(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.)
 
Garrick,
     Is this your parenthesis? - nice parallel.
 
bob
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Garrick Davis <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, January 14, 2000 2:49 PM
Subject: Randall Jarrell's unpublished notes on Pound
 
 
>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. O
ur
>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.