Poetry Notebook (5 page)

‘Not of the sun’ is meant to be interesting because the light is from the sun, and our appreciation of the light has been purposely displaced from its source. But
how interesting is the displacement? Elsewhere in the work, but along the same lines, as it were, we get ‘And the palazzo, baseless, hangs there in the dawn / With low mist over the
tide-mark; /. . . / And the sea with tin flash in the sun-dazzle’ (Canto XXI). From a passage like that the ‘tin flash’ tends to stay with you, because it is less abstract than
the imagery around it, but it rather emphasizes that the imagery around it is standard issue, even if you believe that ‘baseless’ might be a nifty pun. (Personally I think it’s
tin-eared: people who construe Pound’s relentless jokiness as proof of unusual sensitivity to tone often have trouble accepting that he could be deaf to his own bum notes, but it could be
doing him a favour to concede that he sometimes was.)

Cumulatively, in the course of decades, it emerges that Pound’s measures for architectural monumentality, and its relation to landscape, were all archaic, like one of those Japanese
temples that are rebuilt once a decade but are always the same. Some twentieth-century artists in various fields showed up in
The Cantos
(Brâncuşi, Gaudier-Brzeska, George
Antheil, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings) but it was always numbingly apparent that the built world of modern times meant nothing to him poetically. He could respond to an old palace but not to a new
skyscraper (Manhattan was of more interest to Whitman than it ever was to Pound), and the Wright brothers might as well never have bothered.

In Canto XLVI there are a catchy few lines about snow and rain:

Some actual perception has gone into that, but it’s not often that he makes the effort. By the time one of the work’s generally accepted great lines arrives –
in Canto LXXIV, first of the Pisan sequence – its strategy and components are familiar: ‘To build the city of Dioce, whose terraces are the colour of stars.’ But unless we are
looking through a telescope, what colour are stars? Doesn’t the line just mean that the terraces are as
bright
as the stars? And why would it be a good thing for terraces to be that
bright, except in Las Vegas? Further into the work, up into its last published phase,
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos
CX–CXVII (after mysteriously disappearing during the
Thrones
sequence, the Roman numerals had just as mysteriously returned), the spasmodic reflex action of his strategies suggests that they had always been mechanical, even in their heyday. Feeble gestures
like ‘as of mountain lakes in the dawn,’ sounding like the last flourishes in an old manner, can’t help reinforcing one’s suspicion that there had always been a manner, and
not much more. A few hundred gleaming specks in the pan: not a lot of pay dirt after sluicing a whole hillside.

Pound would have called all these little fragments ‘particulars’. The deliberately non-mellifluous rhythm (supposedly all the more inexorable because rarely iambic) is meant to sweep
them all along in the cumulative dynamism of an impressive congeries – a word much favoured by Pound and Poundians. (‘Juxtaposition’ was another – a fancy way of claiming
weight for the practice of bringing incongruous objects together and waiting for a compound meaning to emerge: the hope and faith of every crackpot who creates elaborate wall charts with fragments
of evidence joined together by string.) But you eventually realize that if even the bigger assemblages of bits and pieces were not being carried forward in the sluggish flood, they would look,
separately, pretty much like flotsam and jetsam, not to say junk.

Despite the emphasis he had put on the isolated perception since his first phase as an Imagist, Pound in
The Cantos
isn’t really very good at being evocatively singular about things
seen, and mainly it is because the things seen are seen generically. In the gloom, gold does indeed gather the light against it, but so does Indian costume jewellery. The unshakeable particulars
are in fact amorphous, and his best technique for firming things up is to produce a tangle, like the one brought into being at the end of the same canto with the solemnly isolated clinching line
‘Sunset like the grasshopper flying.’

But isn’t that just what a sunset isn’t like? Brought up in the South Pacific, I’ve seen some quick sunsets in my time, but they were all left standing by even the most
moribund grasshopper. Or is the reference not to speed at all, but just to evanescence? And why are we left asking?

The answer, I think, is that his main way to leave you wondering is to leave you puzzled. Even the statements most obviously aimed at creating an impression of limpidity (a loudly trumpeted
limpidity, if such a thing were possible) raise the question of whether very much is going on at all. A typical moment of stentorian tranquillity is ‘and with hay-fields under
sun-swath.’ It means, when you peel back the appliquéd anachronism of the vocabulary, that the hayfields are in the sunlight. It is important to register how commonly he uses this
trick of defiant obviousness, because the avowedly compressed moments, his proclaimed quiddities, are a deliberate escalation of it, and we had better be sure that what is supposedly being
intensified actually exists:

This comes in Canto LII, in a passage marked with his favourite tag – flatteringly delivered to the reader as if one Renaissance prince were advising another –
about the necessity of calling things by their right names, lest misrule ensue. (In various English forms and in other languages, including Chinese, this incontestable exhortation recurs throughout
the work, decade after decade, with never a concession that some of Pound’s heroes, notably Mussolini, misruled whether they called things by their right names or not, and were often enough
numbered among their own victims, a pretty convincing indication of wisdom’s absence, one would have thought.) But I can’t see how the sun being in the archer’s shoulder, or even
in the crow’s head, or in both, tells us much more than the contention that the ant’s a centaur in its dragon world.

Robert Conquest was the first critic ever to dare question the centaur status of Pound’s Pisan ant, but in the early sixties it was still too soon for Conquest to shake even the Soviet
Union’s reputation, let alone Pound’s. Nor did Randall Jarrell, who could appreciate the best of Pound but used that as the exact measure for finding
The Cantos
a mess, ever
manage to put a big enough dent in the masterwork’s reputation to hamper the academic attention that gathered against it like light against pyrites. The less precise Pound was, in fact, the
more he invited explication. But if we don’t know, and can’t know, what one of Pound’s more arcane pronouncements means to us, we are left with the obligation to be impressed that
it means a lot to him. It’s just a bad gag when he assures us that ‘ZinKwa observed that gold is inedible.’ ZinKwa, or someone like him, crops up frequently, straight out of an
episode of
Kung Fu
and always making an observation that nobody in his right mind would ever try to rebut. A proclivity for Confucius-say-style, potted wisdom was high among Pound’s
worst habits, almost on a level with his admiration for the monetary theories of the Social Credit pundit Major Douglas. The two kinds of verbal tic were particularly deadly when connected, like a
scorpion’s double tail. In Canto LXXVIII there is a passage meant to get Pound’s economic theories into a nutshell:

Or, indeed, inside the space station of
Battlestar Galactica
. Every economic system features money based on work done inside a system and gauged to human requirements.
The question is about whether it is based well or badly. But no amount of exhortation and incantatory repetition can make a guide to conduct out of hot air. In
Section: Rock-Drill
,
Pound’s faith that a sufficiently gnomic utterance will yield an unswerving truth reaches absurdity with such lines as ‘The arrow has not two points.’ Well, it certainly
shouldn’t have one at each end. Usually these cracker mottoes are adduced as translations of Chinese characters floating on the page in isolation. For too much of his life, Pound was
convinced that his grasp of Chinese was improving proportionately with the length of time he would spend gazing at the form of a character. But reading Chinese involves a lot more than looking at
the pictures, just as understanding an economic system involves a lot more than analysing the metallic composition of its currency. Pound was convinced that he could assess whole countries,
periods, empires, and eras by whether and how much their gold and silver coins were debased. Even as late as Canto 103 of
Thrones
he can be heard saying, ‘Monetary literacy, sans which
a loss of freedom is consequent.’

He was always convinced that he possessed monetary literacy. With better qualifications both by heredity and on paper, the same conviction was later to be shared by Bunker Hunt, who tried to
corner the market in silver, and found out the hard way that money is a lot more than chunks of precious metal. But it was certainly true that Pound never possessed much literacy about the loss of
freedom, even his own.
The Pisan Cantos
are correctly regarded as the height of the work, the best it ever got, and even the admirers of his epic historical sweep would admit that they are
because they contain the most of his personal story, at a time in his life when not even he could dodge the obvious about what had happened to a world which had been ravaged by some of his theories
having become actual.

Yet
The Pisan Cantos
, the strongest examples of his favoured form, are surely at their weakest when they presume to deal with his personal despair. There is the total and crippling
failure to realize that his own personal despair doesn’t rank very high against the personal despair of many others whose fate he never cared about, and who were not, like him, fed, looked
after, and given reasonably humane treatment when they fell into the hands of their enemies. (To be fair, it should be noted that much later, in his last years, he was ready to admit that
anti-Semitism had been the ruin of his mind.) There is also his incomprehension of ‘the Dream’ he had been mixed up in. A line like ‘Not getting it about the radio’ is
shorthand for his contention that the diatribes he broadcast on behalf of Fascist Italy had been wilfully misunderstood by his own countrymen. The facts, alas, proved that his accusers had found no
difficulty in ‘getting it about the radio’; that he had been locked up for a good reason; and that he was very lucky to be still alive. It was mightily impertinent of him to suggest
that to condemn him for his broadcasts was a denial of freedom. Since his broadcasts had not only proclaimed the irrelevance of democratic freedom, but had also suggested the desirability of its
being denied to the politically helpless, this stuff has to be called the ravings of a crackpot in order to save him from the consequences of calling it a reasoned argument.

Though we might question the putative greatness of a poet who can’t get much out of his own spiritual disaster beyond a display of self-pity occasionally energized by spite, there could
have been an excuse for his solipsism. He was undoubtedly miserable, and misery is not relative. The conditions he was kept under were calculated to make him realize that he was not in a hotel: he
can be excused for feeling lousy. But to excuse him for being vague is harder. After all, the poems in
Personae
had boasted of their precision, and he had supposedly left the smaller forms
of those poems behind, and got into the limitless form of
the
poem,
The Cantos
, mainly in order to be precise on larger scale. In the Pisan sequence there is an admission that
something has gone wrong: but what has gone wrong, he would have us believe, has gone wrong with the world, not with his view of it. Perhaps because so narrowly personalized, his recorded anguish
is curiously unspecific in the detail: the abiding fault of the whole work is, in its best part, brought to a head along with all its virtues:

But if the ants hadn’t got into his pants, he would still have been done in by the bees in his bonnet, and one of them was his unquenchable conviction that every image
was an epic in embryo. To the end of his life, he went on believing that if he could just define every aspect of existence clearly enough, it would all add up. Not all that far in the future, his
central belief would be echoed all over the Internet, and really
The Cantos
is, or are – or perhaps was or were – a nut-job blog before the fact. But there were considerable
poets who were inspired by him directly – Bunting, Logue – and there is no modern poet who has entirely escaped his influence, if only through the salience with which he raised the
question of whether there can be any worthwhile poetry beyond the poem. And I, for one, owe him for that first blaze of his enthusiastic example. Reading his absurdly confident critical prose, I
could scarcely catch my breath when he talked about poetry as if it were the most exciting thing in the world, which indeed it is.