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
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.
- The Guardian, Saturday 17 November 2007
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