Marinetti, Henry Williamson, Drieu La Rochelle, Gottfried Benn and a host of others, many still widely read.
One must come to the conclusion that talent and political conviction are not to be looked at together, but that certain factors in the personality and background explain much more.
In the case of Pound, a great deal points to his initial arrogance, which in his student days evidenced itself in his contempt for most of those who taught him, with their erudition seen as dull conformity. He was unwilling to follow any curriculum, always preferring arcane knowledge to what was accepted as basic, and opening his own paths into long forgotten languages and literatures of which the academics who taught him had no knowledge.
Professor Moody goes exhaustively into Pound’s studies, sometimes too much so for the average literary reader, but makes his point. If Pound was told to study a period of particular literature, he invariably switched his attention to another one, the more remote the better. But such was his poetic talent and his instinct for the unusual, he was, in his own terms, often right to do so.
Born in Idaho in the United States in 1885, he was fortunate during his teenage years to be taken on European holidays, travelling to many cities which helped to feed his interest in literary culture.
When he came to spend two years in London from 1908, aged 23, he was determined to enter the best society, both socially and culturally, and managed to get two other volumes of poetry published which he distributed freely among those he admired and wanted to admire him.
His idol was WB Yeats, whom he had made great efforts to meet. Yeats at first treated him civilly, though their relationship later turned into a close working friendship.
Living in England was quite cheap then and Pound knew how to be careful on a small parental allowance and very small earnings from the occasional poem in a magazine, but those early London years were difficult. Poetry has seldom given an author a living, and inherited wealth was the norm among those he frequented.
But he made friends who were to develop alongside him, notably Ford Maddox Hueffer (later Ford Maddox Ford) and Wyndham Lewis. He naturally fell in love, but was in no position to marry, concentrating on his poetry and deepening his reading, largely of Dante and his successors and of Italian and Provencal romance poetry. Moody gives much detail in analysing both.
In the summer of 1910, Pound sailed back to the US to “sell boots” as he told his friends.
The next two years in America saw much poetry written, but only occasionally attracting any attention (and when Pound returned to Europe he would stay until 1939).
The period leading up to the First World War was a time of great ferment in all the arts, a period with one “ism” leading to another; when controversial innovations in painting, music and literature shocked the conventional mind but appealed to a young avant-garde that lived for the creative excitement of new ideas and styles; when one new name after another came to public notice only to be replaced by still another. Too many of the most brilliant were to die in the war.
Pound was earning now by writing, reviewing, translating and lecturing, but only enough to keep himself until he married Dorothy Shakespear, to whom he had been attached in love since he first came to London. It was now early 1914 and they had to live very frugally.
Nevertheless he had become a figure in high fashion, sculpted and painted by Gaudier-Brezka and Wyndham Lewis among others.
A central figure in imagism and vorticism, he knew all the creative intellectuals and artists of London.
The arch-student of medieval romance tradition was now in the forefront of cubist modernism, rejecting the soft curves of nature for the angular shapes of Epstein, Gaudier and Lewis which subliminally already suggested the military image of sharp steel, perhaps a clue to the age that was coming, and the move of Pound and so many of his contemporaries to the radical right. The concept of dynamic energy had replaced compassionate humanism.
Whereas the first half of the Moody biography of Pound spends more time than most readers will appreciate on detailed analysis of early and lesser-known work – the archaic Pound – the chapters devoted to his second London stay and to the war itself not only contain a fascinating picture of the volatile age of early modernism, but of Pound himself; short of money but tireless in finding subsidies for artists and writers from collectors and those with cash to invest.
His close relationship with Yeats, for whom he acted as secretary and amanuensis during much of this period, is well described and points to Pound’s ability to defer his own ambition to another’s. He was no Breton or Marinetti or Goebbels, more like a Robbe Grillet or a Hans Richter in later times, a leader among equals, not a dictator.
The Moody biography ends in 1920 and will eventually be followed by a second volume covering the later and more important part of Pound’s life and career.
Although he was the major influence in establishing Eliot’s reputation and ultimately was to be his best editor, not least in the work he was to devote to The Waste Land, Eliot was dismissive of Pound in the early years of knowing him, ungrateful and even pleased at the latter’s temporary critical decline at the end of the war.
This would, of course, change, but Eliot comes badly out of the book, which does not prevent him, ultimately, from being probably the major poet of the 20th century.
Professor Moody’s portrait is of a man full of contradictions, a storehouse of immense knowledge, of endless curiosity about ancient literature from East and West, a major but uneven poet, a man of enthusiasm, taste and generosity, but also one capable of immense misjudgments and attraction to evil.
The madness for which he was certified, 25 years later, a madness relating to genius, may have been there from the beginning.
Each side of his character cancels out the other but, paradoxically, also enhances it.
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