A Revolutionary Simpleton

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Ezra Pound: Poet A Portrait of the Man & His Work Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920

by A. David Moody
Oxford

Again, one can surely be forgiven for seeing a harbinger here, and not only of eventual mental unhingement. In fact, though strictly speaking it lies outside the scope of Moody’s book, let me quote from what Wyndham Lewis was later to write about experiencing the energy-loving and race-memory-oriented fascism that he had at first welcomed so warmly:

The senseless bellicosity of the reactionary groups of the Action Française type may certainly result in far more violence, before long, than anyone is able to measure.

On another occasion he wrote, “Fascists have the word ‘action’ on their lips from morning to night.” In the same book—Time and Western Man—he described his former BLAST colleague Ezra Pound as a “revolutionary simpleton.” That could perhaps furnish a title for Moody’s second volume.

Lewis of course turned against fascism, if only because he decided that it was ultimately just as mob-centered as democracy. Pound’s contempt for democracy was of a more determinedly elevated and “artistic” type. It’s rather charming to find him turning up at the United States Embassy in London in 1918, opposing the possible drafting of T. S. Eliot into the Army on the grounds that

if it was a war for civilization (not merely for democracy) it was folly to shoot, or have shot one of the six or seven Americans capable of contributing to civilization or understanding the word.

In a letter home to his father, discussing his own prospects as a conscript, Pound stated more tersely: “It is not however the habit of democracies to use my sort of intelligence.” It’s difficult to gauge how much this rather airy solipsism had to do with a version of survivor guilt, or an awareness that friends like Ford and Lewis either had endured the test of wartime experience or (like Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, creator of the brilliant statue of Pound that its subject happily considered “phallic”) had not survived it.

And this must bring us to the writing of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” which was his farewell to England and his envoi, also, to both “democracy” and “civilization.” I have never especially admired the bitch/botch echo in the poem, which speaks of the huge wartime sacrifice in which Pound himself played no part and then describes it as having been made for “an old bitch gone in the teeth / for a botched civilization.” The whole thing reeks of trying too hard, and it anticipates the fanatical drone of “Canto XIV,” in which Londoners are described as living in a place full of “financiers / lashing them with steel wires” and:

The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice …

Sometimes credited with presaging or echoing The Waste Land, this stuff actually bodies forth and even exceeds the lowest of Eliot, and there can be small doubt, even on a brisk review of the lines, of the sordid direction in which things are tending.

Toward the close of this dense and clever and generally sympathetic study, Moody does cite an essay by Pound on “The Tribe of Judah” and “the pawn-shop” where, as he deftly points out, there is a telltale confusion between Judaism and “the Jew.” This distinction would eventually become completely lost on Pound, whose eccentric article was written for A. R. Orage’s New Age, in the offices of which (and what a life he lived for the small and obscure magazine) Pound was to meet Major C. H. Douglas, the crackpot Green-Shirt founder of the Social Credit movement. In Douglas’s program, Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith. Moody supplies two very telling examples. In April 1917, Pound had written to his friend John Quinn, urging him to impress on Theodore Roosevelt, of all people, the need for “some system of direct supply … straight from the factory to the particular section of the front where stuff is wanted.” But this amateur-planner megalomania was only a foretaste of the pathos to come. In 1921, just before his departure from England, Pound managed to corner Arthur Griffith, easily the most reactionary and ethereal of the Irish leaders, during the tortured negotiations for his nation’s independence. He ranted at Griffith in an attempt to convince him to adopt Social Credit so as to use the infant Irish republic as its laboratory. According to Pound, Griffith eventually responded: “All you say is true. But I can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics.”

Moody does not mention it, but this very phrase later recurs as a line in “Canto XIX,” by which time Pound’s poetry had become little more than a doctrinaire and propagandistic screed: a mechanical attempt to make poetry do what economics could not. That such an outcome was a tragedy no reader of this biography can doubt. If one seeks or desires to explain the tragedy, one might say that Shelley wanted poets to be “the unacknowledged legislators” of the world, while Pound sought hectically for acknowledgment, not just for poetry but for himself, and lost the sense of both in the process.

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Christopher Hitchens is an Atlantic contributing editor and a Vanity Fair columnist.