>From: pcockram <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: Animal House at the Ezuversity >To: [log in to unmask] >Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:59:54 -1000 > >Everett Lee Lady wrote: > >> What does seem to be true is that many of the academics who have devoted >> a significant portion of their careers to studying Pound seem to despise >> him as a person. Maybe this tells us something about Pound. Or maybe >> it tells us something else. > >I have to say that I don't think this is true (yes, there are a few, but not >many). A so-called poet named Tom Dish, who reads his "criticism" on NPR, >recently came down in favor of the St John's banishment and claimed, in fact, >the very opposite: that academics who write about Pound completely ignore his >politics. What I do think is that those of us who care about Pound as a poet >and person (and no one can claim he wasn't an amazingly interesting and >many-sided person whose opinions were based on ideas that were incontestably >moral, however misguided we may find them to be from our vantage point today) >cannot afford to tiptoe around the issue of his politics. It is something with >which we are all forced to contend, however uncomfortable it may make us, if we >hope for anything we say about Pound to be taken seriously. Of course there >are many annoying, outrageous, and just plain silly comments, but the >contention is worth it. As to the attitudes of academics, I'm judging only by the messages that get posted to this mailing list. A lot of the academics who post here and who have made a profession out of studying Pound don't seem to have any understanding at all of who he was. This is very strange, because the man comes through very clearly in the descriptions in the usual reference works, especially the biographies by Charles Norman and Humphrey Carpenter (which are the ones I'm most familiar with). I'm going to post here an article from my web page, although it's partially incomplete; at the very least, it still needs some editing. You wouldn't think there would be anything in this article that needs to be told to experts on Pound, since the article mostly consists of quotations from Charles Norman and Humphrey Carpenter. And yet the material here seems to be something that a lot of the academics just don't understand. I do think that if one wants to understand the Cantos, one needs to understand as much as possible about Pound's life. And if one wants to understand Pound as a person, one has to learn about his politics. Unfortunately, a lot of the most important part of Pound's politics simply doesn't interest (or at least apparently doesn't) most of the academics who study him. Anti-semitism is a hot button for many of them and Pound's anti-semitism is really the only thing they can notice. But although anti-semitism was pervasive in his conversations and his correspondance, it was never one of the central issues for him. But reading Brooks Adams, or Thomas Hart Benton, or Martin Van Buren, or John Adams is too boring for the academics. They'd rather concentrate on the issues that have a personal charge for them. Likewise, for Pound's economics it's easy to concentrate on the proposed panaceas like Social Credit or the Gesell currency tax which seem in retrospect clearly crackpot. It's much harder to address Pound's core (and rather nebulous) ideas about the essential role that credit and money (which is essentially just a form of credit) play in capitalism, and the fact that there's something fundamentally wrong that financial success in our system comes to those who manipulate money and manipulate the means of distribution rather than to those who actually produce things of value. Money, as Pound says, is intended to be just a convenient ticket that enables people to produce goods for others and acquire goods produced by others without needing to engage in simplistic bartering. But somehow money has taken over the whole system with the actual producers and consumers getting short changed. The essential root of the evils of capitalism (not that I believe that capitalism is totally evil) seems to be not ownership of the means of production, as Marx believed, but control of money and credit. Credit seems to be the essential element in capitalism, because capitalism involves a time reversal. The means of production (factory, whatever) has to be paid for by consumers buying the goods produced, but the factory needs to be constructed before the goods can be sold. So the factory has to be paid for by something that can happen only after it is built. Hence the essential role of credit. And those who control credit, not the evil producers Marx talked about, are the real kings of the capitalist system. Or at least, as I understand it, this is Pound's view. --Lee Lady ==================== What Was Pound Like? Lee Lady <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady/ramblings/pound3.html> [ Still under construction ] I am certainly no Pound scholar. And although I knew E.P. when he was in St. Elizabeths in the late 50's, I have very little if any new information to contribute. But I have noticed through subscribing to the Ezra Pound mailing list that many of those academics who have made a profession out of studying Pound don't seem to have any concept of all of who the man actually was. (Judging by the articles posted to the mailing list, many of these academics seem to actually despise him.) One problem is apparently that academics like to work from documents. But when you read Pound's letters, and the transcripts of the radio broadcasts he made from Italy during the war, and his various published opinionated prose works, you see a very different person than the Pound described by those who actually knew him. Below, I simply want to quote from some of the standard reference materials to give an impressionistic portrait of Ezra Pound as seen by those who knew him. 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.'' (``Met Ezra Pound. Didn't like him. Found him to be the village explainer. Very useful if you happen to be a village; if not, not.'') 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, generous, with a lively interest in other human beings but a rather superficial one (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 mystique to justify his idea that the important part of literature is what's on the surface; what's important, according to him, is the beauty of the language: 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. One notices in his poetry that he tended to be much more at home with mythology and things that had happened at least fifty years previously than with the world around him. He was not a thinker; he was an enthusiast. In the realm of literature, he did have some important ideas, but otherwise few of the non-literary ideas he promoted were his own. One might almost refer to him as a popularizer, except that the form in which he expressed his ideas made them quite inaccessible to all but a small audience. Most of the quotations below have been taken from Charles Norman's book EZRA POUND (MacMillan, 1960). Robert Graves on first meeting Pound (c. 1920): ``From his poems, I had expected a brawny, loud-voiced, swashbuckling American; but he was plump, hunched, soft-spoken and ill-at-ease, with the limpest of handshakes.'' (Quoted in Charles Norman's book EZRA POUND.) Scofield Thayer, 1921 (quoted in Charles Norman's book): ``Ezra Pound, of whom I have been seeing more rather than less, is a queer duck. He wears a pointed yellow [?] beard and an elliptical pince-nez and open Byronic collar and an omelette-yellow bathrobe. On entering a restaurant, one has observed him so awkward as unintentionally to knock over a waiter and then so self-conscious as to be unable to say he is sorry. But like most other people he means well, and unlike most other people he has a fine imagination. At close quarters, he is much more fair in his judgements than hie correspondence and his books would warrent one to believe. ``When one arrives at his hotel on the street of the Holy Fathers, one usually learns from the young lady that Mr. Pound is au bain. But the young lady consents to go upstairs and inquire if Mr Pound will see guests. Mr. Pound receives, beaming and incisive.'' Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast (p. 108): ``His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I often thought of him as a kind of saint.'' Hemingway in 1925: ``We have Pound, the major poet, devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He lends them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end, a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity. ``Personally, he is tall, has a patchy red beard, strange haircuts and is very shy. But he has the temperament of a toro di lidia from the breeding establishments of Don Eduardo Miura. No one ever presents a cape, or shakes a muleta at him without getting a charge. Like Don Eduardo's product, too, he sometimes ignores the picador's horse to pick off the man and no one goes into the ring with him in safety. And though they can always be sure of drawing his charge yet he gets his quota of bull-baiters each year.'' (Reprinted in An Examination of Ezra Pound, edited by Peter Russell.) Of course one of the things that Pound is famous for is having been able to recognize the talent of a large number of extremely notable writers and having helped them get started on their careers and gain recognition. And certainly Pound's judgement in this respect was very astute. But I believe that even more than this is true: I believe that even some of the young writers Pound helped developed into notable literary figures precisely because of Pound's help. It seems clear to me that this was certainly true, for instance, of H.D., who had been Pound's sweetheart back in Pennsylvania before he, and eventually she, came to Europe. Certainly H.D. deserves credit for her wonderful talent. But, in my opinion (based mostly on reading her autobiographical book An End to Torment), she would never have developed that talent and become a poet if it hadn't been for Pound's encouragement. And T.S. Eliot, on numerous occasions over the years, expressed his opinion that Pound's help was absolutely crucial in his own development as a poet. In 1959, E.E. Cummings wrote about the Pound of the Twenties (quotation also taken from Charles Norman), ``During our whole promenade, Ezra was more than wonderfully entertaining: he was magically gentle, as only a great man can be.'' Margaret Anderson (editor of the Little Review) in 1923 (again quoted from Norman's book): ``He was dressed in the large velvet beret and flowing tie of the Latin Quarter artist of the 1830's. He was totally unlike any picture I had formed of him. Photographs could have given no idea of his height, his robustness, his red blondness -- could have given no idea of his high Teddy Roosevelt voice, his nervousness, his self-consciousness. After an hour in his studio I felt that I had been sitting through a human experiment in a behaviorist laboratory. Ezra's agitation was not of the type to which we were accustomed in America -- excitement, pressure, life too high-geared. It gave me somehow the sensation of watching a baby perform its repetoire of physical antics gravely, diffidently, without human responsibility for the performance.'' She commented on his tendancy to ``orientalize'' his attitude toward women, who he kissed on the forehead or drew upon his knee. She concluded: ``It will be more interesting to know him when he has grown up.'' In 1928 or 1929, Yeats wrote to Richard Aldington, ``In his work, Ezra can be abrupt and barbarous; when he wants, he can be a pleasant companion and the most generous of men. He is sensitive, highly strung, and irascible. All this throwing down of fire-irons and spluttering of four-letter words is merely Ezra's form of defense against a non too considerate world. I should say Ezra has had to put up with far more annoyances from other people than they have from him.'' Certainly his ``abrupt and barbarous'' manner has caused a number of people who know his political views only through his letters and radio broadcasts to completely misjudge the tone of his attitudes (although certainly the content alone was often reprehensible enough!) In 1929, in A PACKET FOR EZRA POUND, Yeats wrote his famous description of Pound's kindness to the stray cats in Rapallo: ``Sometimes about ten o'clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats. He knows all their histories -- the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed it; that fat gray cat is an hotel proprietor's favorite, it never begs from the guests' tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell off, a whirling ball of claws and fur, and now avoid each other.'' But then Yeats felt compelled to add: ``Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for the cats -- `some of them so ungrateful,' a friend says -- he never nurses the cafe's cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own.'' Yeats proposes an explanation as follows: ``Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.'' And yet, somehow, five or ten years later, Pound was unable to see that the Jews in Germany and the German-occupied countries, and eventually, toward the end of the war, in Italy itself, were in a situation very comparable to the cats in Rapallo. (According to Eustace Mullins's biography of Pound, however, he did give assistance to some Jewish families that had escaped from Germany. I think the only confirmation of this, though, is Pound's own account.) Reading Yeats's account of Pound's care for the stray cats in Rapallo makes me think of Pound's care of John Chatell, one of the young regular visitors to St. Elizabeths in the late 50's. I would eventually learn that Chatell's family owned an extremely successful real estate company which handled a lot of expensives houses in Georgetown. But Chatell himself lived the life of a poor student (without actually being a student, except at the `Ezuversity'). Marcella Spann Booth, writing in Paideuma, has reminded me of the way Pound used to mother him, scavenging hospital food for him to take home. Writers, artists, musicians, and the like (even mathematicians!) who are widely acclaimed as boy wonders in their twenties often find it difficult to find a path to follow as they reach maturity, and this seems to have been some of what happened to Pound after he moved to Italy and entered his fifties. Pound had now achieved a great triumph, which also seemed to have been his downfall: namely, the world was now taking him seriously. And yet despite having a couple dozen books to his name and being fairly universally recognized as one of the world's great living poets, he was living in fairly severe poverty, as was the case for his whole life. Being taken seriously was, as I see it, an extremely pernicious thing for Pound, because it encouraged him to take himself far more seriously than was compatible with rationality. The brash egotism which had earlier been seen as tolerable and somewhat natural in a bright young man seemed to be turning into an irrational egomania. And it encouraged the world to look at his stupidities, in particular his radio broadcasts, much more harshly than would have been the case if the world had still seen him as the extremely bright but eccentric writer that he had been in London and Paris during his thirties and forties -- in some ways, not only the village explainer, but also the village fool, albeit a highly intelligent fool; almost an idiot savant. Pound's fiftieth birthday was in 1935, and about that time one began to learn the answer to Margaret Anderson's question of what Pound would be like "when he grows up," and the answer was not a pretty one. His old friends now often returned from visiting him to report that he was querrulous and intolerant of any disagreement with his opinions, which many now found quite bizarre. Some (Joyce, for instance) found him in fact quite insane. In Humphrey Carpenter's biography A SERIOUS CHARACTER, Robert Fitzgerald is quoted as saying that Pound's letters and articles written during the Rapallo period ``had the tone of a man no longer in touch.... What had seemed high-hearted and rather Olympian fun began to seem childish and beside the point. Only a man working in isolation, without criticism or ignoring it, could have failed to see the fretfulness and poverty of argument.'' It's always important to remember, though, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, that throughout his life Pound in person was very different and much pleasanter than Pound on paper. However Carpenter also quotes Giuseppe Bacigalupo as having noted an unpleasant change in manner at his occasional meetings with Pound, saying, ``It was not possible to hold a normal conversation.... He had come increasingly to adopt the attitude of someone who assumes that the person he is talking to shares his own interests and knowledge, so that some cryptic allusion seemed to him to be enough to explain what he was thinking --- a hypothesis which was far from well founded.'' It's important to remember, though, that in the context of the 1930's Pound's support for Mussolini and for eccentric economic theories (we would now say "crackpot") were not as bizarre as they now seem to us in retrospect, and were shared by many notable intellectuals of the time. In any case, Pound in Rapallo seemed, as always, to be having a very good time. In Humphrey Carpenter's book, James Laughlin is quoted on the subject of Pound at the movies. "The movies were simply awful, but Ezra loved them. He'd sit up in the gallery with a cowboy hat on and his feet on the rail, eating peanuts, roaring with laughter." The fact is, it seems as though Pound in many ways never did ``grow up.'' Almost all the available photographs of Pound make him look like a very ``serious character'' (the phrase which Humphrey Carpenter used as the title of his biography on Pound), and because of this they totally misrepresent Pound. They certainly look nothing at all like the images in my own memory. One characteristic that most people who knew Pound, from his twenties into his seventies if not his eighties, seem to agree on was a joyous quality along with a boyishness which at times seemed to verge on an insane immaturity. In the PBS Voices and Visions program on Pound, one of the former officials in the Fascist government reports that when they tried to discourage Pound from his radio broadcasts during the war, and asked him whether he realized how seriously such an action would be considered and how serious the consequences for him might be, his response was to laugh. In the Pisan detention camp, where he was at first barbarically prisoned in an open iron cage (after all, the Army thought of him as a despicable traitor, an American who had supposedly broadcast propaganda for the Fascists), he became a camp character, and his self-devised bizarre exercise ritual, including fencing and playing tennis with imaginary opponents using an old broom handle, became a source of amusement for the guards. Many of the guards developed an affection for the old man, and started showing him various kindnesses in violation of their orders. He told the medics in the camp that the United States government would never try him for treason, because he ``had too much on several people in Washington.'' (My source here, as for most of this, is Charles Norman's biography.) As he left the camp to be flown to the United States, he put his hand under his chin to indicate a noose and made a pantomine gesture of being hanged. And when the plane became airborne, he started laughing, because he'd never been in the air before. When he was first put into St. Elizabeths mental hospital, he was put into Howard Hall, where the most dangerous patients were kept, because the staff at St. Elizabeths had been told that he was a serious criminal. Although the time in Howard Hall was a horrible ordeal as one can see from Humphrey Carpenter's biography (aside from everything else, he was never allowed to go outside during this period), when he talked about the experience several times in my presence he expressed amusement that the authorities would consider him dangerous enough to warrent this treatment and said that it gave him the opportunity to meet a couple of murderers, which had been an interesting new experience for him. Humphrey Carpenter's biograph on Pound (A SERIOUS CHARACTER) in Chapter 13 quotes the following report by Louis Dudek on Pound at St. Elizabeths, when he had been moved to the more benign environment of the Chestnut Ward and was allowed to receive visitors out on the lawn in good weather: "He continually kept doing little things to make us comfortable: cutting the fruit ... and passing it around; pouring the tea out of a thermos; offering newspapers to lay on the grass for sitting; bringing out books, magazines, letters from a bag... He would also feed the birds... Said Mrs Pound: `He would never do that in the old days; he was always too busy, always doing something.'" This description (and some of the other reports Carpenter quotes in the same chapter) agree very much with my own memories of St Elizabeths. Although Pound has often been called a narcissist, and was certainly an egomaniac, he was always very attentive to the people around him (including the orderlies and at least many of the patients at the hospital) and took a keen interest in the lives of his regular visitors and was concerned for their well being. As mentioned above, he regularly scavenged hospital food for John Chatel (``young Chatel,'' as he called him in his letters), and possibly some of the other starving artists and writers among his visitors as well. Humphrey Carpenter quotes from a report that "His room was a confusion of jars, bottles, boxes, make-shift containers filled with dainties, exotics, and plain fare of bread, cheese, ham, sweets... and all the left-over food he could `pouch' three times a day at St. Liz. The main purpose of his bulging larder was to feel the starving artist; jar after jar of food went of the grounds `for the noble purpose of nourishing the arts.'" Pound usually referred to himself as ``Grampa,'' and all the younger visitors were encouraged to do likewise. Sheri Martinelli was in some sense (it's probably impossible now to ever establish to exactly what extent) his lover, but she was much more like a favored daughter. She usually referred to him as Maestro and her affection toward him, mixed with deep respect (one might almost say reverence), was like that one might have to a favorite older relative. She brought him cookies, fudge, and jasmine tea. In a short article in Paideuma (volume 13), Marcella Spann gives an account of Pound jumping out of his chair and running across the lawn to greet Sheri "with his most affectionate and energetic bear hug. The cookies she has brought scatter about them, and Sheri exclaims: ``Grampa is the only man in the world you can bring cookies and before he can eat one of them, he drops them all on the ground; and before you can help him pick them up, he steps on every one.''" Pound's old friends in the literary world were often bothered by the indiscriminateness of his friendliness to visitors, and seemed to think that there was something wrong with Pound's being friendly to people with so little stature. But E.P. seemed to be equally interested in and friendly toward just about everybody (and despite his well known anti-semitism, this apparently included those Jews who managed to visit him). When Sheri's lover Gilbert Lee was sent to the penitentiary for dealing heroin, E.P.'s attitude was apparently that this was regretable, but typical of the trouble that artists get themselves into when they're young. In a letter subsequent to Gilbert's release, Pound wrote, ``Well, he's apparently devoting himself to composing jazz now.'' (Gilbert was a jazz pianist, and earned his living as an auto mechanic. Unfortunately, a few years later he had an accident while working on a car that seriously damaged his fingers and consequently ended his career as a musician. Years later, when I met him and Sheri again in San Francisco, he was still an auto mechanic.) I think that one can see here a strong continuity here between the Pound in Paris in the 1920's, as described by passages quoted above from Charles Norman's book, and the Pound in St. Elizabeths during the 1950's. Some academics now take the fact that John Kasper was welcome at St. Elizabeths as proof that Pound was a racist. But in fact, although Pound's anti-semitism was quite conspicuous in almost all his conversations, he was not notably racist. (Furthermore, although Kasper was later to become infamous as a White supremacist, his personal attitudes toward Negroes seemed to be rather confused.) Everyone was welcome at St. Elizabeths, provided only that they were willing to listen to Pound respectfully and try to learn from him. When I started visiting Pound at St. Elizabeths, one of the first things I wondered about was whether he was actually sane or not. At the time, I know not the slightest thing about mental illness, so all I could do was to judge whether he seemed basically rational or not. Pound certainly had his own style of communicating. On my first visit, I couldn't understand a word he said. Later, I started to catch on to his style. The comments by Giuseppe Bacigalupo quoted above describe this fairly well. To repeat, "He had come increasingly to adopt the attitude of someone who assumes that the person he is talking to shares his own interests and knowledge, so that some cryptic allusion seemed to him to be enough to explain what he was thinking --- a hypothesis which was far from well founded." One had to read the correct books and learn the right things in order to make sense of what E.P. was saying. To my seventeen-year-old self at the time, this did not seem completely unreasonable, and once I had learned the background material, Pound's talk seemed fairly reasonable. Reading the ABC of Reading and his other books was a big help, because I realized that a lot of his discourse when there was a big crowd present consisted of quotations from his books; slogans such as ``Artists are the antennae of the race'' or ``Great literature is news that stays news.'' This was perhaps an unusual form of communication, but it seemed quite rational and deliberate; he believed that these slogans were very fundamental truths which it was important to re-iterate over and over again in the hopes that they would finally sink in for the listener. Later on, when I experienced him in small groups of friends, I found his conversation quite ordinary. He was quite capable of small talk. One day Sheri, as I recall (or it may have been John Chatel), mentioned that recently St. Elizabeths had been granting weekend furloughs to some of the patients so that they could spend time with their families, and complained that it was unfair that EP had not been granted a similar privilege. But he responded quite calmly that after all, he was charged with a extremely serious federal crime, and so naturally the hospital would be ultra-cautious about relaxing their control. Oddly enough, this is the one case where I think Pound's usual complaint of oppression by his enemies could have been justified. A lot of influential people, both in Congress and otherwise, hated Pound because of his anti-semitism and in particular because of his radio broadcasts (very few people in those days were familiar with the actual contents of the broadcasts, which were then only available in the Library of Congress on microfilm) and might have raised a big stink if St. Elizabeths had allowed him any sort of freedom. On many other occasions, though, he claimed that he was being kept incarcerated, or that publishers were refusing to include his work in anthologies, because the government or the banking interests wanted to suppress some of the information he would reveal to the public. Even at the time, I was considerably skeptical of this. But one can't claim that someone is crazy just because some of his opinions are irrational. The fact is that very few people are able and willing to apply critical thinking to their own beliefs about politics, religion, and the like, although most of us are quite capable of subjecting the beliefs of those who disagree with us to rigorous critical analysis. In retrospect, though, I do think that Pound had a megalomania that went beyond the bounds of rationality. As far as I can tell, throughout his life, everyone who ever had much contact with him liked him, including those who despised his attitudes. Directory of links for Pound [ More Ramblings and Rantings | HOME ]