A review of The Life of Ezra Pound by Noel Stock must begin by acknowledging the phenomenal achievement of its author. It is comprehensive, detailed, forensic, appreciative, critical, and enlightening, a massive achievement of analysis, investigation, and insight. At around 200,000 words, it’s also a compromise, not for the faint-hearted or anyone with a passing interest in poetry or 20th century history. But it is also something else, something that, despite the magnificence of its erudition, causes this reader to focus on issues outside the text itself. But more on that later: first, the book.
Ezra Pound was without a doubt one of the greatest figures in 20th century literature. Yet unlike his illustrious contemporaries and friends, Joyce, Eliot, and Yeats among them, his name seems to have escaped the mainstream since his death in 1972. I read his great achievement, the Cantos, when I was in college. I did not understand them. In a way, they feel less like a work of poetry than a lifetime achievement, an ordinary book creatively conceived and sometimes over-presented into which a distillation, a reflection, or sometimes sometimes fell, poetically , a mere mention of whatever disparate material Pound was obsessed with. at that moment. The Cantos were Pound’s creative life, but we must not forget the enormous amount of other material, his journalism, music, prose and economics, for want of a more precise word.
Pound was one of the founders and promoters of the literary and artistic movements: Imagism and Vorticism among them. Perhaps they weren’t the longest-lasting addresses. He was American, but seemed more at home in England and then Italy, neither of which chooses to honor his achievements on their soil. But what is strongly felt about this man from the beginning is his conviction, perhaps his obsession with his own genius. He was completely sure that he would contribute to the arts and maybe even change his direction. He seemed to consider his legacy immortal, even before it had been created. He felt that it was something new, original and enduring. And all this when apparently nobody wanted to read his material, or formally give him the time of day. And he not only seemed to deny his failures, he didn’t even seem to register them. The limitations were always elsewhere. In the early years, he seemed like a self-publicist, with his accomplishments acknowledged before they were achieved, like a self-published modern author writing five-star and best-selling reviews of his own work. Today, that would surely never work!
But eventually, perhaps for stubborn application coupled with considerable talent, Pound received the recognition he thought he deserved, though perhaps never by our own contemporary, hard-hitting yardstick of success: sales. Certain academics loved him. Others did not. He himself had high hopes for a Nobel Prize.
Noel Stock includes copious quotations from Pound’s verses, always critically appraised, sometimes critically appraised. The Cantos were so far-reaching in their intellectual coverage that it may seem from the outside that no one without the full range of required skills would understand them. And since these skills included, among other things, a knowledge of Dante and medieval Italian poetry, Confucius, Mencius and Lao-Tze in the original Chinese, troubadour songs in their original oc language, Noh theater texts in Japanese by Pound himself. Experimental English, in addition to knowledge of the classics and their metrics, it might be assumed that there might be few modern readers of his work. This is probably accurate. But there is more to the modern rejection of Pound’s work than his overtly elitist intellectual demands. And it is here that this review must depart from literature, poetry, and indeed Ezra Pound himself, to address the related concepts of fascism and racism.
The main reason Pound’s name remains obsolete today is his adherence to fascist ideas and his overt anti-Semitism. He went to live in Italy. He regarded Mussolini as a good thing. In Italy, at that time, he was not alone in this belief. He embraced Hitler’s aggressive anti-Semitism because he was fundamentally opposed to capitalism, if that meant what he saw as a Jewish-dominated economic and banking system, and the basis for this belief was a bank owned by the Rothchild family. He was also dedicated to broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda (in Italian and English) on the radio during World War II.
Usually my reviews are consciously separate. I try to review the book, not myself. Likes and dislikes are, for me, totally nebulous and indefinable and even fleeting whims that are always less important than considerations of communication or achievement of ends. In the case of The Life of Ezra Pound, the subjective “I” must be included, since our appreciation or not of the writings of this poet now seems to depend entirely on our individual vision of his politics, even though it is neither analytical. nor purposeful. active in his views, as this biography makes clear. In some ways, his politics were as transitory as his current interests, as expressed in the meanders of the Cantos. But what can we do now with Pound? Should we even try to understand it? Is dismissal the preferred option? I’d say it’s worth the effort. It is not the use of “I”! And this is not because you believe Pound to be a particular genius, overlooked, or even readable. And I certainly don’t see his actions as forgivable! And here I apologize for making this book review personal, something about me and not about the book, but I assure you it is relevant. Get out of here if you are suspicious of the personal.
I remember in the recent past a well-known British television host said on the air that Wagner’s music was not played at home due to the composer’s anti-Semitism. I remember another celebrity saying that anti-Semitism was the flavor of the Wager era, and that the rejection of the composer’s work on those grounds alone should provoke a similar rejection of everything artistic or otherwise that emerged from mid-German culture. 19th century. .
In the not too distant past I reread Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In my review I concentrated on those aspects of the analysis that might contradict the completely neoliberal interpretation of the work. Maybe I was wrong in doing it, but I wanted to challenge the idea that there is only one way to read Smith’s notion of free trade. Yet embedded in Smith’s thesis are assumptions about human progress and worth. Hindus, Muslims, and even Catholics have their place in history and civilization, but pagans are considered a primitive subhuman. I don’t recall Smith referring to “The Buddhist,” but that may be my own memory failure. In current politics, how many of the neoliberals, perhaps neocons, who support their own notions of Smith’s free trade concepts, also regard those not associated with a large organized religion as uncivilized and subhuman? And since the assumption seems to run throughout the work, should that alone disqualify Smith’s views on other issues or his contribution to economics? Another position that almost dominates sections of The Wealth of Nations is that there is no economic activity that is or could be greater than the total that describes the state. How many of these same free market advocates would share Smith’s often-expressed disgust for the very idea of a transnational corporation, which he viewed as necessarily market distorting and almost automatically corrupt? This is recognized in antitrust and antitrust law, but how often is this side of Smith’s work cited? My point here is that we can choose to be selective, and we usually do.
I am tempted to introduce the composer Anton Webern into the plot. Webern, a member of the second Viennese school, embraced the atonalism of his associate, Schoenberg. Webern was perhaps the artistic opposite of Ezra Pound, prone to destructive self-criticism and a desire for extremely succinct expression. But Webern, like Pound, thought that fascism might be more sympathetic to the “high art” to which it aspired than to the mechanisms of capitalism that concentrated on what it could sell. Therefore, he initially embraced fascism, eventually at the expense of himself and his associates.
After this considerable distraction, there is eventually a moral, and that is to be careful of anyone claiming answers, especially those based on interpretations of the past on anything other than on their own terms. Which brings me to Brexit! It may seem like a big leap, but keep going. Trust me!
I have a recent, albeit apocryphal, personal experience that suggests that the main motivation among the British working class who abandoned the voters who surely changed the outcome of the referendum was to “get rid of all foreigners.” I use quotes to emphasize that this was expressed to me personally and literally, with an emphasis on “everything.” I had just finished The Life of Ezra Pound and immediately felt a strange but strong link to Pound’s anti-Semitism, which was based on nothing less than trying to find someone to blame.
Perhaps we shouldn’t judge Wagner, Adam Smith, or even Ezra Pound using the moral perspective of our own time. Because if we did that and rejected any adherence to racism or religious fanaticism, how much of our human past would we retain? And given the above view on Brexit, is the moral outlook of our time significantly different from that of the 1930s, or even the 1850s, or the 1770s, or indeed any other time in our game? of guilt plagued by conflicts of history?
The Life of Ezra Pound is a forensic biography of a poet. Describes a life lived in its historical and cultural context. Like all books committed to communicating its subject, it is a masterpiece that takes the reader far beyond the confines of its subject and, therefore, acquires permanent relevance. Revisit this past. We must never deny its existence or forget its consequences. But it reminds us that, as individuals, communities and societies, there is no rule that excludes the repetition of error. And there is also no rule that insists that a current moral foundation must be higher than any other existing, contemporary or past insanity.
