A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound
By Humphrey Carpenter
Houghton Mifflin, 1,005 pages, $40
Reviewing Ezra Pound`s ”XXX Cantos” in 1931, Pound`s old friend William Carlos Williams slyly observed that the basic theme of the book seemed to be
”a closed mind which clings to its power-about which the intelligence beats seeking entrance.” He may have been thinking of Matthew Arnold`s evaluation of Shelley-that precursor to Pound as intellectual gadfly and radical-as a luminous angel, wings beating ineffectually against the void.
Reading Humphrey Carpenter`s monumentally long yet absorbing biography of Pound, one comes away feeling that much of Pound`s later life, like the
”Cantos,” were a terrible yet fascinating botch. Carpenter is a skilled narrator who has managed to cut through the coral reefs of information which have grown up around Pound in order to provide us with a story unsurpassed by any of Pound`s previous biographers. He also provides us with a synthesis of the best criticism Pound has received.
We get Pound the ephebe at the University of Pennsylvania, Hamilton College and then as an instructor of romance languages at a small Protestant college in Crawfordsville, Ind. (before he was dismissed for having a young woman in his room overnight); Pound in Venice and then in London, where he made his way into the circles of Ford Madox Ford and of Yeats; Pound the discoverer of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, H. D., James Joyce and T. S. Eliot; Pound the music and art critic, Pound the economist, Pound the husband of Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Yeats`
mistress; Pound the devoted lover of Olga Rudge, by whom he had a daughter.
In 1924, having exiled himself from an ungrateful England, Pound settled permanently in Rapallo, a small resort south of Genoa. There, as time went by and the first flush of High Modernism receded, he became more and more enamoured of Mussolini, who came to stand for Pound as the figure of the capable leader-not unlike the Renaissance city-state leaders (like Sigismundo Malatesta of Rimini) whom he so admired. So when Mussolini granted this strange American an audience in the mid-1930s and allowed as how the
”Cantos” were divertente, ”Muss” became his man in a way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (to Pound, an ”ambulating dung-heap”) could not.
As his sense of reality drifted off into its own Sargasso sea, Pound became more and more convinced that he was meant to be America`s spokesman in Europe. I cannot believe that any sane person could take seriously Pound`s fractious wartime radio broadcasts from Fascist Italy, given their ramble of literary namedropping and economics, focusing especially on scrip money and the canker of corporate and national greed (Usura, avarice)-the whole spiced with what Pound later called his ”suburban” anti-semitism. On the other hand, Pound did call for a ”weeding out of Jews from the top down” at a time when millions of Jews were being rounded up and executed. Oblivious to everything, Pound went on yawping in his broad version of ”Amurikan” speech- a pastiche of Idaho (Pound`s native state) and Brer Rabbit-half-imitating the infamous radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin and all the while thinking he was being divertente.
However, the FBI, which taped his broadcasts, took them seriously enough. And when Pound decided to continue broadcasting after the U.S. declared war on the Axis powers, it was only a matter of time before he-along with others like Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw-was indicted for treason.
Carpenter is at pains to document the drama surrounding Pound`s attempts to surrender to the Americans, his subsequent arrest by Italian partisans and his brutal imprisonment in a reinforced-steel gorilla cage at the U.S. Army`s detention center outside Pisa. Six months later, having written his extraordinary ”Pisan Cantos,” he was transferred to Washington, D.C.- where he was placed in St. Elizabeth`s Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Found unfit to stand trial, he subsequently was imprisoned in St. Elizabeth`s for the next 13 years.
Carpenter makes a good case that Pound probably would have been exonerated had he actually stood trial for treason; despite months of intense investigation, the U.S. government had not been able to muster a very strong case against him. On the other hand, what with the Nuremberg trials and the disclosures of the concentration camps, the national mood was such that the government was not eager to return Pound to Italy. The logical step, Carpenter argues, was simply to keep Pound in prison until the political climate changed sufficiently to let him go.
When Pound was finally freed in May, 1958-thanks to the labors of Frost and, especially, of Archibald MacLeish-he returned to Italy and soon afterwards lapsed into a near-total silence that lasted until his death at age 87, in the fall of 1972. Carpenter suggests that the reasons for this silence were two-fold: a physical disability that made it hard for Pound to speak consecutively and intelligently, and his late-dawning sense that he had to make some sort of restitution for the damage a lifetime`s worth of running off at the mouth inevitably had caused.
Looking back in old age, Pound saw that what was to have been his crowning achievement-the ”Cantos,” his 40-year epic-now lay in a shambles. It was, he confessed, despite all his talk of the thing eventually coming together, finally ”a botch.” Yet this magnificent failure also contains some of the most beautiful lines in the English language.
If Pound was our Carlyle, our ruined Ruskin, he also was our Tennyson and our Swinburne, with an ear-Williams, again-at times almost divine in its sensitivity to cadence and rhythm. Pound also gave us (despite some howlers of mis-translation) our early-modern sense of the beauties of Anglo-Saxon and Chinese verse, of the Provencal troubadours and Cavalcanti`s clear, medieval line and of the satirical wit of Sextus Propertius. In his essays and earlier letters, Pound`s prose is still powerful, and he virtually saved ”The Waste Land” at a time when Eliot was too ill to edit his own rambling text. Pound could be generous to a fault, as Williams, Hemingway, Eliot and Joyce have attested. And there was in his head, when the inspiration was upon him, a music no one else in our century has equaled.
We are left, then, with a life as unruly, imperfect and as brilliant as Pound`s ”Cantos”-an epic that Carpenter`s narrative seems at times to be imitating, consciously or otherwise. Both are about the same length; both have their brilliances and their uneven insistences. And both splinter at the end into a series of brilliant shards. All in all, though, Carpenter has dealt fairly with Pound`s gifts, as well as with his very serious flaws. Sane, intelligent, witty, even divertente, Carpenter is a master of narrative style. In spite of its initially daunting size, this biography is a pleasure to read.
