OF ELIOT AND POUND

...Apart from anything else," remarks Davie, "these genres call for a sure grasp of social tone, whereas there is much evidence that Pound was socially maladroit...

...He handles especially well the important and delicate question of Pound's collaboration on The Waste Land, giving a clear, well-documented picture of the nature and extent of Pound's help and summing it up by saying that "What Pound did essentially was to release the energy of the poem and suppress what was distracting superfluous, slovenly, or rhythmically or imagistically obstructive in it...

...Spender is reduced to personal testimonial-"in the thirty-five years of my acquaintance with him I never heard him utter an anti-Semitic re-remark...

...Exegesis will be resisted" he tells us at one point-quite unnecessarily, since we have been for some while witnessing his assiduous avoidance of it- this isn't because he couldn't, he hastens to assure us, and in fact he is quite tolerant to those who feel a need to supplement the great gulp method...

...he manages to give a sense of having knowledgeably sifted through the multiple texts already out on Eliot and to have set down in one convenient location, in admirable order, the best that has been thought and said on the subject His own readings of the individual poems, plays and critical essays, while maximally useful (because representative of the mainstream, the orthodoxy of Eliot criticism) are nevertheless exceptionally fine, sympathetic and searching...

...nevertheless Eliot sums up the theme of the whole chapter admirably when he states that the chief value of the poem lies in the fact that it is "an inexhaustible reference book of verse form...

...Davie's own view is exactly the reverse...

...Take, for example, this observation, prompted by his consideration of The Cocktail Party: "A problem for Eliot as a playwright is that for him the choice of eternity is so obviously preferable to that of life on this earth that it is difficult for him not to make actual living seem second-rate...

...What he does is emphasize some remarks that Pound is quoted as having made in interviews at the end of his life and some lines from late poems in which he describes himself as "not a demigod," as a man whose "errors and wrecks lie about me" and, again, as a man possessed of "Many errors, a little rightness...

...Eliot is as well-organized and well-mannered as the picture it gives of Eliot himself, and its form as intricate and self-enclosed as the form that so appealed to the poet of "The Hollow Men" and "The Four Quartets"-that of a multifoliate rose...

...The result is thorough, accurate and fair...

...In his second chapter Davie rightly identifies two main lines of critical attitudes about the poems themselves...

...He interpolates too some glimpses of Eliot's own rather mordant sense of humor, as when he recounts for us the time that Auden came upon Eliot engrossed in a Enmf of Patience...

...The Cantos is really an epic made up of blocks of history in the form of poetic rhythms, Davie informs us in this section, in an insight that certainly sounds far enough out to be bis but which, though he doesn't say so, rather surprisingly originates with T. S. Eliot...

...Etherized" untethers it-makes it float, witty, dreaming...

...and to maintaining that Eliot was too full of Christian virtue and too much a gentleman ever to have been a fascist...

...Finally Davie's attempt to find mitigation for Pound is two-pronged...

...They do not compete...

...He gives special weight to Pound's remark that "the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism...

...or else, we do not...

...And in addition to this full complement of critical evaluation, Spender gives us as well the modest number of facts available on Eliot's life-some from printed sources, others arising from his personal acquaintance with Eliot, who was his editor at Faber and Faber and -who became his honored older friend...

...And there is more, for what Davie loves as much as he detests explication is technical metrical analysis, and in the section on the rhythmic features of The Cantos the anapests, the dactyls, the trochees and the iambs fly at us with no quarter given...

...Before one aspect of their subjects Spender and Davie seem equally helpless-the unpalatable, even scandalous nature of the social and political philosophies Eliot and Pound are on record as holding, with greater or lesser degrees of vehemence, and which have often been described as both anti-Semitic and fascist...

...Their radical dissimilarity intensifies the implied necessity of preferring one over the other...

...In the books under review- recent additions to Viking's Modern Masters series, edited by Frank Ker-mode-these differences are reflected in the tone and temper of the work each has inspired (though of course the individuality of the authors, Stephen Spender and Donald Davie figures as well...

...But neither his appreciation of Eliot's ironic wit nor his personal friendship with him prevent Spender from always being conscious that, behind the homburg and the furled umbrella Eliot affected.in his disguise as a London City man, lay a sensibility with a Conradian awareness of "the horror, the horror" just under the surface of civilized life-a sort of double vision of superficial social calm and vast spiritual deserts co-existing in the real world...

...Having left no doubt about which camp he is aligning himself with, Davie goes on, in the next chapter, to expatiate on his view that The Cantos -117 poems written at intervals from even before "Mauberley" and extending to the end of Pound's life-form the main body of Pound's poetic output and constitute a great literary achievement worthy of the reader's lifelong attention...

...Auden asked him why in the world the game appealed to him, and after a pause, received Eliot's thoughtful Teply: "Well, I suppose it's because it's the nearest thing to being dead...

...Davie's decisions about what to include and exclude from it seem to have been formed along entirely idiosyncratic lines, the consequence of which is to imbue his slender volume with a very odd perspective...

...Oh, he describes them equably enough as consisting, in part, of the idea "that Usury is a vicious and desolating force in both public and private life...

...The Davie book is described as a "major study of the life and work" of Ezra Pound, a description which, in strict accuracy, requires some qualification...

...that Mussolini, unlike Roosevelt, had a grasp of what usury was and had a practicable plan for containing and disinfecting it . . ."-He takes them and disposes of them by redefining them as "not ideas" at all but "opinions...

...Surprisingly, this turns out to be both dazzling and informative, though it may send us scurrying to Brooks and Warren for a quick refresher on the rules of scansion...

...Davie doesn't care much for Eliot...

...However we avoid distortion by adopting the attitude Pound once took in the debate over which of two poetic traditions (co-existing for a time in the English seventeenth century) constituted the "better" one...

...and, supposing we do, what chance we stand of getting it in any future that we can foresee...

...This is heady stuff (a jacket blurb tells us that Robert Lowell got vertigo from it, but he is said to have found it bracing all the same...

...Davie includes the much-admired "Mauberley" in this contention-agreeing with Pound's own epithet for it that it is "thin," and reviling its champions with the suggestion that it appeals to them because they themselves are possessed of "thin and constricted and rancorously distrustful sensibilities...

...Davie, faced with the double difficulty of Pound's more virulent anti-Semitism (the whole of his usury diatribe being intimately linked to the Jew as money-lender) as well as his open advocacy of Mussolinian fascism, is ever harder pressed...

...For, the way to appreciate The Cantos, he insists, is not necessarily to read them for comprehension, but principally for their rhythms which, when read properly- that is, fast and in great gulps, makes for a kind of creative bewilderment which Davie argues is better than comprehension...

...In a bravura display of this point, Davie shows that in it Pound has echoed the rhythms of the Greeks, of Ben Jonson, of Campion and Waller and Chaucer and, in fact, has found a way of both encapsulating and revitalizing tradition by seeing' it and using it as "rhythm working its way through history...

...Davie does not, he says, "deny that some teasing out of quite short excerpts, even some hunting of sources and allusions, is profitable at some stage...

...Perhaps it was the Upward influence in them that led Yvor Winters to complain that he came away from The Cantos without the assurance that he had any ideas at all, a criticism which Davie promptly usurps, turning it into praise of one of the poems' insufficiently recognized virtues...

...in fact he is harshly critical of much of the early work up to 1920, see-, ing it as a misguided attempt of Pound's to adapt talents best equipped for poetry that is mean to be sung to such classical genres as the epigram, the lampoon, and the epistle-all of which are intended for the spoken voice...

...Still it is tempting to see the personalities of Eliot and Pound as having informed and to some extent directed the shape and character of the books that bear their names...

...This chapter, called "Ideas in The Cantos," displays Davie at his most maddening, which is to say his most tantalizing...

...Spender's T.S...

...Internecine warfare,' he answered...

...yet both Spender and Davie recognize a definite connection between the commitment to a hierarchical view of society of some kind, and the perpetuation of a literary culture in its recognized form...

...Spender, long active on the British Socialist left, at one point even enlists Orwell in defense of Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (their common ground being a mutual skepticism over the value of any culture a communist state could provide...

...in fact, it is quite dismaying to think of anyone relying upon it for their only impression of Ezra Pound...

...Though largely suppressing his own personality in the service of his material, Spender adds a tonic twist to his critical interpretations upon occasion...

...The fact that Spender is himself a poet shows to advantage in the sure and convincing grasp he brings to the elements of craft...

...whether we want any more of it...

...He sums up the all-encompassing nature of the problems involved by noting that "Pound's significance . . . may be thought to turn therefore on what we understand by 'a literary civilization...

...And Davie points out that while "there can be no doubt that Pound did believe in a social hierarchy," in Davie's view, "we may suspect any enthusiast for a literary civilization must...

...Perhaps no more eloquent testimony could be found to the stubbornly intractable nature of this shadow across Eliot's and Pound's accomplishments than the signal failure of both Spender and Davie adequately to meet and explain it...

...Refusing to choose, Pound insisted that "All the traditions are precious...

...He reminds us too of the considerable evidence which indicates that Eliot believed the end of Western civilization was impending...

...Just here" he acknowledges, "is a parting of the ways: either we suppose that our grasp on cultural order, as reflected in our language, is too insecure for such departures as this to be tolerated, let alone emulated...

...Not a modernist, then, but a traditionalist, whose "Make it new" did not mean "Make it new" after all, but rather "Keep the old vital...

...Eliot and Ezra Pound held in common - their alienation from America, their tendency to disappear from their poems into a variety of dramatis personnae, and their fundamentally classical approach to literature-the differences between them, as men and as poets, are still more striking than their similarities, a point that is sometimes overlooked because their names are so often linked...

...It is always something of a disservice to treat one book alongside another because of the tendency to seem to be weighing them against one another, and there is no doubt that these two books in particular would be better served in separate reviews...

...Although difficult to follow at times, this section of the book is always interesting and, up to a point, even convincing...

...Consequently detractors and supporters alike are, one after the other, brought up before us for redresss of wrongs and for receipt of improving new versions of what Davie takes to be the true state of Pound's case...

...For my part, a decision either way-given that the person deciding has recognized just what is at issue-is equally honorable...

...while its form is as seemingly chaotic, JANET CWOTH as given to dizzying reversals of logic as the form Pound took for his characteristic poetic configuration - the vortex...

...The first thing he does about the ideas in The Cantos is to toss the really troublesome ones out of court...

...Its brilliance alone qualifies it for the epithet "major" though it would have to be understood to belong to some fairly advanced stage of sophistication in Pound scholarship...

...Davie's Ezra Pound, on the other hand, is controversial, at times brilliant, at times barely comprehensible, in much the same manner his contemporaries have used to describe Pound the man...

...He both urges that Pound be given full credit for these evidences of partial recanting and at the same time, in subtle ways, manages to suggest that the really culpable party behind Pound's evil positions is America...

...Spender's approach is to be as comprehensive as possible...

...In 1929," Spender reports, "when I myself as a very young man had lunch with him for the first time, I asked him what form he had thought the collapse would take...

...however, aside from the catalog of significant dates contained in the Biographical Note at the front, there is almost nothing in it of Pound's life...

...Accordingly...

...Some sample Davie contentions: that Pound was not an iconoclastic crusader for the modern but a militant conservative, an Edwardian with a full pack of nineteenth century attitudes and enthusiasms...

...that international Jewry has played and continues to play such-and-such a part in its operations...

...In his initial chapter Davie is intent on placing the reputation of Pound critics of all persuasions in as damaging a light as possible, seemingly on the theory that we will afterward be less likely to take quite such a dim view of Pound's own...

...He is even tolerant (and these may safely be taken as the only two instances of critical tolerance in the volume) of those who find they cannot altogether abandon the usual grammatical concepts attaching to such forms as the past indicative which, Davie assures us cannot, in a Canto context, be assumed to mean what we expect it to mean in prose discourse...

...Then, with the help of an obscure English thinker named Allfcn Upward (said to have had a great influence on Pound) he redefines* the word "ideas" so that, when it occurs in The Cantos it means "stabs at," "aspirations toward things not yet real...

...The Spender book is described as "the best introduction to the poet yet published"-and it may very well be that-yet it is written with such a high order of intelligence and sympathetic understanding that it can be read with equal pleasure by the Eliot connoisseur...

...Spender concludes: "It is possible to regret the omission of some lines, but of remarkably few...

...Leavis, that Pound's early work-culminating in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"-was his best, and that his Cantos represent instances of regrettably idiosyncratic, perhaps even unbalanced fallings off of Pound's poetic and intellectual powers...

...As for the many cuts Pound advised, to most of which Eliot acceded...

...Both maintain that there can be no ncessary connection between the eminence of that poetic accomplishment and the elitist philosophies Eliot and Pound so conspicuously shared...

...There is, for example, his gloss on the famous lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in which the evening is described as "spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table...

...Finally-and, I suppose, ironically, in view of the insistence on the part of all four poets concerned in these volumes that poetry is a province unto itself, inviolate from external considerations of value and belief-one cannot come away from a reading of either T.S...

...Eliot or Ezra Pound without being reminded anew that the person who undertakes to involve himself seriously in poetry-whether as poet or reader -had better be prepared to deal with much larger questions as well...

...Spender notes that "one has only to substitute the word "anesthetized" for "etherized" to see how "anesthetized" would make the image rigid, anchored, grotesque...

...He said, 'People killing one another in the streets.'" As for the questions that arise out of Eliot's criticism, Spender does not so much attempt to dispose of them as to display them, setting Eliot's views forth alongside opposing ones, of his own and others, so that what emerges is a well-rounded discussion of such issues as tradition versus modernity, tradition and the individual talent, the element of personality or impersonality in the poetic voice, and poetry and belief...

...we find him painstakingly attempting . . . niceties of urbane insolence and Jamesian nuance such as he could not command...

...Puzzled by this, I pressed him for a more precise answer...

...In one camp are the critics who feel, like Dr...