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The

Pound Era

By HUGH KENNER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 197 1

I

University of California Press

IN MEMORIAM M.J.K.

Berkeley and Los Angeles California

In signo fidei praecedentis

Copyright

©

1971 by Hugh Kenner

All previously uncollected and/or unpublished material including letters by Ezra Pound, Copyright © 1971 by Ezra Pound, and used by permission of Dorothy Pound, Committee for

Ezra Pound

All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

ISBN 0-120-01860-\ LCCC No. 72-138349

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Dave Comstock

CONTENTS PART ONE-TOWARD THE VORTEX

Ghosts and Benedictions Space-Craft Renaissance II The Muse in Tatters Motz el Son The Invention of Language Words Set Free Knot and Vortex Transformations Imagism The Invention of China The Persistent East Vortex' Lewis The Stone

I 3 23 4'

54 76 94 121 '45 163 '73 '9 2 223 23 2 24 8

PART TWO-INTERREGNUM

263 279 28 9

Privacies Scatter Mao, or Presumption PART THREE-TOWARD NOW

301 318 349 382 397 407 4'4 437 445 460 49 6 506 5'8 537 563 593

Douglas The Sacred Places The Cantos-I o City City ... Syntax in Rutherford Specifics The Cantos-2 The Anonymous Inventing Confucius The Cage The Last European The Jersey Paideuma The Last Vortex Endings NOTES INDEX

vii

';,:

ILLUSTRATIONS Little" Ray" Pound "Frank" (i.e. Joyce in '904) Gaudier-Brzeska Brass Toy The Sappho parchment Diana bas-relief by Duccio (the Tempio) Knot diagrams Figs 5'9 & po from On Growth & Form Lewis grbtesque (" Woman Ascending Stair") The" Alcibiades" design from Timon Advertisement for Bla.rt The Blast Vortex emblem Gaudier's cat Horse ideogram (2 forms) Tempio photographs (3) Gaudier's Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound " Gonzaga bis heirs and his concubines" Signed column, San Zeno St. Hilaire arches St. T rophime cloisters The Room in Poi tiers, shadowless The figure of Flora ("Botany") Montsegur (2 views) The Wave-pattern, Excideuil Ventadorn ruins San Vitale sarcophagi Tempio sarcophagi Stars on roof of Galla's mausoleum The arena, Verona Map of the Sacred Places Mermaids, Santa Maria dei Miracoli Canto I, line I, EP's handwriting Divus' Homer, page facsimile Stefano's "Madonna in Hortulo" Head of Botticelli Venus Head ofJ acopo del Sellaio Venus Head of Velasquez Venus

ix

9 36

12 56 73 145 . 169 233 235 237 23 8 249

25' 253-)4

257 314 32 4 32 7

328 - 2 9 33 ' 332

333-34 337 340 34 ' 34 '

343 344 345

347 349

312-53 35 8 36 4 36 4 3 64

x

ILLUSTRATIONS

"Yeux Glauques" (Burne-Jones head) Line of score, Pound's "Villon" "Beerbottle on the statue's pediment"

Sketch of table made by Pound Venice from the Dogana's steps "The crocodile"

The elephants in the Tempio Map of Pisan environs, showing DTC "Taishan at Pisa"

Schifanoia grape arbor "The rain altars" (Alyscamps, Arles) "Under Abelard's Bridges" "Portrait of Rodenbach" "The moon barge" (Diana in Tempio) Photo of Ezra Pound, 1965 Wyndham Lewis-portrait of Ezra Pound, 1938 Brunnenburg Photo of Ezra Pound, 1965

36 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

390 39 1 39 2 4 18

421 42 9 472 473 473 477 47 8 479 480

Ezra Pound, to start with. When I first met him he was 62. As these words are written he approaches 86. Mine was the third generation he had taught, and owes him its testimony. So this book was planned as an X-ray moving picture. of how our epoch was extricated from the fin de si'cle. It led me long journeys. And having sat in a Venetian noon at the behest of three words-

49 8 499 539 56 1

mermaids, that carving

-waiting for the doors of Santa Maria dei Miracoli to be unlocked, having then seen the mermaids ("sirenes") Tullio had carved "in the tradition," and watched the custodian's wooden pick pass behind the minute stonework of their frieze to demonstrate its cunning detachment from its base; having visited Rimini drawn by a few more words, and Montsegur (" sacred to Helios") on account of words still fewer, I cannot but endorse the accuracy of perception that set in array the words that drew me on. No one knows enough to undertake a book like this, but generous help has made good much ignorance. For information and shafts of specialized judgment the reader and I are indebted to Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Mr. Omar S. Pound, Miss Olga Rudge, Prince Boris and Princess Mary de Rachewiltz; Eva Hesse and her husband Mike O'Donnell; Guy Davenport (polumetis); Mr. R. Buckminster Fuller, Miss Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Charles Tomlinson, Samuel Beckett, George and Mary Oppen, Louis and Celia Zukofsky; Mrs, T. S. Eliot, Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. William Carlos Williams; Fred Siegel, Christine Brooke-Rose, Geoffrey and Joyce Bridson, Mr. Joseph Bard, William Cookson, Christopher Middleton, Richard G. Stern, Joan Fitzgerald, Walter Michaels; my colleagues Herbert N. Schneidau, Alan Stephens, ' ..'l:.

xi

XlI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Marvin Mudrick, Mary Slaughter, David Young, Immanuel Hsu, Wai-Lim Yip and Chalmers Johnson; Mrs. Alice Leng and Miss Anne Freudenberg; Donald Davie, John Frith, Laurence Scott; Mr. James Laughlin, Mr. Harry M. Meacham; Mr. Reno Odlin and his anonymous correspondent; Mrs. Gatter of Wyncote, Pa.; Mrs. Gay of Excideuil (Dordogne); Prof. D. S. Carne-Ross, Prof. Leon Edel, Prof. A. Walton Litz, Prof. David Hayman; Mr. Fritz Senn; Rev. Walter J. Ong, S.J.; Miss Barbara Tuchman; Mr. David E. Scherman; Mr. Peter du Sautoy of Faber & Faber Ltd., Mr. August Fruge, Director of the University of California Press; my diligent editor Mr. Joel Walters; and-for getting me in touch with Ezra Pound in the first place-Marshall McLuhan and the late Felix B. Giovanelli. Many who helped and whom I had hoped to please are dead: T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Rago, Miss Agnes Bedford, Mr. Frank Budgen, Mr. John Cook Wylie. It was my tacit understanding with the late W. K. Rose that our projected books would complement one another, but his, on the personal interactions in the days of the London Vortex, will never be written now. And I was too late to discuss Social Credit with the late Gorham Munson, or Chinese History with the late Joseph Levenson, and have had to be content with learning from their books. A letter from Mr. John Reid catalyzed the book years ago, though it is not the book he suggested. Mr. William F. Buckley's logistical resourcefulness was indispensable. So was the help of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Committee on Research of the University of California, Santa Barbara, the library staffs there and at the Universities of Virginia, Texas, Chicago, Buffalo and Wisconsin (Milwaukee), and the New York Public Library. And finally, the patience and advice of my wife Mary Anne; there are no fit words. Portions of this book, often in earlier versions, have appeared in Agenda, Arion, Canadian Literature (and the reprint of its articles, Wyndham Lewis in Canada), College English, Eva Hesse's New Approaches to E{ta Pound, Kentucky Review, National Review, Poetry, James Joyce Quarterly, St. Andrews Review, Shenandoah, Sou' Wester, Spectrum, Stony Brook, Sumac, Texas Quarterly.

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Quotations from the writings of Ezra Pound appear through the courtesy of Dorothy Pound, Committee for Ezra Pound, New Directions Publishing Corp., and Faber & Faber Ltd. Unpublished Pound material is used by Mrs. Pound's courtesy and is fully protected by copyright. Mrs. Pound owns the Gaudier-Brzeska panther drawing that appears on the title-page and elsewhere; it is reproduced with her permission. Quotations from William Carlos Williams' poems are used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Lallrence Pollinger Ltd. The quotation from Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger (Penguin Books) is used by permission of Hope Leresch & Steele.

References to the Can tos Commencing with the I970 printing, the American (New Directions) collected edition of the Cantos was paginated continuously, as the British (Faber) edition had been since I964. I give references to the Cantos in the form (74/447:475). This means Canto 14, page 447 of the repaginated New Directions edition, page 475 of the Faber. The reader who wishes to locate a passage in the earlier New Directions edition, which is paginated by separate volume, may subtract from the New Directions page number in the reference the corrections from the following table: subtract Cantos I-30 Cantos 3'-4' . Cantos 42-5 I Cantos )2-'7I Cantos 74-84 Cantos 85-95 Cantos 96-I09 Cantos IIo-end

0

'5 0 206 2)4

422 540 648 770

Thus the example given, 74/447, is on page 25 of the old edition (447 minus 422). Though eight different pages are numbered "25," the Canto number will indicate which one is meant.

XIV

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Cantos subsequent to 109 have not, as of 1971, been incorpotated into the British collected edition. In the very few references to these Cantos, the second (Faber) number refers to the separately published Drafts and Fragments. The reader who finds such complication annoying may reflect that publishers' costs are governed by the accounting system C. H. Douglas described.

Part One TOWARD THE VORTEX

I I

I I

I

GHOSTS AND BENEDICTIONS

I I

I

I

Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things. Miss Peg in London, he had assured her mother, "with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be," would have "lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to 'take her out'." By "out" he meant into the tabernacles of" society": his world of discourse teems with inverted commas, the words by which life was regulated having been long adrift, and referable only, with lifted ed'ebrows, to usage, his knowledge of her knowledge of his knowledge of what was done. The Chelsea street that afternoon however had stranger riches to offer than had" society." Movement, clatter of hooves, sputter of motors; light grazing housefronts, shadows moving; faces in a crowd, their apparition: two faces: Ezra Pound (quick jaunty rubicundity) with a lady. Eyes met; the couples halted; rituals were incumbent. Around them Chelsea sauntered on its leisurely business. James to play:

3

4

PART ONE

TOWARD THE VORTEX.

"Mr. Pound! ... " in the searching voice, torch forunimagined labyrinths; and on, to the effect of presenting his niece Margaret; whereafter Mr. Pound presented to Mr. James his wife Dorothy; and the painter's eye of Dorothy Pound, nee Shakespear, "took in," as James would have phrased it, Henry James. "A fairly portly figure"Fifty years later, under an Italian sky, the red waistcoat seemed half chimerical-"that may be imagination! "-but let us posit it; Gautier wore such a garment to the Hernani premiere, that formal declaration (1830) of art's antipathy to the impercipient, and James would have buttoned it for this outing with didactic deliberation. Fifty years left nothing else doubtful. The voice now given body was part of her world's tone, effusing from pages read in her mother's house: fictions wherein New World impetuosity crossed the Atlantic on journeys of sanctification. They came as pilgrims or they came as shoppers; as passionate antiquaries or as seekers-out of inconceivable sensations. Some of them amused their creator hugely: the young woman from Bangor who knew, she said, what she wanted and always went straight for it, and preferred to spend her money" for purposes of culture "; orthe young man from Boston. who proposed that the great thing was to live ("I don't want any second-hand spurious sensations; I want the knowledge that leaves a trace--that leaves strange scars and stains, ineffable reveries.... But I'm afraid I shock you, perhaps even frighten you "). Grotesque though might be its assertive manifestations, the allure of Europe for the American psyche was in James's awareness the dominant American fact; and" an ear for stilled voices," a responsiveness to

"the scrutable, palpable past," were talents occasionally possible to American intensity, even to an intensity so inexperienced as to think the European experience a wetting of lips at the origins of romance.

America, here, had imaginative advantages, being unencumbered by the worldliness with which Europe had learned to inhabit the European world. It was Whistler, not anyone English, who had known how to make Turner's heritage fructify, and crossed that heritage with what was assimilable from the vogue for Japan. It was another American settled abroad, and not some congener of

GHOSTS AND BENEDICTIONS

5

Thackeray'S, whose multiform consciousness of "felt life" had shaped the most intricate registrations of nuance in human history: subdued the taxonon:ic pretensions of epithets and vanquished the linear rigor oflinked sentences: indeed composed The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Now on Dorothy Pound the eyes of the author of The Golden Bowl were bent, intent dark eyes, as he paired off Dorothy with niece Peg and sent the two young women walking ahead; then side by side with Dorothy'S husband Ezra (encountered by him at hospitable hearths just sufficiently often to ratify public rites of amiability) he fell into step a deliberate distance behind them. The young women strolled and talked; their talk is forgotten. After 50 years, though, one scrap of the master's survived. For James's fierce need to "place" and categorize spurred root curiosities,

and Dorothy heard from behind her, addressed to her husband of two months, in the slow implacable voice the great expatriate's overwhelming q1,lestion, as who should ask, animal, vegetable, or mineral: "And is she a com- pat- riot?": the syllables spaced, the accented vowel short.

*

*

*

Which is all of the story, like a torn papyrus. That is how the past exists, phantasmagoric weskits, stray words, random things recorded. The imagination augments, metabolizes, feeding on all it has to feed on, such scraps. What Sappho conceived on one occasion on Mitylene is gone beyond reconstitution; the sole proof that she ever conceived it is a scrap from a parchment copy made thirteen centuries later; on an upper left-hand corner learning assisted by chemicals makes out a few letters; in Berliner Klassikertexte, V-2, 1907, pp. 14-15, type stands for those letters with perhaps misleading decisiveness: .P'A[ ... LlHPAT.[ ... rOrTYAA .[ ...

... plus the beginnings of a dozen more· lines: very possibly, so modern editions indicate, the first aorist of the verb to raise (conjecturing ~p' a.), and a word unknown, and the name of a girl of Sappho's. Or you can remember from Alcaeus and Ibycus ~p, the

6

PART ONE

TOWARD THE VORTEX

contraction for springtime, and derive the unknown word from (Y'lP6