A review of Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound should begin by acknowledging its author’s phenomenal achievement. It is comprehensive, detailed, forensic, appreciative, critical, and insightful, a massive achievement of analysis, research, and insight. At some 200,000 words, it’s also a compromise, not for the faint-hearted or anyone with a passing interest in 20th-century poetry or history. But it is also something else, something that, despite the magnificence of his scholarship, causes this reader to focus on issues that are external to the text itself. But more of that later: first, the book.
Ezra Pound was undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in 20th century literature. However, unlike his illustrious contemporaries and friends, including Joyce, Eliot and Yeats, his name seems to have disappeared from the mainstream since his death in 1972. I read his great achievement, the Cantos, when I was in University. I didn’t understand them. Somehow they feel less like a work of poetry than a lifetime achievement, an ordinary creatively conceived and sometimes over-presented book into which fell, in poetic form, a distillation, a reflection or , sometimes 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 vast amount of other material, his journalism, music, prose, and economics, for lack of a more precise word.
Pound was one of the founders and promoters of literary and artistic movements: Imagism and Vorticism among them. Perhaps they were not the most enduring addresses. He was American, but he seemed more comfortable in England then Italy, neither of which chose to honor his achievements on his soil. But what is strongly felt in this man from the start 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 he was created. He felt that it was something new, original and lasting. And all this when apparently no one wanted to even read his stuff, or formally give him the time of day. And he not only seemed to deny his failures, but he didn’t even seem to register them. The limitations were always somewhere else. In the early years, therefore, he seemed like a self-publisher, with his achievements recognized before they were achieved, like a modern self-published author writing five-star, best-selling reviews of his own work. . Today, that would surely never work!
But eventually, perhaps through sheer dogged application coupled with considerable talent, Pound received the recognition he thought he deserved, though perhaps never on our own blunt, contemporary measuring instrument of success: sales. Certain scholars loved him. Others don’t. He himself had high hopes for a Nobel Prize.
Noel Stock quotes copiously from Pound’s verse, always critically, sometimes critically. The Cantos were so broad in their intellectual coverage that it might seem from the outside that no one without the full range of requisite 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, minstrel songs in their original language of oc, Noh theater texts in Japanese, the Pound’s own experimental English, aside from a knowledge of the classics and their metres, 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 the overtly elitist intellectual demands of him. And it is here that this review must turn from literature, poetry, and indeed Ezra Pound himself, to address the related concepts of fascism and racism.
The main reason why Pound’s name remains in the past today is his adherence to fascist ideas and his manifest anti-Semitism. He went to live in Italy. He considered Mussolini to be quite 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 it meant what he saw as a Jewish-dominated banking and economic system, the basis of this belief being a bank owned by the Rothchild family. He also dedicated himself to broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda (in Italian and English) on the radio during World War II.
Normally, my reviews are consciously separated. I’m trying to review the book, not myself. Likes and dislikes are, to me, wholly nebulous and indefinable and even fleeting whims that are always less significant than considerations of communication or goal achievement. In the case of The Life of Ezra Pound, the subjective “I” must be included, since our appreciation or otherwise of this poet’s writing now seems to depend entirely on our individual take on his politics, even though it is neither analytical nor pro. active in his views, as this biography makes clear. Somehow his politics were as transient 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 he’s worth the effort. Not the use of “I”! And this is not because I think Pound is 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 something personal, something about me and not about the book, but I assure you that it is relevant. Get out of here if you’re suspicious of the personal.
I remember in the recent past that a well-known British TV presenter said on air that Wagner’s music was not played in her 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 for that reason alone should provoke a similar rejection of anything artistic or otherwise that grew out of mid-German culture. of the 19th century. .
In the not too distant past I reread The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. In my review I concentrated on those aspects of the analysis that might contradict the completely neoliberal interpretation of the work. Perhaps I was wrong to do so, but I wanted to challenge the idea that there is only one way to read Smith’s notion of free trade. Embedded within Smith’s thesis, however, are assumptions about progress and human worth. The Hindu, the Muslim and even the Catholic have their place in history and civilization, but the pagan is judged as a primitive subhuman. I don’t remember Smith referring to ‘The Buddhist’, but that may be my own memory lapse. In current politics, how many of the neoliberal supporters, perhaps neoconservatives of their own notions of Smith’s free trade concepts, also regard those not associated with a major 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 can be greater than the total that the state describes. How many of these same free-market advocates would share Smith’s usual revulsion at the very idea of a transnational corporation, which he saw 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 generally do.
Here I am tempted to bring the composer Anton Webern into the argument. A member of the Second Viennese School, Webern embraced the atonalism of his associate Schoenberg. Webern was perhaps the artistic opposite of Ezra Pound, being prone to destructive self-criticism and a desire for extremely terse expression. But Webern, like Pound, thought that fascism might be more sympathetic to the “high art” he aspired to than to the mechanisms of capitalism that focused on what it could sell. Therefore, he initially embraced fascism, eventually at the expense of himself and his associates.
After this considerable diversion, there is eventually a moral, and that is to beware of anyone offering answers, especially those based on interpretations of the past on anything other than their own terms. Which brings me to Brexit! It may seem like a big jump, but keep going. Trust me!
I have recent, albeit apocryphal, personal experience suggesting that the main motivation among British working class voters who surely changed the outcome of the referendum was to “get rid of all foreigners”. I use quotation marks to emphasize that this was expressed to me personally and verbatim, with an emphasis on “everyone”. 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 from the moral perspective of our own time. Because if we did that and rejected any embrace of racism or religious fanaticism, how much of our human past would we retain? And, given the above opinion 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 from history riddled with conflict?
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 his theme, it is a masterpiece that takes the reader beyond the confines of its subject and thus achieves enduring relevance. Relive this past. We must never deny its existence or forget its consequences. But he reminds us that as individuals, communities and societies, there is no rule that prevents the repetition of the error. And there is also no rule that insists that a current moral foundation must be superior to any other existing madness, contemporary or past.