Pound listservers,
I thought the members of this list would find these notes of particular
interest. I believe the magazine that first published them was Thumbscrew.
Regards,
Garrick Davis
CPR
(www.cprw.com)
************************************************************************
Randall Jarrell
The Pound Affair
edited and introduced by Stephen Burt
In 1949, the Fellows of the U.S. Library of Congress awarded the Bollingen
Prize in poetry to Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos. Pound had been declared insane
and confined to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in 1945 in order to avoid his
facing the death penalty for treason. Anti-modernist poet and critic Robert
Hillyer attacked the award as immoral, given Pound's pro-fascist past; a
variety of American poets and critics responded. Asked for an essay on Pound
and the Bollingen Prize, Randall Jarrell began, but never finished, an essay
he called 'The Pound Affair'.
Probably slightly later, in 1950, Jarrell began a larger essay, tentatively
called 'Notes on Pound', which never progressed beyond the stage of outlines
and sentences in notebooks. Jarrell had conceived that essay as a review of
Pound's 1949 Selected Poems, and as a response to recent essays on Pound by
Eliot, R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, who in Jarrell's view "overestimate
[Pound's] poetry: potentially he seems quite as good as they say, but
actually he rarely is". Other notes concern Pound's overlooked and
substantial, in Jarrell's view, debts to Heine, and the origins of Pound's
allusive prose style. Parts of 'Notes on Pound' (but not of 'The Pound
Affair') made it into Jarrell's later reviews and essays concerning Pound,
notably in his 1962 'Fifty Years of American Poetry'. Jarrell's other
admiring and critical views on Pound may be found in his reviews of
successive volumes of The Cantos, collected in Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980)
and excerpted in No Other Book (1999).
Presented here is Jarrell's last draft of 'The Pound Affair', along with
paragraphs from notebooks and earlier drafts that seem both relatively
finished and clearly intended for 'Notes on Pound' or 'The Pound Affair'. All
that remains of 'The Pound Affair', along with 'Notes on Pound', can be found
in Jarrell's notebooks and papers at the Berg Collection of the New York
Public Library.
My thanks to the Berg Collection for their assistance, and to Mary von S.
Jarrell for allowing this material to be published.
The Pound Affair
The Pound affair has been, as a whole, a terrible parody of He that is
without sin among you - a parody in which Christ's hearers end by seriously
and righteously throwing stones upon the guilty woman. Even to somebody who
thought Pound's politics crazy, his poetry must have seemed tempered by
occasional flashes of charm and genius. (Contrast Secretary Acheson's
statement about Hiss, which evoked so much anger, respect and astonishment
simply because it was a personal moral statement - people expected expediency
or cant - and went against this mechanical age's tion that public affairs are
necessarily of a different order of importance from private ones.) Most
people felt so extraordinary an interest in Pound's case because here at last
was an aesthetic question, a matter of art, from which the art could be
almost wholly excluded, leaving nothing but politics and public morality. Our
time has been neither widely nor deeply interested in art - it preferred
works of art secondhand, in criticism, and told the artist that he was saved
or damned, truly employed, only as he belonged to a party, a church, or the
Parents-Teachers' Association - but it has been obsessively interested in
politics and in the sort of public morality which consists mainly of
unfavorable judgements about other people's political statements. If Pound
had murdered his wife and son, cheated his friends of their savings,
repudiated every moral or aesthetic principle he possessed, and then been
executed by the Italian government for his part in a conspiracy against
Mussolini, he would now be remembered as an anti-Fascist martyr whose life
had been blemished by certain personal failings. And he would still be, from
time to time, the subject of violent attacks by [right-wing newspaper
columnist] W[estbrook] Pegler and Senator McCarthy. Our time said: Tell me a
man's politics and I will tell you what he is; which is another way of saying
I have no interest in what he is - this Man of yours is a hypothesis I have
no need for. "Politics is death," said Nijinsky - who was insane; "Politics
is destiny," said Napoleon to Goethe, and his statement has been admiringly
repeated every since, to end in Mann's monumental-statuary paraphrase: "In
our time the destiny of man finds its expression in political terms." What a
destiny! what an expression! For the artist, for a "private man" - and in
what matters most to us we are necessarily private men - Napoleon's statement
is more insane than Nijinsky's; and today who has not begun to see in
Nijinsky's words a certain elementary empirical truth?
Is it true that some of the worst people in the world vote with us, some of
the best against us, no matter how we vote? That man does not live by
virtuous indignation alone? That men themselves are more important than the
systems which gather around their heads like clouds, and are dispersed like
clouds? How few of us can say! These are truisms which it has seemed almost
the profession of the living - those engaged artists - to ignore. Many people
nowadays, in their bare mean fervent world of politics and its continuation,
war, have been forced into so marginal an existence that they have only a few
times in their lives been able consciously to afford the concessions, the
absurdities, the irrelevancies, the saving graces, the incnspicuous waste,
unfunctional ornament - the paying too much and asking too little - without
which man is a poor forked animal. One goes from their suburbs of raw brick
boxes, "where a roof itself cannot afford to jut out an inch over the wall it
covers," to the shady sooty streets of the past, to the big frame houses with
their eaves and porches and dormers, all that excess the spirit inhabits -
and one feels, with sorrow and terror, that along with these things went some
ease and grace, disinterestedness and generosity and goodnatured
indifference, for which there is no longer room in the houses our time can
afford.
[What follow are complete paragraphs from notebooks drafts of 'The Pound
Affair' and 'Notes on Pound'. In the notebook they are interspersed with more
fragmentary material, and with sentences and notes about specific poems: this
was Jarrell's usual way of writing an essay - as he got closer to publication
he would untangle and rearrange the sentences and paragraphs he wanted.]
The virtuous left, top, good half of our time said to each of us: "You have
one responsibility, the world. You must remember to treat each end - wherever
it is possible or expedient, that is - except your own; your own life is a
means by which those other lives, present or future, can be changed for the
better - when you yourself have become nothing but a means, a means to that
end, you will no longer need to feel to such a degree, the guilt which you
feel, and are right to feel, at present."
****
None of us need to read about the period of the religious wars; we have lived
through those ourselves. Many people nowadays in the midst of our world of
politics and its continuation by other means, war, manage not to believe some
of the things that everybody believed, or was supposed to believe; to live as
if their own lives, too, were ends, not means; to be an inhabitant not simply
of the little Manhattan Island of the present, but went back to the past not
for the lace and the castles, but for the extravagance of an age which had
not yet become our Age of Iron, when people could afford to do things which
had no immediate relevance whatsoever.
****
One goes from this Manhattan Island of the present, everything carried to an
extreme, lifeless extravagance never extravagance of leaves and flowers or
unconsidered joy, with hysterical fanaticism - one goes back to the
continents of the past not for the saints and the castles, but for the
generosity and humanity that can flower from the common assumption that there
are certain things which no one would find it possible to do, certain things
which no one would ever find it possible not to do[.] Their poets often
supported their feelings, and were disregarded when they did not; these
people had not found, as we have, that all these beliefs are superfluities
which a functional society or art or thought (will/can) eliminate; that the
world can go on - or, at least, end - perfectly well without them.
****
One of the American's inalienable rights, one has to suppose, is saying
anything at all that occurs to him about Ezra Pound. This new Selected Poems
of his is a sort of index for a body of work, a question of culture (which it
would be incongruous to write an ordinary review of); the book requires one
to say a good many things, and a good many sorts of things, or else nothing.
****
[I] once heard somebody over radio say we must make this the Centu of the
Educated Common Man. Pound always wanted passionately (1) to educate him by
making him read and admire many things (almost all, naturally, in other times
and other languages); (2) to indict him and his society for never having
heard of it, for not being able to read and admire; (3) to look up to Pound
[as a] great scholar for knowing, reading, admiring, and [the] fact that
Pound was not a great scholar made this even more imp[ortant] to him; (4) to
wink genially and knowingly, to band together loftily with his "own kind who
mate upon the crag." So this gave him tone of (1) missionary urgency and
zeal, (2) of prophetic denunciation, (3) of endless reference, quoting in
original scholarly (4) of witty supercilious allusion and superiority, and
his great motto was[:] refer to cryptically, or if not that, translate in so
mannered a way that only somebody who already knows the original can really
get the translation, or if not that (but it rarely came to this point).
****
If in Pound's political life, in his obsessions with politics, he was foolish
and immoral, in rest of his life he was not tho' he was often exaggerated and
absurd; about as objective meo, but generous, brave, reckless, sincere,
indefatigable in efforts for everything he thought good - had so much
influence on poets that knew him precisely because they knew it was not an
envious competitor of theirs speaking, but somebody so eager for well-being
of Poetry that he was delighted in the [well-being] of the poet - exact
opposite of one of my favorite living poets, whom I once heard speak of
Shelley's running around with other men's wives in order, in his jealousy, to
discredit Shelley with that audience.
If you ever meet Pound there's something sympathetic and appealing, a
gentleness and delicacy, under all fireworks, so you can see how Yeats, Eliot
and all the rest were able to be affected by him as they were. [He c]omes off
worst if we take a Buddhist attitude, and count ignorant mistakes as sin; he
was too much of an enthusiast, too little able to reason or get the distance
from a thing that objectivity requires, ever to be correct about many things
outside of poetry. Perpetual revolutionist; and if he took all his examples
of what he wanted from the past, if he said it was the past his revolution
was returning, would return us to, surely no one is so foolish as to believe
there was ever any past like that; those highly selected jewels of interest
seen through a glass brightly - through one of the brightest of all glasses,
Ezra Pound.
|
