Ezra Pound: Poet – Volume II, The Epic Years, 1921-1939 – review

There’s a gut-wrenching moment about 100 pages into this latest instalment of David Moody’s three-volume biography of Ezra Pound. It is January 1928, and the long-established literary magazine the Dial has just awarded Pound a prize, describing him as “one of the most valuable forces in contemporary literature”. Cause for congratulations, perhaps? Not a bit of it. A renaissance, Pound announced in 1915, is “a thing made by conscious propaganda”. But the writers who benefited most from the renaissance his propaganda had made (Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis) were no longer in the mood to admit that they couldn’t have done it without him. All Eliot could manage, in 1928, was the confession that he found himself “seldom interested”, these days, in what his old friend and colleague was saying, “only in the way he says it”. Lewis, the most wildly inventive member of the original gang, and among the neediest, had got into the habit of damning to rather different effect. Pound, he declared, had become an “intellectual eunuch”. Joyce, meanwhile, was minding his own business, as usual. Moody seems surprised by this “negativity”. His prose lapses, most uncharacteristically, into cliche, as he ponders the blackness of the ingratitude. The problem he seems unwilling to address is that by 1928, Pound, unlike the others, had little to show for all the propaganda.

The despondency soon lifts. This is a critical biography, and its great strength lies in its conviction that the attitudes and activities of the man are primarily of interest insofar as they illuminate the poems he wrote. Not that there was any shortage of attitudes and activities during the decades covered by the current volume. Pound moved twice, with his wife Dorothy somewhat intermittently in tow: from London (“the place lacking in interest, / last squalor, utter decrepitude” etc) to Paris, in 1921; and then from Paris (ditto, but with less fog and mud) to Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, in 1924. Shortly after, two children arrived: a biological daughter, Maria, by his lover, the violinist Olga Rudge, and a legal son, Omar (Dorothy’s, by another man). Moody’s account of the man who had these experiences focuses on the two preoccupations that, in his view, did most to shape the work: music and Mussolini.

In Paris, Pound hung out with Joyce, the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi and some dadaists. But, for Moody, the most important task he gave himself was to compose an opera based on ballads and songs by the medieval French poet François Villon, in whose unflinching descriptions of “this bordello of a world” he found a great deal to admire. Pound never dabbled. It wasn’t enough to compose, and occasionally perform, music. There must also be a theory overturning all other theories. Pound had always maintained that rhythm is what matters in music, not pitch or harmony. Now he published a Treatise on Harmony (1924) to prove it. Critics and biographers have, on the whole, been dismissive of his achievements as a composer and a theorist. Moody, by contrast, is a fan. He believes that the attention Pound paid to musical composition created the structure of The Cantos, the epic poem he had begun to draft in London in 1915, and was to carry on writing for much of the rest of his life. The Cantos is at once singular and plural, a long poem consisting of individual bulletins and sets of bulletins, of varying length, scope and tone, issued over the course of decades. “Musical themes that find each other out,” Pound told Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1968. Poetry, of course, is a music made of words. Its accords and discords arise as much out of meaning and association as out of melody. The Cantos, Moody says, is a “music of the whole mind at work”.

Within 10 years of the publication of the Treatise on Harmony, however, music had been overtaken in Pound’s life, if not in his poetry, by political activism. “Contemporary economics goes over my desk NOW,” he explained in 1934, “just as the Joyce, Lewis, Eliot etc went over it in 1917.” He had long been a fierce critic of laissez-faire doctrine, and an advocate of theories of social credit (a form of government subsidy replacing bank loans, and the “usurious” profits derived from them). Now, suddenly, in January 1933, he was granted an interview with someone who had the power to make social credit a reality. Pound fell deeply in idolatry with Mussolini. What got him was not the political programme – he never joined the fascist party – but the desire to get things done, and the ability to communicate.

The dawn Pound would surely have thought it bliss to be alive in is that of the world wide web as Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived it (he would have fought tooth and nail against the web’s subsequent conversion into a series of semi-private platforms). In effect, he spent much of the 1930s retweeting gists and piths of economic and political theory to as many followers as he could attract, by whatever medium he could gain access to. He could behave like a bit of a troll, too. Moody speaks of the “predominance” of rage and hatred in the economic propaganda, not least in its vicious antisemitism (the propaganda’s “dark force”). Not everyone was impressed. Pound soon found out what being unfollowed feels like.

So did the Mussolini spoil the music? It had taken Pound 15 years to get the first 30 cantos into print. Between 1934 and 1940, he published another 41, most of them meant as lessons in sound economics and good government drawn from the history of the American revolution and other praiseworthy episodes (brought bang up to date by advice from the likes of Rudolf Hess). Cut and paste, many have complained. Musical form, Moody replies. His subtle and unfussy reading of these intractable poems as the rhythmic development of theme and counter-theme effectively refutes the idea that they are just a ragbag. The danger is that musical form will become just the next Poundian shibboleth, yet another standard the poems can’t quite live up to – for an epic including history isn’t likely to keep any beat, steady or not. The appeal of a good deal of the material absorbed into it is its evident reluctance to be in any kind of poem at all. And then there are the marvellous, aching surprises. Written into the stately opening of “Canto 39”, for example, is the brief, inconsequential history of one of the many stray cats Pound looked out for in Rapallo: a history beyond recovery now, and the more poignant for it. Press such moments into a pattern, however “open”, and you lose the poem’s greatest pleasure.

Moody’s third and final volume will have plenty to contend with, good and bad. But he has already done more than enough to show why his subject continues to matter. Pound is still the one the argument is about. Would he have settled for that? Probably not.