(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 Date: Friday, January 14, 2000 2:49 PM Subject: Randall Jarrell's unpublished notes on Pound 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.