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Literature and Politics: The Case of Ezra Pound Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert A. Corrigan
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Extract

March 23, 1976, marked the sixty-eighth anniversary of one of literary history's most remarkable but least celebrated events—the invasion of Europe by Ezra Pound. That imaginative, excitable, and extremely talented Young Turk who stormed the gates of literary London in 1909, died in Italy in November, 1972, a calm, withdrawn, old man, living out the butt end of his life in a self-imposed vow of public silence. But if the poet's voice was stilled at last, his public's was not; fittingly enough, Pound left the literary world as he had entered it, in a swirl of bitter controversy and angry debate precipitated by the decision of the prestigeous American Academy of Arts and Sciences to deny him its coveted Emerson-Thoreau Medal. No one can say for sure whether Pound desired the prize. Many times in the past such honors seemed to have mattered greatly, but often they had been more desperately sought for him by members of that protective coterie of friends and relatives who clustered about in his Italian retreat. It is the relationship of Pound to these associates, the impact of his turbulent career upon his family and friends, and the effects of their well-meaning, if misdirected, efforts on his behalf, that need charting here; there is little need for yet another intricate route through that much surveyed ideomatic jungle he called his Cantos.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 2 , October 1977 , pp. 463 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

NOTES

1. See Pound, Dorothy, Etruscan Gate (Exeter: Rougemont Press, 1971), p. 2Google Scholar; notebook passage indicating that on March 23, 1909 Pound took her and her mother to tea after a concert to celebrate the anniversary of his landing in Europe.

2. See Reinhold, Robert, “Ezra Pound Is Focus of New Dispute” New York Times, 07 5, 1972, pp. 1, 29Google Scholar; “Pound's Prize,” 07 17, 1972, p. 10Google Scholar: , L. V. D. “Veto of Academy's Award to Ezra Pound Stirs a Bitter Debate Among Scholars,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 2, 1972, p. 3Google Scholar: and, Howe, Irving, “The Return of the Case of Ezra Pound,” World, 10 24, 1972, pp. 20–24.Google Scholar

3. One of the latest critics to honor Pound with a book, for example, had not only speculated openly about a campaign to get him the Nobel Peace Prize, but had even intimated to friends that His Holiness the Pope might be prevailed upon to consider canonization.

4. From an unpublished memoir in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress.

5. See, for example, Dorothy Pound's letter to Duncan, Ronald, 10 5, 1947Google Scholar, quoting Pound that “The MacLeish level of Kulchur is not high enough to fool the world.”

6. See interview in the Washington Daily News, 04 30, 1958Google Scholar, and quoted in Mullens, Eustace, This Difficult Individual Ezra Pound (New York: Fleet, 1961), p. 196.Google Scholar

7. Smith, Logan Pearsall, Milton and His Modern Critics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), p. 10Google Scholar, claims to have received this information from Pound's first English publisher, Elkin Mathews.

8. Doolittle, Hilda, Bid Me to Live (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 41.Google Scholar

9. Wallace, Emily Mitchell, “Penn's Poet Friends,” Pennsylvania Gazette (02 1973), p. 35Google Scholar. Wallace also discovered that Pound failed a graduate course—literary criticism!

10. Thayer, Mary Dixon, “Ezra Pound's Father Tells How Son Went to London with a Shilling and Found Fame,” Philadelphia Bulletin, 02 20, 1928, p. 12.Google Scholar

11. A case in point is the legend (or legends) about Pound's midyear dismissal from the faculty of Indiana's Wabash College. Pound provides two versions, both of which recount an evening walk in which he was accosted by a stranded dancer who needed a place to stay the night. (The two versions differ as to whether she was a ballet dancer or a burlesque queen.) Pound generously offered the destitute dancer his own bed, chivalrously spending the night asleep in a chair, but went off to teach his morning class leaving the girl in his bed where she was quickly discovered by his spinster landladies. The girl may have been a dancer and she was undoubtably discovered in his bed, but the rest is fabrication; his guest was actually a resident of the same roominghouse and this particular incident had been the last in a series of nocturnal events that led to his discharge from both the respectable boardinghouse and ultra-conservative college.

12. Reported in Aldington, Richard, in “Des Imagistes,” Saturday Review of Literature, 21 (03 16, 1940), 3, 4Google Scholar; “A Farewell to Europe,” Atlantic, 10 1940, pp. 518–29Google Scholar; and Life for Life's Sake (New York: Viking, 1941).Google Scholar

13. See, for example, the much quoted salute by Graves, C. L. and Lucas, E. U., “Mr. Welkin Mark's New Poet,” Punch, 06 23, 1909, p. 449Google Scholar; “Mr. Welkin Mark (exactly opposite Long Jane's) begs to announce that he has secured for the English market the palpitating works of the new Montana (U.S.A.) poet, Mr. Ezekial Ton, who is the most remarkable thing in Poetry since Robert Browning. Mr. Ton who has left America to reside for awhile in London and impress his personality on English editors, publishers and readers, is by far the newest poet going, whatever other advertisements may say. He has succeeded, where all others have failed, in evolving a blend of the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street and the sinister abondon of Borgiac Italy.”

14. Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 403.Google Scholar

15. The New Masses started to attack Pound as early as September, 1931, with an open letter from Mike Gold. See also attacks in April 10, 1934, and March 17, 1936. On December 11, 1945, Isidor Schneider published his “Traitor or Holy Idiot?” in the same journal and two weeks later it came out with its infamous symposium “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?” See also McKenzie, Donald, “T(h)inker Pound and other Italian Legends,” The Left, Summer and Autumn 1931, pp. 48–52.Google Scholar

16. Letter to Lewis, Wyndham, 02, 1949Google Scholar, in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

17. Letter to Foster, Jeanne Robert, 02 2, 1922Google Scholar, in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

18. Kenner, Hugh, “Incurious Biography,” New Republic, 10 17, 1970, pp. 30–32.Google Scholar

19. See, for example, T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking jews undesirable.” See also John Quinn, letter to Column, Mary Maguire, 01 3, 1919Google Scholar, in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas: “I used to hate Germany and the Germans beyond words. Now I despise them beyond words. I have nothing but loathing and contempt for their whining and for all the low instincts that make the lowest of the low Jews contemptible.”

20. On several different occasions Pound reported to friends that he had told Mussolini at their meeting that the only thing he envied him was the cubs. See, for example, letter to Ronald Duncan, May 8, 1946, Beinecke Library, Yale University. On the other hand, T. S. Eliot wrote to Woolf, Virginia on 04 17, 1936Google Scholar, that he writes “sarcastic letters about Mussolini to Ezra Pound”—presumably to provoke him. See letter in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

21. See my “Ezra Pound and the Italian Ministry for Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture, 6 (Spring 1972), pp. 767–81, for a detailed discussion.Google Scholar

22. See Meacham, Harry M., The Caged Panther (New York: Twayne, 1967)Google Scholar, for Dorothy Pound's version of the events and de Rachewiltz, MaryDiscretions (Boston: Atlantic, Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar, for his daughter's. There are also unpublished letters at the University of Texas that bear upon this subject.

23. For a year or more all of them—husband, wife, and mistress—lived together, and had the poet's mother not been so old and feeble, she might have left her Rapallo flat to join them in literary history's most remarkable menage. Dorothy did manage a weekly trip into town to visit her “ma-inlaw” as she called Isabel Pound, and it was during one such absence that those rough partisans took Pound prisoner and trundled him off to Genoa for questioning by the Allied command.

24. See letter from Dorothy Pound to Cummings, E. E., 11 4, 1945Google Scholar, Beinecke Library, Yale University: “I am now allowed to communicate with my good man and he to receive letters from outside…. He is thankful for any news after five months in communicado…. I have been allowed one visit, after five months of not knowing where he was.”

25. “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?” New Masses, 12 25, 1945, pp. 4–6Google Scholar. For a discussion, see my article, “What's My Line: Bennet Cerf, Ezra Pound and the American Poet,” American Quarterly, 24 (03 1972), 101–13.Google Scholar

26. Ronald Duncan, Letter to Drummond, John, 05 4, 1948Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

27. Arthur V. Moore, Letter to Duncan, Ronald, 02 20, 1946Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, indicates she was to sail on February 25. But Pound reports ship's name in letter to Eileen Lane Kenney dated July 3, 1946 in Beinecke Library, Yale University: “D. is reported to have sailed….” Stock, Noel, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 420Google Scholar, indicates her passport was finally renewed in June, 1946, and by July 14 she had visited her husband twice. Cornell, Julian, The Trial of Ezra Pound (New York: John Day, 1966), p. 50Google Scholar, says she sailed in June.

28. In a letter to Paige, D. D., 05 20, 1947Google Scholar, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Pound says “Mencken wrote year before last on my arriv.—came here with 5 lb. cand and a stack of books….”

29. According to correspondence in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

30. James Laughlin, Letter to Eliot, T. S., 12 23, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

31. James Laughlin, Letter to Eliot, T. S., 12 23, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

32. James Laughlin, Letter to Eliot, T. S., 12 23, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

33. Arthur V. Moore, Letter to Duncan, Ronald, 12 19, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

34. James Laughlin, Letter to Eliot, T. S., 02 15, 1946Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

35. James Laughlin, Letter to Eliot, T. S., 02 15, 1946Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

36. T. S. Eliot, Letter to Moore, A. V., 01 3, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas. Moore wrote back to Eliot on January 6.

37. Cowley, Malcolm, “Books and People,” New Republic, 109 (11 15, 1943) 689–90.Google Scholar

38. Humphries, Rolphe, “Poets, Traitors and Patriots,” New Republic, 109 (11 29, 1943), 748.Google Scholar

39. Louis Untermeyer, Letter to Norman, Charles, 10 8, 1945Google Scholar, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania: published in Norman, Charles. “Ezra Pound,” PM, 11 25, 1945, p. 17Google Scholar. but not reprinted in Norman, Charles, The Case of Ezra Pound (New York: John Day, 1948).Google Scholar

40. Forbes, Clarence A., “Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertuis,” Classical Journal, 42 (12 1946), 177–79.Google Scholar

41. Laughlin, James, “Letter to T. S. Eliot, 12 23, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

42. See Cornell, , The Trial of Ezra Pound.Google Scholar

43. T. S. Eliot, Letter to Pound, Dorothy, 11 13, 1946Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

44. T. S. Eliot, Letter to Pound, Dorothy, 11 13, 1946Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

45. Deutsch, Albert, “Ezra Pound, Turncoat Poet, Seeks Release From Federal Mental Hospital,” PM, 01 25, 1947, pp. 1, 24.Google Scholar

46. See Deutsch, Albert, “Pound Gets ‘Unsound Mind’ Verdict, Escapes Trial,” PM, 02 14, 1946, p. 7.Google Scholar

47. Dorothy Pound, Letter to Cornell, Julian, 03 13, 1948Google Scholar, in The Trial of Ezra Pound, p. 67.Google Scholar

48. This does not mean, however, that Pound's English friends were to give up the legal procedures; they continued to press for court action.

49. Laughlin, James, Letter to Eliot, T. S., 12 23, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas. Hemingway made quite a splash, however, in December, 1954, on the occasion of his winning of the Nobel Prize for literature when he mentioned it was “a good year to release poets.” See “An American Storyteller,” Time, 12 13, 1954, p. 72.Google Scholar

50. Pound, Ezra, Cantos LII–LXXI (Norfolk: New Directions, 1940)Google Scholar. Actually there were 1,000 copies printed but only the first 500 contained the pamphlet Notes on Ezra Pound's Cantos: Structure and Metric, consisting of two essays “Notes on the Cantos,” by H. H. (James Laughlin), and “Notes on the Versification of the Cantos,” by S.D. (Delmore Schwartz). See Gallup, Donald. A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London: 1963), pp. 90–91.Google Scholar

51. Waggoner, Hyatt H., “The Legend of Ezra Pound,” University of Kansas City Review, 10 (Summer 1944), 275–85Google Scholar. See also: Delehanty, Elizabeth, “Day with Ezra Poúnd,” New Yorker, 04 13, 1940, pp. 76–77Google Scholar; “Weston,” New Yorker, 08 14, 1943, pp. 16–17Google Scholar; MacPherson, Douglass, “Ezra Pound of Wyncote,” Arts in Philadelphia (05 1940), 10–28Google Scholar is an historical piece written by a friend of Pound.

52. Eliot, T. S., “Ezra Pound,” Poetry, 48 (09 1946), 326–38Google Scholar. The same issue contained Dillon, George, “A Note on the Obvious”Google Scholar; Blackmur, R. P., “An Adjunct of the Muses' Diadem: A Note on E.P.,” pp. 338–46Google Scholar; and Healy, J. V., “Addendum,” pp. 347–49.Google Scholar

53. Edited by Rolfe Fjelde, issue No. 6 contained Pound's Canto LXXXIII, and two articles: Watts, H. H., “Pound's Cantos: Means to an End,” pp. 9–20Google Scholar; and Richardson, Laurence, “Ezra Pound's Homage to Propertius,” pp. 21–29.Google Scholar

54. Edited with an editorial note by Paige, D. D., vol. V, November 2 of Quarterly Review of Literature (copyright 1949)Google Scholar contains three Pound poems and his “Indescretions” plus: Lewis, Wyndham, “Ezra: The Portrait of a Personality”Google Scholar; Senior, John, “E.P. Pour L Erection”Google Scholar; Moore, Marianne, “Ezra Pound”Google Scholar; Watts, Harold H., “The Devices of Pound's Cantos”Google Scholar; Eberhart, Richard, “Pound's New Cantos”Google Scholar; and West, Ray B. Jr., “Pound and Contemporary Criticism.”Google Scholar

55. Edward Delaney, Constance Drexel, Jane Anderson, Max Kolschwitz, Robert Best, Douglas Chandler, and Frederick Kaltenbach.

56. Mullens, Eustace, This Difficult Individual Ezra Pound (New York: Fleet. 1961).Google Scholar

57. See Gordon, Arthur, “Intruder in the South,” Look, 02 19, 1957, pp. 27–31.Google Scholar

58. Paige, D. D., The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950)Google Scholar. At least one reviewer, “Instruction from Mr. Pound,” Times Literary Supplement, 09 21, 1951, p. 595Google Scholar, considered this a mistake, since the “inclusion of such letters … would have helped Mr. Pound and his numerous supporters to uphold his innocence.…”

59. It was in response to one such letter in 1938 that Zukofsky wrote to Pound: “There hasn't been a feud in these parts and thousands of innocent Americans have not been killed because of the crimes of Messrs. Dupont, Rockefeller, Morgan, etc. On the other hand, if Coughlin seconded by yourself continue to mention the names of Kahn, Rothschild, etc. to the same innocent Americans, one foresees a pogrom in N.Y.C. in 1 year or less, in which thousands of innocent Jews will be killed.” Louis Zukofsky, Letter to Pound, Ezra, 12 14, 1938Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

60. See, for example, Ezra Pound, Letter to Swabey, Henry, 02 28, 1940Google Scholar: “Prot/ism was a new bilge—wave from the Jew scriptures, I think O.T. is probably an over-willing fountain of pus.”

61. Paige includes no letters from Pound to Williams written after 1931, nor do the Paige typescripts at Yale contain any letters to Williams between 1940 and 1947.

62. Pound, Ezra, The Pisan Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1948)Google Scholar. It was published by New Directions on July 30, 1948 in an edition of 1,525. A second impression of 1,023 copies was issued in June, 1949. Faber and Faber issued a British edition of 1,976 copies on July 22, 1949. See Gallup, Donald, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London: Hart-Davis, 1963), pp. 103–104.Google Scholar

63. See, for example, Dorothy Pound, Letter to Duncan, Ronald, 12 21, 1945Google Scholar, indicating twenty pages of typescript were sent to Laughlin of New Directions and to Eliot, T. S. at Faber, and Faber on 12 20.Google Scholar

64. See Dorothy Pound, Letter to Cummings, E. E., 11 4, 1945Google Scholar, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

65. See, for example, a letter to Eliot, T. S., 12 23, 1945Google Scholar, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, in which a close associate of Pound's describes the chief government lawyer, Israel Matlock, as a “rat-faced little I won't say it,” who was “banking… on making his reputation out of the trial.”