Pound, Confucius and Slither. A.David Moody's Ezra Pound Poet, Volume II the epic years.#2

In the late 1930s Pound was promoting Confucius as the remedy for all political ills. The fundamental principle was ‘to call people and things by their correct names…to see that the terminology [is] exact’(qtd Moody 247).   Pound failed to practice this  in his prose but then neither does Moody.  

If the cantos are a ‘poem which includes history’ or ‘the history of the tribe’ the accuracy of that history HAS to be an issue if it is History. Moody recognizes this but slips around the question.

Pointing out that Pound credits Van Buren with actions that his sources credited to Andrew Jackson (p.173): There is more going on here than an alternative version of who did what. Pound was privileging the moral force over the mere fact, in order to create another Jeffersonian hero, an ethical hero, consistently committed to the just ordering of society.  This seems minor to his later claim on page 180:

It has to be recognized, if we are to get on, that Mussolini is as much an invented or mythical figure in these Cantos as Jefferson or Van Buren or indeed as Odysseus. He is just as much transfigured out of history into the poem Pound is making up and he plays his part there in an ethical drama which may be not at all an accurate fit with the political drama of the era.  Pound is not writing Mussolini’s story, nor Jefferson’s nor Van Buren’s. He is writing, as it turns out, the epic of the capitalist era, in which the will to social justice, as embodied in some few heroic individuals, must contend against the greed of the wealthy and powerful and the abuleia of the many. It is a story based on real persons and real practices and its credibility does depend to some degree on its truth to what is commonly known of those persons and practices. Beyond this believability, though, there is another order of reality, that of meaning and values, it is with these that the epic poet is most engaged, and in creating images of what is to be admired or hated, he will bend history to his ends.  But then the nearer a reader is to the history in question, the more problematic this can be. There is a problem, and there will be so long as the actual Mussolini is remembered, in accepting the Mussolini of the cantos as a hero of the struggle for universal social justice. It is a problem that anyone who wants to read the work must learn to live with. History may instruct us that the myth has grievously simplified the facts; and the myth may reveal things facts alone can never tell. We need both history and myth, but should take care not to confuse either with the other.

First note the  attempts to position the reader in the use of the words: 'drama', 'transfiguring', 'epic', at phrases like 'few heroic individuals', 'depends on some degree', 'bend history', 'another order of reality' 'may instruct us' and then those last three sentences.  

First the vocabulary: the real world in which people were dying is a “political drama”. ‘Drama’ is something fictional, staged, not entirely real or to be taken entirely seriously.  To see the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, or Mussolini’s increasing rapport with Hitler, or the move towards attempted genocide as a ‘drama’ is to trivialize suffering and empty the words of their meanings.

To suggest that ‘political drama’ is distinct to ‘ethical drama’ is to attempt a spurious distinction.  It was not possible, in the twentieth century, to write the kind of epic Homer or Virgil or Lawman or Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about their distant past, without slipping into the world of historical fiction.  And it is not possible to use real people with all the baggage of their real activities, beliefs, speeches, actions, and just “bend history” to suit your purposes without moving out of writing history into fiction.  So either Pound is writing bad history, which invalidates his attempt to “write the history of the tribe” or he’s writing one of the most boring examples of 20th century historical fiction.

I’ve already commented on Moody’s use (or abuse) of the term Epic in the previous post. The Cantos are not ‘a myth’, they are one man’s idiosyncratic version of history serving an increasingly strident personal political agenda.

If 'we', (and how I do hate the smug positioning behind that first person plural) want to read the work, if we ‘want to get on’, [what does that mean?] 'we' have to live with factual inaccuracy and an author who could not tell the difference between facts and his own private fantasy.   

Which begs the question: why is the work worth reading? There is no insight on offer, no evidence of intelligence, knowledge or perception beyond the ordinary. 

The strangest claim of all is that if we wait long enough until historians somehow no longer provide accurate factual histories, Pound's inaccuracies will be acceptable.

The ethical question I would suggest is not related to Pound but to his supporters, and by extension to a whole trend in literary criticism and theory. Where does the verbal slither stop?  At what point do the endless pseudo-clever excuses and the carefully pseudo-clever redefinitions of familiar words stop being an acceptable practice? 

Why does “He was wrong” need to be qualified?

‘Does depend on some degree’….’there is another order of reality’, this is not calling things by their correct names. 

A. David Moody (2014). Ezra Pound Poet. Volume II, The Epic Years Oxford, Oxford University Press

“The Cantos of Ezra pound would be the foundation myth of a universal civilization”(p79).

I will get round to reviewing A. David Moody’s second volume in his life of Ezra Pound, but before I do that I want to consider at least two paragraphs to support what I’m going to say about the book as a whole.

The following paragraph, which leads up to the striking claim I’ve quoted above, is disturbing.  As a survey of literary history it is so obviously incoherent. What’s troubling is that the flaws in the argument should be obvious to anyone who has read the texts Moody mentions. And that should be anyone with a serious interest in Poetry. (I admit I haven’t read 'Clarissa'). Why such a prestigious figure as Moody thinks it’s acceptable, or why his editor didn’t point out the problems, is a question I have no answer for. 

Discussing the first book publication of the Cantos, both ‘A Draft of XXI Cantos’ and the deluxe edition of ‘A Draft off XVI Cantos’, Moody writes: 

 “In its beginnings an epic was the foundation myth, the once and future story of a tribe, a nation or people.” [So far so good but then watch how the definition gets left behind and changed by the random assortment of texts.]

Ancient Greece had its 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' [neither are foundation myths] and its classic tragedies; Rome had its 'Aeneid' [a genuine foundation myth]; Medieval England had the Arthurian Romance [not so, the foundation myths are the ‘Bruts’ which trace the English back to Troy after Geoffrey of Monmouth turned the story into a medieval best seller, or the stories in Bede and the AS Chronicle which tell of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons] and the mystery plays [which are dramatizations of the Bible???); Elizabeth’s England had Shakespeare’s Histories [why not the Fairy Queen as well?]; and England after the civil war had ‘Paradise lost’”.

We’ve already skidded from Epic as foundation myth, to Epic as long story, to Paradise Lost and the Mystery Plays which are retelling of Christian Narratives. From collectively shared stories retold to make sense of the world and passed on,  to the work of individual writers giving their particular take on a well known story.  The definition is now going to be stretched even further as the list becomes increasingly strange.

Then the story changed, with ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and became concerned rather with the life of the individual than the fate of a people [This too is debatable, as Pilgrim represents the Medieval Everyman, a point made by the allegorical frame of the story: his challenges on the way to salvation are everyone’s]. England’s epic in the 18^th century was Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ and after that came ‘Don Juan’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude or The Growth of the Poet’s mind” and next Browning’s ‘Sordello’.

As a list of disparate texts this can hardly be bettered.  Browning’s ‘Sordello’, ‘Don Juan’ and ‘The Prelude’ are long poems but what else do they have in common other than they were written by English poets?  'Sordello' is there presumably because Pound will refer to it in the Cantos, but it has no claim to be ‘England’s epic’ nor does ‘Don Juan’ or the ‘Prelude’.  You could make a good case that Tennyson’s rewriting of the Arthurian cycle is the nearest thing 19^th century England got to a national ‘epic’, given the way it participates in the British rediscovery of its medieval past.  

So Moody has developed his definition, and by illustrating it with such a scattered range of poems, has emptied his terms so that Epic and Myth now mean nothing more than  “long poem regardless of genre, readership, content, reception or usage”.

He continues. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, in a United States still inventing itself, Whitman felt the need to reconnect the individual poet with his people and asserted that his experience must be the common, democratic experience of everyone in America. [If he did the arrogance of that claim is either staggering or reduces ‘democratic experience’ to sleeping eating excreting and possibly reproducing.] Pound went on from that to create an epic in which an individual poet would again tell the tale of the tribe, only his tribe would be all of humanity that one man could comprehend; and his tale would not be of himself but be a universal story; and it would shape a future not for any one nation but for all. ‘The Cantos of Ezra Pound’ would be the foundation myth of a universal civilization. The global order capitalism has been busily creating is quite possibly the antithesis of what he had in mind’ (p.79).  

1) Because the history here is not good, I think it undermines any confidence in what the writer is about to say next. Pound said he believed that right naming was the root of justice. There is no right naming here.

2) Having moved through a paragraph that has no logical sequential coherence except for the chronological, we arrive at a final claim that is not underwritten by historical precedent and surely questions Pound’s grasp of reality and raises suggestions of megalomania.  That an ability to rearrange words might give any individual any kind of privileged position and or inherent understanding or insight is ridiculous. Which means the understanding and insight on offer must be judged on their own, stripped of any baggage anyone might attach to the word ‘Poet’ or attempts to redefine ‘truth’ or ‘accuracy’.

3) So the question I suggest should be asked is how and why anyone of any intelligence or perception could be so deluded, then or now, to believe that a poem in the real world could “shape the future” of humanity.  Pound was guilty of taking Shelley seriously, but why should anyone else?

4) The reality of the claim can and should be also evaluated against the realties of its production and reception: How was writing poems released in limited, sometimes expensive editions, written in a style that was off putting to almost all readers, going to be able to change the world the poet lived in?

5) If, on the other hand, the claim is taken seriously, then the poems should be evaluated against their ability to achieve their intended purpose, and as such they are a monstrous failure and the waste of a man’s writing life. They are not, cannot be, a foundation myth for a universal civilization. So they fail.  So why are we bothering with them or the man who wrote them?

To be continued.

Bunting on Pound's Anti-Semitism

Bunting to Pound, 16 December 1938.

[Pound had written to Louis Zukofsky, blaming the Rothschilds, rather than the Nazis, for the persecution of the Jews in Germany. Bunting had been arguing with Pound against Pound’s politics for some time, but when he saw the letter he exploded. What follows is a reconstruction of Bunting’s letter from extracts in Makin, Burton and Moody. Each of them quotes slightly differently and this is an attempt to fill in their ellipses.  I’m not sure of the positioning of the first two paragraphs. Anyone who knows better or has seen the letter I’d be grateful for any corrections.]

No, I’m sorry, and Thankyou; but I can’t take it. I wish I were not as much indebted to you as I am.

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as my man that to hold one man guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that that the non-jews have contributed their fair share, or more than their fare share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty. You have the relevant facts without any need of information that cannot be found in Italy. I can find no excuse, no way of considering your activities as anything else than willful and thought-out perversion of what you know to be true.   

Every anti-Semitism, anti-niggersim, anti-moorism, that I can recall in history was base, had its foundations in the meanest kind of envy and in greed. It makes me sick to see yourself covering yourself in that filth. It not an arguable question, has not been arguable for at least nineteen centuries. Either you know men to be men and not something else, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind at large.  

To spue [sic] out anti-semite bile in a letter to Louis, as I yesterday accidentally discovered you to be doing-to Louis who has shown his devotion to you over many years, and who even now insists that you are to be forgiven because after all you are Ezra-to write such a letter is not a mere lapse of taste it is uncommonly close to what has got to be called the behavior of a skunk.

I suppose if you devote yourself long enough to licking the arses of blackguards you stand a good chance of becoming a blackguard yourself.  It is hard to see how you are going to stop the rot of your mind and heart without a thorough going repudiation of what you have spent a lot of work on. You ought to have the courage for that; but I confess I don’t expect it from you. (Makin 1992, Burton 2013, Moody 2014)

Burton, R. (2013). A Strong Song Tows Us. Oxford, Infinite Ideas.

           

Makin, P. (1992). Bunting: the shaping of his verse. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

           

Moody, A. D. (2014). Ezra Pound Poet.Vol II Oxford, Oxford University Press.