The
Sound of Pound:
A Listener’s Guide
Richard
Sieburth
PEPC Digitial Edition
©2020 Richard Sieburth
published April 2007 in conjunction with
PennSound's Ezra Pound
Page
The Work of Voice
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
One
of the earliest accounts we have of Pound reading a poem aloud
is provided by F.S. Flint, fellow London member (with T. E. Hulme)
of the poet’s club that used to meet at the Tour Eiffel
restaurant just north of Soho in 1909. The poem was “Sestina
Altaforte,” Pound’s first piece to be published in
Ford Madox Hueffer’s prestigious English Review,
quite a feat for a young U.S. poet just recently arrived in London. Flint
remembers that when Pound first read this poem at one of their
monthly gatherings, he roared it out so loudly and so violently
that “the table shook and cutlery vibrated in resonance
with his voice.”[1] Thereafter,
whenever the poets met the restaurant manager placed a screen
around their table, lest similar disturbances annoy the other
diners. Appropriately enough, this PennSound selection
of Pound begins with his 1939 Harvard recording of this same
poem, a loose imitation of an invocation to war by the poet whom
Dante refers to as that “stirrer up of strife,” the
troubadour Bertrand de Born. Accompanying himself on a
set of kettledrums, Pound literally shouts the poem into the
microphone, spitting it out syllable by syllable: “D-A-M-N
IT A-L-L! All this our South stinks peace. . .” Although
in Edwardian London Pound’s “Bloody Sestina” (as
his friends called it) might have passed as a relatively entertaining
Kiplingesque exercise in martial bravado, by 1939 the poem might
well have sounded like hysterical war-mongering—despite
its poet’s avowed pacifism (indeed, Pound saw his 1939
visit to the States as a last-ditch peace mission to avert military
conflict between the U.S. and Europe). Pound,
at any rate, had second thoughts about the recording, for he
later wrote Prof. Frederick Packard of Harvard’s Department
of Speech (who had supervised the recording session for the Harvard
Vocarium Series) that he wanted the recording destroyed and that “it
not be played to anyone the hell ever.”[2] According
to Pound’s daughter Mary, Pound was quite superstitious
about his performance of this poem: he felt that just as his
initial reading of it in 1909 had unhappily presaged the Great
War, so his 1939 recording of it at Harvard was somehow ineluctably
linked to the outbreak of World War II. . . As a
measure of his earliest literary success in London and as an
object—at least in its recorded form—of pentimenti and
remorse, “Sestina: Altaforte” seems an emblematic
place to begin to explore the Pound Sound.
Given
the immediate success of his “Sestina: Altaforte,” Pound
briefly played with the idea of producing a number of other such
poems designed as public performance pieces. These include
his popular “Ballad of the Goodly Fere” or the unpublished “Redondillas,” a
sprightly 1911 satire of the modern age written in the bouncy
meter of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (which
Pound in his old age recorded on a tape made by Olga Rudge in
1968--included elsewhere on this site). By 1912, however,
as Pound moved into his more austere, pared-back Imagist manner,
he had left this kind of narrative, high middle-brow easy listening
poem behind for the more elusive cadences of vers libre or
the more “quantitative” measures of a lyric like “The
Return”—in which it seemed, at least according to
Yeats in his Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse,
that Pound was “translating at sight from an unknown Greek
masterpiece”:
See,
they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements,
and the slow feet,
The
trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
See,
they return, one, and by one,
With
fear, as half-awakened. . .
Though this may have looked (or sounded) like free verse to
Yeats, “The Return” (as Kenner and a number of other
critics have shown) in fact is rather strictly organized around
the single reiterated rhythmic figure of / _ _ /
_ / (best
heard in phrase “Gods of the wingèd shoe”)—what
the French poet Charles Vildrac was at the period calling a “constant
rythmique” in his essays on the new prosody.
“The Return” is mentioned at this length because
it was the very first poem that Pound ever recorded. Although
he obliquely alludes to this episode in The Pisan Cantos (Canto
LXXVII), the full story runs as follows. In the spring
of 1913, Pound crossed the Channel to prepare a series of seven
articles on modern French poetry, published later that fall in
the New Age as “The Approach to Paris.” While
in Paris he met the poets André Spire and Robert de Souza,
both of whom were ardent proponents of the new vers libre—whose
central principle had already been incorporated into Pound’s
initial Imagist manifesto (“As regarding rhythm: to compose
in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”). Both
Spire and de Souza had been attracted to the work of the abbé Pierre-Jean
Rousselot (1846-1924), the founder of experimental phonetics
in France, who occasionally invited poets to his laboratories
at the Collège de France to conduct experiments on the
phonological analysis of poetic diction.[3] The
ardent vers libristes were presumably eager to find out whether
Rousselot’s modern recording devices (which produced what
look like intricate seismographs of vowels, consonants, pitch,
and tempo) could provide scientific proof that free verse was,
in its own way, just as “regular” or “formal” (in
terms of the patternings of accents or quantities) as, say, the
traditional alexandrine.
Pound was apparently recruited by Spire to read “The
Return” into the abbé’s “phonoscope.” He
recounts his session at Rousselot’s Laboratoire de Phonétique
Experimentale in a little-known 1935 piece (“Retrospect:
Interlude”) included in his Polite Essays:
There was in those days [1912-1913] still a Parisian research
for technique. Spire wrangled as if vers libre were
a political doctrine.De Souza had what the old Abbé called une
oreille très fine, but he, the Abbé, wrapped
up De Souza’s
poems and asked me to do likewise in returning them lest his servante should
see what I was carrying. The Abbé was M. Rousselot who
had made a machine for measuring the duration of verbal components. A
quill or tube held in the nostril, a less shaved quill or other
tube in the mouth, and your consonants signed as you spoke them. They
return, One and by one, With fear, As half awakened,
each letter with a double registration of quavering.[4]
One
of Pound’s “Paris Letters” for the Dial in
1920 comments further on this experiment:
I admit that many people did "dismiss" l'Abbé Rousselot;
it is, for example, impossible to imagine God's own Englishman
with one tube pushed up his nose, reciting verse down another,
and God's own Parisian, and God's own supporter of the traditional
alexandrine made a good deal of fun of the phonoscope. . . [T]
his little machine with its two fine horn-point recording needles,
and the scrolls for registering the belles vibrations offers
a very interesting field of research for professors of phonetics,
and, I think, considerable support, for those simple discriminations
which the better poets have made, without being able to support
them by much more than "feel" and "intuition." For
example, the "laws" of Greek quantitative prosody do
not correspond with an English reality. No one has succeeded
in writing satisfactory English quantitative verse, according
to these "rules," though, on the other hand, no English
poet has seriously tried to write quantitative verse without
by this effort improving his cadence.
Given the phonoscope one finds definitely a reason why one
cannot hear the in the in a phrase like in the
wind, as a "long." It isn't long. Whatever
the Greeks may have done, one does not hear the beginning
consonants of a word as musically part of the syllable of the
last vowel in the word preceding; neither does the phonoscope
so record them. All of which with many other finer distinctions
can now be examined with great saving of breath and paper, whenever
the questions are considered of sufficient interest, either by
professors, or by neophytes in the arts of versification.[5]
Here then was scientific proof of Pound’s doctrine of
melopoeia, for Rousselot’s phonoscope could actually hear (and
analytically transcribe) the complexities of each individual
poetic voice (down to its regional accents). Rousselot’s
recording device, however, did not result in replayable cylinders
or discs, but rather activated styluses whose tips scratched
markings onto rolls of lampblacked paper, thus graphing the voice
(split into consonants and vowels) into a species of white-on-black writing—not
unlike the slopes and valleys of a polygraph test or the squiggles
on a film sound-strip. To Pound at least, it seemed as
if the good abbé’s phonoscope had at last managed
to eliminate the gap between actual sound and its conventionalized
(poetic) notation—just as Fenollosa’s Chinese characters
would prove that the eloquent world of things could be accurately imaged by
the world of written signs.
An extended parenthesis might be in order here to locate further
synchronies with Pound’s Imagist phase of 1912-13. One
of Rousselot’s most important collaborators was Ferdinand
Brunot, who held the chair in History of the French Language
at the Sorbonne. Inspired by the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna
(1899) and Berlin (1902), Brunot founded the Archives de la
parole at the university in 1911. Funded by Emile Pathé and
using early Pathé “Saphir” recording discs,
Brunot in 1912-13 recorded examples of patois in the Ardennes,
the Berry, and the Limousin as well as samples of the “street
language” of Parisian workman—first steps toward
his ambitious project of producing a “linguistic atlas” of
France on the phonograph. To illustrate “la
parole au timbre juste, au rythme impeccable, à l’accent
pur” (i.e. high standard French), he also recorded the
speeches and lectures of various French politicians, university
professors, clergymen and other public figures (including Dreyfus
and Barrès). Brunot’s most celebrated recordings,
however, were devoted to contemporary poets. On December
24, 1913 (that is, later in the same year that Pound visited
Rousselot’s laboratory), he recorded Paul Fort, André Billy,
André Salmon, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The latter’s
readings of his poems “Le Voyageur,” “Le Pont
Mirabeau,” and “Marie” may be accessed at PennSound.
1913: modernism meets the phonograph. According to
his friend, André Salmon (who described the recording
session in the newspaper Gil Blas the following day),
Apollinaire listened to playback of his reading “not without
considerable surprise”—feeling “that emotion,
that uneasiness which arises when one hears one’s double
sing.” From Doppelgänger to Doppelsänger.
. .
Radio Operas
As far as can be ascertained, Pound’s next foray into
recording occurred some nineteen years later when he collaborated
with BBC producer E.A. Harding on the station’s October
1931 broadcast of his opera La Testament de François
Villon (first performed live in Paris in 1926) to commemorate
the French poet’s quincentennial. According to Margaret
Fisher’s Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: the BBC Experiments
1931-1933 (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2002), “Together,
Harding and Pound broke technical and theoretical ground in the
production of opera for radio. . . The transmission
[of Pound’s Le Testament]. . . was one of the first
electronically enhanced operas to be broadcast in Europe. It
featured the use of artificial echo throughout the performance
to distinguish scenic location, and the operation of an electronic
audio mixing board to combine prerecorded passages with live
performance. With access to the most up-to-date recording
technology, Harding arranged for a steel tape recording to be
made of the penultimate rehearsal to provide immediate playback
for the performers’ edification.” Listening
to the broadcast on wireless set in the electrician’s kitchen
in Rapallo, Pound was delighted with the clarity of the transmission: “I
not only knew who was singing, but I could distinguish the words,
and the senses of words.” Two hard-to-find LP recordings
of Pound’s Villon exist: Robert Hughes’s 1972 version
for Fantasy Records (Fantasy 12001) and a 1980 Dutch recording
by Reinbert de Leeuw (Philips Stereo 9500 927).
Given the relative critical success of the Villon, Harding
encouraged Pound to write another opera for the BBC. The
latter responded with Cavalcanti: Sung Dramedy in Three Acts,
a piece (with dialogue in English and lyrics in Italian) especially
conceived for radio on which he worked between 1931 and 1933.
Never produced in Pound’s lifetime, its score and libretto
have recently been published by Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher
in their Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville,
CA: Second Evening Art, 2003). The same publisher has also
brought out Hughes’s and Fisher’s edition of the Complete
Violin Works of Ezra Pound (2004) as well as Fisher’s The
Recovery of Ezra Pound’s Third Opera, Collis O Heliconii,
Settings of Poems by Catullus and Sappho (2005). A
generous and extremely well-produced selection from all the above
music (and more) is contained on Ego Scriptor Cantilenae:
The Music of Ezra Pound (producer: Charles Amirkhanian; music
director: Robert Hughes), available on CD from Other Minds (OM1005-2CD).
1939: The Harvard
Vocarium Recordings
Pound’s first extensive recording of his own poetry
occurred during his visit to the U.S. in the spring of 1939—he
had not returned “home” since 1911. While
in Washington, he attempted (and failed) to get a personal interview
with President Roosevelt (presumably to explain his economic
theories), attended a session of Congress and visited the Library
of Congress--where he watched a Japanese film of a Noh drama
performance (which so impressed him that later during WWII he
would suggest that the U.S. hand over Guam to the Japanese in
exchange for “300 sound films of Noh plays”). In
New York, he met with old friends William Carlos Williams, Ford
Maddox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky. The latter, upon
hearing Pound praise Father Coughlin’s shrilly pro-Nazi,
anti-Semitic radio broadcasts, merely commented: “Whatever
you don’t know, Ezra, you ought to know voices” (Carpenter,
561). Pound’s chance to add his own voice to the
American thirties came in mid May when he visited Harvard with
his publisher, James Laughlin (an alumnus), hosted by the poet
Theodore Spencer of the English department. He gave a public
reading of his poems to a packed Sever Hall; one student present
remembered that “he read sitting down, held his breath
for an incredible time before drawing another for the next few
lines of poetry, and yet the voice was too soft to be heard,
unless, as he did unexpectedly, he yelled” (Carpenter,
563).
On May 17th, Pound recorded a selection of his
poetry on 78 RPM acetate/metal-backed transcription discs for
the Woodberry Poetry Room—then still located in Widener
Library (it was moved to Lamont Library in 1949, housed in a
high modernist space designed by the Finnish architect Alvor
Aalta). The Woodberry Poetry Room had been founded in 1931 “for
the purpose of keeping alive the poet’s voice” through
a series of public readings and recordings. The Harvard
Vocarium was in turn founded the following year by Prof. F.C.
Packard, Professor of Public Speaking (and eventually Boylston
Professor of Rhetoric). Like Brunot at the Sorbonne, Packard
was interested in recording local dialect and traditional ballads,
as well as contemporary poetry. T.S. Eliot was one
of the first poets to record for the Harvard Vocarium in 1933
(“The Hollow Men” and “Gerontion”) and
over the years the Woodberry went on to amass the largest archive
of recordings of poets in the U.S. [A
full list of the its holdings may be consulted on the web;
free streaming audio of such poets as Robert Lowell, Wallace
Stevens and Elisabeth Bishop is available.] Pound’s
complete 1939 readings, which are included here by special permission
of Don Share, the current curator of the Woodberry Poetry
Room, are among the rarest and most valuable in its collection.
Pound had always been interested in percussion: in a 1924
concert in Montparnasse, he had accompanied George Antheil on
bass drum in a performance of the latter’s “Sonata
for Drum and Piano”; he also apparently provided the percussion
for the 1926 premiere of his opera Le Testament at the
Salle Pleyel in Paris; and his 1934 contribution to Nancy Cunard’s Negro
Anthology was largely devoted to the German anthropologist
Leo Frobenius’s accounts of African drum-languages (which
find their way into the Pisan Cantos). For
his 1939
1939 Harvard
Vocarium recordings, Pound therefore asked to
be supplied with a set of kettledrums to accompany his reading:
they can clearly be heard on the recording of “Sestina:
Altaforte” and “The Seafarer” but thereafter,
according to witnesses, having become too engrossed in the reading
of his text, Pound merely waved the drum sticks around in the
air, with only the occasional thump on one drum or another (Norman,
360). The drums work most effectively in “The
Seafarer”—first published in 1911 and Pound’s
most deliberately “archaic” poem, composed in the
heavily stressed and alliterative rhythms of the Anglo-Saxon. It
was into this most ancient of English poetic forms that Pound
in 1917 translated Book 11 of the Odyssey (which he in
turn felt was the “oldest” or most primal part of
Homer’s epic)—a text that would eventually become
Canto 1 (cf. on this same website the recording of this first
Canto made in 1958). Canto 1 proposes that we listen to
Homer’s archaic Greek as if chanted (or channeled) by the
exilic voice of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon bard. Something
of a similar intuition had led young Harvard professor Milman
Parry and his assistant Albert Lord (inspired, it would seem,
by Rousselot disciple Marcel Jousse and the new director of the
Sorbonne’s Archives de la parole, the Hellenist
Hubert Pernot who had undertaken recording expeditions to Crete
and Northern Greece) to travel to Yugoslavia in 1933-35 to record
the rhapsodes of Bosnia reciting their traditional Serbo-Croatian
epics: Lord’s study, The Singer of Tales, based
on analysis of the performance practices of these Bosnian skalds,
argues for an Oral Formulaic Homer already implicit in Pound’s
Canto 1.[6]
Pound’s other readings on these 1939 Harvard Vocarium
recordings are somewhat more conventional (that is, sans
drums). From his 1919 “Homage to Sextus Propertius” he
chose not its political sections (i.e. its satire of the Roman/British
Empire) but rather the more melancholy part VI in which Propertius
antethumously imagines his own burial (“There
will be three books at my obsequies/Which I take, my no unworthy
gift, to Persephone”). Pound also selected what had
by 1939 already become his most canonical poem in England and
America, largely through its endorsement in the thirties by such
proto-New Critics as F.R. Leavis and R.P. Blackmur—namely, Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley. His powerful reading of sections
IV (“These fought, in any case”) and V (“There
died a myriad”)—which evoke the senseless slaughter
of WWI—are among the most impassioned anti-war statements
of all times, the dialectical reversal, as it were, of his early “Bloody
Sestina.” Pound rounded out this selection
from his volume of collected poems, Personae (1926), with “Cantico
del sole”—which he reads in a comically affected
tone of sarcastic world-weariness that, half-way through, turns
into a kind of parody of Gregorian chant: the collective guffaws
of those attending the recording session can be briefly heard
at the end.
The remainder of this 1939 reading is devoted to Pound’s
Cantos: A Draft of XVI Cantos had been published in Paris
in 1925; the first thirty were brought out in the U.S. in 1933,
with eleven more following in 1934 and a Fifth Decad appearing
in 1937. The Cantos that Pound chose to record at this
particular juncture in his career provide a rare insight into
what he considered to be the major tonal and thematic highlights
of his ever-evolving work-in-progress. In chronological
sequence (but not necessarily in the order of their recording),
Pound began his selection with Canto XVII (whose first words
(“so that”) connect it back to last words (“so
that”) of Canto I. Following the purgatorial
geography of the previous Canto (“And before hell mouth;
dry plain/and two mountains”), this is the first sustained
glimpse of Paradise we get in the poem. More specifically,
it evokes what Pound calls a paradiso terrestre: though
its Venetian cityscape is suffused with neo-Platonic light (“the
light now, not of the sun”), the Canto celebrates a very “terrestial” and
sensual locus amoenus whose erotic energies are rooted
in the ancient Eleusianian Mysteries and the rites of spring—materialized
by Dionysus, Artemis, Athena or represented by Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus from the sea. Pound’s reading allows
us to hear one of his most characteristic rhythmic signatures:
light dactyls scurrying around agglutinative spondees: “cliff
green-gray in the far,/ In the near, the gate-cliffs of amber,/
And the wave/ green clear, and blue clear,/ And the cave salt-white,
and glare-purple.”
Only a fragment of a reading of Canto XXX survives (Prof.
Packard seems to have cut off the recording after the poet stumbled
about ten lines in). Pound’s decision to recite this
text may have been an indirect nod to its initial place of publication,
for this Canto was first printed in 1930 in Hound and Horn, a
little magazine published in Cambridge and edited by Harvard
undergraduate and Pound disciple Lincoln Kirstein—later
founder, with George Ballanchine, of the New York City Ballet. Canto
XXX provocatively challenges Chaucer’s celebrated “Compleynte
unto Pite” (in which the poet says “My purpose was,
to Pite to compleyne/Upon the crueltee and tirannye/Of Love). Instead
of providing succor against Cruelty (as in Chaucer), Pound’s
allegorical Pity more resembles the figure of the bleeding-heart
liberal, unwilling to act decisively in rooting out evil, unwilling
to close in on the kill as the speaker of this “compleynt,” the
huntress Artemis, recommends: “Nothing is now clean slayne/But
rotteth away.” As these recordings make
clear, the Compleynt Agaynst Pity of Canto XXX is almost identical
in rhythm and diction to Pound’s prophetic indictment of
Usury in his vigorous declamation of Canto XLV--“Pity slayeth
my nymphs,/ Pity spareth so many an evil thing./ Pity befouleth
April, “Pity is the root and spring” becomes “Usura
rusteth the chisel/It rusteth the craft and the craftsman/ .
. ./ Usura slayeth the child in the womb/. It stayeth the young
man’s courting.” Reviewing the latest installment
of Pound’s Cantos in Poetry the previous year (March
1938), Delmore Schwartz said of Canto XLV, the Usura Canto, “there
is nothing like it in English,” while adding in a footnote, “It
is interesting to observe in passing that in this particular
Canto the attack on usury as a poetic statement can be separated
from its connection with a particular economic theory by the
mere device of substituting another three-syllable word with
the same accents, for example, ‘capital.’” In
1938-39, then, it was still possible for left-wing American poets
like Schwartz (or Zukofsky) to hear Marx behind Pound. WWII—and
in particular Pound’s vocal support for the Axis—would
henceforth make this reading infinitely problematic.
By
far the longest recording (almost 20 minutes) Pound made during
this marathon session at Harvard on May 17, 1939 is Canto LVI,
a still unpublished portion of the Chinese Cantos section of
the poem (LII-LXI). Basing himself on an eighteenth-century
French work, Histoire Générale de la Chine by
the Jesuit priest Père de Moyriac de Mailla (who in turn
drew from a neo-Confucian Chinese historian), Pound in these
Cantos traces the history of China from its legendary beginnings
in the third millennium B.C. through the eighteenth century (at
which point the following Cantos switch from Chinese dynastic
history to the American dynasty of the Adams family). In
these Chinese Cantos, ideograms for the first time begin to make
their visual presence systematically felt throughout Pound’s
text—this purely graphic dimension of the page could of
course not be conveyed in his reading of Canto LVI. What
we do hear, however, is his idiosyncratic pronunciation (via
de Mailla’s French romanizations--e.g. Tchin Ouang, Ouen,
Tscheou, Tçin, etc.) of Chinese proper names. Whereas
Chinese had been a virtually silent, primarily visual system
of signs for Pound when he first edited Fenollosa’s Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by the mid-thirties
he had, by own admission, realized that he had been “in
crass ignorance of the Chinese art of verbal sonority” (although
this reading indicates that he had still not mastered its system
of tones).[7] This
unusual recording of Canto LVI, then, is perhaps best listened
to not as a summary of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Chinese
history as the Sung dynasty gives way to the Mongol Yüan
reign founded by Kublai Khan, but rather as a kind of radical Lautgedicht or “sound-poem” whose
Chinese syllables, transliterated into the “french vowels” (Cantos,
p. 310) of De Mailla, serve to produce a strange kind of post-symboliste scat-singing. Especially
revealing of this is Pound’s reading of the following passage
(is it in Chinese or zaum?):
And
in this time was Yeliu Tschutsai
Meng
Kong still held against Mongols.
Han,
Lang, Ouen, Kong,
Mie,
Kien, Tschong, King
Fou,
Pong, Chun King
Gone
Vendome,
Beaugency, Notre Dame de Clery
(
Cantos,
303)
[8]
What is the sudden intrusion of French place-names doing here? They
are drawn from an old French children’s song--“Mes
amis, que reste-il/A ce Dauphin si gentil/ Orléans, Beaugency/
Notre Dame de Cléry/ Vendôme, Vendôme”—verses
which André Spire, Pound’s old friend from the abbé Rousselot
days, had discussed in a July 1914 Mercure de France article
entitled “Le vers français d’après
la phonétique expérimentale,” arguing (together
with Bremond) that they constituted one of the most beautiful
examples of poésie pure in the French language.[9] Pound
defined his Cantos as “a poem including history.” But
as his reading of Canto LVI shows, even in its most historically
referential sequences (the margins of this Canto read “a.d.
1225/65,” “a.d. 1278,” “a.d. 1295,” etc.
to ground its narrative of the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties
in concrete chronological data), Pound’s epic is always
verging on lyric, that is, on the sheer music of (non-referential,
de-semanticized) poésie pure that actually undoes the
very “history” it seeks to “include.”
Hearing
the playbacks of his recordings, Pound was apparently quite surprised
by the sound of his own voice—no doubt his first (Lacanian?)
encounter with it in the mirror of a phonograph. According
to biographer Charles Norman (who interviewed some of those present
at the 1939 Harvard recordings in the late fifties), he commented
on how “Irish brogue [was] coming out as his reading style” (Norman,
366). It has been suggested this “brogue” (or
what Ford Madox Ford referred to his “Northumbrian” reading
style) can be ascribed to Pound’s stint as W.B. Yeats’s
personal secretary at Stone Cottage during the winters of 1913-1915
(at any rate in the Pisan Cantos (Canto LXXXIII
) he provides
an hilarious imitation of Yeats reading his poem “The Peacock” in
1914), but whatever the case, the rolled or slightly burred (Scots?)
r’s and faintly Celtic Twilight vowels would become a prominent
feature of Pound’s reading style. In an interview
with the B.B.C’s D.G. Bridson (published in 1961), Pound
reflected on the relation of his reading style to Yeats’s:
And Yeats’s reading. . . well, in the first place he
had Florence Farr who really could read . . . and then
Yeats, his means of getting, or seeing his rhythm, was
pulling out the vowels: “Made a great peacock in
the pri-i-de of his eye”—that kind of thing,. I
don’t know where he got to later. . . I think my reading
now shows more interest in the meaning of what I’ve got
on the page. I know when we were down in Syracuse,
out in the Greek theatre there, and Yeats wanted me to read something—I
s’pose he wanted me to read something of his or recite
something—I found that the only thing one could do in the
open like that—the only thing I remember that you could
speak clear enough to get across was Sappho’s poem Poikilothron—with
whatever pronunciation or mispronunciation I use of it. But
I have no idea how he read after 1920. . .[10]
Also particularly noticeable in these 1939 readings (especially
in his recitations of his Cantos, less so with the quick-paced
quatrains of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) is Pound’s tendency
to emphasize his line-endings by a marked dip in his voice. The
advantage here is that the listener can actually hear, clearly
demarcated, each of Pound’s end-stoppings (or mid-line
caesurae); the disadvantage is that this kind of circumflex intonation
of line-after-line (the voice rising toward the middle of the
line then falling off again at its end) can become somewhat monotonous
in its “epic” or “bardic” style of medieval
chant—whose archaic sing-song, melismatic mode of delivery
often seems at odds with the “modernity” (or the “factuality”)
of Pound’s subject matter.
1942: He Do the Enemy
in Different Voices (Canto
XLVI)
No
account of Pound’s voice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
can afford to ignore the some 120 speeches he recorded
for broadcast on Radio Rome between early 1941 and mid July 1942—the
texts of which have been published in Leonard W. Doob, ed., “Ezra
Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978). These broadcasts led to
Pound’s indictment for treason by a Federal Grand Jury
in late July, 1943 and then to his internment at the U.S. Army’s
prison camp in Pisa in mid-1945 and subsequent institutionalization
for insanity at St. Elizabeths, the federal mental hospital in
Washington D.C., until 1958—thirteen years of confinement
in all, from which he never really recovered.
At
the root of this legal and medical disaster lay the medium
of radio (this “devil box,” as Pound prophetically
called it). As early as 1924, a mere two years after
the BBC had started regular programming, Pound was (in an unpublished
letter to his father Homer) already comparing the montage technique
of his Cantos to the medley of voices produced by turning a radio
dial; in a 1940 letter he again notes of radio that “I
anticipated the damn thing in first third of Cantos.” (L,
343). A similar fascination with radio informs his
estimate of Lenin’s speeches in the Autumn 1928 issue of
his expatriate magazine Exile: “. . . the Russian
revolution owes its success to Marconi. You may verify
this by reference to John Reed’s 10 Days that Shook
the World. The Bolshevik coup d’état could
not have been effected without wireless; the other means of communication
were sabotaged.” Lenin, he continued, “is more
interesting than any surviving stylist. He probably never
wrote a single brilliant sentence. . . but he invented
. . . a new medium, something between speech and action (language
as cathode ray) which is worthy of any writer’s study.” Radio,
this “new medium” of performative utterance, which
opens up an entirely modern mode of revolutionary praxis situated “between
speech and action” by demonstrating (to quote Austin) “how
to do things with words,” is of course the technology
that prompted Pound’s fidelity to the revolutionary Logos
of Lo Stato Fascista. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935),
he registers the apostolic moment of illumination he underwent
when listening to His Master’s Voice outlining the new
fascist economic reforms in a radio broadcast from Milan in 1934—a
variation on the Augustinian moment of conversion (“take
it and hear”).[11]
Radio
makes its first explicit appearance in Pound’s epic in
a section of Canto XXXVIII, first published in 1933, which briefly
evokes the reception at the Vatican of Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer
of wireless telegraphy, putative Italian inventor of radio and
recipient of the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on
electromagnetic waves. Marconi’s 1933 audience with
Pope Pius XI (which rhymes with Pound’s own personal audience
with Il Duce that very same year) is staged as an allegorical
encounter between those immaterial radiances of form-giving energy
shared both by modern science and medieval Christianity--radio
(whose etymology Pound understood in terms of Dante’s
or Cavalcanti’s radiare or the Curie’s radium)
here meeting religion. This, at any rate, was how Pound
saw (or heard) things in anno XII of the era fascista. By
the time Pound had gotten to Canto LXXII (first published in
January, 1945, in Italian, toward the end of World War II), the
radio broadcasts from the dead that Pound’s epic had now
been channeling for some twenty-five years were becoming increasingly
garbled. Writing in the persona of Dante (are we in Paradise
or Hell?),
the narrator of this Canto encounters Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
who declares: “I
sang war, and you wanted peace./ Both of us blind, me to the
inner things/ you the things of today.” Twirling
his prophetic radio dial, Dante-Pound then hears another voice
on the airwaves—that of his old friend, the archivist Manlio
Torquato Dazzi, translator of Mussato’s thirteenth-century
Latin drama Eccerinus (whose central character is the
bloody tyrant Ezzelino da Romano). As Dazzi begins citing
his translation, this necromantic radio transmission (meant to
raise EZzelino from the dead) is suddenly interrupted by a burst
of static:
But
[he] did not finish the verse
Because
all the air trembled and the shadows trembled as with
a
collapse
As
thunder shaking the rain,
blazing
phrases without sense shot thru the rain,
A
grating noise inside the submarine when the beam strikes it,
I
heard the spirit as if in torture.
(Cantos,
434)
This Marinetti Canto ends ambiguously—a hellish Babel
of radio voices counterpoised with the troubadour harmonies of
paradisal birdsong:
Confusion
of voices as from several transmitters, broken phrases,
And
many birds singing in counterpoint/In the summer
morning
(
Cantos, 436)
Uncannily, these lines of January 1945 point directly ahead
to the acoustic landscape of the Pisan Cantos composed
that same summer: “a confusion of voices” and “broken
phrases” emanating from the MASH-like loudspeakers of the
U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center and from the conversations
of Pound’s fellow (African American) inmates (or “shades”),
fugally interwoven with the “counterpoint” of the
birds singing on the barbed wire of the prison camp (or on the
staves of the poet’s own memory).
Pound
had landed in the stockade at Pisa for a single reason: in the
eyes of the U.S. government he was guilty of acts of treason
for having delivered over a hundred “speeches” for
the Italian Broadcasting System (a/k/a Radio Rome) after the
U.S. went to war with the Axis in December, 1941—thus (as
the Federal Grand Jury indictment of 1943 read) “knowingly,
intentionally, willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, traitorously
and treasonably did [he] adhere to the enemies of the United
States, to wit, the Kingdom of Italy.” This
is of course not the place to go into the full legal debate about
this indictment or the poet’s subsequent trial in 1945-46
(Pound, at any rate, would continue to insist that treason had
never been his “intent” and that he was merely exercising
his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech). It
is nonetheless worth underscoring what kinds of “acts” Pound
was engaged in on Radio Rome: not spontaneous improvisations,
but rather carefully scripted (and relatively well-paid) performances. Pound
first started writing for radio toward the end of 1940, his scripts
being read in English by regular speakers employed by the Italian
Ministry of Popular Culture. In January, 1941 he
was given permission to record his own speeches, which were broadcast,
on an average, twice a week until the fall of Mussolini’s
government in July 1943. Pound typed out his speeches in
advance—often inserting slash marks instead of punctuation
to define what Charles Olson might have called the “breath
units” of his “projective prose” (this typographical
prosody has unfortunately been eliminated in Doob’s transcription
of the manuscripts of the radio speeches; Olga Rudge’s
pamphlet of 1946, If This Be Treason, however, maintains
it for the most). After composing his scripts, Pound would
apparently practice them aloud in his Rapallo home in order to
perfect his delivery and would then travel down to Rome where
he recorded them on discs at the studios of the Minculpop (Ministry
of Popular Culture) on the via Veneto, often in batches of twenty,
receiving 350 lira [about $18 U.S.] per recording.
As his biographer Humphrey Carpenter notes, Pound soon began
to regard himself as something of an expert on radio technique,
offering the Rome Radio staff tips on how to jazz up their American
Hour (although, given the overall incoherence of Pound’s
speeches, certain Italian officials remained convinced he might
be an American spy broadcasting in secret code). At any rate,
Pound, ever the “professional” vocalist and musician,
sent in technical reports on the quality of his own radio transmissions,
observing for example in July 1941, “Excellent delivery
last night. Voice absolutely clear and every word ‘visible,’ except
for a few Orful KRRumpzzz! of static or atmospheric or whatever
that BLITZED out a few phrases—afraid ‘scum at the
top’ [a typical Ezraic reference to (Jewish) bankers and
arms manufacturers] was lost in the thunder.” He
carefully assessed the rhetorical ploys needed to grab the attention
of his audience: “Nothing solemn or formal will hold the
American auditor. If I don’t sound a bit cracked
and disjointed, they will twirl the button and listen to the
next comic song.” To his new pen-pal William
Joyce (better known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” later executed
by the British for his broadcasts from Germany), Pound wrote
about his radio broadcasts: “New technique for Uncle Ez.
. . I think I have got my voice right at last” (Carpenter,
588, 592-93).
Though
Pound thought he had gotten his voice “right” in
these radio speeches, his daughter Mary realized just how wrong
he was going: “his own tongue was tricking him, running
away with him, leading him into excess, away from his pivot,
into blind spots”[12] —which
suggests that these broadcasts are perhaps best approached psychoanalytically
(cf. Jeffery Mehlman on Walter Benjamin’s radio stories
for children) as a kind of extended “talking cure” or
twisted Song of Myself (with Ezra consistently mistaking himself
for his obscene Doppelgänger, Usura). On
another level, working as he was in the populist medium of radio,
here at last was expatriate Pound’s chance (after the completion
of the Adams Cantos) to finally seal his pact with Walt Whitman,
allowing all of America’s “barbaric yawp” to
ventriloquize itself through the microphone of Radio Rome. As
biographer Charles Norman observes: “With his gift
for mimicry, and reveling in his role of air-borne explainer
and cracker-barrel philosopher, Pound gave many of his talks
in stage-American sectional accents—if Yankee, more nasal
than anything ever heard north of Boston, is western, more ‘folksy’ and
drawling than anything ever heard west of the Mississippi, which
may be saying a great deal. But in flat Pennsylvania accents
he was vituperative, with a degree of abusiveness that seemed
incredible in a man of his background and education.” [Norman,
p. 387].
Though they could be easily heard in the U.S. on short-wave
radio during the war (William Carlos Williams, for example, was
furious when he learned from the FBI that Pound had mentioned
him in one of his 1942 broadcasts), these speeches, now fallen
silent, deserve to be more fully integrated into any study of
the Pound Sound. The FCC’s recordings of the broadcasts
(in the public domain) are housed in the National Archives II
in College Park, Maryland and a number of them have been copied,
digitized and transcribed by Benjamin Friedlander—but there
is still clearly a great deal of archival work to be done in
this area (at approximately ten minutes per broadcast, the FCC
recordings come to some twenty hours). Prof. Friedlander
has generously provided the digitized copy he made at the NARA
of Pound’s February 12, 1942 broadcast, which is almost
entirely given over to his reading of Canto
XLVI, first published
in the first issue of New Directions in Prose and Poetry in
1936. Given its colloquial passages and central economic
theme (centered on the foundation of the Bank of England by Paterson
in 1694—that “hath benefit of interest on all/the
moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing”), this
Canto shows just how permeable the boundary is between the Pound’s “poetry” of
the thirties and his polemical “prose” (especially
the performative utterances of the radio broadcasts).
Like
all his radio speeches made after Pearl Harbor, the broadcast
is introduced by a staff member of Radio Rome who reads a statement
that Pound himself had prepared (and which he subsequently claimed
should have exonerated him from any charges of treason):
The
Italian radio, acting in accordance with the fascist policy of
intellectual freedom and free expression of opinion by those
who are qualified to hold it, following in the tradition of Italian
hospitality, has offered Dr. Ezra Pound the use of the microphone
twice a week. It is understood that he will not be
asked to say anything whatsoever that goes against his conscience,
or anything incompatible with his duties as a citizen of the
United States of America.
This is followed by Pound’s own introduction to his
reading of Canto 46—one of the very rare instances, given
what he imagines to be his mass audience, when he actually glosses
the allusions and references in his poetry. Here it is,
with all the skips of the phonograph needle, in Friedlander’s
transcription (which differs slightly from the script given in
Doob, p. 35):
Europe calling. Ezra Pound speaking. I’m reading
you another Canto for diverse reasons. Contains things
or at least hints at things that you will have to know sooner
or later. Berle or no Berle [one of Roosevelt’s economic
advisors]. War or no war. And as I stated last
time I’m feeding you the footnotes first in case there
is any possible word that might not be easily comprehended. The ‘decennio” and
the “decennio exposition” was the exposition. . .
was the exhibition in Rome at the end of the first ten years
of the fascist regime, Mussolini’s fascist regime. They
set up the office, model of the office of the old Popolo d’Italia. Very
like what had been the New Age office in London. Except
that Orage’s office [Orage was the editor of the New
Age, to which Pound frequently contributed between 1910 and
1920] contained a couple of [inaudible: i.e. “drawings
by Max Beerbom”] which have never been published. Listening
to the [skip] commission sat after the other war, listening
to the [skip] commission sat after the other war, listening
to the sins of the British financial system. [I.e. “The
Macmillan Commission sat after the other war [in 1929] to look
into the sins of the British financial system”]. Antonius
Pius, a Roman emperor. Lex Rhodi, the law of Rhodes. Well,
I says about that in the Canto, as you can see. The Latin
phrase “aurum est commune sepulchrum” means “gold
is the common sepulcher.” Common grave of all men. It
parallels a line about Troy being the common grave. I
think it is part of a line by Propertius. But it don’t
matter who it’s quoted from. The greek “helandros
kai helepolitis kai helarxe” is more or less twisted from
a line of Aeschylus about Helen of Troy, the destroyer of m[en]
[skip] destroyer of cities. Geryon or Geryone
is an allegorical beast in Dante’s hell. Symbol
of fraud and all dirtiness. The “si monumentum” is
a Latin tag meaning “if you’re [garbled] from
a monument.” Uh, and the other phrase, “hic
est hyperusura,” known as “this is extra strong usury.” Super
usury. All right now I’m going on with Canto
six. . . forty-six.”
After Pound signs off (“That’s the end of ‘Canto
Forty-Six.’ Ezra Pound speaking.”), the announcer
informs listeners that the next event will be the Concert of
Opera Selections—in this case the overture to Rossini’s The
Rogue Dulac. Pound’s broadcasts were almost always
followed by music: in an irony almost too good to be true,
one of Pound’s most sulfurous ravings (“With Phantoms,” May
18 1942, which contains an explicit endorsement of Hitler’s
racial theories and praise for Mein Kampf) is followed
by selections from Arrigo Boito’s opera Mephistopheles. For a further sampling of Pound’s Rome radio voicings, listeners are directed to the PennSound Radio Speeches page
St. Elizabeths: “Bird
in Cage Does Not Sing”
Imprisoned
in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Detention Center at Pisa from May
24 through Nov. 17, 1945 then flown back to Washington D.C. to
stand trial for treason, Pound was found to be of “unsound
mind” at a hearing on Feb. 13, 1946 and committed to St.
Elizabeths, a federal mental hospital in Washington, until esteemed
fit enough to understand the nature of the charges brought against
him. Initially interned in Howard Hall, the “penal
colony” of the hospital—where he was visited on a
fairly regular basis by Charles Olson—Pound suffered from
the same claustrophobia he had experienced at the DTC in Pisa
and complained about the racket made by the mental patients on
the ward outside his cell. When offered a radio by
a doctor to help drown out the circumambient din, he angrily
rejected the offer, observing that radio was “just plain
noise.” (Carpenter, 727). Many of those who
came to visit Pound at St. Elizabeths—even after he was
moved into the more humane (and more private) confines of Chesnut
Ward in 1947—commented on the oppressive acoustic environment
in which Pound was forced to live. Here is old friend
Ronald Duncan’s account of a 1948 visit:
An attendant or warder led me through miles of inhospitable
corridors swarming with noisy inmates. The noise
and echoes reminded me of a public swimming bath. . . . [His]
room. . . contained an iron bed, chaos of clothes and a
muddle of magazines and paper. . . We had to shout
at each other even in his cell because a large television set
outside in the corridor blared away. “They try to
reduce us idiots to the level of insanity outside,” Ezra
confessed. . . . “Have you written any poems in here?” I
asked. “Birds don’t sing in cages.” We
didn’t mention poetry again (Carpenter, 776).
Or another anecdote, relayed by Charles Norman:
“One New Year’s Day, [Ronald] Goodman and [Robert]
Mezey found the screen and chairs where they usually sat with
Pound [in an alcove] gone. In their place,
was a television set, with patients watching the Rose Bowl game. They
were pretty noisy about it. Pound came storming out
of his room and exclaimed: “They’re trying to bring
the intelligence of the people on the inside down to the level
of the people on the outside” (Norman, 445).
Pound’s Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959),
the two “paradisal” sections of the Cantos that
Pound wrote at St. Elizabeths are probably the only two major
American poems ever written with (and against) a television running
continually in the background.
Pound’s
initial reaction to his incarceration at St. Elizabeths was to
retreat from all this oppressive “noise” into the
music of Confucius—or as he puts in at the beginning of
Canto XCIV: “To Kung, to avoid their encirclement / To
the Odes to escape abstract yatter.” Some of
the early nursing notes on Pound in Chestnut Ward run as follows “Stays
in his room most of his time. While in room constantly
hums. At times thru the night will have a light in
his room. Appears at times to be singing. Appears
to be correctly oriented. At times have heard him
humming some kind of tuneless chant at night” (Carpenter,
779). In addition to completing of his versions of the
two Confucian Classics, The Unwobbling Pivot and The
Great Digest, on which he had already begun work at Pisa
and which James Laughlin published in 1947 (the poet having insisted
that these texts would provide the basis for his legal defense
against charges of treason), Pound was over the course of 1946
and 1947 already deep at work—humming and singing--on draft
translations of the Confucian Odes. Helped by Veronica Sun, a
student at Catholic University who read the Odes aloud to him,
in a series of nine “Sound Notebooks” dated from
May to June of 1947 he recorded the transliterations he had made
of each of the 305 poems that would eventually appear as The
Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, published by
Harvard University Press in 1954.[13] Using
the Wade-Giles Mandarin readings given in Matthews’s
Chinese-English Dictionary as well as some of Karlgren’s
systems for transliterating the reconstructed archaic pronunciations
of the Odes, together with random examples of European romanization
(Pauthier, Lacharme, De Mailla), Pound was above trying to graph
the sounds of the Book of Songs as a kind of Pythagorean
music of the spheres—a music whose harmonies, subtending
and guaranteeing the totality of the cosmic and political and
domestic order of archaic China, would be able to counter—and
silence—the carceral “yatter” [Geschwätz] to
which he had now been condemned. By 1947, he was
writing the Japanese poet Kitaue Kitsano about his project for
a major bilingual edition of the Confucian Odes, a “scholar’s
edition” of the Shih Ching (as the anthology was
known in Chinese) that would include his English translation,
a 588-page “singing key” (i.e. transliterations of
the Chinese sounds) to guide the oral chanting of the poems plus
a rubbing of the Stone-Classic text of the poems as well a reproduction
of the Chinese text written in ancient seal characters—a
four-dimensional musical and visual refraction of the poem. This
full “scholar’s edition” never appeared, though
there are indications that while at St. Elizabeths, Pound would
occasionally intone passages of the Odes to visitors from the
romanized “singing key” he had devised.
Among
the growing stream of visitors to St. Elizabeths in the early
fifties were two young recent graduates of Hunter College, Barbara
Cohen (later Holdridge) and Marianne Roney (later Mantell). Having
been completely bowled over by a reading that Dylan Thomas had
given at the 92nd St. Y in New York City, the two
young women asked whether the Welsh bard would agree to participate
in a recording session of his work. He obliged with a reading
of a handful of his poems and of “A Child’s
Christmas in Wales”—which in 1952 would become the
first release of their newly founded company Caedmon Records. Caedmon, given
its subsequent collection of recordings by such writers as e.e.
cummings, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams,
T.S. Eliot, and Carl Sandburg, did much to launch the whole “Spoken
Word” industry (and indeed, college campus readings by
writers) during the 50s and 60s. Having managed to
get Dylan Thomas, the two young woman decided to have shot at il
miglior fabbro. Here is how Marianne Mantell later
described their initial encounter on Labour Day, 1952.
We first met Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital, whence
we had gone uninvited, after our letters remained unanswered,
in the hope of persuading him to record. It was a faint
hope, and on it we staked close to our last $20.00 to take the
midnight bus to Washington. The institution’s
chief psychiatrist warned us that Pound might rave; but he let
us in, and hid us in a corner of the ward. Pound
was told we were there: he might ignore us or not, as he chose. It
was a fearsome exposition for a gentle denouement. We came
to Pound, as most people come to Pound’s poetry, with uncertainty
and a feeling of less than total sympathy. Pound
came to us as a teacher to his disciples, To him
we looked exactly like two girls who had spent close to their
last $20.00 on the midnight bus to Washington. He
did not even ask if we were hungry but bounced to the refectory,
then to his cubicle, bringing us slabs of bread mounded high
with mayonnaise. We loathed mayonnaise, but did our
best. Meanwhile Pound talked, of Confucius, Mussolini,
the habits of squirrels, the end of his friendship with Cummings
over an argument involving the language of blue-jays. If
he often sounded outrageous we imagined the outrage of others
when Pound first championed Frost, Joyce, and Eliot. A
man may be so far left he seems right, and so far right he seems
wrong. By the afternoon, he was ready to record—in
Provençal, and on our promise not to release the recording
while he was confined. “Bird in cage does not
sing,” he said, many times. The machine was
set up on the lawn, and Pound began to recite. These
lyrics are onomatopoetic, and as he sang of birds, the birds
perched overhead and sang too. In the background,
inmates hooted.
This account, taken from the liner notes of their 1958 Caedmon
recording of Pound reading, indicates in a footnote that this
1952 reading in Provençal “will be included in a
subsequent volume of Pound recordings.” Unfortunately,
it was never issued; and in a recent interview on National Public
Radio Barbara Holdridge indicated that she feared the recording
might have been lost: one only hopes it might be some day recovered
from the archive—motz el son, twittering birds,
hooting inmates and all.
Over
the course of the 50s, Barbara Holdridge and Hillary Mantell,
the young founders of Caedmon, encouraged by Archuibald MacLeish,
persevered in their attempts to record Pound at St. Elizabeths:
We kept going down to Washington on a sort of annual pilgrimage,
always with tape recorder in hand and with gradually less hunger
on our faces. By the summer of 1956, we could afford
a wheel of Provolone. We presented him with it and were
swallowed up at once in the concept of the Cantos. On
the following day, he brought the cheese out and swung it back
at us, saying we had thought to buy him with it. We
left the cheese, and never went back to see Pound. Of
such whim, luckily, history is not always made. Upon
his release from St. Elizabeths [April 19, 1958], his friend
and publisher, James Laughlin, finally persuaded him to make
this definitive recording of his poetry, before sailing from
these shores for his beloved Rapallo [on June 30].
The Caedmon recording of Pound, recorded in Washington D.C.
on June 12, 13. and 26, 1958, was issued as two LP records—the
first (Caedmon TC 1122), dated 1960 and including on its Side
A: 1. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 2. Cantico del sole, 3. Moeurs
contemporaines, and on Side B. 1.Canto I, 2. Canto IV, 3. Canto
XXVI, and 4. Canto LXXIV. Two years later in 1962,
Caedmon issued its vol. 2 of Ezra Pound Reading His Poetry (TC1155) —Side
One: Canto XLV, Canto LI, Canto LXXVI (second half), “The
Gypsy,” “Exile’s Letter,” and Side Two:
Canto XCIX.
These
two 1960-62 Caedmon LP’s of Pound reading (later made available
as two tape cassettes) are rightly considered the most “canonical” recordings
of his poetry. Finally “sprung” from “bug
house” (and, to his mind, finally vindicated), Pound’s
readings of his poetry have a kind of confidence and playful
buoyancy that bespeak the 72-year-old poet’s rediscovery
of liberty after thirteen years of incarceration—song-bird
at last released from its cage. Some of the material
reprises the Harvard 1939 recordings. Pound for example
takes evident pleasure in once again satirically reminding
his benighted countrymen (in the poem “Cantico del sole)
that “The thought of what American would be like/If the
Classics had a wide circulation/Troubles my sleep.” And
as in 1939, he vents his prophetic wrath against Leihkapital in
the Usura Cantos (Canto XLV and Canto LI). His reading
of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, now twenty years later, not
only further underscores the prosodic intricacies of the poem
(there are moments when his phrasing is as quirky as Bob Dylan’s),
but also, by its omission of the final section of Part
I (“Envoi (1919)”) and the final section of
Part II (“Medallion”) provides further fuel to critical
controversy as to the overall structure of the poem (or the relation
of its “E.P.” persona to Pound’s authorial
voice).
Also evident in these 1958 recordings is the re-Americanization
of Pound’s expat English pronunciation over the course
of his 13 years of confinement at St. Elizabeths. The
American inflections come through loud and clear in “Soiree,” the
third of his comic “Moeurs contemporaines” series,
as well as in the “Mr. Nixon” section of Mauberley—though
the bravura performance of echt American speech is reserved
for the beginning of his reading of Canto LXXXIV, the last of
the Pisan Cantos. The other Canto Pound chose
from the Pisan sequence—a selection from Canto LXXVI—provides
an provocative instance of Pound using the recording medium to
override the censorship to which his text was subjected in its
published form. All the New Directions editions
of this Canto contain the following lines:
Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel
States of
mind are inexplicable to us.
dakruôn dakruôn dakruôn [Greek
characters, meaning “weeping”]
L. P. gli
onesti
J’ai
eu pitié des autres
Probablement pas assez, and at moments
that suited my own convenience
Le
paradis n’est pas artificiel
L’enfer
non plus
(Cantos,
480)
In this rare moment of contrition—Pound is typically
at his most “confessional” when speaking in languages
other than his mother tongue--the exact meaning of the letters “L.” and “P.” (here described
as being the “honest” or “honorable” ones, “gli
onesti”) had long been open to debate. But
in his 1958 recording of the poem, unrepentant about his past
sympathies for beleaguered fascists, Pound openly identifies
the Vichy figures on trial for treason in the summer of 1945
as [Pierre] Laval and [Henri Philippe] Pétain—the
poet’s voice here explicitly naming the names that ten
years earlier had been reduced to cryptic abbreviations on the
page. The other Cantos Pound chose to include
in this 1958 Caedmon recording are among the most well-known
of the work: Canto I (Odysseus's “descent” in
the underworld to consult with Tiresias), Canto IV (a palimpsest
of Roman and Provençal eros and its attendant ravages),
Canto XXXVI (Pound’s “traduction” of Cavalcanti’s
great canzone, “Donna mi pregha,”), as well as the
aforementioned selections from the
Pisans Cantos (which,
however, interestingly enough, do not include the celebrated
and much-anthologized “Pull down thy vanity” passage
from Canto LXXXI). By far the longest (and
the most difficult) text Pound reads for these 1958 Caedmon recordings
is Canto XCIX—which at over 23 minutes occupies the entire
side of an LP. Pound was no doubt eager to offer
his public a sample of the current portion of the Cantos he was
working on—
Thrones de los Cantares XCVI-CIX
would
be published (to general incomprehension) in 1959—but his
patient philological scrutiny of the rites and rituals prescribed
by the neo-Confucianist
Sacred Edict is clearly directed
at “advanced students” of the poem.
Canto XCIX is perhaps most famous (in Italy at least) because
Pier Paolo Pasolini chose to quote a recording of it (in Italian)
in the final “Hell” section of his 1975 film: Salò,
or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini had earlier
participated in an Italian documentary, “An Hour with Ezra
Pound,” filmed by R.A.I. Televisione Italiana in 1968 in
Venice. A translation by David Anderson of
Pasolini’s (and Vanni Ronsivalle’s) “interview” with
Pound may be found in the Fall 1981 number of Paideuma,
and stills from this interview (showing Pound with the “idiot
cards” he had prepared as written responses to Pasolini’s
questions) are reproduced in Vittorugo Contino’s Ezra
Pound in Italy (NY: Rizzoli, 1978). In
his film Salò, Pasolini continues to explore his
extremely ambivalent relation to Pound—whose delusional
belief in Mussolini’s Salò Republic as a last-ditch
effort to transform Fascism into a kind of Platonic-Confucian
Utopia is recorded in the Pisan Cantos. The
Salò of Pasolini’s film, by contrast, is a graphic
study in the sustained sadism generated by what its director
calls “the anarchy of absolute power”—and because
it represents an extreme example of an Artaud-like “cinema
of cruelty,” the film was banned in numerous countries
upon its initial release. Toward the very end of
the film, as one of the sadistic Masters of the castle of Salò is
voyeuristically observing through opera glasses the scenes of
unimaginable torture and cruelty in the courtyard below his windows
(sodomy, rack and screws, scalping, gouging out of eyes, cutting
off of tongues), the radio that has been playing in the background
suddenly announces “Poetry Corner: Ezra Pound Canto
99” and as the Master sits in his salon (whose walls are
decorated with the finest examples of Italian Futurist art) gazing
out at the unspeakable acts taking place below, the following
Pound lines are heard in Italian translation:
Rail; scold and ructions; manesco [Ital: “rough,” “brutal”]
And
the whole family suffers.
The whole tribe is from one man’s
body,
What
other way can you think of it?
The surname, and the 9 arts.
The
father’s word is compassion;
The
son’s, filiality.
The
brother’s word: mutuality;
The
younger’s word: deference.
Small birds sing in chorus,
Harmony is in the proportion of branches
As
clarity
(Cantos,
728)
Like so much in Pasolini’s Salò,
this act of quotation cuts several different ways. Are
these eternal verities of neo-Confucianism, here articulated
by the compressed Chinese of the classic Sacred Edict,
meant to provide a curative glimpse of that familial, statal,
and natural order and harmony so lacking from the sadistic anarchy
that is playing out in front of our voyeuristic eyes? Or
is Pound’s vision of the “totalitarian” (an
adjective he primarily understands in its Confucian sense of
the “total process”) instead here being implicated
in the utter horror that Salò represents for an extreme
leftist like Pasolini—just as the Futurist furnishings
of the interior in these scenes bespeak the complicity of a certain
Italian vanguardism (read: Marinetti) with fascism in its most
deranged form?
Tempus loquendi, tempus
tacendi
On
June 30, 1958, four days after having completed his recordings
for Caedmon, Pound sailed for Italy, declaring to reporters upon
his arrival in Naples that “All America is an insane asylum.” Settling
at the home of his daughter Mary and her husband, the Egyptologist
Boris de Rachewiltz, in a castle above Merano, Pound’s
initial euphoria over his release from St. Elizabeths was followed
by exhaustion and depression. The three following
years saw his health and spirits decline—although he continued
at times to write, notably those texts later published in 1969
as Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII and “Conversations
in Courtship,” based on Boris de Rachewiltz’s Italian
rendition of an ancient Egyptian manuscript. His
mental and physical conditions failing, he was briefly hospitalized
in the Martinsbrunn Clinic near Merano in the fall of 1960 and
again in 1961, when it was discovered he was suffering
from a serious prostate condition. In the early spring
of 1962, he moved back into the vicinity of his former
Sant’Ambrogio
home above
Rapallo, residence of his longtime companion Olga Rudge. For
the next ten years, under her care, he would divide his time
between Sant’Ambrogio and her house on the Calle Querini
in Venice. Whether out of sheer despondency, remorse,
or terminal fatigue, Pound fell into a protracted silence. During
this final decade of his life (1962-1972), in the privacy of
their home, Olga Rudge occasionally tape-recorded him, partially
(it would seem) to create a kind of feedback loop that might
jumpstart his voice back into speech again, and partially to
simply archive him reading his own texts (and those of others,
such as Beckett, Flann O’Brian, T.S. Eliot, Yeats etc.)--which
she would subsequently play back to him for his pleasure.
Bridson’s BBC “Readings and Recollections” (1959)
D.G. Bridson, a Social Creditor from Orage’s New English Weekly circle in the 30s and
producer of a performance of Pound’s translation of Sophocles Women of Trachis for BBC’s
Third Programme in April 1954, traveled to St. Elizabeths at the end of 1956 with recording
equipment in order to capture what he thought might be Pound’s swan song, convinced as
he was that the poet’s health was failing and that he might well die in captivity. Dr.
Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths, made one of the doctor’s common rooms
available for the recording. Pound insisted that the choice of poems be left entirely up to
him and that the broadcast (should it in fact ever take place) be utterly uncensored. Bridson
later described the recording session in Agenda magazine:
Pound. . . chose to give his reading stretched out in an adjustable armchair where he could
rest the back of his neck on a cushion. This meant that the book had to be held above the
level of his eyes, and I perched myself on the arm of the chair to hold the microphone at the
proper angle for him—this despite his initial urge to seize it himself and use it like an old-
fashioned upright telephone. He seemed to have forgotten his Roman microphone training.
. . to my amusement, the reading started with some eight of the Alfred Venison poems—the
jaunty, satirical squibs which I remembered Pound having contributed to the New English
Weekly, for which we had both written in Orage’s day. In his persona of the rabbit’s-meat
dealer of Great Titchfield Street in the days of the Depression, he launched out in an
Americanized form of Cockney. . . The performance could only be described as bravura—as
could his reading of “L’Homme Moyen Sensuel” [his 1915 Byronic satire] with which he
followed it up. Some half dozen of the later Cantos—including a splendidly virulent
rendition of the “Usura” Canto—concluded the afternoon’s work (Carpenter, 824).
Pound afterwards explained this eccentric choice of poems to David Rattray [who wrote a
piece entitled “Weekend with Ezra Pound” for the Nov. 16, 1957 issue of The Nation]: “I
conceived the whole thing more or less as a ribbing for Eliot. . . I just wanted to give the old
boy a jolt, some time when he’s settling down for a nice cozy evening, if he turns on the
Third Programme. I chose the ones he likes the least” (ibid.).
Bridson’s recordings of Pound at Elisabeths were never released. In April 1959, however,
he travelled to Pound’s new home at Brunnenburg Castle with a BBC crew to record and to
film Pound. Bits and pieces of the film may be seen in Lawrence Pitkethly’s 1988
documentary, Ezra Pound: An American Odyssey (available on Youtube), while the sound
recordings that Bridson made were broadcast on BBC’s Third Programme in July 1959
under the title “Ezra Pound: Readings and Reflections.” The series was divided into three
separate programs: 1) “The Early Years” (with readings from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Homage
to Sextus Propertius, “Moeurs contemporaines,” “Cantico del sole”); 2) “The Cantos”(with
readings of Cantos I, XIII, XLV, XLIX, CI); and 3) “The Later Years” (with readings
from The Classic Anthology as Defined by Confucius,” the Egyptian “Conversations in Courtship”
and Joel Chandler Harris’s “De Tar-Baby Story,” which Pound enjoyed reading to his
grandchildren at Brunnenburg). Someday, perhaps these recordings will surface from the
depths of the BBC Third Programme Archives. In the meantime, however, a two-part
condensed version of these “Readings and Recollections” broadcast has come to light
(apparently recorded on two LPs in 1963), also narrated by Bridson and based on his
interviews with Pound at Brunnenburg in the spring of 1959, before the poet’s spirits began
seriously sagging. A complete transcript of Bridson’s conversations with Pound may be
found in New Directions 17 (1961), 159-184, under the title “An Interview with Ezra Pound.”
We have transcribed below those portions of the interview contained in the edited-down
two-part series featured here (they represent about three-quarters of the conversations
collected in the 1961 New Directions annual, Pound’s last major interview before his 1960
interview with Donald Allen published in the Paris Review in 1962). Bridson has inserted into
his dialogues with Pound the poet’s readings from “Homage to Sextus Propertius”(sections
VI and VIII; LOA, 535-536; 538-539), as well as Pound’s two old warhorses, unusually
strong declamations of Canto I (the nekuia) and Canto XLV (the Usura Canto). The most
remarkable—and melopoetic—of these 1959 Brunnenburg readings are drawn from
Pound’s translations of the Confucian Odes: Ode 98 (LOA, 804), Ode 105 (LOA, 807), Odes
57 (LOA, 783), and Ode 208 (LOA, 887), accompanied by Pound’s commentaries on the
role of onomatopoeia in these poems. These readings, done when Pound was seventy-four,
have a gusto to them that is far more pronounced than recordings of the Confucian Odes
produced by Olga Rudge in 1970, when Pound was eighty-five (see below). But the most
remarkable aspect of Bridson’s 1959 gathering of these “Readings and Recollections” is
simply the conversational presence of Pound’s newly re-Americanized voice—at ease, within
his tower study at Brunnenburg, speaking not in the hysterical and parodic “Murkn’”(as he
called it) of his scripted Radio Rome shock jock broadcasts, in but more casual,
extemporaneous cadences, at times evocative of the Wyncote, Pa. suburbs of his youth, with
a shade of mid-Atlantic states drawl picked up after his thirteen years in American captivity,
first at the DTC in Pisa and then in the “bughouse” in Washington D.C., all mixed in with
upper Midwesternisms, Britishisms, Scottish burrs and Gallicisms. Pound can shift accents
within the range of a single sentences, many of whose clauses end in underlined emphases,
by vocal capitalization, as it were. With all its anaphoric “ands,” Pound’s garrulity here is
very close to the speech rhythms of the Cantos—a poem, like Pound’s conversation, bound
together not by a single voice, but by many voices.
Transcript of Bridson’s “Ezra Pound: Readings and Recollections (1961 recording):
BRIDSON:
In 1958 Ezra Pound returned to the Italy where he had already lived for more than twenty
years. The recordings you’re about to hear were made at the Castle or Brunnenburg, near
Merano, where Pound was staying with his daughter, Princess Mary de Rachewiltz. Pound
is now in his seventies, but remains as forthright and trenchant as ever. The thirteen years
that he spent at St. Elizabeths Hospital have left very little outward effect on him, though he
tires fairly easily in the mountain air. His study at the castle is high up in the central tower,
with a magnificent view of the mountain peaks that rise about the head of the valley. The
room is packed with his books and papers—Chinese calligraphy well to the fore—and
Gaudier-Brzeska’s well-known black-and-white profile of him propped against the wall
above his desk. There we spent some three or four afternoons, with Pound stretched out on
his bed, talking and reading from his poetry. Down below in the garden—facing the west,
where the first gleam of sunrise catches the snow-covered mountain top—was Gaudier’s
famous four-foot high bust of Pound, for which the profile had been a preliminary sketch.
POUND:
Gaudier made about a hundred of those heads, not with any known instrument—it was a
little, flat, pliable stick. He did about a hundred of them, and I think most of them got torn
up before he did the big marble head.
BRIDSON:
The part that Ezra Pound played in securing recognition for Gaudier’s work is well-known.
POUND:
Gaudier was the most absolute case of genius I’ve ever run into, and they killed off an awful
lot of sculpture when they shot him. You’ve got to consider that all his sculpture was made
during three years. If Sophie Suzanne [Brzeska] hadn’t got him out of France and smuggled
him over to England, he would have been doing his military service—the preparations for
military service—and he never would have done anything. Then he went back and he was
killed at Neuville St. Vaast, which is the kind of wastage you get in a war.
BRIDSON:
I talked with Pound about his early days in Paris—and the recent exhibition, “American
Expatriate of the Twenties.”
POUND:
Well, the twenties didn’t start anything. Good God, I saw Paris for the first time in 1898
and I was wandering around Paris in 1906 with a Celt-Breton named Mathurin Dondo, who
was telling me about Paris at a time when Bert Hassler [student friend of Pound’s at U.
Penn] was cursing Mr. Dondo, who was a mild-mannered man, “You dirty Frenchman
coming over here to corrupt our country.” Well, Dondo was then doing most romantic
stuff in the style of de Musset, and I don’t think he published a book until about two years
ago and then he came out and published one of the few books of contemporary French
verse I can read with pleasure. Flint, you see, thinks he told me all about Paris and French
poetry. Well, good God, I think it was 1906 that Catulle Mendès’s widow had dumped all
his library that she couldn’t sell dumped on the quais there, at five cents a volume. I mean
books by Auguste Suallou and Thibaudeau de Mesnil and so on, dedicated to Catulle
Mendès, à la gloire de la deffense de la langue francoyse, Catulle Mendès, and so on. And one started
to try to weed this stuff out.
BRIDSON:
Pound came to London in 1910 but his early years in London were anything but
prosperous. He told me about his early digs.
POUND:
In Islington I saw “12/6 a week: Bed and Board,” but after three days—I don’t know what
the deuce they did to the food there—I compounded for bed and breakfast. And then
Langham Street. And then I went out to Hammersmith for 3/6. It was fairly small
quarters—there was a slide where you put your suitcase out on a shelf over the hall. But the
threepenny bus fare cut off anything in the nature of economy. Then I found Kensington
Graveyard.
BRIDSON:
12/6 a week or in those days $2.50, bed and breakfast for 6o cents. It wouldn’t
go far in London today. Most of the lesser poets that Pound knew in prewar London are
now forgotten. He remembered some of them among his friends.
POUND:
I would like to see an anthology of the lost poets in England who did one or two good
poems. Well, Grace Rhys, who wrote as well as her husband, and [Maurice] Hewlitt, Sutton
Pickard, Fred Manning. . . There was Margaret Sackville, who was my despair when I first
got to England—of course it was Swinburnian to some extent—but she started off a poem:
The night forgets the day
And there is no rumour left in any place of twilight.
And there was Joe Bromley, and somebody [Patricia Hutchins] was going to do a book on
Kensington. Well, if they do the people who were in Kensington instead of hunting around
for inferior inédits that would be a blessing.
BRIDSON:
Pound has done more than most people to secure recognition for the work of those in
whom he believes. But he pretends to see it otherwise.
POUND:
It might be amusing to know that no established publisher has ever accepted a book on my
recommendation since Elkin Matthews took old William Michael Rosetti’s translation of the
Convito. Oh, it is true there was a near escape. There was a guy [i.e. Charles Olson] who did
a book on Melville, and I was so glad to see a short book that saved me the trouble of
reading Melville that I recommended to the Reverend Eliot. He thought it might be done,
you see, and he recommended it to a firm in New York, and they printed it on his
recommendation. And then he decided it needn’t be done in England, so that was a narrow
escape. The author was annoyed because he thought I’d made an enemy for him because a
fellow named Matthiessen had turned it down and they overrode him. And there was
another near escape when I had been plaguing a friend of mine to reprint Doctor Williams’
In the American Grain, which is about the best thing he ever did. Well Mr. Laughlin, he
wouldn’t touch it on my recommendation but finally my wife told him to do it and he did it!
Those are the two narrowest escapes, but otherwise my record with the established
publishers is absolutely clean and zero. Maybe if instead of giving free advice I had insisted
on getting a two thousand dollar fee for it, maybe they’d take it seriously!
BRIDSON:
One of the earliest influences in Pound’s own poetry, of course, was the work of Robert
Browning.
POUND:
I learned from Browning and I am still learning from Dante. Now that doesn’t mean that
Browning has been exhausted. The whole of the novel in England after Browning is
indebted to Browning. And then again there is a whole lot of Browning that has never been
built on. Stuff like the Inn Album, and so on. Young people don’t see the awful
amount—or the magnificent amount—of work that is lyin’ around ready to do and that
hasn’t been done. . . they think there is nothing left to write.
BRIDSON:
The Browning influence can still be heard in “Homage to Sextus Propertius,”
poetry in which the first echo of the Cantos can also be heard. Here is the reading that
Pound made for me of two of the poems from the sequence:
POUND:
[Pound reads sections VI and VIII of “Homage to Sextus Propertius”]
BRIDSON:
I was interested in the very distinctive style which Pound brings to his poetry reading. Apart
from the Scots rolling of the “R,” I seemed to find in it also an echo of W.B. Yeats.
POUND:
My reading style, I believe, has altered a little since we used to meet at the horrible place
called the “The Tour Eiffel” with Stulich’s protruding stomach and bulbous nose to enhance
the flavor of the food. [T.E.] Hulme discovered the place and Wyndham [Lewis] had credit
there. And I read the bloody Sestina one night and a week later Stulich comes round with a
screen and puts it round the table and says, “Gentlemen, you can make all the noise that you
like.” I believe that what [Ford Maddox] Ford called my “Northumbrian” was more
emotional at that period. I suppose one is more emotional at twenty-whatever-it-was. And
Yeats’s reading. . . well, in the first place he had Florence Farr who really could read. . . and
then Yeats, his means of getting, or seeing his rhythm, was pulling out the vowels: “Made a
great peacock in the pri-ide of his e-y-e”—that kind of thing. I don’t know where he got to
later. . . I think my reading now shows more interest in the meaning of what I’ve got on the
page. I know when we were down in Syracusa, out in the Greek theater there, and he
wanted me to read something—I suppose he wanted me to read something of his or recite
something—and I found that the only thing one could do out in the open like that—the
only thing I remember you could speak clear enough to get it across—was Sappho’s poem
Poikilothron—with whatever Greek pronunciation of mispronunciation I use of it. But I have
no idea how he read after 1920.
BRIDSON:
The literary London of Pound’s earlier years was largely dominated by Bernard
Shaw. But for either Shaw or the Fabians Pound did not have much to say. His own beliefs
were very different.
POUND:
Now, when it comes to education there are two things that everybody ought to hear about at
the age of sixteen and think about when they get to college or university. One of em is the
issue of money and the other’s is the tax system. Now Socialism has always appeared to me
to be idiocy, and the M.S.I [Movimento Sociale Italiano]—that’s a label they’ve got on a
party here—had a paper and they printed a statement of mine to that effect. (Of course,
whenever I put in a plug for free speech, I get accused of endorsing the whole program of
whoever permits it.) Well, about Socialism: what you had in England—you had the stuffed
Webbs and you had the pusillanimous Mr. Shaw. As for the Webbs, even the adoring
Margaret Postgate remembered Beatrice saying, “Now we’ve found out what to do with the
infants and the agèd and the infirm and the feeble-minded—and what are we going to do
with the able-bodied men?” And as for Mr. Shaw, that old character wrote me about Ulysses
that he just couldn’t stand reading it and that no book was worth three guineas. As a matter
of values, of course. . . the kind of thing that those bloody Fabians put up with in your
country and put over—Mr. Shaw’s “Aid to Culture”—one-cylinder civilization based on
abstract ideas.
BRIDSON:
The Ulysses to which Pound refers is of course the Ulysses of James Joyce. It is a
book with which Pound’s name is always associated. I asked him how he came to be
concerned with the work.
POUND:
Well it started when I did the first anthology, Des Imagistes, or the Imagists—which are to be
carefully distinguished from the “Amygists”—who took the one vital component—namely,
“to use no useless word”—out of their little manifesto program. When I was doing that, I
asked Yeats if there was anybody in Ireland fit to put into that volume. And he said there
was this buzzard off in Trieste, so I wrote to Joyce and put his “I Hear an Army” into that
collection. Then Dubliners had been sabotaged in Ireland and Dubliners finally got printed—I
forget how. Then we serialized the Portrait in The Egoist and then when the Little Review came
on—I don’t think The Egoist could get Ulysses printed in England—we started serializing it in
America and after the. . . I think the Little Review was suppressed first for Wyndham Lewis’s
Cantleman’s Spring Mate, but after it had been finally suppressed three or four times for Ulysses
and [John] Quinn had thought he was being clever to get the case before an intelligent judge,
who would keep postponing it until they could finish printing it, the damn judge says to Mr.
Quinn, “Oh, I suppose you would like to get this thing through as quickly as possible.” So
the Little Review was finally stopped in America—there’d been all this succès de scandale and so
on and all that publicity it led to—well, I mean, they’d heard about it in Paris. That’s all I
know about that publication.
BRIDSON:
Pound has always insisted upon the fact that the best and most useful criticism generally
comes from creative writers.
POUND:
I believe that the best critics are the men who do the job. They sometimes make an
intelligent remark before but they are more likely to do it afterwards. And they got out an
edition of Whitman now with a few bits of prose in it—he didn't spend his time writing
essays. But he was the best critic of American literature in his time and this collected volume
has got an interview with Emerson—or at least Whitman’s memory of his interview with
Emerson—which is a crackerjack. And the same way with Hemingway. I mean he didn’t
spend his time on flat-chested highbrow essays but he had sense enough to see that Ulysses
was the end and not a beginning. I mean the two halves—those who regard Ulysses as the
end of a period and then the zavorra, the decadence from it. Well, I mean Hem’s attitude to
some of these people. . . I remember a gentleman who has since had, ah, a certain amount
of publicity, and Hem looked at it, you see, and says, “Uh, can’t you see the son of a bitch in
ten years’ time sittin’ in an office turning some good guy down?”
BRIDSON:
We’ve probably already lived to see that happen. . . As it was, Pound himself remained a very
salutary and critical influence on his time. And nobody has assessed his part in those early
years more objectively than he did himself in the well-known self-portrait which he included
in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Literary London of those days was in fact was a world which we
now associate, nowadays, with Pound and his own particular group, with The Egoist and with
Little Review.
POUND:
As [John] Rodker said of the Little Review, the group at any rate exceed that of any other
group by four. It was started so you could have a place where Joyce and Wyndham Lewis
and Eliot and I could appear together. And after they’d squashed it in America as a monthly
it had to go on—it went to Paris—there wasn’t anything new at that level. We’d had Yeats
and Lady Gregory and Ford and Symons and we’d had as much of the good elder middle-
aged stuff as we could get—so we had to fall back on the arts and we ran a Brancusi
number. It was the first time he’d let anybody print photographs of his stuff. And then we
did a Picabia number.
BRIDSON:
Pound left London and followed the Little Review to Paris. And it was there that the painter
Francis Picabia became one of his friends.
POUND:
Francis Picabia was dangerous to be with—I mean, you had to watch your step or you’d fall
over it. When I was picking the stuff—he moved out of his country studio into a bourgeois
flat out by the Porte Maillot and he’d got his paintings hung up on the wall. . . “Oh yes, that
was a thing when I went down to the country to paint and tried to think that I liked it.”
Well, I said I’d take “that one and that one and that one, and no, not that one.” No, no
that one: that’s a Picasso.”
BRIDSON:
On the subject of Picasso himself, Pound also had something to add.
POUND:
Picasso would go on for a year making a new style and passin’ it off to the dealers—he’s a
great financial genius, whatever he is as an artist. Of course, he and Lewis are the two people
who had been through the mill—they’d done all the academic stuff, they weren’t merely
doing abstract art because they couldn’t do something else. But Picasso would have a new
style or something and at the end of the year Picabia would pick up a pencil and do five or
six squirls on a bit of paper: “Yes, here, this is what Picasso has been handing them for the
past six months.”
BRIDSON:
The Paris of the twenties was a stimulating place to be, even for a man like Pound. Apart
from the painters, there were the other writers. Joyce, in the last stages of writing Ulysses,
and a new generation of Frenchmen.
POUND:
Well, when I went to Paris—after the war—I went over to see what was going on. And I
was in Paris for six weeks and nobody mentioned Cocteau and I did three essays—I forget
where they came out [The Dial]—at any rate on “The Island of Paris.” Then at the last
minute somebody mentioned Cocteau so that my note on Cocteau was a separate thing that
came out as a postscript. The men I knew were Léger and Brancusi and Cocteau and
Picabia. And there seemed to be a great deal of envy of Cocteau and a lot of sloppy
snobbism and you had this Nouvelle Revue Française which was certainly the midwife of
France’s decay as far as their mind or literature was concerned.
BRIDSON:
We get an amusing pre-Académie [Française] picture of Cocteau back in those early days.
POUND:
There was Cocteau disciplining the snobbism, and all these people who’d never got
anywhere sitting around filled with envy of Cocteau. Cocteau was running a night club, you
see, and saying, “Of course, if you make em comfortable, they won’t come. You get to take
a place like this that looks like a lavatory and then they’ll pack into it.” And you see Mr.
Suallou and Mr. de Menil, etc. sitting around at a table at the door and Cocteau playing a
drum in a jazz band and not with any African fervor but as if it were a very difficult mathematical
operation that had to be thought out.
BRIDSON:
The Twenties were a period of transition. You may remember how Pound quoted
Hemingway on the subject of Ulysses—“an end, rather than a beginning.” Pound summed
up the period for me—at least, so far as major prose writing went—in these terms.
POUND:
After Ulysses, the novel was in a crisis and there were these three outsize book that are all
masterpieces: There is Ulysses and Cummings’ Eimi and the finally Wyndham [Lewis] comes
along with his Apes of God. And one wondered why Wyndham was bothering with it and
then ten years later you saw that he was analyzing a very dangerous disease which has done
no end of harm in England. After Ulysses, [Bill] Bird’s press (The Three Mountains Press)
issued a series called “The Inquest,” which was an attempt to see what there was in English
prose that would serve as a basis to go on from. And in that you have got your humble
servant—or your unhumble servant [Indiscretions]—and old Doc Williams [The Great American
Novel], and Ford’s Women and Men, a book by Windeler, the one by B.M.G. Adams, and
Hemingway’s first prose [in our time]. And that is about where I would stand on that period.
And after the age of fifty a man cannot be a telephone directory of contemporary writers. If
he is going to do his work, he’s got to start in and do it—he can’t keep his eyes on the ends
of the earth or on all the sprouting corn.
BRIDSON:
Such then was the story of Pound’s earlier years and contact as he remembered them in our
conversations in Merano. From then on, first in Paris and later in Italy, he was to settle
down to the writing of his Cantos, the major work on which he has been engaged for the last
forty years. We shall be hearing his views on that work in the second of these recorded
conversations.
End of Part I
BRIDSON:
In the first of these recorded conversations with Ezra Pound, we left him at
the point where he began to devote himself to the writing of his major work, the Cantos. In
many ways, Ezra Pound is the Cantos. No work of its time has been more hotly
debated—praised, attacked, enjoyed, deplored, imitated—and avoided. As the start of a
poem is the most obvious place to start any reading of it, Pound recorded the opening of the
poem for me.
POUND:
[Reads Canto 1]
BRIDSON:
One of the carps usually leveled at the Cantos is that the “Chinese history” and “American
history” section make pretty heavy reading for most people. But whatever one makes of
Pound’s interest in Adams, Benton, and the other American figures that bulk so large in the
later Cantos, there can be no doubt as to the magnificent poetry which he has made out of his
attack on usury in Canto 45.
POUND:
[Reads Canto 45]
BRIDSON:
Pound’s attitude to life and living really adds up to the better part of the Cantos. In a very
simple form, his attitude towards writing can be summed up in the next statement that he
made to me.
POUND:
You can’t have literature without curiosity, you cannot have literature without curiosity, and
when a writer’s curiosity dies out he is finished—he can do all the tricks you like, but
without curiosity you get no literature with any life in it.
BRIDSON:
Curiosity is something that Pound possesses in full measure. Pound’s interest in Chinese
dates back to his days in London during the First World War. To begin with, his interest was
mainly confined to a study of the Chinese ideogram as a means to the writing of poetry—in
fact, no doubt stemming from his own particular experiments with Imagism. But a work
which Pound read in manuscript was to have a profound influence over his whole approach
to the subject: it was Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry. I asked Pound how he happened to come across the manuscript.
POUND:
I read Giles’s History of Chinese Literature and I wasn’t content with the translations. I wanted
to know how I could get some more Chinese, but I knew if he knew he would keep it to
himself! And within a few weeks I was at Sarojini Naidu’s and I met Mrs. Fenollosa.
Fenollosa had been scrapping with the academic fatheads and he’d left his manuscript with
her and she’d sat on it. She hadn’t turned it over to anybody—she was the lightest possible,
apparently frivolous society woman—and after a couple of weeks I got a note: would I come
to that hotel in Trafalgar Square—is it Moreley’s?—at any rate, it is where my grandfather
stayed. And there she was, gone like a priestess at an altar, and she merely said, “You’re the
only person who can finish this stuff the way Ernest wanted it done.” Then she sent me his
manuscript—that’s the whole story.
BRIDSON:
Partly as a result of his reading of Fenollosa notebooks, Pound began to try his hand
at translating Chinese poetry. The result was the brilliant series of Chinese lyrics published
under the title Cathay, one of Pound’s most popular works. He was to return to the same
vein many times over the next forty years, as for example with these two Odes from the
“Songs of Ts’I”
POUND:
[Reads from the The Confucian Odes: number 98 (LOA, 804) and number 105
(LOA, 807)]
BRIDSON:
Pound’s interest in Chinese literature was not confined to poetry for long. Soon he was
equally concerned with Chinese thought and philosophy—particularly the works of
Confucius. He has made equally successful translations of the Confucian Analects, the Ta
Hsio, or Great Digest and the Chung Yung, or Unwobbling Pivot. I asked him why he found
Confucianism so important to his own thinking.
POUND:
Well, you can’t shorten up on Kung himself. Take the fourth verse at the start: “The men
of old, wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the Empire that light which comes from
looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own
states. Wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own
families. Wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves. Desiring self-
discipline, they rectified their own hearts, and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought
precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts—the tones given off by the heart.
Wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set out to extend their knowledge to the
utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories.”
[From the Ta Hsio: The Great Digest, LOA, 618-619].
BRIDSON:
I asked Pound how he felt that Confucianism differed from Christianity, and his reply
amused me.
POUND:
Well I made a definition early in life and I found that I could always get a favorable response
from the Afro-American colleagues-in-misfortune at the bughouse. In contrast to
Confucianism, doesn’t Christianity boil itself down to one commandment, namely, “Thou
shalt attend to they neighbor’s business before thou attendest to thine own.”
BRIDSON:
Confucian thought is of course reflected in the Shih King, the anthology of Chinese Classical
Anthology which Confucius himself is said to have edited. Here is Pound own reading of
two of the shorter odes in that collection, in his own translation
POUND:
[Reads Ode 57, “Epithalium (Sidney’s Sister)” (LOA, 783)
I think that’s the one where you must in the original go back and use the supposed
pronunciation of the period. There’s the onomatopoeia of the pp’-putt’ of the fish-tails on
the key. There’s a lot of onomatopoeia in the originals and you need both the ideograms for
the interweaving and you need the graph of the sounds to see what one is trying to get at in
the translations.
[then reads Ode 208 “Cl-ang, cl-ang go the bells” [LOA, 887]
BRIDSON:
Pound’s interest in the poetry of the Classical Anthology extends to the ideas contained in it.
The facts and ideas have inspired the subject matter almost all of his recent work. But he is
not especially interested in acquiring facts for their own sake, unless the facts are important.
POUND:
These idiotic universities are all full of gadgets and provide the young men with no tools.
Now a tool is useful for a lot of different things. All the science of physics comes up out of
a few simple tools like the wedge and the screw and the lever. And they keep on using them
over and over. A gadget is no use except for some particular job and very often only in
connection with some artificial, complicated contraption. You’ve got a series of books
which teach young men something they’ve got to find out or else they’ll be diddled, and then
you’ve got a hundred books at St. John’s, none of them there to teach the kids anything in
particular.
BRIDSON:
This idea of a minimal course of reading—a list of the basic books—is one of Pound’s
favorite subjects.
POUND:
The Putnam Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages points out that at the medieval
university the students had about six books and they had to stick at em until they know
something about em. Back I the twenties [i.e. thirties] I tried to get Eliot and Santayana to
line up on the idea of a curriculum, and Santayana at least brought out: “It don’t matter what
they read so long as they all read the same thing.” And that same thing ought to be a body
of common knowledge required for any fathead who gets a job running a government, and it
ought to be required either for college entrance or the first year in college, and as a
qualification for suffrage.
BRIDSON:
Pound would concentrate on the following six key books as a start:
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa; The Analects of
Confucius, The Unwobbling Pivot and Great Digest; Gists from Agassiz; The Bank of the United States
by Thomas Hart Benton; The History of Monetary Crimes and Roman and Moslem Moneys by
Alexander Del Mar
Now I won’t go into the reasons behind this rather eccentric choice, I’ll only say that if the
books are responsible for the peculiar quality of Pound’s own work, they’re well worth
everybody’s attention. The place of taxation in a proper economy of one of the matters on
which Pound feels very strongly.
POUND:
There are only about two subjects that I got the strength to argue about. One is how you
issue money. Plenty of people want to know how you get it, but there isn’t one in a hundred
thousand who will take the trouble to find out how its gets there in the first place. And the
other question is the system of taxes. Everybody groaning from Naples up to Aberdeen
about the amount of the taxes, and nobody will ask how do they issue money, and how
should you levy the taxes? Ought you to spend half as much, or twice as much, to get the
stuff out of the poor sufferers as comes in from it? And the basis, I should think, of a tax
system ought to be justice, and Mencius pointed out that it ought to be a percentage of the
product—not a fixed charge regardless of whether the poor bastard has got it there to give
you or not. They talk about soaking the rich—well, you don’t soak the rich, you soak the
lazy rich. The clever rich will always hire two dozen lawyers to see how they can get out of
it. Now shall we start with cheapness in collection? No, I wouldn’t. . . I’d start with
justice—the justice of the tax. Now as from Mencius, that is a percentage of the product,
not a fixed charge. And the second thing that you want is minimum cost of collection.
Thirdly, convenience of collection—let us say a manner of collecting that does not permit
dodging. Fourthly, it ought to encourage production, not sabotage it—and damn it, now
your taxes penalize practically every useful activity a man can think of. And fifthly, it should
not create crimes—that is to say they should not turn simple mercantile utility into a
contravention of statute. Take that bootlegger—he was known as “The Ripper” down at
DTC —he said it was whisky, but it may have been red wine—I said now “Would you be a
bootlegger if there was not tax?” Of course, he wouldn’t be a bootlegger! It makes a crime
of taking diamonds from one place to another, and you have a whole police force to chase
the people who do it—that is the kind of thing you ought to avoid.
BRIDSON:
Pound’s position as a champion of monetary reform and other matters well-known, but
what does he consider himself to be and how would he describe himself s a writer? I asked
him as our conversations drew to a close how he would define his own position in society, as
a writer.
POUND:
If I’ve got to have a label, I suppose I’m a syndicalist—simply in the sense that I think
plumbers ought to have a vote about plumbing and that literate men ought to have some say
about literature. Of course, in Byzantium they had trade organization It was a little bossed
from the top, but it can also be democratically organized with the division of powers, and so
on.
BRIDSON:
Our last evening together at Merano was nearly over, I took a last look round Pound’s
study—with its Gaudiers, its Chinese calligraphy and its Martinellis. Pound put on his
sombrero and his long yellow scarf with its embroided Chinese ideogram MAKE IT NEW
[made for him by Eva Hesse], and we walked down the spiral staircase from his study to the
castle garden—I counted, incidentally, eighty-four steps. There, lit up by the sunset, was the
towering Gaudier bust of Pound, staring up at the mountains. We went in from the garden
for our evening drink with Pound’s son-in-law, Prince Boris de Rachewiltz. Upon his return
to Italy last year, when he went back to live at Merano with Boris and his daughter Mary,
Pound met his two little grandchildren fro the first time. One of the most amusing
memories I have of my stay with the whole family at the Castle of Brunnenburg is that of
Ezra Pound reading a bedtime story to his grandchildren—one of the adventures of “Br’er
Rabbit.” As with everything else he does, Pound brought to it an immense gusto, a wealth
of humanity—and a king-size sense of humor. I like to think that from now on life for
Ezra Pound will be comfortably lived in that quieter and happier setting, and that he has
indeed found port after more than unusually stormy seas. But in such pleasant surroundings,
the long voyage of the Cantos themselves might well find a fitting close, even as that other
Ulysses ultimately returned to his own ultimate Ithaca.
Pound Spricht Deutsch: the Bayrischer Rundfunk
Recordings (1959)
These recordings were made on a TK35 Grundig recorder by
Eva Hesse and Mike O’Donnell at Brunnenburg Castle in December
1959 for a Bayrischer Rundfunk radio broadcast entitled “Personae,
Neue Gedichte von Ezra Pound.” The choice of poems was
Pound’s own and the German versions he reads are those
included in Eva Hesse’s recent edition of Personae (Zurich:
Arche Verlag, 1959). Tracks 1-4 are taken from Pound’s
1916 poem “Impressions of François-Marie Arouet
(de Voltaire). This poem is made up of three sections, all loosely
adapted from Voltaire’s poetry—“Phyllidula
and the Spoils of Gouvernet,” “To Madame du Châtelet,” and “To
Madame Lullin”—and Pound reads all three in English
and then the third one (with a slight Austrian accent) in Eva
Hesse’s German translation. Tracks 4 and 5 feature Pound’s
reading of Hesse’s translations of the first section of
the poem “Phanopoeia” (“Rose, White, Yellow,
Silver”) and of the fifth section of Part I of Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (“There died a myriad”).
Track 7 contains some of the raw footage, as it were, of
this Brunnenburg recording session—with Pound reading the
same texts as above in English and German. Eva Hesse described
this session in an e-mail to me (5/9/07): “In December
1959 at Brunnenbrug EP was already in a state of unhappiness
which erupted into a crisis in January, after we had left. .
. . But he did take a lively interest in the recordings and when
Mike [O’Donnell] said that his way of reading reminded
him of Yeats, he was visibly shaken. He grabbed the papers and
vanished into his room. The next morning he came up with a greatly
changed way of reading, which was much more satisfactory to my
mind. I had the impression that he had been practicing this all
night. But he made a great comic show of not being able to pronounce “Zahnfäule” [Hesse’s
German translation of “For an old bitch gone in the
teeth” in Mauberley I,V] and I felt that this
was in partial retribution for our cheekiness the day before.” Indeed,
in the recordings collected in this Track 7 one can distinguish
between Pound’s grander, more Yeatsian style of delivery
and a slightly more casual, more “prosey” mode of
poetic elocution—the poems read n the latter style (Tracks
1-6) were chosen by Hesse for her radio program. Toward the end
of Track 7, Pound reads Hesse’s translation of the first
section of Mauberley (“For three years, out of key
with his time”) in Ezraic German (soft v’s, rolling
r’s). Then there is the following bit of dialogue:
EH: “Can you analyze it, Mike?”
MO: “Listening
to Mr. Yeats too long . . .”
EP: “But I always made
fun of him. . .”
MO: “Now it’s having its revenge”
Another snippet of dialogue features Eva Hesse impishly asking
Pound to read some selections from the comic “Alfred Lord
Venison” (sic) poems that he had previously recorded for
the BBC. Pound corrects this to “Alfred Venison,” and
reminds her that he read these “in the bughouse”—i.e.
at St. Elizabeths [see previous section].
The Spoleto Recordings
(1967)
Olga Rudge’s “management” of Pound’s
silence also extended to her acting as his impressario and agent
for his rare ventures into the public spotlight. The
most celebrated of these involved his participation in Gian-Carlo
Menotti’s 1965 Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds. Also
invited to the festival that year were the poets Stephen Spender,
Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Tate, and Barbara
Guest (in addition to such Italian luminaries as Salvatore Quasimodo),
but the clear “star” was the nearly 80-year-old and
by now mythically “silent” Ezra Pound. Menotti
arranged for a special ballet version of Pound’s Villon
opera, Le Testament, to be performed—which its composer
opined was an utter “waste of time.” Pound,
in any event, refused to recite any of his own poetry on stage
and instead sat in Menotti’s private box, microphone at
his side, and read from Marianne Moore’s translations
of La Fontaine and Robert Lowell’s translation of Canto
CV of the Dante’s Inferno [a recording of Pound’s
reading of “Bruno Latini” may be found among Lowell’s
papers at the Harry Ransome Library at the University of Texas]. Something
of a media circus ensued. As his biographer explains: “There
were political overtones to the occasion. Uniformed police
were in the auditorium to protect him from a Communist demonstration. Outside
in the piazza he was persuaded to read from the Cantos in front
of a big crowd and the television. People asked for
autographs. He said to Desmond O’Grady [an
Irish poet very close to both him and Olga in Venice): ‘It’s
all wrong, they don’t want me here, this is your generation.’ But
he was back in Spoleto next summer, reading from the stage this
time” (Carpenter, 889).
Out of these summer visits to the Spoleto festival, where
Pound mingled (but mostly communed in silence) with such old
acquaintances and admirers as Marshall McLuhan and Isamu Noguchi,
there evolved the project to record him as part of a series of
LP’s entitled The World’s Great Poets Reading
at the Festival of Two Worlds. The series included
records by Italian poets (Ungaretti, Luzi, Gatto, Risi, Sereni), Spanish-language
poets (Alberti, Godoy, Paz, Aridjis), American poets (Berryman,
Corso, Ginsberg), British poets (Kavanaugh, Spender, Tomlinson). But
given the aura of silence that now surrounded him, Pound was
given pride of place and granted a full LP of his own, recorded
at Spoleto in the summer 1967. The producer
of the record was Vincent R. Totora, an Italian-American
who had studied at the University of Padua after the second world
war and traveled to East Berlin as part of a communist youth
group. During the fifties he worked as a folklorist and
made documentary films in the U.S. (on the Shakers, the Hasidim,
and the Etruscans). His work in public relations led to
an affiliation with Spoleto Music Festival in the late 1960s
where he participated in the production of several recordings
of festival performances as well as the Ezra Pound Reading
His Cantos LP. Hugh Kenner, the doyen of Pound
scholars, was invited to write the liner notes for the record,
dated 1968. This jacket commentary on “Ezra
Pound at Spoleto” is reproduced here for the first time
by permission of the Hugh Kenner Estate. Familiar
with Pound’s voice ever since he first visited him at St.
Elizabeths (with Marshall McLuhan) in June, 1948, Kenner’s
ear for the subtle and understated inflections of Pound’s
late, affectless reading style is unerring:
A voice from another age, from a very old man, born in Idaho
at a time (1885) when the lanes of London were scavenged by municipal
goats. Marius the Epicurean was published that year,
Browning and Ruskin were active. Wagner was but two years
dead, Jesse James but three. And at 82, in Spoleto,
1967 borne by earthspin with the rest of us through a cosmos
adrift with artificial satellites, the survivor retraces his
written memories. The Muses are daughters of
memory, civilization is memory, the Cantos a lifetime
of ordered memory: by intention, the active ledgers of civilized
mankind, overseen by the Muses.
Canto III begins by remembering a young man’s
Venice (“I sat on the Dogana’s step”), and
a reference to “those girls” reminds us also of Browning
remembering how he made part of Sordello “on an
empty palace-step/At Venice.” “Gods float
in the azure air. . .” remembers how the Italian Renaissance
remembered Greece; “My Cid rode up from Burgos” remembers
the 12th-century Spanish poet remembering Ruy Diaz;
and the end of the Canto remembers a wall painted by Mantegna,
now ruined. Sordello and the Poema del
Cid remain.
For the Cantos repeatedly remember craftsmen, because
time that takes poets, heroes, walls does not ruin craft. Having
early perceived this, Pound deliberately set out to learn, as
Renaissance poets did, how poetry is written: what Homer knew
about, what Propertius knew about it that Homer did not, what
can be gathered only from the troubadours, or only from Dante. His
great effect on his contemporaries—on Eliot, for instance,
or Hemingway, or Dr. Williams—derives largely from his
mastery, and his insistence that there is nothing mysterious
about mastery. Language is mysterious, and the poet’s
initial gift utterly mysterious, but rhythms, shifts of diction,
semantic precisions, nearly all recalling past mysteries, will
come at his need if he has paid such matters sufficient attention
through a sufficiently long apprenticeship.
The sureness of Canto III, written in Pound’s
early thirties, is a sign that the apprenticeship is behind him. Canto
XVI, written in Paris a few years later, works with comparable
sureness on a larger scale. It carries us out
of a hell of the mind, witnessed by Blake and Dante, into a visionary
paradise (“then light air, under saplings”) where
sleep is troubled by voices recalling wars: Victor Plarr
on the War of 1870, Fernand Leger in highly colloquial French
on the Great War, Lincoln Steffens on the Russian Revolution.
Canto XLIX on the other hand (Italy, 1935) derives
a vision of tranquility from a set of anonymous Chinese poems
about lakes, calligraphed in a book the poet’s father acquired
in the early years of the American taste for Oriental artifacts,
and joins to these a Japanese transcription (“Kei Men Ran
Kei. . .”) of a poem attributed to the legendary Emperor
Shun of Chine (2255 B.C.), and a folk song (“Sun up: work”)
said to date from the time of Shun’s predecessor the Emperor
Yao. The theme of the Canto is quiet order, its hidden
subject, Tradition.
Tradition and Craftsmanship were among the themes of Pound’s
preoccupation during his imprisonment in Pisa (1945), when he
had reason to think that the Cantos might soon be terminated
by an executioner. The first half of the Canto
LXXXI recalls scattered men of insight in sundry corners
of an earlier world, before the War; and insight, as the second
half shows, is not invention but vision, recreation. “It
is not man made courage, or made order, or made grace;” it
is man’s privilege, rather, to glimpse these qualities
in a cosmic order that embraces ants and goddesses, and affirm
them in words and music, and reaffirm them generation after generation. Its
music and eloquence have made this one of the most anthologized
of the Cantos; yet the virtuosity is not on display, is rather
obligated by the example of the great predecessors from whom
the Canto quotes or to whom it alludes.
Canto XCII (1955), written in St. Elizabeths Hospital
in Washington, reaffirms the relevance of vision to the practical
order, and laments millennia of “desensitization.” Canto
CVI (1960) offers tantalizing visions into the heart
of some supernatural order, associated with the sun, with eyes,
and with mysterious pervasive light, and culminates in a vision
of the natural order as a vast temple, the sky “leaden
with elm boughs.”
As this preponderance of visionary material suggests, the
long work was approaching its culmination. But the
poet’s health failed soon after his return to Italy, and
only fragments of the final sequence have appeared. Near
the end of the Spoleto readings [in From Canto CXV] we
hear lines that sound like a valedictory:
A
blown husk that is finished
But
the light sings eternal . . .
--himself the blown husk, the eternal light the poem set out
so long ago to recover and celebrate, the order man has not made.
Though the dynamism of earlier decades has departed from his
voice, though his eye at Spoleto moves from line to line of the
text with little prevision of a passage’s cumulative force,
Pound’s reading elucidates certain things we might not
have found out for ourselves: notably that the meaning is nearly
independent of elocutionary aid. He has advised sundry
translators of his work to proceed word by word, simply setting
down equivalents and trusting the sense to declare itself. No
poet cares more about local accuracy of meaning, and he reads
line by line as he hopes to be understood, line by line. When
the meaning is unclear it is because the auditor either does
not catch an allusion or is troubled by an ellipsis; by rapid
movement from instance to instance, perception to perception,
without specification or transition.
In these readings the showier aspects of Pound’s craftsmanship—the
rhythmic drive for instance of the “Pull down thy vanity” chorus
[in Canto LXXXI]—receive no emphasis: a reader with
a text must recreate these qualities for himself. But
his central discipline, which was to state things exactly and
arrange these statements in an elucidative order, survives the
impediments of failing strength and faltering attention.
It was central to heritage that he recalled poetry to the
declaration of significant meaning: meaning of greater import
than the state of the poet’s spirits on a certain morning. He
did not look for subjects, they forced themselves upon him, during
his long career of involvement in the agonies of a civilization
racked by wars and depressions. About such public
agony, and about the heritage it seemed essential to preserve
from its ravages, he had things to say, the art of saying which
was his lifelong study. Hence the uncluttered felicity
that age and fatigue cannot hide from whoever listens to his
voice today.
The Confucian Odes
(1970)
Three years after these Spoleto readings, a companion LP was
recorded (probably in Venice) for Arthur Luce Klein’s Spoken
Arts label. Produced by Olga Rudge with Vincent R.
Totora again acting as the Production Coordinator, the record
was entitled Ezra Pound Reading his Translations of the Confucian
Odes, and, according to its jacket, “was prepared under
the auspices of the Asian Literature Program of the Asia Society.” The
LP features twenty-four selections from Pound’s The
Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, first published by
Harvard University Press in 1954 and then as paperback (under
the title The Confucian Odes) by New Directions in 1959. Judging
from the number of readings of these Odes contained on the private
tapes that Olga Rudge made in Venice around this period (1968-70),
Pound apparently carefully practiced his performance of these
poems under her expert supervision in preparation for this recording—which
remains as a result one of the finest examples of his late singing
style. For these poems are above all meant as songs to
be sung, their tones attuned to the ancient practices of rites
(li)—hence Pound’s frequent recourse in these
translations to English or Scots ballad meters (Burns)
or to the American folksong tradition (as in his inspired cracker-box
rendition of “Yaller bird, let my corn alone”) or
even jazz skat-singing (as in “Hep-Cat Chung”). Here,
again reproduced for the first time (and with permission), are
Hugh Kenner’s liner notes for this 1970 release—whose
down-home rural rhythms and offbeat rustic diction can still
hold their own against the albums of the same period by Bob Dylan
or The Band:
Here’s
the kind of shape civilization takes now: America’s
archpoet, born in Hailey Idaho, October 30, 1885 and raised in
Pennsylvania, sits in his 85th year at a microphone
in Italy, reading versions he made in Washington 20 years ago
of anonymous Chinese poems at least 2500 years old. The
notes of a Swedish scholar, Bernard Karlgren, guided him through
their intricacies. And as to his first interest in
such poetry, it was aroused decades before that by the papers
of a half-Spanish American, Ernest Fenollosa, who had become
Japan’s Imperial Commissioner for Fine Arts. Local
literatures seem obsolete.
And
yet the Chinese poems are intensely local. They come
from a time when men’s deepest feelings were tribal, and
rulers were like warrior-priests, and ritual human actions—marriages,
wars, homages to the ruler—took things of the natural world
as sacramentals and omens. Many of the poems seem
as artless as folk-songs.
To
recapture such strata of feeling in a time remote from them takes
an intricate, cosmopolitan technique. Pound’s
rhymes and rhythms are elusive; his syntax evades the symmetry
of the plain thing said plainly. In the first Ode
we hear.
Clear
as the stream her modesty;
As
neath dark boughs her secrecy,
reed
against reed
tall
on slight
as
the stream moves left and right
dark
and clear,
dark
and clear. . . .
This circles a long way from the literal to hint, as direct
transcription no longer can, at mysterious wholenesses of feeling,
the reeds and the stream and the dream-lady all members of one
felt universe, one cannot specify how.
Such
seamlessness, the odes imply, is the human norm. Let
it be ruptured by self-seeking or by idle language, and we may
expect droughts and locusts:
Heaven
has let down a drag-net of ill-doing,
the
locusts have gnawed us with word-work,
they
have hollowed our speech. . .
This fuses actual locusts in the grain-field with trivial
bureaucrats; for as all beneficences are intertwined, so are
all calamities.
The
Odes are called “Confucian” because Confucius was
once thought to have selected them. Certainly he
insisted that his followers know them word by word. Not
to have studied them, he said, is to stand with one’s face
to the wall. Ever since his time, being known to
all literate men, they have helped define Chinese civilization.
Ezra
Pound’s concern with defining a civilization reaches back
some sixty years to the days when he was first making Provençal
and Anglo-Saxon qualities available to readers of English. A
civilization, he has always implied, consists of the best that
we know, not kept under glass but set free to shape our sensibilities
and direct our wills. About 1916 he commenced the
still unfinished Cantos, a compendium of history’s
paradigms of order. In the odes he saw a precedent
for the Cantos, a seeming miscellany, extending from folk
wisdom to rarified discriminations, which had in fact helped
order a great civilization. In translating the Odes entire,
he was in part vindicating his own enterprise; and in his version
of the last Ode here recorded, a lifetime’s technical mastery
defines intricate ceremonial, drums doing homage to a ruler’s
answering might, so ancient the response it exacts is sophisticated
now because no longer habitual:
.
. . With thud of the deep drum,
flutes
clear, doubling over all,
concord
evens it all, built on
the
stone’s tone under it all.
T’ang’s
might is terrible
with
a sound as clear and sane
as
wind over grain.
A literal rendering runs simply, “The hand-drums and
drums din, resounding are the notes of the flutes; it is both
harmonious and peaceful, following the sounds of our musical
stones: oh, majestic is the descendant of T’ang, august
is his music.
Pound
has remembered the old association of ruler and grain god, and
Confucius’ comparison of the good ruler to wind over grass,
and shaking his rhythms with primitive urgency, has held the
structure of the stanza’s sound as clear as that of the
music it celebrates. After three thousand years the
poem stirs Pound into speech; after three thousand years Pound
lends a dead poet his voice.
An Angle (1972)
Pound’s
final official recording was published as a small 33 rpm vinyl
disk placed inside the back cover of a portfolio produced
by the Erker-Presse of St. Gallen, Switzerland. A
deluxe, limited edition of several of Pound’s Cantos, lithographically
reproducing facsimiles of the poet’s own handwriting
(signed and dated Venice, April 6, 1971) and accompanied by seven
lithographs by Giuseppe Santomaso, An Angle was issued
in 1972 to generate funds for the “Consultative Committee
for the Unesco International Campaign for Venice”—with
all profits going to the restoration of the Basilica dei Frari
in Venice.
In this last and rarest of Pound’s
public recordings, the focus is entirely local (and philanthropic)
with the ministering presence of Olga Rudge just as evident as
in the final text Pound ever published—a civic-minded translation
of a poem by Ugo Fasolo (published at Olga’s behest in
the [London] Sunday Times Weekly Review of April 12, 1970) protesting
the pigeon epidemic that had descended on his adoptive Venice
(see Library of America, p. 1201). Returning to his earliest
Cantos, Pound chose to assemble an ideogram of texts all relating
to the history of his Venice. From Canto XVII (which
had previously read at Harvard in 1939), he selected a passage
evoking Venice as a kind of otherworldly paradis artificiel worthy
of the fin-de-siècle symbolists—a city, as seen
in a mirror, a “forest of marble” and with “waters
richer than glass.” This is in turn juxtaposed
with a passage from Canto XXV, which includes decrees concerning
the palace of the doges and which reproduces a letter from the
16th-century painter Titian and the council’s
resolution concerning the commissioning of one of his paintings—an
illustration of state patronage of the arts during the Renaissance. This
is followed by three excerpts from Canto XXVI, the first alluding
to the gathering of the delegates to the council convened by
Pope Eugenius IV in the 15th century to explore ways to unite
the Eastern and Western branches of the Church—with the
delegates from the East debarking at Venice before making their
way to Ferrara. The following excerpt is composed of a
long letter by the 16th-century Venetian painter Vittore
Carpaccio addressed to the Marquis of Mantova, complaining that
he has not been paid for a painting of Jerusalem that has been
unfairly taken from him—a typical case of an artist exploited. The
final excerpt is taken from the very first lines of the same
Canto, with Pound remembering his initial stay in Venice in 1908,
age 22—piazza San Marco and gondolas: “And I came
here in my young youth/ and lay there under the crocodile/ By
the column, looking East on the Friday. . . The prows rose silver
on silver/ taking light in the darkness.”
Miscellaneous Late Recordings
These
performances are taken from what have sometimes been called “The
Aspern Tapes”—some twenty hours of recordings that
Olga Rude made of Pound reading (or, occasionally, conversing),
most of which date from the fall of 68, when she apparently acquired
a cassette tape recorder of her own to celebrate his 83rd birthday. These
tapes first came to light in the spring of 1984 when in the course
of a visit to Olga Rudge's home in Venice, the Pound musicologist
Robert Hughes was shown, lying in a desk drawer, what he describes
(in an e-mail to me) as "a mess of about two dozen 'Radio Shack"-type
cheap cassettes, many of them with their tape guts extensively
spilled out." Hughes laboriously respooled the tapes
and the following fall, after her participation in the 1985 Pound
Centennial in Hailey, Idaho, Olga Rudge flew to the Bay Area
where she spent a week with him overseeing the transfer of this
material onto reel-to-reel Scotch 226 tape and TDK High Bias
Cassettes. Hughes tried to equalize and filter the
high hiss (and "the low moan of the vaporetti") as much as possible-all
in the hope that these recordings might be acquired by Stanford
University's Archive of Recorded Sound. Negotiations
with Stanford however broke down in 1987: for some of the extraordinarily
Jamesian intrigue in Venice surrounding the Pound materials in
Olga Rudge's possession, see John Berendt's recent The City
of Falling Angels. Selections from these "Aspern Tapes" have
been made available in digitized form the with crucial assistance
of Robert Hughes and the kind permission of Olga Rudge's grandson
and executor, Siegfried Walter de Rachewiltz. To
remain consistent with the organization of the other recordings
on this PennSound Pound page, these readings have been arranged
by their original date of composition, not by their date of recording.
The
first reading featured here is “Redondillas, or Something
of That Sort,”—a long, satirical poem that was removed
from Pound’s collection Canzoni (1911) in its proof stages. Its
meter and matter parody that of Tennyson’s 1886 “Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After” (with bows to Byron and Whitman). Pound’s
reading of this poem is prefaced by the comment “I’d
sensed enough not to print this in 1911 and am relieved to see
it reprinted now”—which definitely places this tape-recording after the spring of 1968, when New
Directions brought out a limited edition of “Redondillas.” Pound
can be heard fumbling about as he tries to get his reading underway,
exclaiming in despair “it’s such a muddle,” before
finally being pointed in the right direction by the authoritative
voice of Olga Rudge who impatiently advises him “to take
a deep breath” and to “start at the beginning.” Pound
then manages to make it all the way through the text in one go,
virtually sight-reading a poem he had not laid eyes on in 57
years.
Given
the firmness and gusto of the poet’s voice (plus the fact
that they seem to come from a different tape recorder), the two
readings that follow--the first from Canto LXXX and second
from Canto LXXXVIII--may well date from as early as 1962, when
Olga Rudge initially took Pound into her care. Canto
LXXX (from the Pisan Cantos sequence)
provides a particularly virtuoso example of the poet’s
ear for dialects and languages. In this show-piece
of sorts, we hear him move in the space of a few pages from Irish
brogue (“Your gunmen thread on moi dreams”) to Sienese
dialect (“non è una hontrada è un homplesso”),
to the sounds of prisoners being put through their drills at
the Pisa DTC (“hot hole hep cat”),” to
a snatch of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing
over the camp’s loudspeaker system (“mi-hine eyes
hev”), to Homeric Greek (“hou tis”) to a commentary
on the Chinese ideogram for dog, to Dante’s Italian (“così discesi
per l’aer maligno”) or Froissart’s French (“on
doit le temps ainsi prendre qu’il vient”).
The following selection, from Canto LXXXVIII (in Section:
Rock-Drill), features Pound speaking
in the persona of Thomas Hart Benton, author of A Thirty
Years View (1854), a memoir recalling the American
political scene from 1820 to 1850 and which interested Pound
above all for its insights into the “bank wars” that
occurred during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-37). Benton,
like Jackson and other such figures as Randolph, Van Buren and
Macon, deeply opposed the Clay proposal to recharter the Bank
of the United States in 1832. Benton in this passage recounts
how Randolph of Roanoake had asked him to be a second in the
duel to which Henry Clay had challenged him—but which Benton
had to refuse because he was related to Clay’s wife. Pound
takes particular pleasure in articulating the drawls of these
southern gentlemen involved in an affair of honor which he places
in the larger context of the history of the “epic” battle
between state vs. private control of banking.
The
next recording, which seems to date from March 1969, is a reading
of the entirety of Canto XCIII (still from Rock-Drill—thus originally written at St. Elizabeths in 1954-55). The
initial sound quality is quite poor; Pound seems quite lost and
hesitant as he tries to feel his way through the text, but his
confidence grows as he hits a magnificant patch of Provençal
(“Peitz trai pena d’amor/Que Tristans l’amador/Qu’a
suffri mainta dolor/Per Iseutz la bionda,”p. 644), then
falters again at the thought of suicide (“The suicide is
not serious from conviction/. . . . From sheer physical
depression, c’est autre chose,” p. 645), then, a
few pages later, his frail, ancient voice lifts and gathers pulse,
carried along by the powerful litany-like cadences of a prayer
(“oro”=I pray) beseeching compassion. The
prosody is positively penitential:
Lux
in diafana,
Creatrix,
Oro.
Ursula
bendetta,
Oro
By
the hours of passion,
per
dilettevole ore,
guide
your successor,
Ysolt,
Ydone,
Have
compassion,
Picarda,
compassion
By
the wing’d head
By
the caduceus,
compassion;
By
the horns of Isis-Luna,
compassion.
The
black panther lies under his rose-tree.
J’ai
eu pitié des autres.
Pas
assez! Pas assez!
For
me nothing. But that the child
Walk
in peace in her basilica,
The
light there almost solid.
(Cantos,
648)
This entire Canto, written in 1954, takes on added resonances
in 1969—its lines now emerging from an old man’s
silence and readdressed to his lover of 45 years:
Shall
two know the same in their knowing?
You
who dare Persephone’s threshold,
Beloved,
do not fall apart in my hands.
(Cantos,
651)
All ending with Dante’s purgatorial: “Tu
mi fai rimembrar.” You make me remember.
The
final major selection from the Cantos featured here is Canto
XCVI, the first of the late Thrones (1959). Pound
explained the title to Donald Hall in his Paris Review interview
of 1962: “The thrones in Dante’s paradiso are
for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good
government. The thrones in the Cantos are
an attempt to move from egoism and to establish some definition
of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth. . .
. Thrones concerns the states of mind of people
responsible for something more than their personal conduct.” It
is difficult to date exactly the reading of this Canto--it seems
to precede the 1968 recordings by a few years—but whether
because of the quality of the sound on the tape or because of
Pound’s style of performance, Canto XCVI has a kind of
gorgeous hush and remoteness to its music: although written in
the mid-50s and recorded ten years later, it seems to come from
very far off, virtually from outer space or from deep
beneath the sea. We have here entered into
Pound’s arcanum. The Canto opens with the shipwrecked
Odysseus, saved from drowning by Leucothoe’s veil (or kredemon)
and borne “thru these diafana” into a catalogue of
late Roman and Byzantine emperors (drawn from the accounts of
chroniclers gathered in volume 95 of Migne’s Patrologia
Latina)—which in turn leads into lengthy quotations
in Greek from The Book of the Eparch of Leo the Wise (866-912),
as we sail to a paradisal Byzantium of civic order grounded on
humane sovereignty, low interest rates, and exactitude in language
and coinage. Virtually impenetrable in its arcane
references to the economic history of the late Roman and Byzantine
Empires, Canto XCVI—as this late reading makes clear—is
also, on the sheer level of sound, one of Pound’s most
beautiful: the baffling obscurity of the text when read on the
page is, if not clarified, at least lightened and deepened when
listened to in his reading.
The
final Cantos selection from the “Aspern Tapes” comes,
appropriately enough, from the Drafts and Fragments Cantos
CX-CXVII—most of which were composed between late 1958
(after Pound’s return to Italy) and late 1959, even though
these poems were not officially published in book form by New
Directions until ten years later, that is, in 1969. Pound
had previously read a short excerpt from this final section (“from
Canto CV”) on his 1967 Spoleto album, but these recordings
made by Olga Rudge (on a tape that judging from internal evidence
must date from February or March, 1970) seem to contain his only
other surviving performance of shards from the late Drafts
and Fragments. The sound quality of these tapes is
quite poor—Olga occasionally bought cassette tapes of classical
music and simply recorded over them, thus creating the acoustic
equivalent of Pound’s own textual palimpsests. In
addition, the poet’s voice is extremely frail and he is
evidently having trouble just focusing his eyes on the page. In
the reading of a passage from “Notes for CXI,” it’s
almost as if we were listening to a duet—with Olga’s
stage whispers gently (and this time, O so patiently) prompting
Ezra’s delivery as he falters and loses his way. We
overhear the infinite care with which—voice coach to his
silence--she nudges him on into song:
Soul
melts into air,
anima
into aura,
Serenitas.
(Cantos,
803)
The
final recording reproduced here was made at the podium of the
Fondazione Cini—il miglior fabbro (as Eliot called
him in his dedication of The Waste Land) speaking in formal
academic Italian in front of an audience of dignitaries (including
his old acquaintance Eugenio Montale) gathered in Venice for
the 1965 commemoration of the 700th anniversary of
Dante’s birth. Pound modestly notes that he is unworthy
of pronouncing himself on the Florentine on this occasion but
that he would like to honor the memory of a major Dantista,
recently scomparso—namely, his old friend T.S. Eliot
who had died in January of that same year and for whose Westminster
Abbey funeral he had flown up to England. Pound later wrote
(in a short piece published in the winter 1966 issue of the Sewanee
Review): “His was the true Dantescan voice—not
honoured enough, and deserving more than I ever gave him. I
had hoped to see him in Venice this year for the Dante commoration
at the Giorgio Cini Foundation—instead: Westminster Abbey” (Carpenter,
888). After briefly characterizing Eliot’s
immense debt to Dante, Pound, the lone survivor of high modernism—Hemingway
and H.D. had died in 1961, Cummings in 1962, Williams in 1963,
and now Eliot in 1965—recites the following lines from “The
Burial of the Dead” section of The Waste Land:
Under
the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A
crown flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I
had not thought death had undone so many.
He concludes by passing on the flame to a much younger American
poet, Robert Lowell, from whose poem “Brunetto Latini” (based
on Canto XV of the Inferno) he proceeds to read,
slowly fading into inaudibility:
I
would say more to you, but must stand
Forever
talking, speech must have an end. . .[14]
.
Margaret Fisher photo of Olga Rudge
and Bob Hughes, San Francisco, Fall 1985
Margaret Fisher photo of Olga Rudge,
San Francisco, Fall 1985