Ezra Pound: The Last Rower

...From the passage as a whole one gathers that Mr...

...Mr...

...A weary old man's three syllables, still they contain the substance of what he'd been saying all his life...

...For anyone...

...its existence was repeatedly cited, yes...

...Paid for by a Friend of Liberty the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle in gt proportion and go to saleable slaughter with the maximum of docility...

...If there's a difference between "chronometrical" and "historical," we may guess that our author doesn't much care about it...

...R on sis valle : "When I was in Zurich in the winter of '67 I saw Joyce's bare grave-Hugh Kenner, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the John Hopkins University, is author o f The Pound Era and, just published, Geodesic Math and How to Use It...

...His quixotic trip to America in 1939, hoping to get Roosevelt's ear and prevent the coming war, is the subject of one of The Last Rower's most touching chapters...

...But the poet's mind entertained an intricate dance of sharply perceived and discriminated identities, and only when you're comfortable with that fact can you accept what Mr...

...To say that there a r e Poundian lessons Mr...

...At any rate, Pound was impatient...

...With which compare: To Ronsisvalle's supposition that he had travelled a great deal: "I have not done much travelling, in fact I have stayed put for years at a time...

...And Pound's understanding of the Italian Renaissance had been shaped in his young manhood by the Swiss historian Burckhardt, the first chapter of whose key book was entitled "The State as Work of Art...

...but coveted it was not...

...Brancusi seemed to me a saint...I said as much in Guide to Kulcbur...

...Here as so often a vaguely apposite word has been thrown in the general direction of a sentence judged in need of some intensification...

...Again: "And at San Zeno (Verona), looming in the semidarkness, the coveted signed column, luminous in its detail...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 23 Here as so often--I've merely sketched a couple of examples-the theme to grasp is that every idea that went wrong had entailed a set of distinctions: in fact had been engendered in the act of making one more distinction, one of the minute verbal distinctions that were the central habit of his mind...

...Soon after his initial inquiry, he discovered a root cause--or so he thought...

...Heymann quotes a sequence of passages that mention Jewish themes, and thinks it evident that they are "full of hate...

...No enterprise--he was always sponsoring enterprises--seemed capable, he said, of getting under way without at least some Jewish personnel, whose role in the world, so he thought, was to counter the "Xm" penchant for inaction...

...And it was no affront to the competence of Adam Smith, let alone of traditional wisdom, to suppose that, given this new understanding, the system of production and exchange need no longer be damped down by the scarcity whose working Smith analyzed...

...The Last Rower: it is the Ulysses image in its peculiarly American form--"that non-Homeric, romanticized figure out of Dante by way of Tennyson which so spectacularly haunts the imagination of Ezra Pound...

...her mother wrote novels and kept a salon...

...the reader of both books cannot but be struck by insistent similarities between the coda of The Last Rower, which purports to be a 1971 interview Mr...

...I haven't really done much travelling--in fact, I have stayed put for years at a time...

...Charles Norman, Pound's first biographer, likewise couldn't believe that Douglas, so far as he made sense, wasn't just Marx in different language, Marx being the only kind of economic radical Norman could conceive of...

...Centralized financial credit-control," he wrote in Credit-Power and Democracy, "will break up this civilization, since no man, or body of men, however elected, can represent the detailed desires of any other man, or body of men...

...The name of John Calvin, even, might conceal Cohen...

...Stein, whom you mention, I knew very slightly...

...he was indicted on a capital charge...

...I don't see that restlessness is necessary for artists or for anyone...

...One began by excluding whole groups: Catholics, Jews, Americans, the uneducated, tradespeople, provincials...

...Your doubts are accentuated in the narrative portion of the book, especially if you've written on the subject yourself and find your own sentences coming back refracted as though by deep water...

...Given what I think is his radical misunderstanding of a number of the things he quotes, it is the more remarkable that he quotes them so calmly...

...Afterwards, a whisper in London could be heard in Seattle...

...may seem detached, no longer interested, on the contrary he follows everything...

...Heymann intermittently recognizes but finds baffling--the survival of Pound's best through his worst period, its near-total availability to his talents whenever he collected his attention properly...

...There we find Pound's answers to the questions of a young Sicilian poet, Vanni Ronsisvalle, notably: "Cocteau called me the rower on the river of the dead: 'le rameur sur la fleuve des morts...

...Douglas, he perceived, had formulated a principle, a description of how money seemed to operate inside an economic system...

...Another was his reading of Mussolini himself: Mussolini seemed in many ways a 19th-century American type: the man who got things accomplished...

...The tale of the perfect schnorrer" is told in Canto 35 the way Pound heard someone Jewish tell it, in what his phonetic spelling means to record as a Jewish.accent (no more caricatured, by the way, than he elsewhere caricatures the American intonations he cared about so deeply...

...Lawrence (of Nottingham and Taos...

...Start by casting an innocent eye...

...He sent back, through an intermediary, two words of gratitude: "It matters...

...Pound had great trust in the wisdom of such communities...

...Similarly, there was no intrinsic naivete in supposing, as Pound did, that Douglas had reduced to law, in his "A + B Theorem," something that had always been the case but had gone unnoticed...

...You even suspect that he rather fancies those blurs, so freely does he impart them to the sentences of others...

...Harvard's Harry Levin, speaking for the committee that had attempted to award the 1972 Emerson-Thoreau medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to Ezra Pound, only to find itself overruled by the Academy's council, dissented tartly from the council's implication that the committee had been in some way naive...

...Heymann, who lets us know that he is himself Jewish, seems exemplary in his fairness of intention...

...The imperatives it postulates are social, not biological, and Stephen Birmingham raised no one's blood pressure when he explained in Our Crowd how the affluent Jewish families of New York looked out for one another, in part because no one else was going to look out for them...

...Cloy, says Merriam-Webster, "to satisfy or fill to capacity or to excess, as the appetite...

...Hence two complementary extremes: his diatribes against statesmen who showed no sign of understanding, and his increasing susceptibility to the notion that by holding their attention during a quarter-hour audience he could _9 I've tried to sketch an exposition of Douglasite principles in The Pound Era (1971), pp...

...Heymann hasn't absorbed--about watching single words, about leaving blanks for what you don't know--is also, alas, to say that the book's usefulness is impaired...

...As for the notorious detail from Canto 74, which begins, Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized...

...I'll bypass the issue of quasi-plagiarism and concentrate on the pattern of modification, which is after all what exerts pressure on a naive reader...

...I don't see that restlessness is necessary...

...Hemingway never disappointed me...

...It seems more accurate to say that they tacitly acknowledge the hate, and try to cut it back to some factual kernel...

...The one thing that cloys a desire is its excessive gratification, but since at the moment in question the young Pound wasn't seeing his poems in print at all, that can't be what is meant...

...Though this switches the gender o f " f l e u v e , " may it still perhaps be what Mr...

...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 I'll linger briefly with the Maxwell analogy...

...Heymann's which we'd better inspect...

...he had undergone the horrors of the Pisan cage, six feet by six, three weeks of sun by day and floodlights by night, under omnipresent guard...

...For millennia, before Marconi, the range of the human voice had been restricted to the circle a man could fill by shouting...

...For artists...

...Pound, like his master Dante, is not only an artist but an impassioned moralist...

...Setting aside the inaccuracy of "expostulated," one discovers more innocent wrongness here than is compatible with the establishment of a base to triangulate from...

...Or errors creep in when borrowing isn't in question, as when Heymann complains of Pound's "desultory examination of Socrates' Ethics" (read "Aristotle's...

...Its members were not "irresponsible aesthetes," nor was Pound...

...The material is laid before us, many pages of it, wholly new information about the distressing frenzies of those years: Pound's involvement with hierarchies of Italian officials, his broadcasts over Rome radio, his efforts to play economic adviser to the short-lived Sal~ Republic, his rantings about bankers and race, his arrest, detention at Genoa, imprisonment near Pisa, ambiguous incarceration in Washington...

...Heymann's sensibility prompts him to retouch a sentence that has acquired a little blurred patch...

...William Chace in Contemporary Literature (Autumn '76) has exemplified with parallel passages Mr...

...Dorothy even began by marrying an American, Ezra Pound...

...meditated on, yes...

...The intention is one thing, the realization another...

...Douglas was trying to guide a political party in England, and Pound had a radical suspicion of British institutions, adapted as they were to defusing anything novel...

...Then ground is touched, a 20-word quotation which a footnote assigns to Leslie Fiedier...

...Since the poem is not automatic writing but elaborately worked over, and since he had everything to gain hy not interrupting that astonishing passage (and it does resume again), the conclusion seems inescapable that he meant to record the manner in which vision is dispelled by upwelling frenzy...

...The real problem presented by such details is not ethical but poetic...

...Heymann duly credits the quoted part of his sentence...

...Heymann's exposition of this tricky topic stem from his not having known that remarkable woman Dorothy Shakespear Pound, who exercised with no malice whatever the methods that used to be normal in the British professional classes for restricting the number of people one needed to bother about...

...No, it's just a fancy substitute for "historical," as you may learn by checking back to the source to which Mr...

...You ask about my Paris friends in the 1920s: Brancusi, Joyce, Hemingway...

...it was true, and deplorable, as he told an audience on an otherwise disgraceful occasion, that John Adams' works were (1939) unobtainable, "whereas the works of Marx, Engels and Trotsky were readily available in selections costing mere pennies...

...Heymann "remembered reading some place...

...moreover, "the Ulysses image in its purely American form...

...For in addition to what he reprocessed from the books of others, Mr...

...Chronometrical," evoking the chronometer: what does that mean...

...Fiedler has done more for the cadence of the Heymann sentence than for the articulation of a guiding sense...

...You note pure Time-coverese, though at Time a copy-editor's eye would have caught "quotation by J e a n Cocteau" and emended " b y " to " f r o m " ; writers don't compose quotations, they get quoted...

...If your college library hasn't Paideuma ask it why not...

...I'll need a long excerpt: Preparing an autobiographical sketch for the 1949 edition of the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, the author expostulated: "1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same...

...No," he answered...

...Le Musee de l'Art Moderne in Paris contains much of his work, but I would like to see his 'Table of Silence' in Rumania...

...and having outlined various public facts he wrote, "You will see that there are elements in the case far more interesting than my personal welfare...

...One then readmitted individuals one by one...

...It is this new material, Mr...

...And the context in which Pound cited it--Canto 45, for instance--will generally imply a rebuke of covetousness...

...And an un-Poundian stridency, betraying the fact that will is doing the work of ease, makes it all but inevitable that most readers will get the intention of the detail precisely backwards...

...It may indeed...

...Add what claims to be a statement from Olga Rudge to Heymann, "Ezra might seem detached and no longer interested, but he follows everything, nothing escapes him...

...Watching Mr...

...hlds perfectly evident that other acquaintances were less fortunate, that some on some days heard little but rant...

...Some ultra-fussiness about dates...

...Heymann's narrative on one of those pages where inattention to words is contaminating substance...

...When Jews began to enter his field of attention, it was easier than it should have been for him to think of them en bloc...

...it is sad to look back...

...The man who wrote the Pisan Cantos was the same who had been delivering the broadcasts, and the Cantos were possible, including their finest pages, not because he could cut his aesthetics loose from his morals but because they were always continuous, The story begins with Douglasite economics, which unluckily enters Mr...

...Pound's long life was to end just a few months later, but not before word of Professor Levin's stand had reached him...

...In the little modifications that Heymannize a borrowing, facts sometimes go wrong as well as epithets...

...When I wzs in Zurich in the winter of 1967 I saw Joyce's bare grave--Joyce's name with Nora's sat in a corner of the cemetery, the names nearly illegible on a stone hidden in the grass...

...Unless, that is, you happen to have available Vittorugo Contino's Ezra Pound in Italy, published in Venice in 1970 and unlikely to be consulted by American promotion committees...

...301-317...

...Part of its point, told that way, is that the Jewish community knows its schnorrers, and speaks of them sharply...

...Heymann well understands, that justifies his writing about Pound at all, and it all pertains to Pound at less than his best, sometimes at a worst we can barely comprehend...

...note finally the virtual identity between what Heymann says Pound said about Eliot and what Pound wrote in the Eliot Memorial Issue of the Sewanee Review, even to a phrase he wouldn't have spoken ("instead: Westminster Abbey"): and confront your awakened doubts about how much of the Heymann "interview" with Ezra Pound (by 1970 a virtual nonspeaker) ever occurred...

...The lure of false clarities, not to mention the Puritan susceptibility to devil-theories, helps explain his vulnerability to anti-Semitism...

...A tiny point, one word, but Ezra Pound taught three generations to watch single words...

...One more of his quotations--not from Pound--deserves special pondering...

...And Mr...

...They began to enter his field of attention in the 1930s, not because he was listening to Hitler but because his attention had turned to the mechanisms ofinternationalcredit, and he'd decided that the failure of its masters to identifs- themselves with national interests stemmed from the fact that many of them belonged to a group most nations tended to exclude from positions of influence...

...Pound the Rower is a luscious mortuary phrase, which Mr...

...Though the naturally gregarious Ezra resisted its assumptions, and though the Pounds had many Catholic and Jewish friends--more, probably, than most Protestant gentiles in Europe in their generationwthe proximity of so intensely English a woman had certain long-term effects...

...Maxwell's equations, we may say, made radio possible...

...Hemingway did not disappoint me...

...All manner of unpleasing phenomena can be explained by this pattern if you can identify enough Jews, and during the frenzy and exasperation of the war years Pound was scenting crypto-Jews everywhere...

...one would think it evident that the group who ought to feel insulted are the goyim...

...The Bad Pound by contrast is merely mad...

...put Social Credit across...

...But once the race of the banker had been admitted to the field of relevant forces, Pound's defense against conspiracy-theories had become perilously thin...

...Lawrence (of Arabia) for instance is converted into D.H...

...I can only conclude that there were in his psyche simultaneous levels of integration, that I was wholly fortunate in my sampling, and that the Pound I knew was closer to the poet of the Cantos than the Pound of some other accounts...

...We are simply unaccustomed to problem-solving that doesn't entail centralization of power...

...But the laws Maxwell formulated were active in the universe before he formulated them, and studies of acoustics in free air remained valid after Marconi had liberated the carrying-power of the voice from their domain...

...Nor, ironically, was Pound himself more lucky...

...Pound comes to the reader of this book refracted through curious habits of Mr...

...It is a moving, humiliating confession, and he could have made himself look just great by omitting it...

...The date is October 1945...

...227-240, authoritative on Pound's misapplication of Douglas...

...Heymann intuits the magnitude of his theme...

...That is why one must proceed so slowly and carefully in stating the elements of his main ideas...

...The committee, he asserted, did not need to be told that "art cannot be isolated from morality...

...You'd be hard put to say what else you gather...

...That is why we find blocks of sense embedded in the frenzy...

...Brancusi seemed to me a saint, he is first in my list of values in 'Guide to Kulcher.' I want to see his Table of Silence, a venetian friend has offered to take me to Roumania to see it...

...Paradoxically, they are part of a willed effort to be fair about things he might easily have omitted...

...What Cocteau may have meant doesn't matter...

...To understand it at all, the reader needs a more accurate sense of Pound at his best than Mr...

...Some defects in Mr...

...Heymann also offers this dialogue: "You still manage to do a good deal of traveling," I suggested to Pound...

...Mr...

...Heymann quotes a letter to the firm of London solicitors of which Dorothy's father had been a member...

...Socrates wrote no book), or evokes "gondolas in drydock in the vast Piazza San Marco," which is akin to finding skiffs drydocked in Times Square...

...This was pertinent to the causes of wars because it seemed evident that Britain and Germany had gotten onto a collision course out of competition for foreign markets, and the question to be answered was why foreign markets were needed: why the home market was always underfinanced...

...Heymann's way with them, one grows aware of the need he feels to be vivid, to intensify, to lend something personal to accounts of events that were after all before his time (he is 31) and have had to be reconstructed from the narratives of others...

...The column was admired, yes...

...Nor were "central banks" the mainspring of his remedy...

...reflect on the improbability of Miss Rudge (if you've met her) saying "might" where "may" is meant, compare the more grammatical version in the Contino book: "You see, E.P...

...Heymann secured with Pound, and Pound's words to Ronsisvalle, published in 1970...

...Thus Earle Davis in his Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics (1968) muddles himself through supposing that Douglas must have meant something like the New Deal (which makes Pound's opposition to Roosevelt an insoluble problem...

...If indeed he was mad, he wrote to me once, ought not intention be directed to what drove him that way...

...Heymann's reader is likely to take away...

...Mussolini seemed to fit the artist's role...

...By the 1930s another of Pound's American vectors was operative: his Puritanism, which coupled the generous assumption that by paying attention anyone of good will could understand anything important, with the corollary suspicion that failure to understand might connote something worse than inattention: might connote impurity of will...

...Here's what he tells us about his title: I remembered reading some place a quotation by Jean Cocteau...

...Heymann had a rich lode of material which he was the first writer to see, the FBI files on the "Pound case," and his hold on this is impaired by a certain vagueness about his man...

...More important, he recalled himself to order in the Cantos...

...His diagnosis did not indict "financiers' manipulations," but rather what he took to be a fallacy that inhered in the accounting system, and would have caused chronic shortages of money no matter who operated the system...

...Think of an automobile with its engine idling--it doesn't run but all its parts are moving...

...ponder what purport to be Pound's last 1971 words to Heymann, introduced with a great pother of descriptive atmospherics--' 'It is sad...very sad to look back," and their analogy with his words to Ronsisvalle just after the Cocteau citation, " I t is sad to look back...

...In St...

...He was trying to explain why systems of production never seemed to distribute enough purchasing power to buy back the product, a fact that was highlighted by the widespread prosperity discernible during wartime, when a considerable fraction of the product didn't need buying back because it got destroyed...

...This was not, so far as it went, a notion that necessarily led to hating anyone...

...To Douglas's mind, both war and lack of mox.ey had been caused by financiers' manipulations--usury~and his mathematically drawn panacea, or at least the main one, called for the distribution through central banks of national dividends...

...Pound was easily convinced...

...24 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...

...No, the word is just wrong...

...Elizabeths after receiving Jewish visitors Pound once remarked--I was there--that they had, as expected, been "stimulating...

...Elizabeths Hospital--it was work on the Cantos that saved him...

...Nothing in Mr...

...Douglas in 1918 had not "invented" a "system," he was offering a diagnosis...

...Dorothy's father was a London solicitor...

...think of an automobile with the motor running, it is not moving but it is functioning...

...New technology follows new principles, and Douglas seemed to have made a new principle available in showing why the operative scarcity is apt to be a scarcity of money, not of goods...

...Late in 1918, in the offices of A.R...

...Heymann proceeds to improve by contributing " L a s t . " He then tells us it is the Ulysses image (though Ulysses the seafarer rowed no rivers...

...Their most cryptic pages record his struggle with himself, his struggle to keep his attention on what he knew for sure, the temptation to seek underpinnings for his errors (and the discovery that underpinnings matching his criteria were seldom to be found...

...Politics," he wrote in 1933, "might mean: capacity for getting action on Douglas's ideas...

...T.E...

...This gets blurred by reflex response to things in the Cantos...

...In fact the proposals of Douglas entail such a degree of decentralization, such a maximizing of personal freedom, that believing he means what he says can seem almost insuperably difficult...

...I can't...

...Heymann' s habit of lifting, slightly modified, the words and the rhetorical patterns of the people who did the work...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 21 The poet "was to spend much of the next two decades putting the facts he had been taught in school together again" in a chronometrical pattern of his own design...

...other graves had little Christmas trees and wreathes with candles as is the custom there...

...Heymann states accurately that in the Infernal years--in Pisa and in St...

...If true, this principle resembled Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic equations, the theory on which something practical could be constructed, to the great liberation of mankind...

...Joyce's name with Nora's nearly illegible on a stone hidden in the grass...

...The serious student also needs to master evidence presented by Dennis R. Klinck in Paideuma, V-2 (Fall 1976), pp...

...But think of some other Americans whom it fits...

...There were long spells when he was not obsessed, moreover knew that his obsessions existed...

...And there is the moving moment in Canto 91 when the most continuously sustained paradisaic vision so far in the poem--not a mere dozen lines but nine consecutive pages--is suddenly brought to nothing by some angry lines about "kikery," and he has to consult a good many luminous memories to get it going again...

...he was without legal counsel...

...And though he was to caricature all his own perceptions and descend into frenzied demagogic rant, the governing system of distinctions was always available whenever he could manage to recall himself to its plane, and the econ0-political ideas could straighten themselves out again and give off their original light...

...The Good Pound of The Last Rower--Pound the poetm is blurry and at his best a nature mystic...

...He had called Pound "a rower on the river of the dead"--"un rameur sur le fleuve des morts...

...I speak with a confiaence based upon the fact that during perhaps 50 hours spent in Ezra Pound's presence over a total span of 20 years I never heard him make an anti-Semitic remark, and not because the subject never came up...

...Members of the committee never questioned the assumption that art is grounded in ethics...

...And what does "cloying" mean here...

...The coveted signed column: are we to imagine Pound wishing he could chop that stone shaft out of San Zeno and take it home...

...He had $80 in his pocket, a manuscript of poems, the cloying desire to see those poems in print...

...That was one reason he thought that Mussolini's Italy offered more hope...

...Orage's The New Age, Pound encountered Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, formerly chief construction engineer of the British Westinghouse Company in India, and the "inventor" of a new system of economics, called Social Credit...

...You can call this procedure British snobbery, or you can call it a strategy for survival on an overcrowded island...

...Heymann: "You ask about my London and Paris friends--Joyce, Hemingway, Brancusi, Eliot...

...Generally the Cantos give us the sane version, speeches and letters the demented...

...It was in quest of that practical implementation that he turned his eyes toward Mussolini, ignoring Douglas' warnings about centralized power...