Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920 by A David Moody

Waging war on the sublime

A David Moody's life of Ezra Pound is, at last, the ambitious, energetic biography the poet deserves, says Andrew Motion

Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920
by A David Moody
544pp, Oxford, £25

     There's a blur near the centre of 20th-century literary biography: lives of the two greatest modernists are missing. Or at least not fully present. Peter Ackroyd and others have done their best to get round the prohibitions of the Eliot estate, but we still lack a properly detailed, intimate account. Problems of a different kind have delayed a full and scholarly biography of Pound, despite the best efforts of Humphrey Carpenter and others. Pound's life is so vast in its energies, so richly international in its reach and so bedevilled by controversies that it has taken more than 30 years - since Pound's death in 1972 - for A David Moody's book to arrive on the scene. The first volume of this grand opus is a significant event.

The two-part structure of Moody's book recalls RF Foster's tremendous life of Yeats (also published by Oxford), and the two narratives often combine to good effect. But where Foster, especially in his more relaxed and dynamic second volume, manages to combine the story of Yeats's inner life with his career on the public stage, Moody adopts a more objective approach. His prose is more obviously driven by the need to get the facts straight and to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of the poems, than by curiosity about psychological motives and personal characteristics. It means the book has an air of slightly detached efficiency - which is no bad thing, except that it makes Pound himself seem a touch remote. We see the blaze of his firebrand energy; we marvel at his generosity to writers of whom he approves; we admire his astonishing powers of self-driving; but we rarely feel these things on our pulses.

     It's a compelling story all the same. From his respectable suburban beginnings, through his schooling in a small military academy at Wyncote, north of New York, and his immersion in foreign literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, Pound devoted himself to poetry with extraordinary devotion and ambition. Even his earliest poems, which come trailing clouds of decadent glory, experiment with the large-scale structures that would eventually find their apotheosis in the Cantos. Equally striking is his determination to position himself as a rebel, whether he's dealing with social conventions or poetic traditions. He wanted to "make it new" as soon as he made it at all.

Or at least he tried to make it new. Bolstered - as he would be throughout his life - by patrons and protégés such as Hilda Doolittle and Katherine Heyman, he began by talking the proto-modernist talk much better than he walked the walk. Dante, Villon and Browning all helped to shape his theories about how to drag poetry out of the late-Victorian doldrums, but the actual language of his early verses, in A Lume Spento (1908) for instance, is still slurred by its archaism and gilded gorgeousness.

     Pound himself held the provincialness of America partly to blame, and after a brief but turbulent time at Wabash College in Crawfordville, Indiana, he travelled to London looking for greater freedom - and more publicity. It was a journey that Robert Frost would take a few years later, hoping for similar rewards, but whereas Frost found supporters and a stable audience almost immediately, Pound had to wait and struggle. It was partly his own fault. Although he delivered a strong and immediate blow to the styles of the old world, made friends with Yeats and gathered round him a community of kindred spirits (the Australian poet Frederick Manning, the publisher Elkin Mathews, Dorothy Shakespeare, the daughter of Olivia, whom he would eventually marry), he was still more effective as a provocateur than as a writer per se. The general reaction to his work was well summarised by Edward Thomas, who wrote warmly about Personae in January 1909, then changed his mind when Exultations was published in September of the same year. By common consent, there was too much noise about Pound and not enough substance; too much referring and not enough originality.

Like many revolutionaries before and since, Pound drew a good deal of energy from opposition, but he could see that some of his critics had a point. His theories about poetic renewal were still running ahead of his practice - partly because of the difficulties he found in reconciling a recognisably modern idiom and subject matter with the need to retain a sense of "mystery". Yeats helped to guide him towards finding a balance, as did Ford Maddox Hueffer (later Ford) and (by the early 1910s) Alfred Orage, the editor of the New Age. The influence of his reading among French medieval poets, and of emerging imagist contemporaries such as TE Hulme, was even more decisive. In the months leading up to the first world war he finally became more nearly the Pound we know and most admire - wonderfully braced in his translations (of "The Seafarer", and the Cathay sequence), and much more sharply focused on the here and now in his own work.

     Much more effective as a poetic mover and shaker, too. Although the outbreak of the war meant his audience had better (ie, worse) things to think about than poetry, it also galvanised him with a new sense of urgency. As Moody says: "He had called for slaughter in a war without truce, meaning it metaphorically. The real thing seemed to him the final stupidity of the world he had wanted to destroy, a mindless murdering contest between detestable 'teutonic atavism' and 'unsatisfactory Democracy'." Blasting and blessing alongside Wyndham Lewis and other vorticists, acting as foreign correspondent for Harriet Monroe's Poetry, commissioning for the New Freewoman, Pound rallied others as furiously as he goaded himself to embrace "the point of imagism" - which was to recognise emotion as the primary energy in poetry because only emotion "causes a pattern to arise in the mind". When writing to his friend Alice Henderson he explained that this emotional energy could only be released by writing in a compressed style which preserved "the austerity or economy of the speech". It was a version of theories he had always held dear. Now, hideously dramatised by events in France, they finally became the reality of his writing.

     Although Pound had always exploited his role as an outsider, Moody rightly emphasises that he scorned the "impotence" of "the mere aesthete" and believed "the serious artist" must engage with "the powers of the world" in order to act as a part of its "intelligence". In spite of his achievements during the early years of the war, it was often a period of frustration for Pound. He had "very little power of any kind", his audience was small, and he was worried that his poetic missionary work would centre him "in propagande" rather than new work. This meant that as the decade drew to a close, signals about his future as a writer were distinctly mixed. On the one hand his reputation seemed to be in decline, and his impatience was leading him to formulate political and social views that would later elaborate into the anti-semitism for which he became notorious. On the other hand, he had met Eliot, was about to meet Joyce and was writing more distinctively than ever. Fittingly, one of the best poems from this period, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", is an obituary for his young self - the self he had spent the previous 20-odd years escaping: "He strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime' / In the old sense. Wrong from the start . . ."

But right in the end. Moody's book ends shortly before the publication of Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses, both of which Pound helped to bring into the world, and both of which marked the beginning of a long-sustained modernist triumph. It also leaves Pound himself in possession of the early Cantos, which would eventually become his master-work. Moody has led us to this crucial point with admirable skill as an organiser of material, and clear good sense in his role as a critic. If we sometimes miss the sound of Pound's heartbeats, the disappointment does not deter us from eagerly looking forward us to the next volume.

· Andrew Motion is poet laureate

•  Retrieved from
• The Guardian, Saturday 17 November 2007

Truman Capote VOICE FROM A CLOUD

Truman Capote

VOICE FROM A CLOUD

     Other Voices, Other Rooms (my own title: it is not a quotation) was published in January 1948. It took two years to write and was not my first novel, but the second. The first, a manuscript never submitted and now lost, was called Summer Cr'ossing- a spare, objective story with a New York setting. Not bad, as I remember: technically accomplished, an interesting enough tale, but without intensity or pain, without the qualities of a private vision, the anxieties that then had control of my emotions and imagination. Other Voices, Other Rooms was an attempt to exorcise demons: an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable. Surely there were reasons for this adamant ignorance, no doubt protective ones: a fire curtain between the writer and the true source of his material. As I have lost contact with the troubled youth who wrote this book, since only a faded shadow of him is any longer contained inside myself, it is difficult to reconstruct his state of mind.

     However, I shall try. At the time of the appearance of Other Voices, Other Rooms, critics, ranging from the warmest to the most hostile, remarked that obviously I was much influenced by such Southern literary artists as Faulkner and Welty and McCullers, three writers whose work I knew well and admired.   Kevertheless, the gentlemen were mistaken, though understandably. The American writers who had been most valuable to me were, in no particular order, James, Twain, Poe, Cather, Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett; and, overseas, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Dickens, Proust, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Turgenev, De Maupassant, and Emily Bronte. A collection more or less irrelevant to Other' Vuices, Other Rooms; for clearly no one of these writers, with the conceivable exception of Poe (who was by then a blurred

childhood enthusiasm, like Dickens and Twain), was a necessary antecedent to this particular work. Rather, they all were, in the sense fhat each of them had contributed to my literary intelligence, such as it was. But the real progenitor was my difficult, subterranean self. The result was both a revelation and an escape: the book set me free, and, as in its prophetic final sentence, I stood there and looked back at the boy I had left behind.

     I was born in New Orleans, an only child; my parents were divorced when I was four years old. It was a complicated divorce with much bitterness on either side, which is the main reason why I spent most of my childhood wandering among the homes of relatives in Louisiana, Mississippi, and rural Alabama (off and on, I attended schools in New York City and Connecticut). The reading I did on my own was of greater importance than my official education, which was a waste and ended when I was seventeen, the age at which  I applied for and received a job at The New Yorker magazine. Not a very grand job, for all it really involved

was sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers. Still, I was fortunate to have it, especially since I was determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom. I felt that either one was or wasn't a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case; however,  I now realize that most young writers have more to gain than not by attending college, if only because their teachers and classroom comrades provide a captive audience for their work; nothing is lonelier

than to be an aspiring artist without some semblance of a sounding board.

     I stayed two years at The New Yorker, and during this period published a number of short stories in small literary magazines. (Several of them were submitted to my employers, and none accepted, though once one was returned with the following comment: "Very good. But romantic in a way this magazine is not.") Also, I wrote Summer Crossing. Actually, it was in order to complete the book that I took courage, quit my job,

left New York, and settled with relatives, a cotton- growing family who lived in a remote part of Alabama: cotton fields, cattle pastures, pinewoods, dirt roads, creeks and slow little rivers, jaybirds, owls, buzzards circling in empty skies, distant train whistles-and, :fivemiles away, a small country town: the Noon City of the present volume.

     It was early winter when I arrived there, and the atmosphere of the roomy farmhouse, entirely heated by stoves and fireplaces, was well suited to a fledgling novelist wanting quiet isolation. The household rose at four-thirty, breakfasted by electric light, and was off about its business as the sun ascended-leaving me alone and, increasingly, in a panic. For, more and more, Summer Crossing seemed to me thin, clever, unfelt. Another language, a secret spiritual geography, was burgeoning inside me, taking hold of my night-dream hours as well as my wakeful daydreams. One frosty December afternoon I was far from home, walking in a forest along the bank of a mysterious, deep, very clear creek, a route that led eventually to a place called Hatter's Mill. The mill, which straddled the creek, had been abandoned long ago; it was a place where farmers had brought their corn to be ground into cornmeal.

     As a child, I'd often gone there with cousins to fish and swim; it was while exploring under the mill that I'd been bitten in the knee by a cottonmouth moccasin-precisely as happens to Joel Knox. And

now as I came upon the forlorn mill with its sagging silver-gray timbers, the remembered shock of the snakebite returned; and other memories too-of Idabel, or rather the girl who was the counterpart of Idabel, and how we used to wade and swim in the pure waters, where fat speckled fish lolledin sunlit pools; Idabel was always trying to reach out and grab one.

     Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole Look. Usually when a story comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long sustained streak of lightning that darkens the tangible, so-called real world, and leaves illuminated only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape, a terrain alive with figures, voices, rooms, atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must soothe and

tame it. Which, of course, is an artist's principal task: to tame and shape the raw creative vision. It was dark when I got home, and cold, but I didn't feel the cold because of the fire inside me. 

     My Aunt Lucille said she had been worried about me, and was disappointed because I didn't want any supper. She wanted to know if I was sick; I said no. She said, "Well, you look sick. You're white as a ghost."    

     I said good night, locked myself in my room, tossed the manuscript of Susmner Crossing into a bottom bureau drawer, collected several sharp pencils and a fresh pad of yellow lined paper, got into bed fully clothed, and with pathetic optimism, wrote: "Other Voices, Other Rooms-a novel by Truman Capote." Then: "Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by thebest means he can .. ."

     It is unusual, but occasionally it happens to almost every writer that the writing of some particular story seems outer-willed and effortless; it is as though one were a secretary transcribing the words of a voice from a cloud. The difficulty is maintaining contact with this spectral dictator.

     Eventually it develuped that communication ran highest at night, as fevers are known to do after dusk. So I took to working all night and sleeping all day, a routine that distressed the househuld and caused constant disapproving comment: "But you've got everything turned upside down, You're ruining your health." That is why, in the spring of the year, I thanked my exasperated relatives for their generosity, their burdened patience, and bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans. There I rented a bedroom in the crowded apartment of a Creole family who lived in the French Quarter on Royal Street. It was a small hot bedroom

almost entirely occupied by a brass bed, and it was noisy as a steel mill. Streetcars racketed under the window, and the carousings of sightseers touring the Quarter, the boisterous whiskey brawlings of soldiers and sailors, made for con-

Truman. Capote was twenty-three ueare old when Voices, Other Rooms" was Published. This essay will preface the twentieth-anniversa1'y edition, to be issued by Random House in February, Mr. Capote's book "In Cold Blood" has been a bestseller since 1965.

Retrieved from

Harper's Magazine, November 1967. Pages 99 and 100.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Introduction

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

Introduction

     Scout (Jean Louise) Finch and her older brother, Jem Finch, live in the town of Maycomb, Al. during the 1930s. Their mother died long before the story begins, and the children are being raised by their lawyer father, Atticus, with the help of Calpurnia, the African-American cook who has worked for the Finches for a long time. Jem and Scout spend their summers playing with their friend Dill Harris, who comes to stay with his aunt, Miss Rachel Haverford, every summer. One summer Dill convinces the Finchchildren that they should try to get the town bogeyman, Arthur "Boo" Radley, to come out of his house. Nobody has seen him for 20 years or more, and all the children are petrified of him. Jem manages to run up to the Radley house and touch it, but their games don't get much farther than that. The following fall, Scout starts first grade and the children begin finding small objects in a knothole of a tree on the corner of the Radley property. They are curious about these things, and are disappointed one day when they find that Mr. Nathan Radley, Boo's brother, has filled the hole with cement. Their interest in Boo Radley wanes somewhat as their relations with the other children in town begin to be strained by a court case their father is working on. Atticus is defending Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Scout gets into fights with other children, and Jem tears up the camellia bushes at the house of old Mrs. Dubose, who has insulted their father. Atticus makes him apologize, and Mrs. Dubose requests that Jem come to read to her every afternoon for a month.

     The following summer Dill doesn't come to visit his aunt and Atticus has to go away to sit in the Legislature. During this time, Calpurnia takes the Finch children to her church and they get a glimpse of Negro life. Soon after, their Aunt Alexandra comes to live with them and tries to make the children behave properly. Dill Harris shows up soon afterwards, having run away from home, and they are all happy that he is allowed to stay for the rest of the summer.

     As the trial approaches, Atticus goes out one night. The children sneak out too, and see him sitting in front of the jailhouse reading a book. A band of white men arrive, drunk and asking Atticus to let them have Tom. The children approach and break up the tension between the men and Atticus, and the gang leaves. When the trial finally begins, the children go down to the courthouse even though Atticus has told them not to. The only available seats are in the balcony, where the black people have to sit. From there they watch the whole trial. Atticus makes a good defense, and it becomes obvious that Mayella Ewell forced her affections on Tom. She was seen kissing Tom by her violent father, Bob Ewell, who beat her and then encouraged her to accuse Tom of rape. Tom says that he had been around the Ewell house trying to help Mayella because he felt sorry for her, and because he has one crippled hand, it is obvious that he could not have caused the injuries that she suffered. The Ewells are furious that they have been made fools of and the jury sits out a long time, but in the end a guilty verdict is returned. Tom is sent away to a prison camp to await an appeal, and while there he tries to escape and is shot dead. The black community shows their appreciation to Atticus by leaving all sorts of food on his back porch. Bob Ewell spits in Atticus' face, harasses Tom Robinson's widow, and is suspected of having tried to break into the judge's house.

     Atticus dismisses Bob Ewell's actions, saying that he's too cowardly to do anything truly dangerous. But in the fall, Jem and Scout go to a Halloween pageant, and as they are walking home at night, they are attacked in the dark. There is a scuffle, and eventually they are carried home. Jem has been knocked out and has a broken arm; Scout is confused. The doctor examines Jem, and Scout notices a stranger in the room, a man she decides must have been a country person who came to see the pageant. Sheriff Heck Tate arrives a little later with the news that Bob Ewell is lying dead down the street, stabbed between the ribs. He was the person who attacked the children, and the stranger is the person who has saved them. Scout looks at the stranger again and utters her now famous line, "Hey, Boo." Sheriff Tate tells Atticus that Bob Ewell must have fallen on his knife and that is how he will report the case. Scout walks the pale and silent Boo Radley back home, and they never see him again.

***

 About the Author

     Harper Lee is an elusive figure. Since the publication of her first and only (known) novel, she has carefully guarded her privacy and does not give interviews. She was born Nelle Harper Lee on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Ala. Her parents were Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee, and she is the youngest of four children, including two sisters and a brother. She went to Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama, where she studied law. Though her father and older sister, Alice, were

lawyers, Lee herself left law school before earning her degree. In the 1950s she worked as an airline clerk in New York City, and in 1957 she submitted the manuscript of a novel to Lippincott. For the next several years she revised this manuscript, and in 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird was published. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was named by President Lyndon Johnson to the National Council of Arts in 1966.

     In 1959 she went with her childhood friend Truman Capote (on whom the character Dill Harris is said to be based) to Kansas as a research assistant for the book that would become In Cold Blood (1966). Capote dedicated the book partially to her, and invited Lee to what has become one of the most famous parties of the twentieth century -- his glamorous Black and White ball in honor of Katherine Graham.

     In 1962 the movie To Kill a Mockingbird was released. The screenplay was written by Horton Foote. Gregory Peck went on to win a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch. In a rare interview with Roy Newquist (published in Counterpoint, Rand McNally, 1964), Lee said "I have nothing but gratitude for the people who made the film…. I'm no judge, and the only film I've ever seen made was Mockingbird, but there seemed to be an aura of good feeling on the set." She said that at first, though she liked Gregory Peck when she met him, she was unsure that he was right for the part. However, when she saw him in costume, she said "I knew everything was going to be

all right because he was Atticus."

     Since it first appeared in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird has never been out of print and is considered a classic all over the world. In recent years, Lee has split her time between New York and Monroeville, where she lives with her sister. Aside from her famous novel, Harper Lee has written only four essays for publication. Many speculate that she has written books under another name or that she has been working on her memoirs or other novels, but there is no confirmation of these rumors. However, it is hard to believe that Harper Lee has given up writing. In her interview with Newquist, she said "You know, many writers really don't like to write…. I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much."

Reviews

“Despite a melodramatic climax and traces of sermonizing, the characters and locale are depicted with insight and a rare blend of wit and compassion.” – (Reviewed September 1, 1960 Booklist Review)

“Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning first (and last) novel of racial injustice in a small Southern town ranks among just about everyone's favorite books. This 35th-anniversary edition contains a brief new foreword by the elusive Lee." – (Library Journal Review 5/15/1960).

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