Exile and Cunning

...ete . eter Ackroyd's new biography, Ezra Pound and His World (Scnbners, 116pp , $12 95), raises once more the issue of why this "familiar compound ghost" remains as disquieting a figure today as he became during World War II when he supported himself in Italy by broadcasting Fascist, anti-Semitic propaganda to American troops We are not always so disturbed by the mental or moral lapses of poets, the shocking tidbits that often spice up their biographies instead frequently serve to confirm our smug conviction that the greatly gifted ought to pay for their genius There is nothing comforting, however, in contemplating Pound descending to the tawdry company of Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose The foremost leader of the Modernist movement m literature raises an age-old question we would rather not confront To what extent is an artist answerable as a citizen9 One of the most ingenious attempts to explain the enigma of Pound was advanced by Donald Hall in Remembering Poets (1977) He had met the aging Pound in Rome shortly after the United States government released him from St Elizabeth' s in Washington into permanent exile Having become nostalgic for America, Pound longed to return and be reaccepted by his fellow-countrymen, and rashly Hall volunteered to help him Both poets quickly discovered that few members of the literary establishment back home were willing to forget or forgive In Hall's view Pound was an overgrown enfant terrible, bewildered by an adult world that treated his "pranks" as a serious offense But this explanation is not entirely satisfactory, for Pound could be more consciously malign than Hall apparently perceived Ackroyd is careful not to similarly diminish his subject by oversimplification The result is a multifaceted portrait that explores the whole range of Pound's complexities First and most important, Pound chose to see himself as an outsider "I was brought up in a city with which my forebears had no connection and I am therefore accustomed to being alien in one place or another," he wrote in 1920, after he had left the United States for Europe From an early age he provoked situations that led to trouble, loss of jobs, estrangement of friends "Heneededconflict," observesAck-royd, "and everything was being turned into a series of confrontations—with himself, with his contemporaries, and with 'the system '" Wyndham Lewis came to the conclusion that Pound "never seems to have seen the individual at all," and the poet certainly disregarded the feelings of others when they interfered with his own convemence For years he played his wife and mistress and their children off one another He also hectored everybody with his own opinions—initially on literary matters, then, as he grew older, on every conceivable subject Gertrude Stein spotted the incorrigible provincial behind that cosmopolitan facade, and tartly characterized him as "a village explainer—excellent if you were in a village, but if not, not " Alas, this role, as it became compulsive, brought about his downfall In Ackroyd's words, "although his work as a poet was mediated by a refined and harmonious language there was no such resourcefulness in his other, more immediate, writings He was to become a voracious propagandist " In particular, Pound arrived at the conviction that economics was the foundation of everything As his early esthetic theories had preached simplicity of form unembellished by rhetorical devices, so in this new field he was drawn to C H Douglas' simplistic dogma, Social Credit, "which considered the woes of mankind to be the product of some shadowy system conspiring against the individual—a system likely to be manipulated by financiers and Jews " Unfortunately, the reliable taste that had sustained Pound's excellent literary judgments abandoned him here As a Fascist prophet he became "belligerent and incoherent " No one can say definitely whether the treasonous path he chose was actually the result of growing insanity, or whether he had felt for too long that he was superior to common morality Like Oscar Wilde, Pound needed a spell of incarceration to make him realize that he had misjudged the nature of his actions as well as how others would react to them, like Wilde, too, his eventual understanding destroyed his confidence as an artist Pound's generosity as a critic, though, is indisputable He gave the diffident T S Eliot courage to become the leading poet of his generation, taught Hemingway "how to write and how not to write" and was one of the first to recognize the peculiar genius of Joyce The list of those he helped artistically goes on and on He created a climate that made the acceptance of Modernism possible by becoming its prime expositor His translations brought the works of many foreign writers alive in English and his own poetry showed flashes of brilliance Yet as time went on he found it increasingly difficult to restrain his inchoate jumbling of ideas, associations and, yes, the very sort of rhetoric he had inveighed against in others We continue to find Pound disturbing, 1 think, not merely because the political horrors he espoused have not faded into the mists of historical romanticism, but because he exemplifies the fall of anyone who allows himself to become possessed by doctrine Any dogma may be misused as a Procrustean bed to cut down or stretch human beings to its measure In addition, Pound's weaknesses were more representative of his world and ours than we might care to believe—the demagogic populism, the desire (reflected both in the Cantos and in his economics) to find one key system to rule all others, the appetite for almost anything new at the expense of the old "The insecurity and bnttleness of his temperament had become a divining rod of the age's character," writes Ackroyd, "reflecting its darkest side as well as its brighter" In this sense, he was a true artist, m other respects, he finally became an exile even from poetry XJ JL JLoward Nemerov's Sentences (Chicago, 85 pp , $8 95) embodies the tradition of ironic detachment and polish defended by T S Eliot and eschewed by Pound This is Nemerov's first book of verse since his Collected Poems of 1977 won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize The title, Sentences, may be taken as expressing syntactic vehicles ol thought, and "judgments" on both this wot Id ("a mtsety, as it always was") and art ("a mystery /Ol pure telalion that looks always right/Whatever it does ") A lot met poclry critic ot this maga/ine, Nemeiov enioys taking a sardonic look at human beha\ 101 (and, occasionally, the malicious gods who may have created us m their bizarre images) At the same time, he is a pastoral poet The creations of Nature provoke him to wonder about man's creativity A Sunday afternoon "By Al Lebowitz's Pool" sets off a consideration of Reflection and reflexion, lo vely words I shall be sorry to let go when I let go Reflected light, reflexion of the wave, For things reflected are more solemn and still Than in themselves they are, it is the doubling Perhaps that seems to bring them nearer thought, Could we reflect, did water not reflect7 Nemerov's interest in mirronngs extends to what he once called "the likeness between poems and jokes " He finds the two similar in their compactness and in the paradox that their serious content might be less effective if delivered straight His themes never change—they are always man's sometimes tragic, sometimes ludicrous relation to history, death and the universe But he treats these concerns in a variety of styles ranging from the ribald Popian epigram...

...Who having uttered vanished from the world Leaving no memorv but the marvelous Magical elements, the breathing shapes And stops of breath we build our Babels of Whether joking or serious, the Nemerovian poet is a cunning magician His ability to name the objects around him allows him to form relationships with them that otherwise would not exist As he reminds us, " by law/Any three things in the wide world/Triangulate the wasp, and Betelgeuse,/ And Our Lady of Liberty in the harbor, if/It's any comfort to us, and it is " Poets demonstrate that we can feel at home among comparisons that we, not an alien universe, have created Sentences has little use for the Poundian lov e of exile Nemerov realizes it is onlv too easy to be a stranger and sojourner that we scarcely find time to familiarize ourselves with our surroundings before the lights go out foreyer, that wisdom outlasts novelty For years Nemerov emphasized a iragic perspective Here his mellowed vision tocuses on comedy the wedding ot the natural world with thought where "Illusion s pnv liege gives me the idea that 1 \m not so much writing this verse as reading it' Up out ot water and light and shadow and leat doing the dance ot their v anous dependencies " This most cunning magician manages to convince us that his teats are metelv part ol the latgei magic ot creation...

...The prick is the soul philosophers should have sought A kid can get a hard on from pure thought —to the sublime invocation of the mind's powers exemplified by "The Makers," those forgotten inventors of poetry the first great listeners, attuned To interval, lelationship, and scale The first to sav above, beneath, beyond, Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine...