>So, why not post opinions to help those who come fresh to Pound. What
>attitudes and advise can we find on this discussion group about the
>quality of the biographies. Recent words put Tytell down, criticise
>Carptenter. There should be an assessment too ofwhat Charles Norman's
>work as well as C. David Haymann offers in terms of information and the
>validity of such.
>Noel Stock seems to have the highest regard.
 
Stock is good if you're looking for a compendium of facts.  But the
book is quite bloodless.  It's useful if you want to look up various
details, but I can't imagine anyone actually sitting down and reading
it.
 
I'm not familiar with all the biographies, by any means.  However I find
Charles Norman gives me at least a little sense of Pound as a human
being.  But none of the biographies I've seen do nearly as good a job
of that as various parts of Hugh Kenner's book, THE POUND ERA.  I would
also recommend the chapter on Pound in Lewis Hyde's book THE GIFT.
 
I think that H.D.'s book AN END TO TORMENT is also obligatory reading.
Maybe not so much for the factual information as for the tone of the book,
which gives a very good idea of what sort of person H.D. was.  (H.D. also
wrote several novels dealing with Pound and the other people in her life.
I have one of them --- BID ME TO LIVE --- and have so far found it
unreadable.)
 
See also Marcella Spann Booth's reminiscences in Paideuma.
 
I think that anyone who has even a casual interest in literature has a
pretty good sense of the sort of human being Hemingway was.  I think we
all have some rough sense of who Joyce was.  We have a very strong
sense of who Gertrude Stein was.  Less so, maybe, for F. Scott
Fitzgerald, but still we have some general image.  But when it comes to
Pound, all the biographies seem to tell us for the most part is what
books and articles he published, where he was living at various times
--- lots of factual material.
 
Hugh Kenner tells me at least a little bit about the kind of relationship
that existed between Pound and H.D. and I think Charles Norman is good in
this respect as well.  Nothing that I've seen (and I haven't seen it all
by any means; I'm no Pound scholar) has told me much at all about Pound
and Olga Rudge, except that she was a violinist and they went to dinner
on various occasions.  I have no idea what sort of person she was or why
Pound was attracted to her.
 
In my opinion, if a biography is going to give any real idea of who its
subject was, it also has to do a fairly good idea of showing who the
other people in the subject's life were.  None of the biographies I've
seen so far as give me much of any idea of who Dorothy Pound was, aside
from telling me that her mother (Olivia Shakespear) was one of Yeats's
mistresses.
 
And none of them has at all adequately presented any of the people I
knw myself, such as Sheri Martinelli.  Stock has a single reference to
Sheri in his index, and describes her merely as, "a strange, rather
scatterbrained young woman who visited Pound regularly at St.
Elizabeths."  This is more or less factually correct, as far as it
goes, but it also misses the whole point.  It's about like saying that
E.P. "wrote a lot of poems and had some politically controversial
ideas."
 
In my opinion, it's impossible to have any real idea of who Pound was
during the St. Elizabeths years unless you have some conception of who
his regular visitors were.
 
Sheri was at St. Elizabeths almost seven days a week for several
years.  Only Dorothy Pound was a more faithful visitor.  If you don't
understand that Sheri Martinelli was, in spirit, very much a younger
copy of H.D., then how can you claim to have any understanding of
Pound's life?  (For the best portrayal of Sheri, albeit in only a few
lines, see Marcella Spann Booth's article in Paedeuma volume 13.  Also
see my web page, <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady/snapshots/sheri.html>,
for some pointers to other information about Sheri.  She was not merely
a scatterbrained individual who visited St. Elizabeths.  She was
someone who, over the course of her life, was friends with Anais Nin,
William Gaddis, Anatole Broyard, Charlie Parker, and Alan Ginsberg.)
 
Unfortunately, I did not know John Kasper and Eustace Mullins.  But it's
quite clear that biographers take their information about them from a few
newspaper articles which give no sense of what sort of persons they were
at the time they were visiting Pound.  Charles Norman does a little
better than most as regards Kasper.  Mullins in his later life would
become a well known anti-semite associated with rightist militia groups,
and there's a lot of information on him as he now is on the web.  But
neither Kasper nor Mullins were political activists at the time they were
visiting Pound.
 
The biographies I've seen try to inaccurately segregate Pound's visitors
into a political circle and a literary circle.  All of Pound's visitors,
including Kasper and Mullins, were originally very interested in Pound as
a literary figure.  And all of his visitors received a good dose of his
politics.
 
 
In my opinion, if you look for the one salient detail that really brings
Pound to life, it is Gertrude Stein's comment that he was the "village
explainer."  I don't have much hope for any biography that doesn't
highlight this comment.
 
Pound, in my opinion, was in his youth (and really, still in his
fifties) what in contemporary terms would be called a nerd.  Extremely
bright, quite arrogant intellectually during his youth, generous but
lacking much real interest in other human beings (see especially Lewis
Hyde's book THE GIFT in this respect), a good judge of literature but
not a good judge of people.  (He was taken in by Mussolini's enormous
personal charm just as much as the ladies in Franco Zefferelli's recent
film TEA WITH MUSSOLINI.)
 
If Pound had been born a little later and the circumstances of his life
had been a little different, I think he would have been ideally suited to
be a science fiction writer of the Golden Age of Science Fiction ---
someone like Damon Knight or Frederick Pohl or, perhaps more to the
point, A. E. van Vogt.
 
He was someone who looked at the surface, and he developed a form of
poetry that looks at the surface, and developed an entire critical
mystic to justify his idea that the important part of literature is
what's on the surface; what's important, according to him, is the
melopeia, phanopeia, and mythopeia.  "Literature is language that's
highly charged with meaning."  You never see Pound saying, "Literature
is writing that sees deeply into the human heart," or anything of that
sort.
 
But, in my opinion, any useful biography of Pound should also tell us
about Pound's development as a thinker.  Something that merely tells me
that in such and such a year he published CATHAY, and in such a such
other year he published THE ABC OF READING is not, as far as I'm
concerned, very useful.  How did he come to be interested in the things
he was?  And what exactly were his ideas all about?  Merely telling me
that he inherited a bunch of Fenellosa manuscripts is not very
enlightening.  What was it that made him so interested in Fenellosa's
ideas?
 
People have asked here about where his anti-semitism came from.
Apparently it became much more extreme during the course of World War II,
and I think one can only conclude that he learned it from the Nazis.
I don't see any other hypothesis that makes sense.
 
I have my own hypothesis here.  Before Hitler, anti-semitism was
widely prevalent and was somewhat banal.  But the Nazis took
anti-semitism to such an extreme that people were forced to see it for
what it really was.  One could no longer be an anti-semite simply as a
matter of unthinking conventional prejudice.  Consequently, most people
were so repulsed by what was happening in Germany that they had to start
feeling that, although they still might not like Jews in a lot of ways,
still, one had to respect the fact that Jews were fellow human beings.
 
If, on the other hand, one was not willing to back off from one's
anti-semitism, then one needed to find stronger justifications for it,
and and the result would be that one's anti-semitism would become even
more extreme.  In other words, either one's stomach would be turned by
what the Nazis were doing to Jews, even before the world learned about
the death camps, or one would have to reconcile oneself to it by
deciding that Jews were truly evil people who must be driven from
society.  This is, in my opinion, what happened to Pound.  (One must
also never forget that Pound was, during this period, not very sane.)
 
>What I would most appreciate learning, for my own personal curiosity, is
>what is the opinion of the scholars of Ezra Pound (which I do not claim
>to be), what is the opinion of the biography written by Eustace Mullins.
 
Although Mullins biography was not very carefully done or carefully
published, it does have the advantage of being an account by someone who
knew Pound fairly well during the St. Elizabeths years.  It glosses over
some of the more unattractive aspects of Pound's life.  (And for some
reason, he refers to Marcella Spann as "Marcella Jackson.")  And I'm
sure there are loads of inaccuracies.  And Mullins is unable to refrain
from constantly injecting his (and Pound's) anti-liberal political
attitudes into the account.  But if you read it with caution, I think
there's some important information in it.  (However, as previously
mentioned, I'm not the best judge, since I'm no Pound scholar.)
 
 
======
It is a question not of being happy or fulfilled, but of being on fire.
 --- Anais Nin
 
Lee Lady         <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>