The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts 9781474429184

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The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature Published The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts Edited by Maggie Humm The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English Edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English Edited by David Johnson and Prem Poddar A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures – Continental Europe and its Empires Edited by Prem Poddar, Rajeev Patke and Lars Jensen The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rowlinson The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts Edited by Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East Edited by Anna Ball and Karim Matar

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The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Edited by Roxana Preda

The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction Edited by David Brauner and Axel Stähler The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory Edited by Stuart Sim The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities Edited by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards The Edinburgh Companion to NineteenthCentury American Letters and Letter-Writing Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman and Matthew Pethers The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts Edited by Frances Dickey and John D. Morgenstern The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature Edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva

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Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Jonathan Ellis The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts Edited by David Punter The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Edited by Jeanne Dubino and Paulina Pajak The Edinburgh History of Reading, Volume 1: Early and Modern Readers Edited by Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose The Edinburgh History of Reading, Volume 2: Common and Subversive Readers Edited by Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose

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The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts

Edited by Roxana Preda

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Roxana Preda, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2917 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2918 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2919 1 (epub) The right of Roxana Preda to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations A Brief Introduction Roxana Preda

viii ix 1

PART I FOUNDATIONS 1. ‘Mermaids, that Carving’: Ezra Pound and Italian Art Giuliana Ferreccio

9

2. ‘Templum Aedificavit’: Ezra Pound and Architecture Stephen Romer

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3. Ezra Pound and East Asian Art Mark Byron

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4. Ezra Pound and Old Music Charles Timbrell

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5. Ezra Pound: Premier Danseur by Proxy Evelyn Haller

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6. Time, Speed, Precision and the Poetry of the Everyday; or, Ezra Pound’s Cinema Aesthetic R. Bruce Elder

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PART II THE LONDON PERIOD 1908–1920 7. Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Aestheticism: Sharing ‘Breath for Beauty and the Arts’ with Rossetti and Pater Sara Dunton and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos 8. Ezra Pound and James McNeill Whistler: Modernism and Conceptual Art Jo Brantley Berryman

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9. Ezra Pound and Walter Rummel Charles Timbrell 10. ‘Museum Pieces’: Laurence Binyon, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts Justin Kishbaugh

177 183

11. Into the Vortex: Ezra Pound, Anarchism and the Ideological Project of Art Criticism Mark Antliff

193

12. ‘Intelligence . . . Shut In by the Entrenched Forces of Stupidity’: Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis Paul Edwards

214

13. Vorticist Photography, or The Three Angles of Ezra Pound and Alvin Langdon Coburn Ira Nadel

231

14. ‘Creation and Action’: Ezra Pound and Italian Futurism Sean Mark 15. Ezra Pound and Wassily Kandinsky: Inner Necessity and the Paradiso Terrestre Jack Baker 16. Agnes Bedford: An Invisible Helpmate Stephen Adams

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260 273

PART III PARIS 1921–1924 17. Constantin Brâncuşi, Vorticist: Sculpture, Art Criticism, Poetry Roxana Preda 18. Percussive Music for a Triangle: Ezra Pound’s Relationship with George Antheil and Olga Rudge Mauro Piccinini

283

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19. ‘Like Coins out of Circulation’: Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le Testament Scott W. Klein

334

20. Ezra Pound as Music Theorist: Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony Gemma Moss

347

21. The Expansion of a Theory: Great Bass and Ballet mécanique Margaret Fisher

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22. Renaissance Man: Ezra Pound’s Search for a Contemporary Colour Palette Through His Solo Violin Works Leslee Smucker

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PART IV THE ITALIAN YEARS 1925–1945 23. Ezra Pound’s Artistic Thinking and Relations in Italy, 1925–1945 Massimo Bacigalupo

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24. Music Recollected: Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti Charles Mundye

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25. Vida Sin Fin: Ezra Pound and Gerhart Münch Roxana Preda and Heriberto Cruz Cornejo

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PART V WASHINGTON: MENTORING THE YOUNG IN THE 1950s 26. Sheri Martinelli: The White Goddess Alec Marsh

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27. Art ‘in the Solid’: Ezra Pound and Michael Lekakis Galateia Demetriou

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28. A ‘Transference of Power’: Ezra Pound and the Cinema of Hollis Frampton Daniel Hackbarth

483

Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

503 509 539

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Acknowledgements

I

am especially grateful to the editors at Edinburgh University Press, Jackie Jones and Ersev Ersoy, for their wonderful support along the journey of this volume. The discussions with Jackie made conceptualising and organising this book possible. Ersev was there for every question I had while editing the chapters and finalising the volume for submission: warmest thanks to them both. I am also grateful to all my contributors for their patience and courtesy in their interactions with me, their willingness to commit to this project, work at short notice and go through the revision process. In particular, I would like to thank Margaret Fisher and Mauro Piccinini for assisting me with peer review; they worked well over their fair share to make this volume the best it can be. The editor and contributors would like to thank Mary de Rachewiltz and New Directions Publishing Corp. for kind permission to quote from Pound materials, archival and printed. We are also grateful for the generosity of Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes at Second Evening Art publishing house in Emeryville, CA, and of Maestro Tarsicio Medina at the Gerhart Münch archive in Morelia for allowing us to reproduce materials from their publications. Unpublished archival material by Ezra Pound: ©2018 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Printed works by Ezra Pound: ©New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission.

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List of Abbreviations

ABCR ATH

Pound, Ezra [1934] (1987), ABC of Reading, New York: New Directions. Pound, Ezra (1927), Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 2nd edn, Chicago: Pascal Covici. B1 Lewis, Wyndham, ed. (1914), BLAST 1. B2 Lewis, Wyndham, ed. (1915), BLAST 2. BNAC Martinelli, Sheri and Charles Bukowski (2001), Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960–1967, ed. Stephen Moore, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow. Cav Hughes, Robert and Margaret Fisher (2003), Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound, Emeryville: Second Evening. CEP Pound, Ezra (1982), Collected Early Poems, ed. Michael John King, New York: New Directions. CWCMP Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound [1919] (2008), The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein, New York: Fordham University Press. DF Pound, Ezra (1998), Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions. EPEW Pound, Ezra (2005), Early Writings: Poetry and Prose, ed. Ira Nadel, London: Penguin. EPM Pound, Ezra [1977] (2008), Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. Murray Schafer, New York: New Directions. EPMA Pound, Ezra (1996), Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. EPP I Moody, David (2007), Ezra Pound: Poet, vol. I: The Young Genius, 1885–1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press. EPP II Moody, David (2014), Ezra Pound: Poet, vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press. EPP III Moody, David (2015), Ezra Pound: Poet, vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939–1972, Oxford: Oxford University Press. EPS Pound, Ezra (1978), ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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x

list of abbreviations

EPVA

Pound, Ezra (1980), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes, New York: New Directions. ET Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) (1979), End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H.D., ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King, New York: New Directions. FAN Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, eds. (2009), Futurism: An Anthology, New Haven: Yale University Press. G-B Pound, Ezra (1970), Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, New York: New Directions. GK Pound, Ezra (1970), Guide to Kulchur, New York: New Directions. J/M Pound, Ezra (1935), Jefferson and/or Mussolini, London: Nott. L/DP Pound, Ezra (1999), Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, New York: Oxford University Press. L/DS Pound, Ezra (1984), Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–14, ed. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz, New York: New Directions. L/HP Pound, Ezra (2010), Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody, Oxford: Oxford University Press. L/JL Pound, Ezra (1994), Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. David M. Gordon, New York: Norton. L/ORA Pound, Ezra (1998), ‘I Cease Not to Yowl’: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. LE Pound, Ezra [1954] (1968), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, New York: New Directions. LR The Little Review. OCCEP The Online Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Roxana Preda. The Cantos Project. http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk P Pound, Ezra (1990), Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, New York: New Directions. P&P Pound, Ezra (1991), Poetry & Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and J. Longenbach, 11 vols, New York: Garland. P/J Pound, Ezra (1980), Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read, New York: New Directions. P/L Pound, Ezra (1985), Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer, New York: New Directions. PA Humphreys, Richard, John Alexander and Peter Robinson, eds. (1985), Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy, London: Tate. PC Pound, Ezra (2015), Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Manchester: Carcanet. PD Pound, Ezra (1960), Pavannes and Divagations, London: Peter Owen. PT Pound, Ezra (2003), Poems & Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, New York: Library of America.

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list of abbreviations SL SP SR T

WTSF

xi

Pound, Ezra (1971), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige, New York: New Directions. Pound, Ezra (1973), Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, New York: New Directions. Pound, Ezra [1912] (2005), The Spirit of Romance, New York: New Directions. Pound, Ezra and George Antheil (2011), Le Testament: An Opera by Ezra Pound. 1923 Facsimile Edition, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes, Emeryville: Second Evening. Pound, Ezra (1992), A Walking Tour in Southern France, ed. Richard Sieburth, New York: New Directions.

References to The Cantos of Ezra Pound are to the New Directions 1998 reprint. Quotations from The Cantos are shown by Roman numeral/page number. Archive materials from Beinecke Library, Yale, are shown as YCAL MSS no. Box no./ Folder no.

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A Brief Introduction Roxana Preda

E

zra Pound’s life and poetry were intimately interwoven with the arts of his time. As a passionate traveller, his eyes were open to the city architecture and artworks of the past; as a foreign correspondent for little magazines, he actively sought to meet the artists of a specific milieu and learn from them; as a promoter of his friends’ work, he organised exhibitions and concerts, so that they could earn their living; he wrote about them in the press, initiated funding campaigns, bought art from them and loaned them money. Finally, he cooperated with them in common projects and learned enough of their skills to try his hand at original composition in their art. Pound was neither a mere consumer of art nor a passive witness: he actively changed the artistic landscape of his times by his hands-on approach. Moreover, he was one of those rare artists who produce significant work in more than one art: in his case, it was poetry and music. This complexity of involvement has required a more intricate approach to the organisation of this volume, whose underlying structure implicitly advances two major distinctions. The first separates the thematic from the chronological in two sections. The second proposes a biographical approach which modulates both, showing the myriad ways in which Pound’s life and friendships flowed into his work. The thematic aspect, underlying the first section of the Companion, ‘Part I: Foundations’, highlights broad cultural choices permeating Pound’s approach to his own art and to life. First, the importance of Italian urban landscape, history and civilisation to Pound’s emotional world and to the axes coordinating his imagination. Giuliana Ferreccio demonstrates that Pound’s lifelong allegiance to Italian Renaissance art served as an orientation in his judgements on artists, past and contemporary. The models of classical beauty that Pound absorbed in his travels underlay his interest in urban and ecclesiastical architecture, which stayed with him from his time as a child visiting Venice for the first time in 1898 to his return to Italy in 1958. Stephen Romer’s chapter on Pound and architecture shows that French and Italian Romanesque occupy pride of place in his discriminations of value; the ecclesiastical architecture of Verona and Rimini and the combination of natural and urban landscape in Venice, Sirmione and Rapallo offered parameters of value whereby contemporary architecture and quality of life could be judged. Though Pound discovered the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini relatively late, in 1922, its significance was bound by neither local nor temporal constraints – the discovery remained a crucial event underlying his mature work, The Cantos, indeed making it possible. As a correlative to the sights available to him in his European travels, a very old interest of Pound’s, rooted in his youth in Pennsylvania, namely ancient Oriental art,

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proved of permanent significance to his work, not only underlying his conception of imagism, but also infusing the poetic texture of The Cantos, as Mark Byron presents in detail. A study of Chinese and Japanese art, filtered through his interaction with the learned Laurence Binyon, was the foundation to the myriad ways in which Pound modulated the literary culture of the Far East throughout his life. The first section of the Companion also includes essays on Pound and the temporal arts: Charles Timbrell assesses Pound’s lifelong allegiance to medieval and pre-classical music, which emerged around 1911, when Pound found scores for Arnaut Daniel’s poems in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and lasted until his old age, when he and Olga Rudge danced to Vivaldi in their small Venice flat. As an artist fascinated by music, whose poetic art was determined by its rhythmic lessons, Pound delighted in dance, recognising its affinities with poetry. Evelyn Haller follows this lifelong interest, whether in Pound’s private life, as a friend to dancers and organiser of dance performances, or as amateur choreographer. Drawn from early on to study Lope de Vega’s plays, Pound applied the lessons of the dramatic to his poetry by modulating a myriad of different voices, high and low, English and foreign. It is thus meaningful that the dramatic should resonate and overspill into the cinematic. Cinema is a new field of research in Pound studies, which Bruce Elder theorises here for the first time. Pound’s beliefs and attitudes on cinema changed as the medium developed and matured: Elder’s chapter reveals the affinities between Pound’s poetics of imagism and filmic direct presentation, as well as the poet’s use of collage in The Cantos and montage in film. The thematic axis governing the first section of the Companion thus designates areas of the arts which undergird Pound’s lifelong beliefs and emotions. The next section is governed by a chronological approach, following the four main periods of his active life as an artist: London 1908–20; Paris 1921–24; Rapallo 1925–45; and Washington 1946–58. These parts give us a definite sense of how the various forms of balance in Pound’s interaction with the arts changed over time. Each period has its own character that emerges clearly from the contributions to this volume. At the time of his arrival in London in 1908, Pound was a young poet steeped in late nineteenth-century English literary traditions, which he was assimilating to his studies of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. The chapter by Sara Dunton and Demetres Tryphonopoulos shows that Pound’s roots were late Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite: the figures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Walter Pater loomed large on his poetic and artistic horizon, intersecting with his budding fascination and enchantment with Italian art, cities and nature. The first chapters of Part II, ‘The London Period 1908–1920’, deal with Pound’s early involvement, already formed in his student years in the United States, seeking to provide an archaeology of his interest in the arts. His beginnings show a commitment to aestheticism, a willingness to filter life through art and look at his daily reality through the phantasmal layer of culture and beauty that his Italian and (later) French travels were casting on his imagination. His early friendships with pianist virtuosos like Katherine Ruth Heyman and Walter Rummel, delineated by Charles Timbrell, provided his first education in music; his appreciation of Whistler, outlined by Jo Brantley Berryman, was germinal to his career as an expatriate American artist in Europe; finally, his meetings with Laurence Binyon, Curator of the Oriental Prints Room at the British Museum, described by Justin Kishbaugh, were all formative and proved to be a foundation that helped him interact with the London avant-garde later.

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a brief introduction

3

The turn to modern art came rather abruptly towards the end of 1913 through a series of events that apparently had nothing to do with each other, but which were all connected by Pound’s willingness to straddle different milieus and get involved in discrete strands of artistic activity in pre-war London: Sean Mark details at length the effects of Pound’s exposure to Marinetti’s propaganda for Futurism in 1910: it gave him an aesthetics to fight against, but also a model of strong promotion of the arts which he would later come to admire. Paul Edwards describes the impact that Wyndham Lewis made upon Pound around 1913 and the poet’s involvement in Lewis’s venture, BLAST, which was the nucleus of his beliefs and allegiances regarding contemporary art. Pound was involved in Vorticism heart and soul and did not abandon its aesthetics after World War I, as Lewis seemed to do. His friendship with Gaudier-Brzeska and the affection he felt for the young sculptor made Pound prefer sculpture to painting as an anchor and stable reference for his art judgements. Pound appropriated Vorticism as a set of aesthetic principles and practices to be applied in painting, sculpture, poetry, photography and ultimately all the arts. Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in World War I, just as Pound was embarking on The Cantos in 1915, made the poet particularly sensitive both to sculpture as an art form and to the fate of sculptors. Mark Antliff’s chapter opens up a new direction in the consideration of Pound’s Vorticism, by following its affinities with the ideology of anarchism via Gaudier-Brzeska. As Wyndham Lewis came later to realise, politics and artistic formalism seemed apart but were in fact strongly related. Vorticist experiments like vortography, a practice Pound and Alvin L. Coburn invented and experimented with together, had ample reverberations in later painting, as Ira Nadel shows. Jack Baker explores the role of Kandinsky within Vorticism and the influence of his aesthetics on Pound’s cantos of the 1930s. During his stay in London, Pound’s musical education was making huge strides through his writing of music reviews for The New Age. However, his tastes in music had been formed by his absorbing curiosity about troubadour music much earlier: Charles Timbrell delineates the importance of Pound’s friendship with Walter Rummel in a first example of musical collaborative project on troubadour music in 1912. Towards the end of his stay in London, Pound initiated a collaboration with another musician, Agnes Bedford. Their initial work together, published in 1920, was an edition of troubadour scores in modern transcription, in the trend of the earlier work with Rummel. After Pound’s departure from London, the friendship with Bedford would blossom into their collaboration on the first version of his opera Le Testament de François Villon, completed in November 1921. Using archival resources, Stephen Adams’s chapter illuminates this lesser-known professional friendship, revealing its importance for the progress of Pound’s musical understanding and training in composition. The Companion thus presents the London period as a rich tapestry revealing Pound’s aesthetic background and his education in modernist and Oriental art, as well as his absorbing interest in classicism and the Renaissance, which he would constantly bring together in his mature work. When he moved to Paris in 1921, he built up his interaction with artists, wrote his articles on art and developed his artistic practice on principles he had absorbed in London. Whereas older milestones of Pound scholarship emphasised his connections with the Dada circles in the city, Preda follows Pound’s interaction with Brâncuşi, whom the poet saw as a Vorticist sculptor and a living example of the artistic plenitude Gaudier-Brzeska could have achieved had he lived. But the important difference between the Paris period and the London one is

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the much greater importance Pound attached to music at this time. The real turning point occurred in 1923, when Pound fell in love with Olga Rudge, a talented American violinist, and met George Antheil, a young composer and pianist. Together, they were a ‘percussive triangle’, as Mauro Piccinini calls them. Pound’s interest in music became absorbing: Scott Klein fittingly presents Pound’s continuing revision of his opera Le Testament, first with Antheil’s help in 1923 and then on his own in 1926 and 1931 as foundational in his maturing as a composer. Between 1923 and 1926, in what became a flourishing period of his musical activities, the poet commissioned music from Antheil and promoted him through articles placed in the Criterion and the transatlantic review; he organised concerts so that Antheil’s compositions could be heard in performance; and he tried his hand at compositions for violin (commented on at length by Leslee Smucker). Pound also put together a Treatise on Harmony, which summed up a musical aesthetics based on rhythm, which Gemma Moss evaluates in detail; and participated in Léger’s and Murphy’s film, Ballet mécanique. Pound’s exact contribution to the film, which has been obscure for a long time, is now illuminated in chapters by Bruce Elder, Margaret Fisher and Mauro Piccinini. Pound’s short Paris stay (1921–4) was followed by twenty-one years spent in Italy, mostly in Rapallo, a seaside resort on the Ligurian coast. Pound’s withdrawal from the hectic social life of Paris was an emergency measure he needed to take so as to concentrate on his long poem The Cantos, which he rightly felt to be his most important work and which he had neglected for the sake of his friends’ careers. His move to Italy was the natural outcome of his early enchantment with Italian art – it was a coming into his own, a turn inward to the fonts of his own creativity and imaginative life. His interaction with artists was now more limited to the Italian milieu and to his particular location, as Massimo Bacigalupo describes. Moreover, Pound concentrated on his musical studies and his own compositions, as his interest in music developed even more during these years: he renotated Le Testament for performance in 1926 and four years later he composed another opera, Cavalcanti, discussed by Charles Mundye. Leslee Smucker delineates the connections between his compositions for violin and his poetic principles. Between 1933 and 1939, Pound organised concerts in Rapallo, wrote music criticism and involved himself in musical research. One of his friends at the time, the pianist Gerhart Münch, helped him uncover new treasures of old music in the archive of Oscar Chilesotti in Rapallo. Heriberto Cruz and Roxana Preda follow the threads of the musical collaboration between Münch and Pound in their chapter devoted to the evolution of the two men’s careers beyond their initial meeting in 1933. Starting around 1936, Pound encouraged Olga Rudge to immerse herself in musicological research on Antonio Vivaldi. These activities were interwoven with Pound’s poetry writing and reveal aesthetic questions of method, rhythm and presentation both in The Cantos and in music. After Pound was incarcerated at St Elizabeths in Washington in 1946 as the result of his Fascist broadcasts for Rome radio and subsequent indictment for treason, his contacts with the world of the arts became very restricted and the nature of his involvement changed again. He received many visits at St Elizabeths and increasingly found himself in a new role – an inspiration for young artists. He had mentored budding poets before; but now he found that his informal Ezuversity bore fruit in new creation in painting, sculpture and film. The Companion presents three instances of Pound’s interaction with young artists: Sheri Martinelli (in a chapter by Alec Marsh), Michael

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a brief introduction

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Lekakis (outlined by Galateia Demetriou) and Hollis Frampton (presented by Daniel Hackbarth). Apart from the thematic and the chronological axes which the volume uses to organise the ramifications of Pound’s involvement in the arts, we have to add a third dimension, which is coordinated with the first two, namely the biographical view. Pound’s interest in the arts was a natural result of his social and professional life. He was educated by his artist friends in London, he collaborated with artists as he met them along the way and his roles changed over time. This is why a number of the chapters have a biographical slant so as to put this state of affairs into stronger relief. The biographically oriented chapters are placed in the chronologically organised sections, even if in some cases, relationships with a few artists would prove to be lifelong. For the London period, the volume includes a more elaborate chapter on Pound and Wyndham Lewis by Paul Edwards, with the addition of Justin Kishbaugh’s chapter on Laurence Binyon and Charles Timbrell’s on Walter Rummel. For the Paris period, the Companion includes a chapter on Pound’s friendship with Brâncuşi so as to account for Pound’s admiration for a mature artist of prime rank, whereas Mauro Piccinini delineates the occasionally playful professional interaction with George Antheil and Olga Rudge. For the Rapallo period, Massimo Bacigalupo investigates Pound’s friendships with local cultural figures and reveals their importance for our understanding of Pound’s aesthetics. For the Washington period, the personal dimension is even clearer than at any other point in Pound’s life. His incarceration prevented the poet from taking an active part in American artistic life and drastically reduced his choices for possible courses of action – this time, artists came to him: the chapters on Sheri Martinelli, Michael Lekakis and Hollis Frampton all have a biographical component. After Pound returned to Italy in 1958, he became an inspiration, an icon and a source for new artistic work. His life was public, but an enigma at the same time; his personality seemed to lose the Fascist edge and was mellowed by age, wisdom and regret. Pound’s life and poetry became a subject for contemporary art and a fable of the artist in his own time.

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PART I FOUNDATIONS

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1 ‘Mermaids, that Carving’: Ezra Pound and Italian Art Giuliana Ferreccio

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talian art held a significant place in Pound’s aesthetics and poetics, both in his critical essays and in his poetry, especially The Cantos. His lifelong involvement with Italy’s painting, architecture and sculpture, especially the quattrocento, strongly affected his preferences and the way he influenced contemporary avant-garde experimenters and subsequent artistic and critical movements. His markedly non-chronological and cosmopolitan approach to the arts led him to connect painting and poetry, poetry and sculpture, poetry and architecture, the Renaissance and modernity; his view ranged from the medieval aristocratic courts fostering troubadour poetry to the cultural milieus of the Italian city-states. These he mostly saw as favourable contexts for producing new art, while researching them aesthetically and historically to establish a spectrum of difference: Venice, Rimini, Ferrara, Florence. True to a pan-aesthetic Paterian habit of reading one art in terms of another, and in keeping with a long tradition of art connoisseurs and historians, his overall engagement with Italy revolves around its poetry, its monuments, its places. He was steeped in his admired quattrocento and surrounded by the pagan gods he felt inhabited its landscape – they had not been ousted by puritanical ‘hell obsession(s)’ (LE 153). Engagement with Italy and the Italian Renaissance was common and widespread enough at the turn of the century all over Europe (Coyle 1995: 9) and has been amply enlarged by iconologists such as Aby Warburg’s pupils and followers, Erwin Panovsky and Ernst Gombrich. Pound’s trans-historical perspective and his generalised reaction against positivist or philological methods of inquiry were shared by many prominent intellectuals of the time. Among them, Jacob Burckhardt and Aby Warburg shared with Pound an intense and innovative involvement with Italian art and culture that opened new ground and developed methods in historical and iconological research, extending well into the twentieth century. Despite their widely differing backgrounds, they all gave shape to the tensions permeating literary and artistic culture at the turn of the century, anticipating general cultural changes in attitude towards the arts and art history. The value of Italian art for Pound lies in its revelation of the continuities and transitions of the classical and pagan heritage in our times,1 whose reawakening he saw as one of the best ways to renew artistic practices in the present, to make art new and find new criteria for art appreciation: ‘all criticism is an attempt to define the classic’ (LE 220). In preserving and disclosing the survival of pagan antiquity and its historical reinterpretations and translations at various times, Italian art afforded a bulwark

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against the destructions of ‘the barb of time’, ignorance and wars. Familiar though he had been with Italian art centres from his youthful European tours with his family and from his early forays into art criticism, Pound’s interest in art started with his first enthusiasms for Italian places and landscapes, where ancient art blended with nature and informed it, and where he could shape his idiosyncratic ‘historical sense’ and his transhistorical conviction that ‘all ages are contemporaneous’ (SR 2). Moreover, Italy being the key to this survival, its architecture, sculpture, painting are also testimony of the continuous reinterpretations and intertextual links that this survival presupposes, of its constant innovations within its continuity and discontinuity. From the beginning, however, his involvement in Italian art had a theoretical import: his valuing the clear-cut line in the painting of Angelico, Botticelli and Carpaccio and in the sculpture of Duccio had its roots in a quite early conviction that ‘in painting the colour is always finite. It may match the colour of the infinite spheres, but it is always confined within the frame . . . The line is unbounded, it makes the passage of a force, it continues beyond the frame’ (Pound 1912: 18). His preference for linearity and the ‘medieval clean line’ (LE 150) is thus linked with his view of a universal energy, ‘the universe of fluid force’ in which man’s, and the poet’s mind are rooted, as in a Greek ‘phantastikon’ (SR 92). Consequently, one should not expect from Pound’s preferences a comprehensive historical view of Italian art. Pound’s tastes were always eccentric, as one would expect from him, and apparently arbitrary; the crucial relevance of a work of art for him is probably the result of his first experiences and discoveries (Bridson 1979/80: 211). Against the grain of a long-standing tradition of English and American exiles, he neither liked Florence nor was attracted to such great Venetian painters as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, in spite of his love for Venice. In fact, Pound’s opinions about painting, after his initial fin-de-siècle allegiances, were widely divergent from received notions; his provocative dismissals of eminent masterworks consistently mattered for their theoretical implications, as did his enthusiastic assessments of artists who were then far from being valued as foremost masters (Dasenbrock 1999: 224). On the other hand, Italian art for Pound had always been meant as an exemplar of civilisation and a method for assessing the condition of contemporary art, not as a purely aesthetic concern. In the mid1920s, his main interests shifted from artworks to artists’ practices, their finished works becoming less important compared to their artistic process (Beasley 2007: 164–92). At this point, Pound made a decisive turn away from the disillusioned aestheticism he had imputed to the protagonist of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, towards assessments of art in its wider meaning. Besides reviving pagan antiquity, the Italian Renaissance showed Pound a new and fruitful role for artists and patrons, what good art means and what it can do for society. In 1922, patronage became an absorbing interest as he first encountered Sigismondo Malatesta’s artistic legacy. Malatesta was a discerning patron-artist, as well as a man of action, whose cultural efforts and ‘record of courage’ (P&P VI: 159) were displayed in his Tempio. In the 1930s, Pound concentrated on the relation between art and society, notably in Canto XLV, with its indictment of market-dominated art production, anticipating Adorno’s attacks on the ‘culture industry’; in Pound’s terms, this was ‘the disease that gives us museums instead of temples’ (‘Paris Letter’, P&P IV: 277). In his later criticism and in the middle and late cantos, the reasons for the significance of Italian art change as its function shifts from method and paragon to testimony

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and illustration. This chapter will retrace the ways Italian Renaissance artists and artworks affected Pound’s poetics, asking why he focused on certain works instead of others and when a certain painter acquired relevance. I will be distinguishing between the artworks which most frequently recur in his poetry and prose, and the ones he just mentions in passing, and will move on mostly chronologically, following the various phases of his engagement.

‘Why Verona? Why Italy?’ Pound’s discussions about art probably began with his friend and painter William Brooke Smith, and centred on the Pre-Raphaelites (Carr 2009: 18–19). Pound had written his first art criticism as a freshman theme on Uccello’s battle picture in the Louvre (EPVA 305); while in 1906, after seeing Velázquez in the Prado, he had ‘wondered what all the fuss was about’ (EPVA xi). His visit to the Prado lingered in his mind and was echoed in 1911 in ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, but it was Fra Angelico and Rembrandt above all others who must have stimulated his taste for art criticism. In July 1907, he wrote an essay on Rembrandt and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in the Prado that was never printed, but must have meant a lot, as he reports it in a 1907 letter to his mother: ‘I have done two rather good things, one for Rembrandt and the other for Fra Angelico . . . The second [‘Fra Angelico: For The Annunciation’] is a deeper thing’ (L/HP 87). At this time, Pound did not focus especially on Italian art; Fra Angelico and Rembrandt interest him for a contrast between colour and line, tending towards a preference for line which will stay for a long time and supply the tie between ‘primitive’ Italian painters and avant-garde art. The Florentine painter is not particularly referred to until the 1930s and especially not until Guide to Kulchur, probably because by then Pound had seen Fra Angelico’s frescoes in Cortona (GK 113). Fra Angelico nevertheless figures prominently in Cantos XLV and LI, as an artist whose work is free from usury. In April 1908, after leaving America, on his way to Venice and to the publication of his first collection of poems, A Lume Spento, Pound discovered Verona and was charmed by the admired city, a lifelong enthusiasm bursting out in Canto XCI/634: ‘and damn it all / I wd/ like to see Verona again.’ This first contact with one of the main artistic sites of northern Italy was first expressed in a dreamy, visionary poem from Personae (1909), ‘Guillaume de Lorris, a Vision of Italy’: ‘And first the cities of North Italy / I did behold, / Each as a woman wonder-fair, / And svelte Verona first I met at eve’ (CEP 87). In the introduction to Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, signed 15 November 1910, when he compared alchemical equations with women endowed with alchemical virtù, ‘svelte Verona’ was recalled in the image of the woman’s emanation as ‘slender pillar of light’ (Pound 1983: 13). At this stage, his excitement led him in various directions, composing ‘Poesque’ stories titled ‘Verona’, ‘Pavia’, ‘The Necklace’, which were apparently sent to his mother in May–June 1908 (L/HP: 113), besides writing Poesque ballads such as ‘Threnos’ (P&P I: 20). Although in 1908 he was struck forcefully enough by San Zeno’s ‘pure magic’ to send postcards of it to his father (L/HP 233), his deepest interest surfaced slightly later, in 1910, when his delight in Italian landscape and architecture in Verona and Sirmione started to be channelled by his desire to reimagine himself in Catullus’ as well as Cavalcanti’s time, just as he had done by identifying with the troubadours (‘Histrion’, CEP 71).

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In 1910, Pound had been journeying around Lake Garda, staying in Sirmione while waiting for Dorothy Shakespear and her mother, visiting Verona and San Zeno again (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). He saw the ruins of the Roman world in the ruins of Catullus’ villa in Sirmione, and San Zeno reminded him that this world was not dead, but had undergone transformations: ‘It’s the same old Sirmio Catullus raved over a few years back or M. A. Flaminius more recently’ (L/HP 228). This is how he started and chiefly formed his taste; it was here that he corrected the proofs of The Spirit of Romance and wrote his first translations of Guido, which he would publish as Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti in 1912. On Lake Garda Catullus, Dante, Cavalcanti and the troubadours were all present and contemporaneous. The ‘liquid glory’ (‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula’) of the sapphire and cobalt lake made him think of how Catullus and Flaminius had seen their gods there: ‘The gods have returned to Riva, or to be more exact . . . they have never left it’ (EPP I 125). He had found his paradise and his home, a place to start: Verona is perhaps the most beautiful city in north Italy. The church of San Zeno is the ultimate perfection . . . Dante wrote a good deal of the Divina Commedia in Verona & the ‘Paradiso’ is dedicated to Can Grande [Dante’s patron] . . . mother is quite right in supposing that Sirmione is the lost paradise. (L/HP 229–30)

Figure 1.1 San Zeno, Verona. Exterior view.

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Figure 1.2 San Zeno, Verona: View of nave and entrance to crypt. When he visited Verona again in 1911 with William Carlos Williams’s brother, he seems to have caught such continuities as characterising the Renaissance, hinting at a book he never wrote: ‘I’ve been Veronizing with William. & “done” Mantua and Goito with him . . . I’m working on a book about the Renaissance’ (L/HP 252–3). The connection between Catullus and Flaminius, a minor Renaissance poet writing in Latin, seems far-fetched, but Pound had been writing on him in his first published articles and recalled him again as one of the ‘Poeti Latini’ ‘who were most persistent in this effort to bring the dead to life’ (SR 223). Their ‘classical revival’ brought back the important legacy of a ‘feel of the elements’ which had been stifled in medieval art (SR 229). Although in his 1929 annotations to The Spirit of Romance he doubted their value, in 1910 Pound thought that Flaminius’ work ‘is not unlike that of the French Pléiade’ and placed him next to Castiglione’s sonnet on the death of Raphael and an adaption from Du Bellay. This secondary Renaissance poet, whom Pound translated, showed him a way to connect the ‘pleasing shores of Sirmio’ with Catullus’ power to resurrect the Greek poetess Sappho in his verse (SR 230).

Three Cantos and ‘The Renaissance’ His love for Sirmione, Lake Garda and Verona takes actual poetic shape in the initial version of his long poem, the ‘rag-bag’ of Three Cantos, where Pound’s focus shifts to his own poetic identity and, by replacing Catullus with Sordello, finds his start. He is gradually moving away from dramatic monologue towards a complex form of

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translation, meant as both restoring the unity of a ‘decayed civilization’ as he had done in ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, and reviving the legacy of the dead poets in order to renew contemporary art. He realises that the Greek heritage is preserved in, and can be rediscovered by translation and adaptation into Latin, which ensures its survival in our time, a discovery he dramatises at the end of Ur-Canto III, later Canto I. His revival of the classics becomes less straightforward, involving loss as well as continuity, giving translation the new sense of an awakening of latent energies, considering the ‘Roman vortex’ as a precedent of the London one he was trying to create. The main thread binding together the various literary allusions in these UrCantos is tied both to the memory of Pound’s first apprehension of the classical past, and to retracing the pilgrimages of his first Italian tours of 1908–12. At this point he merges all his different points de repère and ties them to the contemporary vortex of London and Paris. What counts most, however, is Pound’s explicitly linking the Renaissance revival of antiquity or, as he calls it, ‘awakening’, to the new ‘art’ he was discovering in America. In the contemporary ‘The Renaissance’ articles (1914), the modern possibility of a Renaissance in his lifetime finds its best expression as he compares modern office buildings to campanili: ‘I do not mean our copies of old buildings, . . . I mean our own creations, our office buildings like greater campanili, and so on’ (LE 219). In Three Cantos I, Verona is again in the foreground: ‘I walk Verona. (I am here in England)’ possibly links to Browning’s opening in Sordello (P 230; Ricciardi 1991: 27), but more likely refers to Pound’s early visionary poem on Verona, ‘Guillaume de Lorris’. Together with it is his ‘peninsular village’, Sirmione, a place ‘full of spirits’ where by confusing the thing he sees ‘with actual gods’ he finds a start: adapting Catullus who was adapting Sappho and superimposing his own vision of the lake onto that of the ‘Lydian’ waters surrounding Sappho’s island. Translation, however, is never a straightforward business; Three Cantos II starts with images of decline and destruction, and Catullus’ villa where he got his start was after all a ruin. The pathos of Rome’s decadence, in Three Cantos III, is at the core of the Renaissance classic revival, suggested by Castiglione’s Latin sonnet on the death of Raphael, which Pound had adapted in 1906 (P&P I: 6). Castiglione’s sonnet is a homage to Raphael, who had translated the glory of the pagan world in the frescoes for the Vatican Rooms, leading back ‘the spirit unto this our poor dead city’ (SR 226); a lament for his death, and a dirge for Rome’s contemporary decline, the ‘maimed body of our city, due to sword, fire and years’.2 Since Pound’s central image in Three Cantos III, the Latin ‘corpore laniato’, was not in his transcription of the poem in SR, and is not exactly so in the original, his insistence on the body torn to pieces may refer back to his ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, echoing Raphael’s reviving and reuniting the fragments of a past civilisation. Yet there may be various closer allusions: the brilliant young Raphael had painted the older aristocratic courtier’s portrait and enjoyed his conversation just as Pound enjoyed the conversations he had with Gaudier-Brzeska in his studio (OCCEP, Three Cantos III: n. 25) while the sculptor was working on his bust. Gaudier-Brzeska ‘was, of course, indescribably like some one whom one had met in the pages of Castiglione or Valla, or perhaps in a painting forgotten’ (G-B 48). Rome’s maimed body served well as a symbol of Gaudier-Brzeska’s untimely death and the sheer loss to art caused by his not having had a patron like Lorenzo il Magnifico or Pope Nicolas V.

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Luminous Details In his ‘Raphaelite Latin’ of September 1906 (P&P I: 5) Pound launched his lifelong attack on the philologists who underrated the value of Renaissance Latinists because they were ‘bound to the Germanic ideal of scholarship’ and therefore not able to see what the beauty of the classics, and their Renaissance imitators or translators, consists of. This is the beginning of a long-lasting struggle against philology, reiterated in the 1917 articles ‘Provincialism the Enemy’ where his former accusations of philology’s stifling quantitative methods are linked to the contemporary war-enemy, ‘the Junker’, and to German ‘Kultur’ which deals ‘with some minute particular problem unconnected with life, unconnected with main principles’ (P&P II: 232), and resumed in Canto XIV/61–3 where usurers, the ‘perverters of language’, ‘obscur(e) texts with philology’. Pound’s anti-philological stand is given critical footing when he announces the ‘New Method in Scholarship’, his method of the ‘Luminous Detail’ in ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ (1911) (SP 21–6), where he claimed to be gathering up the buried fragments of a decaying civilisation. He illustrated his new method in scholarship by implicitly disparaging the philologists’ ‘method of multitudinous detail’, and praising instead Jacob Burckhardt’s invention of the ‘interpreting detail’, which probably inspired his own definition. Pound had been reading The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (EPP I 170; Three Cantos III; EPEW 159), which was the first work to consider the Renaissance as a coherent whole, to establish its fundamental historical significance, and to see its revival of antiquity as the first sign of modernity (Casillo 1989: 14–15), as Pound himself will maintain in his ‘Affirmations’ series of 1915. In Pound’s view, Burckhardt showed that a few significant chosen facts, as opposed to a heap of motionless, ‘reticent facts’, offered a kind of ‘intelligence that govern[s] knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit’ and can give an enlightening insight into a particular historical period (SP 22–3). The Luminous Detail, often a work of art, enlightens by presenting a fact which embodies the dynamic marks of a momentous change in history and in the ‘Art of poetry’: ‘The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment . . . He seems to draw into the art something which was not in the art of its predecessors’ (SP 25). In addition to their common interest in Malatesta, Pound’s few, albeit explicit references to Burckhardt indicate his interest both in his prose of 1915 and in Three Cantos III (G-B 111; EPEW 159). After famously declaring that ‘all ages are contemporaneous’ (Sappho’s Greece, the Roman ‘vortex’, troubadour poetry, Cavalcanti and the Renaissance, Japanese drawings and Noh theatre, Chinese poetry and bronzes), Pound started linking Arnaut Daniel’s writerly precision with Italian medieval architecture and linking it back to Byzantine churches and to Roman monuments (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2): The twelfth century . . . has left us two perfect gifts: the church of San Zeno in Verona and the canzoni of Arnaut Daniel; . . . the architects were applying the laws of proportion to buildings . . . (or they were simply continuing the use of Byzantine stone forms, lacking the money to encrust the interior with mosaics) . . . Romanesque architecture, being the natural evolution from the classic, seems more admirable than the artificially classic modes of the Renaissance. In the forms of Arnaut Daniel I find a corresponding excellence, seeing that they satisfy not only the modern ear . . . but also the ear trained to Roman and Hellenic music. (SR 22)

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This is a crucial statement explaining Pound’s taste; he admired the classic and followed the ways it survived in history, but always opposed classic revivals that imitated outer decorations and ignored what made the classic a vortex. The values of Roman architecture are clearly visible in the stern simplicity and grandeur of San Zeno, which is closer to classic antiquity than any Renaissance imitation. Architecture and sculpture are now becoming a paragon for the arts while Pound’s criticism is moving towards a new ‘historical sense’, and further towards the many-sided notion of a perfect structural fitting of sculptural ornamentation to architectural building. He returned to the significance of San Zeno in the ‘Paris Letter’ of December 1922, recalling his visit to the church in 1911, when William Carlos Williams’s brother Edgar came upon Adamo’s signed column and Pound realised that the architect had sculpted the stone himself. This event is retold in Cantos LXXIV/468 and LXXVIII/500; San Zeno is hailed in Canto XLV as an example of art untouched by usury. What comes to matter is the practice of hand carving, which unites the sculpted detail with the church’s structural elements, implying an organic relationship between the architect’s design and the handicraft act of carving the stone, and mirroring the same organic relationship tying each detail to the whole he found in Daniel’s poems. What counts most is the detail containing in a nutshell the vital principle of a whole civilisation. (Figure 1.3)

Only Connect By inventing new critical terms based on distinct artistic fields, Pound decisively contributed to giving modernism its programmatic slant away from realistic representation. Even so, his range of references around 1913 was fairly traditional, affected neither by contemporary art nor by his beloved Italian quattrocento. Although Pater’s and Burckhardt’s Renaissance studies may have drawn his attention to Botticelli and Mantegna, his familiarity with the pictorial art of the period was not as broad as one would expect (Bridson 1979/80: 211). Even before Lewis alerted him to Mantegna’s relevance to vorticist aesthetics Pound had seen his Camera degli Sposi in Mantua; yet on his 1911 trip with Edgar Williams he merely states that he had ‘done’ Mantua (L/HP 252) and never mentions Mantegna’s tryptic in San Zeno, a work which

Figure 1.3 Signed marble column: ‘Adaminus de Sco Giorgio me fecit.’ Church of San Zeno, Verona. Photo: Alexandru Preda, 2016.

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secured Mantegna the Gonzaga patronage. Through Pound’s friendship with Binyon, and his work at the British Museum, he may have become familiar with Mantegna’s famous etchings and drawings, a few of them representing the subject of Botticelli’s La Calunnia, which will emerge conspicuously, if quizzically, in Canto XLV. Still, only when Pound became deeply engaged in the avant-garde, beginning with his ‘The New Sculpture’ (1914), did he start envisaging the Italian quattrocento as representative of a Renaissance vortex, paralleled by contemporary Vorticism. At this stage, however, it was sculpture and not painting that acted as a model. Only years later, in the Cavalcanti essay (1910–31), are quattrocento paintings associated with sculpture and with his favourite poetry: ‘Nobody can absorb the poeti dei primi secoli and then the paintings in the Uffizi without seeing the relation between them, Daniel, Ventadour, Guido, Sellaio, Botticelli, Ambrogio Praedis, Nic. Del Cossa’ (LE 153); these preferred painters figure prominently in Canto XX. In his 1913 correspondence with Dorothy Shakespear, Pound shows more enthusiasm for sculpture and architecture than for painting. Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice had now become the cornerstone of early Renaissance (and modern) art: ‘I enclose . . . a reminder of the precise meaning of the term “Quattro cento” . . . I’ve got the bases of the columns in larger reproduction’ (L/DS 226). In a previous letter, Pound insisted on his distinction between a sense of history (he was pleased with the Fenice theatre’s rococo style) and his own ‘historical sense’, associated with his analogical, a-chronological view of art-historical periods, the capacity to see continuities between contradictory world views (L/DS 224). Why would Tullio Lombardo’s bas-reliefs, making up the bases of the columns in Santa Maria dei Miracoli, be a token of his historical sense? There may be various possible reasons, combining with each other: on the one hand, Pound is redefining his appreciation of ancient sculpture, and its legacy to the modern one, by stressing the traits that most strongly remove it from plastic representation, or ‘The Caressability of the Greeks’ (P&P I: 230), in favour of a non-humanist, geometric, formal treatment of an idea (P&P I: 221); on the other, he may have seen in Santa Maria dei Miracoli the rebirth of the pagan gods under Christian ritual forms, their hybridisation by Christian architecture (Figures 1.4 and 1.5). Around winter 1913 to spring 1914, Pound had befriended Gaudier-Brzeska and had started sitting for his hieratic head: ‘I knew that if I had lived in the Quattrocento I should have had no finer moment, and no better craftsman to fill it’ (G-B 48). GaudierBrzeska’s words, as reported by Pound, give modern instances of concord between the material and the style, between sculpture and architecture: ‘the sculpture I admire is the work of master craftsmen . . . every stroke of the hammer is a physical and mental effort. No more arbitrary translation of a design in any material’ (G-B 31). In Pound’s view, Gaudier-Brzeska’s pre-eminence lay in his joining the traits of a medieval craftsman with those of a modern artist and intellectual, thus becoming the symbol of a possible rebirth of Renaissance fruitful relationships between a community of artists and connoisseurs and their patrons. As had often happened before, and will happen again, the theoretical relevance of a work of art becomes clear a posteriori, in this case when Pound starts steadily considering contemporary sculpture. The mermaids bas-relief in Santa Maria dei Miracoli became one of his sacred tokens and, along with Duccio’s bas-reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, would go into his memories in The Pisan Cantos: ‘and Tullio Romano carved the sirenes / as the old custode says’ (LXXVI/480): here Pound mixed up Tullio

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Figure 1.4 Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Venice: ‘The Jewel Box’.

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Figure 1.5 Tullio Lombardo, bas-relief with sirens and putti. Column plinth. Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Venice. Photo: Paola Modesti, Cameraphoto Arte, Archivio Chorus Venezia.

Lombardo with Giulio Romano, who painted the frescoes in Palazzo Te in Mantua. The ‘Jewel Box’, as Pound called it, built by architect and sculptor Pietro Lombardo and his sons, showed some of the traits Pound had extolled in San Zeno’s column, namely, the organic connection between the sculptural details carved by a craftsman, and the architectural structure of the whole church. Both are monuments of their time, yet the details show an artistic protest: the architect of San Zeno makes the un-medieval gesture of signing his work; the sirens show the survival of a pagan past in a Christian church. The inlaid polychrome precious stonework was largely due to his sons and craftsmen, who were traditionally said to have used leftover slabs from San Marco, in a superposition of epochs and styles. Although the church was built to harbour a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary, the base of the columns portrays the pagan motif of floating mermaids.3 Interpretations of the mysterious scenes vary but the main allegorical point seems to concern either the end of pagan antiquity, or an ancient marine Eden, and the transition to the Christian world, or the soul’s seajourney to an otherworldly dimension. The bases of the two columns vary in tone and subject, except for the recurrence of putti, or erotes, winged young boys associated with the divine power of sexual desire, often presiding over rites of initiation. While the mermaids and putti on the right-hand plinth, the sirens proper, are symmetrically disposed in a peaceful succession, on the left-hand plinth, both the mermaids and the erotes look dramatically awed and are involved in some enigmatic chain of actions

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and highly strung expressions. These left-hand bas-reliefs, probably by Tullio Lombardo, show a curiously flattened quality, despite their shapely figures – mainly due to a flat, empty background and to the mermaids’ frontal posture, which underlines a horizontal linear movement rather than the in-depth, three-dimensional design typical of Renaissance perspective as, for instance in Donatello’s or Ghiberti’s bas-reliefs, and turns the marble figures of the mermaids into a water-flow, a blending of stone and water, as Pound will recall in Canto LXXXIII/549, ‘Dei Miracoli: mermaids, that carving’. This blending of stone and water shows that the carving, the material, the subject and the architecture all blend in a coherent whole while, at the same time, reaffirming the continuity between pagan antiquity, Byzantine monuments (the leftover slabs from San Marco) and the Renaissance Christian church. The reference to stone and water will be the focus of Pound’s reviews of Adrian Stokes’s Quattro Cento and The Stones of Rimini (1932, 1934). Such flattening of the image is becoming a distinctive trait, linking Duccio’s bas-reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano with the accentuated picture plane of vorticist abstraction (Robinson 1985: 151). In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir and in his ‘Affirmations’ for The New Age of 1915, Pound introduced two topics which will remain in The Cantos and forthcoming prose: he now sees the ‘squashed’ quality of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures and the clear-cut outlines of Botticelli, Della Francesca, Mantegna as a ‘vortex’ rhyming with contemporary art. In the 1914 BLAST issue hosting GaudierBrzeska’s first manifesto of Vorticism, Pound defined the traits of modern sculpture in surprisingly similar terms: the craftsman’s stone sculpting grows out of the architectural structure, it embodies the form the material is animated by: as he would maintain in the Cavalcanti essay, ‘the god is inside the stone, vacuos exercet aera morsus. The force is arrested but there is never any question about its latency . . . the shape occurs’ (LE 152). Humanistic plastic perspective is replaced by the abstract design of ‘masses in relation’, as theorised by Gaudier-Brzeska’s statements: ‘Sculptural energy . . . is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes’ (G-B 20) and ‘I shall derive my emotions solely from the arrangement of surfaces’ (G-B 28). In Gaudier-Brzeska’s ‘Vortex’, Pound saw a concentrated history of sculpture which he would republish in Guide to Kulchur; it opposed the sphere to linear forms, plastic volumes to the juxtaposition of planes, setting aside Renaissance plasticity and perspective. What is more, Pound found a precedent for the masses in relation of Epstein’s and Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures, not in the great Renaissance sculptors (‘there has been for centuries no sculpture that one could take very seriously’) but in the flattened surfaces of Renaissance medals: ‘We must go back to the polychrome portrait effigies of the early renaissance, or to the medals of that period, before we discern anything that can move us.’ While Gaudier-Brzeska reminded him of an early Renaissance craftsman, the kind of sculpture which best defined his modernity was an addition, the Chinese vortex: ‘“The Boy with the Coney” is Chou or suggests slightly the bronze animals of that period’ (G-B 29). Pound’s provocation is stepping over the great examples of Renaissance sculpture (Donatello, Michelangelo) to underline the modernity of early Chinese bronzes, which resurface again in Three Cantos I: ‘Exult with Shang in squatness? The sea-monster / Bulges the squarish bronzes’ (P 233).

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Botticelli and Pictorial Rhythm While Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculptures and suggestions confirmed the principle that decoration and structure should be integrated, the link between quattrocento and avantgarde painting is made explicit in the much-quoted finale of Three Cantos I: If Botticelli bring her ashore on that great cockle-shell – ... Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about us: Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis, If for a year man write to paint, and not to music – (P 234) As neither Italian artist is significantly mentioned before Three Cantos I, Pound’s discovery may have been suggested by Binyon’s The Art of Botticelli: An Essay in Pictorial Criticism (1913), where the latter expands on Botticelli’s significance for modern art and compares the harmony of line in Chinese pictures to Primitive Italian painting: ‘Botticelli’s instinct was to work in line, like the great painters of the Far East’ (Binyon 1913: 34). Binyon taught Pound to detach Botticelli from Pater and a ‘coterie of aesthetes, with their cult of languor and wistfulness’. In discovering what the art of a ‘Florentine of the Quattrocento means for us to-day and for our own art’ (Binyon 1913: viii), Binyon stressed Botticelli’s ‘constructive power’, giving samples of pictorial criticism which Pound must have recognised as similar to his own critical practice based on transdisciplinary assumptions. Binyon’s writing on contemporary art was perceptibly influenced by his interest in East Asian art and literature, the subject of his widely praised Painting in the Far East (1908). Pound had been a close friend of his and attended his lectures in 1909. Both Binyon and Fenollosa praised linearity and flatness in Oriental art, which did not use a three-dimensional perspective, and was typical of the kind of primitivism most avant-garde artists took as a model in their juxtaposition of planes. Later, when Pound observed that ‘The Rimini bas-relief is conceived in three dimensions then squashed’ (1934), he insisted on the flattening of the image as a favourite trait. This was not only a specific mark of Agostino di Duccio’s style in the Tempio Malatestiano but is also discernible in the representation of the sea in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, where the water’s surface shows no in-depth perspective as to the picture plane; rather, it seems almost vertical (Robinson 1985: 151). This same flatness may also be found in the absence of shadow in Mantegna’s and Della Francesca’s figures. Pound would forcefully object to chiaroscuro and the uncertain, ‘muzzy’ edges it used to define volume.4 When he extols the ‘clear-outlined blossoms’ of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in Three Cantos I, however, the accent falls not so much on the clear-cut boundary line as on the energy blown by a personified wind, in much the same way as Binyon identifies in Botticelli’s ‘pictorial rhythm’ the lesson he can teach the modern movement, ‘laudably endeavouring to present in pictorial terms energies rather than appearances’ (Binyon 1913: 38). This vision of the birth of Venus will recur again, but first significantly in Canto XXIII/109 where it merges precision of line, movement and form: ‘and I saw then, as of waves taking form, / As the sea, hard, a glitter of crystal, / And the waves rising but formed, holding their form.’

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Besides enjoying great popularity well into the 1920s, Botticelli’s Spring and The Birth of Venus had been at the centre of scholarly discussion around the turn of the century. Aby Warburg’s famous lectures on The Spring (1892) were widely known among art historians. Faithful to his principle that ‘God is to be found in detail’, Warburg shared with Burckhardt a deep engagement with the quattrocento; he continued the latter’s legacy in a new direction, away from historical-philological inquiry towards a cultural iconology, which has more than one analogy with Pound’s aesthetic tenets: the new method of the luminous detail, his interest in eternal states of consciousness, his endeavours to retrieve the pagan gods, his vorticist painterly and sculptural emphasis on energy and movement, and the close connection between painting, sculpture and writing. Warburg’s lifelong research similarly focused on the afterlife of pagan antiquity in the Renaissance (Nachleben); he discovered the recurrence of images of movement through forms of design as a means of visually expressing emotions (Pathosformeln, ‘formulas of pathos’), and worked on the relation between painting and literature. Both Pound and Warburg were engaged in a cosmopolitan, multicultural enterprise crossing disciplinary boundaries, comparing poetic, visual and musical languages (Ferreccio 2013: 229). What interested Warburg most was the artist’s minute portrayal of motions apparently caused by winds, the sort of movement Botticelli showed in his paintings and Agostino di Duccio in his allegorical bas-reliefs: filmy hair and flowing garments enhanced the portrayal of mythical figures, and gave them a recurring figurative expression having little to do with naturalistic representation. Such astonishing correspondences are heightened by Warburg’s and Pound’s common engagement with the same quattrocento artists and monuments: besides Botticelli, Duccio’s bas-reliefs in the Tempio, Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi in the Mantuan Ducal Palace, and Tura’s Salone dei Mesi in the Schifanoia Palace in Ferrara (Warburg [1912] 1999: 563–93).

To Kalon in the Marketplace After World War I, the social meaning of artistic activity became Pound’s main concern and entailed a turning point in his aesthetics, sharpened by a generalised European reaction against the humanistic, liberal values that seemed to have encouraged, not prevented, the war (the ‘few thousand battered books’ of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley). In his Parisian years, mainly fuelled by his endorsement of Dadaist experimentation, Pound became interested in Machine Art, filmmaking and avantgarde music, all of which shifted his focus away from the finished artwork towards the process of artistic creation, leading him towards a new comprehension of art in general. Moreover, after discovering the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini in 1922, he turned his attention to the issue of patronage. The builder of the Tempio, Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–68), became the ideal patron, because his practice was to provide a steady stream of income to an artist for as long as necessary and irrespective of the quantity of work: ‘And for this I mean to make due provision, / So that he can work as he likes, / Or waste his time as he likes’ (VIII/29), the opposite of the kind of market-dominated artistic production ‘the age demanded’ in the twentieth century, where art, contaminated by ‘usura’, was made ‘to sell and sell quickly’ (XLV/229). In Canto VIII, a prologue to the Malatesta cantos, in a letter he addressed to Giovanni de’ Medici, Malatesta shows all the qualities a patron should possess: the artist may

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waste his time, but keep up his activity ‘so that both he and I shall / Get as much enjoyment as possible from it’; their exchanges and conversations will be profitable for both. Since witnessing Gaudier-Bzreska’s material difficulties, Pound had envisioned such a form of patronage. In a letter to John Quinn at the time of the Three Cantos, in spring 1915, he wrote: ‘if a patron buys from the artist who needs money . . . the patron then makes himself equal to the artist, he is building art into the world; he creates’ (SL 51–3). Pound would explore Malatesta’s model of patronage in A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928) and compare it with that of other cities like Florence, Ferrara and Venice. He found that the relationship between patron and artist differed in each case: the Venetian oligarchy, for example, gambled and lost with market-minded Titian, while leaving Carpaccio unprotected (XXV–XXVI). Dada’s new stand against ‘vendible’ art was seen as discarding the autonomy of the aesthetic object (its ‘aura’ in Walter Benjamin’s terms), and countering the bourgeois transformation of painting and sculpture into what Pound termed as ‘adjuncts to the various luxury trades’ (‘Art and Luxury’, P&P IV: 14), anticipating Adorno’s indictment of the art industry and Brecht’s critique of ‘culinary’ art. Granting that the Dadaists’ departure from traditional materials was not an innovation Pound might have advocated, his newly acquired economic theories led him to read Dadaist works as a criticism of capitalist turning of the various arts into commodities saleable in the marketplace. Pound’s new direction is summed up in the ‘Paris Letter’ of December 1922 where his models for the new art are no longer individual paintings, privately owned and vendible artworks, but frescoes, a kind of painting that is both part of architecture and has a public or ritual function. No longer Botticelli’s paintings but quattrocento frescoes and architecture are now the paragon for modern art and reveal the social and economic conditions under which an artist worked then and should work now: Leger [sic] returns to painting and finds the easel picture a constriction. . . . Ghirlandaio wanted to paint the town walls of Florence. Leger would be perfectly happy doing the outside of a railway terminal, or probably doing an ad on the slab side of a skyscraper. (P&P IV: 277) Lamenting the neglect of good sculpture and painting in modern life, Pound declares that this is ‘part of the disease that gives us museums instead of temples, curiosity shops instead of such rooms as the hall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena or of the Sala di Notari in Perugia’ (P&P IV: 277)5 (Figure 1.6). What is more, the palazzi Pound now mentions show that art can be an active part of everyday public activities, exactly like a railway station, and his models go back to his beloved Verona. In the same Paris Letter, while criticising ‘the general and generic ignorance of (modern) architects’ and the asinine ‘classic’ proportions of the Madeleine,6 Pound envisaged a new sense of proportion, fit for ‘a new aesthetic of factory architecture’, a proportion that is well represented in the façades of palaces in Verona showing ‘an oblong pierced by several small oblongs beside and above an oblong or arched door’. Pound seems to highlight a juxtaposed, rhythmical succession of flat forms, having nothing to do with lifeless attempts to reproduce classic, motionless harmony. The proportion combining these oblongs can attain ‘the qualities of music’. Later, in April 1930, his own ‘beloved and never surrendered quattrocento’ is compared to surrealism, in a parallel between surrealist Hans Arp and a ‘Cosimo Tura in Bergamo’, adding that he cannot ‘conceive

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Figure 1.6 Sala del Mappamondo, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Photo: Roberto Testi. Courtesy of Museo Civico, Siena.

surrealists objecting on aesthetic grounds to Cavalcanti’, and connecting Guido with surrealist writers Louis Aragon and André Breton (P&P V: 219).

A Daring Synthesis: The Tempio Malatestiano. Starting with the ‘Malatesta Cantos’ Pound renewed his method of poetic composition, much in the style of a Cubist collage or Dada objet trouvé, transposing excerpts from historical documents and letters into his poem in long and frequent quotations, overlaying scraps of narrative and fragmented images on a flat plane. By this strategy, Malatesta’s figure is portrayed as a ‘medley’ of power struggles and idealised courtly love, materialistic concerns about money from military expeditions and artistic sensibility. The historical shreds, whether mimetic or abstract, go into a discordant collision which gives us a modernistic view of Burckhardt’s Renaissance man (Perloff 1981: 182–3). Pound was not the first to concentrate on Sigismondo Malatesta, but the condottiere is newly faceted and mainly relevant to Pound as a connoisseur and a patron in a broad sense. The Tempio’s significance lay in Sigismondo’s capacity to set up conditions that enabled artistic creation: in Pound’s view, ‘Sigismondo registered a state of mind, of sensibility, of all-roundedness and awareness’ (GK 159); he is a token of the sense of continuity with classic culture Pound was advocating by having, among other things, Gemisto Plethon’s bones brought from Greece and buried in a sarcophagus on the outside wall of the temple. Pound’s engagement with the Tempio goes through several

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Figure 1.7 Matteo de’ Pasti, medal of Sigismondo Malatesta, 1450. Verso: Tempio Malatestiano with Leon Battista Alberti’s cupola. Courtesy of Horne Museum, Florence. phases from the early hints of 1922 through the immediately ensuing ‘Malatesta Cantos’ (1923), to his reviews of Adrian Stokes’s books on the quattrocento (1932–4). The two main examples of Italian art Pound now turns to, the Malatesta temple and the Schifanoia palace, have been interpreted as keys (Terrell 1993: 45) or a ‘nesting structure’ (Davis 1984: 101) paralleling the structure of The Cantos (Figure 1.7). The Tempio Malatestiano is known as one of the first projects by Leon Battista Alberti, who was summoned by Malatesta to cover the exterior of the existing Gothic church of San Francesco in Rimini with a façade and side walls. Adding a rotunda covered by a dome – which were never built – was to give it a style as evidently classical and monumental as the ribbed cupola of the Florence cathedral. Alberti’s original plan is shown in a medal by Matteo de’ Pasti. The church remained unfinished as Sigismondo’s fortunes declined. Although the interior by Matteo de’ Pasti and Agostino di Duccio is richly decorated with figures representing sybils, zodiac signs, cupids and gods, the exterior is characterised by a stern sobriety reminiscent of the Byzantine churches in Ravenna: Sigismundo had appropriated marbles from Sant’Apollinare in Classe for his pagan Tempio; for the sarcophagi along its right side, San Vitale had probably been a source of inspiration. The Tempio thus combined cultural layers from various periods, a procedure Pound was adopting for The Cantos. It was built over a previous church and preserved its essential features, without cancelling out differences, showing elements from different, ostensibly incompatible, historical and artistic periods: the Gothic Christian church, the Renaissance revived pagan temple, and the Byzantine marbles and stone tombs (see Figure 2.10, p. 53). In his review of Stokes’s Stones of Rimini, Pound calls it a ‘daring synthesis’, as its details have not been ‘digested and reduced to a unity of style à la Palladio’ (P&P VI: 159), but allow their own character to emerge by the juxtaposition and simultaneous presentation of luminous fragments drawn out of a cultural and historical sequence. In the ‘Malatesta Cantos’ Pound does not dwell upon the interior or Alberti’s reconstruction, except for the apparently derogatory remark ‘a touch of rhetoric’, nor does he comment extensively on Duccio’s bas-reliefs, despite the sculptor’s name figuring in Canto IX,

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even though they cannot have escaped his attention from the start, owing to their flat surfaces, the relevance of linear design, and the large presence of astrological symbols. In Canto XVII, metaphors for flattened forms appear in his images of Venice’s palaces and Agostino’s bas-reliefs, ‘arbors of stone . . . marble leaf over leaf . . . stone ply over ply’ (XVII/78). Duccio is mentioned again in Canto XX/90, where Pound’s idealised, paradisal landscape may have been modelled on the bas-relief showing a Mediterranean harbour under the sign of Cancer, Malatesta’s zodiac sign: ‘Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered, / By the clear edge of the rocks / The water runs, and the wind scented with pine /. . . Agostino, Jacopo and Boccata’ (XX/90; see also OCCEP XX: n.16) (Figures 1.8 and 1.9). Although Stokes’s early work may have relied on the Venetian Canto XVII, his evocations of stone and water in The Quattro Cento (1932) impressed Pound, reminding him of several bas-reliefs in the Tempio (Read 2003: 133). Recalling Pound’s preference for flattened surfaces over spherical ones, abstract design over representational perspective, whether it be Botticelli’s sea in The Birth or Duccio’s bas-reliefs, one realises that the ‘shapes’ which Stokes scrutinised probably attracted Pound’s attention for their emphasis on planar carving and flattened forms. Pound may have drawn on a tradition of German aesthetics (Read 2003: 138) or, more plausibly, on a Neoplatonic insistence on the action of light, which places all objects on a single plane, avoiding the plastic ‘caressability’ of the Greeks, in keeping with his previous dislike of both plasticity and Donatello’s naturalistic in-depth perspective (P&P V: 375). In his view, Stokes had caught ‘pure sculptural values’ by detecting examples of a perfect fitting of shape and stone, what Pound calls ‘stone alive’, recalling the sirens in Santa Maria dei Miracoli through the old custode’s comments: ‘Four centuries they have been trying and they cannot get anything as good as these mermaids’ (P&P V: 375 and LXXVI/480). In Pound’s review, the ‘medley’ has its own peculiar antithetical unity, which he discovered as a shock from Stokes’s montage of juxtaposed photographic reproductions in his Stones of Rimini (1934), which, like the cantos, offer what Pound thinks the best of very different civilisations: ‘Buddism and the far east, perfect Hellenism, clumsy Roman forms, a pattern sense from Africa’ (P&P VI: 159).7 This leads Pound to find another principle of unity, and antithesis, which concerns The Cantos more closely: the unity is given not by the building, but by Matteo de’ Pasti’s ‘medal of intention’ which shows a discrepancy between conception and production. As the idea crystallises only in the process of building, the result may differ sharply from the original design: I believe the construction to have a spherical basis – fortunately foiled in the effect, . . . Take a full set of photos of the temple and start counting the CIRCLES. Reverse Stokes stone-blossoms criterion or rather augment it by the idea of the flattened sphere . . . Again and again we find the sphere squashed down . . . the Rimini basrelief is conceived in three dimensions and then squashed. (P&P VI: 160) In the medal engraving, the dome with which Pasti had meant to cover the building is huge and overpowering compared to the actual tempio, which was supposed to just provide a vestibule to the imposing whole. The two very dissimilar buildings seem here juxtaposed and compressed, recalling the squashed sphere of Gaudier’s ‘Semitic Vortex’ which ‘elevated the sphere in splendid squatness’ (G-B 22).

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Figure 1.8 Agostino di Duccio, view of Rimini under Cancer (Sigismondo Malatesta’s zodiac sign), c. 1450. Marble bas-relief. Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. Courtesy of Giorgio Pasini, 2018.

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Figure 1.9 Agostino di Duccio, bas-relief of Diana, c. 1450. Marble. Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. Courtesy of Giorgio Pasini, 2018.

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Schifanoia: A Clue The frescoes in the ‘Salon of the Months’ at the Schifanoia Palace in Ferrara, whose reproductions of March and April Pound had stuck on the wall of his studio in Rapallo (Yeats 2015: 5), had indeed an essential function in offering an analogy to the structure of the cantos, as Yeats had suggested in A Packet for Ezra Pound (Figures 1.10 and 1.11). In the interview with Bridson of 1959, Pound endorsed part of Yeats’s description: ‘the Schifanoia Frescoes I discovered after I had done something similar’ (Davis 1984: 95). The frescoes are organised in three bands, one above the other, each divided into subgroups of scenes. The bands juxtapose divine scenes at the top, a ‘triumph’ in Petrarch’s tradition, earthly scenes at the bottom from Borso d’Este’s life at court, and isolated zodiacal figures in the middle, symbols and decans out of Eastern mythology representing an astrological calendar. The frescoes were commissioned and executed by Borso d’Este in the last years of his life (1467–70) and soon abandoned; they were covered with plaster during the eighteenth century and the room used as a tobacco factory. At the time Pound started The Cantos, Cosimo Tura was known to have painted the walls (Canto XXIV/114), but later Francesco Del Cossa was acknowledged as the artist of at least three of the insets (March, April, May), a fact that Pound also found out later. The nearest analogy with the cantos may be Pound’s three movements weaving

Figure 1.10 The Salon of the Months, Palace Schifanoia, Ferrara. General view, interior. Photo: Ghiraldini-Panini. Courtesy of Musei di Arte Antica, Ferrara.

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Figure 1.11 Francesco del Cossa, March. The Salon of the Months, Palace Schifanoia, Ferrara. Photo: Ghiraldini-Panini. Courtesy of Musei di Arte Antica, Ferrara.

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through his poem as ‘the casual, the recurrent, and the permanent’. The Cantos, however, mainly recall the upper divine scenes and the earthly ones, leaving out the cryptic central band representing the decans – the rulers of ten parts, or ten degrees of a zodiacal sign – symbolising the first, second and last decad of the month. In The Pisan Cantos, Pound would recall at least two scenes – both probably referring to the month of March – where he compares Disciplinary Training Center soldiers to Borso’s courtiers on horseback, and prisoners to the peasants binding the vines (Davis 1984: 97): ‘Guard’s cap quattrocento passes a cavallo / on horseback thru landscape Cosimo Tura’ (LXXIX/505), and ‘niggers comin’ over the obstacle fence / as in the inset at the Schifanoja (del Cossa)’. Apart from the three levels, what seems to have struck Pound most is the effect of montage the earthly scenes show, despite a skilful use of in-depth perspective; the various episodes are juxtaposed without narrative connections, as though they take place simultaneously (Davis 1984: 101–2).

Chiaroscuro: Florence vs. Venice Even though Venice is central to The Cantos, it comes as no surprise that the Venetian painters Pound admires do not belong to the celebrated sixteenth-century school of Titian but to the former century of Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio and their quattrocento ‘medieval clean line’ (Mamoli Zorzi 1985: 159). Pound’s preference for Carpaccio (an interest he shares with Proust) and Giovanni Bellini could spare no room for the technical achievements of the following generation of Venetian painters, who not only advocated the primacy of colour over drawing, hard contours and sculptural quality, but were the forerunners of the modern market-regulated production of artworks as well. The art of using line to define form was replaced by layered patches of large brushstrokes; there are no sharp edges in defining outlines such as we find, for instance, in the Bellini in Rimini. Their chiaroscuro plays up atmosphere and contrasts of light and darkness. Although Pound’s vision of gods floating in the azure air in Canto III may seem to suggest his admiration for Titian and Veronese’s mythological divinities suspended in midair, neither artist is ever mentioned in this respect (if we except the episode of a 12-year-old Pound admiring Titian’s La Vanità, ‘because it was a prettier lady than [he] cd. find in any other frame’) (EPVA 305). When in Canto XXV the gods ‘are held in the air / Forms seen and then clearness, / . . . as the sculptor sees the form in the air’ (119), it is sculpting, not painting, he alludes to, and the gods have turned into a dynamic abstract form. As he maintains in the Cavalcanti essay, quattrocento painting is a means of visualising divine forces, a key to form, not a picture (LE 153–4). His preference for linearity and flattened surfaces goes together with his preferring quattrocento linear as opposed to aerial perspective, which renders background objects and figures smaller and unclear (Schmied 2003: 80). This might be a reason why Pound never significantly dwells on Leonardo. While early on, he merely states a preference for Carpaccio, the Bellini in Rimini, and Piero della Francesca’s Sigismondo in profile kneeling with his dogs, and in general for paintings with clearly defined outlines, in ‘Cavalcanti’, Pound draws a sharp line between good and decadent art, which now assumes moral and political overtones. ‘This capacity to see in an intense, visionary way derives from a Mediterranean non-Christian view of the body . . . the painters in the Uffizi, all these are clean, all without hell-obsession’ (LE 153). At a later time, the

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body no longer radiates, ‘light no longer moves from the eye, there is a great deal of meat, shock-absorbent’, exemplified by ‘the brown meat of Rembrandt / and the raw meat of Rubens’ (LXXX/531).

Murder by Capital: The Usura Canto In the 1930s, Pound’s interest decidedly shifted to the relation between art and society, condemning market-dominated art production and emphasising a drastic opposition between usurious and non-usurious art. Economics and art theory come together and coalesce in the ‘Usura Canto’ (XLV), where the artists whom Pound most cherished are openly mentioned or hinted at. The canto rehearses and performs a ritual and passionate indictment of usury, but also presents the delightful activities and artworks usury corrodes as powerful and luminous forces against it, thanks to the poem’s ritualistic rhythm and repetitions. The artworks Pound now mentions have long been discussed and reaffirmed in ‘Cavalcanti’, as the chosen tokens and paragons of what makes art new, of ‘donative’ artists, of works establishing a link across ages, countries, cultures; the continuity tying Roman monuments, Byzantine churches and Romanesque architecture is clearly seen in the stern simplicity and majesty of San Zeno, which he characterised as an example of the ‘section d’or’ along with St Trophime at Arles and St Hilaire in Poitiers. The ‘section d’or’ gave the churches the clear lines and proportions, a ‘harmony in the sentience’, where thought has its demarcation and energy has its shape, as in the dynamic image of the ‘rose in the iron filings’. Its opposite is described as ‘the architectural ornament of bigotry, superstition, and mess’ (LE 150–4). Tokens of the ‘medieval clean line’ recall the 1910 introduction to his translations of Cavalcanti, which went through various accretions, yet always maintaining its opposition to excessive, pointless ornamentation and the ‘moulds in plaster’ of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley which were the outward signs of the ‘tawdry cheapness’ of the age (P 186). In its final version, the essay compares such ornamentation to Petrarch’s kind of ornament, ‘not an irreplaceable ornament, or one that he couldn’t have used just about as well somewhere else’. Only in Mauberley, where Pound denounces the ravages of war, is the ‘mess’ equated with usury’s damages to art, when the line gets blurred and botched, growing ‘thick’ (XLV/229). Neither the Usura Canto nor Pound’s prose is ever too specific as to what usurious art may be, but a constant series of ‘uninterrupted . . . rather acute disgusts’ unequivocally point to what he disliked. In the 1918 article ‘Building: Ornamentation’ (‘The cement imitations of Pietro Lombardo’s mermaids set into brick façades are unspeakable abominations’ P&P III: 187), he refers by contrast to the lack of organic relation between the artwork, its material and the architectural structure, echoing Gaudier-Brzeska’s rejection of ‘the arbitrary translation of a design into any material’ (G-B 31). Superfluous ornamentation has become the ‘bulging and bumping and indulging in bulbuous excrescence’, the opposite of the Byzantine ‘ornament flat on the walls’ (LE 151). Most of the tokens of non-usurious art he mentions here respond to such qualities: clear-cut outlines, harmonious proportions, organic relation among parts, energy enlivening a ‘world of forms’. Canto XLV’s ‘painted paradise on his church wall . . . where virgin receiveth message’ refers to Fra Angelico’s many Annunciations, connecting Pound’s 1906 early forays into art criticism, where Fra Angelico was ‘a deeper thing’ than Rembrandt,

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to his more recent visits to Cortona and Angelico’s frescoes, mentioned in Guide to Kulchur (GK 112) and Canto LXXVI/482; ‘Gonzaga’ alludes to Mantegna’s frescoes for the family in the Camera degli Sposi in the Mantuan Ducal Palace, referring back to Pound’s first visits to Mantua and recalling Mantegna’s ‘sterner line’, which foreshadowed avant-garde Vorticism; ‘Zuan Bellin’ (Giovanni Bellini) alludes to Pound’s favourite painting, the ‘Pietá’, once in the Tempio. A curious choice is Ambrogio Praedis, a secondary figure but good miniaturist, probably chosen for his proficiency in exquisite finish, which may have reminded Pound of Bronzino (LXXIX/505). Another peculiarity is Pound’s long-lasting attraction to Jacopo del Sellaio, whose Venus Reclining with Cupids he must have seen in London before the war; the painting, which inspired ‘The Picture’ and ‘Of Jacopo del Sellaio’, both published in Ripostes (1912), is referred to by Dorothy (L/DS 120–1), while the painter himself is mentioned in Canto XX.8 There remains the mystery of La Calunnia, a late and sombre Botticelli, so unlike his Venus prototype (Figure 1.12). Why should Pound cite this particular Botticelli in Canto XLV? There are various explanations, but no certain solution. The painting is based on the lost original by Apelles, whose allegorical figures Lucian described in detail. His description was well known in Italy during the Renaissance, and produced several paintings on the subject, besides having been paraphrased by Alberti in his De Pictura, where Botticelli probably found his theme, and which Pound is very likely to have read. It is one of the most famous among Botticelli’s allegories: its figures, greatly energised – ‘agitated’ in Warburg’s terms – are dramatically assembled. The group frenziedly advancing towards the throne seems tossed by a relentless wind which halts only in the statue-like image of truth, as Binyon describes it in The Art of Botticelli, which Pound was probably familiar with (Binyon 1913: 143). Pound may have been attracted by Botticelli attempting to revive a lost original, and relying on a written description, but he could also have identified with the unjustly slandered artist, dragged by the hair before an ass-eared authority, as Bridson claims; a more plausible explanation centres on the judge, identified as Midas, possibly associated with usury’s effects. The connection between gold and mendacity was stated in Mauberley and would be repeated in Canto LXXVIII, ‘and Churchill’s return to Midas broadcast by his liary’ (Robinson 1985: 145). A further hint may come from Binyon’s book, in which he expands on La Calunnia, referring to Mantegna’s well-known drawing on the same subject in the British Museum. ‘Mantegna’s sterner line’ of Three Cantos I may refer not to the fresco in Mantua but to this drawing, whose sharp outlines favoured the production of numberless etchings.

‘Galla’s rest’ In the Pisans Cantos, Italian artists and monuments mainly appear as recollections from his younger years, while scenes from the prisoner camp and the mountains around Pisa merge with his dreams of Taishan (Mount Tai) and memories of his beloved sacred places. Arles’ Alyscamps (LXXX/532), the ancient Roman burial ground – ‘Elysian Fields’ in Provençal – which Pound visited in 1912, is mentioned by Dante in the Inferno as the city of Dis; it returns in the Pisans by contrast as ‘Elysium / for serenity’, probably recalling his 1912 tour notes: ‘Arles . . . is a living complex, like Venice, or Verona’ (WTSF 64). Les Alyscamps with its numerous, sundry sarcophagi lining

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Figure 1.12 Sandro Botticelli, La Calunnia, 1484. Tempera on panel. Courtesy of the Uffizi Galleries, Florence:

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a tree-shaded alley connect back to Byzantine San Vitale, where the sarcophagi are placed in an alley close to Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum, itself harbouring sarcophagi in its niches. Schifanoia re-emerges in the description of camp guards. The usual connection between architectural structure and pictorial component is still there, but other elements prevail. In Pound’s youth, the abstract and primitive quality of Byzantine mosaics and images drew his attention as it had done for several European avant-gardes. A regular visitor to Hulme’s salon, Pound responded to his lectures on modern art and its philosophy in his article ‘The New Sculpture’ (Pound 1914f). In commending the significance of Epstein’s work against its detractors, Pound draws attention to Hulme’s, and Worringer’s, distinction between vital art (realistic) and geometric art – the latter harkening back to pre-Renaissance cultures, such as Byzantium and ancient Egypt. He subscribed to their opposition between humanism and anti-humanism, realistic and abstract (‘The artist has been for so long a humanist!’). In the 1920s, the Byzantine belonged to architecture: Pound connected the neoclassical Tempio Malatestiano to the Byzantine Church of San Vitale and Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum in Ravenna by suggesting that Alberti’s design for the side elevation of the Tempio with its sarcophagi may be traced back to the tradition of Byzantine churches in Ravenna (IX/41). The sarcophagi in Ravenna show that Byzantine art and architecture are rooted in late Roman art and find their significance in the idea of a tradition based on the simultaneous overlaying of various cultural periods. The connection between the Byzantine in Ravenna and the Tempio centres at first on Malatesta’s enterprising recklessness in achieving his artistic goals (‘got up a few arches, / And stole that marble in Classe’ IX/36), foreshadowing, however, his impending decline; it may also suggest an unfavourable comparison between Ravenna’s accomplished masterpieces and the Tempio’s ‘jumble’. Yet the recurring, unforgettable line ‘in the gloom the gold gathers the light against it’ (XI/51) possibly alludes both to Malatesta’s ‘record of courage’ against his contemporaries, and to the blue dome spangled with stars in Galla’s mausoleum, which promise the survival of the classical inheritance in Italy and Europe. The same line acquires an otherworldly tone by returning in the visionary Canto XVII, connecting the Byzantine mosaics with Venice’s ‘forest of marble’ and ‘the light not of the sun’. In Canto XXI, Placidia’s ‘blue-black roof’ whose ‘Gold fades in the gloom’ stands for the value of permanence as against the transience of ‘another war without glory’. It points to the harmonious patterning obtained in VenetianByzantine art and anticipates the wavering contrast between light and darkness of Drafts and Fragments. Galla Placidia, Empress of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, resurfaces in Carta da Visita, where her mausoleum introduces a new, hauntingly contemporary notion of tradition, embodied in the sacredness of images, whether of gods or of kings: ‘Tradition inheres (inerisce) in the images of the gods, and gets lost in dogmatic definitions. History is recorded in monuments, and that is why they get destroyed’ (SP 322). In the Pisans, the linear precision of quattrocento art is linked to the sacred act of transmitting a tradition across cultures: ‘but a precise definition / transmitted thus Sigismundo / thus Duccio, thus Zuan Bellin, or trastevere with la Sposa / Sponsa Christi in mosaic till our time / deification of emperors’ (LXXIV/445). Mosaics are equal to sacred icons, the ‘Resurgent Eikones’ transmitting the suggestion of a permanent world beyond the purely historical facts of emperors and kings. In Thrones, Byzantine civilisation figures prominently for the first time in the poem, alluding to a possible ordered world, whereas the economic theme is again connected to art: early Christian churches

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in Rome and Siena: ‘Santa Sabina / & San Domenico . . . where the spirit is clear in the stone’ (XCIII/643) are contrasted with St Peter’s, where usury and commerce have corrupted architectural design: the ‘internal horrors (mosaic)’ and its ‘melon hat’ (CIX/794) are testimonies of that. In Canto CIX, Byzantine art affords the transition from Thrones to the more sombre Drafts and Fragments, by associating Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome with Galla Placidia’s tomb in Ravenna and the cathedral on the island of Torcello in the Venetian lagoon. Galla’s ‘quiet house’ is central to Drafts and Fragments, as it rhymes with Torcello and its Byzantine basilica, merging with, and alternatively opposing, moments of liveliness and of annihilation. While Pound had originally opened Canto CX to connect back to Thrones and present a clear paradise presided over by a benevolent goddess or Virgin Mary (Stoicheff 1995: 38), in the final version, confusion and decline seem to prevail, as in the sharp contrast between the mosaic of the Madonna over the portal in Canto CX and the squalid vision ‘of the Madonna / above the cigar butts / and over the portal’ in Canto CXVI/815. Whose is ‘Thy quiet house’ opening Canto CX? Is it Galla Placidia’s tomb in Ravenna, Venice itself, or the seventh-century basilica which survived Torcello’s decay? Is Pound addressing and identifying himself with Torcello, the sunken city, once thriving like the Byzantine Western Empire? If Torcello was submerged, its basilica survived, and Galla’s quiet house may again ‘lead back to splendour’, however dismal the darkness may be. In the canto’s first lines, what stands out is the contrasting juxtaposition of the static, abstract quality of Byzantine figures and the lively and life-giving movement of ‘the crozier’s curve’ running ‘on the wall’. This curve suggests the Venetian light reflecting on the waves; also the outline of a gondola’s forefront gliding in the canal and projecting zigzagging, ever-changing designs. Pound’s lines ‘Hast ’ou seen boat’s wake on sea-wall, / how crests it?’ is possibly reminiscent of a mosaic in the basilica (Stoicheff 1995: 76). The mosaic comes to life as ‘wake exultant’, generating a fusion of art and a numinous nature. In these final lines, Italian art and landscape merge again, although the pagan gods no longer assure the poet that the cosmos may cohere.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Roxana Preda’s invaluable suggestions on this topic. The Cantos Project and its useful glosses have also been a great help. 2. See the translation of Castiglione’s sonnet in The Cantos Project, Three Cantos III: Sources: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/overview/iii-sources/100-castiglione-sonnet-toraphael-sanzio 3. The plinths of the great columns on both sides of the altar are carved with hybrid sea creatures, mermaids and tritons, inhabiting a fantastic marine world, which may represent a continuous narrative. They have pleasant features and are provided not only with the long tails of fish or sea snakes, but also with leafy forelimbs and in some cases wings. Putti and cupids, or erotes, are standing on their tails. No matter how one reads the possible narrative, however, this imaginary, marine world definitely refers to the myth of Venice’s miraculous birth out of water, underlined by the pillars suspended on the canal outside the church (Modesti 2009: 26–30). If Pound was familiar with, or guessed at, such clues, the ‘sirens’ may have stayed on his mind both for depicting the transition from pagan antiquity to Christianity and for alluding to a nekyia of sorts. Besides, the plinths being placed on a base carved in the shape of cushions may have been suggested by a similar element in the chapels of the Malatesta temple in Rimini (Modesti 2009: 26).

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4. If chiaroscuro was an age-old technique used in every art, it became widely practised in sixteenth-century Italian painting to give volume to the body, and found its apex in Raphael and Caravaggio. Objecting to Raphael’s ‘carnal tissue’ (‘Durch Rafael ist das Madonnenideal Fleisch geworden says Herr Springer’), Pound sees decadence setting in ‘about 1527’ as the people have become ‘corpuscular, but not in the strict sense “animate”’ (LE 153). Chiaroscuro is a sign of ‘Renaissance decadence’ again in ABC of Reading (1934: 132). 5. Part of a thirteenth-century building, the Sala dei Notari was originally intended for the city commoners’ assemblies and only later used by the solicitors’ guild. The Palazzo Pubblico was the fourteenth-century city hall of the Sienese Republic, where the government met. 6. A popular Parisian monument, at times a church, at times a public building, started as a Greek temple in an eighteenth-century neoclassical style, but finished only in the mid-nineteenth century in a more pompous rendering of the classical. 7. Stokes’s montage of photographs recalls Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, a montage collection of Pathosformeln, images showing ‘original rhythms’ by the movement of their garments’ wind-blown, rippled surfaces. The now famous Atlas was never completed and later transferred to London. 8. The attribution to Jacopo del Sellaio is doubtful and the painting is mainly regarded as a work by an imitator of Botticelli.

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2 ‘TEMPLUM AEDIFICAVIT’: Ezra Pound and Architecture Stephen Romer

Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan, City of pattern’d streets; again the vision. V/17 A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit. The detail must bear inspection. ‘Paris Letter’, The Dial, December 1922

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ne sighs for the stone window-frames of Verona’; thus Ezra Pound, expressing a singular longing in the pages of The New Age, September 1918. Addressing readers who had been confined to their island prison during four years of war, Pound’s longing would have found an echo, though the particular object of desire might have bemused them. It occurs in the context of the poet’s ‘Art Notes’, written under the pseudonym of one ‘B. H. Dias’ (so cheekily close to Bias) in an article entitled ‘Building: Ornamentation!’ (EPVA 76). The exasperated exclamation mark can be explained by the context: these occasional notes on London architecture were written as the Modern Movement (de Stijl, Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and L’Esprit Nouveau) was getting under way, and the word ‘ornament’ had become a loaded one – especially since the 1908 treatise by Adolf Loos, Ornament und Verbrechen (‘Ornament and Crime’). Loos, whose trenchant and argumentative style resembled that of Pound himself, declared that the Occident had evolved beyond ‘the need’ for ornament: ‘Now that ornament is no longer organically integrated into our culture, it has ceased to be a valid expression of that culture’ (Banham 1980: 94). Loos is in fact attacking modern ornamentation – and ‘sham ornament’ was Pound’s bugbear too. Casting his eye over parts of the capital, he frames his critique less in anthropological terms than in aesthetic and moral ones: Westward from Marble Arch by the Park a patient observer will find cast-iron balcony railings full of mendacity, and, alternating with them, a few fine balconies in perfectly plain slender bars. This is not a matter of cost. The clean line of the well-proportioned plain iron costs no more than the lies. Complications and convolutions in these machine-made ‘ornaments’ are lies, because the ornamented surface is an implication that it has cost more trouble than the plain. The lie deceives no one, and it has never attained the dignity of a convention. (EPVA 76–7)

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I quote this commentary at the outset because it contains in nuce several of Pound’s beliefs and obsessions concerning architecture (and indeed art in general) which it is the purpose of this chapter to unpack: the clean line (ideally carved directly into stone or marble); plainness compared to ‘niggle’; authentic craftmanship as opposed to machine-made ‘mendacity’. It is also representative of his style: trenchant, assertive, but also swift-swipe, rapid and judgemental. One can also perceive inklings of the moral and economic critique that came to dominate so much of his later thinking. In truth, though, there is no continuous commentary on architecture, still less a theory, to be discovered; rather, as we shall see, Pound’s oeuvre makes sporadic (though compelling) allusions to architecture considered per se, which range from the technical (mostly in the prose) to the visionary (in the verse).

‘Each as a Woman Wonder-Fair’: Early Visions The poet’s first allusions to architecture are indeed visionary, but also vague, in the Pre-Raphaelite vein; they are wraith-like in marked contrast to the later, intense realisations of The Cantos. And they allude more to cities and cityscapes than to any detailing of construction. The first city, the last city and the continuing city was always Venice for Pound; he arrived and first settled there in 1908, and he died there in 1972, and is buried on the island cemetery of San Michele, close to another of his sacred places, Torcello. In 1908, having escaped Wabash College in Crawfordsville, known familiarly to Pound as the sixth circle of hell, he made landfall in Europe at Gibraltar, travelled by sea to Genoa and then overland to Venice. He visited the northern Italian cities for the first time, and they appear like phantoms in ‘Guillaume de Lorris Belated’ (Personae, 1909), where Verona, notably, ‘is a woman wonder-fair’ that bestows on Guillaume/Pound a kiss, and so they part – ‘And yet my heart keeps tryst with her, / So every year our thoughts are interwove’ (PT 91). Despite the stale creampuff, Verona did establish itself solidly in Pound’s heart and memory, anchored there by an architectural gem, the Church of San Zeno, with the signed pillar, in best red Verona marble; one of the columns that sustains the crypt of the church (see Figures 1.1–1.3). It is notable that Pound’s touchstones, in architecture as elsewhere, emerge from lived experience, from choses vues, and often early on in his career, as if they were seared into his imagination. Hence, we find three churches singled out as exemplary in the celebrated ‘Usura Canto’: Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit. Not by usura St Trophime Not by usura Saint Hilaire. (XLV/230) He first saw San Zeno in 1908, the French Romanesque churches of St Trophime (in Arles) and possibly also St Hilaire (in Poitiers) in 1912, on his walking tour of troubadour country. That remarkable walking and writing tour charts indeed a momentous transformation in Pound’s poetic art, and the ‘built environment’, whether nestled in valleys or dominating craggy outcrops, plays a significant part in it. Richard Sieburth, who edited the abandoned manuscript, describes the process: ‘As he essayed this newfound discipline of seeing (Rilke’s Augenwerk) on the landscapes and townscapes

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of southern France, Pound gradually managed to transform his eye into a modernist organ of phanopoeia through the unlikely medium of descriptive travel prose’ (WTSF xvi). In what concerns us, it is clear that Pound, armed with his Baedeker, had no ambition to be a Ruskin or a Pevsner: disappointed at the outset by Poitiers and Angoulême he writes wearily: There is a cathedral for connoisseurs, my real objection is to the idea that one come to ‘see’ or that all travel is to study the phases of architecture visigothic or otherwise, or that one should tap a certain cask of emotions in the teeth of every cathedral. If one wish sensation from Architecture one had better stay in New York. (WTSF 7) We shall consider Pound’s enthusiasm for skyscrapers later on, but here it is his impatience with the niceties of architectural terminology that should be noted. It recurs later, on his visit to Narbonne: The medieval church, with buttress & battlements is ‘late’ but hang it all one cannot forever play philologist. (WTSF 56) One feels an epigram about ‘Tourist with Baedeker’ coming on . . . And yet the church he glimpsed at Poitiers later becomes a touchstone. So do St Trophime and its cloister in Arles. His visit to the latter was a high point, epiphanic even, intellectual and emotional excitement running high – which must be why it is St Trophime that features in Canto XLV, or thirty-six years later in Guide to Kulchur, rather than, say, the roseate cathedral of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse which nevertheless elicited highest praise at the time. Something else stirred the poet in Arles: an apprehension composed of ‘architecture’ but transcending it – the civic space, what Donald Davie calls ‘stonescape’ – and the vision of ‘human and civic dignity’ projected therein (Figure 2.1): Arles reveals so much – around you Arles is a city, is not a country to be walked across or a mt. you can climb to the top of. . . . There are machines, there are ghosts & corpses of cities, all of them, but no, Arles is the other sort, the living complex, like Venice, or Verona, or perhaps Cadiz, even tho I throw in this last as a mere venture. You can not in any real sense see such places, you pass & you return, & you know like fate in the weaving that some time you will come back for good there. (WTSF 64) Pound’s original concern had been to trace the places and journeyings of the troubadours; but as he walked, his purpose changed: ‘I had set out upon this book with numerous ideas, but the road had cured me of them’ (WTSF 33). Accuracies, exactitudes, of the kind we find in the poem that commemorates this tour, ‘Provincia Deserta’, are thrown off, for example these jottings on the ruined castle of Excideuil with its tower

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Figure 2.1 The church of St Trophime, Arles. Exterior view. clear edged, unascendable, and for no known reason these things wrought out a sort of perfect mood in things, the air was after rain damp and coolish. The wheat in some parts shoulder high over it. The sheer drop at the edge of the level. (WTSF 26) Pound’s perceptions are predominantly spatial here – and they combine with the heightened mood to leave an imprint, a construct, a complex ideogram – clear edge, sheer drop, level – in the poet’s mind that he would reproduce later, in Canto XXIX, which remembers a second visit to Excideuil, this time with T. S. Eliot (Arnaut), in 1919, and adds the detail of the wave pattern: ‘So Arnaut turned there / Above him the wave pattern cut in the stone / Spire-top alevel the well-curb / And the tower with cut stone above that’ (XXIX/145). This ‘wave pattern’ recurs, in the words of Richard Sieburth, as the ‘hieratic signature of place in the paradisal geography of The Pisan Cantos’ (WTSF 24), where

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it is linked to Mont Ségur and the altogether visionary city of Dioce that is Ecbatan (‘terraces the colour of stars’): Nancy where art thou ? Whither go all the vair and the cisclatons and the wave pattern runs in the stone on the high parapet (Excideuil) Mt Segur and the city of Dioce Que tous les mois avons nouvelle lune (LXXX/530) That ‘tower with the cut stone’ and the ‘wave pattern’ both allude to carving, and it is clear that by the time he can write lines like this in Canto LXXVI: ‘nothing matters but the quality / of the affection – / in the end – that has carved the trace in the mind’ (LXXVI/477) (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). The act of carving, direct carving into marble or stone, as the poet carves into time by word and rhythm, has taken on quasi-sacred

Figure 2.2 Castle of Excideuil. Exterior.

Figure 2.3 Castle of Excideuil. Wave pattern. Photo: Gordon McKechnie, 2017. Reprinted by permission.

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connotations. Donald Davie grasps this when, wresting his poet from the toils of the theorists (of language, of psychoanalysis), he stresses the ‘stonescape’ whose physical aspect Pound can deliver with rare precision: ‘Architecture and sculpture, conceived of not as the providers of museum monuments for photographers but as elements and agencies in the shaping of habitable environments, escape all the nets of metonymy and metaphor’ (Davie 1991: 201). We shall return to the ‘totally architected, totally sculpted environments’ when considering, in the Italian section below, the city of Venice. So far, we have seen the poet offer muffled impressionist generalities about the Romanesque, associated with certain preferences. But where does Pound stand in relation to the great architectural movements of his time? The answer is, he stands at an angle to them; in fact, the central issues (materials, form and function, ornamentation) are all of them at different times discussed, or at least evoked, but the major names or movements (except briefly in relation to Fernand Léger and Machine Art) are not mentioned at all. The index of Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, Harriet Zinnes’s very inclusive edition of Pound’s writing on the arts, yields up the names of these architects: the master of the quattrocento, Leon Battista Alberti; Vitruvius; Palladio; Viollet le Duc (‘the dead hand of’); and in the modern period Lutyens (in passing), Edward Wadsworth (his ‘Vorticist’ building) and a brief memory of a certain ‘Ricards’ (in fact, Edward Alfed Rickards, of Rickards and Lanchester, who designed the Methodist Central Hall in London). The index fairly bristles, however, with references to modern sculptors, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein and Brâncuşi; to these must be added the Vorticist painter and draughtsman Wyndham Lewis. So, no Louis Sullivan, no Van Doesburg, no Frank Lloyd Wright, no Mies van der Rohe, not even Le Corbusier. But Pound did take an active interest in the revolutionary Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916), who was adopted posthumously for the Futurist cause by Marinetti. Supportive of the cultural programme of the fascio, in 1936 Pound wrote a piece in Italian for the journal Il Mare, suggesting that a ‘Casa Littoria’ be built in Rapallo, following designs by Sant’Elia. The building was to be ‘a library accessible to foreigners, either dilettantes or tourists, to help them understand the new Italy’. When he mentioned the project to Marinetti, the Futurist replied: ‘Glory to Antonio Sant’Elia glory to Fascist Italy so well architected by Benito Mussolini’ (quoted in Beasley 2007: 200). This was an exceptional sortie for Pound, however, whose predilections where architecture is concerned tended always to the clean lines of the classical and the Romanesque. Pound was never a fully paid up Futurist; he was a Vorticist, and Vortex Pound, should we need reminding, was always careful of the past, or at any rate ready to quarry and preserve ‘all the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live’ (B1 153). Wyndham Lewis saw Pound, in those early pre-war years in London, as a ‘demon pantechnicon driver busy with removal of old world into new quarters’ (Humphreys in PA 39). It is therefore in keeping that he should plead for the past: One doesn’t need to relinquish the beautiful inutility of the Tempio merely because there is a new aesthetic of factory architecture. There was a new aesthetic of steel, there is a new aesthetic of reinforced concrete . . . mostly botched, incomplete,

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stephen romer unaccomplished, unrealized by constructors. The great architect will always welcome an actuality. For the ass who built the Madeleine and the nincompoops who imagined that mere multiplication of some ‘classic’ proportion would make a larger building more . . . Heaven help to an adjective, more shall we say, imposing, rather than more of an imposition . . . there is nothing but contempt. (EPVA 174)

Pound’s reaction to the phenomenon of the Manhattan skyscraper, encountered during his return to his native land back in 1911, and recorded in a long essay, ‘Patria Mia’ (1912), shows clearly how he was inhabited by both these tendencies – excited curiosity about the new (the really new), and respect for the ‘energized past’. Contending that America ‘has a chance for a Renaissance’, and noting of the crowd on Seventh Avenue its ‘animal vigour’, and the ambient wealth, he presents this startlingly eccentric vision of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, built in 1909 (Figure 2.4): With the advance of steel construction it has become possible to build in the proportion of the campanile something large enough to serve as an office building. This tower is some 700 odd feet high and dominates New York as the older towers dominate hill towns of Tuscany. It is white and very beautiful, and it is imperfect, for its clock projects in a very ugly manner. But no man with sensibilities can pass the base of it without some savour of pride and some thought beyond the moment. (SP 105–6) Pound’s ‘Praefatio ad Lectorem Electum’ in The Spirit of Romance (1910) proposed that ‘It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous’ (SR 2); and it is in holding to this credo that Pound can indeed (with a poker face) evoke a Tuscan campanile while admiring a Life Insurance Tower in Manhattan. On a different level, the habit would enable him to read Benito Mussolini through the prism of Sigismundo Malatesta and vice versa. In architectural terms, however, the comparison shows a breathtaking disregard for differences in materials and construction methods. Pound is merely trafficking here in visual echoes.

Figure 2.4 Metropolitan Life Tower, New York, 1909.

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London: ‘Building: Ornamentation!’ It was back in London during the Great War, in the ‘Art Notes’ for The New Age already mentioned, that Pound’s credentials as a serious critic of architecture can best be gauged. And it is here, also, that his preference for the classical, the ordered, the austere, even – and his distrust of ornament, and indeed of the Gothic, contrary to Ruskin – is clearest. The notes are sporadic, without science or system, but they show a remarkably sure grasp of essentials and a coherent taste. As ever, Pound is certain about his aversions: The horror of London is its grey-yellow brick. It is the horror of Islington; it is the horror of the districts south of the Thames through which one passes on train coming from Dover. In the more pretentious houses there is added to this the horror of machine-cut stone trimmings. I do not know whether these borders, copings, cornices, and so on are stone or a composition moulded into horrible forms and indented with ‘ornaments’. The borders are common both to yellow and bad-red brick houses. (EPVA 74) There was one hapless street, Observatory Gardens, Campden Hill, Kensington, a stone’s throw from Pound’s own lodgings in Church Street, that in particular threw him into a kind of apoplexy – and he returns to it twice. A fairly unexceptionable row of terrace houses in red and white brick, one might think; but Pound looked closer: The worst houses in the world are on Campden Hill; they are brick of an undistinguished red, with whitish stone ornaments and borders and stripes and gew-gaws and scroll-saw effects favoured in the late middle of the last century. (EPVA 74) A visit to Observatory Gardens confirms the accuracy of Pound’s censure: the heavy, machine-carved window-frames are topped with what look like white bedknobs. They are fussy and pretentious – and ‘mendacious’ in Ruskin’s sense, because it is hard to feel that any craftsman went home satisfied by a job well done, and in which he invested something of himself. In Ruskin’s view (and his views inform Pound’s), the absence of human toil in the carving of ornament makes ‘the thing worthless’ (Ruskin 1995: 217–22). What then is the remedy in the face of such ‘abomination’? One answer might be found in Pound’s poetics for an Imagist: use either no ornament or good ornament. ‘To begin with the greatest caution, we may say that no dwelling-house built in the style of 18th-century brick, plain, restrained, in careful proportion, will be an eye-sore’, and further: ‘The pseudo-classical 18th-century to Regency style is pleasing where a block can remain uniform. But the old charm of the Regent Street crescent is fast perishing under the irruption of new imitation American structures’ (EPVA 78). In short, Pound approves Georgian London when not disfigured by modern excrescence – and by this token, a city he must wholly approve of would be Bath, though he never speaks of it. The austere elegance, and plainness, of Bedford Square might pass muster (Figure 2.5). Although Pound says, in keeping with the zeitgeist here, that ‘plainness would appear to be the sole road to health’, where ornament is concerned, he does not execrate it entirely, like Loos or the Futurists or the Purists, only it must be good

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Figure 2.5 Classic Georgian: Bedford Square, London. ornament – ideally carved by a (worthy) living sculptor (EPVA 85). Complaining of the machine-cut faces on the keystones above the portico of the Ritz in Piccadilly, he has this wistful, and endearingly impractical thought: When one thinks of Gaudier-Brzeska too poor to buy stone for his work, one can readily believe that had the Ritz blocks been left rough, he would have been only too glad to carve them at a guinea a mask; and Piccadilly would have been that much the richer. (EPVA 85) Two years later, writing from Paris in 1920 (whose modern architecture he also excoriates), Pound returns to the charge: ‘When Gaudier was too poor to buy stone he would gladly have made door-heads and capitals, and no man offered him a stone door-post.’ And having noted en passant that the Florentines had the sense to employ the 16-year-old Donatello to build ‘a new gateway’, he signs off: ‘The British are the most timorous people on earth in any matter of aesthetics. And the nation will get no buildings worth seeing, it will have no “new age of cathedrals” until it takes a chance on the “maniacs”’ (EPVA 160). Amid the timidity and the abomination, there were in fact signs of life. Pound approved the Epstein sculptures on the Strand, commissioned by the architect Charles Holden in 1908, and later vandalised for reasons of what we might now call ‘health and safety’ (their disfigured remains are still to be seen on Zimbabwe House). Charles Holden (who designed London University’s uncompromising Senate House on Malet Street) is an interesting figure here, and certainly he ‘took a chance on the maniacs’ when he again commissioned contemporary sculptors, in exactly the way Pound advocated, to decorate the bare modernist façade of 55 Broadway, built in the late 1920s. This time he called upon Epstein, Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Samuel Rabinovich to adorn the austere Portland stone with specially commissioned sculpture. And Pound would surely have approved the sentiment, if not perhaps the ‘floribund style’, of this early declaration by Holden: Come you Modern Buildings, come! Throw off your mantle of deceits; your cornices, pilasters, mouldings, snags, scrolls; behind them all, behind your dignified proportions, your picturesque groupings, your arts and crafts prettinesses and exaggerated technique; behind and beyond them all hides the one I love. (Romer 2015: 164)

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In his architectural flâneries around Bloomsbury and the West End, Pound shows a remarkable down-to-earth practicality. He refrains from the fanatical ‘sweep-it-allaway’ to make place for the Città Nuova style of Sant’Elia’s Futurist writings – and considers the London weather: ‘Certain styles are suitable for the climate and for the general needs of contemporary city dwellings and business.’ As we have seen, he counsels plainness. He goes into the correct, proportionate positioning of windows in a façade to render it harmonious, in some detail. In Dean Street, Soho, he examines the quality of carved door-frames, and fanlights above doors, and recognises how the short- or long-lease system in London could dissuade proprietors from embellishing their properties (EPVA 78, 82–3). By the time he came to write Guide to Kulchur in Fascist Italy in the late 1930s, Pound’s ideas about good and bad economics had hardened – and it was this iniquity he came to dwell on (GK 245). Aesthetic description and discrimination, in Pound as in Ruskin before him, quite rapidly moves into a consideration of underlying political, social and economic conditions.

Ways of Seeing: Vorticism One significant side effect of Vorticism on Pound, and of his passionate engagement with and on behalf of the painting and sculpture of Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and Edward Wadsworth, was to educate the poet’s vision of space and of how architecture occupies and indeed patterns that space. The general discontent at the anarchic muddle of London is suddenly lightened, and indeed in part redeemed, by a vision of architecture, or indeed of the interstitial space between buildings, which produces in the poet a rapture of the kind he expresses like this, in 1915: What was a dull row of houses is become a magazine of forms. There are new ways of seeing them. There are ways of seeing the shape of the sky as it juts down between the houses. The tangle of telegraph wires is conceivable not merely as a repetition of lines; one sees the shapes defined by the different branches of wire. The lumber yards, the sidings of railways cease to be dreary. (EPVA 9) And he acknowledges the source of this new vision in his monograph on Gaudier-Brzeska: These new men have made me see form, have made me more conscious of the appearance of the sky where it juts down between houses, of the bright pattern of sunlight which the bath water throws up on the ceiling, of the great ‘V’s’ of light that dart through the chinks over the curtain rings, all these are new chords, new keys of design. (G-B 126) Wadsworth in particular captured these ‘great V’s’ in paintings like View of a Town, Townscape, The Open Window or Vlissingen (see Figure 11.7, p. 205).

Paris: ‘Experimentalism’ By 1920, having antagonised them for so long, Pound felt frozen out of nearly every literary clique and editorial office in London. The poet’s riposte was to opine that intellectual life was now quite dead in England, and to ‘shift to Paris’. The four years Pound spent (intermittently) in the French capital represent something of a parenthesis

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in his career.1 They are important from our point of view for two reasons: in 1922 Pound first clapped eyes on the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, and its existence came to represent for the poet ‘an apex’ in the history of European civilisation. They were also, and this is the second point, the nearest he came to theorising about architecture in what we may call the Continental way. This change, or development, in his thought was largely inspired by his meetings with a sculptor, Constantin Brâncuşi, a draughtsman, mathematician and showman, Francis Picabia, and a painter, Fernand Léger. But Pound was also much taken up at this time with the theory and composition of music, working with Georges Antheil, and his opera Le Testament de Villon. Brâncuşi instructed Pound about form, and reinforced the insights into the sculptural he had already learned from Epstein and Gaudier. Léger inspired him to inquire into the potential place of the machine in art and music, while Picabia was prized for his clean drawings of Dada-style gadgets and mechanisms, and for the nimbleness of his mind, with its satirical cast and sense of the absurd (Picabia was a friend of Marcel Duchamp). One might speculate, given Pound’s genius in superimposing epochs and experiences, that the euphoric experience of Brâncuşi and his studio fed into his feeling for Alberti’s Tempio in Rimini, much on his mind at the time. This is from his essay on Brâncuşi (Figure 2.6): Brâncuşi, in so different a way from Proust, has created a world, or let us say Proust has created a somewhat stuffy social milieu, and Brâncuşi has created a universe, a cielo, a Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms, and a cavern of a studio which is, in a very old sense, a temple of peace, of stillness, a refuge from the noise of motor traffic and the current advertisments. (EPVA 172)

Figure 2.6 Brâncuşi’s studio (recreated in the Museum Gallery, Renzo Piano Building, Paris).

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Brâncuşi’s cavern, a place of total art, so to speak, filled with Platonic forms, was indeed a cielo to Pound, who elsewhere, in an undated document in the Yale archive, compared it wonderfully to the sensual samadhi of bathing off Rapallo (EPVA 307). The clean line, the pagan refuge, the uncomplicated enjoyment of sunlight and water, the notes on Brâncuşi are a kind of miniature credo; the sacred place, free of Christian ‘niggle’, brings to mind passages in The Cantos, and that other collection of pagan wonders, the Tempio at Rimini. The poet who had with the Vorticists waged war on representation and ornament, proclaiming that form be considered per se, and not in relation to any object extrinsic to the work, found confirmation and appeasement in Brâncuşi’s art; and perhaps some comfort in encountering the one artist who could give some idea of what Gaudier-Brzeska, had he lived, might also have achieved, but whose loss, to sculpture, and to Pound personally, nothing could ever remedy. Brâncuşi’s cavern, and the quintessential forms it contained, were somehow familiar, and a comfort; elsewhere Paris seethed with what Pound called measuredly Experimentalism, and urban design was a critical part of this. Mondrian’s studio, for example, a space decorated as an extension of his paintings, with orthogonal shapes on walls and ceiling, also proclaimed the new totality, whereby the painting was to be extended into three dimensions into the urban context around it: The genuinely Modern artist sees the metropolis as Abstract living converted into form; it is nearer to him than nature, and is more likely to stir in him the sense of beauty . . . that is why the metropolis is the place where the coming mathematical artistic temperament is being developed, the place whence the new style will emerge. (Banham 1980: 152) We have come a long way from Ruskin’s ideal of variation and idiosyncracy left by the individual craftsman, and it was the heady world of International Abstract Art that Pound brushed up against in Paris in the early 1920s. His closest associate in the domain was Fernand Léger (who became a friend), and the painter was the subject of Pound’s ‘Paris Letter’, January 1923. Léger is contemplating huge canvases and, true to his Vortex, Pound alludes to the Italian Renaissance: ‘Ghirlandaio wanted to paint the town walls of Florence, Léger would be perfectly happy doing the outside of a railway terminal, or probably doing an ad on the slab side of a skyscraper.’ Further lamenting breakage or celebrating continuity with ‘all the past that is vital’, Pound conjures the ghost of Alberti: a very great architect and not particularly well-known painter, says in his praise of painting in the Trattato della Pittura that the architect gets his idea from the painter, that the painter stirs the desire for beautiful building. One has but to recall the backgrounds of Quattrocento painting to see the sense of the remark. The painter begins with himself. Pinturicchio, whomever you like. If he cannot build he at any rate registers a precise ideal of beauty. (EPVA 173) Pound continues this Letter, deploring the vagueness of desire for buildings, and quoting Edgar Williams (architect brother of the poet William Carlos) when he encountered the signed column on San Zeno, Verona (Figure 1.3, p. 16): ‘How the hell do

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you expect us to get any buildings when we have to order our columns by the gross?’ (EPVA 173). In the light of these comments, and Pound’s further assertion that the Adamo me fecit carved on to the column by, as the poet surmised, the architect of the whole building – Adamo de Sco Giorgio, who ‘is said to have cut some or most of the stone himself’– our sense of Pound’s architectural ideal as the totally carved or even sculpted structure, harmonised according to the wishes of the master architect, becomes clearer. We shall see examples of this in the Italian section below. Pound claimed not to be nostalgic in matters architectural: ‘I do not expect people in our time to have a gross of Pietro Lombardos sent down from Sheffield and Birmingham to fill London with beautiful doorways and balconies’, he had said back in 1918. But he hankered after such beauty as he sighed for those stone window-frames in Verona. In 1922 in Paris, he notes of the contemporary scene merely this: ‘there was a new aesthetic of steel, there is a new aesthetic of reinforced concrete . . . mostly botched, incomplete, unaccomplished, unrealized by constructors’ (EPVA 174). There was indeed such an aesthetic. In the Salon d’Automne of that same year, 1922, a certain Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (aka Le Corbusier) showed in a darkened room two dioramas of ‘A Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants’, and by 1925 had designed the notorious Plan Voisin for central Paris, which would have dynamited the entire rive droite, and sent up ‘unités d’habitation’ in reinforced concrete, eighteen cruciform tower blocks joined by arterial highways. It can scarcely be claimed of Pound that he takes the measure of the major players who were engaged in theorising the new architecture. It was, however, via his association with Léger that he took an interest in Machine Art, and came as close as he ever would to the activities of the acknowledged Parisian avant-garde. In some notes for a projected study that was never published, Pound worked at a possible aesthetics of the machine, notably on the idea that the better the machine (in terms of efficiency) the better it would also be aesthetically; and also, as Léger discovered, ‘ideal machines’ tended not to improve on the real, functioning, utilititarian object. In the mid-twenties, now installed in Rapallo, but remembering Léger and Paris, Pound requested photographs from his ever devoted parents, of machines and machine spare parts. It was above all the parts of a machine that keep it in motion that interested Pound, and he came to associate the machine more with music, which operates in space-time, than with static arts like painting or sculpture or architecture: ‘The architectural work does not move; it has only its problems of stasis. Or one might put the three plastics in order: Sculpture: concerned with the form of its outside (stationary)’ (EPMA 70). There is nothing ground-breaking about this, but I cite it as a rare example of Pound laying down in a quasi-axiomatic form distinctions between architecture and other arts. That breezy distinction might have elicited a snort from theorist and professional architect alike. But in the scattered comments that follow are insights into his own epoch: The best modern architects are, I suppose, almost universally the engineers; their best form comes from the mathematics of strains, etc. rather than from any thought about pictorial qualities. Their worst effects come from their trimmings. But the best engineers are possibly in our time the engineers of machinery. (EPMA 71)

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A Note on Pound and MIAR (Italian Movement for Rationalist Architecture) It is convenient at this point, before discussing the major themes of Pound’s engagment with architecture in Italy, to append this note on Fascist architecture if only to explain its rather brief appearance here. This is principally because the poet alluded to it only in passing; in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) he praised il Duce for ‘grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swamp-drainage, new buildings’ (J/M 73), and in Canto XLVI he mentions the ‘Decennio exposition’(XLVI/231) referring to the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista of 1932, where he would have seen architectural plans by Giuseppe Terragni and others for the construction of new roads cutting through Rome and new monumental centres, like the EUR quarter, which remains today (Paul 2016: 102–14). Terragni, who began as a follower of Sant’Elia (whom as we have seen Pound did follow), developed the clean lines and heavily recessed windows of an almost entirely abstract, unadorned ‘rational’ architecture that Italian historians have described as a ‘return to Mediterranean myth’ and a ‘dream of reason’ (Dal Co and Tafuri 1991: 254). A fine example is the Casa del Fascio in Como (Figures 2.7 and 2.8).

Figure 2.7 Casa del Fascio, Como.

Figure 2.8 EUR, Coliseo Quadratura, Rome.

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The recent recovery of an obscure review (in Italian) of P. M. Bardi’s Belvedere dell’ architettura italiana d’oggi from February 1934 confirms that Pound did know of the range of architectural projects being carried out under the Fascist Directive (P&P VI: 133). Bardi’s brochure in praise of the regime’s renewal of architecture contains photographs of Mattè-Trucco’s famous Fiat factory near Turin with the test-track on the roof (a thoroughly Futurist marvel), and of bridges, dams, coal-mines and roads, finishing with the new town of Littoria (now Latina), built on the land reclaimed by the pharaonic project to drain the Pontine marshes in 1932, Anno X, Era Fascista. Pound praised Bardi ‘per la sua solida comprensione delle forme e dell’elemento contrapuntistico nel disegno’, and recommended that the brochure might be used as a school manual. When confronted with this elegant, stripped-down, rational architecture (especially that of Terragni) it is impossible not to think also of the Renaissance theorists of perspective whose plans and paintings of deserted cityscapes, notably those associated with Piero della Francesca and Luciano Laurana at Urbino, continue to fascinate (Figure 2.9). It is indeed to Italy, and the quattrocento in particular, that we must now turn.

Italy: ‘Carved Stone upon Stone’ As we broach the Italian years, the years in which Pound became increasingly obsessed with social and economic matters, his commentary on architecture could be said to crystallise in three related domains: there is the visionary architecture and stonescape of The Cantos; there is his association with Adrian Stokes, whose passionate account of quattrocento stone carving, notably in the Tempio Malatestiano, initially so impressed Pound; and there is, of course, his own ongoing fascination with the Tempio, which represents a concentration of his thought on building, sculpture and painting, but also on the ‘factive personality’ of Sigismundo, Lord of Rimini (1416–68), who conceived of the Tempio and commissioned its contents, and who is of course the protagonist of the Malatesta Cantos (VIII–XI).

Rimini: The Tempio Malatestiano Pound first set eyes on the Tempio in Rimini in 1922, on one of his Italian excursions from Paris, which was then his base. As we saw from his Dial Letter of 1922 – ‘one doesn’t need to relinquish the beautiful inutility of the Tempio’ – he was already

Figure 2.9 Luciano Laurana (attrib.), The Ideal City, c. 1470. Tempera on panel,. Urbino: Galleria Nazionale delle Marche.

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Figure 2.10 Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. General view.

fascinated (Figure 2.10). In his mind, the Tempio itself was a vortex; it contains, literally, within its outer casing ‘the past that is capable of living into the future’. His succinct account of the eclectic contrapunto style of the building ends Canto IX: ‘The filigree hiding the gothic, / with a touch of rhetoric in the whole / And the old sarcophagi, / such as lie, smothered in grass, by San Vitale’ (IX/41). The quattrocento Tempio was constructed by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) around the original brick duecento Gothic church of San Francesco around 1450. This encasing of the original church in Istrian stone thus conflates Gothic and Renaissance styles. The architectural historian Stephen Kite describes it thus: ‘Alberti’s great aqueduct-like arches – which recall Rimini’s Ponte Tiberio – roll in counterpoint with the Gothic geometric tracery of the brick church’ (Stokes 2002: 2). The impressive façade of the Tempio is also inspired by a local fragment from antiquity, the Arco d’Augusto, which was an ancient gate into Rimini. Alberti’s exterior ‘casing’ was in fact undertaken later than the remodelling of the interior in the 1440s under a team of artisans led by Matteo de’ Pasti and Agostino di Duccio, who was responsible for the marble bas-reliefs on classical/pagan themes that empanel the columns of the chapels. Vortex-Tempio was therefore, inside and out, a machine that concentrated and processed the past, a many-layered thing – but in that no different from most early ecclesiastical buildings that get transformed over the centuries. It was Sigismundo’s personality, his prodigious willpower, and his passion for classical and astrological imagery as executed by great quattrocento builders, sculptors and painters that make the Tempio extraordinary. ‘He, Sigismundo, Templum Aedificavit’ declares Canto VIII with gravitas, and he did so against the odds, given his rackety career as condottiere

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and mercenary. In the late thirties, Pound comments further on the Tempio in his prose work Guide to Kulchur: ‘You can contrast it with St. Hilaire. You can contrast it with ANY great summit done WITH the current of power’ (GK 160–1). By the current of power, he means here the Catholic Church, for Sigismundo was in and out of favour with the Papal State at different moments of his career. Above all, Sigismundo is the exemplary patron of the arts, and Pound actively sought if not his like, exactly, then his modern equivalent, a man like the New York lawyer John Quinn, who bought work by artist-friends Lewis and Epstein. Or maybe a man like Benito Mussolini, when judged by his cultural directives. The fact that the austere and expeditious condottiere loved his third wife Ixotta degli Atti enough to build her such a shrine – as tradition for a long time claimed – and to fill it with pagan monuments endeared Sigismundo all the more to Pound. Adrian Stokes (1902–72), who devoted many pages of lavish prose to the Tempio in his book Stones of Rimini (1934), may shed some light on Pound’s thinking about the Tempio as a building. Pound and Stokes met on a tennis-court in Rapallo in 1926 and were friends and collaborators for the next three years – Stokes acknowledges his friendship (and his debt to the Malatesta Cantos) in the preface to his book. He says this of the Tempio façade: As I look, the tense cohesion of the encasement impresses me so forcibly that already my mind has received the full stimulus that will need to find expression in such phrases as ‘stone blossom’ and ‘incrustation’, suggesting an almost organic connection between architectural members and between background and ornament. . . . Employment of classical pillars or pilasters nearly always means an impression of distributed weight and coherence. But see how that impression is intensified on the Tempio façade into something far more dynamic, see how the pilasters are grown from the wall-space, grown steadfastly like a flower . . . You can no longer distinguish architectural members. The thing is organic, one, everlasting. (Stokes 2002: 180–1) I quote at some length, because I believe that Stokes here puts his finger on a crucial quality that runs through Pound’s evaluations: it resides in the word ‘organic’ and especially in the ‘organic’ relation between architectural members, between background and ornament. So-called ‘good ornament’, a phrase Pound uses without ever explicating it, is surely ornament that melds in ‘organically’ with the building’s wallspace – hence his preference for relievo carving, bas-relief and intaglio, over dynamic, freestanding forms. Stokes also uses the words ‘compact’, ‘silent without rhythm’ and ‘steadfast’ of the façade; and so strong is it that ‘the fact that it is unfinished starts not one single speculation’ (Stokes 2002: 177). It is precisely the serene, hieratic quality of the quattrocento, its monumentality (think of Piero della Francesca’s painting), that provides the link to Gaudier-Brzeska, to Epstein, to Brâncuşi, (add in also the Cubism of Braque and Picasso) as it does also to the ‘rational’ architecture of the Modern Movement (Figure 2.11), just as it stretches back the other way to the Greek kore and to Mesopotamian bas-relief. In a word, it is the modernist preference for Abstraktion over Einfühlung, abstraction over empathy, to use the terms of Worringer’s influential book (1907).

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Figure 2.11 Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. Main entrance.

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That said, the fact that the Tempio is unfinished makes it available to a quasi post-modern reading; the façade ‘quotes’ from other epochs – accidentally from the original Gothic brickwork, where the top gable is missing – and deliberately in its echoing of classical stylobate, arch and pediment. When Pound came to reconsider the Tempio in his review of Stokes’s book (which incidentally as good as ended the friendship)2 and found ‘a Medley!’, preferable to the homogenised style ‘à la Palladio’, he lists the eclectic sources and concludes that, ‘as a human record, as a record of courage, nothing can touch it’ (EPVA 167–8). Few critics have resisted the obvious parallel with the medley of The Cantos, also to be considered as the record of one man, a record of courage. He also puts us on our guard, in his review of Stokes’s earlier book, The Quattro Cento (1932), against making the kind of statement I have just made, concerning the formal attraction that the monumental and hieratic held for modernists: ‘the Quattro Cento did not act from pure formal desire. Nobody can understand the Quattro Cento, feel with the Quattro Cento, on a stripped-bare cubist basis’ (EPVA 223).3 The polemic then must turn upon the meaning of the Tempio and its symbolism, a topic hotly contested and discussed by Pound, Stokes and others before and since (that is, was it conceived as a shrine to Ixotta and a hymn to love, or does the intertwined ‘logo’ S/I refer not to the couple, but to the first two letters of Sigismundo’s name?), but is beyond the remit of this chapter.4 The Tempio was for Pound, like Brâncuşi’s studio, a place of refuge, of Platonic or esoteric forms, outside the compass of Christian doctrine.

Santa Maria dei Miracoli and San Zeno I suggested at the outset that Venice, with its unique existence as water and stone, was really Pound’s città ideale. In ‘Guillaume de Lorris Belated’ he beholds the city, called Fenicè, ‘as a lotus flower / Drift through the purple of the wedded sea’ (PT 92), and forty years later in the unfinished Canto CX he revisits the ‘quiet house’ of Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello (CX 797); Venice figures throughout The Cantos as a frequent point of reference in the matter of Italian history. Olga Rudge purchased a small house near Santa Maria della Salute in 1928, which Pound would visit; the last years of his life were largely spent there. The actual building in Venice he most frequently cites is the little quattrocento church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, in the Canareggio district, built and decorated by Pietro Lombardo (1480–9) aided by his son Tullio. By any standards, this little church is a marvel; situated along a canal, the marble casing of the building is reflected in the green water (see Figure 1.4, p. 18). It seems that Pound valued the church not only for its harmonious exterior, made up of panels of marble inlay with different colour values, but for the hand-carving of the ornament inside, which seems to emerge organically out of the pilasters (as in Stokes’s description of the Tempio façade). In the case of the Miracoli church it is Lombardo’s carved mermaids that are picked out for their excellence (which, like Duccio’s tiles in the Tempio, are pagan figures in a Christian church). Pound quotes the ‘old custode’ of the church in his review of The Quattro Cento: ‘There it is. For four centuries they have been trying and they cannot get anything as good as these

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mermaids’ (EPVA 225); he uses the anecdote again in canto LXXVI (see Figure 1.5, p. 19). Similar mermaids, machine-worked in cement imitation, we recall, Pound cast as an ‘abomination’ in London (EPVA 77). It bears repeating: hand-carved bas-relief, of the kind which appears to ‘emerge’ from the stone rather than being imposed upon it, is the elusive ‘good ornament’, and it is the distinction between ‘carving’ and ‘modelling’ that becomes central in Stokes’s later work. For all these qualities, the Miracoli should be considered in relation to another church, the twelfth-century Romanesque basilica of San Zeno in Verona. Stokes records this as being, remarkably, the one building in Italy that Pound praised in conversation, along with the Romanesque churches in Arles and Poitiers (Read 1999: 82). His fondness for the style was clear from the Walking Tour, and he asserted his preference even before that, in The Spirit of Romance, considering the Romanesque to be the ‘natural evolution from the classic’ and thus ‘more admirable than the artificially classic mode of the Renaissance’ (SR 22). With its harmoniously proportioned interior in white and rose marble, and the double row of widely articulated delicate arches that divide the nave, San Zeno is perhaps the high-water mark of Italian Romanesque (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2, pp. 12–13). The church also contains the carved and signed column (Adaminus de Sco Giorgio me fecit) signifying, for Ruskin as for Pound, the craftsman’s noble pride in his work. Both in the Usury Canto, and in Guide to Kulchur, San Zeno is a summit – rising clean and without censure after inspection by Pound’s blunt instrument of measure – ‘in a Europe not YET rotted by usury’ (GK 159).5

A Note on Stonescape in The Cantos: ‘Marble Trunks out of Stillness’ Architecture and particular buildings figure widely in The Cantos – we have considered the Tempio (VIII–IX); as we shall see, Venice itself appears, in a memorable visionary ‘approach’ (XVII). And in a kind of summary of what we have already seen, there are memories of the walking tour and Excideuil (XXIX) ‘the wave pattern cut in the stone’, and the Roman arena at Verona, with its limestone gradins, that recur several times and come to represent ‘a symbolic stage, where many a dramatic or significant moment of human history, past and present, is acted out’ (Terrell 1993: 59). Places, moments, buildings described in earlier contexts reemerge frequently in those great poem-acts of memory, the Pisan Cantos (‘Or at Ventadour the keys of the château; / rain, Ussel’ (LXXIV/456); ‘the jewel box, Santa Maria dei Miracoli’ and the anecdote about the custode and the carvings (LXXVI/480); in the same Canto we find ‘to set here the roads of France / Aubeterre, the quarried stone beyond Poictiers’, ‘and the tower on an almost triangular base / as seen from Santa Marta’s in Tarascon’ (475). And so on and so forth, all the way through to one of the last pages of The Cantos, where again the memory of the walking tour recurs – ‘to set here the roads of France’ (Notes for CXVII et seq./ 823). Taken together, I think these quotations show what Davie means by ‘stonescape’ in The Cantos, and how its solidity – or rather, how Pound can re-vision it exactly as something solid, and ungainsayable – helped to sustain him through the ordeal of Pisa and beyond.

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Venice/City of Dioce-Ecbatan Is Venice the ‘city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars’ (LXXIV/445)? Terrell glosses this as Ecbatan, the visionary city built by Dioce, ruler of the Medes; and suggests that Pound likens the ruler’s ‘aspiration to create a paradisal city with what he perceived to be Mussolini’s intentions’ (Terrell 1993: 362). What city would that be? A work in progress, clearly. Not, surely, one of those new Fascist towns, Littoria or Carbonia, with their artifical names and rational gridwork (how forlorn, and how dated they look now!). For answer, we might conclude with a closer look at Canto XVII, which combines many elements we have seen, notably Pound’s love of cut stone, its appearance in water, and its embodiment in Venice. Flat water before me, and the trees growing in water, Marble trunks out of stillness, On past the palazzi, in the stillness, The light now, not of the sun. (XVII/76) The trees growing in water is imagery that has its base in organic fact – as Davie, through a reading of Stokes, comments of the passage: ‘Pound compresses into a single perception the whole process of the composition of marble from the incrustation of sunken timber by algae, through shell-encrusted cliff and cave, to the hewn stone of the palazzo with its feet in water’ (Davie 1991: 111). And Pound’s canto goes on, into the lagoon: And the wave green clear, and blue clear, And the cave salt-white, and glare purple, cool, porphyry smooth, the rock, sea worn. (XVII/77) This too is Venice, or could be . . . In his chapter ‘Stone and Water’, Stokes almost glosses the passage for us: For this Istrian stone seems compact of salt’s bright yet shaggy crystals. Air eats into it, the brightness remains. Amid the sea Venice is built from the essence of the sea. . . . if in fantasy the stones of Venice appear as the waves’ petrification, then Venetian glass, compost of Venetian sand and water, expresses the taut curvature of the cold under-sea, the slow, oppressed yet brittle curves of dimly translucent water. (Stokes 2002: 19, 20) And we come perhaps as close as anywhere to the city whose terraces are the colour of stars, or the promise of it, or perhaps to something even better, the beauty of stone in water, later in the same canto:

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“There, in the forest of marble, the stone trees – out of water – the arbours of stone – marble leaf, over leaf, silver, steel over steel, silver beaks rising and crossing, prow set against prow, stone, ply over ply . . . the gilt beams flare of an evening.” (XVII/78) Here, the phanopaeic mode that Pound had worked on since ‘The Return’ bears fruit; by an act of rhythmic compression, imitating the movement of the boat in the enigmatic steersman’s speech, and also the phenomena as he passes them in review, the poet ‘cuts a shape in time’.6 The elegiac photographs of Ezra Pound as an old man staring out at the Salute and the lagoon may tempt one to end with Venice. But that would be to neglect the Vortex, through which Pound tried always to rescue the living past for the artists of the present. Hence Gaudier-Brzeska, the craftsman, the master of hand-cut stone, finds his forebears and his justification in the carving of Pietro Lombardo or of Agostino di Duccio. But so, too, do they find their energies renewed in him. I said earlier in this survey that Pound did not fully engage with the major architects of the International Style who were his contemporaries; that may be so, but it is surely to his lasting honour that he remained unfazed and undazzled by such a pharaonic monstrosity as Le Corbusier’s projected Plan Voisin for Paris, just as he remained aloof from the allure of mathematical abstraction that resulted in concepts for living like the unité d’habitation or the village vertical. Pound’s approach to architecture was aesthetic, but also practical – he was aware of differences in climate, and he was never impressed by pomposity, or by ‘the mere multiplication of some “classic” proportion’, as he wrote in his 1922 Paris Letter. He remained throughout too much the disciple of Ruskin to be swept away by technology – ‘one doesn’t need to relinquish the beautiful inutility of the Tempio merely because there is a new aesthetic of factory architecture’; nor did he forget human investment, and the trace of one man’s effort: Templum aedificavit.

Notes 1. For an excellent account of Pound’s artistic forays in avant-garde Paris, see the essay ‘Parenthetical Paris 1920–1925: Pound, Picabia, Brâncuşi and Léger’ by John Alexander in Humphreys, Alexander and Robinson (1985). 2. Richard Read’s article (1999) is the fullest account of an extraordinary meeting of minds. The role of the critic Donald Davie, and his influence on later Pound criticism, are also explored. 3. For the ‘stripped-bare cubist’ effect, I can think of no finer example than the sheared-off angles of white marble at Carrara itself, a quarried mountain whose planes and volumes would have delighted the heart of Gaudier-Brzeska.

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4. See in particular Lawrence Rainey’s extensive study of sources in Rainey (1991). 5. For a succinct account of Pound’s views on usury and on Italian Renaissance art, see Robinson (1985). 6. Pound’s love of stone and water lives on in the architecture of Carlo Scarpa (1906–78), who was an admirer of the poet and possessed his works; most notable is the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, which integrates rising tidal water into its architecture. My thanks to Ms Shiho Sasaki for drawing my attention to Scarpa’s beautiful work.

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3 Ezra Pound and East Asian Art Mark Byron

A picture is a soundless poem, and a poem is a speaking picture. Qian Zhongshu1

E

zra Pound’s serious engagements with East Asian visual arts reach back at least as far as 1909, when he would regularly visit Laurence Binyon in his role as Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Binyon’s initial influence – particularly his Painting in the Far East (1908) and Flight of the Dragon (1911), both of which Pound read on first publication, and the latter of which he reviewed in BLAST (2 July 1915) – is well known. Pound’s receipt of Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks deepened this aesthetic awareness, turning his attention to poetry, Noh drama, and of course the apparent pictorial qualities of Chinese writing. The various strands of Pound’s East Asian aesthetic develop from his early poetry into more subtle and complex expressions in The Cantos: from Confucian ethics in Canto XIII, and ekphrastic emulation of the ‘Eight Views’ genre in Canto XLIX, to an appreciation of Na-Khi decorative arts scattered through Thrones and Drafts & Fragments. The broad outlines and more nuanced contours of Pound’s engagement with East Asian Art have been carefully explored by such scholars such as Zhaoming Qian, Wai-Lim Yip, Sanehide Kodama, Angela Jung Palandri, Woon-Ping Chin Holaday, Ira Nadel, Daniel Pearlman and David Ewick, among others. Yet these engagements also tell us a great deal about Pound’s aesthetic orientations more generally: why his intensive focus on a Chinese genre of calligraphy and landscape painting draws him into unacknowledged dialogue with Emerson, Thoreau, and the American pastoral tradition, for example; or why his attention turns to Arab and Persian sources, as well as the non-Han culture of the Na-Khi in China’s Southwest, at a time when his Confucian focus shifts from the authority of The Unwobbling Pivot to the contemplative atmosphere of the Odes. This chapter will take as its focus Pound’s early years in London – the ‘British Museum years’, as he called them in Canto LXXX – and how his early engagement with East Asian art, particularly Chinese painting, shaped his aesthetic and returned at pivotal points during his career. The influences of Chinese poetry, Japanese Noh, and other verbal and performative traditions on Pound’s writing were of course profound, and in several senses these traditions overlap or intersect with those of the visual arts: the visual emphasis Pound gave to Chinese writing in his adaptation of Fenollosa’s essay ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry’; Pound’s sensitivity to elements of the Noh stage set, such as the green needles of the pine trees and the elaborate costuming of the shite; or his interest in kōdō or ‘the way of incense’, picked

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up when reading Frank Brinkley’s Japan: Its History, Art and Literature (1901) during his residence at the Stone Cottage with W. B. Yeats (Araujo 2018: 114). An extensive scholarly tradition treats Pound’s Chinese and Japanese literary aesthetics in fine detail, and this chapter will not seek to provide an epitome of that tradition except where it informs specifically visuals aspects of Pound’s East Asian aesthetic. Instead, a focus on Pound’s early interactions with Chinese painting shows how specific artworks, and the genres they exemplified, installed themselves in Pound’s aesthetic repertoire, providing him with a wellspring upon which he could draw at later points in his poetic career.

The British Museum Years Pound’s initiation into Chinese and Japanese aesthetics began in the Philadelphia of his youth. His parents displayed commonplace cultural aspirations by exhibiting the odd piece of Chinese art in the family home, perhaps inspired by the Chinese and Japanese artworks – vases, tray, screens and carpets – they saw at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 (Qian 2003a: 4). Later, as a student, Pound was very likely to have visited the new Chinese collection at the University of Pennsylvania’s Free Museum of Science and Art (now the University Museum). The Museum’s vice-president, Maxwell Sommerville, added a reconstructed Buddhist temple to the rich Chinese collection and dressed up as a Buddhist priest to guide visitors through the exhibition (Qian 2003a: 5). Zhaoming Qian rightly assumes that Pound probably visited the museum with William Carlos Williams and H.D. It is difficult to say precisely how formative these early influences were upon Pound’s ideas on art and aesthetics, given that he was immersed in Romance philology and made little mention of East Asian art in the Philadelphia of his youth during his career. On an auspicious visit to his Aunt Frank in New York prior to his decisive departure for Europe, Pound was able to see a Japanese screen album depicting the eight views of the Xiao and Xiang rivers in China’s Hunan Province – this was the sho-sho hakkei tekagami behind Canto XLIX, the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto. This object may too have dimmed in his memory once he had left Philadelphia permanently, but it resonated with artworks he viewed soon after in the British Museum, and of course came back into his possession in 1928 to influence the composition of The Fifth Decad of Cantos. As many scholars have pointed out, Pound’s introduction to Laurence Binyon in London in 1909 was a decisive factor in his exposure to Chinese and Japanese art. Binyon’s role as Pound’s ‘mentor’ in the pre-war years (Qian 2003a: 6), coupled with his pivotal role as the Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings in greatly enhancing the Museum’s holdings in East Asian art, gave Pound access to these cultural spheres in unprecedented ways. Binyon facilitated Mary Fenollosa’s meeting with Pound on 6 October 1913, and Pound’s receipt of Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks benefited substantially from Binyon’s editorial and organisational efforts (Arrowsmith 2010: 155). The vogue for Japonisme, first in Paris in the 1850s and then eventually in London, thanks in part to James McNeill Whistler in such paintings as Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1865), and the historically durable taste for chinoiserie evident in such structures as the Kew Gardens Pagoda designed by Sir William Chambers and built in 1762, meant that these new acquisitions in the British Museum were not the first window onto the cultures of East Asia in London. The ‘mania’ for antiquities from western China at the turn of

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the century saw the British Museum co-fund Sir Marc Aurel Stein’s second expedition there in 1906–8, and take receipt of a swathe of manuscripts, paintings and textiles from the Mogao cave precinct in Dunhuang, Gansu Province (Huang 2013: 147–8). Further, the acquisition of the Wegener Collection in 1910 and the Morrison Collection in 1913 greatly enhanced both general and specialist knowledge of China and Japan,2 especially compared with the British Museum’s relatively modest Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings in 1888. This aesthetic and cultural foment occurred in a concentrated time period just as Pound was finding his feet in that city, before his attention turned decisively to Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh in 1913 when he took receipt of Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks. Following the recent work of Qian and Arrowsmith, what might another account of his East Asian influences add to an understanding of Pound’s aesthetic development? This chapter will focus on perhaps the most prominent acquisition of Chinese painting by the British Museum, the so-called Admonitions scroll. This scroll is a pivotal object in the evolution of East–West artistic and cultural understanding, acquired at a critical time in the careers of both Pound and Binyon. An object of great antiquity and immeasurable cultural value, the scroll is known within Pound Studies, having received attention in Chapter 1 of Zhaoming Qian’s The Modernist Response to Chinese Art (2003a) and Chapter 5 of Rupert Richard Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum (2010). Its fame has endured over the last century despite the scroll itself having been very rarely exhibited due to its fragility and cultural importance. Certain aspects of its provenance, including its date of composition and the identity of its artist, have long been subjects of considerable debate, still not entirely settled. Further, the general understanding of its importance has undergone a major transformation in recent years, following a symposium and exhibition in the British Museum in 2001. As a consequence, its role in developing Pound’s awareness of Chinese aesthetics and culture requires considered reappraisal. By reading this object and the scholarly invigoration it has received in recent years, Pound’s relationship with East Asian thought, art and literature gains a new coherence even in its apparent tensions and contradictions.

The Admonitions Scroll and Its Implications for Pound’s Chinese Aesthetics When the ancient handscroll The Admonitions of the Instructress to Court Ladies arrived at the British Museum under the stewardship of Laurence Binyon it initiated a new phase of Western appreciation for Chinese art. It was exhibited from the summer of 1910 to the spring of 1912 with other new acquisitions, such as the seventeenthcentury Eight Views of Yunqiao Zhuren as well as Japanese adaptations of the genre by Sesson Shūkei (1504–89) and Kano Tōun (1624–94). Over the course of the past century much has been discovered about the scroll painting, including matters of its provenance, authorship, ownership and aesthetic significance. Several aspects of this history impinge directly upon its potential significance for Pound as an aesthetic landmark, not least the painting’s history as an object and its thematic and symbolic repertoire. The scroll was first attributed to the Jin Dynasty painter Gu Kaizhi (c. 345–406 CE) by the Song Dynasty artist and calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107). This narrative painting was composed as a political and ethical gesture, illustrating episodes of an

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eighty-line poem concerning appropriately Confucian behaviour, composed in 292 ce by the savant and courtier Zhang Hua (232–300). This poem served to admonish Empress consort Jia (c. 257–300), the wife of the Western Jin emperor Huidi, whose rule spanned 290–306 (Murck 2003: 138), and who was considered to have overreached her courtly role. Only nine of its original twelve scenes survive, and it is not known when or how the missing scenes were lost. Since its composition in the fifth or sixth century, ‘it has passed through the hands of many imperial and private collectors, and bears impressions of their seals, and a number of their own paintings and inscriptions on attached lengths of silk and paper’ (McCausland 2003b: 7). It also contains two paintings added to the long colophon, one by the Qing Dynasty Qianlong Emperor (1711–99). The scroll is an exquisite example of accretive connoisseurship and scholarly appreciation. The way it embodies its history of ownership and aesthetic development bears distinct affinities with Pound’s composition methods in The Cantos: literally ‘ply over ply’ (a phrase first to appear in Canto IV), the scroll absorbs its history in the relation between extant paintings and the accumulation of colophon commentaries, poetic responses and seal stamps (Figure 3.1). The story of the British Museum’s acquisition of the Admonitions scroll has been told several times, although certain details vary between accounts. As it became clear that the Qing Dynasty was in its final decline, Chinese objects – scrolls, porcelain, sculpture, textiles – flooded into London in the years between the fin de siècle and World War I, as did Japanese ukiyo-e and nishiki-e collections of prints in the period 1906–9 (Arrowsmith 2010: 111). Following expert advice from such authorities as Herbert Giles, the scroll was purchased by the British Museum in 1903 from Captain Clarence A. K. Johnson, who had acquired it in Beijing: ‘A letter from its owner,

Figure 3.1 Zou Yigui (1686–1772), colophon painting (detail) from Admonitions of the Instructress to Court Ladies, seventh century, after Gu Kaizhi (c. 345–406). © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Captain C. Johnson, dated 7 January 1903, suggests that the Museum and the owner had reached an agreement concerning its purchase: the Museum would offer to pay Capt. Johnson a sum of £25’ (Hongxing 2003: 277). Qian claims the Museum paid ‘the ridiculous amount of 1,250 pounds’ for the object, citing a payment record dated 27 March by Sidney Colvin, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the time (Qian 2003a: 7). Theories as to how Captain Johnson came into possession of an imperial treasure also vary, with Shane McCausland suggesting it probably came from the Summer Palace during the ‘Relief of Pekin’ Operation during the Boxer Rebellion (McCausland 2003b: 7–8), while Qian asserts Johnson’s possession of the object came about by plain theft (Qian 2003a: 7). On 8 April 1903, the scroll was accessioned into the British Museum collection and then ‘authenticated as a masterpiece of Gu Kaizhi in the fledgling Burlington Magazine by the poet and scholar Laurence Binyon’ (McCausland 2003b: 7–8). Binyon’s article on the Admonitions scroll was ground-breaking in taking Chinese painting seriously as a tradition in its own right: This was the first time any Western scholar had made such an argument in print, and thus Binyon’s 1904 essay stands as a landmark not only in the history of Western scholarship on the Admonitions scroll specifically, but also in the history of Western scholarship on Chinese painting more generally. (Mason 2003: 289) Binyon also devoted a chapter of his book Painting in the Far East (1908) to the Admonitions scroll, contributing to its increasing fame as revised editions of his book came out. In the same year, Édouard Chavannes from the Collège de France identified the provenance of the inscriptions as a third-century treatise by Zhang Hua (Mason 2003: 290). Pound had installed himself in Binyon’s circle from 1908, having applied for membership of the British Museum’s Reading Room in October of that year (Arrowsmith 2010: 61). He subsequently became a frequent visitor to the Prints and Drawings Students’ Room which required a private appointment – his signature first appears in a visitors’ book on 9 February 1909. Pound’s name is recorded in several visitors’ books alongside a wide variety of artists and critics such as W. B. Yeats, F. S. Flint and Richard Aldington; he became by far the most frequent visitor among the group of writers who sought access: ‘It cannot be a coincidence that this first visit occurred only a few days after Pound’s introduction to Laurence Binyon by their mutual publisher Elkin Mathews’ (Arrowsmith 2010: 107–8). As Qian notes, Dorothy Shakespear was another habitué of the Prints and Drawings Students’ Room, and embarked on a series of paintings in imitation of the Chinese paintings and Japanese ukiyo-e prints she saw there (Qian 2003a: 17–18). Pound translated his exposure to East Asian art into his poetry, as Arrowsmith asserts: ‘It would be several years before Pound began to use extra-European artworks at the British Museum as the inspiration for technical experiments in his poetry, but he started using motifs derived both directly and indirectly from them almost immediately’ (2010: 61–2). His poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, first published in 1913, is a case in point, with critics ascribing a number of sources and influences to its imagery. He attended at least one and probably two of four lectures in a series on East Asian art given by Binyon in 1909 at the Albert Hall,3 later reporting his great interest in a letter to his parents. The substance of the lecture was likely to have been related

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to the first chapter of Painting in the Far East in which Binyon challenged Western stereotypes of Asian art as reified and oppressively formulaic. Instead, he argued for the Chinese aesthetic of emulation, of taking on subjects mastered over centuries and adapting them to one’s own hand. For Pound, a poet modelling his own emergent career on the emulation of Homer, Dante and the troubadours, Binyon’s thesis offered a way to combine formal experimentalism with the challenges and satisfactions of emulating the genres, tropes and techniques of poets before him. This exposure had a direct influence on his Vorticist experiments, sharing with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska the perception of aesthetic expansiveness and potential (Qian 2003a: 19–20). As WoonPing Chin Holaday points out, this view of Chinese painting also recalibrates notions of original and copy, where masters took upon themselves the honour of emulating their predecessors, giving a radically different understanding to tradition from the temporally bound conception in the West: by way of a shared aesthetic, artists could be contemporaries across centuries (Holaday 1977: 31). Pound often expressed a similar sense of his artistic and literary influences as contiguous, stating in the ‘Prefatio’ of The Spirit of Romance, published in 1910, that ‘all ages are contemporaneous’. Public interest in Chinese and Japanese painting was still on a sharp upswing in London following an earlier exhibition in the British Museum in 1888: ‘as news of the acquisition spread, several scholars in England and Europe began to study the scroll more intensively, and over the next five or six years, the first wave of Western writing about the painting appeared in various books and journals’ (Mason 2003: 289). Adding to Binyon’s acts of publicity, these scholarly and popular contributions ‘had made the scroll so famous that in 1910 the Museum decided to showcase the painting for the first time in a major public exhibition’ (Mason 2003: 289).4 The Admonitions had come into the British Museum’s possession as a scroll, and was exhibited as such in 1908–10. It was dismounted around 1912 and placed on hard boards for conservation purposes, thus reconfiguring the object differently from what Binyon would have seen in 1903, and Pound subsequently. Although from a modern curatorial perspective such radical augmentation might seem to visit unnecessary violence upon the scroll, as an object it was over several centuries a composite, accumulative thing, augmented, inscribed and painted upon by its many owners. When it arrived in London, its exterior was mounted with a blue brocade wrapper for protection, bearing Emperor Qianlong’s identifying inscription and calligraphy. Inside this outer protective layer was a silk tapestry fragment with flowers on a blue ground, then a panel of yellow silk bearing the Qianlong seal, then a longer portion of the older yellow brocade with seals ranging from the Song to the Qing Dynasties. At this point, the object reveals the painting itself – or at least its nine surviving panels – followed by blue brocade with seals again ranging from the Song to Qing Dynasties. The viewer then comes to the Qianlong Emperor’s orchid painting, inscriptions and seals, which are followed by a colophon by the Song Emperor Huizong (1082–1135), bracketed by a blue border panel with seals. A white slip added during the Ming Dynasty contains ‘collector Xiang Yuanbian’s (1525–1590) assessment of the scroll as a genuine work by Gu Kaizhi’ (Cura 2003: 263) (Figure 3.2). Finally a Qianlong colophon was added in 1746 as well as a colophon painting in ink on paper by Zou Yigui (1686–1772) titled Pine, Bamboo, Rock and Spring (松 竹 石 泉, Songzhu shiquan). These Qing additions are accompanied by no fewer that thirty-seven Qianlong seals, indicating just how significant this scroll was to the emperor.

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Figure 3.2 Right: Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–96), orchid painting. Left: Jin Emperor Zhangzong (r. 1190–1208), colophon of the Admonitions texts. Both from Admonitions of the Instructress to Court Ladies, seventh century, after Gu Kaizhi (c. 345–406). © Trustees of the British Museum. To understand the role played by Zou Yigui’s colophon painting, it is crucial to know how the Admonitions scroll was venerated in the Qianlong court. Following the completion of the Shiqu baoji or cataloguing of the Imperial Collections in 1746, the scroll was rehoused in a dedicated pavilion in the Qing-era Jianfugong or Palace of Established Happiness in the Forbidden City in Beijing, along with three other paintings attributed to Li Gonglin (1049–1106): the Dream Journey on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, now housed in the Tokyo National Museum; the Shu River (Shuchuan tu) in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and the Nine Songs (Jinge tu) in the National Museum of China on the east side of Tianenmen Square, Beijing (Hongxing 2003: 278). With its Qianlong orchid, the scroll bore a family relation to the other paintings to which the Qianlong Emperor added paintings of a chrysanthemum, bamboo and plum blossoms, forming an arboreal series. This act of unification restored the four paintings as an integral series after two hundred years of separation when the collection of the Ming collector, painter and calligrapher Dong Qichang (1555–1636) was broken up after his death. All four paintings were remounted on the same brocade, giving a physical unity to their thematic links ‘to Confucian moral and political teachings’ (Hongxing 2003: 283). The Qianlong Emperor recounts this process in his long colophon on the Admonitions scroll. Although it does not bear any direct thematic or historical link with the paintings or poem of the Admonitions scroll, unlike the other three of the ‘Four Beauties’ (四 美 具, si mei ju) in the Qianlong Emperor’s collection, the theme of mountain landscapes in Zou Yigui’s colophon painting may be linked both to the painter and to the emperor: ‘this scene, by virtue of its inclusion in a scroll full of remonstrances, signifies the peril of not maintaining virtue and upright conduct’ (Cura 2003: 273). This overtly Confucian ethical statement announces the scroll, and its Qing augmentation, as instruments of good government and ethical action: ‘Zou Yigui, renowned for his scrupulous incorruptibility, and the Qianlong Emperor, whose virtue was proved by his continued peaceful rule, together demonstrate the tranquility and bliss of

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heeding this admonition’ (Cura 2003: 273). Although Pound would have been unaware of the specific historical context, the association of such an exquisite painting with Confucian ethics resonates profoundly with his translations of The Doctrine of the Mean (中 庸, zhong yong), and much later with his project in Thrones, emulating Dante’s reward of those responsible for good government in the Paradiso. In addition, the mountains of the colophon painting bear iconographic resonances with The Dream Journey on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, where the surrounding mountains frame the eight scenes of boats returning, geese flying, evening snow and so on. Pound was acutely sensitive to this topography in his rendition of the Eight Views genre in Canto XLIX, presumably unaware of its overtly Daoist sensibility, in contrast to the Confucian overtones in the Admonitions colophon painting. The Admonitions scroll responds in painting to a literary text of Zhang Hua, reversing the ekphrastic flow that characterises much of Pound’s interest in Chinese art, best illustrated in his own ekphrasis in Canto XLIX. The scroll’s didactic illustration of Confucian social values in an imperial court scenario lends itself to transhistorical purposes of instruction, a quality Pound returns to time and again in his choice of sources, and captured in his adaptation of the phrase inscribed on the bathtub of Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 bce) – ‘Make It New’ (薪 日 日 薪, xin ri ri xin). For example, the first panel, ‘Lady Feng and the Bear’, presents an example of courageous sacrifice, where the court lady shields the emperor from a wild bear. This episode appears in the China Cantos two decades after the Admonitions scroll was exhibited in the British Museum: and in the imperial garden a bear forced the bars of his cage and of the court ladies only Fong faced him who seeing this went back quietly to his cage. (LIV/280) Other panels present situations of decorous behaviour, such as the second panel, ‘Lady Ban Refuses to Ride’, in which a court lady chooses to walk behind the imperial palanquin instead of sitting next to the emperor, thus avoiding a gesture of overreach and pride. This illustration of decorum repeats in the eighth scene, ‘A Lady Kneels in Deference’. The ethical lessons contained in these and other scenes – against overreach, or the monopolisation of the emperor’s affections, and the cultivation of the essential bonds of trust – are doubly inscribed in the ninth panel, in which the court instructress is depicted copying out the admonitions illustrated in the preceding panels. In all panels, the expressiveness of hand gestures, facial expressions and particularly the movement of eyes bears the ‘spirit’ of the court ladies physically expressed in their actions: the ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’ (qi) Binyon discerns in the best Chinese painting and to which Pound refers as ‘rhythmic vitality’ in his review of Binyon’s Flight of the Dragon in BLAST in 1915 (Qian 2017: 63–4). Zhang Hua’s poem is inscribed on the scroll, and begins with the creation myth of yin and yang. It then moves into the natural ‘order of things’ in the Confucian worldview, covering the ‘three bonds’ of society, between parent and child, husband and wife, and ruler and subject. The order of rule is evident in line 10 of the poem: ‘a kingdom should be ruled in good order’ [王 猷 有 倫] (McCausland 2003a: 15). The functional resemblance of this sentiment to Pound’s preferred principle

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of Chêng Ming or the ‘Rectification of Names’ (正 各, zheng ming) is clear, where precise definition of terms (誠 意, cheng yi) combines with the quality of sincerity to produce order in the self, the family and the state, as set out in the Confucian book The Doctrine of the Mean.5 Zhang Hua’s poem ostensibly concerns the admonition of female courtly behaviour, but this is set against the background of a Daoist sense of natural order, rise and decline, evident in line 35: ‘When the sun has reached its mid-course, it begins to sink’ [日 中 則 昃] (McCausland 2003a: 16). The echo of this line, intentional or otherwise, in Pound’s translation of the traditional ‘ClodBeating Song’ or ji rang ge in Canto XLIX is uncanny – ‘Sun up; work / sundown; to rest’ (XLIX/245). Line 43 of the poem – ‘Correct your character as with an axe, embellish it as with a chisel’ [斧 之 藻 之] (McCausland 2003a: 16) – anticipates Pound’s lifelong association of ‘precise definition’ with Confucianism. Its vocabulary even deploys the axe as a metaphor of the human will, resonating with Pound’s Italian translation of The Doctrine of the Mean, L’Asse Che Non Vacilla (Pound 1945). The effect of Pound’s usage consolidates the affiliation he draws between Confucius and Mussolini by means of the iconography of Italian Fascism. Finally, Pound’s definition of the character ming as ‘the sun and moon, the total light process’ in his Confucius (Pound 1969: 20) bears resemblances to lines 49–50: ‘To utter a word, how light a thing that seems! / Yet from a word, both honour and shame proceed’ [夫 出 言 如 微 / 而 榮 辱 由 茲] (McCausland 2003a: 16). The Admonitions scroll’s extensive history of ownership since the eleventh century is physically recorded and embedded in its serial re-mountings, seals, inscriptions and colophon paintings. The scroll first records its presence in the Song Imperial collection: the seal of Emperor Huizong (ruled 1101–26) and the transcription of Zhang Hua’s ‘Admonitions’ poem by Emperor Zhangzong (ruled 1190–1208) are recorded in the colophon section of the scroll. It may have been transferred from the Northern Song to the Jin court in the twelfth century, and then to the Southern Song court in the thirteenth, making it possible that ‘the scroll moved from north China (under Jurchen or, after 1234, Mongol rule) to south China (under Han-Chinese rule) in the midthirteenth century’ (Wang 2003: 212). It was then probably in the Yuan (Mongol) court collection, although the inventories and seals from this period are not well understood (Wang 2003: 215). Interestingly, most of the extensive colophon material evident in the Admonitions scroll was added by Jurchen and Manchu, that is, non-Han hands, the most prolific period when it belonged to the Qianlong Emperor (McCausland 2003b: 13). In one of China’s most prized antiquities, the presence of these foreign hands and seals is an irony that would not have been lost on Pound. His intense focus in the China Cantos on foreign threat to the Chinese Imperium – Jins, Khitans, Mongols, ‘hochangs’ and so on, but crucially not Manchus – locates the contradiction at the heart of what the Admonitions scroll has come to represent: an icon of Chinese cultural longevity and refinement, but one treasured most ostentatiously by a non-Han ruler. This movement from the centre of Chinese imperial history to its margins and back again begins to show the complexity of Pound’s Chinese preoccupations in relation to his interests in Western civilisation, and the additional complexities subsequent scholarship introduces to renewed consideration of East Asian history and aesthetics in The Cantos and beyond. As Qian and others have noted, much later Pound turns from the imperial centre to the Na Khi of Yunnan Province in several cantos in

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Thrones and Drafts & Fragments, in line with the poem’s turn from the assertion of political will to quietude and even a kind of consolation. Yet this movement between centre and periphery occurs much earlier in the poem, in ways that resonate with the specific history of the Admonitions scroll. The scroll is structured as one of a series, with its Confucian ethical mode complementing the Daoist tone of the Dream Journey on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, just as Pound’s Daoist ekphrasis in Canto XLIX acts as a prelude to the Confucian history of China he draws from de Mailla and in turn his rendering of the Song Dynasty Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance. The scroll’s depiction of women conforming to Confucian ethical paradigms channels this force in the deft representation of hands and eyes, just as ‘The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful’ (LXXIV/445) belonging to the conflated Greek/Buddhist visage of Persephone/Guanyin provide spiritual sustenance to the poet in the Pisan Disciplinary Training Center. Pound was probably unaware of how Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism intersected and diverged at various points in Chinese history, and how texts and material artefacts represent these shifting relations, often in highly codified form. Yet his ability to deploy techniques and imagery from this aesthetic domain and adapt them to his purposes suggests his intuitive grasp of the deep history etched within the Chinese materials to which he was exposed in the ‘British Museum’ years and beyond.

The Influence of the Admonitions Scroll Through History Laurence Binyon played an instrumental part in acquiring the Admonitions scroll for the British Museum and in its initial reception. He set out a number of historical claims by virtue of his reading of the scroll as a work of visual art, rather than as a container of comprehensive knowledge of Chinese history or a historically inflected literati production. In addition to his early essay in The Burlington Magazine of 1904, Binyon dedicated an early chapter of Painting in the Far East to an examination of the scroll’s physical attributes and historical importance. He made the extraordinary assertion – one yet to be disproved – that the Admonitions scroll is the first Chinese painting known in the West to have preceded the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). Binyon argued for its authenticity as a fourth-century painting by Gu Kaizhi by way of its extensive collection of seals, the extensiveness of repairs to the scroll over time, and the confidence of its brushwork (Binyon 1908: 38–9). The scenes depicted in the series of paintings can be dated by virtue of the kinds of colours used, the condition of the silk, and the relative expertise (the calligraphic line) or primitiveness (the depiction of mountains) of its brushwork. On this last matter Binyon made a nuanced evaluation: In actual beauty of delicately modulated brushline, sensitively sweet, yet confident in power, no painting of later ages surpasses this. It is suave and tender, yet never soft or weak; firm and precise, yet never dry. The calligraphic element is there, as in all Chinese painting; but there is also unusual lifelikeness and humour. How beautifully felt is the action of the hands of the tall maiden knotting up the coil of hair in the toilet scene! . . . We are made to feel all this, and at the same time we feel the painter’s enjoyment of pure rhythm in following with his fine brush the wave of the light drapery that streams from the ladies’ robes. (Binyon 1908: 42–3)

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The combination of deft brushwork and fineness of feeling is captured in Binyon’s description, in which he pays homage to the artist’s ability to capture complex emotional states in the precise and minimal use of line. Pound was to make a similar judgement in 1915 when he appended his famous note to his translation of Li Bai’s poem ‘The Jewel Stairs Grievance’ in Cathay: Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach. (P 136) Both scenes – one visual, the other poetic – are prized for their discretion, implying certain emotional states by means of delicate technique: physical gesture in the brushline, and grammar, description and tone in the poem. Binyon’s sensitivity to such matters of technique provide him with evidence for the scroll painting’s antiquity: ‘It precisely bears out the observation of a Chinese critic of the eighth century, who writes of the landscape of Ku K’ai-Chih’s period that the mountains were drawn stiffly “like hairpins and combs,” and that the figures were made larger than the mountains’ (Binyon 1908: 41). As with the most prized paintings in the Chinese tradition, Gu Kaizhi aimed at an expression of inner states rather than the strict likeness of realism. Binyon rightly points out that this sensibility stems from the Buddhist tradition of imbuing artistic subjects with expressive spirituality: ‘It was said of Ku that he was supreme in poetry, supreme in painting, and supreme in foolishness . . . He had a whimsical, exaggerated manner of expressing himself’ (Binyon 1908: 45). Wen Fong identifies how Gu Kaizhi conveys inner emotional states in his depiction of body language, particularly in human eye contact: ‘Gu noted that the secret of “transmitting the spirit in portraiture lies in the eye,” which he believed to be the site of animation’ (Fong 2003: 21). Again, there are strong links to be drawn with The Cantos: from the beginning Aphrodite’s ‘dark eyelids’ (I/5) and Athena’s ‘glaukopos’ or gleaming eyes (P 231), ‘Goddess’ eyes to seaward’ at Terracina (XXXIX/195; LXXIV/455; CVI/774), the ‘suave eyes’ or a ‘subtlety of the eyes’ of The Pisan Cantos (LXXIV/445; LXXXI/540), and so on. But this focus on the eyes provides Fong with a way to contextualise the provenance of the Admonitions scroll as well as its ethical and political utility. He connects its Daoist and Buddhist sensibility with the fourth-century context of its production, specifically the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty and the relocation of the Han capital to Nanjing: this historical upheaval saw a turn to Neo-Daoism and Buddhism and a renewed focus on spirit (shen) and soul (ling), with a consequent transformation in the arts that manifested as a retreat into painting nature as well as calligraphy (Fong 2003: 21). Scroll painting developed more rapidly in the south between the third and sixth centuries: northern courts were involved in decorating public temples, while in the south investment was directed to scroll art on classical themes in the Han courts, thus tying the southern courts more firmly to the earlier Han Dynasty by thematic and formal means. The development of southern scroll painting genres and techniques for expressly political-historical purposes was a reaction to the times in which the Admonitions scroll was created: ‘While the Admonitions scroll may have reflected such ancient utopian

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ideals, the painting itself was in fact the product of a time of trouble, when the very concept of ethical rule was severely tested’ (Fong 2003: 19). Binyon’s interventions were important for several reasons, not least as a corrective to the common view in the West at the time that Chinese art was thought to be derivative of Indian art via Buddhism (1908: 48). Binyon saw Lao Tzu preparing the way for expressive art in the pre-Tang context, drawing attention to the important Daoist context for both landscape and portrait painting. Binyon took this even further, setting Lao Tzu against Confucius as the true spiritual ground for Chinese art: Lao Tzū, the mystic, the proclaimer of paradoxes, the man of imagination, the seer, represents the other side of the Chinese genius. From this other imaginative side has flowered all that is most glowing and alive in Chinese painting and literature. And surely it is not least by her painting and her literature that China will live for the world. (1908: 55) Thus, for Binyon, while China may not exhibit the earliest examples of Asian art, it was the earliest tradition to mature: while the other countries of Asia yield but scattered evidence of their schools of painting, China has left a continuous record of famous artists, and an endless amount of allusion and criticism, which testify to the unrivalled vitality of its schools and their importance in the life of the nation. (1908: 48–9) His evaluation famously claimed that Greece and China each produced its own continent’s truly original art, drawing on the cultural prestige of Greek sculpture epitomised in the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles and other acquisitions. In what has been considered to be a vaguely Orientalist gesture, his drawing Chinese art and Greek art together in this way raised the reputation of the former at a time when it was only beginning to be understood in its fuller historical and aesthetic context in the West. What Pound was to do for Chinese poetry in the West, Binyon accomplished for Chinese painting. For all of his scholarly and imaginative perspicacity, Binyon based his evaluation of the Admonitions scroll on his understanding of the Chinese philosophical tradition and his ability to distinguish certain formal qualities of Chinese painting. Rigorous scholarship concerning the genres of Chinese art, their historical provenance and their ethical and political applications, only became available in the West over the course of the twentieth century. Given this scholarly evolution, and recent revaluations of the historical implications of the Admonitions scroll in particular, it is now possible to provide a fuller account of its significance in Chinese history in ways that vindicate much of what Binyon had to say about it in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Admonitions scroll and the poem it incorporates serve as a warning against female abuses of power, but in accordance with Confucian tenets of good government: According to the Confucian theory of the Mandate of Heaven, while a virtuous ruler had the mandate to rule all under heaven, it was the duty of the minister to remonstrate with the ruler should he deviate from the path of virtue. (Fong 2003: 19)

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This genre of painting became prominent again in the Song Dynasty, at the same time the Admonitions scroll was first documented: ‘The tension between powerful palace women and Confucian officials during the eleventh century created opportunities for officials to use a painting like Admonitions to criticize and instruct’ (Murck 2003: 144). The Northern Song use of admonitory paintings saw such images taken very seriously: The sensitivity to pictures made a scroll like the Admonitions a political asset and a risk: an asset because its antiquity camouflaged the pointed lessons in the paintings; a risk because showing a painting with implied criticism could easily cause offence. (Murck 2003: 142) One example of this use arises in the admonishment of Lady Liu (969–1033 ce), consort of Emperor Zhenzong (r. 997–1022) and regent for Emperor Renzong (r. 1022–63), who overstepped her role by donning emperor’s robes to conduct an important sacrifice at the clan temple. The court official Cheng Lin (988–1056) presented her with a portrait of Empress Wu Zetian, who was guilty of usurping the imperial throne and who founded her own brief Zhou dynasty (684–705 ce). The implication of such a ‘gift’ was clear: painting not only had the capacity to embody particular political and ethical messages, but could be used strategically to convey admonishments, threats, warnings and other messages. For such a strategy to be effective, however, the recipient required sufficient education in political history, the genres of painting and the history of aesthetic reception. This kind of education was part of imperial court life, and in part explains the enthusiasm for systematic record-keeping of the imperial collections. Yet the scroll also bears witness to aesthetic developments beyond the court, in the rise of the literati tradition. Mi Fu (1052–1107) provides the earliest written record of the scroll’s provenance as the work of Gu Kaizhi, aligning its sensibility with the emergent literati class of his time. Soon after, the Daoist Song Dynasty Emperor Huizhong (r. 1101–25) attempted to wrest the painter from the literati tradition in favour of a kind of romantic aesthetic. These ambiguous relations between instruction and aesthetic contemplation characterise the history of the Admonitions scroll’s reception beyond the Song era, but equally they help clarify some of the tensions in Pound’s East Asian aesthetic throughout his career. As the scroll becomes an object of artistic admiration in the Song, ‘the history of the Admonitions scroll attributed to Gu Kaizhi shows that the meaning of Gu Kaizhi always depended on the eye of the beholder rather than the object itself at the point of its creation’ (Fong 2003: 31). That is, the dominant role of mimetic representation or ‘form-likeness’, formalised in the Han Dynasty of the third century bce, gave way to literati historical painting in the aftermath of the Yuan Dynasty: It was during the Song period (960–1279) that mimetic representation in Chinese painting finally reached its zenith before coming to an abrupt end following the Mongol conquest of 1279. From that moment onward, literati painters, turning back to art history, used a calligraphic idiom of art historical styles to ‘write ideas’ (xieyi) or to express the artist’s inner feelings. (Fong 2003: 31)

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This retreat into artistic sensibility and art-historical emulation had a precedent in the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the rise of Song (following the chaos of the Five Dynasties in the early tenth century). This transition saw a shift from the Confucian model of civic-mindedness in government to the instatement of absolutist one-family rule. This demoralising turn led to Song artists retreating from public service: ‘In turning away from the official orthodoxy of a didactic narrative and adopting a new kind of art known as scholar-official painting, Su Shi advocates a new literary aesthetic that rejected mimetic realism in favour of calligraphic self-expression’ (Fong 2003: 32). The Song painter Su Shi (1037–1101) saw the artistic progress of the Han and Tang periods culminating in an aesthetic perfection that his historical moment could only seek to emulate: For Su, the solution to what he perceived as the end of progressive art history was to turn back to earlier art history, to seek renewal through the revival of ancient styles rather than to create new modes of mimetic representation, which he considered neither meaningful nor possible. (Fong 2003: 32) This crucial phase in the history of Chinese aesthetics intersects with Pound’s East Asian influences in several ways. Su Shi articulates a rationale for the literati movement that would seek scholarly consolation, emulating ancient precursors in their artistic productions and displaying this learning in the material composition of their works. Matters of style, brushwork, representations of landscape and portraiture invested painting with an historical reflex that was itself subject to historicisation in the subsequent application of seals and colophons. Pound’s Cantos – famously a ‘poem containing history’ – displays its sources in its network of intertextual references, languages, scripts and hieroglyphs, prose quotations, and such apparatus as bibliographical citations and marginal glosses. Pound’s ambition to ‘Make It New’ was potent precisely because of its combination of avant-garde experimentation and aesthetic renovation, but as the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto (XLIX) demonstrates so effectively, consolation also worked a powerful thread through the poem. This canto in particular emulates the Daoist and Buddhist dimensions of Chinese aesthetics – especially those of the Song Dynasty from which Su Shi speaks – and does so in a tactical retreat from the politics of the Revolutionary-era United States and of Leopoldine Tuscany and Europe. Pound was to draw heavily upon this sensibility in The Pisan Cantos, where the ‘suave eyes’ of Persephone/Guanyin are invoked, and the minutiae of the natural world – butterflies, lizards, ants – are scaled against the infamies of war and global politics. The Admonitions scroll came into the possession of the Ming court by unknown means, passing through the hands of various court officials who had constructed extensive collections of paintings as evidence of their connoisseurship (Little 2003: 219–20), including Gu Congyi (1523–88). A fortuitous element of Gu’s ownership of the scroll is its connection with the Xiao Xiang tradition taken up by Pound in the ekphrastic portion of the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto. ‘Gu Congyi’s ownership of the Admonitions scroll is also confirmed in Dong Qichang’s (1555–1636) colophon on the twelfth century handscroll entitled Dream Journey on the Xiao and Xiang Rivers in the Tokyo National Museum’ (Little 2003: 220). The scroll then passed through a series of hands in the Qing dynasty – scholars, calligraphers and even the Korean

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salt merchant An Qi (1683–c. 1746) – before settling in the hands of its most famous owner, the Qianlong Emperor. The assertion of his ownership is ‘visually prominent, in reference to the large quantity of marks left by the emperor on the body of the scroll over a period spanning almost the entire duration of his reign [1736–95]’ (Cura 2003: 260). The scroll came to represent the emperor’s encyclopaedic aspirations in artistic and political terms: ‘Perhaps the most revered painting in his collection, the Admonitions scroll, as reconfigured in the eighteenth century, embodies [his] ideals and ideologies’ (Cura 2003: 260). It was also during this reign that Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine was belatedly published (1777–84), recapitulating the Song Dynasty historical compendium, The Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance (資 治 通 鑑, Zizhi Tongjian) compiled by Sima Guang over nearly two decades and presented at court in 1084. That compendium text had been expanded, revised, updated and translated into Manchu, from which de Mailla took his translation (Nolde 1996: 68–70).

The Eight Views and Beyond The integrated sense of formal aesthetic qualities, their historical provenance and their implications at different points in the history of the Admonitions scroll resonates with Pound’s use of source materials generally, and especially his use of East Asian art. The tekagami or album behind Canto XLIX is by far the most significant of these, but such influence can be traced back to his British Museum days, to the inheritance of Fenollosa’s notes and subsequent reading of his Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. The surprising proximity of the Eight Views tradition to the Admonitions scroll outlined above provides grounds to reconsider Pound’s use of his source materials, and especially his absorption of Daoist and Buddhist sensibilities in his appropriations. A good deal of astute scholarly work has been written on the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto, but it is only by taking into account the philosophical and aesthetic qualities of the Eight Views genre, as well as their historical implications, that its placement in The Fifth Decad after the history of Leopoldine Tuscany and the Founding of the United States begins to make more strategic sense. The genre is imbued with a sense of rusticity, but one bearing sharp political implications beneath the appearance of natural sublimity and the picturesque. Such sources as Wai-lim Yip’s Pound and the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang (2009) and Alfreda Murck’s The Subtle Art of Dissent: Poetry and Painting in Song China (2000) open up entire histories of artistic genres, besides providing ways of understanding how Daoism (the dominant sensibility in Chinese landscape painting), Buddhism and Confucianism are parlayed with and against each other in specific works of art. As seen in the way genre and reception operate with the Admonitions scroll, the movement between political strategy and quietist retreat can be performed within the one artwork in a single complex historical moment, as well as the work’s ideological force and direction changing across time. Pound may not have had sufficient grounding in the history of Chinese painting to consciously grasp such nuances, but he was attuned to them sufficiently to perform his ekphrasis and commentary in the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto. In this sense, Canto XLIX is an appropriate homage to the Admonitions scroll, an object he rarely mentioned after the ‘British Museum’ years, and perhaps submerged in his memory, but in its architectonic lessons by no means forgotten.

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As Pound worked towards completion of The Cantos in Thrones and Drafts & Fragments, and as his Confucian attentions shifted from the Four Books to the Odes, the aesthetic and thematic implications of East Asian art changed too. His deployment of Chinese landscape shifted from the literati genre of the Eight Views and its implied scholarly and historical indices, in favour of the deep ecology of the Na Khi in Yunnan Province. Zhaoming Qian and other scholars have evaluated Pound’s use of Joseph Rock’s scholarship on the customs and ecology of the Na Khi. Qian adds a fascinating account of the friendship between Pound and P. H. Fang, a native of Lijiang intimately familiar with Na Khi ceremonies and writing, during his later years in St Elizabeths.6 As the later cantos attempt to reconcile geopolitical power, economy and law with a vision of a paradiso terrestre, Na Khi material provides a similar foil to that of the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto much earlier in the poem. Yet even then in the final gestures of the poem, Pound moves between Na Khi ecology, Greek myth, Chinese and Japanese Buddhism and the topography of the Eight Views, bringing them together in verbal brush-strokes of female figures he may yet have remembered from the Admonitions scroll more than half a century before: The purifications are snow, rain, artemisia, also dew, oak and the juniper And in thy mind beauty, O Artemis, as of mountain lakes in the dawn, Foam and silk are thy fingers, Kuanon, and the long suavity of her moving, willow and olive reflected, Brook-water idles, topaz against pallor of under-leaf. (CX/798) East Asian art stayed with Pound to the end of his writing career, providing a vocabulary and affective range to The Cantos that enabled lyrical quietism to coexist with Confucian order, and the impulse to encyclopaedism to be mediated by poetic representation of spontaneous perception. The Admonitions scroll is one of many foundations for this astonishing aesthetic, but in its own formal qualities, thematic range, provenance and custodial history, it embodies a singular distinction in shaping Pound’s East Asian aesthetic.

Notes 1. From ‘Zhongguo shi yu zhongguo hua’ (‘Chinese Poetry and Chinese Painting’), in Zhongshu Qian (1990: 6.5), quoted in Zhaoming Qian (2003a: 67). It is worth noting that very similar statements have been attributed to Cicero, Leonardo da Vinci and the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi (1037–1101), among others. 2. ‘Binyon used his close friendship with [Arthur] Morrison to eventually enable the British Museum to buy the writer’s collection; it first acquired more than a thousand ukiyo-e prints in 1906 and then over six-hundred paintings in 1913’ (Rodner 2012: 21). For an account of the Wegener and Morrison acquisitions and their impact on the London viewing public, see Huang 2013: 147–165.

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3. Arrowsmith identifies the lecture series as ‘Art and Thought in East and West: Parallels and Contrasts’ from archival notes unearthed in the British Museum in 2003 – Binyon’s archive running to seventy-five boxes – with the four lectures listed as: (1) ‘Sculpture and Religious Art’ on Greek and Indian art, and medieval European sculpture compared with India, Japan and China; (2) ‘The Renaissance in Europe and Japan’ on Italy and the Ashikaga Shogunate in Kyoto, and the fall into materialism and academism; (3) ‘Landscape and the Feeling for Nature’ on nineteenth-century Europe, early Chinese poetry and art, and the Rinpa school of painting; and (4) ‘Popular Art and Realism’ on nishiki-e and European genre painting (Arrowsmith 2010: 115). 4. The Japan–British Exhibition was held in May–October of 1910 in Shepherd’s Bush. Consisting of a replica of a Japanese garden and an enormous exhibit space, the display held many art objects from Japan: ‘Advertising posters for the Japan–British Exhibition were a very common sight around London during 1910, and their particularly dense concentration in tube stations and carriages may provide an additional clue to the way “In a Station of the Metro” was conceived’ (Arrowsmith 2010: 137). It was the biggest exhibition of its kind in British history, with 8.5 million visitors – for comparison, the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 had 6 million visitors. In addition, the Victoria and Albert Museum opened an exhibition of 354 Japanese prints in December 1913 from the collection of R. Leicester Harmsworth; and the Whitechapel Gallery mounted a Chinese art exhibition in 1913 as a sequel to its extremely successful 1901 show (Arrowsmith 2010: 142, 154). 5. For a detailed account of how Pound incorporates these concepts into his version of Confucianism in The Cantos, see Chapter 2, ‘Confucianism and Pound’s Rethinking of Language’ in Lan (2005: 45–83). 6. See Rock (1947, 1948) for Pound’s primary sources on the Na Khi. Fang may have introduced Pound to Peter Goullart’s study of the Na Khi, Forgotten Kingdom, which the poet read in 1959 (see also Qian 2008: 196–205).

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4 Ezra Pound and Old Music Charles Timbrell

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n this chapter, the term ‘old music’ encompasses Pound’s favourite musical periods, the twelfth to eighteenth centuries. The presentation is organised around five musicians who particularly influenced his thinking about these periods: Walter Morse Rummel, Agnes Bedford, Arnold Dolmetsch, Olga Rudge and Gerhart Münch.

Early Influences and Troubadour Music The earliest musical sounds that young Ezra heard probably came from his mother, who played the piano often at home. At some point she tried to teach him the instrument, but according to William Carlos Williams, ‘he could never learn to play. . . . But he “played” for all that. At home, I remember my mother’s astonishment when he sat down at the keyboard and let fly for us. Everything, you might say, resulted except music’ (1967: 56). Writing about parties at the Pound house around 1904, Williams recalled the singing: ‘No one had a voice. We’d do our best to please Mrs. Pound. Ezra himself couldn’t even carry a tune as far as I ever heard’ (1967: 65). Although he endeavoured to play the bassoon and attended some concerts in his college years, there were few hints that music would play a vital role in Pound’s later life and that he would become a professional music critic and a successful concert organiser. The first professional musician in his life was the American pianist and composer Katherine Ruth Heyman (1874–1944). Eleven years his senior (her birth year is often erroneously given as 1879), she had studied piano in Berlin and embarked on an international career by the time she met Pound. She was then known particularly as an advocate of the music of American composers, including Arthur Foote, Arthur Farwell and Charles Ives. (Later she became a leading exponent of the music of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, whose works she recorded.) In September 1904, Pound wrote to his parents that he was ‘occasionally hearing Miss Heyman play. It’s a comfort to find a person with brains & sense. once & a while’ (L/HP 21). She and Pound became close friends: he dedicated his poem ‘Scriptor Ignotus’ to her, and in 1908 he briefly served as her concert manager when he was in Venice and London. According to her student Faubion Bowers, she and Pound had many long discussions about music, art and literature, including the appearance of old ideas in new art forms and the difference between rhythm and metre, both in words and in music (Poriss 1998: 28). The details of their discussions are of course not known, but these subjects occupied both of them later in life. In Heyman’s book The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music, she included a discussion of the use of ancient Greek and Asian modes in later Western

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music and the need for modern vocal composers to follow the rhythms of words more strictly (1921: 10–21, 40, 79, passim). Heyman and Pound went in different directions after 1908, although she later composed a song, ‘Apparuit’, on Pound’s poem of the same title. Pound paid tribute to her as the ‘Aube of the West Dawn’ in A Quinzaine for this Yule and as ‘the american lady, K. H.’ in Canto LXXVI. An important musician who probably met Pound through Heyman was the GermanAmerican pianist and composer Walter Morse Rummel (1887–1953; see also ‘Ezra Pound and Walter Rummel’ in this volume). Their friendship developed in the US and Paris during the period 1905–9, and their common interest in the troubadours was evident by October 1910, when Rummel wrote to Pound telling him of his recent research in London and Paris and asking if he knew Pierre Aubry’s book on the troubadours and trouvères.1 Aubry was a pioneering musicologist, but his work was soon challenged by Jean Beck in La musique des troubadours, a book that Pound definitely knew and considered authoritative (L/HP 255, 555n). The troubadours had interested him ever since his studies of Provençal poetry at Hamilton College, and his love of that literature is reflected in many of his early poems (for example, ‘Na Audiart’, ‘Marvoil’, ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, ‘Piere Vidal Old’ and ‘Planh for the Young English King’) as well as in his book The Spirit of Romance. Their work together on troubadour songs during 1911–12 culminated with their publication in 1913 of Hesternae Rosae, Serta II: Neuf Chansons de Troubadours des XIIième et XIIIième Siècles. Rummel’s name appears in large print on the title page, and below it in smaller print Pound is credited with the English adaptation and M. D. Calvocoressi with the French adaptation. The adaptations are printed under the vocal lines of the scores, together with the original Provençal texts. In his preface, Rummel discussed neumatic notation, the lack of rhythmic indications, and the fact that he and Pound believed that the rhythm of the music should be in close relation to the rhythm of the words. This simple conclusion was in line with Pound’s frequently stated insistence on the concord of words and music (motz el son, as the troubadours called it). However, this view was contrary to Aubry’s opinion that the rhythms of troubadour songs should be interpreted according to medieval rhythmic modes (such as trochaic, iambic or dactylic) that were used in polyphonic church music. Most modern-day scholars have discounted this aspect of Aubry’s work (Aubrey 1996: 240–1). The songs chosen were (using Pound’s spellings) ‘Chansson doil mot’ and ‘Lo ferm voler’ by Arnaut Daniel, ‘Quant l’herba fresq el fuell apar’ by Bernart de Ventadorn, ‘La grans beautatz’ by Folquet de Romans (or Marselha), ‘Tant m’abelis’ by Berenguier de Palazol (or Palol), ‘Mere au sauveour’ by Williaume li Viniers, ‘Li granz desirs’ by Li Cuens d’Angou, ‘Mainta ien me mal razona’ by Peirol and the anonymous ‘A l’entrada del tens clar’. Pound had located the two sole surviving songs by Daniel at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan in 1911. He and Rummel thought that they were publishing them for the first time, but actually they had been published in 1896 by Antonio Restori (EPM 28). ‘Mere au sauveour’ was later used in Pound’s opera Le Testament. Rummel supplied the tempo, metre, rhythm, dynamics and piano accompaniments. Preludes, interludes and postludes were also included, as might have originally been provided by various wind, string and percussion instruments. Parallel fourths and fifths are the harmonic underpinning. As he stated in his ‘Preface’, Rummel’s intention

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was not to ‘pay homage to any dry and stale dogmas scientifically imposed on a most delightfully living music by certain text-books to harmony and counterpoint’. Rather, the aim was ‘to reflect some of the charm and atmosphere of these various works and melodies; to bring them before the public of to-day in as living and vital a form as possible’. Today, in an age of informed performance practice, these arrangements sound quaint and dated, with their piano glissandos, prolonged repeated notes, cadenzas and pounding chords. Michael Ingham has written that the publication is ‘valuable mainly for Pound’s virtuoso translations, all the more impressive for having to fit existing tunes’ (Ingham 1999: 232). On the other hand, Stuart McDougal has found the translations not terribly good, although they do ‘form an important stage in Pound’s development as a translator’ (McDougal 1972: 31). In mid-April 1913, shortly after the publication of Hesternae Rosae, Pound expressed some reservations about Rummel’s settings. In a letter to his father, he wrote: ‘W. R. has been doing some more music. I like the way he has set [my poem] “The Return”, better than the way he has done the Troubadour things’ (L/HP 302). A major further collaboration between Pound and Rummel has unfortunately been lost: Canzoni of Arnaut Daniel, translated by Ezra Pound, with original music transcribed by Walter Morse Rummell (sic). A typescript was submitted to the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company in Chicago in early 1913, and Seymour mailed out a prospectus for the publication later in that year. But due to lack of reader interest, the manuscript was returned to Pound. Pound revised it in January 1918 and sent it to a private printer in Cleveland. No word was heard from the printer, whose press apparently ceased operation around that time (L/HP 424; Gallup 1983: 446–7). Since music is extant for only two of Daniel’s songs, it is possible that Rummel was intending to supply his own ‘original’ music for other Daniel poems. Tantalisingly, only three pages of Rummel’s musical sketches have survived, headed ‘Canzoni III’.2 After Rummel, Pound’s most important musical collaborator became the London pianist and vocal coach Agnes Bedford (1892–1969; see ‘Agnes Bedford: An Invisible Helpmate’ in this volume). She was an invaluable musical colleague of Pound’s for forty years, serving as his amanuensis for the completed version of Le Testament (1921), helping him learn music composition and song setting, coaching his singers at rehearsals, and later providing advice and criticism for his opera Cavalcanti (see T, passim; Hughes and Fisher 2003: 193–4; and EPM 484). Bedford is relevant here because in 1920 she and Pound published a small collection, Five Troubadour Songs: Original Provençal Words and English Words Adapted by Ezra Pound from Chaucer, a sequel to the collection that Pound had published with Rummel. In the preface (‘Proem’), Pound states that ‘compound notes and ligatures are not regarded as a series of even crotchets, but as a main note ornamented: ornamented, that is, by various devices, shakes, double-shakes, mordants, backfalls, etc.’. Rather than providing English translations of the Provençal texts, as he had done for the earlier collection, Pound decided to add poems by Chaucer which, with slight alterations, could fit the music and offer ‘perhaps the closest kinship with the spirit of the originals’. The songs chosen were (using Pound’s spellings) ‘Miels com no pot dir’ by Pons de Capdeulh, ‘Can par la flor’ by Bernard de Ventadorn, ‘Molt era dolz mei Cossir’ by Arnaut de Maruelh (referred to simply as Miroil by Pound),

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and ‘Nom allegra chan ni cric’ and ‘Fort chant oiaz’, the latter two by Gaucelm Faidit. Only Bedford’s name appears on the title page, and the ‘Proem’ is amusingly co-signed by Pound and William Atheling, his nom de plume. As with Rummel’s collection, the sources were manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (Aubrey 1996: passim). And as in the collaboration with Rummel, the transcriptions and piano accompaniments were not intended for scholars but rather to provide a version that might be appreciated in contemporary drawing rooms. The choice of musical rhythms to fit the stresses of the texts was, as always, a prime concern of Pound’s. As he stated in the preface, ‘In the main, the tempo, accent, and duration of the notes are indicated by the words; and slight difference in verbal rhythm would probably have produced some variation in the melody, from one strophe to the next.’ In the beginning of ‘Miels com no pot dir’ there are interesting instances of 3/4 metre in the voice part laid over 3/2 metre in the piano part, and in ‘Nom allegra chan ni cric’ the metre frequently changes from duple to triple. Ostinato chords in crotchets characterise the effective accompaniment in ‘Fort chant oiaz’, a lament on the death of Richard the Lion-Heart. Perhaps the most lasting influence of any troubadour in the collection was that of Bernard de Ventadour and his poem ‘Can par la flors’ (‘When flowers appear’): Pound included lines from the third stanza as a sirens’ song at the beginning of Canto XX, which he wrote four years later: ‘Si no’us vei, Domna don plus mi cal, / Negus vezer mon bel pensar no val.’ Much later, in Canto XCV, he would finally include the translation he had drafted back in 1924: ‘And if I see her not / No sight is worth the beauty of my thought’ (XCV/665).

Pound as Music Critic Pound made his debut as a music critic on 1 April 1911 in the Monthly Musical Record. Significantly, the concert was comprised mostly of Baroque music, and it included his friend Walter Rummel as pianist. The review should be quoted in full here, as it is not included in other accounts of Pound’s music reviews. Headed ‘Concerts-Chaigneau’, it reads: It is at once a surprise and an undiluted joy to find oneself at a concert given for the sake of music and not for the purpose of advertising the performers. These concerts at the Salle des Agriculteurs carry this principle to excess. The names of the composers are printed in a larger type than those of the artists who render them. It is like being reminded that Shakespeare and not Forbes Robertson is really responsible for ‘Hamlet’. With all this modesty the playing is so excellent as to require no comment. The programme informed us of Rameau’s ‘Orphée’, Bach’s Sonata in G major, and Mozart’s Sonata in D major for two pianos; and we were given Rameau – Bach – and Mozart, their beauty and their message, not the fiery souls and phalangic pyrotechnics of certain aspiring virtuosos. The highest tribute one can pay to the artists who give these concerts is perhaps, to tell the truth, that one is not conscious of them. Only by the perfection of one’s enjoyment does one realize how exalted has been the standard of performance. The programme on March 16th contained, besides the selections

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charles timbrell named: Airs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries harmonized and scored by Walter Morse Rummel; Suite for two flutes by Pierre Bucquet; and Quintette in G minor by Boccherini. This series of concerts, for the production of works rarely played, has been inaugurated by the Sisters Chaigneau, who were so intimately concerned with the Philharmonic Society. Among the distinguished artists, composers and conductors who have joined them in this unusual effort are Madame Casals-Suggia, Messieurs Harold Bauer, Pablo Casals, Camille Chevillard, Walter M. Rummel, Jean Ten-Have and Jacques Thibaud. (Pound 1911a)

Although Pound wrote occasionally for various periodicals after arriving in London in 1908, the opportunity to write regular music reviews did not arise until 1917, when he began to serve as critic for The New Age, a London weekly, writing under the nom de plume ‘William Atheling’. On 24 January 1918, he wrote to his father: Am doing art and music critiques under pseudonyms, paying the rent. Rather entertaining work. [NOT to be mentioned.] It may be I have at last found a moderately easy way to earn my daily. Bloody queer what a man will do for money. MUSIC!!!! (L/HP 411) He continued with the journal until 1921, mostly covering solo recitals or chamber music, rarely operas or orchestral programmes. He had high praise for such leading musicians as cellist Felix Salmond, tenor Vladimir Rosing and pianists Myra Hess and Vladimir Cernikoff. The one category he consistently wrote enthusiastically about was ‘old music’, devoting at least sixteen concert reviews or articles to the subject. They reflect Pound’s preference for music that had thin textures, clean lines and simple forms. In The New Age he repeatedly extolled the talents of the singer and diseuse Raymonde Collignon and the tenor Yves Tinayre, who would both later participate in performances of his opera Le Testament. Writing of Collignon’s premiere performance of the Rummel–Pound troubadour songs, Pound (‘William Atheling’) indirectly publicised himself and then offered a small criticism of Collignon’s interpretation: We were delighted with the exquisite melodic line of the Rummel reconstructions from the Troubadour music, and it was a comfort to find words in some relation to notes, a treat not commonly granted us. In the Ventadour song the last line should be sung with the words more separate and distinct, since it is the whole point and climax of the song. (EPM 102) In a review of a recital by Tinayre, Pound provided greater musical detail: The voice seemed larger than before; the enunciation clear and accurate, the delivery firm, and with nothing left to chance; suave in [Monteverdi’s] ‘Lasciate mi morire’, in [Pergolesi’s] ‘Tre Giorni’, with its admirable lyric line, the voice was remarkable with its delicate lift and float, perfect in tang and in passion. (EPM 176) Pound was on less sure ground when writing about instrumental music. His dismissals included the entire genre of piano concertos and the ‘slop’ of various Romantic

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composers. In January 1920, an angry reader wrote to The New Age complaining that Mr Atheling ‘gives himself away in every article he writes as an ignoramus of the first water where music is concerned. One might overlook his repulsive flippancy if his judgment were correct, and if he knew how to criticize impartially’ (EPM 206). Ironically, in the same issue Pound wrote one of his most penetrating reviews, covering Albert Coates’s conducting of Gluck, Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin, and Tinayre’s programme of French war songs from the Middle Ages to the Revolution (EPM 207–9). Of more pertinence here are Pound’s articles devoted to the renowned instrumentmaker and scholar Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940). Born in France, Dolmetsch had learned piano-making from his father, studied at the Brussels Conservatory and the Royal College of Music in London, and made a variety of musical instruments for the firms of Chickering in Boston and Gaveau in Paris. He then settled in England, where Pound met him in October 1914. Shortly after that, Pound attended a performance of old music given by Dolmetsch’s small ensemble. He was fascinated by what he heard and saw, and he immediately commissioned a clavichord from Dolmetsch – an instrument that he retained for the rest of his life. Dolmetsch and his musicians, performing on harpsichords, clavichords, viols, lutes and recorders, spearheaded an international movement to revive old music played on authentic or replicated instruments. In December 1915, Dolmetsch published a highly influential book that is still considered a classic in the field, The Interpretation of Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Pound seems to have read this book thoroughly, and it helped to fill in many gaps in his musical knowledge. It also reinforced his own ideas about the relations between poetry and music. During the two-year period from 1915 to 1917, Pound wrote four articles devoted to Dolmetsch. In the first of these, he compared the purity of older ‘pattern music’ with Romantic and impressionistic music, finding the later styles inferior because they were often programmatic, conceived from the outside in. ‘It [later music] is like a drug, you must have more drug and more noise each time . . . [and] its effect is constantly weaker and weaker.’ The article primarily refers to his experience of listening to Dolmetsch perform and lecture. He compared a performer such as Dolmetsch, who selflessly played old music for the purpose of being at one with it, with a modern virtuoso performer who tries to dominate his audience (EPM 35–40). Pound’s second article, written after he had digested Dolmetsch’s book, begins with a discussion of the relation of music and poetry, specifically vers libre: ‘Poetry withers and “dries out” when it leaves music, or at least an imagined music, too far behind it. . . . Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets’ (EPM 42). The article then moves to a consideration of Dolmetsch’s book, with comments on eight of the book’s quotations drawn from Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument (1676), Jean Rousseau’s Maître de Musique et de Viole (1687) and François Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le clavecin (1717). Couperin wrote: ‘Those who will use [my] Preludes must play them in an easy manner, WITHOUT BINDING THEMSELVES TO STRICT TIME [Pound’s emphasis], unless I should have expressly marked it by the word mésuré.’ To this, Pound adds that ‘No one but an imbecile can require much further proof for the recognition of vers libre in music – and this during the “classical period.”’ The article is not so much about Dolmetsch as it is about the ways that Dolmetsch’s observations about old music corresponded to Pound’s own ideas about poetry and aesthetics (EPM 42–5).

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The brief third article is little more than an advertisement for Dolmetsch’s book. ‘No intelligent musician would willingly remain without it. . . . It is not merely “full of suggestion” for the thorough artist of any sort, but it shows a way whereby the musician and the “intelligent” can once more be brought into touch’ (EPM 45–6). The final article is a rehearsal of two of Dolmetsch’s salient points: that composers have gradually ceased to trust the intelligence of their interpreters; and that rather than studying scales endlessly, an early musician would have begun playing the bare form of a work and then gradually would have attended to the details. From these observations, Pound expounds a personal philosophy: In any age a few learned men must always support the poet against the musicteacher; the artist who creates against the machine for the vending of pictures; the inventive writer against the institutions of publishing and distribution. . . . In music the trouble may well have begun with an attempt to write music for the insensitive and the blockhead. (EPM 48, 50) Dolmetsch, with his book, editions and performances, helped greatly to shape and reinforce Pound’s musical tastes. Certain qualities of old music as articulated by Dolmetsch contributed to Pound’s overall aesthetic philosophy of the importance of concision, small scale, abstract patterns, distinct forms, objective qualities and the contrasts between free and regular rhythms (see Merritt 1993b). Although Pound’s personal involvement with Dolmetsch was limited, he remembered him with admiration in Cantos LXXX, LXXXI and XCIX. In December 1920, Pound moved from London to Paris and soon began thinking about composing an opera, Le Testament, based on the words of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon. At first, Pound had the considerable help of Agnes Bedford, who notated his musical thoughts – together they completed a first version of the opera in 1921. Then two years later, Pound met the young American pianist and composer George Antheil (1900–59), whom he championed extravagantly, comparing his music favourably with Stravinsky’s. Their friendship resulted in Antheil’s renotation of Le Testament in micro-rhythms, putting on paper Pound’s own reading aloud of Villon’s words. In 1927, Pound published a retrospective volume, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, ‘with Supplementary Notes by Ezra Pound’, an attempt to boost Antheil’s reputation and to simultaneously advance Pound’s credentials as a musical thinker. It involves a critique of older views about harmony and advocates the idea of using rhythm as the fundamental organising principle of music. Much of the content may have originated in discussions with Antheil, who held similar views. During this Paris period, Pound rarely occupied himself with the subject of old music, except in his sessions with Agnes Bedford. But many of his musical works – including the operas Le Testament and Cavalcanti, and his pieces for violin – were inspired by his fascination with ‘old music’, with finding modernity through the works of early composers rather than building on the achievements (or in his view, the excesses) of the nineteenth century. In November 1920, Pound wrote a short review of a London concert in which he praised the American violinist Olga Rudge (1895–1996) for the ‘delicate firmness of her fiddling’ (EPM 233). Three years later, after he had settled in Paris, Pound met Rudge, and she soon became his mistress and intellectual muse. In December 1923 she performed a Paris recital that opened with Pound’s first work for the violin, a

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transcription of Gaucelm Faidit’s troubadour song ‘Fort chant oiaz’, which Pound had entitled for this occasion ‘Plainte pour la Mort du Roi Richard Coeur de Lion’ (EPM 249).

Pound as Concert Organiser In 1924, Pound and his wife Dorothy moved to Italy, settling in Rapallo, a seaside resort near Genoa that they had enjoyed visiting earlier. There, between October 1933 and March 1939, he organised an important series of more than thirty concerts. In the first two years, the main performers were Rudge and an excellent German pianist from Dresden, Gerhart Münch (1907–88). They were sometimes assisted by two local musicians, the violinist-conductor Luigi Sansoni and the cellist Marco Ottone. After the summer of 1935, when Münch moved to Anacapri, the concerts benefited from notable outside performers, including the New Hungarian Quartet, the Gertler Quartet, soprano Lonny Mayer and pianist Renata Borgatti. Pound hoped to create ‘a local culture of musical excellence, founded on the wellordered harmonies of pre-romantic composers’ (EPP II 187). Initially, he may have planned a revitalisation of early music along the lines of Dolmetsch’s concerts. But very soon, for comparison or contrast, contemporary composers were included: Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Scriabin, Albéniz, Bartók, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Romantic music, except for a few works by Chopin, in whose music Münch excelled, was ignored. (Writing in 1933, Pound stated that ‘Music in the past century of shame and human degradation slumped in large quantities down into a soggy mass of tone’; ABCR 200.) In late 1937, when Münch decided to resume his performing career in Germany, Pound and Rudge began to capitalise on their shared interest in Vivaldi’s music. Pound announced the intention to have a reading of as many of Vivaldi’s works as possible in Rapallo, including ‘study sessions’, or illustrated talks. Rudge soon became an important force in the international revival of Vivaldi’s music, discovering the manuscript of his oratorio Juditha Triumphans in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and cataloguing the extensive Vivaldi holdings in the National Library in Turin. In 1938, she co-founded the Centro di Studi Vivaldiani at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena and subsequently was asked to rewrite the entry on Vivaldi for the new edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Meanwhile, Pound built up their own library by ordering photostats of the large Vivaldi collection at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden, which Münch sent to him by May 1938 (Cruz Cornejo 2016: 44). In September 1939, Pound and Rudge had the satisfaction of knowing that their efforts on behalf of Vivaldi resulted in a week-long festival of six Vivaldi concerts at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. It was the first major presentation of the composer’s works in modern times. According to the Vivaldi scholar Walter Kolneder, the week in Siena ‘heralded the Vivaldi renaissance which today is immediately evident’ (Kolneder 1970: 6). Noel Stock has summarised Pound’s role in the Vivaldi revival: He played the leading part as organizer in the early stages, but more important in the long-run probably was his constant support and encouragement of Olga Rudge. To her he communicated his enthusiasm and helped her to overcome various obstacles, with the result that she carried out a difficult and arduous programme of research. (Stock 1970: 338)

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Pound’s enthusiasm for Vivaldi could be amusing as well as serious, as when he stated that Vivaldi’s oratorios made ‘ole pop Handel look like a cold poached egg what somebody dropped on the pavement’ (EPS 8). (He was apparently unaware that Vivaldi wrote only three oratorios and that only one of them was extant – the one discovered by Rudge.) The final six concerts in Rapallo were held in March 1939 and included eleven of Mozart’s violin sonatas, performed by Rudge and Borgatti; arias by Mozart, Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Caldara, sung by bass Guido Guidi; piano works by Haydn, Mozart and Ravel, played by Borgatti; and sonatas by Bach and Ravel, performed by Rudge and Borgatti. Despite the imaginative programming and the enthusiastic participation of excellent musicians, the Rapallo concerts never really caught on with the public. In March 1937, Pound wrote: We expected a reasonably large public. It was bitterly disappointing. It was almost as if the idea of a better and nobler culture was hateful. But I console myself by remembering the gratitude and warm response of the small handful of people who recognize the exceptional importance of the events taking place in the Town Hall in Rapallo. (EPM 422) Pound’s involvement with early music was limited after his Rapallo years, but in 1941 at the time of his pro-Fascist radio speeches, he compelled Radio Rome to broadcast Vivaldi ‘until the disks wore out’ (Carpenter 1988: 586). Years later, at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, he was delighted to hear his old friend Louis Zukofsky’s 11-year-old son play violin works by Corelli, Bach and Mozart, and even Münch’s arrangement of ‘Le chant des oiseaux’. And on another occasion, a visiting recorder quartet from Buffalo came to play Gabrieli for him on the hospital’s lawn (EPP III 423). A touching final image comes to mind from the last years in Venice, with Ezra asking Olga to put a Vivaldi disc on the record player so they could dance to it (EPP III 501).

Notes 1. Walter Rummel to Ezra Pound, 20 October 1910. YCAL MSS 43 45/1970. It is unclear whether Rummel was referring to Aubry’s La rhythmique musicale des troubadours et des trouvères (1907) or his Trouvères et troubadours (1909). 2. Rummel’s sketches are contained in Rummel Folder 5540 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. An announcement of the Seymour Company’s planned publication of the Pound/Rummel Canzoni of Arnaut Daniel is reproduced in L/DS 199.

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5 Ezra Pound: Premier Danseur by Proxy Evelyn Haller

How can we know the dancer from the dance? William Butler Yeats Nunc est bibendum Nunc pede libero Pulsanda tellus Horace, Book I, Ode xxxvii, 1, in ABCR

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ance and the idea of dance informed Pound’s life and poetic imagination. He even defined poetic thought, which he called logopoeia, as ‘the dance of the intellect among words’ (LE 25). Susan Jones observed that ‘dance hovers suggestively behind Pound’s aesthetics and his understanding of the reader’s “physical” engagement with the rhythms and disjunctions of poetic form’ (Jones 2013: 205).1 He naturally connected dance with rhythm and visual impact in the poem ‘Effects of Music upon a Company of People’ when he contrasted movements in nature: ‘The petals! / On the tip of each the figure / Delicate / See, they dance, step to step. / Flora to festival’ with those of ‘legion of Romans. / The usual, dull theatrical!’, probably recalling how he had hated marching as a student at Cheltenham Military Academy (PT 245–6). This chapter explores Pound’s relation to dance as a metaphorical leader of the muses joined in a pas de trois with poetry, rhythm and music, as in the Balanchine ballet of 1928 Apollon Musagète and as a dancer moving in idiosyncratic solo performances that were at times Dionysian. Aspects to be addressed include: how Pound accoutred himself for his role; his compulsion to move; how dance influenced his dreams and in turn his poetry; his attraction to early music and dance, evidenced by his study of poetry expressed through the dance-songs of the troubadours; his devotion to the music of Vivaldi through Olga Rudge’s scholarly reconstruction of the manuscripts and with Dorothy Pound in sponsoring concerts of his music; Pound as a choreographer himself; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a fellow daemon of energy whose art he championed; the vortex and lateral movement inherent in this phase of modernist art as proclaimed in BLAST and beyond; Pound and Noh; the god-dance; and his ongoing love of dance, with his view of his poems as children told to dance as he sends them out into the world. In 1912, Pound assured Harriet Monroe that he would deliver to Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in distant and elevated Chicago ‘[W]hatever is most dynamic in artistic thought’ in London or in Paris (EPP I 213). Pound was already in a unique position to

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make such an offer to Harriet Monroe, for he had recognised unacknowledged dance forces driving art. Those he had not encountered by 1912, he would later engage, such as the performance of Asian aesthetics he found in Ernest Fenollosa’s papers starting in 1913. Enhanced by his study of the songs of the troubadours, he was open to the controlled movement of Japanese Noh. In collaboration with William Butler Yeats and Michio Ito, Pound arrived at and championed a satisfying use of lateral (diagonal) movement supported by Vorticism to counter conventional linearity. As he wrote in his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska: ‘The real sculptor “sees” or is aware of, not only the sides of his work, but of the “through,” that is the diameters that can be passed through it from any angle’ (G-B 145). Compare Pound’s statement with Joan Acocella’s comparison of how Nijinsky had countered his training as a classical dancer, ‘dancing to the music, producing the rounded, three-dimensional shapes of academic ballet’, with his revolutionary choreography: ‘by having the dancers move “through” the music in flattened profile, gliding in lateral lines (Acocella 2007: 189). Acocella’s summary of Balanchine’s contribution to the evolution of dance recognises a similar motive and pattern: ‘Balanchine, by virtue of his complete absorption of subject matter into movement, and his radical transformation of the academic steps, did with dance what Pound wanted to do with language: make it not a story but an action’ (2007: 223). Nor were Pound’s pronouncements limited to the enhancement of life for the uppermost stratum of the population in an elitist form of art. Always eager to ‘make it new’, as in his ongoing support of George Antheil’s music and machinery, Pound was similarly moved to imagine a chef d’orchestre controlling movements of machinery within and outside factories on a large scale so that workers’ activity could be rethought as a dance to the music of machines, so that ‘at the end of eight hours, the men go out not with frayed nerves, but elated – fatigued, yes, but elated’ (EPM 315).

Pound Accoutred With his high crest of golden-red hair, evoking the Coq d’or ballet of 1914, his frenetic carriage and his impulse to proclamation, the young Ezra Pound manifested his status as a poet at the time ballet was being transformed through the impresario Serge Diaghilev and the most memorable of male dancers, Nijinsky. Pound had seen Nijinsky dance the role of the faun in the ballet he had choreographed to Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune (28 February 1913; L/HP 300). He also saw Pavlova dance (c. 20 April 1912; L/HP 277) and with an echo of a Homeric simile, he praised her in his poem ‘The Garret’: ‘Dawn enters with little feet / like a gilded Pavlova’ (1913). He was genuinely impressed by her dance, writing in a review in Athenaenum in April 1920 that ‘it was her own delicate and very personal comment of emotion upon the choreographic lines of Fokine which won her the myriad hearts’ (‘Pavlova’ P&P IV: 50). Moreover, Pound published dance and art criticism under the pseudonym of B. H. Dias, as well as music criticism under that of William Atheling, in The New Age. As ‘T.J.V., drama critic of the Athenaeum’, he reviewed concert performances of Karsavina, Pavlova and the young British ballerina Phyllis Beddells (16 and 23 April 1920; aee Jones 2013: 213–17). Later, he devoted at least three years of his life to becoming a composer (Fisher 2003b: 24) despite his self-assessment in a letter to his parents written in 1909 wherein he expressed his attraction to all the arts:

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I never voluntaraly [sic] do anything but write lyrics & talk to my friends. If I were not tone deaf. I might compose & if I were not so demmed [sic] clumsy I might pant or sculp. as it is I participate in the other arts by proxy & stimulation (17 August 1909, L/HP 184) Well before Pound became engrossed in Ernest Fenollosa’s papers, he understood the importance of self-presentation; but he also knew what he was doing as he accoutred himself for his role: to know by the age of thirty more about poetry than any man living. In their first encounter as 15- and 16-year-olds at a costume party in Philadelphia, Hilda Doolittle noticed his ‘bronze gold hair’ and his green Moroccan robe (PT 1208). In 1914, Pound wrote of himself and his appearance in BLAST 1, ‘IN MONUMENTUM AERE, ETC.’: You say that I take a good deal upon myself; That I strut in the robes of assumption. In a few years no one will remember the ‘buffo’, No one will remember the trivia parts of me, The comic detail will not be present. (B1 46) Pound was confident of mingling in the company of his own kind, as expressed in ‘Come My Cantilations’: ‘Let come beautiful people / Wearing raw silk of good colour.’ David Moody, Pound’s biographer, describes the general impression he made: ‘the floppy artist’s beret and the ebony cane, and many thought of Byron or of Whistler and the late Aesthetes, and thought no further’ (EPP II 7). Sisley Huddleston, a Times correspondent, affirmed: Nobody looks the part of a poet so well as Pound. In his velvet coat, his open shirt with Danton collar, his golden beard, his long hair well brushed up and back from a high forehead, he suited the romantic conception of a poet. (Huddleston 1928: 82) Nor was Huddleston alone in noting Pound’s attire, which verged on costume, allowing for a degree of hyperbole from Ford Madox Hueffer: Ezra . . . would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut into a point. (quoted in EPP I 113) To return to Pound’s Le Coq d’or hair: the style in itself was not unusual for young men of the time, as shown in William Carlos Williams’s photograph, taken for the University of Pennsylvania. In the first issue of BLAST (1914), however, a sequence resembling an annotated litany, written by Wyndham Lewis, includes: ‘BLESS the HAIRDRESSER / . . . He makes systematic mercenary war on this WILDNESS. / He trims aimless and retrograde growths / into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and ANGULAR PLOTS’ (B1 25). The idea of wilderness, aesthetically tamed, chimes with urban planning and architecture in a Vorticist vein suggested by Edward Wadsworth’s artwork in the two issues of BLAST.

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Like the red-crested poet, the production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or was both innovative and colourful. Given that Diaghilev’s biographer, Sjeng Scheijen, states: ‘The only real hit of the [1914–15] season was Coq d’or’, it is likely that Pound, who was working as a dance critic, saw a performance, or was, at the least, aware of it (Scheijen 2009: 297). He continues: ‘the singers [in Le Coq d’or] were no longer part of the dramatic action, but simply sang in the wings while dancers portrayed the various roles . . . Its appeal lay to a degree in the neat replacement of acting singers [as in opera] with a combination of dance and mime.’ A source of visual pleasure was Goncharova’s arresting palette, drawn partially from Russian folk art, with ‘bright combinations of red, orange and yellow, and blended primitive and naïve patterns of flowers and leaves with abstract motifs and decorations’ (Scheijen 2009: 297). Unfortunately, Diaghilev pulled Coq d’or from the repertoire of the Ballets Russes owing to an ongoing feud with the deceased composer’s family, exacerbated by a recently signed copyright convention between Russia and France that incurred the prospect of ongoing payments to Rimsky-Korsakov’s widow. ‘Never has a widow done a greater disservice to her late husband’s reputation. The success of the work would certainly have made it part of Diaghilev’s repertoire, guaranteeing it a place in the canon of European opera’, Scheijen declares (2009: 298). Save for the photographer, Pound’s self-presentation was not set to static poses. Iris Barry describes how Pound did not enter a space, but made an entrance, in this instance his weekly entrance to a Chinese restaurant in Regent Street during the Great War: Into the restaurant with his clothes always seeming to fly round him, letting his ebony stick clatter to the floor, came Pound himself with his exuberant air, pale catlike face with the greenish cat-eyes, clearing his throat, making strange sounds and cries in his talking, but otherwise formal and extremely polite. (quoted in Norman 1960: 197) His public performance was not altogether dissimilar to a persona that often appeared in his letters. Although Eliot wisely heeded Pound’s changes to ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, thereby enabling his text to become The Waste Land, Pound himself persisted in a ‘murican’ persona, especially in correspondence, which evokes a music-hall performance. Louis Menand has described it as ‘a kind of homemade cowboy/Yankee drawl’ (2008: 123). Decades later, shortly after Pound’s release from St Elizabeths, he was driven to Richmond for a literary gathering. James J. Kilpatrick, president of the Poetry Society of Virginia, editor of the local newspaper and of the Virginia Quarterly Review, which would soon publish Canto XCIX, wrote of the occasion in The National Review: ‘He wore an open-necked shirt of a particularly god-awful magenta [the colour of the BLAST 1 cover], tails out, and a pair of outsized slacks with the cuffs rolled up. A black coat, flung clockwise over his shoulders completed the costume. If the description sounds theatrical, it is intended to suggest that there is in Pound a good deal of the actor, a good deal, indeed of the ham. His bearded face, mobile, is the bust of some morning-after Bacchus; but it is seldom in repose.’ (quoted in EPP III 435–6)

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Pound’s Compulsion to Move Until he withdrew into silence, Pound was anything but a ‘patient etherized upon a table’. Perpetual motion characterised his presence, making Gertrude Stein fear for the survival of her chairs; evidently, he could not sit still. As Stein wrote in the guise of Alice B. Toklas, ‘In his surprise at the violence [Stein’s reaction to a conversation including Scofield Thayer, the editor of The Dial] Ezra fell out of Gertrude Stein’s favourite little armchair, the one I have now tapestried with Picasso designs, and Gertrude Stein was furious’ (Stein [1962] 1972: 190). The undergraduate Pound had already known that members of a Greek chorus (in his preferred spelling xoros, an example of how he liked to return to the roots of language) did not stand still as columns. Indeed, in April 1903, William Carlos Williams described Pound’s performance in the chorus of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, presented in English by undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, as wearing ‘a great blonde wig at which he tore as he waved his arms about and heaved his massive breasts in ecstasies of extreme emotion’ (Carpenter 1998: 42). More than half a century later, in 1960, Pound posted advice about how a performance of his version of Women of Trachis should be spoken and sung: ‘may be the Xoros ought to be declaimed by one good voice – with the chorus moving to the thud of the words’ (letters to Ronald Duncan, 6 March 1960, quoted in EPP III 470). His 1905 graduation picture from Hamilton College was captioned ‘Oh, how he throws those legs’ (Robinson 1982: 234–5). Not surprisingly, Pound was not noted for his grace of movement in athletics. Ford Madox Ford remarked that tennis with Ezra felt like ‘playing against an inebriated kangaroo’. Hemingway commented on his having ‘the general grace of a crayfish’ while boxing (Carpenter 1988: 132). Of his fencing at university – he did not make the team – it was observed that ‘He was not well coordinated, and he fenced with wild, unconventional strokes’ (Carpenter 1988: 40), once nearly putting out William Carlos Williams’s eye in a seemingly friendly match in the front hall of the Pound family house at Wyncote using Homer Pound’s walking sticks. It should be noted, however, that Williams was on the university fencing team. Pound’s interest in fencing persisted, for in 1913 he wrote to his mother from Stone Cottage that he and Yeats ‘find we have room to fence in the study when the weather is bad’ (Carpenter 1988: 222). Presumably, Yeats suffered no damage. Nonetheless, Pound could dance, albeit as an idiosyncratic solo performer. Indeed Sisley Huddleston wrote that he was a supreme dancer: whoever has not seen Ezra Pound, ignoring all the rules of tango and of fox-trot, kicking up fantastic heels in a highly personal Charleston, closing his eyes as his toes nimbly scattered right and left, has missed one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life. (1928: 121) In his dancing – idiosyncratic though it was – Pound was not ‘out of key with his time’, for Osbert Sitwell remembered that dancing more than conversation was the art which occupied the young men of the time in the Cabaret Club . . . a night-club . . . hideously but relevantly frescoed by . . . Percy Wyndham Lewis, [which] appeared in the small hours to be a

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evelyn haller super-heated Vorticist garden of gesticulating figures, dancing and talking, while the rhythm of the primitive ragtime throbbed through the room. (Sitwell [1948] 1957: 219)

Caresse Crosby in her old age spoke of the ‘rambunctious, combative’ Pound of the 1920s, who had arrived in Paris ‘bronzed and in negligé to dance a “voodoo prance” with her at the Boule Blanche’ (Conover 2001: 234). In her memoir, she described a particular instance in Paris in 1930 when ‘a brilliant band of Martinique players were beating out hot music’: As the music grew in fury Ezra avidly watched the dancers. ‘These people don’t know a thing about rhythm’ he cried scornfully, and shut his eyes, thrust forward his red-bearded chin and began a sort of tattoo with his feet – suddenly unable to sit still a minute longer he leapt to the floor and seized the tiny Martinique vendor of cigarettes in his arms, packets flying, then head back, eyes closed, chin out, he began a sort of voodoo prance, his tiny partner held glued against his pistonpumping knees. The music grew hotter, Ezra grew hotter. One by one the uninspired dancers melted from the floor and formed a ring to watch that Anglo-savage ecstasy – on and on went the two, until with a final screech of [cymbals] the music crashed to an end. Ezra opened his eyes, flicked the cigarette girl aside like an extinguished match and collapsed on the chair beside me. The room exhaled a long orgasmic sigh – I too. (Crosby 1953: 225, quoted in Wilhelm 1990: 290–1, 8–9) David Moody refers to ‘accounts of Pound dancing, wildly, to rhythms only he could hear, but there is no mention of his dancing with [his wife] Dorothy’. Moody reasonably raises the question: ‘But then how could they dance together, given the way he danced?’ (EPP II 8). The ‘tiny partner’ working at the club resembles a puppet or prop, but in time a chastened Pound danced happily with his partner of fifty years. He was still a soloist when a Fred Astaire movie he had seen in Venice with Olga Rudge inspired him to dance all the way home to her house. Since he continued to dance once they were home, Olga had to remind him of the comfort of the neighbours before he would desist. Although that was a comparatively happy time, Pound’s compulsion to move – perhaps love of movement – did not abate. Decades later, in 1958, upon his arrival in Italy following his release from captivity at St Elizabeths, Pound went to Dorf Tyrol. There he entered into his element, as the annual celebration of his daughter Mary’s birthday was transferred from 9 July to 13 July to make ‘a welcoming party’. As Il Poeta – Mary’s conception and projection of him – he entered into the ‘“Breughelesque feast” with flowers and torches and the village band with a big drum, and Pound led off the dancing, finding the rhythm of the Tyrolean music irresistible’ (EPP III 445).

The Dreamer Dreaming of Dance After a period of transition, Pound left Brunnenburg, his daughter’s castle near Merano in the South Tyrol, and moved to Rome and then, with Olga Rudge, to her two residences: in San Ambrogio near Rapallo, and in Venice. Olga noted in her journal how

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she and Pound danced together while they were once again living in Venice: ‘Why is it, in old age, dancing seems better? We had a gramophone, dancing with Him to Vivaldi [was] His idea!’ (Conover 2001: 239). Also ‘[d]uring this era’, which Conover defines as ‘The Last Ten Years’, ‘Olga began to record Ezra’s dreams in her notebook. In an early one, he saw Olga dancing in a window: ‘“Me?” “Yes.” “Was I dancing nicely?” “Yes.” “What kind of dancing?” “Oh, that Ceylonese bending”’ (Conover 2001: 240). Examples of ‘bending’ are found in photographs in The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life by Troy and Margaret West Kinney ([1914] 1936). These are examples of movements from Indian and Arabian, as well as Persian and Javanese, dances. The dancer is Zourna, a Tunisian who also studied dance in France. With many examples of ‘bending’, she performs an Arabian Dance of Greeting in fifteen stills; a Dance of Mourning in eight stills; a Dance of the Soul’s Journey in fourteen stills. In a characteristic pantomime in Modern Egypt, Zourna expresses sorrow. Two stills demonstrate Dances of the Falcon. In their widely disseminated book, the Kinneys discuss Oriental Dancing through Islam. They write: From a race of artists Mohammed took away the freedom to paint or model representations of living things. Yet the prohibition was a seed from which sprang a garden of expression more graphic than paint, a school of symbolism perhaps the most highly wrought the world has seen. . . . Instead of movement, as in most European dancing, its essential interest is in a series of pictures, charged with significance and rich in harmony of line.’ (Kinney and Kinney [1914]1936: 196, 198) When Pound related his dreams to Olga, they were living again in her Venetian house of one room on each of three storeys, decorated on the first floor with arresting colours. Before the war, the two higher floors had been decorated with art which had included Oriental pieces underscored by relatively oversized furnishings to dramatic effect. The first floor was ‘bright yellow with painted ochre columns and a bright glass star’ hanging from the ceiling; the child Mary sat in a ‘high dark-blue armchair’, propped up on cushions and a leopard skin, facing her mother ‘over a monumental dark table’ while Pound was seated on ‘a dark-blue broad bench’. On the third floor, the child Mary had seen ‘two pairs of strange shoes, one of straw and one of black wood’. Later she ‘learnt that these were Japanese shoes’ and ‘the most beautiful dress’ hanging on the looking glass door was a kimono (de Rachewiltz 1975: 21). These interiors were indicative of a time when the ‘Orientalism’ of the Ballets Russes had burst through the pallid hues of European and American urban interiors. That Pound responded to Olga’s question ‘What kind of dancing?’ with ‘Oh, that Ceylonese bending’ does not suggest a precise definition of dance, given the imprecision of dreams, but harkens back to what had happened decades earlier with ‘the sudden ascendancy of an all-purpose Orientalism through Diaghilev’s productions’ (Harris 1989: 84). While one must allow for synchronicity, comparable examples of colour and style are found in dances in the ballet Le Dieu Bleu (1910) with costumes and designs by Bakst and choreography by Fokine. The set by Bakst had stone carvings in the background and large, intimidating snakes. Regarding a scene from Le Dieu Bleu conceived in the style of Marius Petipa’s Bayadère of 1877, Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska, wrote that she interpreted her role ‘based on a series of slow steps and poses in pseudo-Indian Siamese style’ (quoted in Misler 1988: 83 n.17). As Nicoletta Misler notes,

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evelyn haller These dances of the Bayadère carried a cultural reference but actually had nothing to do with Oriental culture. They were derived instead from the fashion for Indian dance and the dances of Southeast Asia that invaded Europe and America as a result of various professional and amateur performances. (Misler 1988: 83)

Bakst – whom Pound names as a stage scene designer in his poem ‘Our Respectful Homages to M. Laurent Tailhade’ – also designed a costume for Nijinsky in another 1910 ballet, Les Orientales. In Le Dieu Bleu Nijinsky’s ‘otherworldly appearance was enhanced by the use of all-over blue body-paint’ (Misler 1988: 83) to suggest the god Krishna. Leon Bakst was comfortable with Oriental art, for he had a statue of a walking Buddha from Siam in his combined living quarters and studio. An earlier example of how dance could influence the content of Pound’s dreams occurred as he wrote to Dorothy Shakespear around 1912 of ‘a most gorgeous dream about the marriage in Cana of Galilee – it began in symbolical patterns on a rug and ended in a wedding dance to exceed the Russians both in grace, splendor & legerity’ (EPP I 197). The dream became ‘Dance Figure’, inscribed ‘For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee’ and originally subtitled ‘A Thoroughly Sensuous Image’: ‘Dark eyed, / O woman of my dreams, / Ivory sandaled, /There is none like thee among the dancers, / None with swift feet.’

Pound as Choreographer Unlike Nijinsky and his sister Bronislawa Nijinska, who were established dancers when they became choreographers, Pound choreographed an unrealised dance that owes more to Noh than to the muscular rigours of ballet. He had already dreamed a pattern that became a dance, realised in his poem ‘Dance Figure’ (P 91), as we have seen. In ‘Ione, Dead the Long Year’ (P 115–16), a Sapphic poem of lamentation that recognises presence by absence – ‘Empty are the ways of this land / Where Ione / Walked once, and now does not walk / But seems like a person just gone’ – Pound grieved for Ione de Forest, a dancer who had died by her own hand on 2 August 1912. Ione (Jeanne Hayes or Joan Hayes) had danced ‘The Rite of Luna’, the last ritual in Aleister Crowley’s The Rites of Eleusis in 1909 (OCCEP VII: n.20). In the autumn of 1915, Pound ventured into choreography with The Dance of the Birth of the Dragon, composed in French, presumably for Michio Ito, whom he had met through his involvement with Noh. Pound’s plan for his CHOREOGRAPH (his word and choice of upper case) includes drawings of patterned movements as well as costume design, stage settings and specifications for musical instruments: the biwa (Chinese lute), frog drums (bronze drums of Southeast Asia that sound when struck by monsoon rains) and temple gongs. His choreography, Pound wrote, ‘Symbolizes at the same time the evolution of Chinese art and the evolution or the liberation of the soul or the principle of air.’2 Is it significant that Pound’s typing leaves multiple spaces between words and consistently before periods? Since a typist has control over spacing on a manual typewriter, it would seem that as with the original spacing of ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Pound wants to suggest ‘not a story but an action’. By way of prologue, Pound declares that

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Chinese art begins with the art of the Pacific. With some representations of a marine monster, this symbol becomes the Dragon. The dance symbolizes successively the life of the waters, which emerge, first the dance of the earth, secondly the dance of the fructification of wheat, the adoration of the stars, the astrological dance. Then fire is born, the dance of fire. Conclusion, light is given. The Gold Dragon appears in the air. Though it resembles the god-dance of Noh, The Dance of the Birth of the Dragon may be described as a goddess-dance. The central figure, Kuanon, the bodhisattva of compassion, can be of either gender. The woman dancer also represents the male god Shiva, Lord of the Dance, through a succession of poses taken from ‘statuettes’ that depict him surrounded by a ring of fire while balanced on one foot with the other leg suspended in a bent position. In Hindu myth, it is Shiva Nataranja, for example, who dances the world into being. Influenced by ancient Chinese bronzes, the setting is blue and green. Further sources of nuances are likely to be Dante’s Paradiso (‘the evolution or the liberation of the soul or the principle of air’) and the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass prior to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. In his discussion of Noh, Pound had included ‘elements [that] disappeared from our Western stage . . . even dances – like those of the mass – which have lost what we might call their dramatic significance’ (Fenollosa and Pound 1916: 18). The dancer has her back to the audience except for a three-quarter phase, and her robe is decorated with many small symbols. Pound’s use of ‘la salle’ (the room) evokes Yeats’s plans for his Noh-influenced plays to be performed before a small aristocratic audience, although Pound also suggests larger venues. In Part I, the ambience is ‘blue and green, shades of a bronze vase of 1700 bc. The female dancer is dressed to look like a primitive monster.’ Her costume is sketched specifically from the back. (‘[B]lue and green of the most ancient bronze’ is in handwriting beside the sketch.) ‘She dances a dance of the waters to pray before a closed chest of the goddess Kwannon. She presents always her back to the theatre.’ (Added in handwriting’ (to the room – to the public)’ after the typewritten ‘to the theatre’.) Pound has sketched a series of rows of curved lines in lateral or diagonal directions in front of the chest to represent the dance (‘figure de la danse’ handwritten). All the forms of the movements are bluntly aquatic. The prayer is efficacious. In Part II, ‘The Second Figure’, The dancer turns, presents herself three-quarters ‘to the room’ (added in pencil before the typewritten ‘to the theatre’). She wears ‘émoussés’ (blunted?) Chinese shoes, perhaps alluding to the bound feet of Chinese women although the dancer herself can move freely, with fans carried on arms outstretched to the sides as in the sketch Pound provides. The dancer wears ‘a priestly robe ornamented with very small, very numerous symbols. She traces with her hands double fan-shapes of dance, in the design of the frigate bird.’ Pound indicates with four question marks his indecision concerning the kind of bird accompanied by a sketch of the motions of the dancer’s hands. He has adjectives like ‘sharp’ and ‘pointed’ in this part of the dance, which he will repeat in Part III. Continuing with Part II: ‘She dances the dance of the earth and wheat’ (grain). A sketch of castellated design in four attached parts is joined by an equal sign to a row of five waves which follows and separates the dancer’s ‘discovery of the sun, the moon, and the stars’. ‘She dances the dance of the

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labyrinth of the skies.’ Two sketches follow: one a horizontal pattern of two circular motions joined ‘like this’ or joining vertical and horizontal circular motions of the fans on the dancer’s outstretched arms with a stronger suggestion of the movement of a wheel. Indeed her movements recall the lines of the chorus in the Noh Nishikigi during the dance of the reunited ghostly lovers: ‘How glorious the sleeves of the dance, / That are like snow whirls!’ (PT 416) In the Part III ‘Figure’, the hitherto closed ‘chest of Kuanon opens, and the woman dancer emerges from the priestly blue-green robe dressed as Shiva considered as the principle of fire, the colour of gold as well as the colours of red and orange, in Chinese tones’. Once again, ‘All is pointed.’ She dances in successive postures drawn from statuettes of Siva ‘The Dance of the principle of fire’. In Part IV ‘Conclusion’: ‘The goddess Kuanon sends forth divine light. (Theatrical effect: the light falls like a sphere, the scene is plunged into darkness. The dancer disappears. A shimmering great golden paper Dragon appears in the air and seems to fly.) The End.’ Pound’s choice of a great Dragon made of shimmering golden paper evokes the eagle that appears in Canto XVIII of the Paradiso, though Dante’s conception is composed of just rulers, with King David coming to occupy the eye of the eagle in its evolved form (Paradiso XX: 37–9). That Pound’s Dragon ‘seems to fly’, however, may relate to the transformation of Dante’s eagle. The shimmering golden paper also relates to ‘the game of “ciocco”: this consists in striking a smoldering log and guessing one’s fortune by the play of sparks’. Dante’s use of ‘ciocco’ as earlier in Canto V, ‘is a metaphor for the visionary presentation of history’ (OCCEP VII: n.12). Parts of The Dance of the Birth of the Dragon reappear in Pound’s later work: as, for example, a passage in the first of ‘Three Cantos’ published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, June 1917. Pound addresses Robert Browning, declaring that in contrast to ‘a world like Puvis’’, his is ‘Never so pale’ as he sets out his ‘matter . . . in straight simple phrases’: Exult with Shang in squatness? The sea-monster Bulges the squarish bronzes. (Confucius later taught the world good manners, Started with himself, built out perfection.) With Egypt! Daub out in blue of scarabs, and with that greeny turquoise? (P 233) In Canto III from A Draft of XXX Cantos, ‘Green veins in the turquoise’ is the penultimate line in the opening set of nineteen, wherein Pound sits ‘on the Dogana’s steps’ and muses upon the gods who ‘float in the azure air’, as in the final published version. The colour – whether of patinated bronze or occurring in minerals – is intense, unlike the ‘pale’ idealised figures and forms in the paintings and murals of Puvis de Chavannes, such as those of Ste Geneviève in the Panthéon. Pound posits movement from the restrained sea monster shaping the squat square bronze on which it appears. Gaudier-Brzeska had written: ‘Plastic soul is intensity of life bursting the plane’ (B1 156). Nor is Kuanon forgotten in Pound’s Three Cantos I, published in June 1917. Lines evoking a Chinese temple follow ‘that greeny turquoise’

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wherein ‘Fine screens depicted, sea waves curled high, / small boats with gods upon them, / Bright flame above the river!’ Here the goddess whom Pound had hidden in a closed chest appears: Kwannon Footing a boat that’s but one lotus petal, With some proud four-spread genius Leading along, one hand upraised for gladness, Saying, ‘’Tis she, his friend, the mighty goddess! Paean!’ (P 233) In Three Cantos I, Kuanon appears as a memory of a painting and an Eastern Aphrodite, like her, borne by water, not on a cockle shell, but by a lotus petal. Pound feels briefly tempted to let his poetry be inspired by painting for a time: ‘If for a year man write to paint, and not to music’ appears as a definite possibility at the end of the canto (P 234). As a vision of love and compassion, Kuanon would reappear many more times in the final version of The Cantos (Gildersleeve 2003: 193–212)

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Like Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska was a man in perpetual motion. Also like Pound, he could explode into idiosyncratic solo dancing, as Sophie Brzeska described in her diary: ‘A comical drink-fuelled occasion in Gaudier’s studio where he began to dance ‘the cake-walk’ ‘tango’ etc. his eyes burning – his hair wild. What was funny . . . wasn’t so much the exotic dances themselves – it was seeing Pik [Gaudier] the young bear like nothing on earth with his great seven-league boots jumping like an extraordinary buffoon.’ (quoted by Powell 2015b: 35) Pound compared Gaudier-Brzeska’s own movement before he knew him to that of ‘a well-made young wolf or some soft-moving, bright eyed wild thing’, reminding him ‘a little of my friend Carlos Williams’ (G-B 44). After supplying the pronunciation of ‘Brzeska’ as ‘Jaersh-ka’’ which Pound, admittedly ‘playing the fool’, had garbled, Gaudier-Brzeska acknowledged having made the sculptures on display at the 1913 Allied Artists Association exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, sculptures Pound and Olivia Shakespear (Dorothy Pound’s mother) had repeatedly returned to, among them ‘a green ceramic wrestler’. Thereupon, ‘he disappeared like a Greek god in a vision’ (G-B 44). Consider Pound’s book-length memorial to the sculptor killed in the Great War at the age of twenty-three as a lament analogous to his poem ‘The Return’, in which Susan Jones sees ‘the dynamic, even kinesthetic element of the creation of poetry’ (2013: 208). Again, like Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska was not only a daemon of energy but a contrarian spirit. He wrote to his partner, Sophie Brzeska, in London of the people in his art class with contempt, for they ‘are so stupid, they only do two or three drawings in two or three hours, and think me mad because I work without stopping’. He would ‘do from 150 to 200 drawings each time’. Moreover, Gaudier ‘especially’ worked ‘while the model is resting, because that is much more interesting than the poses’ (17 November 1912, in Barassi 2011: 32). He learned from the sculpture of

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Rodin, but ‘loathe[d] the work of most of the Ancient Greeks, especially Praxiteles: “These are not men, only well oiled corpses . . . they are not forms which can give a local rhythm, do not evoke the base or the sublime, have no vibrating life-force”’ (in Barassi 2011: 30). ‘His stillness seemed an action, such was the daemon of energy that possessed him, or served him’, Pound wrote of Gaudier-Brzeska (G-B 39). So confident was Gaudier-Brzeska of his ability to sculpt that he preferred action to stillness in his models. He wrote to Sophie Brzeska: ‘The model takes his pose – which, of course, is a good thing – and keeps it for ten or fifteen minutes. I should have liked to have a model who didn’t pose at all, but did everything he wanted to, walked, ran, danced, sat, etc.’ (14 November 1912, quoted by Powell 2015a: 60). The forty-two illustrations of Gaudier’s work in Pound’s Memoir include several in motion, notably, EQUESTRIAN in pen and ink, MAN AND HORSE, a pen and wash of a man about to mount, THE DANCER, BIRD SWALLOWING FISH with the sculptor standing behind it, and several studies of wrestlers, including a LINOCUT repeated for the cover of the New Directions 1970 edition. Buoyed by Pound’s Chinese poems, Gaudier-Brzeska observed the war with a choreographer’s eye from the trenches of France. ‘It has been a lurid death dance’ with ‘a few legs and heads flying’, he wrote to Olivia Shakespear (G-B 70). While awaiting ‘better fighting clothes, soft greys instead of bright blues and reds’, he wrote to Pound on 25 May 1915 of the Germans: ‘Right and left they lead Rosalie to the dance. . . . Perhaps you ignore what is Rosalie? It’s our bayonet, we call it so because we draw it red from fat Saxon bellies’ (G-B 63). It wasn’t the bayonet so much as a knife, however, that Gaudier-Brzeska regarded as his favoured tool not only to work on wire entanglements but to carve – when it was available to him – the butt end of a German rifle (G-B 59). Gaudier-Brzeska’s influence on Pound was ongoing not least by way of synchronicity. In his choreography for Dance of the Birth of the Dragon, as we have seen, Pound gives the instruction ‘Scene: blue and green, shades of a bronze vase of 1700 bc.’ Gaudier-Brzeska had written in his ‘Vortex’, as he pursued the sphere as well as its variations through the history of sculpture: ‘The Shang and Chow dynasties produced the convex bronze vases’ (G-B 23). He had written to Pound on 27 January 1915: ‘If I return . . . I believe I shall develop a style of my own which, like the Chinese, will embody both a grotesque and a non-grotesque side’ (G-B 60). We have an intimation of what was not to be in his drawing in pen and India ink of ‘STAG (in the Chinese manner)’ (1913; G-B Plate VI), drawn from the back, with wing-like antlers and a single raised hoof. Pound’s memoir Gaudier-Brzeska, published in 1916, which celebrates the art of his friend, includes photographs of his sculptures Red Stone Dancer (Figure 5.1) and The Dancer. Pound included his own article ‘Vorticism’ from The Fortnightly Review (September 1914) as well as Gaudier’s ‘Vortex’ which he had ‘Written from the Trenches’, published in the second and last number of BLAST. In both their renderings the Vortex emblematises dance as well as the idea of dance. Gaudier-Brzeska had written in BLAST: ‘Sculptural energy is the mountain. Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes’ (B1 155). Pound composed an analysis of how, with The Red Stone Dancer, GaudierBrzeska had worked free of influence, to have established a personal style at age 22:

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Figure 5.1 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), Red Stone Dancer, c. 1913. Red Mansfield stone, polished and waxed. 17 × 9 × 9 in. (43 × 23 × 23 cm). © Tate, London.

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We have the triangle and the circle asserted, labled almost, upon the face and right breast. Into these so-called ‘abstractions’ life flows, the circle moves and elongates into the oval, it increases and takes volume in the sphere or hemisphere of the breast. The triangle moves toward organism it becomes a spherical triangle (the central life-form common to both Brzeska and Lewis). These two developed motifs work as themes in a fugue. We have the whole series of spherical triangles, as in the arm over the head, all combining and culminating in the great sweep of the back of the shoulders, as fine as any surface in all sculpture. The ‘abstract’ or mathematical bareness of the triangle and circle are fully incarnate, made flesh, full of vitality and of energy. The whole form-series ends, passes into stasis with the circular base or platform. (G-B 137–8)

The Vortex and Lateral Movement When Pound wrote of ‘luminous details’ in 1911–12, he used a word that reinforced the idea of the vortex: ‘circumjacent’. He wrote of ‘the few really significant facts which “give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects into sequence, and law”’ (EPP I 170). Of the presentation of the first issue of BLAST in 1914 Paul Edwards writes: Its bright magenta cover with heavy black capitals impressing its stark diagonal title on our flinching retinas and the playful self-contradictions of its aggressive manifestos, have taught generations of art students . . . how to make revolt into a style. (Edwards 2009: v) In BLAST 1, the first example of choreographed movement within the annotated litany written by Wyndham Lewis occurs at the beginning: ‘Bless England! Bless England or its ships which switchback in / Blue, Green and Red Seas all around the PINK EarthBall / Big Bets on Each’ (B1 22). Among the poems Pound published in Lustra (1916, 1917) is ‘The Game of Chess’, wherein he writes: ‘Reaching and striking in angles . . . these pieces are living in form, / Their moves break and reform the pattern’ (P 124). Hugh Witemeyer describes the images of ‘The Game of Chess’ as ‘stroboscopic’. Moreover, ‘Their function is to evoke the visual patterns on a chessboard as a projected subject for a set of dynamic, abstractionist paintings or prints.’ The lines to which Witemeyer refers, however, are also evocative of dance (Witemeyer 1999: 51): Whirl! Centripetal! Mate! King down in the vortex, Clash, leaping of bands, straight strips of hard colour, Blocked lights working in. Escapes. Renewal of contest. (P 124) As Witemeyer notes, these images ‘are not grounded in a particular personality’; their force indeed compels movement – rapid movement – in a specified whirling motion. About this time, Pound admonished Dorothy Shakespear not to waste energy on activities such as embroidery (ultimately enfeebling, he appears to suggest) that did not

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engage one’s entire attention. If she could not attend fully to her own art, then she should work on colour. Pound cites ‘Chess, tennis, fencing all help. They demand complete attention . . . Anything that demands only partial attention is useless in developing a vortex . . . in time it would incapacitate one for serious creation of any sort’ (L/DS 198–9).

Pound and Noh While there is no evidence that Pound attempted his own performance in a Noh play, he did fill in for an absent actor in a rehearsal of a Noh-inspired play by Yeats, who wrote, ‘I shall not soon forget the rehearsal of The Hawk’s Well when Mr. Ezra Pound . . . in the absence of our chief player rehearsed for half an hour’ as Cuchulain (Yeats 1924: 214). When Pound returned to the United States in 1939, ‘he viewed the films of Noh plays at the National Archives’ (Conover 2001: 136). He may have had those authentic productions in mind as he translated Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis while he was at St Elizabeths, ‘wanting to see what would happen to a Greek play’ in the medium of Noh. In 1958, his daughter Mary, accompanied by Eva Hesse, who had translated Pound’s works into German, saw The Women of Trachis performed to a full house in the largest theatre in Berlin. ‘The Noh elements came over well’, Eva Hesse reported. The audience was likely to have been well prepared, for there ‘The long-standing tradition of Noh plays dated back to 1906’ (Conover 2001: 219). In Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching, Carrie J. Preston describes ‘The uncomfortable posture of seiza’ in which one sits on one’s feet (Preston 2016: 16). Preston’s study of Noh has included her rare opportunity to learn its physical movements in Japan. Could Pound have had the patience to assume and maintain that posture? Not likely. It is easier to imagine him attempting a grand jeté of classical ballet. Still, his study of Noh within the treasury of Fenollosa’s papers contributed profoundly to his achievement of The Cantos under the rubric of ‘a long Vorticist poem’, as several scholars have suggested. Reversing the flow of influence, Preston explores at length episodes in Pound’s life, corroborated with scenes of The Pisan Cantos, that would make a fantastic subject for a noh cycle’ within all five categories performed on a given day: ‘The warrior-poet is exhausted by a round of imaginary fencing in his cage under the blazing Italian sun and blinding prison floodlight. He falls asleep and, in the first category, god play, dreams of the tennin: ‘the nymph of Hagoromo came to me, / as a corona of angels’ (LXXIV/450). Preston continues with persuasive transfers from Pound’s life with the second category, the warrior play: the ghost of Ito appears with samurai sword and ‘overcoat’ as an example of ‘sincerity, the precise definition’ (LXXVII/488) with Yeats as his companion (tsure). The third category, woman play, ‘revisit[s] his challenging domestic arrangements during the war’ where Dorothy and Olga, wife and mistress, had to live under the same roof. This potential Noh play is modelled on Pound’s translation of Awoi no Uye, figuring Lady Awoi’s jealousy: ‘and Awoi’s hennia plays hob in the tent flaps’ (LXXVII/485). Preston posits the fourth category as a potential play of spirits, which Pound described as showing the ‘struggles and the sins of mortals’ (Fenollosa

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and Pound 1916: 15): this ‘might feature . . . the black trainee who covertly constructed a writing table . . . out of a medical supply box’; he would ‘“wear the Baluba mask” and respond to Pound’s mix of racism and gratitude’ (LXXIV/454). The fifth category, demon play, would show Pound to be possessed by any number of his demons – Mussolini hanged ‘by the heels at Milano’ is a prime candidate – and Yeats and Itō would attempt an exorcism holding Pound’s ‘eucalyptus bobble’, picked up ‘for memory’, and chanting from M. E. Speare’s The Pocket Book of Verse ‘found on the jo-house seat’. (LXXIV/445, 455; LXXX/533) (Preston 2016: 51) Not only is Preston’s delineation of patterns of Pound’s life that relate to the templates of Noh plays insightful, but it suggests that they may have occurred to Pound himself.

Pound and the God-Dance Once Pound encountered the god-dance in Fenollosa’s papers, it became an important aesthetic tool for him. While a woman’s dancing – probably stamping – on a tub to attract the sun-goddess Amaterasu to emerge from her rock-cave may strike a Western reader as odd, Pound is likely to have responded to a similarity with Roman thought and practice: how to evoke and engage the pulsations of nature. Pound quotes Horace from Book I, Ode xxxvii, 1: Nunc est bibendum / Nunc pede libero / Pulsanda tellus, following the statement of his conviction ‘that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music’ (ABCR 14). The context for Horace was the Festival of the Liberalia, on 17 March, when youths received the toga virilis (Ovid 1995: 204, n.10): ‘Now with the first step (of the dance) I free (or release from winter’s clutches) / The throbbing (teeming with life) fields.’3 Stamping is an integral part of Noh. Hence, the five jars placed under the Noh stage at right angles affect the quality of sound made by the actors’ stamping while the back wall prevents sound from being wasted. Nijinsky’s choreography and instruction made stamping an integral part of the Stravinsky ballet The Rite of Spring, to the discomfort of Diaghilev’s dancers. Later, similar complaints were made to his sister, Bronislava Nijinska, for her choreography of Les Noces (‘The Village Wedding’). Pound’s critical enthusiasm for the Polovtsian dances of Borodin’s Prince Igor focused on ‘a force . . . the surge and thud of the music . . . is yet carried on and enforced by the dancing tumult as a complete sound might be enforced by an echo, by a series of resounding repercussions . . . the spirit of the music moves this flood of physical rhythm’. (Pound 1919a, quoted in Jones 2013: 214) Pound’s own performance of music emphasised the thud or stamp, as Sisley Huddleston observed at a performance of Quatre Chansons du Testament, ‘Paroles de Villon, Musique d’Ezra Pound’. Huddleston wrote ‘Pound, on the platform, sat at the drums which he beat with a will’ (1928: 83). In Pound’s poem ‘Our Respectful Homages to M. Laurent Tailhade’, a satirist, he urges:

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Let us stamp with our feet and clap hands In praise of Monsieur Laurent Tailhade, Whose ‘Poemes Aristophanesques’ are So very odd. Let us erect a column and stamp with our feet And dance a Zarabondilla and a Kordax – Let us leap with ungainly leaps before a stage scene By Leon Bakst. (PT 1177) The physical ferocity of the new Russian ballets recalled not only the mythic times of ancient Russia but also those of ancient Greece. Indeed, among Bakst’s paintings was a large panel (250 × 270 cm) entitled Terror Antiquus, depicting a painted archaic statue of Aphrodite in the foreground of a cataclysmic scene of earthquake and flood sweeping away Egyptian-styled buildings during the destruction of Atlantis (Ingles 2000: 59). ‘Poetry is a centaur’, Pound had insisted in his analysis of ‘The Serious Artist’. ‘The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets’ (LE 52). As if he were himself able to move beyond the limits of two legs or at least capable of imagining an extrapolated dexterity, the penultimate line of Canto IV is ‘The centaur’s heel plants in the earth loam’ (IV/127). If, metaphorically, poetry is a centaur, poems must not be static.

Pound’s Work in Staged Performance In 1965, Pound was Gian-Carlo Menotti’s guest of honour at his Spoleto Festival, Due Mondi. Le Testament de Villon was performed as a ballet, with the singers in the orchestra pit – Pound’s reaction to this curious formation is not recorded, but then, it was a festival of music, theatre, and dance. (EPP III 498) The arrangement that David Moody finds curious is not far different from the final performance mode for Le Coq d’or in probable response to Diaghilev’s growing belief that ‘opera was not the art form it had been’. Stravinsky had declared in 1912: ‘Generally speaking, I am not drawn to opera.’ His preference was for ‘choreographic drama’. As he explained: ‘Opera is a lie, aspiring to truth, but I want a lie, aspiring to a lie. Opera is a battle against nature’ (Scheijen 2009: 297). Pound’s enthusiasm about the puppets in La Boutique fantasque suggests an attraction to things mechanical if they do not resemble the rhythm of the metronome: ‘The gesture is never a copy of a real gesture; it is always something which represents the real gesture by puppet’s proxy; it has the frenzy and the impotence of the puppet’ (Pound 1919b, quoted in Jones 2013: 216). When Pound translated or, rather, made ‘a version’ of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, he stated: ‘The Trachiniae presents the highest peak of Greek sensibility registered in any of the plays that have come down to us, and is, at the same time, nearest the

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original form of the God-Dance.’ Near the end of the play, Herakles is in burning torment because of the misplaced trust of his wife Deianeira (‘Day’s Air’) in the dying centaur Nessus’ assurance that a love charm soaked in his blood will restore Herakles’ affection for her, should she need it in the future. Summarising prophecies he has been told and surveying his life, Herakles reveals to his son Hyllos: For amid the dead there is no work in service. Come at it that way, my boy, what SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES. (PT 1108) Pound footnotes the lines with ‘This is the key phrase, for which the play exists’ (PT 1108). Stage directions make the god-dance explicit: ‘He turns his face from the audience, then sits erect, facing them without the mask of agony, the revealed make-up is that of solar serenity. The hair golden as electrified as possible’ (PT 1108).4 Pound’s choice of capital letters for ‘the key phrase’ recalls the emphatic graphic style of the two issues of BLAST, published in 1914 and 1915. Pound wrote that ‘his translation came about from reading the Fenollosa Noh plays for the new edition (in The Translations, 1954), and the hope of its being performed by the Minoru company’ (Hall 1962: 26). The performance history of Pound’s Women of Trachis includes a BBC radio presentation in London in 1954. The role of Hyllus, son of Herakles, was played by significant American actors in the New York productions: James Dean in the one-night reading at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1954 and Martin Sheen in the production by The Living Theatre at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1960. Closer to Pound’s hope that his version would be performed by the Minoru company was ‘a noh-inspired version performed in Berlin in Eva Hesse’s translation’, also in 1960, which was well received by an audience familiar with Noh (Sieburth 2003b: 1333).

Pound Charges His Poems to Dance Early in this chapter I quoted from Pound’s poem ‘Effects of Music upon a Company of People’, lines which he subtitled ‘Temple qui fut’ (‘temple that was’) wherein the persona delights in the ‘Delicate’ dance of ‘The petals!’ (PT 245). The following lines choreograph ‘Ply over ply’ (IV/70) in a dance pattern of three dimensions: ‘Twine, bend, bow, / Frolic, involve ye. / Woven the step, / Woven the tread, the moving. / Ribands they move, / Wave, bow to the centre. / Pause, rise, deepen in colour, / And fold in drowsily’ (PT 246). When Pound heard music, he felt dance rhythm, as his poetry demonstrates. When he sent his poems out into the world, he instructed them as though they were children – and they were his children. He told them to dance: Go, little naked and impudent songs, Go with a light foot! (Or with two light feet, if it please you!) Go and dance shamelessly!

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Go with an impertinent frolic! ... Here are your bells and confetti. Go! Rejuvenate things! ... But, above all, go to practical people – Go! jangle their door bells! Say that you do no work And that you will live forever. (PT 266–7)

Notes 1. See Jones’s discussion of Pound’s criticism in relation to Huntley Carter and Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics (2013: 205n.20). 2. This and the following extracts are translated from Pound’s six-page document in Princeton University Archive. 3. With thanks to my colleague Liam Purdon for his translation and provision of the context. 4. S. V. Jankowski observes that Herakles’ last words to his son in Pound’s version ‘[transfer] the reader into the age of American building industry and [draw] an appropriate parallel’: “and put some cement in your face, / Reinforced concrete”’ (1956: viii). Pound’s metaphors of cement and reinforced concrete evoke upwardly flourishing American cities – as he celebrated New York skyscrapers in ‘Patria Mia’ and thought synchronistically with Daniel Burnham’s large-scale plans for Chicago.

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6 Time, Speed, Precision and the Poetry of the Everyday; or, Ezra Pound’s Cinema Aesthetic R. Bruce Elder

Pound’s First Statement on Film, Photography and Machine Art: Contemplative Form and the Too-Hurried Life

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zra Pound’s first extended deliberation on the cinema was published on 26 September 1918, under the title ‘Kinema, Kinesis, Hepworth, Etc.’ in The New Age. It took up the central theme of what cinema historians refer to as classical film theory, namely, the question whether the cinema was already (or might become) an art like the other great, high arts. Pound’s article is a blistering rejoinder to those who claimed it was (or might become) an artistic medium. The idea at the core of his critique of the cinema was that it does not promote contemplation by highlighting selected details. We hear a good deal about the ‘art’ of the cinema, but the cinema is not Art. Art with a large A consists in painting, sculpture, possibly architecture; beyond these there are activities, dancing, grimacing, etc. Art is a stasis. A painter or a sculptor tries to make something which can stay still without becoming a bore. . . . Photography is poor art because it has to put in everything, or nearly everything. If it omits, it has to omit impartially. It omits by a general blurr [sic]. It cannot pick out the permanently interesting parts of a prospect. It is only by selection and emphasis that any work of art becomes sufficiently interesting to bear long scrutiny. . . . The cinema is at the furthest possible remove from all things which interest one as an ‘art critic’. (EPVA 78–9) Pound’s reflections on the cinema at this time stress the accelerated, mechanical character of cinematic time. The experience of watching a film is one of relentless pressure to move forward through time: when we read a poem or a novel, or view a painting, we can speed up or slow down our experience; we can decide to linger over aspects of the work; we can even go back and review specific elements. Even dance, or music, or theatre (the other arts of time) are generally structured to invite contemplation. A similar contemplative temporal quality might have characterised the work of a filmmaker like Georges Méliès, who was a stage-magician, and who constructed his

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films on the theatrical model of the popular, vaudeville-like theatre of attractions. But within a few years of the cinema’s birth, filmmakers learned to present a succession of views, each of which is rapidly exhausted, and to move on to the next quickly. In his article for The New Age, Pound accuses cinematic time of being mechanical, and so of being both psychologically (spiritually) harmful and artistically deleterious.1 Both notions have an important context. I deal with each in turn. The change in the experience of time in modern, mechanised culture was an important theme in the sociological writings of Pound’s time. People had become aware of the acceleration of modern lives: to be truly modern was to live in a metropolis and to experience one’s nerves constantly being jangled, frequently resulting in nervous debility and exhaustion. In 1903, near the very beginning of the age of the cinema, Simmel, without naming either narrative or the cinema, commented on the non-narrative, cinematic quality of urban experience in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’: The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individual consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli . . . Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course, and show regular and habitual contrasts – all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in a single glance, and the unexpected onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions the metropolis creates. (Simmel 1950: 409–10)2 The narrator in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley seemingly concurs with Simmel’s comments, though (unlike Simmel) Pound actually connects the distress of modern societies to the cinema: The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.3 (P 186) The cinema provides an instant mould of the grimacing face of a time that lives a speeded-up existence. The passage suggests this acceleration has social and ethical implications: when lives lack the inwardness necessary for human flourishing, lies take the place of the truth arrived at by self-reflection. Society loses its moral compass.

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The second basis for Pound’s critique of the cinema’s temporal character, its aesthetic deficiency, had an even more intricately worked-out context, namely, the modernists’ conception of aesthetic experience. As Clive Bell put it in the ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, the essay that became modernism’s most famous creedal declaration, The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion . . . That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art [the subject of Bell’s book], and that this emotion is provoked by every kind of visual art . . . is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. (Bell 1913: 6–7)4 The modernists’ commentary on aesthetic experience stressed its contemplative character: Pound’s comments above – that ‘art is a stasis’ and ‘an artist tries to make something which will stand being looked at for a long time’ – likewise assert that aesthetic experience unfolds itself across an extended duration. Such experience cannot be attained by an agitated sensibility of the sort that is induced by the accelerated, mechanical time of the cinema. But the importance of contemplation is only one aspect of the modernists’ conception of aesthetic experience on which Pound based his critique of the cinema. Subsequent essays on the topic would draw on other aspects of that conception, and in the interests of clarity and efficiency, I consider those other features at this point. Aesthetic experience depends on apprehending form and requires a sense of the mutual adaptation of the features of the experienced object to one another and to the whole that they constitute. The experience is compelling, and it demands that we set aside our utilitarian concerns and our quotidian manner of relating to objects. Clive Bell writes, ‘Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination?’ (1913: 25–6). Moreover, to elicit a sense of rightness, these forms must conform to the qualities of the medium in which they are realised: in painting, for example, the form must accord with its material conditions (coloured goo smeared on a two-dimensional surface). Some modernists even promulgated a historiographic principle according to which art advances by identifying ever more narrowly each art medium’s particular features, eliminating the incursion of alien influences from an adjacent medium (painting becomes more truly painting by eliminating alien influences from drawing or sculpture) and constructing forms that are more in keeping with a particular medium’s sphere of special competence. Pound, at least in his Vorticist period, evolved similar ideas: consider his ideas on ‘primary pigment’ (‘Vortex’ in B1 153–4). The consequence of this, Bell (like most of the modernists) concluded, is that art has nothing to do with life, not even with the emotions of life: he writes, ‘to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions’ (1913: 25). If a work of art succeeds or fails because of a particular emotion that contemplation of its form engenders, then the relation between the work of art and reality counts for little, if anything. Only relations intrinsic to the artwork (relations of one element or one feature of the artwork to other elements and features and, ultimately, to the whole) are significant. Accordingly, modernists like Bell claimed, ‘The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant’ (1913: 25). Though no rigorous argument for

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the complete repudiation of representational practices issued from any strong modernist theorist, there was nonetheless an anti-representational tendency implicit in the modernists’ basic position. Bell’s comments here summarise the modernists’ view on the importance of pure form; they also capture something of the suspicions many modernists harboured regarding the inability of photography to elicit aesthetic experience, and those suspicions extended to the cinema as well. Pound was acquainted with the generically modernist ideas that were in the air at this time (and that I am summarising by referring to Bell, because he is the most commonly cited theorist expounding these ideas), and in his Vorticist period at least, mostly concurred with this generic modernism on the irrelevance, and possible deleteriousness, of representation: The work that depends upon an arrangement of forms becomes more interesting with familiarity in proportion as its forms are well organized . . . Our respect is not for the subject-matter, but for the creative power of the artist; for that which he is capable of adding to his subject from himself; or, in fact, his capability to dispense with external subjects altogether, to create from himself or from elements. . . . The satisfactions of art differ from the satisfactions of life as the satisfactions of seeing differ from the satisfactions of hearing . . . The result of the attempt to mix the satisfactions of art and life is, naturally, muddle. There is downright bad art where the satisfactions offered or suggested are solely the satisfactions of life. (G-B 97–8) Another key notion of the generic modernism of the era, one that can be traced back to the psychologist-aesthetician Edward Bullough, helps explain Pound’s claim about bad art muddling art and life, namely, Bullough’s ideas on ‘under-distancing’. In a series of lectures he delivered at Cambridge University in 1907 (and subsequently distilled into one of the most important essays on aesthetics ever published), Bullough laid the foundations of the modernist theory of aesthetic experience. He considered that a particularly important quality of such an experience was a feature he called ‘Distance’ (Bullough consistently used an upper-case first letter for ‘distance’, though, again, I shall not). He pointed out its nature by contrasting two experiences of fog that we can have, one non-aesthetic and the other aesthetic in nature: Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea fog, for the moment, its danger and practical unpleasantness . . . direct the attention to the features ‘objectively’ constituting the phenomenon – the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things . . . observe the carrying power of the air . . . note the curious creamy smoothness of the water . . . and the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects. This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like a momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary and familiar objects – an impression which we experience sometimes in instants of direst extremity, when

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our practical interest snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some impending catastrophe with the marvelling unconcern of a mere spectator. (Bullough 1912: 90) The difference between our experience of fog as something terrifying and our experience of it as something beautiful is that the latter is characterised by what Bullough calls distance: a separation between oneself and the sources of one’s affects, and between the experience of fog we have at the particular moment and the experience we would have if we responded in our usual ways. When our experience of the fog is distanced, we respond reflectively, recognising that fog has the power to cause fear (we may even feel terror), but at the same time we uncouple from our usual experience of fog – to rise above it and thematise it. Thus Bullough characterises the ‘aesthetic object’ anew (and that characterisation was to become an essential principle of generic modernism): it is not subject or model or a pretext for a work of art but ideal, formal object – Pound variously analogises that ideal object to the Neoplatonic hypostasis, to musical form, and to mathematical objects/mathematical expressions (G-B 90–1). The polysemous ramifications of Bullough’s metaphor of distance have caused much consternation. But one sense of distance, among others, that he relies on concerns that between art and life. Bullough rejects realism: ‘To say that Art is anti-realistic simply insists upon the fact that Art is not nature, never pretends to be nature and strongly resists any confusion with nature’ (1912: 99). (In a statement that resembles one of Pound’s that we will take up anon, Bullough remarks that drama is the art most likely to produce a confusion between art and life.) Foregrounding form promotes an appropriate distancing: Thus ‘symmetry, opposition, proportion, balance, rhythmical distribution of parts . . . [are] a general help towards Distance’ (Bullough 1912: 105). Such ‘visibly intentional arrangements . . . enforce Distance, by distinguishing the object from the confused, disjointed and scattered forms of actual experience’ (1912: 106). That is, these features encourage the phenomenological switch from the quotidian reality to the realm of form. Such formal attributes are characteristic of art, but not of life, for, Bullough and Pound concurred, ordinary life is subject to accidental, unintentional, inharmonic conditions. A statement Pound made in 1915, in his ‘Affirmations’ piece on Vorticism, confirms the tendency to see the distance between art and life as depending on the phenomenological switch between comprehension of utility and apprehension of form: A painting is an arrangement of colour patches on a canvas, or on some other substance. It is a good or bad painting according as these colour patches are well or ill arranged. After that it can be whatever it likes. It can represent the Blessed Virgin, or Jack Johnson, or it need not represent at all . . . When a man begins to be more interested in the ‘arrangement’ than in the dead matter arranged, then he begins ‘to have an eye for’ the difference between the good, the bad and the mediocre in Chinese painting.5 (EPVA 6–7) Pound agreed, too, that the specific features of the medium in which it is realised decides the fittingness of a composition. He defined Vorticism’s underlying principle in the following way:

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Vorticism means that one is interested in the creative faculty as opposed to the mimetic. We believe that it is harder to make than to copy. We believe in maximum efficiency, and we go to a work of art not for tallow candles or cheese, but for something which we cannot get anywhere else. We go to a particular art for something which we cannot get in any other art. If we want form and colour we go to a painting, or we make a painting. If we want form without colour and in two dimensions, we want drawing or etching. If we want form in three dimensions, we want sculpture. If we want an image or a procession of images, we want poetry. If we want pure sound, we want music. These different desires are not one and the same. They are diverse desires and they demand diverse sorts of satisfaction. (EPVA 6) The demand for mimetic art seemed to Pound the greatest barrier to the acceptance of Imagist poetry and Vorticist sculpture, which tend towards the crystalline (to adopt Wilhelm Worringer’s term and meaning), that is, toward a life-renouncing desire for abstract regularity and necessity. In 1912, Pound had written, ‘in every art I can think of we are clogged and damned by the mimetic’ (SP 41–2). In defending Gaudier-Brzeska’s statutes to an audience in St Louis, he explained, If sculpture were judged by the closeness with which it copies pre-existing material objects, the plaster cast or mould of the object would be the apex of the achievement . . . Brzeska’s statues have form . . . It is for the spectator to decide whether the forms of this sculpture are in themselves delightful. (EPVA 220–1) Pound’s disgruntlement with cinema lay in the fact that it was (in his view) purely a mimetic art suited to imitating the hectic pace of modern life. ‘Prose kinema is the naturalistic novel – like the cinema, it offers a “slice of life”, or crude realism’ (SP 135 n.1).6 Pound would go on to revise his view of the cinema – in fact, his views on cinema would progress through a series of stages. The purpose of this chapter is to track this evolution and to relate it to Machine Art’s concern with ‘the object’ (to use that term that had such currency in the 1910s and 1920s). I do so to show how these interests allowed Pound to overcome his reservations about the cinema and to emerge as the exemplary practitioner of cinematic poetry.7 This modernist-based critique of cinema had to contend with the opposite view that was already in this era becoming increasingly prevalent, one that connected the cinema to a visual arts tradition that celebrated visual vraisemblance (rather than dismissing it as artistically irrelevant, as the modernists did). A commonplace of art history is that the advent of the cinema precipitated an artistic revolution by making possible a new sort of dynamic form that gives the impression of having actually incorporated movement into a work of art. For centuries, the arts had striven to use balance and harmony to suggest stasis and thereby to elevate their contents to the realm of that which is beyond change. This immobility signalled that artists’ concerns were with the eternal – with the Platonic realm above the transient occasions of the shadow world of quotidian reality. Then, sometime just over a century before the birth of the cinema, a new social, economic and intellectual reality emerged that made the fleeting, the momentary, the ephemeral more urgent. Some thinkers have associated this exigency with mechanisation and urbanisation, which produced a terrifying

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acceleration of experience, while others put it considerably earlier, claiming it began with Isaac Newton’s showing that the planets moved according to the same laws that govern the motion of balls rolling down inclined planes and of apples falling to the earth’s surface. Newton’s science prompted thinkers to reject the world picture that depicted the heavenly realm as beyond real change; henceforth, the superlunary realm was believed to be subject to change, in exactly the same way as the sublunary realm. The changeable, even the fleeting, assumed increased importance. In this account, the cinema’s ability to give the impression of actually having incorporated movement developed out of this turn towards the everyday realm in all its transience: indeed, it advanced its fundamental purpose, for it gave the impression of actually incorporating the dynamics of the phenomenal world in its own, not idealised terms. Thus, thinkers who were favourably disposed towards the cinema averred that the advent of film must be understood as furthering an ambition that Romantic and Impressionist artists had already recognised as urgent. Siegfried Kracauer writes, since any medium is partial to the things it is uniquely equipped to render, the cinema is conceivably animated by a desire to depict transient material life, life at its most ephemeral. Street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other fleeting impressions are its very meat. Significantly, the contemporaries of Lumière praised his films – the first ever to be made – for showing ‘the ripple of the leaves stirred in the wind’. (1960: ix) It is no wonder, art historians pointed out (and Kracauer implies in this passage), that the subject matter of Lumière’s films – light on the sea, a train in the station, the gait and gestures of people promenading on city pavements – is also that of Impressionist painting. Film, through its power of presenting motion, succeeded in bringing the transient, in all its lowly ephemerality (but ultimately real dynamism), into the realm of art. The idea that film’s particular virtue is the ability to capture the fleeting gave rise to another, ‘supra-art’ strain in early film theory that stressed that special wonder was its impersonal, anonymous character, which results from its being produced by a machine. The literary critic, Impressionist filmmaker and founder of the important French Ciné-club movement Louis Delluc (1890–1924) maintained that film was a wholly new medium, destined to go beyond art in connecting viewers with the world: A chance evening at a cinema on the Boulevards gave me such extraordinary artistic pleasure that it seemed to have nothing to do with art. For a long time, I have realized that the cinema was destined to provide us with impressions of an evanescent eternal beauty, since it alone offers us the spectacle of nature and sometimes even the spectacle of real human activity. You know, those impressions of grandeur, simplicity, and clarity which suddenly cause you to consider art useless. Obviously, art would be utterly useless if each of us was capable of appreciating consciously the profound beauty of every passing moment. (Abel 1988: 137) He continues by developing the thesis that this new force will overcome art: ‘The cinema is rightly moving towards the suppression of art, which reveals something beyond art, that is, life itself. Otherwise, it would be merely a median term between stylization and transient reality’ (Abel 1988: 137).

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Pound rejected Delluc’s radical alternative: he saw little enduring value in connecting with the flow of life: the medium should, precisely, transform – stylise – transient reality, to elevate it to the condition of art, which at this point he connected to the (idiosyncratic) personal. And that was the full extent of the concession he would make. His basic understanding was that art should disconnect itself from life. It should not be an imitation of life. The contrast between the traditional view of art – that of the young Mauberley – and Delluc’s is highlighted in their views on the cinema’s documentary proclivities. In ‘Art Notes: Kinema, Kinesis, Hepworth, Etc.’ Pound allows that the cinema is ‘an excellent medium for news’. However, he insists, News is the antipodes of literature, as the cinema is the antipodes of Art. The cinema is an excellent medium for Pathe’s animated Gazette. It should be an excellent medium for instructing children in botany, physics, geography, zoology, the costume of foreign peoples, the appearance of foreign cities and the processes of manufacturing. It makes excellent ‘historic records’. . . The cinema is the phonograph of appearance. (EPVA 79) Delluc agreed with Pound that the cinema has an affinity with fleeting phenomena of everyday life, and that this put it at odds with art. But he differed with Pound in believing that cinema’s calling was a higher one: for Delluc, it is to film’s benefit that it will suppress art, by reaching something beyond art, namely life itself. The idea that art (or art’s successor) should, first and foremost, connect to the flow of life is diametrically opposed to the notions on art that Pound expounded at the time. As Mauberley’s narrator’s remark about the accelerated grimace suggests, Pound was not interested in including the lowly, the everyday or the emotionally deformed in a work of art. He remained committed to the idealising methods: his interest was in those exceptional moments of insight that transcended the material world. He sought those moments when consciousness undergoes a transformation into a luminous awareness, the ‘precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective’ (G-B 89).8 The cinema has affinities with both naturalism and Impressionism: the cinema, naturalist art and Impressionist art all trade in appearances of the world. When Pound accused the Futurists of offering simply ‘a sort of accelerated impressionism’, what he was accusing them of was mimeticism, of trying to imitate instantaneous appearances, and not to create an architectonic, as the Cubists and Vorticists did (B1 155). Mauberley’s decline from Imagism to Impressionism (marked by the transition to Part Two of the poem) offers the exquisitely precious impressions demanded by an effete age’s mimeticism (one powered at half-wattage that, unlike true art, lacks the power of transformation, and so makes the artwork’s contents a plaything of external reality). To summarise, the modernist-inspired argument Pound offered to counter the belief that film possesses attributes that would allow it to take its place among the great high arts is based on three principal assertions. The first is that the cinema does not afford time for the contemplation requisite for aesthetic experience, that film’s temporality presses forward and relentlessly interferes with contemplation. The second is that film images are produced photographically; however, photographic images are bound tightly to their models, and afford the image-maker little control over the process of

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making – of sculpting or fabricating – the image. The third is that the medium has an affinity with the lowly, for fleeting or chance events, while art seeks, through harmony, to elevate its subject to the realm of the timeless.

Pound’s Second Statement on Film, Photography and Machine Art: Vorticism and Pound’s Shifting Ideas on Cinema In 1923, Pound confirmed his negative assessment of the cinema, and he expanded and developed his critique of the cinema’s claim to being an art in his ‘Paris Letter’ on Abel Gance’s La Roue (February 1923; EPVA 175–7). The piece opens with an acknowledgement that the makers of La Roue have done everything possible to make art a commercial proposition (one that must please the masses). He singles out writer Blaise Cendrars for commendation, speculating that it is due to him that the film includes ‘some interesting moments, and effects, which belong, perhaps, only to the cinema’, explaining further that ‘we can admit that they are essentially cinematographic, and not a mere travesty or degradation of some other art’ (EPVA 175). He then commends the work for drawing on forms being created by the most advanced painters of the time: ‘The bits of machinery, the varying speeds, the tricks of the reproducing machine are admirably exploited, according to pictorial concepts derived from contemporary abstract painters’ (EPVA 175). Note that the positive attributes of the film that Pound identifies are features of Machine Art and that he connects abstract art and Machine Art through Vorticism. The comment states Pound’s justification for saying that creators of La Roue did all they could to make Vorticism and Machine Art commercial, that is, to give advanced artistic practices a place in the movies. However, although the work is motivated by a ‘high-brow urge’, that impulse only ‘carries the work so far’ and no farther. The reason is that ‘these details are interpolated into a story (of sorts)’. As a result, the work declines into ‘the usual drivelling idiocy of the cinema sentiment and St Vitus’ (EPVA 175). The last conjunction, of idiotic ‘cinema sentiment’ with St Vitus, suggests that the cinema’s impulse to mechanical movement is uncontrolled and unregulated (as are the movements of one afflicted by Sydenham’s chorea, known at the time as St Vitus’ dance). In short, movement in film is inharmonious. Pound acknowledges that the work has some merits, but its major importance is that it settles the question that drove early film theory, and it does so by responding in the negative: it establishes ‘for once and for all that the cinema is of no use as an art, very probably’.9 The explanation Pound provided in the Dial article for why the cinema cannot be art restates some of the points The New Age article had made: you test a picture by its powers of endurance, by seeing whether it can interest you for a number of months. However, something about film militates against sitting with one of its images, so that even when the photography in a film is good, as it is in the ‘Cendrars film’, one doesn’t have the time to sit with the image. One is carried along by the story and faux sentiment: But there is the dilemma; the instant that slap-stick comedy, personal touch, tender infancy, puppy dogs, ‘humour’, ‘drammer’, et cetera enter, the whole question of visual effects, composition, et cetera is chucked overboard. Inévitablement. Yes, I think we may as well say, inévitablement. (EPVA 175)

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I used the expression ‘something about film’ above to reflect a shift in Pound’s view regarding what it is that militates against the possibility of spending time with a particular image (a particular shot, which resembles a photograph, presented for a set time). The New Age article contended that cinema’s mechanical temporality endowed the cinema with a drive to press forward relentlessly. Something in film’s intrinsic character militated against its joining the roster of the arts. In the Dial article he proposed, to the contrary, that an external factor corrupts the medium’s potential. That villain is ‘drammer’ and the false emotions that go with it (recall Edward Bullough’s comments on drama as the artistic medium most likely to promote under-distancing): these external factors impel the film’s action and, what is worse, they distract us from visual composition, visual effects and so on, whose forms draw upon the medium’s inherent characteristics. Moreover, Pound goes so far as to say this narrative thrust weakens the mind, to the point that it will accept a ‘club-sandwich’, that is, a work that layers visual effects on top of story-telling on top of further visual effects, ‘an alternation of visual effects, photo-cinematographic effects, and the agile-flea melocomic-sentimento-kinesis’ (EPVA 176). One thinks of Mauberley’s ‘Mr. Nixon’ section, for Pound suggests there that the economic situation of art-making is the agent of corruption; in the case of film, economic considerations force the cinema to assume a corruptingly intimate relationship with drama. Though the two articles appear prima facie to be basically in accord with each other, Pound evidently revised his estimation of the cinema in the interval between the composition of the two: whereas the New Age article expounded the view that the agent that damns film is inherent in the medium, the Dial article proposes that an external agent, commerce, corrupts cinema. This shift raises the possibility that if the economic situation of filmmaking changed appropriately, the cinema might discover its artistic potential. Admittedly, at the time he wrote this article, Pound didn’t think that a positive transformation of film’s economic situation was likely. Nonetheless, he had assembled the conceptual armature for an edifice in which the cinema might come forth as art.

Pound’s Third Statement on Film, Photography and Machine Art: Or, Softening his Views on the Machine Soon enough, Pound would formulate the tenets of a position that would come close to Delluc’s (though instead of suggesting that film would suppress and surpass the arts, he would suggest that arts would evolve towards forms that would accommodate the specific features of the cinema, which he seemed to believe owed to its being a Machine Art). A factor which seemed to move him in that direction was Vorticism generally and, more specifically, his involvement in Alvin Langdon Coburn’s vortography (a vortograph is a photographic image produced by shooting through a triangular tube lined with mirrors, producing the effect of multiple images). To be sure, it took a few years for Pound to understand the implications of vortography for his views on film and photography. But he expressed intimations of the views that he would develop over time in his anonymously published introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of Coburn’s vortographs in February 1917. It begins with a capsule summary of Vorticism’s affirmation of modernist principles:

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The vorticist principle is that a painting is an expression by means of an arrangement of form and colour in the same way that a piece of music is an expression by means of an arrangement of sound. In painting the form has only two dimensions (though it may suggest or ‘represent’ a third dimension). In sculpture one uses three dimensions. Or to put it another way: Painting makes use of colour arranged on a surface; Sculpture of masses defined by planes. (EPVA 154–5) and goes on to apply those principles to Vorticism in the camera arts, stating: ‘the medium of the vortographer is practically limited to form (shapes on a surface) and to a light and shade; to the peculiar varieties in lightness and darkness which belong to the technique of the camera’ (EPVA 155). The article continues by outlining the vortograph’s capacity to free the camera image from the object. The account is straightforward modernism, beginning with a modernist-inspired declaration, set in capital letters. THE CAMERA IS FREED FROM REALITY The vortoscope is useless to a man who cannot recognise a beautiful arrangement of forms on a surface, when his vortoscope has brought them to focus. His selection may be almost as creative as a painter’s composition . . . VORTICISM has reawakened our sense of form, a sense long dead in occidental artists. Any person or animal unable to take pleasure in an arrangement of forms as he or she takes pleasure in an arrangement of musical notes, is thereby the poorer. People are sometimes tone-deaf and colour-blind. Other people, perhaps more numerous, are form-blind. Some ears cannot recognise the correct pitch of a note, and some eyes get no pleasure from a beautiful or expressive arrangement of forms. Until recently people enjoyed pictures chiefly, and often exclusively, because the painting reminded them of something else. Numerous contemporaries have passed that state of development.10 (EPVA 155) The idea that vortography freed the photographic image from the object had been brewing in Pound’s mind for some time. He claimed to have worked with Coburn in developing the vortographic technology.11 On 22 September 1916, he wrote an excited letter to his father: Coburn and I have invented ‘vortography’. I haven’t yet see[n] the results, He will bring them in tomorrow morning. They looked damn well on the ground glass and he says the results are O.K. The idea is that one no longer need photograph what is in front of the camera, but that one can use ones elements of design. i.e. take the elements of design from what is in front of the camera, shut out what you dont want, twist the ‘elements’ onto the part of plate where you want ’em, and then fire. I think we are in for some lark. AND the possibilities are seemingly unlimited. The apparatus is a bit heavy at present, but I think we can lighten up in time. (L/HP 379) Photography requires some torsion, twists, forces, effects in order to produce art. So does film. Such twists and torsions obtrude on viewers’ consciousness and foreground

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the image’s facture: they draw viewers’ attention to the images’ design (form). Pound, we will see, found in the vortographic process a method for doing exactly that, and it changed his views on photography and film. Drawing even closer to Delluc, Pound writes, A natural object or objects may perhaps be retained realistically by the vortographer if he chooses, and the vortograph containing such an object or objects will not be injured if the object or objects contribute interest to the pattern, that is to say, if they form an integral and formal part of the whole. (EPVA 155) In sum, the vortograph liberated the camera from the reproduction of visible reality. A vortographer could choose whether the image he or she produced would resemble the object before the camera, and if it did, how exact that resemblance would be. In other words, it opened up a space for creative freedom, whose measure is the potential difference between the object as it is seen by the naked eye and the image in the vortograph. If the still camera had been liberated from its bondage to reality, then surely a movie camera could be as well. This is exactly the inference Pound made. The conclusion he drew had a precise parallel in film theory in the early writings of Rudolf Arnheim, who became a key modernist art theorist. In his foreword to Film as Art, a key text in classical film theory, Arnheim says that ‘it was the precarious encounter of reality and art that teased me into action. I undertook to show in detail how the very properties that make photography and film fall short of perfect reproduction can act as the necessary molds of an artistic medium’ (1957: 3). In the central essay in that book, ‘Selections Adapted from Film (1933)’, Arnheim systematically unfolds the implications of the fact that the world as it is experienced in real life is three-dimensional and in colour, while its photographic or cinematographic representation is two-dimensional and (as Pound kept emphasising about a vortograph) in black and white. Arnheim enumerates a variety of choices a photographer or cinematographer can make, each of which alters the image: the selection of camera placement, camera angle and camera lens; lighting arrangements that, through the peculiar varieties in lightness and darkness that belong to the technique of photography or cinematography, affect our perception of objects within the photographed image; and, especially significant for film, the interruption of the time-space continuum through editing. These are akin to the ‘torsions, twists and effects’ Pound alluded to. Arnheim was trained by the founders of gestalt psychology at the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin. He applied gestalt ideas to art and in so doing developed what he called a Materialtheorie, a theory intended to show that artistic and scientific descriptions of reality are cast in moulds that derive not so much from the subject matter itself as from the medium, the Material, employed. That principle forms the basis of the writings collected in Film as Art: My teachers Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler were laying the theoretical and practical foundations of gestalt theory at the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin, and I found myself fastening on to what may be called a Kantian turn of the new doctrine, according to which even the most elementary processes of vision do not produce mechanical recordings of the outer world but organize the

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sensory raw material according to principles of simplicity, regularity, and balance, which govern the receptor mechanism. This discovery of the gestalt school fitted the notion that the work of art, too, is not simply an imitation or selective duplication of reality but a translation of observed characteristics into the forms of a given medium. (1957: 3) Arnheim’s abiding interest was in understanding the interrelationship between art and visual perception, and in Film as Art, he draws parallels between the construction of visual percepts and the construction of film images. The construction of both depends on principles of simplicity, regularity and balance – the same principles that shape visual perceptions also influence the translation of observed characteristics of the world into the medium of film. Since the medium of film and the mental images are different, the relationships that are formed differ between the two types of images: the sort of balance we see in a two-dimensional film image, for example, differs appreciably from the sort of balance we observe in the three-dimensional world. Arnheim shows, in the end, that the systematic differences between the world as it is perceived by the senses and its representation on the cinema screen can result in the creation of a form that is relatively independent of the objects depicted. Not until film began to become an art was the interest moved from mere subject matter to aspects of form. What had hitherto been merely the urge to record certain actual events, now became the aim to represent objects by special means exclusive to film. These means obtrude themselves, show themselves able to do more than simply reproduce the required object; they sharpen it, impose a style upon it, point out special features, make it vivid and decorative. Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of reproduction serve in some way to mold the object. (Arnheim 1957: 57) We noted earlier that Pound’s critique of cinema offered three fundamental factors that he believed limit film’s artistic potential: its failure to allow for the contemplation requisite for aesthetic experience; its photographic bond to reality that affords the image-maker little scope for image-making – for fabricating an image; and film’s affinity with the everyday, for fleeting events and chance occurrences. Vortography showed the way past the second objection: as Pound explained to his father, because of the vortograph, ‘one no longer need photograph what is in front of the camera, but . . . one can use ones elements of design. i.e., take the elements of design from what is in front of the camera, shut out what you dont want, twist the “elements” onto the part of plate where you want ’em, and then fire’ (L/HP 379). Thus ordinary objects could go into making the design. Generally, the vortograph showed Pound the way to the belief that a photographic composition could be an arrangement of ‘shapes on a surface’ and of ‘the peculiar varieties in lightness and darkness which belong to the technique of the camera’. More to the point, vortography established that ‘camera art’ that registers the realities of the everyday world, which in their natural existence are highly indeterminate, could be so transformed by the vortographer that they could become part of a meaningful, harmonious arrangement. Vortography proved, in sum, that the vortographer could create – not passively reproduce, but actively

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create – an aesthetically satisfying and meaningful form whose pretext derives from real-world elements but whose artistic character builds on the medium’s intrinsic characteristics (insofar as they are an arrangement of ‘shapes on a surface’ and of ‘the peculiar varieties in lightness and darkness’). These ideas, surely, could be extended to the cinema (but if extended to the cinema, would show that the real-world pretexts for the image would be not the elements but the dynamic incidents or transient events of the quotidian realm). As we have seen, Pound claimed to have been involved in the invention of the vortoscope. His interest in the device was reawakened by a chance encounter. Sometime in the summer or fall of 1923, Pound wrote to his parents, noting that ‘Dudley Murphy, whom I met in venice in 1908, he being then eleven; turned up a few days ago . . . he is trying to make cinema into art.’12 For Murphy, making film an art depended on organising cinematic figures of movement so they accord with familiar musical principles. Some time later, in November, he reported on the progress of a film project, ‘I have practically completed the film with Ezra Pound and it looks quite interesting . . . it is quite abstract – no people – only interesting forms’.13 The project that Murphy and Pound (probably along with Man Ray and, possibly, the composer George Antheil) were working on together was a Vorticist project. On 29 January 1924, Pound wrote to his parents again, expressing doubts about what would become of the project: ‘also, work on vorticism film – experiment interesting – but probably Murphy hasn’t brains enough to finish the job in my absence or without pushing’ (L/HP 522). It seems the project ran into difficulties that were partly financial, but almost certainly also partly formal and conceptual. Ezra Pound and Fernand Léger were close friends: early in 1921 Pound had moved into a flat a few doors from Léger’s and each exerted an influence on the other’s ideas about Machine Art.14 Pound suggested to Murphy that Léger might be willing to fund the project (and Natalie Barney might underwrite Antheil’s score). Murphy provides this account: One day, when I was visiting Ezra Pound and talking about my work, he told me that a friend of his, Ferdinand [sic] Léger, wanted to make a movie. Also George Anteil [sic], the young protégé of Stravinsky would like to make a movie. So he brought the three of us together and we decided to make one. I had met an attractive American divorcee who had a beautiful house in Paris and who was intrigued with me, Gladys Barbour. I told her of my plans and she lent me the money to buy a movie camera.15 Pound wrote to his parents again two months later (September 1923), saying, ‘We [that is, Pound and George Antheil] have a new Léger “projet” waiting to be framed’ (L/HP 519). Léger not only agreed to help finance the film, but became involved in the filmmaking (which involvement, I believe, was substantial and, in the end, decided the final shape of the film). The outcome was Ballet mécanique, which incorporated many vortographic effects that began with Pound’s work with Murphy (and Man Ray).16 Léger’s The Little Review article on Ballet mécanique acknowledges ‘an important contribution due to a technical novelty of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Ezra Pound – the multiple transformation of the projected image’ (Léger 1924–5: 43) (Figures 6.1–6.4).

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Figure 6.1 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Vortograph of Ezra Pound, 1917. Gelatine silver print. Courtesy of George Eastman Museum.

Figure 6.2 Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Ballet mécanique, 1923–4. Film still. Public domain.

Figure 6.3 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Vortograph of Ezra Pound, 1917. Gelatine silver print. Courtesy of George Eastman Museum.

Figure 6.4 Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Ballet mécanique, 1923–4. Film still. Public domain.

Pound’s Fourth Statement on Film, Photography and Machine Art: The Slowly Evolving Idea that Machines’ Beauty Relates to Their Function Let us consider the third factor Pound once had believed prevented the cinema from becoming an art, namely, that figures of movement in cinema, because they draw on quotidian processes and random events, lack strict temporal organisation and, accordingly, purpose – they are merely devices for inducing strong (albeit disorganised) sensations. Pound’s change of mind on this matter had momentous consequences for his art. What would be required to overcome this final objection? Evidently, the most direct

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refutation of that claim would be a demonstration that figures of movement garnered from everyday life can be composed into truly harmonious relations. An inkling of the affordance that would yield such a proof occurred to Pound as early as 1915 when he affirmed that a ‘feeling for . . . machines’ is ‘one of the age-tendencies, springing up naturally in many places and coming into the arts quite spontaneously in England, in America, and in Italy. We all know a small boy’s delight in machines’ (G-B 116). But it wasn’t until 1931 that he worked out the implications of that affordance, in a postscript to a letter to Samuel Putnam (editor of The New Review 1927–33). When Fernand Léger and Co., years since, tried to make ‘ideal machines’, three dimensional compositions of machine forms that wd. simply look pretty and do no work, they found they cd. not come up to the plastic excellence of the actual machines. [From looking at photographs of machinery] I conclude: 1st. The plastic beauty of machinery reaches its maximum in the mobile parts and in the parts where the maximum power is concentrated. (Vorticism, confirmation of 1914 manifestos.) Much lower plastic standard in the immobile parts or casings etc., where the form is arbitrary and not imposed by the necessities and efficiencies of the machine. (Where it is a mere case of the ‘taste’ or half educated or uneducated form sense of the designers, mechanical aesthetes, etc.) (EPVA 215–17) These ideas coincide remarkably with the Purist ideals that Fernand Léger held in the early 1920s. The Purists saw themselves as successors to the Cubists; the movement was launched when, in 1918, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887–1965, who went under the name Le Corbusier) published Après le cubisme. The accumulation of fragmentary percepts in a Cubist painting highlighted the anxiety-ridden spirit of the time; yet, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier declared, the Cubists had not realised that they were creating a troubled art for a troubled time. The Purists aspired to create a more positive, harmonious art that would lead the world to an epoch of order that would embody an ésprit nouveau. They were for an uplifting art, one that would produce joy by satisfying our craving for order. The aesthetic values they acknowledged had, as they recognised, classical foundations. They strove to bring forth an art in which clarity and objectivity would be of the essence. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier advocated an art whose beauty would derive from functional efficiency and precision, an art that would engage the intellect. The Purists insisted that everything should be made with precision and adapted through number and measure to traditional canons of harmony and beauty that relate ultimately to the human body and the senses. The Purists’ theory of perception was rooted in their ideas about evolutionary selection. Purism held that the order of the human body is the basis for our ideal of beauty and its makeup is the pattern for which humans seek. The nature and structure of our bodily organs – and, hence, their form – have resulted from their adaptation to functional requirements. As our organs evolved towards ever greater economy of form and function, common features emerged. These make up what can be considered a stock of fixed features. These forms have been perfected by their adaptation to constant human needs and human desires and brought to an ideal state through the economy of desire and function. The Purists maintained

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that these forms constitute ideals (which they referred to as objets types) and that our notion of beauty is founded on these ideals. Machines have undergone a similar evolutionary process and, because they fulfil a function (and are therefore subject to adaptive selection), they, too, are beautiful. (Pound’s comment about Léger’s effort to make ‘ideal machines’ that do no work and his coming to the realisation that ‘they cd. not come up to the plastic excellence of the actual machines’ suggest the influence Purism had on him in the period following the Great War.) The notion had a long gestation. For example, his 1915 ‘Affirmations’ piece on Vorticism shows that Pound’s embrace of the practices that descended from Salon Cubism reconciled him to machine/cinematic temporality.17 It begins by disavowing the modernist conception of the autotelicity of an artwork: We do not enjoy an arrangement of ‘forms and colours’ because it is a thing isolated in nature. Nothing is isolated in nature. This organization of form and colour is ‘expression’; just as a musical arrangement of notes by Mozart is expression. The vorticist is expressing his complex consciousness. (EPVA 8) This dismissal of the autotelicity of the artwork, a statement of a new conviction about the ontology of a work of art that Pound had adopted, is, as we shall see, grounded in a revised understanding of the relation between consciousness and the artwork that raises questions concerning the statement above: just whose (or what) consciousness is referred to? The note continues with remarks about accelerated perception whose positive character results from the influence of evolutionary adaptation exerted on him. One is more alive for having these swift-passing, departmentalised interests in the flow of life about one. It is by swift apperceptions of this sort that one differentiates oneself from the brute world. To be civilised is to have swift apperception of the complicated life of today; it is to have a subtle and instantaneous perception of it, such as savages and wild animals have of the necessities and dangers of the forest. It is to be no less alive and vital than the savage. It is a different kind of aliveness. And vorticism, especially that part of vorticism having to do with form – to wit vorticist painting and sculpture – has brought me to a new series of apperceptions. It has not brought them solely to me. I have my new and swift perceptions of forms, of possible form-motifs; I have a double or treble or tenfold set of stimuli in going from my home to Piccadilly. (EPVA 9; emphases mine) Thus, Pound states ideas about evolution in the arts, claiming that such adaptation had fitted the senses to experience a stream of sensations rushing by. The Purists would soon (1918) develop similar ideas, and Pound would embrace their elaboration of the evolutionary ideas. Doing so would help him work out the long-gestating idea that in Machine Art, form relates to purpose, and that the absence of function depletes a work of art. What eventually reconciled Pound unconditionally to film, then, was the belief that one ‘is more alive for having these swift-passing, departmentalised interests in the flow of life about one’. His evolutionary claim that to be civilised (that is, to be modern) is ‘to have swift apperception of the complicated life of today’ – a claim

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staked by artists as far back as the Impressionists – accords precisely with an evolutionary theme that would soon find a fully elaborated form in Purism, which would stress an ongoing adaptation of the senses; in Pound’s case, it would presently be reinforced by the acquaintance he would develop with Léger’s ideas (a result partly of his friendship with Léger and partly of his involvement in Ballet mécanique). Swiftness, and interest in the flow of life, even in transient and chance encounters (suggested in the comment about going to Piccadilly), are valorised as evolutionary necessities demanded of new art.

Pound’s Fifth Statement on Film, Photography and Machine Art: Embracing the Flow of Life = Embracing the Cinema; or Impersonality In 1928, shortly after his experiences with Ballet mécanique, Pound published an article in The Exile that totally embraces the cinema. He dismisses the American cinema as childish, using a popular film of the era as its type – ‘The American film is The Thief of Bagdad, a bed-time story told for a child of the desert’ – but enthusiastically endorses a Russian and a German film (P&P V: 61).18 However, he was taken with a film he identified as ‘Die Symphonie der Gross Stadt Berlin’, and whose maker’s name he admitted he could not recall: the fact that he could not remember who made the film – he doubtlessly related that inability to the notion that a film is not an artisanal product or the art of an auteur – led him to proclaim that art is healthiest when anonymous. This is a significant shift away from the expression theory implicit in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Homage to Sextus Propertius: when he composed those works, Pound believed that poetic language acquired value by being highly idiosyncratic, highly individuated and highly personal. But the cinema itself, a Machine Art that manifests the spirit of the age, leans towards ambiguity. This impersonal film proved to Pound that film could be art: in the Großstadt Symphony we have at last a film that will take serious artistic criticism: one that is in the movement, and that should flatten out the opposition (to Joyce, to me, to Rodker’s Adolfe) with steam-rolling ease and commodity . . . It would be simple snobism not to accept the cinema, on such terms, as being, on parity with the printed page, L’histoire morale contemporaine, with the national and sociological differences clearly marked. (P&P V: 61)19 Ruttmann’s Berlin is a film of the Alltägliche, the transient, fleeting occasions of the everyday world: it cross-cuts snippets of everyday life in the great metropolis. Accordingly, Pound’s newly conceived conviction that the cinema can be on a parity with the printed page shows he had overcome his criticism that the cinema’s affinity with transient events and chance encounters precludes it from being an art like the other great high arts. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, in a more insistently, completely and artistically satisfying manner than Impressionist art (partly because it actually incorporates dynamic forms), is an elegant and dynamic configuration of lowly, quotidian, fleeting events. Ruttmann’s film creates, from forms drawn from the everyday city, a harmonious

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interplay of geometric designs (similar to those that had been the content of his earlier, purely abstract films). The point of Pound’s using Goncourt’s phrase L’Histoire morale contemporaine is to suggest that the current condition of the Spirit and its concrete manifestation in a space and time (modern Berlin) is connected to the machine, industry and the cinema (a point Pound had made earlier, in his ‘Affirmations’ piece). What is most remarkable about this article by Pound is that it equates Ruttmann’s methods with Joyce’s and his own. The only way I can make sense of this is to take it as asserting that Ruttmann’s montage captures the mind’s response to the everyday, the fleeting, the quotidian. Pound recognises that cinema’s method – its impersonal, mechanical method – is essentially phanopoeia, ‘a casting of images upon the visual imagination’ (LE 25). What Pound understands by impersonality can be grasped through the Bullough strain in generic modernism. A successful artwork maintains an ontological distance from the real of the quotidian experience. It doesn’t address the ‘literal viewer’ (to adopt that term) or manipulate his or her everyday emotions (playing to an audience is the business of amusements): rather, with a successful work of art, a phenomenological shift occurs, as the literal viewer dissolves and is absorbed in contemplation of the relations that obtain in the work itself (constituting the work’s internal relations). When that phenomenological shift occurs, space-and-time as experienced is distanced from the spatiotemporal conditions of quotidian life and one participates in a higher universal life. In the case of cinema, this phenomenological shift is encouraged by the fact that camera is a spectator internal to the work itself, which can easily absorb the spectator, bringing him or her to participate in the film’s dynamic.20 The method of phanopoeia tends to create a form whose ontological status is ambiguous: a syntagm constructed by phanopoeia can be regarded as depicting external events; but it can also be considered a phenomenological record. Experiencing that ambiguity requires drifting off into a certain type of thinking – and the purpose of Imagist poetry was to record the ‘precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective’. The sentences that follow that famous passage are less frequently quoted, though they are just as important for our purpose: ‘The logical end of impressionist art is the cinematograph. The state of mind of the impressionist tends to become cinematographical. Or, to put it another way, the cinematograph does away with the need of a lot of impressionist art’ (G-B 89). Phanopoeia too tends to suggest a mental state of receptivity, which allows the outward to become a thing inward. This sort of receptivity is a key to the composition of the Cantos, and that is what makes it a cinematographic poem, the greatest in the English language.21 Other factors played into Pound’s embrace of the cinematographic method. As early as 1913, Pound had written of a ‘prose tradition’ in poetry: It means constatation of fact. It presents. It does not comment. It is irrefutable, because it does not present a personal predilection for any particular fraction of the truth . . . it does not deal in opinion . . . The presentative method does not attempt to ‘array the ox with trappings’. It does not attempt to give dignity to that which is without dignity, which last is ‘rhetoric’, that is, an attempt to make important the unimportant, to make more important the less important . . . The presentative method is equity . . . It fights for a sane valuation. (P&P I: 181)22

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The notion of fact that Pound moves towards formulating here extends and transforms the ontological ambivalence of the image in Imagism, whose principles Pound embraced in the years 1912 to 1915. In Imagism, the image has a liminal status, between subjectivity and objectivity. But throughout the Imagist period, indeed from as far back as 1904–5, Pound had been thinking about a ‘long poem’, and at the close of his active involvement with Imagism, in fact, in May 1915, he undertook work on this epic. At the outset, his conception of the poetic form still rested on core features of the Imagist/Neoplatonic notion of an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time . . . It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. (LE 4) Still, the work seemed to foreground a central experiencing subject. Between 1919 and 1921, there was a hiatus in the composition of the Cantos – not even Pound’s letters in this period make reference to work on the long poem containing history. It seems that Pound entered a period of confusion and doubt about his method. What is more, it seems that Eliot’s criticism of the Cantos, as being dominated by the presence of a narrator (modelled on Browning’s Sordello), brought Pound to think more deeply on his paratactical method. The shift in the role of the narrator, the decreased use of personal pronouns, the increased reliance on ellipsis, the poem’s extraordinary syntactic compression (laid out well in Bush 1976), and the alteration in ideogrammatic method it relies on all reflect an underlying transformation about which it is difficult to be precise in a short space. Sometime earlier, Pound had laid the groundwork for a method of presentation of images that would transcend the limited self (and, in that sense, be impersonal); he did that with his idea of masks of the self, which implicitly relies on the distinction between the external self and the real self.23 The epiphanies that are so much the stuff of the Cantos are moments when the external self drops away and the whole of what one is identifies with the real self, and the real self identifies with the order of the cosmos. In his earlier years, those of The Spirit of Romance and I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (1911–12), Pound believed that one became a poet of significance by discovering his particular virtù and, through that, a peculiar way of apprehending a personal universe that is characteristic of his true, higher self. This is the view he propounds in The Spirit of Romance. In its ‘Praefatio ad lectorem electum’, he declares, Art is fluid moving above or way over the minds of men. . . . Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all these things, the artist with that which flows. (SR 5–6) The colour of the river and objects reflected in it are the smoke wraiths of the earth; the water itself is the more permanent reality. Another metaphor that Pound uses for

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this reality in the Spirit of Romance is ‘the universe of vital force above us’, which is paired, as positive with negative, yin with yang, with the living universe below us, ‘the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive’ (SR 92). Poetry he conceived of as a means of interpreting one’s having passed through moments of ‘delightful psychic experience’ in which the mind of the poet communicated with the vital energies above us or below us. Pound interpreted great poetry as dealing with those mental states: at this time, he considers the principal divisions of Dante’s Commedia to reflect different mental states, the first canticle conveying the ‘state of man . . . who has lost “the good of intelligence”’ while the third canticle conveys the state of one whose intelligence is attuned to God (SR 128). This remains his idea of poetry through 1917. Subsequent to this, his conception of the relation of intelligence and these higher energies shifts. In the winter of 1914–15, Pound deliberated on Fenollosa’s ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry’. That essay includes the passage: But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs. The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters: they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture. The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession. (CWCMP 45) and A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them. (CWCMP 46) A still thing is like a single cinema frame, a cross-section of action, whose only true existence is in capturing the flow and movement. This is not how Pound originally interpreted the essay – originally, he used it to found his theory of consciousness as metaphoric. He soon became critical of that idea, however. Already in ‘Indiscretions’ (1920) he could write that we have ‘long since passed the stage when “man sees horse” or “farmer sows rice”, can in simply ideographic record be said to display anything remotely resembling our subjectivity’ (PD 3).24 But as much as he came to dispute details of Fenollosa’s essay, he continued to embrace the ideogrammic method as suggesting process, energy, flow. As the famous description of the ideogrammic method in The ABC of Reading (1934) makes clear, he came to understand its particular virtue

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as the constatation of particular, objective realities: a constatation of particulars can reveal the underlying operations of nature. In this period, Pound became interested in energies giving rise to fugitive forms. In ‘Vorticism’ (an earlier work, from 1915), he writes, An organization of forms expresses a confluence of forces. These forces may be the ‘love of God’, the ‘life-force’, emotions, passions, what you will. For example: if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies of the magnet will proceed to organise form. It is only by applying a particular and suitable force that you can bring order and vitality and thence beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as ‘ugly’ as anything under heaven. The design in the magnetised iron filings expresses a confluence of energy. It is not ‘meaningless’ or ‘inexpressive’. (EPVA 7) Many thinkers construed the new, electromagnetic conception of reality as offering a vitalist picture of the universe. Vitalism appealed to many on the grounds on which it appealed to Pound: it suggests a consciousness above the limited viewpoint, a sort of biocosmic Mind that experiences reality impersonally. Biocosmic reality is permeated by an intelligent life-force and the event-objects that constitute its surface reality are like ideas in this mind, organised by a particular and suitable force that brings order and vitality and thence beauty to the myriad particulars it organises. An appreciation of a fundamental ambiguity in event-objects’ ontological status (that characterises The Cantos as much as it does Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) is an implication of achieving a biocosmic viewpoint. Pound’s essay ‘Cavalcanti’ observes that we ‘appear to have lost the radiant world, where one thought cuts through another with a clean edge’; he continues with a vision of a paradisiacal realm, a world of moving energies ‘mezzo oscuro rade’, ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto’, magnetisms that take form, that are seen, that border on the visible, the matter of Dante’s paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in the mirror, these realities perceptible to the sense, interacting, ‘a lui si tiri.’ (LE 154)25 He contrasts this with the world of recent science: For the modern scientist energy has no borders, it is a shapeless ‘mass’ of force; even his capacity to differentiate it to a degree never dreamed of by the ancients has not led him to think of its shape or even its loci. The rose that his magnet makes in the iron filings, does not lead him to think of the force in botanic terms, or wish to visualize that force as floral and extant (ex stare). A medieval ‘natural philosopher’ would find this modern world full of enchantments, not only the light in the electric bulb, but the thought of the current hidden in air and in wire would give him a mind full of forms, ‘Fuor di color’ or having their hyper-colours. The medieval philosopher would probably have been unable to think the electric world, and not think of it as a world of forms. Perhaps algebra has queered our geometry. (LE 154–5)

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In Pound’s later poetry, facts are a phenomenon experienced as though impersonally; yet in being gathered together, they suggest a mind full of forms: gatherings of obdurately crystalline appearances paradoxically reveal the operation of a higher mind. We have seen that Pound suggested art is best when it is anonymous – one might say ‘impersonal’. When film connects with the flow of life and forms itself so that it is able to convey that flux, it draws facts into a ‘constatation’; or, rather, facts are urged into a constatation by a higher mind/energy/magnetism, or by the force of history (when the higher mind attracts facts to – ‘a lui si tiri’ – the dynamic energy that is its first emanation, and whirls them around its still centre): the film’s form reveals that urging. Another way of saying this is that we have an impression, in reading/looking at such work, that ‘we are watching things work out their own fate’. These ever-changing arrangements are the flow of life. Moreover, film reveals this order emanating from ‘the electric world’. Thus, Pound’s article on Symphonie einer Großstadt was written as a ‘theorization’ of the shift in his writing that is evident in Cantos XIV, XV, and XVI, which appeared in 1925, in the Three Mountains Press edition of Draft of XVI Cantos. (Thus, it was some years before Pound formulated the theoretical justification for practices he had already employed in The Cantos and acknowledged the cinematic character.) Cantos XIV and XV (called ‘The Hell Cantos’), which draw on the Commedia’s first cantiche, are filled with people whose sterile, uncreative being has made them corrupt and vicious: its images include people surrounded by faecal matter and water slugs with ‘faces smeared on their rumps’, with limp penises and condoms ‘full of blackbeetles’ and being led through oozing, foetid mud, then washed with acid. Canto XVI recalls the Commedia’s second canticle. This Purgatorio canto exemplifies the new, cinematic qualities Pound’s writing took on: it hovers between dream and reality (as the cinema so often does), as it presents the protagonist/Pound falling asleep in grass and hearing voices – think of them as thoughts carried on electromagnetic signals: these voices speak of the horrors of war in very graphic (factual) terms, all of them seemingly accurate transcriptions of Pound’s friends’ and acquaintances’ descriptions of war as the highest form of sabotage.26 These descriptions, moreover, are expressed in a vibrant, colloquial vocabulary (the poem includes a remarkable account, in a colloquial French, by Léger of his war experiences), and some of the phrases used are downright vulgar (as the blunt sailor’s English ‘Gees! Look a’the Kept’n, / The Kept’n’s a-getting’ ’er up’). Others produce a convincing effect of English spoken by people of different classes and ethnic origins: this presentation of different voices renders all impersonal: they all appear as fleeting manifestations of higher electromagnetic reality. Melopoeia (poetic constructions that can be ‘appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear’) and logopoeia (poetic form that ‘takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word’) combine with phanopoeia to produce an intensely visual effect (‘How to Read’; LE 25). The poem shows that Pound had found a method to incorporate the flow of life (to be impressionistic) into this nonetheless idealising work (a higher, active consciousness draws all these facts into a harmonious organisation, as the urging of a magnet draws the steel-dust into the shapely form of the rose). Three years later, he connects this interest in the flow of life, idealised, to the cinema: out of forms drawn from the everyday city Ruttmann’s Berlin creates a harmonious interplay of geometric forms.27 What is more, Berlin shows how

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an anonymous force or higher mind can organise facts into a seemly constatation – can achieve what Clive Bell called significant form. Earlier, Pound doubted that connecting with the flow of life could serve an artistic purpose. Canto XVI shows that he had become convinced that a constatation of facts reveals a higher force – a higher urging – at work organising an artwork. The cinema, because of its impersonal machine character, and because its nature is to give facts a luminous form, is well fitted to convey this higher reality at work. Cinematic form became a model for poetry.

Summarising Pound’s Changing Views on the Cinema Let’s summarise the influence of Machine Art on the evolution of Pound’s poetry. Pound’s earliest writings on the Machine Arts concerned photography and film. His earliest writings on film stress the accelerated, mechanical character of cinematic time: they characterise the experience of watching a film as shaped by relentless pressure to move forward through time. Photography is poor art because it puts in everything, or nearly everything: if it eliminates details, it does so impartially, by a general blur. But art depends on selection and emphasis in order to bear long scrutiny. Moreover, both film and photography have a proclivity for mimeticism, and a theme of Pound’s art theory – one which he continued to expound into the Vorticist period – is the modernist principle that mimetic features are aesthetically irrelevant, and perhaps deleterious: I cited above Pound’s comment, A painting is an arrangement of colour patches on a canvas, or on some other substance. It is a good or bad painting according as its patches are well or ill arranged. After that it can be whatever it likes. It can represent the Blessed Virgin, or Jack Johnston, or it need not represent at all. (EPVA 6) It is the creative power of the artist that matters, and that power even allows a strong artist to dispense with external subjects altogether, to create from himself or his elements. ‘The satisfactions of art differ from the satisfactions of life as the satisfactions of seeing differ from the satisfactions of hearing’, Pound notes in Gaudier-Brzeska. ‘The result of the attempt to mix art and life is, naturally, a muddle. There is downright bad art where the satisfactions offered or suggested are solely the satisfactions of life’ (G-B 97–8). The vortoscope helped change Pound’s mind on these matters: the machine, he discovered, could transform any elements to bring them into accord with principles of form. Thus, this machine (the vortoscope) showed Pound the way to the belief that a photographic composition could be an arrangement of shapes on a surface – a harmonious arrangement built on the medium’s intrinsic characteristics. Real-world elements could be incorporated into that harmonious organisation. While, earlier, Pound had maintained that the ‘result of the attempt to mix art and life is, naturally, a muddle’ he now maintained that the elements drawn from a real-world pretext by an operation that makes use of the camera, elements that may include features that are highly mimetic (though they do not necessarily have such features), can be incorporated into an artistic composition provided that they are transformed – that they are dialectically

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negated and sublated.28 In Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound offers remarks that suggest where this new direction would lead: ‘Nature contains the elements.’ It is to be noted that one is not forbidden any element, any key because it is geological rather than vegetable, or because it belongs to the realm of magnetic currents or to the binding properties of steel girders and not to the flopping of grass or the contours of the parochial churchyard. ‘The artist is born to pick and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful as the musician gathers his notes and forms his chords.’ There, again, is a basis. One uses form as a musician uses sound. One does not imitate the wood dove, or at least one does not confine oneself to the imitation of wood-doves, one combines and arranges one’s sound or one’s forms into Bach fugues or into arrangements of colour, or into ‘planes in relation’ . . . These new men have made me see form, have made me more conscious of the appearance of the sky where it juts down between houses, of the bright pattern of sunlight which the bath water throws up on the ceiling, of the great ‘V’s’ of light that dart through the chinks over the curtain rings, all these are new chords, new keys of design . . . All this is new life, it gives a new aroma, a new keenness for keeping awake. The swirls in the film on my morning coffee I had watched for some years. They make Whistlerian butterflies, they are in a known key, experimenté. This new awakening to form may be a purely personal matter. (G-B 125–6)29 Later, in 1928, Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt made Pound aware that transient events and chance encounters can take their place in a work – not transient events suitably transformed, but simply appropriately arranged (he has come to understand that art in the age of the cinema must rely on constatation). The cinema/Machine Art also induces Pound to consider what forces shape this fitting constellation/constatation. Ruttmann’s film, and more generally Machine Art, had helped convince him it is impersonal.

Pound Embraces the Cinema II: Pound’s Cinematic Poetry Influences Other Poets and Filmmakers Pound’s cinematic method became influential among modernist poets. Among them, Zukofsky was singularly aware of montage’s cinematic character.30 Zukofsky notes that Pound wrote in Exile: That ‘perhaps art is healthiest when anonymous . . . in the Grosstadt Symphony we have at last a film that will take serious aesthetic criticism: one that is in the movement, and that should flatten out the opposition (to Joyce, to [Pound], to Rodker’s Adolphe) with steam-rolling ease and commodity, not of course that the authors intended it’. (Zukofsky 2000: 70, quoting P&P V: 61) To which Zukofsky immediately appends these remarks: And has implied that Sovkino’s The End of St Petersburg had an inertia of mass power behind it impossible of attainment in a single Chekov.

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Pound anticipated The End of St Petersburg as poetry some years before the production of the film.31 Immediately thereafter Zukofsky quotes a long passage from the very cinematic Canto XVI (lines 222–51), and then remarks, ‘Good humour which is not ashamed to set down fact, has also to do with Pound’s transcriptions of the spoken tongue – his colloquial spelling, and with his exploring music’ (Zukofsky 2000: 71). Pound’s method of setting down facts – sometimes seemingly carried on airwaves, as those of Canto XVI could be – would have a staggering influence on Zukofsky (this passage can be construed as his acknowledgement of that influence), as well as on Reznikoff, Bunting, Oppen, Rakosi, Niedecker and Rexroth, and from thence, on the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. In 1939, William Carlos Williams would declare, The truth is that news offers the precise incentive to epic poetry, the poetry of events; and now is precisely the time for it since never by any chance is the character of a single fact ever truthfully represented today. If ever we are to have any understanding of what is going on about us we shall need some other means of discovering it. The epic poem would be our ‘newspaper’. . . . The epic if you please is what we’re after, but not the lyric-epic sing-song. It must be a concise sharpshooting epic style. Machine gun style. Facts, facts, facts, tearing into us to blast away our stinking flesh of news. Bullets.32 Facts, facts, facts, tearing into us machine-gun style: is that not the montage style of October: Ten Days that Shook the World? Or of Canto XVI (1925)? The poet, painter and essayist Kenneth Rexroth remarks perceptively about this paratactical/montage style of Pound, Eliot and James Joyce (understandably, he doesn’t mention Rodker): It is common to trace this method to French poets after Baudelaire, to so-called Cubist poetry. There is a fundamental difference. Cubist poetry, say that of Pierre Reverdy, is like Cubist painting. There is one subject, a still life, the Pont Neuf, a girl with a guitar. The elements of that subject are broken up and dissociated both in space and time and recombined in a new, more esthetically powerful whole, but with the same subject. [This sort of artistic practice is what Pound extolled in his writings on Vorticism.] Pound, Eliot, Joyce in Finnegans Wake did something very different. The subject is vague, ill-defined, grandiose, and appears as an after image of the collage of a wide variety of fragmentary subjects . . . The dissociated verbs and nouns, adjectives, and adverbs of Pierre Reverdy, Gertrude Stein, or Walter Arensberg are formed into new meanings. The collages of whole sentences and paragraphs of The Waste Land and the Cantos go to form new significances. . . . The Cantos and The Waste Land are put together like a collage still life by Juan Gris, but in which the cuttings from newspapers, playbills, theatre tickets, and sheet music are meant to be read. Again, the method is cinematographic but much more advanced. The analog is later ‘ideological montage’ of Sergei Eisenstein, in Potemkin and Oktober. As the years went by Eisenstein and Pound were mutually

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to influence one another. Although Eisenstein never dared to admit such an influence, he makes it obvious in an essay on Far Eastern poetry and the cinema which derives directly from Pound. (Rexroth 1971: 61–3)33 The analysis of reality into simple units and their re-synthesis in an artwork to create a parallel to the process of forming experience, as in the Cantos or the films of Sergei Eisenstein, became a greatly valued method in the high modernist era, and virtually defined an international style of the vanguard. The rise to dominance of ‘montage poetry’ was partly due to the influence of film; or rather, it was due to the mentalité that the cinema created. Rexroth identifies the goal of the analysis and re-synthesis involved in this mode of construction: ‘Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself (Rexroth 1980).’ But Pound’s poetry, by imitating mental syntax, became a model for Stan Brakhage’s cinema and that of lyrical filmmakers of the 1960s. For years, Pound was Brakhage’s great tutor. The appearance of Brakhage’s lyrical films Anticipation of Night (1958) and Window Water Baby Moving (1959) transformed the language of the cinema overnight, reshaping it into a form that owed almost everything to some of the more lyrical passages in Pound’s Cantos. The appearance of Dog Star Man (a prelude and four parts; one section appeared yearly between 1961 and 1963, and the last two parts appeared in 1964) consolidated the influence of Cantos on the art cinema: for some years, it was the most imitated work in the canon of experimental films and established the prevailing notion of an avant-garde film. The appearance of the even more Poundian Songs (the title is an homage to the Cantos), a series of thirty-one 8mm films which appeared between 1964 and 1969, ensured the continuing dominance of the Poundian mode in experimental film into the early 1970s. And it continues to exert influence on many of the most interesting vanguard filmmakers. Around 1973, Hollis Frampton embarked on a long film cycle, Magellan (when Frampton first showed me a computer printout of his plan for the work, it was titled SOLARIUMAGELANI, which became the title of one section of the work). Magellan confirmed what Frampton’s films, writings and (especially) his letters from the 1960s on had been testifying to, namely, that Pound’s Cantos, his ideas on language and his art theory were key influences on Frampton. This utopian project had encyclopaedic ambitions: it was to constitute a survey of all possible forms of knowledge, the transcendental conditions of which were disclosed by an exhaustive analysis of the full range of the cinema’s syntactic possibilities; that is, it was to be a taxonomic ‘circumnavigation’ of the relations between the cinematic syntaxes and possible forms of understanding. Magellan has been admired and written about by filmmakers and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets alike.

Notes 1. Pound was not alone in this. Virginia Woolf, in ‘The Movie Novel’, an article in the Times Literary Supplement, makes remarkably similar comments (Woolf 1966: 290– 1). Laura Marcus provides an excellent account of the evolution of Woolf’s views on cinema (2007: 99–178). But another example, that of the poet and filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier, is more relevant to the evolution of Pound’s views on the cinema. L’Herbier’s article ‘Hermès et le silence’ opens by stating that cinema is a ‘machine à imprimer la vie’ (1918: 7). It offers seemingly compelling versions of the standard arguments of

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the time that the cinema was destroying Art: it is a vulgar, commercial, too-democratic medium that mechanically presents trivial truths about chance ephemera rather than spiritually enhancing beautiful lies that follow strict principles and are the personal expressions of genius. These were exactly the views Pound offered that same year. But then, while acknowledging that the cinema will destroy Art, the piece takes a sudden turn towards valorising its mechanical anonymity, its capacity to connect viewers to the flow of life, and cinégraphie’s potential as a universal language. Herbier celebrates its artisans: cinema triumphs as an expression of a natura naturans or, rather, the natura naturans becomes mechanical. This turn foreshadows the course of development of Pound’s views on the cinema. This speed-up of life and the piling of images on top of one another are suggested in Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographes, made between 1882 and 1904, the very period we are commenting on. Note the implication that the cinema is more like a mould that takes its form from its model than a sculpture carved in marble. Bell is among the canonical modernists, and I shall use his writing as the basis for my commentary on the modernists’ view of the nature of aesthetic experience. Unlike Lewis’s, Pound’s conception of the vortex was rooted in physical theories of energy and Maxwell’s theories of electromagnetism (mediated by Helmholtz); on this see Pfannkuchen (2005: 61–78). I make this point here, because in Elder (2018), I also trace the trajectory of Ezra Pound’s theories of energy and the influence that the emerging paradigm of electrotechnics had on his writing. The cinema, in this era, was understood to be an art akin to X-rays, and connected to electromagnetism. This was an addition Pound made in 1962 to ‘Patria Mia’ to clarify a sarcastic reference to ‘slicer’ poets he had made while bewailing the state of the arts and humanities in his fatherland. I do not want to suggest that the cinema and Machine Art were solely responsible for Pound’s development of The Cantos’ paratactical (montage) form. Such a reductive account would be absurd: obviously, the development was influenced by a wide range of factors. But I do think Pound’s efforts to come to terms with the cinema and Machine Art in general had a very significant role which has hardly been appreciated. This piece originally appeared four years before The New Age ‘Art Notes’ article. The same month that Pound’s piece on La Roue appeared, the music and art critic Émile Vuillermoz published the first instalment of a two-part review in Cinémagazine (23 February 1923, 2 March 1923), pp. 363–5. Vuillermoz made almost identical points to Pound’s: in the cinema, everything rushes; commerce and the producer undercut any value a work might have. Just as Pound deemed the ‘drammer’ to be responsible for the work’s undoing, Vuillermoz identified a poor story as the culprit. Like Pound, Vuillermoz found the cinematography the work’s strong point: ‘He [the director, Abel Gance] has learned how to analyze the hallucinatory beauty of speed, the drunken frenzy of the wheel’ [sic] intelligent labour, the steel rods and gear wheels, the great stirring voice of the organisms made of sheet iron, copper and steel. His “Song of the Wheel” and “Song of the Rails” are visual scores of unforgettable beauty and power. The man who has learned how to gather up such thrilling songs out of mere matter is indeed a great poet’ (Abel 1988: 278). Where La Roue had reinforced Pound’s belief that the cinema could not, ‘very probably’, be art, its pictorial beauty reinforced Vuillermoz’s conviction that the cinema would become a great high art: the cinema was confronted with choosing between the money-maker’s interests, which would consign the medium to vulgar mediocrity, and the elite’s interests, which would carry the cinema towards poetry. But note Vuillermoz’s point: the cinema gathers up thrilling song out of mere matter. Pound came to celebrate that ability, as he came to understand that such a gathering is the work of an inspired, impersonal machine operation. Take note of the allusion to an evolutionary process.

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11. Standish Lawder reports that Pound later wrote to Alfred Stieglitz: ‘Coburn I haven’t seen since we rigged up the vortoscope with my old shaving mirror – hence ultimately the Ballet Mechaniques [sic], Antheil’s, Léger’s, Murphy’s try’ (Lawder 1975: 265–7). 12. The letter, in the Beinecke collection at Yale, is undated, though an archivist has added an inaccurate note to the effect that the letter was written in October 1924. Judi Freeman gives July 1923 as the date (Kuenzli 1987: 31). Moody (L/HP 520) gives October 1923. That is possible, though weighing against the claim is another letter from 16 November 1923, in which Murphy claims that he and Pound have practically finished the Vorticist film they were working on. While it is possible, it seems to me unlikely that between late October and 16 November 1923 Pound and Murphy would have met, got to know each other well enough to agree to work on a film project together, planned the project, and carried it to near completion. (In fairness, one should acknowledge that much later, in ‘Machine Art’ [1927/1930], Pound suggested they took ‘a few metres of interesting and highly unsatisfactory film’ (EPMA 76), which could be taken as lending credibility to claims for such an abbreviated time span. Counting against that (at least somewhat) are Pound’s comments, in a letter from 29 January 1924 (L/HP 522), that in November and December he had occupied himself, among other activities, with work on the Vorticist film. This suggests that project consumed more than a day’s or a few days’ work. It should also be pointed out that Pound seems to have been inclined to slight his part in the project, which he and the other collaborators on Ballet mécanique rejected as unsatisfactory – though he also notes Léger, Dudley Murphy and, notably, Man Ray, whose execution of the idea he extols as ‘infinitely better’ – to the point, even of misrepresenting the period when he worked on his Vorticist film, as ‘1920 or 21’.) Another fact about Murphy and Pound’s collaboration bears comment. Man Ray suggests that he and Dudley Murphy initiated the project that became Ballet mécanique, that Léger got involved only when they ran out of money, and that Pound’s role was exclusively introducing Murphy and George Antheil, the composer of the score for the film, to the painter. But a letter that Murphy wrote to his father in November 1923 testifies that, at that point, Pound was paying the costs of the Vorticist film (Dudley Murphy to Hermann Dudley Murphy, 19 November 1923; cited in Freeman 1987: 43n.13). All this argues for Pound’s having a larger role in the film than he is usually credited with. Murphy’s beliefs about the value of having a richly significant correspondence between a film’s visual dynamics and the dynamics of an existing piece of music reflect an important strain in modernist art theory, namely, that all the arts aspire to the condition of music. But there is also a more specific influence: no matter how conservative Dudley Murphy’s own films are, one can detect in his comments on Ballet mécanique the influence of the Purist and Orphic strains of Cubism, with their interest in harmonic form (for music has always been understood as the exemplary harmonic art). 13. Dudley Murphy to Carlene Murphy Samoileff, 16 November 1923, quoted in Freeman ([1987] 1996: 33). It is worth noting whom Murphy identified as the project’s moving force. 14. Léger expressed his gratitude for Pound’s role in helping extend his ideas on Machine Art by dedicating his article ‘Aesthetics of the Machine’ (published in The Little Review in 1923) to the poet and art theorist. 15. Dudley Murphy, ‘Murphy by Murphy’, unpublished manuscript, quoted in Freeman (1987: 31). Note the discrepancy between Man Ray’s and Murphy’s accounts of the film’s origins. 16. The history of this film is extraordinary. It is my belief that Ballet mécanique blended several projects, one of which was Pound and Murphy’s Vorticist film. The second half of the second chapter of my recent book Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect (Elder 2018) is devoted to Ballet mécanique; there I attempt to sort out the different personalities and projects that went into the making of that work.

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17. Undoubtedly Wyndham Lewis was an influence on Pound’s ideas at this time, especially his interest (derived from Roger Fry) in the artwork as a composition and channeller of energy. Lewis believed that artwork, a machine and the human body all use arrangement to harness energy to a purpose. The life of art, Lewis proclaimed, ‘is no EQUIVALENT for Life, but ANOTHER Life, as NECESSARY to existence’ (B1 130) – which, as I go on to suggest, came to play an increasing role in his poetics (and helps explain his growing openness to the cinema). However, there are also sharp divergences between Pound’s art theory and Lewis’s, even at this time, and would become more obvious as time passed. Lewis was striving towards giving utterly mundane realities – and even ugliness – a place in a work of art and allowing a quantity of ugliness to enter a composition. He was, in fact, deeply committed to attacking the very concept of harmonious form (‘Even if painting remain intact, it will be much more supple and extended, containing all the elements of discord and “ugliness” consequent on the attack against traditional harmony’; B1 142.) Furthermore in BLAST, Lewis expressed extreme distaste for Kandinsky’s spirituality (to which, of course, Pound, with his interest in such Neoplatonist ideas as to kalon (physical, artistic or moral beauty), splendour, hypostasis and the noûs, Neoplatonic interests that had been evident since A Lume Spento (1908) and Canzoni (1911), was somewhat more open). BLAST 1 includes as well Edward Wadsworth’s translation of excerpts from Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst, which offers a new theory of harmony (dynamic equilibrium). Kandinsky argues, in effect, that this new form of synthesis can accommodate disorder because it is capable of contrapuntally resolving concord and discord: the principles of concord and discord in all the aforesaid parts, that is, the juxtaposition of the single forms, the interpenetration of one form with another, the distortion, the binding and tearing apart of the individual forms, the combination of the mysterious with the definite, the rhythmic and the non-rhythmic on the same plane, the abstract forms with the purely geometrical (simple or complicated) and the less definitely geometrical, the same treatment of the combination of the boundary lines of the forms from one another (heavy or light), and so on – all these are the elements which create the possibility of a purely aesthetic counterpoint (B1 124). Pound went some distance in agreeing that the new art must admit anything from the real: his criticism in the years 1914–15 was sometimes quite forward-looking in that regard: ‘you will never awaken a general or popular art sense so long as you rely solely on the pretty . . . Our respect is not for subject-matter, but for the creative power of the artist . . . in Rodin’s “La Vieille Heaulmière,” the “beauty” of the work depends in no appreciable degree on the subject, which is “hideous”’ (G-B 97–8); and, in bringing Gaudier-Brzeska to a conclusion, he proclaims that the artist cannot be ‘forbidden any element’ (G-B 125). But Pound’s views on the matter were much more conflicted. In his own poetry, right up to 1919, the effort to incorporate ugliness into a work and to subvert harmony was relegated to the satires of Ripostes (1912) and Lustra (1916, 1917), and Pound was forthright in declaring these works to be minor works – he deemed most of them sketches, and sketches, he averred, were not significant art. (Thus, in considering the development of Pound’s art from the pre-Vorticist days, through the Vorticist period and up to the composition of Cantos XIV, XV and XVI, one must consider the question of what led Pound to the point where he could elaborate forms that incorporate raw ‘ugliness’. This development occurred sometime after Vorticism; in fact, it did not occur until 1923, exactly at the same time as Pound was involved in making Ballet mécanique. I believe the lessons Pound learned from the cinema, Machine Art and electrotechnics contributed significantly to this development.) Furthermore, Pound’s writing on the visual arts suggests he still felt a degree of allegiance to the generic modernist principle (think of the statements of Bell and Kandinsky on the topic, or those of Bullough, the thinker whose ideas most resemble Pound’s) that all artistic form is analogous to music, a belief Lewis explicitly rejected. As I pointed out above, Pound praises Vorticism for reawakening a

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20. 21.

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r. bruce elder sense of form, epitomised in the pleasure that may be taken in music, but had withered in Occidental artistic circles. Further, though Pound at this time followed Lewis in accusing Futurism of being impressionistic and scientific (G-B 89), this belief hardly seemed deep-seated or long-lasting: his work with Léger would open him to Futurist ideas on electromagnetism, energy and machines, including the cinematograph, which Lewis despised. (Léger’s artistic principles were extraordinarily catholic, incorporating ideas from Impressionism, Analytical Cubism, Section d’or, Salon Cubism, Purism, Orphism, Synthetic Cubism, Dada and Futurism.) In writing this, I do not wish to deny that Lewis was an important influence on Pound, in the BLAST years or after. However, I do want to assert that Pound’s ideas on energy, magnetism, dynamism, composition, vitality and the place of the mundane in an artistic composition were overdetermined – and the cinematograph was exerting a determinative (and hitherto unexplored) influence. Most classical film theorists – the ones who argued that there is a significant enough difference between the world we view on the cinema screen and world as it is experienced by the senses to permit the cinema to become art – chose Russian and German films to make their case. Pound’s choice of Thief of Bagdad (sic) as the ‘bad object’ might have been the result of the extraordinarily talented poet, dancer and early commentator on photography, Sadakichi Hartmann, having played the part of Ahmad’s Court Magician in the film. Pound may have felt that Hartmann had been reduced and humiliated by that involvement. Actually, the title of the film is Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) and its maker is Walter Ruttmann, who until that point had made abstract, musical films. Elsewhere, Pound translates Goncourt’s phrase ‘L’histoire morale contemporaine’ from his preface to Germinie Lacerteux (which Pound took as an exemplary brief on behalf of realism) as ‘the history of contemporary ethics-in-action’, and applies it to the realism of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (P/J 140). But ‘contemporary ethicsin-action’ doesn’t seem quite right in this context. Perhaps ‘contemporary ethos-in-action’ is somewhat closer, and that is how I have construed it. The Rodker referred to is John Rodker, a Symbolist/Expressionist writer and a publisher who brought out works by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Henri GaudierBrzeska, Edward Wadsworth and Roald Kristian through his Ovid Press. Adolphe 1920 is a stream-of-consciousness novella written by Rodker. His ‘Hymn of Hymns’ is an example of art’s incorporating the lowly, the base, the abject; the influence of Rodker’s writing on The Cantos says a great deal about Pound’s coming to accept what most theorists (including Kracauer) conceive of as one of the cinema’s principal attributes. It probably speaks, too, to the influence of cinema on Pound’s writing. Perhaps the image as a sort of impersonally self-regarding visual form (it has an objective pretext, yet fuses subjectivity and objectivity) is a precursor to camera-viewed film-shot. In fact, Pound wrote to Joyce, ‘I have begun an endless poem, of no known category. Phanopœia or something or other, all about everything . . . I wonder what you will make of it. Probably too sprawling and unmusical to find favour in your ears. Will try and get some melody into it later on’ (April 1917; P/J 102). That should make clear that at its inception, Pound understood that The Cantos was not primarily a piece of melopoeia. Eva Hesse suggests that Pound used ‘Phanopœia’ in this statement as the title of the ‘long poem containing history’. See Bloom (1987: 39). Ronald Bush’s The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos offers detailed commentary on the evolution of the poem. Chapter 5, ‘Stages of Revision 183–263’, presents acutely the serial revisions the conception of the Cantos underwent between 1915 and 1925. My brief remarks put a somewhat different emphasis on particular events.

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23. In October 1906, Pound writes a letter to Viola Baxter Jordan in which he makes a reference to that part of him ‘which is most real, most removed from the transient personality, (Persona, a mask), most nearly related to the things which [are] more permanent than this smoke wraith the earth’ (Pound [1905] 1972: 109). 24. Pound is alluding to a passage in CWCMP 44. Because it is germane to the discussion that follows, it is worth pointing out that while Fenollosa does state (as Pound indicates) that character stands for a ‘mental horse-picture’, the point that he is making here involves an ontological ambiguity (or an effort to overcome the dualism of Western thought): he goes on to say that the succession of images in thought called up by the ideogram has a strict analogy to the operations of nature. In combining a temporal with spatial aspect, it is ‘more objective’ than either painting or sound art (CWCMP 45). And, more to the point, ‘In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate’ (CWCMP 45). Or, to put it otherwise, these event-things are casting moving images on the mind-screen. 25. Pound alludes to Guido Cavalcanti’s philosophic canzone. The passages cited here are all translated in Canto 36: ‘mezzo oscura [luce] rade’ – ‘in the middle of darkness, light shines infrequently’; ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto’ – ‘shines in itself, a Perpetual Effect’; ‘a lui si tiri’ – ‘draws to itself’. 26. Similar ambiguities arise in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Pound’s Cantos. The former is routinely described as a stream-of-consciousness work. But whose consciousness does it present? There are issues regarding Joyce’s logopoeia similar to those regarding Pound’s in the Cantos, namely, what relations do the abstract/linguistic forms have to the work’s documentary/objective character? 27. Ironically, media historians have connected German independent filmmakers’ turn from abstract film to forms that made use of documentary images to a matinee screening, mounted by Berlin’s Novembergruppe, on 3 May 1925, at the UFA-Palast. What seemed to have effected the change was the presence in that programme of a film that most came to feel was more truly cinematic than the abstract works that were the principal subject of the screening. That film was Images mobiles, a working title Fernand Léger had given Ballet mécanique. It seems that the German Absolute filmmakers who saw the exhibition understood that their works were not aligned with the nature of the cinematic medium because their forms did not work with and, crucially, extend the attributes of the medium that derive from the photographic apparatus. 28. This, of course, is exactly the position that Sergei Eisenstein expounds in his earlier film theory. This question of how to reconcile forms that derive from a camera and so contain realistic features with the modernist edict that form alone is aesthetically relevant was a key question of classical film theory. The answer that classical film theory generally gave is that the content of shots had to be transformed to separate their appearances from those of their real-world pretexts. 29. Note, these ideas are certainly not consistent with ideas from Gaudier-Brzeska quoted above, concerning the muddle that results from attempting to mix art and life (even though the two sets of remarks were published only weeks apart). The passage from G-B suggests the very effort to incorporate the real in the work threatens the work, while this passage affirms that the real can be incorporated into a composition, provided it is selected by an artistic sensibility and successfully transformed. This is just the sort of inconsistency one discovers when tracing ideas that are in evolution. It also bears comment that Pound’s theoretical ideas sometimes anticipate his practices, and sometimes the practices anticipate, by a longer or shorter interval, theoretical ideas he would formulate. In this case, his ideas about the right of the ideal to enter an artwork presage his enthusiasm for Coburn’s work and the influence Coburn would exert on his poetry. On the other hand, Pound’s radical use of constatation (to use, once again, that Flaubertian term) and related cinematic forms

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r. bruce elder preceded by some years his formulation of a theoretical basis for it, when Ruttmann’s film prompted him to think again about das Alltägliche and its place in work of art. Ronald Bush makes a salient observation on that topic: ‘Out of these observations [that the artist cannot be forbidden “any element”], the Cantos would develop an inclusivity that helped define modern verse. However, as Lewis observed in 1914, there was a “certain discrepancy in between what Pound said . . . and what he did.” . . . 1915’s Three Cantos contained hardly a trace of painting’s new “ugliness.” Shimmering images and a slightly irregular narrative tone set Three Cantos dominant “timbre”’ (1976: 51). The poet, artist, filmmaker and film theorist Oswell Blakeston summarised ‘Mr. Zukofsky’s manifesto on poetry’ (his 1932 aesthetic declaration in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology) in the avant-garde film magazine Close Up: ‘An objective – rays of the object brought to a focus’, ‘An objective – nature as creator – desire for what is objectively perfect’, and notes ‘It was above all the rhetoric of mechanical seeing that landed Zukofsky’s poetic within “the province of the cineaste”’ (Blakeston 1933: 293–4). The End of St Petersburg (Конец Санкт-Петербурга, ‘Konets Sankt-Peterburga’, 1927) is a film on the October Revolution, directed by V. Pudovkin, on the occasion of the event’s tenth anniversary. Zukofsky’s point is that Pound’s montage of factual reports on the revolution anticipated the film’s; he also acknowledges the cinema’s formidable power. Concerning the Russian Revolution itself, that is correct, but I think the method was part of the spirit of the time, a force Pound and Pudovkin were responding to. From an unpublished introduction to Paterson, which can be found under the heading ‘Introduction to Book of David Ruth’ among the poet’s papers at SUNY Buffalo, and is quoted in Weaver (1971: 120). I have quoted very selectively from this very insightful passage. Readers interested in the montage style in Pound’s poetry and its influence on cinema should read that entire passage, as well as the related commentary that begins on p. 100. Rexroth, at one time, carried on an active exchange with Zukofsky and he was associated with Zukofsky’s Objectivist movement. Zukofsky and Rexroth, it seems to me, were virtually unique in intuiting the influence the cinema was exerting on the mentalité of the emerging age of electrotechnics, and Rexroth was unique in understanding the features that distinguish Pound’s montage methods from Cubist fragmentation (faceting) and recombination.

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PART II THE LONDON PERIOD 1908–1920

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7 Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Aestheticism: Sharing ‘Breath for Beauty and the Arts’ with Rossetti and Pater Sara Dunton and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos

Beauty in art reminds one what is worth while. I am not now speaking of shams. I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, not telling people that beauty is the proper and respectable thing. I mean beauty. You don’t argue about an April wind, you feel bucked up when you meet it. You feel bucked up when you come on a swift moving thought in Plato or on a fine line in a statue. Ezra Pound, ‘The Serious Artist’ (1913)

I

t is no small matter that one of the most enduring statements lifted from Pound’s Canto LXXX – ‘Beauty is difficult’ – owes its origins to a late nineteenth-century conversation between a poet and a painter. Writing in 1945 while imprisoned at the Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, Pound retrieves from memory this fragment of William Butler Yeats’s anecdotal account of his conversation with Aubrey Beardsley shortly before the young artist’s death in 1898.1 The discussion of beauty between Yeats and Beardsley epitomises the challenge common to all artists, both literary and visual, who had been repudiating tradition in England and France since the mid-1800s, radicalising ideas about art in an increasingly secular world. The visual artist Beardsley is the more unconventional figure: he created ‘ugly’ drawings of literary and mythological subjects traditionally rendered as ‘beautiful’. When Pound writes from confinement in 1945, he is not only grappling with the inherent difficulty of expressing beauty in modern terms; he is also writing from a future he had not foreseen. Citing the painter’s response to the poet’s specific question – ‘La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley / when Yeats asked why he drew horrors’ (LXXX/531) – Pound writes from a place of horrors himself, where the pursuit of beauty through art seems untenable. And so, Pound leans back to the Yeats he sought out in England, his link to his nineteenth-century intellectual predecessors. It was through Yeats, James Longenbach explains, that Pound had become connected to them all: ‘In England, he recovered the dead by meeting the living who retained the past in their very selves. Yeats became Pound’s guide through a poetic underworld inhabited by Rhymers, Pre-Raphaelites, Victorians, Shelley, and Keats’ (1987: 30).2 As Pound struggles in Pisa to navigate his modern underworld of imprisonment, he turns again to Yeats to revitalise his poetic psyche, alluding to the same yearning that had motivated him to seek out Yeats and the community of writers and artists living in London in the early 1900s.

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To demonstrate Pound’s longing at that time to transcend history through other living artists, Longenbach cites these lines from ‘In Durance’, an early poem of Pound’s written when he was still in America, and later published in Personae in 1909: ‘Yea, I am homesick / After mine own kind that know, and feel / And have some breath for beauty and the arts’ (CEP 86; Longenbach 1987: 30). Isolated a half-century later, Pound again seeks out those of his own kind, those with the same ‘breath’, who had characterised the cultural ethos of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. While Pound may not have revered Beardsley as he did Yeats, his return to the moment of their exchange is almost as significant as the content of their conversation. Beardsley died a young man, at age twenty-five in 1898, on the cusp of the new century; it is this temporal context that resonates with Pound in 1945, recalling his arrival in London at age twenty-three. Beardsley, as one of the Decadents, the last community of artists affiliated with the broader movement of Aestheticism, appears in Canto LXXX as a ghost of that movement and as an avatar of Pound’s. To highlight the significance of this transition, Pound juxtaposes Yeats and Beardsley in a distinctively modern way: he drops their names, wraps them within an allusion to an anecdote (a narrative onceremoved from Pound), then revives and features them in a rich paratactic sequence that Hugh Kenner describes as a ‘poignant cluster’ (1972: 74). While in Pisa, Kenner argues, Pound ‘was living like Beardsley in the shadow of death . . . in the consciousness of a transience whose term is death, and as never before in his life was building with precious fragments, conserved by memory’ (p. 74). Pound nestles the key phrase, ‘Beauty is difficult’, within thirty-three lines of this tenuous cluster (lines 594–626). The sequence is filled with brief nods to his predecessors – Puccini (‘Spewcini’), Pre-Raphaelite masters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones – and to his contemporary, Arthur Symons.3 He incorporates a comment from Beardsley (‘Monsieur Whoosis’): ‘Les hommes ont je ne sais quelle peur étrange /. . . de la beauté’ [‘Men have I don’t know what strange fear / . . . of beauty’4] which follows his allusion to the goddess of beauty through his call to Cythera – his evocation of the island birthplace of Aphrodite. These semi-disguised ruminations on visual representations of beauty culminate in lines 623 to 626: all that Sandro knew, and Jacopo and that Velásquez never suspected lost in the brown meat of Rembrandt and the raw meat of Rubens and Jordaens.5 Terrell advises that here ‘[a]ll the names in this passage denote painters of Venus’ (1993: 445n.342); but Pound’s subtler subtext reveals his knowledge of painterly techniques and aesthetic leanings. When it comes to depictions of Venus, he leans towards the early Renaissance Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli, whom he deems to ‘know’ more than the Dutch Baroque master Rembrandt. As Burton Hatlen suggests, ‘Pound is . . . clearly affirming the aesthetic of Botticelli and his contemporaries over the “meatier” aesthetic of Rubens and Rembrandt’ (2002: n.p.).6 Botticelli’s work (particularly his Birth of Venus) is characterised by a ‘strange and beautiful style’ that ‘did not directly imitate classical antiquity, but used the myths . . . in a way still tinged with Medieval romance’ (de la Croix and Tansey 1975: 469). Hatlen remarks on ‘an almost hallucinatory’ quality in Botticelli’s work, enhanced by ‘precision of line,

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the clarity of detail’ that he aligns with Pound’s ‘new method for scholarship’ – the ‘luminous detail’ (2002: n.p.). Pound introduced his ‘new method’ in 1911, in ‘A Rather Dull Introduction’ to his series of articles, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’. This method, he emphasises, is not one he discovered, but it is crucial because it privileges ‘eye-sight’ and visual experience. When he asserts that, ‘A few good days in a good gallery are more illuminating than years would be if spent in reading a description of these pictures’ (SP 23), the echo of his assertion resonates in Canto LXXX. There he alludes to artworks through mere mention of painters to enforce his claim from 1911 that ‘[t]he artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment’ (p. 23). Pound’s reference to Cythera in Canto LXXX does not need explanation since ‘the best of knowledge is “in the air”’ (p. 23) and is gleaned, as he extols in ‘The Serious Artist’, from response to ‘swift moving thought’ and the ‘fine line in a statue’ (LE 45). Pound practises what he preaches by juxtaposing allusions to Venus/Aphrodite and those who painted images of her. Today, as attention to pre-twentieth-century thinking recedes, this palimpsestic method is often misread as a modernist innovation. Although Pound and his cohort (especially H.D.) mastered this approach in their modern practices, it is not one they invented: its origins lie in the ethos of the ‘cult of beauty’ that pervaded artistic impulse from the mid-to-late nineteenth century and continued to flow into the first decade of the twentieth. Rossetti and his generation of artists were driven by ‘the desire to escape the ugliness and increasingly vulgar materialism of the age and create a new ideal of beauty’, so as to be ‘set free from stale patterns of thought, outworn establishment ideas and confining Victorian rules of propriety and bourgeois morality’ (Calloway 2011: 11). Hatlen observes that the Pre-Raphaelite artists, the earliest Aestheticists, ‘sought to evoke a sense of sacred mystery revealed through and around the “luminous details” of their paintings and poems’ (2002: n.p.) He astutely draws a parallel between their motivations and those of the early modernists: ‘Both were caught up in the question of how we find our way from the luminous moment, which is by definition atemporal, back into a temporality that will make the moment of perception intelligible to others’ (2002: n.p.). In her reflections upon the origins of Aestheticism, Elizabeth Prettejohn ruminates on the vagueness of the term itself, citing an early critic, R. V. Johnson, writing in 1969, who ‘prefer[red] to call it a “tendency”’ rather than a movement (Prettejohn 1999a: 2). She then contrasts the looser classification of Aestheticism with that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was ‘a distinct historical entity’ (p. 2); and, lastly, she points to the lack of a ‘formal grouping of artists or writers who declared allegiance to “Aestheticism,” “art for art’s sake”, or any of the related slogans used in the Victorian press’ (p. 2). Whether it is understood as a movement or as a ‘tendency’, Aestheticism is a term that has come to enclose Pre-Raphaelitism, with the two ‘isms’ marking (respectively) the beginning and conclusion of a controversial half-century of art theorisation and production. Up until the 1990s, it is safe to say, historians of Anglo-modernism drew a line between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the year 1910, thanks in great part to an infamous claim by Virginia Woolf that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’.7 Modernist scholarship, guided by this periodisation of ‘isms’, assigns the birth of Imagism to ‘on or about’ 1912, one decade into the modern age. Aestheticism too has been awarded a beginning – the year 1848 when the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was initiated by Rossetti – and an end in 1900, coinciding with the death of its most controversial proponent, Oscar Wilde. Curiously, these two timelines

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do not include the years 1900 to 1910, offering (by omission) an interesting interstitial temporal space which is fluid and transitional. This was the decade in which Pound had visited the great art museums of Europe,8 courted H.D. in Pennsylvania, had a short-lived career as a college instructor, and migrated to Italy and then to London in search of Yeats and ‘his own kind’. The decade also accommodates Pound’s (and modernism’s) intersections with the tenets and remnants of Aestheticism. One of the most enduring of these tenets was the conviction that ‘visual experience is . . . central to conceptions of the aesthetic approach to life’ (Prettejohn 1999a: 1). In ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ and ‘The Serious Artist’ Pound echoes this notion as he formulates new ways to respond to and represent the ‘difficulty of beauty’; a halfcentury later, the issue resurfaces in the Pisan Cantos to confirm that the difficulty had persisted for the modernists, just as it had for the radical Aesthetes before them. For those nineteenth-century radicals, their visual and verbal representations of beauty needed to be purified, not in any moral sense, but rather in the sense of redefining their roles and artworks within society: ‘Theirs was to be “Art for Art’s sake” – an art self-consciously absorbed in itself, aware of the past but created for the present age, and existing only in order to be beautiful’ (Calloway 2011: 11). When Pound writes about ‘beauty in art’ in ‘The Serious Artist’ in 1913, he addresses the same concern: artists and poets should not be producing ‘slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, not telling people that beauty is the proper and respectable thing’ (LE 45). He also, quite tellingly, includes in this essay a single-sentence paragraph that indirectly nods to Aestheticism: ‘The cult of beauty and the delineation of ugliness are not in mutual opposition’ (p. 45). Here Pound reinforces his call to modern artists to resist creating subjective evaluations and representations, but also, perhaps, to remind them that their mission was one they had inherited, not invented. Another critical component of this inheritance was the belief that ‘works of visual art make vivid subjects for critical and imaginative writing’ (Prettejohn 1999a: 1). In Canto LXXX, the ‘vivid subject’ of the goddess of beauty links Pound to his predecessors, particularly Rossetti, whose depictions of women – in poetry and especially in painting – can easily be aligned alongside a ‘list of the mythological or literary female figures Pound invokes in The Cantos’ (Gibson 1995: 183).9 However, beyond the superficial qualities of inspirational beauty historically attributed to these muses lies the greater significance of the artists’ purposeful selection of these women: they are chosen as exemplifications of the difficult task of rendering beauty in ways suited to their complex times, as manifestations of the process of creating art. In the following three reflections on Pound’s, Rossetti’s and Pater’s depictions of female muses, this challenge underscores the writers’ ambitions to create artworks for their ‘present age’, and, above all else, to ‘avoid slither’ and sentimentality.

Pound and ‘Is-hilda’ I pray thee love these wildered words of mine: Tho I be weak, is beauty alway strong, So be they cup-kiss to the mingled wine That life shall pour for us life’s ways among. Ecco il libro: for the book is thine. Ezra Pound, untitled, ‘Hilda’s Book’ (1905–7)

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Pound’s early muse is luminous, but she is no goddess: she is Hilda Doolittle, not yet baptised as ‘H.D., Imagiste’, whom he vigorously wooed with many books in their Pennsylvania youth. In her memoir, End to Torment, H.D. recalls his enthusiasm: It was Ezra who really introduced me to William Morris. He literally shouted ‘The Gilliflower of Gold’ in the orchard. . . . He was a composite James McNeill Whistler, Peer Gynt, and the victorious and defeated heroes of the William Morris poems and stories. (ET 22–3) The depth of Pound’s parallel passions for literature and for H.D. cannot be overestimated. Their eclectic selection of reading material (chosen mostly by Pound) included ‘a series of Yogi books’ (ET 23) and dramas by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and was heavily weighted with Rossetti’s poems and translations, Walter Pater’s critical prose, and the poetry of Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne and William Morris. The injection of these sensibilities into their thinking was formative for both aspiring writers, perhaps in part, as Helen Carr observes, because ‘from the Pre-Raphs and the aesthetes they had support for their sense that the beautiful was more important than the commercial, and art than examination success’ (2009: 60). H.D. had an unhappy, unsuccessful experience at university;10 Pound completed his Master’s degree in 1906, but came to resist ‘compartmentalized learning in the philological mode’ and soon ‘realized he was not going to be a professional scholar’ (Marsh 2011: 19); he abandoned the prospect of doctoral studies, rejecting the guidance of his thesis supervisor in favour of another model, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet whose translations of his namesake made Dante live again’ (Marsh 2011: 19). In her memoir, H.D. also recalls Pound bringing her a ‘Thomas Mosher reprint of the Iseult and Tristram story’.11 ‘He called me Is-hilda. . . and wrote a sonnet a day; he bound them in a parchment folder’ (ET 23). Written between 1905 and 1907, the poems in the folder entitled ‘Hilda’s Book’ were not published as an entity until 1979, when they were included with End to Torment. A few were published in 1908 in ‘The San Trovaso Notebook’ and in Pound’s first major collection, A Lume Spento; for the most part they have received little critical attention, usually designated, as they are by Alec Marsh, as evidence of Pound’s ‘juvenile pre-Raphaelite high style’ (2011: 21). The epigraph above is an extract from an untitled fifteen-line sonnet that begins, ‘I strove a little book to make for her’. The poem effectively narrates Pound’s gesture of love to Hilda in the style cited by Marsh: the language and syntax are formal – ‘for the book is thine’ – and the poet’s treatment of his muse seems to exemplify the very ‘sentimentalizing about beauty’ Pound comes to warn against. His decision not to republish most of the poems of ‘Hilda’s Book’ post-1908 seems to confirm his purposeful dismissal of Pre-Raphaelite influences. This editorial direction supports the argument put forth by Thomas Grieve, who contends that critics insisting on revisiting the rejected poems are misguided. ‘Those who insist on . . . the enduring influence of the Pre-Raphaelites of nineties aestheticism’, Grieve writes, ‘have had a field day with some of the more tortured instances of Pound’s juvenilia’ (1997: 37). While few would dispute the varying degrees of sophistication between the poems of ‘Hilda’s Book’ and those written thereafter, it is important to realise that Grieve’s critique addresses the impact of literary British Aestheticism, but elides any interconnectivity between nineteenth-century writers and artists, as well as their shared fascination with visual experience. It is this very interconnectivity, arguably, that stimulates Pound’s artistic sensibility in its early

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stages. And so, while several of the sentimental, derivative poems Pound was composing in the interstitial decade post-1900 were rightly classified as ‘Pre-Raphaelite pastiche’ (Froula 1983: 31), there is another, highly generative painterly layer beneath the textual pastiche that merits attention. Pound’s playful word association between H.D. and the Iseult legend signals his attunement to the motives behind the Pre-Raphaelites’ intertwining of aesthetic theorisation with their past and present. They chose to evoke the identifiable historical period of English medievalism not only to counter the dominant Victorian period they inhabited, but also to draw attention to their actions. Restricted by social and academic conventions that prescribed artistic techniques and subject matter, Rossetti and his cohort exploited methods of contrast and exaggeration as transgressive acts. In painting and drawing, these methods were exemplified by extremely precise detailing, shifted perspective viewpoints and intense colouration; subject matter often featured women in distorted poses against darkened landscapes. The Pre-Raphaelites’ strategy aligns with what Walter Pater identified in his essay ‘Aesthetic Poetry’: by positioning their contemporary selves within an isolated historical phase they cast themselves ‘into relief, to be divided against [themselves] in zeal for it’ (Pater [1889a] 1948: 82).12 Rossetti’s elaborate pen-and-ink drawing How They Met Themselves (1851–60) is an evocative rendering of this concept. A man and woman in medieval garb meet their ghostly doppelgangers in a woodland setting; the ‘how’ in the title implies that their meeting was perhaps premeditated, although their exaggerated expressions suggest it was not. For Rossetti and his followers, radicalising the present meant generating a connective energy through such imagined encounters with their artistic ancestors.13 In the early love poems of ‘Hilda’s Book’, Pound often ‘paints’ H.D. as his lost medieval twin Is-hilda/Ysolt. He opens his sonnet ‘Per Saecula’ with this notable query: ‘Where have I met thee? Oh Love tell me where / In the aisles of the past were thy lips known / To me’; and ends with an answer to his own question: ‘I met thee mid the roses of the past’ (ET 75). In ‘Domina’, Is-hilda is addressed as ‘My Lady’ whose smile bears ‘Some strange new thing she can not tell / Some mystic danaan spell’ (ET 74). Here, as in most of the poems in ‘Hilda’s Book’, when the poet faces his muse, he shifts the mood to one of uncertainty. Hatlen links this with the ‘luminous moment’ he recognises in both Pound’s and the Pre-Raphaelites’ works, and which he identifies as ‘a crisis of narrativity, as the moment of vision interrupts a story that we may or may not be able to bring to completion’ (2002: n.p.). Rebecca Beasley’s observation extends this idea: ‘There is good reason for aestheticism’s association of beauty with the visual sense’, she contends, since ‘the eye appears to offer the possibility of catching the passing moment by wresting it from time and perceiving it in space’ (Beasley 2007: 19). Pound himself was at a creative moment of crisis: to modernise poetics, he needed to dissociate himself from the works of his nineteenth-century predecessors but retain their notions of the ‘passing moment’, the primacy of the visual sense and its connection to the perception of beauty. These were not ideals that Pound wanted to dismiss, but he needed to do so to reinvent them. In 1908, under the pen name ‘Weston St. Llewmys’, Pound wrote an ‘Epigraph’ for his poetry collection A Quinzaine for this Yule, and revealed his intentions to proceed with respect for his predecessors and the cult he inherited from them:

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Beauty should never be presented explained. It is Marvel and Wonder, and in art we should find first these doors – Marvel and Wonder – and, coming through them, a slow understanding (slow even though it be a succession of lightning understandings and perceptions) as of a figure in mist, that still and ever gives to each one his own right of believing, each after his own creed and fashion. (CEP 52) In this passage, Beasley comments that ‘Pound’s metaphorical fashioning . . . in terms of visual perception derives from the interdisciplinary lexicon of his aestheticist milieu’ (2007: 45). Her observation from 2007 emphasises the cultural language of her day; on the other hand, Louis Martz, in his 1976 introduction to Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, is more concerned with what he names as a ‘principle that runs throughout [Pound’s] early poetry . . . the belief that the poetic power breaks through the crust of daily life and apprehends a transcendent flow of spirit, energy, or divine power, which Pound calls “the gods”’ (CEP xiv). Both these critical assessments, although separated by thirty years of modernist studies, tie back directly to the proto-modern legacies of Rossetti and Pater: to Rossetti’s interdisciplinary mastery of painting and poetry, and to Pater’s sophisticated theorisations about the role of Aesthetics in the representation of beauty in the arts.

Rossetti and ‘The Blessed Damozel’ The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1846–7) Soul Caught in the rose hued mesh Of o’er fair earthly flesh Stooped you again to bear This thing for me And be rare light For me, gold white In the shadowy path I tread? Surely a bolder maid art thou Than one in tearful fearful longing That would wait Lily-cinctured Star-diademed at the gate Ezra Pound, ‘La Donzella Beata’ (1905–7) Of all the verses in ‘Hilda’s Book’, ‘La Donzella Beata’ is renowned for being clearly derived from the Pre-Raphaelite oeuvre, and for being one of the few poems Pound selected for inclusion in A Lume Spento in 1908.14 Helen Carr refers to it as Pound’s

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‘reply to Rossetti’s early poem, “[The] Blessed Damozel”’ (2009: 61), which, in its day, was recognised as a remarkable achievement for the young artist, poet, and translator15 (Figure 7.1). Pound must have appreciated the parallels here: Rossetti was in his late teens when he wrote his tribute to Dante’s work in 1846–7, and Pound was in his early twenties when he wrote his ‘reply’. Pound’s translation of Rossetti’s title into Italian is an indirect nod to all three writers. As Jerome McGann argues, Dante is probably Rossetti’s single most important precursor, partly because he supplied Rossetti with a powerful myth of the poet’s life, and partly because, in seeking to reconstruct that myth through his translations, Rossetti was led to fashion an English style that has been materially marked by Italian linguistic and poetical resources. (McGann 2003: xxii) Pound composes ‘La Donzella Beata’ with a loop of succession in mind: he, Dante and Rossetti all paid attention to constructing their own mythologies through their own works. When Pound reinterprets Rossetti’s poem about a medieval damsel, he is fully aware that the Pre-Raphaelite was contemplating not only Dante’s work but also his own efforts to revive poetics through (as Martz terms it) a ‘transcendent flow of spirit’ generated by succession, adaptation and allusion (CEP xiv). Carr offers these two key observations about Pound’s short poem: first, ‘that it looks as it stands on the page as if it is a piece of free verse, although Pound did not consciously attempt to write free verse for some time’ (2009: 62); and, second, although brief in comparison with Rossetti’s lengthy poem of twenty-four sestets, Pound’s poem ‘picks up many of its images and words (white, light, gold, lilies, stars)’ (p. 62). There is a hint of Pre-Raphaelite pastiche in Pound’s language, but the textual lineation of the poem, as Carr notes, foreshadows spare Imagist structure: the first line, for example, consists of the single word, ‘Soul’, and the last line is simply ‘To thee;’ the poem’s fourteen lines suggest an octave/sestet sonnet, but the rhyme scheme disappears at the turn, leaving only the final ‘thee’ to rhyme with the fifth line. Pound’s prosodic deviations inspire Carr’s contention that ‘La Donzella Beata’ is a ‘mocking reversal’ of Rossetti’s damsel, ‘who longs for her beloved to join her in heaven, [whereas] Pound’s . . . comes down to meet her living lover’ (p. 62). While the reversal of roles Carr describes is an ironic gesture, it may not necessarily be ‘mocking’. What Carr does not address is the possibility that Pound is replying here not only to Rossetti’s poem but also to Rossetti’s painting of the same name, which he created to accompany the poem.16 From this viewpoint, Pound’s poem could be considered as ekphrastic,17 since its images are inherent to the painting as well as the poem. Pound privileges the visual experience of Rossetti’s artwork over the verbal for the reader through purposeful allusion, by inserting a luminous moment, a potential interruption for the reader whose reading of a text is interrupted by an indirect reference to the painting it describes. His precise positioning of Rossetti’s damsel – ‘Stooped you again to bear / This thing for me . . . in the shadowy path I tread’ – evokes the painted image just as it does Rossetti’s written description and view of his damozel: ‘And still she bowed herself and stooped / Out of the circling charm’ (lines 43–4). Pound deploys allusions to the painted image alongside adjectives plucked from Rossetti’s text to intensify two key encounters: within the poem, the poet who challenges his muse, and, outside the poem, the reader who is led to simultaneously envision the image and experience the poem. In so doing, Pound pays indirect homage

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Figure 7.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel, 1871–8. Oil on canvas. 136.8 × 96.5 cm (53⅞ × 38 in.); predella: 35.2 × 96.2 cm (13⅞ × 37⅞ in.); framed: 212.1 × 133 × 8.9 cm (83½ × 52⅜ × 3½ in.). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.202. Photo: Imaging Department. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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to Rossetti’s practice of producing a ‘double work of art’: ‘the creation of a poem to accompany and “interpret” a picture, the creation of a picture to re-realize a poem’ (McGann 2000: 21). Pound is acknowledging the potency of Rossetti’s purposeful acts of ‘doubling’; it was through these acts, as McGann explains, that Rossetti ‘shows every artist’s understanding, that the only adequate interpretation of a work of art is a responsive work of art’ (McGann 2000: 21). By ‘doubling’ Rossetti’s poem with his own response, which is also an indirect ekphrastic nod to Rossetti’s painting (which is his response to his own poem), Pound demonstrates his understanding of Rossetti’s methodology and grander mission. ‘The Blessed Damozel’/‘La Donzella Beata’ pairing is a foundation for Pound’s formulation about understanding beauty – ‘slow even though it be a succession of lightning understandings and perceptions’ (from his Epigraph to A Quinzaine, quoted above) – which comes to underpin Imagism. Pound’s pairing also foreshadows his later reference, in Canto LXXX, to the difficulty of beauty and its transition into the twentieth century. How can these complex double works of paintings and poems, these tributes and allusions, constitute entirely original creations of art? How can beauty be re-produced in ways that modernise its inherent power of influence upon artists and their audience? Within these contexts of re-representation, how can beauty continue to ‘never be presented explained’, as Pound insists in his Epigraph? Soon after making this claim, it appears that Pound, in his poetry, began to suppress signs of indebtedness to the artists of Aestheticism; on the other hand, it can be argued that his indebtedness to their philosophy held and manifested itself in his critical thinking and methodology. In this respect, Pound owes much to Rossetti: here McGann writes about Rossetti’s programme, but his observations can as easily be applied to an examination of Pound’s formulations of Imagism: Rossetti’s critical intelligence as an artist lies essentially in this: that he sought a programmatic expression for a new kind of artistic representation. He is extremely selfconscious both as a technician and, in much of his work, as a polemical theorist. More than that, because the polemic is being made on behalf of art as a nonconceptual form of understanding, Rossetti is most theoretical in his explanations when he expresses himself in artistic (rather than conceptual) terms. So he will interpret a painting by writing a sonnet, or a poem by making a painting. So he will elucidate the poetry of Dante and his circle by translating them into equivalent poems. Rossetti constructs an argument in images for the procedure of arguing by images. (2000: 32–3) When Pound presents his tenet – ‘Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective’ – in 1912, he is espousing a programme, a new path freed from the past.18 Interestingly, in ‘The Fault of It’, written in 1911,19 Pound’s more self-conscious account of the evolution of this new direction emerges from the first five lines of the sparse eleven-line poem: Some may have blamed us that we cease to speak Of things we spoke of in our verses early, Saying: a lovely voice is such and such; Saying: that lady’s eyes were sad last week, Wherein the world’s whole joy is born and dies. (CEP 207)

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In this poem Pound juxtaposes vague references – ‘Some’ and ‘such and such’ – with decidedly nineteenth-century inflected diction – ‘she hath’ and ‘ye’ – to demonstrate the transition to his programme for a ‘new kind of artistic expression’: his choice of words, and his placement of them within his text, exemplify the dilemma under discussion. Most notably, he ends ‘The Fault of It’ with a plea and an admission: ‘Ask us no more of all the things ye heard; / We may not speak of them, they touch us nearly.’ Despite Pound’s expression of affinity with his ‘own kind’ from the nineteenth century, in this poem he is poised to repress them. Without extolling Rossetti, he follows his model: the Pre-Raphaelite promoted and practised his arts in a revolutionary fashion, ‘doubled’ his literary and visual artworks to highlight their interconnectivity, all while drawing attention to his process as an artist. In 1889, Pater writes a tribute to Rossetti that foreshadows Pound’s situation at the end of the liminal period between 1900 and 1910. Writing only seven years after Rossetti’s death, Pater positions Rossetti in loose historical contexts: At a time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel, yet felt to be no more tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing attention – an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man’s own proper speech. (Pater [1889b] 1948: 87) Pound would have probably dismissed any suggestion of a parallel between Rossetti’s relationship to ‘poetic originality’ and his own. Even though he too was striving for a new vocabulary and novel approach, he needed to distance himself from being identified with the roles of aesthete and aesthetic critic assigned (respectively) to Rossetti and Pater. Pound’s challenge, then, was to synthesise Rossetti’s experiments into his own ‘programmatic expression’ while being careful ‘not to speak’ of the Pre-Raphaelite’s influence. Yet Pound finds himself working within the same arena of opposed forces within the arts – intellectual/sensory; literary/visual; secular/spiritual – that his predecessors had addressed with great originality. In his early critical prose these forces engage him just as deeply as they did Pater, reflecting their shared determination to re-examine the role of the artist.

Pater and ‘La Gioconda’ Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true students of aesthetics. Walter Pater, ‘Preface’, The Renaissance (1873) In his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, written twenty years before he paid tribute to Rossetti, Pater presents the Mona Lisa – ‘La Gioconda’ – as ‘a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’ ([1872] 1980: 98). Pater’s oddly visceral

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depiction of the iconic portrait occupies only thirty-three lines of his ruminations on da Vinci, yet it has become iconic itself. This is due in large part to Yeats’s decision to extract half of Pater’s lines, restructure them as free verse, and present them as the ‘first modern poem in his (1936) edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse’ (Longenbach 1987: 34). Pater’s decision to radicalise his description of the pre-eminent visual representation of ‘beauty’ is as deliberate as Yeats’s: he destabilises the notion of the portrait as an artwork fixed in time with his own unsettling verbal representation of its subject as a depository. Pater sees no conventional attributes of physical womanly beauty in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: hers is a troubling beauty, he writes, ‘into which the soul with all its maladies has passed’ ([1872] 1980: 98). His response to her image reflects what Longenbach identifies as Pater’s existential view of history as being the ‘equivalent of personal experience because the present itself is woven from the remnants of the entire past’ (1987: 34). This, Longenbach asserts, is what ‘lies at the core of Pater’s entire aesthetic’ alongside his ‘more demanding belief that it is only as a living presence that we know the past’ (p. 34). Early in his career, Pound follows Pater’s lead: he engages with Rossetti through ‘La Donzella Beata’, through his response to the poem and the painting. As young writers and theorists, both Pound and his predecessor Pater grappled with reconciling the concrete aspect of personal experience with the intangible forces weaving the past with their present. Pater is still renowned for his promotion of this concept, for his belief in ‘the primacy of sensation and experience for its own sake’ (McGrath 1986: 54). The most widely anthologised expression of this empiricist line of thinking appears in The Renaissance, in the ‘Conclusion’, written in 1868, pre-dating (interestingly) the other essays in the collection it ‘concludes’: ‘Not the fruit of experience’, Pater proclaims, ‘but experience itself, is the end’ (1980: 188), which he enforces with his conviction that ‘art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’ (1980: 190). In his ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he alerts the ‘true’ students of aesthetics to this belief, instructing them to heed ‘all the objects with which [they have] to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind’ (p. xx). In 1910, Pound adopts this same spirit in his own preface to The Spirit of Romance, ‘Praefatio Ad Lectorum Electum’. First, he boldly declares that ‘Art is a fluid moving above or over the minds of men’, and then he qualifies his declaration: ‘Having violated one canon of modern prose by this metaphysical generality’, he writes, ‘I shall violate another. I shall make a florid and metaphorical comparison’ – which he proceeds to do: Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all these things, the artist with that which flows. (Prefatio in SR n.p.) Here Pound deftly weaves Paterian inflection with the distinctively ironic, self-deprecating voice that will come to distinguish much of the critical prose that he writes thereafter. By 1913 he has shifted to the more strident provisos of ‘The Serious Artist’– ‘I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, not telling people

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that beauty is the proper and respectable thing’ (LE 45) – that he contemporaneously delegates to poetics with his call for ‘direct treatment of the “thing”’. In some respects, The Spirit of Romance might be read as containing the last tangible evidence of young Pound’s debt to Pater and Aestheticism. However, while the ‘florid’ language and style of his early reflections on art and beauty soon disappear from his prose, he persists in exploring theories common to them both. Victorian and modernist scholars alike continue to examine the degree of Pater’s influence upon modernism in general and Pound in particular. F. C. McGrath notes that the ‘Conclusion’ ‘fostered the emphasis in Modernist writing on the fragmentary nature of experience and helped to undermine the notion of the unitary personality, which had become subject to the same forces of fragmentation as sensory experience’ (1986: 55); Gibson proposes that while Pater’s ‘vocabulary – of delicateness, sweetness, and charm – would have been unwelcome’ to Pound, nevertheless ‘Pater’s solution to the problem of aesthetic detachment, his insistence on recurrence, provided an equipoise that had a lasting impact on Pound’s work’ (1995: 28); and Longenbach (setting aside what he calls the ‘fragile solipsism’ of the ‘Conclusion’)20 contends that Pater ‘bequeathed to his modernist disciples’ (including Pound) his particular historicism, his ‘faith in a general consciousness that unites all individuals, past and present’ (1987: 33). While it seems paradoxical that ‘historicism’ should be so crucial to the configuration of a movement designed to sever itself from the past, it is arguably the strongest connective thread between the early twentieth and mid-to-late nineteenth centuries. Valuable critical discourse on this interconnectivity is often found in works that do not focus on modernism. A representative example of this discourse is Carolyn Williams’s study, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism, which contains only two references to Pound, three to the Pre-Raphaelites and one to Rossetti. And yet, despite these few direct correlations, Williams presents a primary argument about Pater’s methodology that has tremendous relevance to Pound’s: In a fierce yet wistful embrace of necessity, Pater acknowledges from the beginning that the simplest act of perception is an aesthetic act. He turns to history – and in particular to the history of art – to recover the sense of a world of objects external to the mind, though he realizes at the same time that history itself is in part the result of an aesthetic reconstruction. ‘Aesthetic historicism’, then, names the complex interaction through which Pater’s aestheticism and historicism stabilize, support, supplement, and correct each other. (1989: 3–4) Williams does not analyse the links between ‘aesthetic historicism’ and modernism, but she does provoke further thinking about them. Reflecting upon ‘Pater’s interest in the spirit of the Mona Lisa as a composite form, the quintessential form of historicist aesthetic composition’, she remarks that ‘Pater’s passage is composite of many pasts, recorded in the words of others’ (p. 123). Sieburth identifies a similar form in Pound’s preface to The Spirit of Romance, in which ‘Pound declares that his method of literary criticism will be founded on “selection”, that is, on the art of quotation (or what he would later call “excernment”) rather than on “the presentation of opinion”’ (2005: x). Sieburth contends that ‘The Spirit of Romance prefigures the Cantos, constructed as it is of a cento of citations . . . [that] will continue to resonate through the immense echochamber’ of the epic poem (p. x). Pound’s recollections of conversations in Canto LXXX

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spring back to mind here: his memories are his records, and his paratactic placement of them as fragments of anecdotes alludes to his practice of aesthetic historicism. Sieburth discusses another commonality between The Spirit of Romance and The Cantos that further exemplifies this aspect of Pound’s practice, namely that ‘both books attempt to articulate a pattern, at once historical and atemporal, of cultural beginnings and rebeginnings’ (2005: vii). Williams discusses a similar strategy in Pater’s reading of the Mona Lisa, ‘which embodies the impossible possibility of gathering all the transformations of historical time in one place’ (1989: 123). To facilitate this gathering, Williams claims, Pater turns to the ‘poetic figure’ of Mona Lisa, to ‘the image of the human figure, a graphic reminder that his aesthetic is based on the romantic correlation of personal memory and the cultural past’ (pp. 123–4). In Canto LXXX, faced with the challenge of gathering such transformations from his memory, Pound rallies a cluster of temporally and stylistically diverse artists – Sandro, Jacopo, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Jordaens – then juxtaposes them within one line of the poem. Each of these artists ‘painted’ Venus, an icon of mythical beauty (equal to the earthly ‘La Gioconda’), but the specifics of their artworks are elided. Instead their names are surrounded by spare references to his London contemporaries, medieval French castles, Confucian philosophy, Homer’s Odysseus, the Catholic prayer book, an American agronomist and so on. 21 Pound’s modernist manoeuvre is syncretic in nature: his juxtaposition of diverse elements results in a fusion meant to draw attention to their diversity, just as elision draws attention to omission of details. Both are crucial components of Pound’s process. Although Pound was deliberate in his early effacement of the influence of Aestheticism, he retained critical elements of Paterian thinking and methodology throughout his poetic and critical praxes. Foremost amongst these are the emphases on the flux of experience, the primacy of the ‘concrete’ and the deployment of allusion. These inheritances nourished the modernists’ techniques of fragmentation and inspired their responses, at the outset of the twentieth century, ‘to a world in which the bonds of cause and effect have been loosed and life itself is perceived as a rapid succession of discrete impressions’ (McGrath 1986: 64). By the mid-century mark, when the imprisoned Pound integrates the anecdotal conversation between Yeats and Beardsley into Canto LXXX, he purposefully juxtaposes the two artists to evoke, perhaps, what he had expressed early in his career in ‘In Durance’: his yearning for those who share his ‘breath for beauty and the arts’. The inherent difficulty of representing beauty persists, and, most importantly it is what binds him, and his contemporaries, to his predecessors. Pound yearns for many artists, Pater and Rossetti included, but also for an ethos. In his ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, Pater chooses the fifteenth century in Italy as most exemplary of such an ethos: ‘Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thought’ ([1872] 1980: xxiv). Surely Pater’s words must have returned to Pound in Pisa, where he struggled to share ‘breath for beauty’ through the visual and literary memories that nurtured his art and eased his isolation.

Notes 1. In Stone Cottage, James Longenbach explains that Pound likely ‘recalls an anecdote which Yeats told him. . . “I said to [Beardsley] once, ‘You have never done anything to equal your Salome with the Head of John the Baptist.’ I think, that for the moment he was sincere when he replied, ‘Yes, but beauty is so difficult’”’ (1988: 173).

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2. ‘Rhymers’ Club (act. 1890–1895) was a gathering of some of the most distinctive poets of the early to mid-1890s. . . . In their two volumes of verse, and the trajectories of their very different lives, they showed themselves not as a school or a movement but as a representative group of fin-de-siècle poets. The club had its genesis in the need felt in the early 1890s to discuss the challenges of poetry in a complex new age, when the Victorian greats were either dead, in the case of Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold, or moribund, in that of Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Swinburne, and there was no new giant to take their place but a great many active poets’ (Adams 2007: 16). 3. Carroll Terrell points out that ‘Modern Poem’, written by Arthur Symons (1865–1945), ‘has lines Pound always liked: “I am the torch, she saith, and what to me / If the moth die of me? / I am the flame / of Beauty, and I burn that all may see”’ (1993: 444n.334). 4. As translated by Carroll Terrell (1993: 444). 5. Sandro Botticelli (1444–1510) and Jacopo Sellaio (1422–93), early Italian Renaissance; Diego Velásquez (1599–1660), Spanish Baroque; Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Dutch Baroque; Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), Flemish Baroque. 6. Hatlen’s observations come from an address he presented at the 2002 MLA Convention. In it he offers a detailed cross-examination of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Pound’s poetic praxis. 7. Peter Gay reports that Woolf’s statement comes from ‘one of her most spirited talks, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, delivered in 1924 to a receptive audience at Cambridge, [in which she] summed up her case against the literary establishment’ (2008: 186). 8. As Harriet Zinnes observes, when Pound arrived in London during the ‘artistic ferment’ that had been rumbling there and in Paris, he had already been ‘able to study at first hand the great Western masters’ (EPVA xii) in his travels to Europe with his family at the close of the century. Richard Sieburth’s chronology indicates that in 1898, Pound visited England, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy with his mother and her Aunt Frank; in 1902, Pound returned to Europe, again with Aunt Frank, and this time with both his parents (PT 1207). 9. Mary Ellis Gibson lists the following figures: ‘Diana the goddess of birth and death, Aphrodite the goddess of love and destructive passion, Persephone bringer of the spring and mate of Hades . . . In the works of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, the most literary Pre-Raphaelites and the ones most important for Pound, these figures include Helen, Pandora, Aphrodite, Medusa, Vivien, Astarte, Circe, and Lilith’ (1995: 183). 10. H.D. biographer Louis H. Silverstein notes that in 1905–1906, H.D. ‘attends Bryn Mawr College as a day student for three semesters; . . . withdraws, possibly due to ill health, failing grades, and increasing involvement with Pound’ (1990: 33). 11. The editors of End to Torment, Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King, identify this book as ‘“The Romance of Tristram and Iseult”, retold by J. Bedier, trans. H. Belloc, Portland, Me., Thomas Bird Mosher, 1907’ (ET 64n.22). 12. This essay appears in Walter Pater: Selected Works, edited by Richard Aldington, a fellow Imagist poet of Pound and H.D. In his introduction, Aldington reports: ‘The study of William Morris called “Aesthetic Poetry”, though written in 1868, was not published until 1889’ (1948: 7). Donald L. Hill, editor of the 1980 version of Pater’s The Renaissance, notes that ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ was published anonymously as ‘Poems by William Morris’ in October 1868 in the Westminster Review (Pater [1872] 1980: 204). 13. Rossetti created several versions of How They Met Themselves (1851–60), both painted and drawn. The most striking of these is the pen-and-ink rendering, which belongs to the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and can be viewed online at the Rossetti Archive. 14. Sieburth notes that the other three poems carried forward to A Lume Spento were: ‘“Li Bel Chasteus”, “Comraderie” (entitled “Era Ventura” in “Hilda’s Book”), and “The Tree”’ (2003b: 1236).

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15. As McGann outlines in his introduction to Rossetti’s Collected Poetry and Prose, by the year 1848 Rossetti was already training as a painter, was writing poetry and had completed ‘most of the translations that eventually appeared as the Early Italian Poets in 1861 . . . It was in this year that the core set of Rossetti’s artistic and poetical touchstones began to coalesce in a practical way’ (McGann 2003: xviii). 16. The painting of The Blessed Damozel was completed between 1875 and 1878, long after Rossetti composed the poem in 1847. The scholarly commentary in Rossetti Archive explains that this ‘most famous’ of Rossetti’s paintings ‘is certainly his most elaborate presentation of the subject that interested him beyond all others: the relation of an emparadised woman to her earthly lover’ (n.p.). Dante’s Vita Nuova is identified as the prime literary source of influence. 17. Current literary criticism favours James Heffernan’s explanation, which defines ‘ekphrasis’ simply as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (Heffernan 1993: 3). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th edition) explains that ekphrasis, which originated as a term in classical rhetoric, is a ‘detailed description of an image, primarily visual; in specialized form, limited to description of a work of visual art’. 18. Pound opens his essay ‘A Retrospect’ with this note prefacing his three famous tenets of Imagism: ‘In the spring or early summer of 1912, “H.D.”, Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following’ (LE 3). 19. In Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, editor Michael King includes ‘The Fault of It’ in the section ‘Uncollected Miscellaneous Poems, 1902–1912’, where the poem is cited as published in Forum, July 1911 (CEP 207). 20. Longenbach qualifies the impact of the ‘Conclusion’ with his comments on Pater’s later ‘copious retraction and reformulation of that doctrine that he undertook in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Plato and Platonism (1893). Pater’s “most famous disciples” at the end of the century trumpeted the solipsistic doctrine of the “Conclusion” long after Pater had devoted himself to other concerns’ (Longenbach 1987: 33). Pound and Yeats, Longenbach affirms, were disciples of Pater who did not ignore the ‘higher doctrines’ of his later works. 21. See Richard Sieburth’s annotations to Canto LXXX in the 2003 edition of The Pisan Cantos (pp. 145–52), and Carroll Terrell’s in his Companion to The Cantos (pp. 428–49).

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8 Ezra Pound and James McNeill Whistler: Modernism and Conceptual Art Jo Brantley Berryman

To Whistler, American by Ezra Pound On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery You also, our first great, Had tried all ways; Tested and pried and worked in many fashions, And this much gives me heart to play the game. ... You were not always sure, not always set To hiding night or tuning ‘symphonies’; Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried And stretched and tampered with the media. You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts Show us there’s chance at least of winning through. Poetry, 1912

P

ound visited the James McNeill Whistler exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1912, responding with a burst of enthusiasm, a poem for Poetry magazine, and admiring reviews. He had known Whistler’s work since his student days in Philadelphia. Years later, in the Pisan Cantos, Pound recalls Whistler’s innovative art, his allusions bringing back memories of the artist’s courage to continue creating new work in the face of harsh criticism and misunderstanding. Whistler served as inspiration and exemplar for Pound; his influence lasted a lifetime. When Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1901, James McNeill Whistler was well known in art circles in America as well as abroad. Even though he left the United States in 1855 and never returned, Whistler’s paintings had been shown in notable art exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia, including the well-attended 1876 Centennial International Exhibition and special exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1881–2 and 1893–6, as well as their annual exhibitions in 1900 and 1902–3. His work had also attracted the attention of American museums and collectors: the controversial Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) was purchased in 1892 by Samuel Untermyer (New York City; acquired by the

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Detroit Museum of Art in 1946). The Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburg purchased Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate (1884) after it was exhibited at the Carnegie International in 1896; and the Art Institute of Chicago purchased Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Southampton Water in 1900. Whistler’s most significant patron in America, however, was Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919), who began buying his work in 1887. They met in London in 1890, travelled together, and remained close friends until Whistler’s death in 1903. His collection of Whistler’s work became the largest in the world. In 1901 Freer began a collaboration and friendship with Ernest Fenollosa, who advised him on acquiring Japanese and Chinese art; subsequently, Freer’s extensive collection became the foundation for the Freer Museum of Art in Washington DC (Lawton and Merrill 1993: 134ff). Fenollosa also became an important influence on Ezra Pound, but that would not happen until 1913, in London, when Pound received The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry from Fenollosa’s widow. Freer’s purchase of Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room was announced on the front page of the New York Herald, 17 July 1904, when Pound was staying in New York City with his Aunt Frank (Stock 1970: 15; L/HP 18, 21). Whistler received more national attention in 1904 when Freer offered his vast art collection to the Smithsonian Institution, and again in 1906, when the United States government officially accepted the gift. Pound must have been aware of this publicity, but he first mentions Freer in a letter from London on 13 October 1913, when he informs his mother, ‘Have seen Mrs Fenollosa (relict of the Fennolosa [sic] who has written on Chinese art, and who has had so much to do with the Freer collection)’ (L/HP 311). In his 1915 article ‘The Renaissance II’, he praises both Fenollosa and Freer: ‘we have, or we are beginning to have, collections. We have had at least one scholar in Ernest Fenollosa, and one patron in Mr. Freer. I mean these two men at least have worked as the great Italian researchers and collectors of the quattrocento worked and collected’ (EPVA 264–5). When Whistler died in London, 17 July 1903, The New York Times obituary included a number of tributes to him, while acknowledging, and yet, even now, there are no standards by which one can judge his work, by which one can form an estimate of his true place in the ranks of the world’s great artists. That he is among them is not doubted; just how high up among them is not so clear. It is only once or twice in a century that the originator of a new style in art or literature appears, and it takes at least a century for the world to recover from the dazed condition into which it is thrown by such a man’s work. (New York Times 1903) Through his own study of Whistler’s work, however, Pound did come to have ‘standards by which one can judge’ and decided Whistler was ‘high up’ indeed among ‘the ranks of the world’s great artists’. Those standards led him not only to value Whistler as ‘the originator of a new style in art or literature’, but to become such an originator himself. Pound praised Whistler for his courage, perseverance and imagination in originating a new style – and also for devising an innovative way to respond to negative criticism. Early on, Pound began measuring a work’s artistic value by its underlying concepts, its inventiveness and capacity to challenge convention. In an undated (1906?), unpublished typescript held at the Beinecke Library, Pound recommends Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies:

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Do not let a professor of English refer you to Ruskins Modern Painters and think you can read it safely untill [sic] you have read the first part of Whistler’s ‘Gentle Art of Making Enemies’ which is the most perfect introduction and interpretation of the ‘Great Critics’ maunderings in the realm of paint. (YCAL Mss 43 86/3710) With his contrast between John Ruskin’s statements about art in ‘Modern Painters’ and Whistler’s in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Pound recalls the account of the infamous libel trial of Whistler versus Ruskin that occupies the first part of The Gentle Art; and he aligns himself with Whistler. The trial took place at the Exchequer Court in London on 25 and 26 November 1878. The impetus for this trial is well known, as is the outcome. Referring to Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, Ruskin had accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ (Figure 8.1). Whistler won the suit, but was awarded only one farthing. The costs of the trial bankrupted him. When Pound recommended The Gentle Art in his early, unpublished essay, he was formulating his own aesthetic positions, deeply interested in the issues raised by Whistler versus Ruskin. A major point of contention in the trial concerned what viewers had expected to see, which was decidedly not what Whistler had created. Evidence for Ruskin’s side was presented by Tom Taylor, the art critic of the Times; R. A. Frith, a popular painter and member of the Royal Academy; and Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Pre-Raphaelite artist and designer. Those speaking for Whistler’s side included Whistler himself. Testifying against Whistler, Burne-Jones criticised Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Nocturne: Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge: ‘In my opinion complete finish ought to be the object of all artists’ (Whistler [1890] 1967: 14). Whistler’s painting ‘shows no finish – it is simply a sketch’ (p. 15). Frith also testified: ‘the nocturne in black and gold is not a serious work to me . . . I cannot see anything of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of “Battersea Bridge’” (p. l7). By ‘complete finish’ and ‘true representation’, however, they meant the elaborate details they used in their own paintings to create illusionistic images that could be connected to a narrative. Whistler’s motives and methods were diametrically opposed to theirs. Not surprisingly, his results were different – and not understood. Théodore Duret, art critic and Whistler’s close friend, explained that Whistler and Burne-Jones were working ‘in the most opposite styles’ (Duret [1904] 1917: 48). He writes, at this period in England the painters had a vision that we can call literary. Their pictures sought, above all, to recommend themselves by subjects taken from mythology, legend, or history. They sought to represent persons engaged in welldetermined actions. They were intended to retain attention by an execution precise and carried to a high point of what was called ‘finish’. So Whistler, with his contrary ideas, could say of them: ‘They may be finished, but they have certainly never been begun’. (p. 40) In her critical biography, James McNeill Whistler, Hilary Taylor concurs: The lack of finish upset not only Burne-Jones and Ruskin, but also judge, jury and public at the trial. As well as this they were puzzled by the apparent lack of theme, the lack of any story which could be translated into words, the lack of

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Figure 8.1 James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, 1875. Oil on panel. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Gift of Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Photo: Bridgeman Image.

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any reference to beautiful or morally uplifting incident . . . But Whistler frankly divested his paintings of any outside sort of interest. The Battersea Bridge he called ‘a certain harmony of colour’, the Falling Rocket an ‘artistic arrangement’. (Taylor 1978: 102; see also Whistler [1890] 1967: 3, 8) In turn, Pound will put forward the concept of ‘artistic arrangement’ as the guiding principle for his own poetry to come. In 1912, he described such a goal. For poetry to live, ‘it must be conveyed by the art of the verse structure, by something which exalts the reader, making him feel that he is in contact with something arranged more finely than the commonplace’ (SP 41). As he conceives of Imagism and begins The Cantos, Pound devises a verse structure of poetic lines that do not follow a discursive narrative or logical sequence, but are arranged in such a way that readers themselves must make connections.1 The poet presents; the reader perceives – or doesn’t. In the case of Whistler’s early viewers in London, too few perceived what his ‘arrangements’ were meant to accomplish. Bankrupted by the costs of the trial, Whistler moved to Venice in 1879 when the Fine Arts Society, London, commissioned him to produce a series of twelve etchings. He returned to London the following year with enough etchings, paintings and pastels for an exhibition of the agreed-upon twelve, plus two more exhibitions at the Fine Arts Society (Taylor 1978: 105). Whistler, however, did not confine himself to a traditional presentation of his etchings. Instead, he describes his exhibition ‘Arrangement in Yellow and White’ in a letter to Thomas W. Story, 5 February 1883, explaining that he had conceptualised the entire exhibit in a new way, creating a complete environment that included the display of his work: White walls – of different whites – with yellow painted mouldings – not gilded! – Yellow velvet curtains – pale yellow matting – Yellow sofas and little chairs – lovely little table yellow – own design – with Yellow pot and Tiger lilly [sic]! Forty odd superb etchings round the White walls in their exquisite white frames – with their little butterflies – large White butterfly on yellow curtain – and Yellow Butterfly on white wall – and finally servant in yellow livery (!) handing Catalogue in brown paper cover same size as Ruskin pamphlet!!! And such a catalogue! – The last inspiration! – Sublime simply – Never such a thing thought of. (Whistler [1883] 2003–10) Whistler had conceived of a new way not only to present his work, but to turn the tables on hostile critics. In what he describes as his simply ‘Sublime’ and inspired catalogue, he offered a number of choice comments. Théodore Duret explains: While so many people trembled before any unfavorable judgments that the press and critics might pass on them, Whistler offered the spectacle of one of the most badly treated men coming to mock at what had been written about him . . . Under each number in his catalogue appeared quotations taken from a well-known writer or from an influential journal, and all hostile. (Duret [1904] 1917: 62) Duret continues, ‘Critics, accustomed to see artists trembling before them, found themselves attacked by Whistler, who turned their judgments into ridicule and showed up all their blunders’ (p. 72).

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Whistler employs this same technique in his account of the trial in The Gentle Art, using as marginalia quotations from critics, mainly Ruskin, to demonstrate their errors in judgement. For example, ‘“In Rembrandt’s system . . . the colours are all wrong from beginning to end” – John Ruskin’ (Whistler [1890] 1967: 11). ‘“Vulgarity, dullness, or impiety will indeed always express themselves through art, in brown and gray, as in Rembrandt” – John Ruskin’ (p. 12). Such remarks must have been particularly galling to Whistler, who studied and admired Rembrandt, and who had determined to explore the effects of blacks, browns and greys in such paintings as Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate. If he did not initially discover the method of exposing critical comments to scrutiny by direct quotation in The Gentle Art, Pound would have recognised the technique from knowing Whistler’s most likely source: Théophile Gautier’s sottisier. When Whistler arrived in Paris, ‘The prevailing atmosphere among the art students in Paris, [was] epitomized by two much discussed books, Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie Bohème and Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin’ (Taylor 1978: 7). Many of the statements and ideas from Gautier’s Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin are repeated or echoed in Pound’s critical writings as well as Whistler’s. For example, Gautier asserts that he wishes to expose the limitations of troublesome critics. One of his complaints is that critics do not themselves produce creative work; they disparage what they do not understand: What, after all, are these critics . . . ? They are simply men who have been at college with us, and who have evidently profited less by their studies than we, since they have never produced a work, and can do nothing but bespatter and spoil the work of others like veritable stymphalian vampires. Would it not be something to criticize the critics? (Gautier [1835] 1889: 42–3) Gautier suggests compiling a sottisier simply by collecting and presenting those critics’ statements: There would be enough to fill a daily paper of the largest size . . . [and] would provide authors with ample materials for taking their revenge, without involving any work but that of underlining the passages with pencil and reproducing them word for word. (Gautier [1835] 1889: 43) In a letter to Edgar Jepson from London, May 1918, Pound advocates Gautier’s (and Whistler’s) method of responding to objectionable critical views: ‘Expression of dislike is no use. Illustration of rottenness by single punk lines DOES the job’ (SL 135). In ‘How to Read’ (1928), Pound recalls his frustration with the British press and his effort to expose and ridicule what he called the ‘stupidities’ printed there: It was incredible that literate men – men literate enough, that is, to write the orderly paragraphs that they did write constantly in their papers – believed the stupidities that appeared there with such regularity. (Later, for two years, we ran fortnightly in the Egoist, the sort of fool-column that the French call a sottisier, needing nothing for it but quotations from the Times Literary Supplement.) . . . Later it struck me that the best history of painting in London was the National Gallery, and that the best history of literature, more particularly of poetry, would

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be a twelve-volume anthology in which each poem was chosen . . . because it contained an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression. (LE 17) Pound most likely used the concept of a sottisier as a framework for sections of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley when he himself wanted to create poetry that ‘contained an invention, a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression’ as well as to respond to pervasive, but obstructive critical opinions. For example, in the ‘E.P. Ode’ he seamlessly and deftly presents critics’ claims about E.P. that he thought were mistaken and misleading in the guise of a representative critic, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Presenting these critical pronouncements as a dramatic lyric, a familiar form from Robert Browning, Pound creates the character Mauberley. In a letter to William Carlos Williams from London, 21 October 1908, he explains the dramatic lyric is ‘the sort of thing I do . . . I paint my man as I conceive him. Et voilà tout!’ (SL 3–4). Intending to separate his own views from Mauberley’s, he writes to Felix Schelling from Paris, 1922: ‘(Of course I’m no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock. Mais passons.) Mauberley is a mere surface. Again a study in form, an attempt to condense the James novel’ (SL 180). Pound refers to James’s technique of allowing characters to reveal themselves through their own thoughts and words in order to create a portrait of their individual sensibility for the reader. Relying on the reader to see the difference between his own views and the views of his composite critic Mauberley, Pound encountered, like Whistler, a lack of understanding from those expecting more conventional expressions of ideas. In Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound cites Whistler as a fellow artist who would have identified with his goal of developing innovative artistic methods and would have been sympathetic to his cause: Our battle began with Whistler, the delicate, classical ‘Master’. I believe the Cerberi of the ‘Tate’ still consider pre-raphaelitism a violent and dangerous innovation, but we will leave that old war out of the question. Whistler was the only man working in England in the ‘Eighties’ who would have known what we are at and would have backed us against the mob. I do not mean to say there would have been absolute agreement, but he would not have sided with the mob, he would not have uttered ‘bêtises’. (G-B 119–20) Stung by continued disparaging comments from uncomprehending reviewers, Whistler responded to his critics and detractors in ‘Ten O’Clock’, a lecture he first gave in London, 20 February 1885, at ten o’clock in the evening. He repeated his talk at Cambridge University, 24 March 1885, and again at Oxford University on 30 April. The lecture was printed in 1888 and included in The Gentle Art (1890). Mallarmé translated it, and it was published in Paris, 1888. The ‘Ten O’Clock’ impressed Pound enough for him to recommend it to Hilda Doolittle, when they were both students in Philadelphia. In An End to Torment, she recalls, He brought me Whistler’s Ten O’ Clock. He scratched a gadfly, in imitation of Whistler’s butterfly, as a sort of signature in his books at that time. He was a composite James McNeill Whistler, Peer Gynt, and the victorious and defeated heroes of the William Morris poems and stories. (ET 23)

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H.D. doesn’t elaborate on what she might have learned from reading the ‘Ten O’Clock’, but what Pound took from Whistler’s work is evident in his critical writing to come. Théodore Duret explains, ‘The Ten O’Clock is made up of aphorisms, exalted pronouncements on art, and at the same time of epigrams and sarcasms in which the enemies of the author are most wittily described and abused’ (Duret [1904] 1917: 76). Published along with ‘Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics’ and other pieces in The Gentle Art, this collection of Whistler’s thoughts and critical comments can be viewed as a precursor to Pound’s early critical and aesthetic values, an account of the not so gentle struggle between those wanting to advance new ideas about art and literature on the one hand and those holding on to established, conventional views of what art is supposed to be on the other. By the time Pound arrived in London, 1908, the trial may have seemed long settled in Whistler’s favour. Pound entered the London scene, however, with the next stage of development in the arts: what would become known as modernism. The basic issues that Whistler confronted during the trial and in the press emerged again for Pound when he found himself engaged in a conflict between the current, prevailing views and his new way of thinking about and creating art. Meanwhile in America, the Whistler versus Ruskin trial could still be presented as a cause célèbre. When The Falling Rocket was shown in 1910 at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibition of forty works by Whistler, Lotus magazine critic and editor Gustav Kobbé gave this account: ‘I call “The Falling Rocket” epoch making. It marks the decline of an arrogant school of criticism and the beginning of Whistler’s influence on modern art’ (Kobbé 1910: 8). Kobbé emphasises the significance of this painting and notes the trial’s long-term effects, ‘the subject of one of the most sensational trials at law in which a picture ever was involved – a trial so far reaching in its results that “Nocturne in Black and Gold – the Falling Rocket” deserves to be called an epoch-making canvas’ (p. 11); and he defends Whistler for bringing suit against Ruskin: The suit was instituted with the high and serious purpose to determine whether an honest artist has a right to paint what he wants to in his own way, though that way differs from the standard of patron, critic, academy or public. (Kobbé 1910: 17) Kobbé adds that the trial was not only about artistic freedom, allowing individual expression, but also about how art should be evaluated. Ruskin had protested the amount Whistler asked for his work: two hundred guineas. Asked if he could justify that sum for the two days’ work he said it took him to produce the painting, Whistler replied, ‘I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime’ ([1890] 1967: 5). When he sold the painting to Untermyer in 1892, Whistler quadrupled the price. Kobbé recounts Whistler’s defiant response to Ruskin’s complaint that The Falling Rocket was overvalued: Ruskin had stigmatized the price of two hundred guineas asked for this picture by Whistler at the Grosvenor Gallery as ‘impudence’. He sold it for eight hundred guineas and wished Ruskin might know that the purchaser had valued it at ‘four pots of paint’. (Kobbé 1910: 24)

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Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket created another controversy regarding its subject matter. Kobbé reports that when Whistler was on the stand and asked his definition of a Nocturne, he replied: I have, perhaps, meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in the work, divesting the picture from any outside sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form and color first, and I make use of any incident of it which shall bring about a symmetrical result. Among my works are some night pieces; and I have chosen the word Nocturne because it generalizes and simplifies the whole set of them. (Kobbé 1910: 18) The explanation that Whistler’s work is an ‘arrangement of line, form and color first’ rather than ‘about’ a narrative, sentiment or moral lesson has led to describing it as an example of ‘art for art’s sake’. Associated in England with Walter Pater and the PreRaphaelites, ‘art for art’s sake’ became identified with a Cult of Beauty. Pater and the Pre-Raphaelite painters were preoccupied with ‘beauty’ in art, as were Whistler and Pound. The difference, however, is in how they defined beauty. The Pre-Raphaelite identification of beauty with mimetic details, immediate visual pleasure and surface appeal does not correspond to Whistler’s or Pound’s concept of beauty associated with compositional structure and creative design. In a letter to his mother from London in January 1909, Pound describes ‘two kinds of artists’: l. Waterhouse who painted perhaps the most beautiful pictures that have ever been made in england. but you go from them and see no more than you did before. . . . 2. Whistler & Turner. . . . when you first see their pictures you say ‘wot ‘T- ‘ell’ but when you leave the pictures you see beauty in mists, shadows, a hundred places where you never dreamed of seeing it before. The answer to their work is in nature. The artist is the maker of an ornament or a key as he chooses. (L/HP 151–2) Pound draws his distinction directly from Whistler’s in The Gentle Art: The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day . . . in arrangement of colours to treat a flower as his key, not as his model. (Whistler [1890] 1967: 128) In his essay on Dante in The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound recalls this distinction between the two sides represented in the Whistler–Ruskin trial; most significantly for his poetry, however, Pound now adds a literary example: There are two kinds of beautiful painting one may perhaps illustrate by the works of Burne-Jones and Whistler; one looks at the first kind of painting and is immediately

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delighted by its beauty; the second kind of painting, when first seen, puzzles one, but on leaving it, and going from the gallery one finds new beauty in natural things . . . Thus there are works of art which are beautiful objects and works of art which are keys or passwords admitting one to a deeper knowledge, to a finer perception of beauty; Dante’s work is of the second sort. (SR 154) That Pound reiterates this distinction between two kinds of beauty, identifying the ‘second sort’ with Dante’s work, underscores its importance to his own poetry. As commonly perceived at the time, ‘beauty’ in art was illustrated by the painting of Burne-Jones; whereas the other, the ‘finer perception of beauty’, Pound identified with Whistler, Dante and himself. A creative ‘arrangement’ that moves beyond expected representations, this other kind of beauty appeals to the imagination and the intellect – its basis is not sensual or emotional, but conceptual. In ‘Affirmations: Analysis of this Decade’ (1915) for The New Age, reprinted in Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound explains his concept: ‘the beauty, in so far as it is beauty of form, is the result of “planes in relation” . . . the artist, working in words only . . . works not with planes or with colours but with the names of objects and of properties’ (G-B 121). By juxtaposing those names or ‘using some device of simile or metaphor’ (p. 121), the poet can create meaningful arrangements that require the reader to arrive at new perceptions and insights. Such demanding methods for the reader may not have had immediate popular appeal; but Pound did not expect a wide audience: ‘There is another phase of “the revolt” as they call it, which is also traceable to Whistler. I mean to say “art for the intelligent”’ (p. 124). Trying to elucidate his concept, Pound admits, ‘One is destined to reiterations, and turns again to the “Ten O’Clock”’, reminding readers of Whistler’s statement, ‘Nature contains the elements’ (G-B 125); but the artist combines and arranges them. Indeed, in the ‘Ten O’Clock’, Whistler asserts, ‘Nature contains the elements, in colour and form of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music . . . But the artist is born to pick, and choose . . . that the result may be beautiful’ ([1890] 1967: 142–3). Whistler concludes, ‘the great qualities that distinguish the one work from the thousand, that make of the masterpiece the thing of beauty’ can be attributed to the artist’s ‘nobility of thought’ (p. 148). The work of art represents ‘the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him to carry out’ (p. 145). Notwithstanding his effusive language, Whistler expresses an idea that Pound will embrace: the most important element in a work is the inventive thought it conveys. The creative concept becomes the object of art itself. No longer valuing art mainly for its realistic details, narrative or moralistic content, Whistler valued ‘the amazing invention that shall have put form and colour into such perfect harmony’ (p. 147). Pound maintained his early sense of two perceptions of ‘beauty’ in the art criticism he wrote during his London years, as he promoted the Vorticist movement – and launched The Cantos. His concept of this alternative ‘beauty’ becomes a touchstone for judging art in a series of articles that he wrote for The Egoist in 1914. For example, in ‘The New Sculpture’ (February 1914), he praises the work of Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein: ‘It is not to be denied that Mr. Epstein has brought in a new beauty’ (EPVA 181). He also pointedly tries to distinguish between his concept of beauty and that associated with Walter Pater and aestheticism. In ‘The Caressability of the Greeks’ (March 1914), Pound defends ‘the new sculpture’ against the criticism that it lacks the

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appeal of Greek art. Noting that ‘I have not filled my page with ideas out of Pater and the Encyclopedia Britannica’ (EPVA 185), he asserts that the new work does not fit ‘the Paterine sentimentalesque Hellenism’: Regarding this pother about the Greeks: Some few of us are at last liberated from the idea that ‘THE BEAUTIFUL’ is the caressable, the physically attractive. Art is not particularly concerned with the caressable. The modern renaissance, or awakening, is very largely due to the fact that we have ceased to regard a work of art as good or bad in accordance with whether it approaches or recedes from the ‘Antique’, the ‘classical’ models. (EPVA 186) Identified with the Aesthetic movement in England, Whistler also wanted to distance himself from the principle of ‘art for art’s sake’. Hilary Taylor notes that in the ‘Ten O’Clock’, he rejects aestheticism: the critic and the philistine are taken to task. Whistler also attacks that newer phenomenon, the ‘aesthete’. . . . Whistler had by this date become identified in the public mind with the aesthetic cult . . . But in the ‘Ten o’clock’, he expresses a scorn for the aesthete as uncompromising as his scorn for the critic. He is conscious that a superficial demand for ‘art for art’s sake’ could become as empty, as misleading, as demoralizing for the artist as the more conventional expectation of art for the story’s sake. (Taylor 1978: 118–19) Since then, the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ has taken on various meanings and associations, and Whistler and Pound have continued to be identified with the phrase. However, both challenged accepted views – even those identified with ‘art for art’s sake’ in order to promote aesthetic values based on a work’s inventive concepts. Presenting new ways of creating and understanding art, they anticipated what would come to be called Conceptual Art. As an art movement recognised in the 1960s, Conceptual Art has been described as work that challenges established boundaries and expectations for art; work that privileges underlying idea over method of expression. Although individual styles varied widely, self-proclaimed conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth helped to establish and define the movement. Kosuth declared that Marcel Duchamp first ‘changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change – one from “appearance” to “conception” – was the beginning of “modern” art and the beginning of Conceptual Art’ ([1969] 1973: 80). Whistler and Pound, however, had already advocated such a change. In the Paris Review interview (1963), Donald Hall asked Pound about the value of form versus content in his poetry; and Pound replied, ‘I began the Cantos about 1904 . . . The problem was to get a form . . . [but] The what is so much more important than how’ (Hall 1977: 223). Pound adds that his interest in new aesthetic concepts began as a student in America: ‘I got started on the idea of comparative forms before I left America. A fellow named Poole did a book on composition.2 I did have some things in my head before I got to London’ (Hall 1977: 228). Pound’s early perception of changing artistic values can be traced not only to Whistler, but to another source of information about cutting-edge art: his friend William Brooke Smith. They met when Smith was an art student at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (1901–5)

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and Pound was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania (1901–3). Pound memorialises Smith in his first book, A Lume Spento, and in the Pisan Cantos, calling him ‘my first friend’ (LXXVII/485). Studying ceramics, industrial drawing and applied design, Smith most likely introduced Pound to current trends and issues in the visual and plastic arts. The Museum School prided itself on progressive education in the arts, including offering students the most advanced ideas about creating art. Such ideas had been formulated and promoted by Arthur Wesley Dow in his Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (1899). Called ‘the bible of art students and teachers’ (Lancaster 1969: 285), this work helped to change art education in America and was based on Dow’s study of Hokusai and Japanese ukiyo-e. It reflects his collaboration with Ernest Fenollosa at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Dow declares, in terms recalling those of Whistler and Pound, Composition, building up of harmony, is the fundamental process in all the fine arts . . . art should be approached through composition rather than through imitative drawing . . . This approach to art through structure is absolutely opposed to the time-honored approach through imitation. (Dow [1899] 1912: 3) Explaining that ‘Composition refers to the “putting together” of lines, masses and colors to make a harmony’ (p. 3), Dow concludes, ‘the relation among the parts of a composition is what we call Beauty’ (p. 50). Fenollosa shares this view, declaring in his 1896 essay ‘The Nature of Fine Art: I’ that art should be based on a ‘harmonious arrangement . . . a new kind of beauty . . . and a new faculty to create ideas in terms of it’ (1896: 671). Pound intended to call his first book La Fraisne (The Ash Tree) and dedicate it ‘to such as love this same beauty that I love’. However, when Smith died of consumption in 1908, just after Pound arrived in Venice, he renamed it: But sith one of them [those who love this same beauty] has gone out very quickly from amongst us it [is] given A Lume Spento (With Tapers Quenched) in memoriam eius mihi caritate primus William Brooke Smith Painter, Dreamer of dreams. ‘Eius mihi caritate primus’ (‘his, my first love’) may well be a reference to the love of each ‘for this same beauty’. Pound suggests a deep understanding between the two based on shared knowledge. Referring to this dedication in a letter to William Carlos Williams from London, 21 October 1908, Pound declares, ‘I don’t try to write for the public . . . [but] “To such as love this same beauty that I love, somewhat after my own fashion”’ (SL 6). Years later, Pound wrote to Williams: Any studio I was ever in was probably that of some friend or relative of Will Smith . . . How in Christ’s name he came to be in Phila. – and to know what he did know at the age of 17–25 – I don’t know. At any rate, thirteen years are gone; I haven’t replaced him and shan’t and no longer hope to. (SL 165)

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In the Pisan Cantos, Pound refers to the mountain visible from his prison camp in Pisa as if it were the sacred mountain in China near the birthplace of Confucius; and he recalls Smith, connecting in memory both references to distant sources of learning and inspiration: ‘and Mt Taishan is faint as the wraith of my first friend / who comes talking ceramics’ (LXXVII/485). Smith’s studies would have included the designs of Hokusai and the Japanese ceramics that had received so much attention in Europe, England and America. Creating meaning from ‘planes in relation’, Pound brings together other allusions to art and sacred sites that conjure up worlds for the imagination: ‘Sirmio / with Fujiyama above it’ (LXXVI/478). Here he recalls Sirmio, the promontory site of Catullus’ villa on Lake Garda, with the cloudy peak of Riva rising at the far end of the lake, connecting in memory his view of Mt Riva with Hokusai’s views of Mt Fuji. Distant places, times, art and poetry unite in the mind that conceptualises layered meaning as beauty.3 In ‘Ten O’Clock’, Whistler concludes his ‘story of the beautiful’, finding it ‘hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon – and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai – at the foot of Fusiyama’ ([1890] (1967): 159). Neither scale nor site determines beauty as Whistler conceives it; rather, his idea of beauty can be found in works of art from the magnificent to the miniature. Whistler and Pound developed this sense of a new kind of ‘beauty’ from the alternative aesthetic values introduced by work from Japan. Hokusai and Japanese art influenced Whistler and the Impressionists in the nineteenth century; that influence was also felt in art education in America thanks to such artists and educators as Arthur Dow, and available to Pound through his art student friend Will Smith. Whistler has been recognised as one of the first artists working in Paris to show an interest in art from Japan, but just how and when he first came in contact with Hokusai and the accompanying new aesthetic has been less well known. Whistler’s reputation was initially established in London and Paris when his first set of etchings was printed and well received. In the summer of 1858, he created the ‘Twelve Etchings from Nature’ that would come to be called ‘The French Set’. In November, Whistler had them printed by Auguste Delâtre,4 known as the most artistic printer in Paris. Delâtre was also the printer for Félix Bracquemond, who famously declared that he had discovered the work of Hokusai in 1856 on a visit to Delâtre’s print shop, where a shipment of porcelain from Japan had been wrapped in woodblockprinted pages from Hokusai’s Manga. Since Whistler and Bracquemond were friends, it is most likely that Whistler learned about Hokusai from Bracquemond, and much earlier than previously thought, earlier than when his interest in japonaiserie can be observed in his painting – for example, in La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine (1863–5) or Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (1864). It is worth noting that Pound praised the etchings of Whistler, Bracquemond and Jacquemart as art on the highest level, although a full discussion of his views on etching is not possible here. Artists in Whistler’s circle absorbed the Japanese influence in various ways; for example, Claude Monet and Edouard Manet developed their own individual styles as they explored different aspects of Hokusai’s work. Pound, however, identified with Whistler: ‘I trust the gentle reader is accustomed to take pleasure in “Whistler and the Japanese” . . . From Whistler and the Japanese, or Chinese . . . the English-speaking world that spreads itself into print, learned to enjoy “arrangements” of colours and masses’ (EPVA 192). Pound considered Whistler’s (and the Vorticists’) work more

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conceptually advanced than that of the Impressionist Monet: ‘The organization of forms is a much more energetic and creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack’ (G-B 92). By the mid-1860s, Whistler had a collection of Japanese porcelain vases, articles of clothing, fans and Hokusai prints that he drew from to use as props in his paintings. By the late 1870s and early 1880s, he had more thoroughly assimilated Hokusai’s techniques and incorporated them into such paintings as Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate. Lacking a Renaissance perspective, with their flattened picture plane and unusual depiction of space, these paintings disoriented and disturbed early viewers. They also departed from the expected colour palette: the jewel tones of Pre-Raphaelite painters, for example, or the Impressionist depiction of daylight falling through air, presenting scenes with various colour harmonies at different times and seasons. Rather, Whistler in these later paintings explores the colours of night, using colour tones recalling the paintings of Rembrandt and Franz Hals. Combining, synthesising, assimilating various styles and techniques from different cultures and centuries, Whistler not only created his own original art, but also offered Pound a model as he drew from eclectic sources to produce new work. Pound responded to seeing the 1912 Whistler exhibition at the Tate in London not only by sending Harriet Monroe the poem ‘To Whistler’ (Poetry 1912), but also in a letter from London, 18 August 1912: I send you all that I have on my desk – an overelaborate post-Browning ‘Imagiste’ affair and a note on the Whistler exhibit. I count him our only great artist . . . even this informal salute, drastic as it is, may not be out of place at the threshold of what I hope is an endeavor to carry into our American poetry the same sort of life and intensity which he infused into modern painting. (SL 10) As part of his ‘Patria Mia’ series for The New Age, Pound reviewed the Whistler exhibition, expressing his admiration for the artist’s ability to absorb various influences and assimilate many styles in order to create something original: I have gathered from the loan exhibit of Whistler’s paintings now at the Tate (September 1912), more courage for living than I have gathered from the Canal Bill or from any other manifest American energy whatsoever. . . . For the benefit of the reader who has not seen this exhibition I may as well say that it contains not the expected array of ‘Nocturnes’, but work in many styles, pastels of Greek motif, one pre-Raphaelite picture, and work after the Spanish, the northern and the Japanese models, and some earlier things I know not what school. The man’s life struggle was set before one. He had tried all means, he had spared himself nothing . . . What Whistler has proved once and for all, is that being born an American does not eternally damn a man or prevent him from the ultimate and highest achievement in the arts. (EPVA 1–2) Identifying with Whistler’s eclecticism, individuality and ability to learn from past work without imitating or limiting himself to any one style, Pound wanted to draw

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from, but move beyond, the tradition in order to create original, new work befitting his own temperament and time. In ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ (The New Age 1911–12), Pound describes two kinds of work: ‘the “symptomatic” and the “donative” . . . The symptomatic mirror obvious and apparent thought movements . . . But the “donative” author seems to draw down into the art something which was not in the art of his predecessors’ (SP 25). He is talking here about authors, but he also offers examples from the visual arts: Let us suppose a man, ignorant of painting, taken into a room containing a picture by Fra Angelico, a picture by Rembrandt, one by Velasquez, Memling, Rafael, Monet, Beardsley, Hokusai, Whistler, and a fine example of the art of some forgotten Egyptian. He is told . . . every one of these is master-work. (SP 24) Before being able to recognise the achievement inherent in master-work, Pound declares, ‘we must know, at least, a little of the various stages by which that art has grown from what it was to what it is’ (SP 25). The ‘donative’ author ‘is ever a disconnected phenomenon, but he does take some step further. He discovers, or, better, “he discriminates”. We advance by discriminations’ (SP 25). Arnaut Daniel, Pound suggests, exemplifies such a ‘donative’ author: He perceived, that is, that the beauty to be gotten from a similarity of line-terminations depends not upon their multiplicity, but upon their action the one upon the other; not upon frequency, but upon the manner of sequence and combination. (SP 26) Pound will adapt the idea of ‘sequence and combination’ for Imagism and the Cantos’ complex structure and combination of references – ‘planes in relation’. As amorphous as the terms seem, Pound continues to observe his categories of ‘donative’ and ‘symptomatic’, separating those who he believes have advanced their art from those who maintain the conventions, perpetuating established beliefs and methods. In his column ‘Art Notes’ for The New Age, Pound reviews an exhibition of pastels, complaining that not ‘any member of the society has gone so far as to attain even a passable mimicry of Whistler’s pastels’, and contrasts those two different approaches to making art: ‘the ability to copy a set mode with remarkable skill, and the ability to “do something new”; to “express”, or to open the beholder’s eyes to some visual (or perhaps even emotional or metaphysical) quality not before apprehended’ (EPVA 96). Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate (Figure 8.2) is an example of Whistler’s ‘ability to “do something new” . . . to open the beholder’s eyes’ to some ‘quality not before apprehended’, but not everyone so readily apprehended. In Pisa, Pound returns in memory to his London years, and relates an anecdote about this painting: So old Sauter front hall full of large photos of Bismark and Von Moltke so that during the Boer war Whistler used to come and talk strategy

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Figure 8.2 James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate, 1884. Oil on canvas. 90 × 48 in. (228.6 × 121.9cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: Purchase, 96.2.

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but that he, Sauter, never cd/ see the portrait of Sarasate ‘like a black fly hanging stuck to that canvas’ till one day after Whistler’s death I think it was Ysaÿe was with him who saw the Whistler for the first time and burst out: What a fiddle! (LXXX/523) These lines, arranged carefully as planes in relation, contain an entire argument about art theory and technique, recalling early critical reactions to Whistler’s work. The allusions point to the renowned violinists Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908) and Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931), as well as Whistler’s friend, Bavarian landscape and portrait painter George Sauter (1866–1937). A composer and virtuoso violinist born in Spain and residing in Paris, Sarasate performed to great acclaim throughout the world, giving many concerts in London. Ysaÿe, like Sarasate, was noted for his extraordinary technical skill and innovative playing techniques. Pound’s underlying concept in juxtaposing these allusions concerns how expert accomplishment and innovation may be understood and appreciated – or not. First publicly displayed at the Society of British Artists exhibition in London in the summer of 1885 and purchased for the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1896, the portrait of Sarasate was loaned by that museum for the 1905 London Memorial Exhibition. On the executive committee planning the exhibition, George Sauter could easily have seen the painting (possibly in Whistler’s studio) before it was sold to the Carnegie, and then revisited it with Ysaÿe at the Memorial Exhibition in 1905.5 Sauter’s remark, as reported, calls to mind the disparaging comments Whistler had continually endured and that remained in Pound’s memory. Whistler had responded to such criticism at the time: ‘When the painting was exhibited Whistler said, “they talk about my painting Sarasate standing in a coal cellar, and stupidities like that. I only know that he looked just as he does in my picture when I saw him play in St. James’s Hall”’ (Whistler [1883] 2003–10: n.p.). Like Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, the Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate created controversy with its unexpected colour tones and spatial organisation. Today, the painting is described on the Carnegie Museum of Art website with considerably more understanding: Held full face against the picture plane, the violin creates a spidery, two-dimensional extension of Sarasate’s own thin form. The figure, high on the picture plane against black, nearly shadowless surroundings generates considerable spatial ambiguity. Sarasate’s body appears to be floating before the viewer. (Carnegie Museum n.d.) Highly regarded at the time for his portraits and landscapes, Sauter used a palette of light, pastel colours to create luminescent effects; no wonder he was baffled by Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’ or ‘Arrangement in Black’. To him, the image of Sarasate could easily have looked like a ‘black fly hanging stuck to that canvas’, floating in a darkened space – as much an insult as the thrown ‘pot of paint’ or figure ‘standing in a coal

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cellar’. That is, until Eugène Ysaÿe looked at the painting and saw the violin: ‘What a fiddle!’ Ysaÿe, with a reputation as a virtuoso violinist comparable to Sarasate’s, would have noticed that exquisitely painted violin at the centre of the painting, with the finely drawn bow balancing the composition. Sarasate played on a 1724 Stradivari, which he donated to the Musée de la Musique in Paris; he also had another Stradivari which he gave to the Real Conservatorio Superior in Madrid. These violins may not have been donated at the time Ysaÿe saw the painting; but they were famous, as was their owner. In Whistler’s concert portrait, both Sarasate and his violin are centre stage, co-equal. Ysaÿe’s exclamation on seeing the minutely detailed, realistic image of that violin suggests he is responding to an authentic, convincing representation with the appreciation of a virtuoso, an expert on violins, if not art. The violin image also suggests that Whistler had the technique to paint mimetically whenever he wished. Pound must have known the double meaning of ‘fiddle’ as ‘fake’: ‘What a fraud!’ He well knew the insults that had been constantly directed at Whistler; he also thought that in musical performance, a certain level of technical skill is expected from performers and cannot be faked. In ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: On Technique’, he mentions Ysaÿe and the conductor Arthur Nikisch for their virtuosity, explaining that the need to develop technique for ‘the art of music’ is taken for granted, but as to ‘the art of poetry . . . it is not uncommon to hear practicing “poets” speak of “technique” as if it were a thing antipathetic to “poetry’” (SP 31). Pound, however, continues, ‘As for the arts and their technique – technique is the means of conveying an exact impression of exactly what one means in such a way as to exhilarate’ (SP 33). This description recalls his poetic goal of structuring his poetry by a sequence or arrangement of lines ‘which exalts the reader, making him feel that he is in contact with something arranged more finely than the commonplace’ (SP 41). With their innovative techniques, harmonising colours in Arrangement in Black and poetic lines as ‘planes in relation’, both Whistler and Pound met with resistance and incomprehension; but as the next passage in the Canto suggests, the abuse could have been worse. The allusions to the Boer War (1898–1900) and German heroes of unification, Otto von Bismark (1815–98) and Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91), provide another context and point to another kind of expertise – political and military; they remind us how views can change with time and location. As a German citizen, George Sauter was interned in Britain during World War I and deported in 1917. He never returned to Britain. Perspectives on art and literary styles change; attitudes about wars and nationality change – from Homer ‘who followed the greek armies to Troas’ to World War I, ‘Holland Park’ assaults and ‘Yurra Jurrmun!’ (LXXX/523). From his point of view in Pisa, at the end of World War II, Pound recalls the past. The mind moves through time; these lines give one pause. As Pound early adopted aesthetic values that led him to appreciate ‘master-work’ from different cultures and centuries, he, like Whistler, assumed the role of advocate for art that challenged conventional thought and redefined the concept of what art could be. As did Pound, Whistler absorbed multiple influences from many sources, including such writers as Théophile Gautier as well as French artists who themselves were influenced by Japanese artists and ukiyo-e masters such as Hokusai. Hokusai influenced work that can now be understood as part of the continuum of Conceptual Art. For example, he produced satirical books that combined image and text on the page, intended as a particular sort of cultural critique using irony, word play and witty

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parody. These books were well known in nineteenth-century Paris; their influence can be seen in later works by such artists as Aubrey Beardsley (who was introduced to Hokusai’s work by Whistler) and Francis Picabia. Identified with the Dada artists, Picabia has recently been described as an early conceptual artist, working in what Pound called the medium of thought itself. Pound recruited Picabia in Paris to be foreign editor of The Little Review, which subsequently published its Picabia issue, spring 1922. In Guide to Kulchur, Pound looked back on ‘Picabia’s acid’ as a satirical ‘instrument which cleared out whole racks full of rubbish’ (GK 88). In his seminal article ‘Dada Pound’, Richard Sieburth notes, ‘Pound’s evaluation of [Picabia] is remarkably astute. He makes no claim to present him as a painter or draughtsman in the traditional sense, but rather as what one might today call, a conceptual artist.’ Sieburth explains this conclusion by quoting from Pound’s 1921 ‘Parisian Literature’: Picabia works ‘in a definite medium, to which one may give an interim label of thought’ (Sieburth 1984: 50). Also, in her Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism, Rebecca Beasley cites Pound’s comments on Picabia as evidence that Pound is ‘an early advocate of conceptual art’ (Beasley 2007: 172). Hokusai, however, can be described as an even earlier practitioner of Conceptual Art. Again and again he changed the concept of what art could be. For example, he was asked to compete at court with a traditional brush-stroke artist to create a painting to be judged in front of the Shogun Iyenari. He proceeded by dipping the feet of a chicken in red paint and chasing it across a blue curve that he had painted on a paper scroll. Describing his work as a landscape of the Tatsuta River with floating red maple leaves, Hokusai won the competition (see Calza [2003] 2010: 128). Devising new ways to conceptualise and present art, Whistler helped lead the way as other Western artists continued to push the boundaries and reimagine artistic methods, materials and motives. In turn, as he developed innovative techniques for poetry, Pound received immediate inspiration and ideas from Whistler. Selecting, synthesising, assimilating, Pound created his own modernist style; but the one constant in the works he produced and valued is that he worked with innovative concepts that extended our understanding of the arts – based on the medium of thought itself – what would come to be known as Conceptual Art.

Notes 1. See Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: ‘The poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony . . . The process is metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations . . . Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry . . . This is more than analogy. It is identity of structure’ (CWCMP 60, 54). 2. Pound was probably referring to ‘Poore’: Henry Rankin Poore, Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures: A Handbook for Students and Lovers of Art (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1903). Poore refers to Arthur Wesley Dow’s text, Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1899) as a source and echoes many of Dow’s ideas. Poore was first identified by Anthony Ozturk (1987: 12). 3. Ezra to Homer Pound, April 1910, from Hotel Eden, Lake Garda, Sirmione: ‘Dear Dad, Mother is quite right in supposing that Sirmione is the lost paradise. I’ve been about a bit & I guess I know heaven when I arrive’ (L/HP 230). In a later letter, also April 1910, he

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draws two maps of the area, showing the Sirmio peninsula jutting out into Lake Garda, the mountains, the town of Sirmione, the Roman ruins among olive orchards and Hotel Eden (L/HP 233–4). 4. Auguste Delâtre (1822–1907) had the set printed at the premises of Edmond Gosselin (1849–1917), 71 Rue St Jacques, Paris, in an edition of twenty in November 1858. Then the plates were taken to London and printed under Delâtre’s direction in an edition of fifty sets a few weeks later (Lochnan 1984; Whistler [1883] 2003–10). 5. Whistler’s Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate was also exhibited in 1885 in Hamburg and Paris. In 1896, the painting was entered in the Carnegie International Exhibition and subsequently purchased for the Carnegie Museum of Art. On loan, it was displayed at the 1905 London Memorial Exhibition (22 February to 15 April), sponsored by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers. Whistler had founded this organisation in 1898 and served as the Society’s president until his death in 1903. Its first secretary was George Sauter, who became friends with Whistler after moving to London from the continent in 1889 (Stock 1970: 155). The 1905 Memorial Exhibition catalogue lists Sauter as a member of the executive committee for the exhibition as well as council member for the organisation. He could have first viewed the portrait of Sarasate, if not when it was exhibited abroad in the late 1880s, then in Whistler’s studio before it was sold to the Carnegie Art Institute. In 1905 ‘after Whistler’s death’ (LXXX/523), he could easily have accompanied Ysaÿe on a visit to the 1905 Memorial Exhibition and reported the event some time later to Pound, when they were neighbours in Kensington. (Pound moved from 10 Church Walk to 5 Holland Park Chambers in 1914; Sauter lived nearby at 1 Holland Park Avenue W.) My thanks to Walter Baumann for a stimulating correspondence about George Sauter.

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9 Ezra Pound and Walter Rummel Charles Timbrell

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he German-American pianist and composer Walter Morse Rummel (1887–1953) was one of Pound’s closest friends from 1910 until about 1914. Born in Berlin, his father was Franz Rummel, a renowned pianist, and his mother was Cornelia (‘Leila’) Morse, a daughter of the American painter and inventor of the telegraph Samuel F. B. Morse. During his teens, Rummel studied with two leading teachers in Berlin, pianist Leopold Godowsky and composer Hugo Kaun. In 1907, after his father’s early demise, he acquired American citizenship through his mother. In October 1908, he made a brilliant double debut in Berlin as pianist and composer, receiving many laudatory reviews. Late in 1909, he decided to move to Paris, where he hoped to study with Debussy, whose music strongly attracted him.

Figure 9.1 Walter Rummel in his Paris apartment, c. 1917. Author’s collection. Gift of Omar Pound. The date of Rummel’s first meeting with Pound cannot be determined precisely. Presumably it occurred during one of Rummel’s trips to the United States in 1905, 1906 or 1907, and possibly they were introduced by a mutual friend, the American pianist and composer Katherine Ruth Heyman. (See ‘Ezra Pound and Old Music’ in this volume.)1 What is known is that in March 1910, Pound stayed at Rummel’s Paris apartment for two days while en route to Italy. Probably soon after that, Rummel composed a setting of Pound’s translation from Lope de Vega, ‘A Song of the Virgin Mother’, scored for voice, strings, flutes, harp and trumpet. Unfortunately, the work

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is lost.2 On 7 June, Pound attended a recital that Rummel gave at Bechstein Hall in London with the American contralto Janet Spencer, whose performance included songs by Schumann, Strauss, Debussy, Heyman and Rummel. Rummel visited the US during the summer and autumn of 1910, performing a recital on 26 July in Stockbridge, MA, which included the American premieres of four of Debussy’s Préludes. In early September, he was the guest of Pound and his family at the latter’s summer home in Swarthmore, PA. Another guest was Pound’s friend Hilda Doolittle (‘H.D.’), not yet an established poet. Years later, she recalled the ‘sheer bliss’ of Rummel’s piano performances at the house (Carpenter 1988: 150). Pound also recalled the Swarthmore days warmly, observing that ‘Walter and I had two weeks at Swarthmore that mattered’ (L/DS 38). For his part, Rummel wrote to Pound to thank him for giving him ‘much strength’ at that time, and for encouraging his artistic ‘awakening’ (Pound 1988a: 52). Probably stemming from this period was Pound’s lovely poetic tribute to Rummel’s piano playing, ‘Maestro di Tocar (W. R.)’ from Canzoni, recalling how the ‘magic’ from his hands could cause hearts and loves to ‘rise in that space of sound and melt away’. Their discussions in Swarthmore undoubtedly included possible future collaborations. One important such project took place from March until June 1911, when Pound stayed at Rummel’s apartment in Paris and they did research together on troubadour songs. Later in the year they shared a house in London for about a month, at 39 Addison Road North, possibly putting final touches to their project. In 1913, they published nine troubadour songs in a collection entitled Hesternae Rosae (see ‘Ezra Pound and Old Music’ in this volume). Around the time of this collaboration, Rummel composed Three Songs of Ezra Pound (Pound and Rummel 1911), consisting of ‘Madrigale’, ‘Au Bal Masqué’ and ‘Aria’. All three poems are particularly suited for musical settings. The simplest is ‘Madrigale’, with an accompaniment of slow, quiet chords that support lovely, restrained melodies. ‘Au Bal Masqué’ is marked ‘serenade-like, very naughtily’, beginning with slightly dissonant repeated chords played quietly and rather fast in the upper register of the piano. The central section is a waltz based on a rocking twonote idea, marked ‘swaying dreamingly’ at the words ‘Light kisses, not over long!’ In ‘Aria’, the vocal line consists of variants of a simple melody supported by fast and light trills and arpeggios. Because Pound’s poem ‘Au Bal Masqué’ exists only in Rummel’s song, its text should be quoted here in full: Kiss ye lightly, kiss ye kindly, Light the flame it burneth blindly. I have kissed six ways in seven of the way kisses are given. Be your kisses lightly given! Light kisses, not over long! over long, over long, bringeth sorrow to the song and pain too great for soon forgetting. And I have been in Arcady.

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Like many of Rummel’s forty published songs, these three are pleasant without being particularly distinctive. Years later, Pound wrote to his father that ‘enforchoonately Walter did set the verses to music, but fortunately they are not easy to get’ (L/HP 652). Much finer is Rummel’s setting of ‘The Return’, composed a year later.3 The piano writing matches the text in its sparseness, with slow, solemn, repeated chords that grow in intensity until the fortissimo climax on the barbaric shouts of ‘Haie! Haie!’, then fading to a whisper at the end, to: ‘These were the souls of blood, / Slow on the leash, / pallid the leash-men!’ At this point, mention should be made of some of the friends Pound and Rummel had in common. In London in late January 1909 Pound met the writer Olivia Shakespear, who introduced him to her daughter, Dorothy, whom he would later marry. Olivia entertained frequently in her Kensington home, and her circle came to include Pound, Rummel, Yeats, H.D., Richard Aldington, Frederic Manning, Rabindranath Tagore and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. In May 1911, Pound introduced Rummel to Yeats, a poet Rummel had long admired, having set ‘When We Are Old’ as early as 1904. Rummel became fast friends with the Yeatses, staying with them several times in Dublin and in 1917 composing the music for his play The Dreaming of the Bones (Yeats 1921). In March 1910, Rummel introduced Pound to Margaret Cravens, a single 30-yearold American studying music in Paris, and the three of them became quite close. Cravens studied piano with Harold Bauer and Thérèse Chaigneau, a French pianist whom Rummel would marry two years later. Pound must have greatly impressed Cravens, for she immediately offered to put a large sum of money at his disposal annually, to finance his travels and generally make his life easier. The history of their friendship is a complicated and touching one, lasting from March 1910 until her suicide in early June 1912. She left farewell letters to Pound (who was travelling on his way to Provence at the time) and to Rummel. The lengthy letter to Rummel suggests that she had harboured a secret, frustrated love for him. The announcement of his forthcoming marriage to Chaigneau may well have precipitated her suicide. On the music rack of her piano was the last music she had played, Rummel’s Three Songs of Ezra Pound, inscribed to her by him on the day before her death.4 Rummel gave recitals for the Shakespears’ guests on several occasions. Shortly before one such event, Dorothy wrote to Pound to chastise him quite sharply for trying to dictate the guest list and ‘interfere with other peoples’ drawing rooms’ (L/DS 232– 3). At another soirée, in November 1911, Rummel played Debussy and Schumann, probably Debussy’s Images, Book II (which included ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ and ‘Poissons d’or’) and Schumann’s great, three-movement Fantaisie, Op. 17, pieces that were in Rummel’s repertoire at the time. This performance – or possibly one he gave around the same time at the home of Eva Fowler – was the inspiration for Pound’s two-part poem ‘Effects of Music Upon a Company of People’, soon to be published in Ripostes.5 The first part of the poem is subtitled ‘Deux Mouvements – 1. Temple qui fut. 2. Poissons d’or’; and the second part is headed ‘From a Thing by Schumann’. The key image of ‘Temple qui fut’ is of souls that move and vibrate like the petals of multicoloured flowers. The abrupt final line mocks the audience: ‘O crowd of foolish people!’ Equally perplexing is ‘Poissons d’or’, with its image of flower petals that ‘twine, bend, bow’. In ‘From a Thing by Schumann’, the concern is with souls, fabrics

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(satin, silk, gauze, gold threads) and precipitation (rain, hail and snow). Again, the final line is abrupt and dismissive: ‘The usual, dull, theatrical!’ The ‘effects of music’ might as well have been caused by observing the flowered dresses of the ladies in the audience, the curtains in the room and the weather outside. The poems are curiously abstract, especially coming from a future music critic. Rummel was in Debussy’s circle by 1911, performing in recitals with him and playing the premieres of at least ten of his pieces.6 This advocacy may have rubbed off on Pound during the years when he and Rummel were best friends. On 22 May 1911, they attended the premiere of Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, and Pound pronounced the music ‘very wonderful’ (L/HP 251). On another occasion, Pound wrote that he had heard Debussy ‘insuperably leading a chorus in Paris in his Charles d’Orléans songs’ (EPM 96n.). Shortly after Debussy’s death in 1918, Pound wrote an article that praised his ‘fantastic colour-suggestion’, ‘absolute mastery in arranging for voices and strings’ and ‘unique orchestration’ (EPM 96–7). Later, however, under the influence of Arnold Dolmetsch and the revival of ‘old music’, Pound became quite intolerant of Impressionism. (See ‘Ezra Pound and Old Music’ in this volume.) After a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1921, he wrote to his colleague Agnes Bedford that Debussy’s opera encouraged him ‘to tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do the thing on two tins and washboard. Anything rather than that mush of hysteria, Scandinavia strained through Belgium plus French Schwärmerei’ (SL 167). Rummel always had a deep interest in spiritual matters, both historical and current, and his notebooks are filled with long pages copied from philosophers ranging from Aquinas to Rudolf Steiner. He also shared interests in theosophy, occultism, table-turning and other psychic matters with many of his friends, including Dorothy, Olivia, Yeats, Georgie Hyde-Lees, Katherine Ruth Heyman, H.D., Eva Fowler and G. R. S. Mead. Pound, however, seems to have had little concern with these subjects, aside from a passing interest in astrology and attendance at some of Mead’s lectures for the Quest Society (for which he gave a lecture in 1912 on the origins of the troubadour love-cult; Stock 1970: 113).7 Rummel, in a letter explaining certain esoteric signs and symbols to Dorothy, concluded by suggesting that she might ask Ezra for further elucidation. But, he warned her, ‘If he begins “Boo-hooing”, it’s something worthwhile. Occult things, especially when they are worthwhile, have that effect on him it seems!!’8 Rummel and Pound drifted apart after their respective marriages in 1912 and 1914. Pound, who had once considered Rummel a very promising composer, observed in 1925 that he was ‘a person of interest until the war, etc etc finally reduced him to the status of a pianist. He now fills the Albert Hall in London, and gets a sapphire tie-pin each year from the Belgian Royal Family’ (Stock 1970: 259). The last time they saw one another is uncertain because of Pound’s contradictory recollections. In a letter to H.D. in 1948, he wrote that he ‘last saw W[alter] about ’27 settin’ in a lot of baronial furnichoor and polaaar baaar rug? with dazzlin’ grass (or black) widder of I think finnish general’.9 But in 1959, in a letter to another correspondent, he wrote that the last time had been ‘when the BBC was getting ready to do my Villon [that is, October 1931]’.10 A still later date of 1933 is contained in a letter he wrote to Dorothy Pound (EPP II 183). In any case, one of their last meetings was remembered in these lines from Canto LXXX:

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and dear Walter was sitting amid the spoils of Finlandia a good deal of polar white but the gas cut off. (LXXX/513) This passage, and the words in the letter to H.D., are explained by the fact that the ‘dazzlin’’ woman was Rummel’s soon-to-be wife, an attractive Russian poetess named Francesca Erik, who was getting a divorce from an Estonian exporter and ship owner. The polar bear rug and the furniture, which appear in later photographs of his home, would have been the spoils of the divorce, and Estonia was misremembered as Finland. The gas was probably turned off because of Rummel’s notoriously casual approach to practical matters (Timbrell 1990: 109–10). Pound’s last communication with Rummel was in 1936, when he wrote from Rapallo to request a copy of the edition of Vivaldi’s cello sonatas that Rummel had co-edited in 1916 with the French cellist Marguerite Piazza-Chaigneau.11 It is appropriate to conclude with a few remarks about Rummel’s colourful later life. In 1918, he left his first wife after he became romantically and professionally attached to the dancer Isadora Duncan, with whom he gave joint recitals during the next three years. In the 1920s, he moved to London and married an English woman, and by the 1930s he enjoyed international acclaim as a soloist, noted especially for his interpretations of Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin. In 1927, he met Francesca, who became his third wife, and in 1935 they moved to Brussels. There they enjoyed the friendship of Queen Elisabeth and the patronage of King Leopold III, whose mistress Francesca became for several years – an arrangement that Rummel reluctantly agreed to in part because Leopold provided them with a large, renovated house in the centre of the city. Rummel performed frequently in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, travelling with a special passport after his American one had been confiscated. In 1944, he accepted German citizenship in order to continue his career. This led to an investigation by the FBI and a denunciation by the American government. After the war, he and Francesca moved back to France, where he attempted to revive his career. Rummel died of cancer on 2 May 1953 and is buried in a communal artists’ grave in Bordeaux. Pound made a passing reference to his death in Canto CIV.

Notes 1. Pound first met Heyman in 1904, while he was at Hamilton College (Carpenter 1988: 48). In 1906, Rummel made a song setting of Heyman’s poem ‘Across the Hills’ (New York: G. Schirmer, 1907), and in 1907, Heyman played the Berlin premiere of Rummel’s piano piece ‘The Voice of the Forest’ (Leipzig: Leuckart, 1907). 2. The manuscript of this composition is listed in a catalogue of Rummel’s early works in Monthly Musical Record, 1 November 1911, p. 285. It is possible that this work is alluded to in a letter of 24 February 1915 from Frederic Manning to Eva Sumner: ‘I loved what you wrote to me of Walter’s [Rummel] cantata’ (Marwil 1988: 96). 3. The Return (London: Augener, 1913). 4. See Pound (1988a: passim). H.D.’s autobiographical novel Asphodel (1992; written in 1921–2 and published posthumously) recounts the relationships of Rummel, Pound, Cravens, Chaigneau, H.D., and others, with their names changed.

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5. See Stock (1970: 107), where a performance at the Shakespear home is mentioned; also L/ DS 80. Regarding a performance at Eva’s Fowler’s home, see Saddlemyer (2002: 668n.45). 6. Regarding Rummel’s relations with Debussy, see Timbrell (1992: 399–406). 7. Pound reworked the lecture as Chapter 5 of The Spirit of Romance. 8. Walter Morse Rummel to Dorothy Shakespear, 12 February 1912. (YCAL MSS 43, 45/1970). 9. Ezra Pound to H. D., 4 November 1948 from Pound to H.D. (YCAL MSS 24 14/484–9). 10. Ezra Pound to N. V. Dagg, 3 July 1909. (YCAL MSS 43 11/509–11). 11. Walter Morse Rummel to Ezra Pound, 19 April 1936. (YCAL MSS 43 45/1970).

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10 ‘Museum Pieces’: Laurence Binyon, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts Justin Kishbaugh

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obert Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on St Laurence’s Day, 10 August 1869. Both of his parents were of Quaker lineage, and his father served as an Anglican clergyman. Binyon’s biographer, John Hatcher, suggests that he had little support for his artistic inclinations at home, and, as a result, may have chosen to forsake his first name, Robert, which was the name of his maternal grandfather, to go instead by his middle name, Laurence, after the saint on whose holiday his birthday fell (1995: 1, 7). Binyon’s education began at King Edward’s Grammar School and continued at the Godolphin School, St Paul’s, and, ultimately, Trinity College, Oxford. While at St Paul’s, Binyon became a Foundation scholar – his studies focused almost exclusively on Latin and Greek with a smattering of English history and literature: he twice won the school’s Milton prize for his original poetry. At Oxford, he continued to write poetry, which led to his being awarded the school’s prestigious Newdigate prize for his poem Persephone and the publication of a small collection of poetry entitled Primavera that featured his work along with that of three of his closest friends: Manmohan Ghose, Stephen Phillips and Arthur Cripps (Hatcher 1995: 3, 13, 29–36). Graduating from Oxford in June 1892, Binyon applied for a position in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. His lack of familiarity with the German language, however, led to his not being offered the job. The following June, though, he applied for a different vacancy at the Museum and, this time, was hired as a Second Class Assistant in the Department of Printed Books. Yet in April 1895, less than two years after becoming a Museum employee, he applied for and was transferred to fill a vacancy in the Department of Prints and Drawings (Hatcher 1995: 37–40). At the time, the Museum itself functioned as something of a cultural centre in London, but the Department of Prints and Drawings – commonly known as ‘the Print Room’ – introduced Binyon to some of the most interesting and important of his artistic contemporaries. Names as notable as Herbert Horne, Selwyn Image, W. B. Yeats, Augustus John, Robert Bridges, Lionel Johnson and Thomas Sturge Moore, for instance, dotted the pages of the Print Room guest book within the first two years of Binyon’s employment there (Hatcher 1995: 42). Daily, Binyon and his colleagues, along with several of the Museum denizens, would gather at the Vienna Café to have lunch and discuss art. These meetings at ‘The Austrian’, as Binyon and the other regulars called it, created a sense of community among the artists in London at the time and allowed for interesting types of cross-fertilisations. In fact, in Canto LXXX,

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Pound remembers as the end of an era the time when the café closed its doors in 1914 due to its owner and members of its staff being interned at the beginning of World War I (Hatcher 1995: 209): And also near the museum they served it mit Schlag in those days (pre 1914) the loss of that café meant the end of a B. M. era (British Museum era) (LXXX/526) When Pound arrived in London in September 1908, he wasted no time in attempting to find publishers for his work. Almost immediately, he found in Pollock & Co., a publisher for his A Quinzaine for This Yule. Once the hundred copies of that text sold out, though, Elkin Mathews stepped in and printed a second run. Shortly thereafter, Mathews also signed on to publish Pound’s next collection, Personae (Wilhelm 1990: 9–11). Notably, Mathews also served as Binyon’s publisher, and, through him, Pound and Binyon met in February 1909. Following that meeting, Pound would write to his father that his new acquaintance ‘seems to be one of the best loved men in London’; he recognised ‘a sort of pervading slow charm in him & his work’ (L/HP 158). That slowness would leave its impression upon Pound so much that in Canto LXXXVII he recalls: Only sequoias are slow enough. BinBin ‘is beauty’. ‘Slowness is beauty.’ (LXXXVII/592) At the time of meeting Pound, Binyon was preparing his series of lectures on ‘Art & Thought in East & West’ to be held in Kensington’s Albert Hall on the consecutive Wednesday afternoons of 10, 17, 24 and 31 March 1909 (Hatcher 1995: 159). Binyon gave Pound a ticket for the first, which the poet found ‘intensely interesting’ (L/HP 164), and then sent him a ticket for one of the remaining three, which Pound also seems to have attended, reporting back to his father in late March that he had ‘just come from hearing Binyon lecture, & meeting Sturge Moore’ (L/HP 164). Those lectures formally introduced Pound to the treasures and quality of Asian art and kindled an interest in him that would, in large part, shape his subsequent poetics and worldview. Richard Rupert Arrowsmith argues, however, that the ‘narrative strategy’ of Binyon’s lectures, which ‘juxtapose[d] particularly productive epochs in civilizations remote from one another in time and space in an attempt to uncover correspondences’, must have been, for Pound, ‘equally as compelling as the information on East Asian art itself, for he would later use a comparable system of “subject rhymes” to give structure to the eclectic historical sweep of his Cantos project’ (2011: 30). Thus, in both the form and content of Binyon’s lectures, Pound may have located the earliest intimations of a new approach to poetry (Figure 10.1). That Pound would report meeting Sturge Moore on the same day he attended one of Binyon’s lectures is not surprising as Binyon is likely to have acted as the conduit for

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Figure 10.1 Edmund Dulac, Laurence Binyon as Sharaku Might Have Seen Him. Woodcut print. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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that meeting as he also did with another important figure for Pound: Wyndham Lewis. Binyon knew Lewis from the latter’s days as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art when he visited the Print Room to study and find inspiration. Of course, following their meeting, Pound and Lewis would go on to create the aggressively avant-garde artistic movement of Vorticism, but they were first brought nose to nose by their older representatives, Binyon and Moore. Many years later in Pisa, Pound would again harken back to that meeting: So it is to Mr Binyon that I owe, initially, Mr Lewis, Mr P. Wyndham Lewis. His bull-dog, me, as it were against old Sturge M’s bull-dog, Mr T. Sturge Moore’s bull dog, (LXXX/527) The effects of Binyon’s own writing and work at the museum on Pound have been the subject of much scholarship. Woon-Ping Chin Holaday, for instance, argues that elements of Binyon’s 1908 publication Painting in the Far East may have shaped Pound’s approach to poetry. In particular, Holaday identifies striking similarities between Binyon’s description of the Eight Views of Hsiao and Hsiang, and the images in Pound’s Canto XLIX – the ‘Seven Lakes Canto’ (1977: 33). To be exact, Holaday persuasively compares the following lines from Binyon: A range of mountains lifts its rugged outline in the twilight, the summits accentuated and distinct against the pale sky, the lower parts lost in mist, among which woods emerge or melt along the uneven slopes. Somewhere among those woods, on high ground, the curved roof of a temple is visible. It is just that silent hour when travelers say to themselves, ‘The day is done’, and to their ears comes from the distance the expected evening bell. (Binyon 1908: 135) with the second stanza from Canto XLIX: Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes against sunset Evening is like a curtain of cloud, a blurr above ripples; and through it sharp long spikes of cinnamon, a cold tune amid reeds. Behind hill the monk’s bell borne on the wind. (XLIX/244) Yet Binyon may have not only described those scenes for Pound but also provided the opportunity for him to see them in person for, from 1910 to 1912, the British Museum held an Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings that Binyon curated and organised. For that exhibition, Binyon also wrote and published a Guide to an Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings in which he described the works on display. Interestingly, in searching through that catalogue, Holaday notes that

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a Japanese version of the same Eight Views of Hsiao and Hsiang (or Xiao and Xiang) by the artist Sesson was held by the Museum and included in the exhibition. Although no conclusive evidence that Pound attended the exhibit has been found, Zhaoming Qian identifies that Pound was in London at the time and ‘[b]y early 1911 so many reviews and articles had been published on the exhibition that few Londoners with any interest in China could have remained oblivious to its attraction’. He ultimately concludes: ‘Pound almost certainly saw the show’ (2003a: 12). Based on the sheer variety of opportunities that Binyon produced for Pound to encounter the original versions of those ‘Eight Views’, one can certainly argue, as Holaday does, that even if not a direct inspiration, Binyon’s writing and curatorial work may have subconsciously informed Pound’s presentation of the Seven Lakes. Interestingly, Arrowsmith also locates a possible source for Canto XLIX in a different series of ‘eight views’ that Binyon acquired for the British Museum in 1907. Specifically entitled Eight Views of Omi, these Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige followed in the tradition of the Eight Views of Hsiao and Hsiang and include the individual works ‘Evening Bell at Mii Temple’, ‘Autumn Moon at Ishiyama Temple’ and ‘Descending Geese at Katada’ (Arrowsmith 2010: 157–8). In the imagery of the first piece, Arrowsmith finds in the titular ‘evening bell’ a potential origin for Pound’s ‘monk’s bell’ as quoted in the section above. More convincingly, though, as temple bells seem about as ubiquitous as the series of eight views in the art Binyon procured, Arrowsmith also identifies that ‘Autumn Moon at Ishiyama Temple’, which follows ‘Evening Bell at Mii Temple’ in the sequence of views, features a temple ‘cast in shadow by a foothill that decisively separates it from the nearby village and lakeshore’ (p. 202). Rather than standing in full view on the mountain as it appears in both Binyon’s description of the Eight Views of Hsiao and Hsiang and the screen book Pound sent for and received from his parents in 1928, the temple in this Hiroshige print, obscured as it is by the mountain, may explain why the line in Canto XLIX reads, ‘behind hill the monk’s bell’. To further add to his argument, Arrowsmith finds in the ‘intense flash of orange and red sky above freezing mist’ featured in another print from the Hiroshige series, Descending Geese at Katada, the possible origins of the ‘fire from frozen cloud’ that also appears in Canto XLIX (2010: 203; XLIX/244). Zhaoming Qian, furthermore, places a great amount of importance on a handscroll entitled The Admonitions of the Instructress to Court Ladies that Binyon featured in that Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings. Specifically, Qian argues that the images in that scroll, which visualise Confucian morals, may have initiated Pound’s interest in the Chinese philosopher’s teachings. Qian further surmises that Admonitions may have influenced Pound’s decisions regarding which poems from Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature he would rework in an Imagist manner. In particular, Qian draws a connection between Pound’s choice to adapt ‘Fan Piece, for Her Imperial Lord’, whose speaker is Lady Ban, and the fact that one of the panels in Admonitions also features Lady Ban as its subject (Qian 2003a: 48–54). As Holaday notes, multiple pictures of the Buddhist goddess Kuanon (alternatively, ‘Kannon’, ‘Kuan-yin’, ‘Kwanyin’, ‘Kwannon’ or ‘Guanyin’) were also included in that exhibition. Focusing on exhibits 39 and 44, Holaday finds similarities between the painted representations of Kuanon in water scenes and her appearance and conflation with Botticelli’s Venus in Pound’s Canto LXXIV (1977: 33):

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justin kishbaugh XAPITEΣ possibly in the soft air with the mast held by the left hand in this air as of Kuanon enigma forgetting the times and seasons but this air brought her ashore a la marina with the great shell borne on the seawaves nautilis biancastra. (LXXIV/463)

Holaday believes those images in Binyon’s exhibit may have influenced Pound’s representation of Kuanon in the section quoted above because images of her in water scenes are extremely rare, as most conventional images present her against the sky or clouds or in stand-alone sculptures (Holaday 1977: 35). In his book The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, Zhaoming Qian (2003b) also suggests that the version of ‘Kwannon’ that Pound included in ‘Three Cantos I’ could have been amalgamated from the images offered in exhibit numbers 25, 44 and 80, whereas Ron Bush argues that, by exposing Pound to images of Kuanon and correlating them with representations of the Christian Madonna, Binyon influenced Pound’s depictions of Kuanon in not only the Pisan Cantos and the first of the ‘Three Cantos’, but also, and in a more prominent manner, his unfinished Italian Cantos and notebook manuscripts for the Pisan Cantos (Bush 2013: 185–213). Arrowsmith, on the other hand, thinks an image of Kuanon that appeared on a slide in one of Binyon’s Albert Hall lectures may have inspired another appearance of the goddess in The Cantos. Based on Binyon’s lecture notes, Arrowsmith deduces that the curator discussed and projected an image of the Yumedono Kuanon that Ernest Fenollosa uncovered in the 1880s. That particular representation, however, differs from most in that the bodhisattva holds a precious jewel with both hands near her heart – a pose that Arrowsmith explains led to the sculpture’s official title of Nyoirin Kuanon or ‘Kuanon holding the magic wish-granting jewel’. That jewel, Arrowsmith speculates, could be the very stone to which Pound’s mind wandered in Pisa when he wrote in Canto LXXIV ‘Kuanon, this stone bringeth sleep’ (Arrowsmith 2010: 210–12; LXXIV/455). Thus, while numerous competing theories exist on how Binyon may have influenced Pound’s conception and subsequent images of Kuanon, one might best conclude that Binyon provided a variety of opportunities for Pound to become acquainted with the bodhisattva of compassion and they resonated with him so much that he often returned to them and her in moments of both struggle and transcendence. In yet another painting included in Binyon’s Exhibition of Chinese and Japanese Paintings, Qian also locates a potential source for Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’. To make his point, Qian draws attention to A Lady Meditating by a Lake, which, in only a few suggestive strokes, uses ‘[t]he blossoming trees on the same “flattened” plane of attention . . . to equate the lady’s state of mind’ (2003a: 13). Arrowsmith, however, notes that Pound may have also found inspiration for his famous two-line poem in a Hokusai painting that arrived at the Print Room shortly prior to the poet’s first visit. The painting, entitled Poem by Ono no Komachi (IX), was a companion piece for a Komachi poem that was the tenth inclusion in the Japanese anthology Ogura hyakunin isshu or ‘One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets’. Binyon had a translation of the Komachi poem completed and included it in his 1916 Catalogue

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of Japanese and Chinese Prints. The translation reads: ‘While I have been sauntering through / the world, looking upon its vanities, lo! / My flower has faded and the time of the long rains come’ – and, to visualise those lines, Hokusai presents a man with a broom clearing the cherry petals that have fallen from an overarching tree during the April rains. Arrowsmith contends, then, that Pound may have discovered the impetus for one of his most enduring and ‘imagistic’ poems in the triad of that poem, its accompanying image and the themes of ephemerality they present (2010: 119–22). Arrowsmith extrapolates his argument even further, though, when he points out that Pound begins his book The Classic Noh Theater of Japan (Pound and Fenollosa 1959) with two plays based on Komachi’s life, Sotoba Komachi and Kayoi Komachi, and, in the first of those plays, the poet’s extreme pruning of the text transforms a Buddhist tale of redemption into a statement on the impermanence of physical beauty. In Pound’s return to and prioritisation of Komachi and his threading of a theme of transience from her poem to a play that focuses on her life, Arrowsmith finds further reason to identify Komachi’s poem and Hokusai’s illustration of it as generative elements in Pound’s composing of ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (2011: 123). In 1911, Binyon published The Flight of the Dragon, a book in which both scholars and Pound himself have found similarities to Pound’s work. Interestingly, in an article simply titled, ‘Binyon, Stevens, Pound, Eliot’, John Hatcher finds another potential inspiration for ‘In a Station of the Metro’ in the following line from Binyon’s book: ‘the apparition of the flowers in their sensitive beauty becomes a source of romantic sentiment such as in Europe only the beauty of woman has evoked’ (Hatcher 2005: 12; Binyon 1911: 109). Even more conspicuous, though, are Pound’s own references to Binyon and Dragon in BLAST 2. Subtitled ‘Lawrence [sic] Binyon’, section III of Pound’s ‘Chronicles’ article presents a rather conflicted statement on Binyon’s relation to artistic tradition. The article begins by censuring Binyon for his ‘disgusting attitude of respect toward predecessors whose intellect is vastly inferior to his own’ but quickly changes to affirm that ‘Mr. Binyon has, indubitably his moments’ and ‘it would be well to set forth a few of them’ (B2 86). What follows is a series of nine quotes from Binyon’s Dragon that Pound believed express similar concepts to those of his Vorticist agenda, such as the one he transcribes in all caps: ‘FOR INDEED IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL THAT THE SUBJECT-MATTER SHOULD REPRESENT OR BE LIKE ANYTHING IN NATURE; ONLY IT MUST BE ALIVE WITH A RHYTHMIC VITALITY OF ITS OWN’ (B2 86; Binyon 1911: 21). Interestingly, Hatcher also notes that a small exhibition Binyon put together at the British Museum in 1914 may have influenced Pound and his reactions to Binyon’s text. More specifically, Hatcher offers a fascinatingly intricate story of how a piece thought to be but actually not created by the artist Korin, originally entitled The Wave Beaten Rock and then renamed as Pine Island, led not only to Yeats writing in his Introduction to Pound’s Noh plays of ‘that screen painted by Korin, let us say, shown lately at the British Museum, where the same form is echoing in wave and in cloud and in rock’ (Pound and Fenollosa 1959: 161) but also Pound’s choice to include in his review of Dragon a quote from that book that reads: ‘You may say the waves of Korin’s famous screen are not like real waves, but they move, they have form and volume’ (B2 86; Binyon 1911: 21). Of further note is that when Binyon displayed that piece in 1914, he placed it alongside works by Korin’s predecessors, Koyetsu and Sotatsu. Such an arrangement, Arrowsmith believes, must have led to the inclusion

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of misspelled versions of those names atop that issue of BLAST’s ‘Bless’ list (B2 93; Arrowsmith 2010: 160–3). In his article, ‘“Make It New”: Laurence Binyon, Pound and Vorticism’, art historian David Peters Corbett also traces the development of a proto-modernist aesthetic through Binyon’s William Blake (1922), Painting in the Far East (1908), Flight of the Dragon (1911) and The Art of Botticelli (1913) to illustrate how Binyon could have simultaneously acted as both a positive influence on and a negative example of Pound and Lewis’s Vorticist agenda. In particular, Corbett compares the recurrent themes of ‘rhythm’ and non-mimetic representation that Binyon espouses in those texts with statements Pound made regarding Vorticism, such as the quote from Dragon cited above and: ‘The vorticist relies not upon similarity of analogy, not upon likeness or mimcry [sic]. In painting he does not rely upon the likeness to a beloved grandmother or to a carressable mistress’ (Corbett 1997: 186–9; B1 154). Even more interesting, though, is Corbett’s identification in Botticelli of another possible Binyon-based origin of Pound’s ‘Make It New’ in the lines, ‘We cannot discard the past; we cannot throw away our heritage, but we must remould it in the fire of our own necessities, we must make it new and our own’ (Corbett 1997: 193; Binyon 1913: 17). Despite Corbett’s recognition and comparison of the similarities between Binyon and Pound’s statements on ‘newness’, his application of that concept to Pound’s Vorticist phase only seems unnecessarily limiting as Pound’s interaction with artistic, mythological and political history in The Cantos shares much with Binyon’s theories of remaking the past. Although The Cantos themselves are built upon Pound’s concept of the ‘subject rhyme’, which literally uses the past to create new meaning through elaborate series of trans-temporal juxtapositions, in his first tentative steps towards that method in the ‘Three Cantos’, Pound’s mind conspicuously returns to Botticelli. In the first of the ‘Three Cantos’ that appeared in the June 1917 issue of Poetry magazine, Pound writes: How many worlds we have! If Botticelli Brings her ashore on that great cockle-shell – His Venus (Simonetta?), And Spring and Aufidus fill all the air With their clear-outlined blossoms? World enough. Behold, I say, she comes ‘Apparelled like the spring, Graces her subjects’, (That’s from Pericles). Oh, we have worlds enough, and brave décors, And from these like we guess a soul for man And build him full of aery populations. Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about us: Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis. If for a year man write to paint, and not to music – O Casella! (P 234) Fascinatingly, in those lines, Pound not only conjures Botticelli, whom he may associate with Binyon and the concept of ‘mak[ing] it new’, but also does so through references to both The Birth of Venus and Primavera, as Peter Robinson notes in his ‘Ezra

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Pound and Italian Art’ (PA 126). That Pound would associate Venus with Primavera is not unusual, but the fact that Binyon does the same in Botticelli seems relevant, especially because Binyon refers to Primavera only in translation as ‘“Spring”’ (1913: 10). In the Online Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Roxana Preda also picks up on Pound’s reference to Venus and Primavera in the ‘Three Cantos’ but goes on to note that when Pound mentions Picasso and Lewis near the end of the poem, he does so to set those artists up as ‘the modern analogues to Botticelli and Mantegna’ (OCCEP TC I: n.68). In that poem, therefore, one finds Pound correlating Lewis and, by proxy, Vorticism with Botticelli and the Renaissance and doing so by referencing the same works by the same titles that Binyon isolates and groups together in Botticelli, which was published in 1913 – the year prior to the publication of BLAST. Furthermore, when Botticelli’s Venus reappears in Canto LXXIV as a transfiguration of Kuanon – another association Preda notes as possibly beginning in the first of the ‘Three Cantos’ (OCCEP TC I: n.57) – Pound may very well be transposing images from two paintings he directly associates with Binyon, and that Kuanon-as-Venus amalgam serves in that poem to bring the poet up out of hell. Compare, then, that role with Binyon’s description of the figures in Venus and Primavera: Indeed it is with an aspect like what we imagine of Persephone’s return that Botticelli’s Venus comes to earth out of the seas. Maiden and innocent, yet with knowledge in her eyes of the things that suffer and are not satisfied, she comes, fugitive rather than triumphant, as to shelter. . . . In the ‘Spring’, too, she reappears, how grave and with what pensive eyes! as [sic] if aware of the pain that comes with birth and of the sorrow that is entwined with human rapture. Not otherwise has Botticelli painted his Madonnas. (Binyon 1913: 10) Thus, in what seems strikingly more than coincidence, Pound creates a web of Binyoninspired associations wherein Venus is Primavera is Kuanon, and she, as Binyon describes, carries with her the experience of hell even as she serves as a guide to paradise. Add to all of this that Binyon uses that analogy to support his notion of Botticelli as an artist who ‘make[s] it new’ and that Binyon himself appears in-text six cantos later, and one finds Binyon as a significant shaping force behind the form and content of Pound’s poem. In October 1913, Binyon also served as chairman for the committee that planned and opened an exhibition of ‘Chinese Art’ at the Whitechapel Gallery. As Arrowsmith reports, that exhibition included very little two-dimensional art or sculpture and instead offered an eclectic assortment of elegantly coloured clothing, vases and enamel paintings along with a set of ‘magic mirrors’ that featured, respectively, a sea monster and blackened glass outlined with celestial designs. Arrowsmith believes Pound may have attended the exhibition and that those included items may have precipitated the lines ‘Rest me with Chinese colours / For I think the glass is evil’ that, not coincidentally, originally appeared in the November 1913 issue of Poetry in a poem then entitled ‘Xenia’ but later renamed ‘A Song of Degrees’ (Pound 1913a: 59; Arrowsmith 2010: 154–5). Binyon would again come into Pound’s orbit in 1934 when Pound read, admired and reviewed Binyon’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. Despite still finding problems with Binyon’s propensity to drift back to his Miltonic upbringing by relying a bit too

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heavily on grammatical inversions, Pound most respected the way that Binyon’s translation maintained a ‘transparency in the sense that one sees through to the original’ (LE 209). That ability to show the original can certainly be equated with Pound’s Imagist tenet of ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”’, and one wonders if one of the most significant ways Binyon influenced Pound was as an example of the ability to write about, describe or ‘present’ an artwork or ‘image’ verbally so readers might experience it directly even without a visual copy. Arrowsmith points to a line in Pound’s correspondence wherein he tells Binyon: ‘All your work on Oriental art is bound to profit you when you come to the lighting of the Paradiso’ (SL 255) and uses it to argue that this renewed contact with Binyon was certainly the impetus for Pound’s writing Seven Lakes Canto (Arrowsmith 2010: 201). Apart from his own work, though, the poet offered suggestions and edits on Binyon’s version of the Purgatorio, and, even while in custody in Pisa, remembered his translations; on 4 October 1945, he wrote to Dorothy that ‘Ole Bin Bin died in early ’43. Shd/ have had time to finish his translation of Dante. Am sorry’ (L/DP 105). Binyon did, in fact, die on 10 March 1943 – as Hatcher notes, ‘days after completing the final revisions to the Paradiso proofs’ (1995: 294), which certainly must have pleased Pound. Ultimately, as most scholars note, Binyon’s relationship with Pound was complicated. Binyon introduced the poet to people, artwork and ideas that all went on to inspire him and his poetry. Binyon’s writings on and exhibitions of Asian art certainly offered Pound new subjects and approaches for creating art that actively assisted the poet in his efforts towards modernisation. More specifically, Binyon’s work and influence led to Pound’s friendship with Wyndham Lewis and most likely inspired images and lines in some of Pound’s most famous works, such as ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the ‘Seven Lakes Canto’, items in BLAST and possibly his most quoted phrase, ‘Make It New’. Yet, while Binyon managed to keep one foot in the modern era, he kept the other firmly planted in the Edwardian age, and that chafed Pound considerably. Pound renewed his respect for Binyon for his translations of Dante, and their subsequent correspondence seems to have provided Pound with both strength and subject material while interned at Pisa. Despite the myriad of potential ways Binyon may have directly influenced Pound and his poetry, though, one wonders if his work at the Museum – his ability to notice, select, arrange and present – was not the single most important of his effects on Pound. Binyon’s approach to his curatorial work may have impacted the shape, style and content of Pound’s seminal text, The Cantos. Early in their relationship, Pound seems to have noticed this similarity between Binyon and himself as well, for, in a 1909 letter to his father, he complains that ‘[n]o literature is made by people in other professions. – except in the rarest of cases’ such as Binyon, who, Pound enviously reports, ‘gets paid for doing pretty much what I do in the museum’ (L/HP 165–6).

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11 Into the Vortex: Ezra Pound, Anarchism and the Ideological Project of Art Criticism Mark Antliff

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rom the publication of his spirited celebration of the work of Henri GaudierBrzeska and Jacob Epstein in his polemic ‘The New Sculpture’ (The Egoist, February 1914) to his poignant reflections on the ‘Death of Vorticism’ (The Little Review, March 1919), Ezra Pound tirelessly promoted the Vorticist movement. But during its initial unfolding in 1914, he did so from a very particular ideological perspective, namely that of anarchism.1 Previous scholars have written cogently about the impact of anarchism and the thought of Dora Marsden on Pound.2 In this chapter, I will build on their findings to address more fully his efforts to integrate Vorticism into this ideological matrix, with special attention to sculpture, the medium at the heart of his Vorticist art criticism.3 Pound’s anarchism should be contextualised not only with reference to Marsden’s theories and those of the doyen of anarchist individualism, Max Stirner (1806–56), but in the light of the anarchist syndicalism of the French polemicist Georges Sorel (1847–1922). Pound forged a unique version of anarchism, premised on a melding of Sorel’s theory of myth and class war together with Stirner’s call for a ‘Union of Egoists’ made up of workers and disaffected members of the intelligentsia, united in an anarchist revolt against the state. Sorel celebrated the general strike as a mythic catalyst able to intensify conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and over the course of 1914, Pound came to define Vorticism in terms of a comparable set of mythic dyads, grounded in anarchist paradigms, addressing culture as well as politics. These contrasting dyads cast the Vorticists as allies of the working class engaged in open warfare against the bourgeoisie and the state; as unruly bohemians rebelling against the state’s cultural allies and institutions; as the pioneers of a new style of art appreciation keyed to Stirner’s egoism; and as the champions of specific artistic techniques expressive of these revolutionary values. Beginning in January 1914, Pound deployed this anarchist critique with reference to a series of rivals, including the prominent Victorian critic Edmund Gosse, fellow Imagist and Egoist contributor Richard Aldington, and the Vorticists’ major nemesis, the Futurist chief F. T. Marinetti.

Pound’ s Anarchist Roots Pound’s exposure to anarchist currents began in earnest in the summer of 1913 when he joined Marsden’s circle as a regular contributor to The New Freewoman and its reincarnation as The Egoist in January 1914. His first foray into art criticism, ‘The

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New Sculpture’, appeared in the fourth issue of The Egoist, and between January 1914 and the publication of the Vorticist journal BLAST in June 1914, Pound, together with his close allies Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska, published a series of articles in The Egoist aligning their new aesthetic with the journal’s ideological agenda. Marsden, a former suffragette, championed an anarchist-individualist interpretation of the egoist philosophy of Max Stirner, author of the highly influential Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1845). Stirner’s book was translated into English as The Ego and His Own in 1907 by Steven Byington, who contributed to The New Freewoman and The Egoist up to April 1914.4 Scholars have noted that Marsden’s Stirner-inspired critique of generalised abstractions had a profound impact on Pound, who embraced her nominalist celebration of sensate individualism and adapted his theory of literary Imagism and the ideogram to this anarchist agenda. During this same period, Pound’s relations with the self-styled philosopher T. E. Hulme, combined with his burgeoning friendship in 1913 with Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis and Epstein, exposed him to other anarchist currents, most notably the French and British anarchist-syndicalist and anti-militarist movements, which echoed Sorel in eulogising strike action as the principal means of achieving revolution.5 All three artists had long-established contacts within the anarchist movement, and beginning in autumn 1913, the future Vorticists Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis joined Pound in attending Hulme’s weekly salons, where artists and writers rubbed shoulders with leading radicals in the labour movement, including A. J. Cook., a prominent syndicalist organiser among militant miners in south Wales.6 Cook, along with syndicalist agitators Guy Bowman and Tom Mann, championed the politics of direct action during a period when strike action among the British proletariat had exploded, with nearly 41 million work days lost to stoppages in 1912 alone.7 During this same period Hulme was translating Sorel’s anarchist syndicalist manifesto Reflections on Violence (1908) as well as absorbing Sorel’s closely related critique of democracy, The Illusions of Progress (1908).8 Thus Pound’s exposure to anarchist thought transcended the individualist configuration to include syndicalist theory and that movement’s attempts to radicalise the proletariat.

The Anarchist Critique of Abstraction: Georges Sorel and Max Stirner To understand how exactly Pound came to reconcile these two currents and deploy them in the context of his own cultural politics, we must first examine the thought of Georges Sorel. While scholars have pointed to Max Stirner’s critique of rationalism and abstractions as fundamental to Pound’s embrace of Marsden’s anarchist ‘nominalism’, the potential impact on Pound of Sorel’s equally vociferous attack on rationalist abstractions has gone unnoticed. What united Sorel, Stirner and Pound in this critique was their shared opposition to parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage. Sorel condemned the democratic principle of ‘one man, one vote’ for falsely positing political equality among all citizens on the basis of Enlightenment ideals, especially Cartesianism; in response, he promoted class consciousness as a form of communal solidarity antithetical to such homogenisation. Sorel’s theory of syndicalist revolution was based on anti-rationalist paradigms conducive to such anti-democratic thought.

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In Sorel’s view, Republican ideology subsumed all classes into its atomised concept of citizenship; he countered this homogenisation by asserting the heterogeneity of class difference, and identifying vital qualities unique to the working class (Sternhell 1994: 36–91; M. Antliff 2007: 73–81, 2011). In The Illusions of Progress, Sorel traced the emergence of abstract notions of citizenship back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a leisured aristocracy and their bourgeois allies embraced the philosophy of René Descartes, as well as theories of ‘natural law’ that gave birth to the democratic ‘doctrine of progress’ and Republican notions of citizenship (Sorel [1908] 1969: 12–21, 150). Following the French Revolution of 1789, the bourgeoisie, in consort with the newly established Republican plutocracy, reportedly utilised this normative notion of citizenship to dupe members of the working class into ignoring their own self-interest in favour of benign acquiescence to material inequality. In response, Sorel championed class conflict, augmented by means of the myth of the general strike, as an antidote to the false solidarity fabricated in the name of parliamentary democracy (M. Antliff 2011: 164–70). In his Reflections on Violence, Sorel drew on the philosophy of intuition developed by Henri Bergson to define myth as ‘a body of images capable of evoking all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the War undertaken by socialism against modern society’ (Sorel [1908] 1961: 28–34, 137).9 Having condemned parliamentary socialists for employing rational argumentation to promote incremental social change, Sorel lauded the mythic power of the French anarchist-syndicalist vision of a general strike for its ability to instil revolutionary fervour among the working class by demonising the bourgeoisie and their plutocratic allies (M. Antliff 2011: 161–4). Stirner in The Ego and His Own had anticipated Sorel in his critique of rationalism, abstractions and opposition to democracy. The first half of Stirner’s book focuses on the ideological means through which individuals are coerced by social forces to deny their own self-interest; the second part seeks to define ‘ownness’, the condition of freedom from such coercive influences. Throughout the book, Stirner repeatedly defines the self as embodied, as motivated by irrational sensations of physical desire, and as a temporal being undergoing constant change, both physical and psychological. This ‘egoist’ self is described as ‘the unique one’, a particular being unlike any other (Stirner [1845] 1993: 362–6). Thus our ego is a ‘corporeal ego’ and self-realisation can only be achieved when the individual ‘has fallen in love with his corporeal self and takes a pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 13, 363). The enemy of this heterogeneous self is any institution or belief system, whether religious or secular, that directs individuals away from their own embodied interests and desires. The process of self-delusion wherein the ego subordinates his or her interests to those of others occurs when we swear allegiance to abstract ideas and concepts, thereby generating a perverse bifurcation between the material world and an otherworldly realm of ‘pure spirit’, indicative, on the human scale, of an imagined separation of mind from body (Stirner [1845] 1993: 31). Among ancient civilisations, such abstractions took the form of spectral gods, soon to be reduced under Christianity to a single ‘God’; but following the rise of Cartesianism in the seventeenth century, human faith in an absolute, eternal ‘pure spirit’ metamorphosed into a fetishised veneration of rationalism (Stirner [1845] 1993: 85). In addition to Cartesianism and concepts of the ‘Sacred’, other such transcendental

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‘essences’ include ‘Morality’, the ‘State’, the rule of ‘Law’, ‘Justice’, ‘Essence’, ‘Man’, ‘Humanity’, the ‘Citizen’ and the ‘Fatherland’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 26, 29, 32, 44, 46–8). All are characterised as rhetorical specters (Stirner [1845] 1993: 184) divorced from the temporal flow of our embodied individual existence, and Stirner routinely capitalises them to mock their supposed status as concrete entities. He argues that such ideas are invariably deployed by vested interests to encourage us to subordinate our own flesh-and-blood being in the service of an abstract ideal. Thus individuals cede their own self-interest to a collective ‘common interest’ and individual welfare is sacrificed in the name of the ‘general good’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 61). This self-sacrifice reaches an extreme in the case of the citizen soldier, called to offer his very life in the service of another collective abstraction, that of the ‘Nation’. The ‘egoist’, by contrast, is one who ‘instead of living to an idea, that is, a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his personal advantage, serves the latter’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 29–30). Stirner also instructs us to ignore concepts of good and evil and related notions of ‘illegality’ as moral categories inhibiting ‘self-ownership’ and the freedom to respond ‘to the full energy of the will’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 51–5). On this basis, he called for a full-blown ‘insurrection’ against the state (Stirner [1845] 1993: 54–5, 316).

A Union of Egoists: Proletarians and Intellectual Vagabonds Stirner broadened the scope of this rebellion by positing an alliance between the proletariat and a restive, impoverished intelligentsia made up of individuals not unlike himself. Stirner declared that ‘intellectual vagabonds’ who ‘run wild with their impudent criticism’ form ‘the class of the unstable, restless, changeable’ who are part of the broader ‘proletariat’; moreover, these vagabonds and their working-class counterparts are reportedly united in regarding ‘the State as a power protecting the possessor, which privileges the latter, but does nothing for him, the non-possessor’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 112–15). Stirner then eulogised strike action as evidence of egoistic selfempowerment, noting that ‘this is the sense of the labour disturbances which show themselves here and there’, and that ‘if labour becomes free, the State is lost’ (Stirner [1845] 1993: 116). Over the course of 1914, Marsden and Pound actively merged Stirner’s thought with that of Sorel to ally the anarchist individualism espoused in The Egoist with the direct action strategies of the syndicalist movement. In April of that year, Marsden called on the working class to revolt against the army and all systems of governmental authority, declaring that ‘when the assumption that we all obey is shattered, the sense of responsibility for self-defense returns’, and with it, the potential for ‘civil war’ between the working poor and the state’s authoritarian apparatus, including the army, ‘the bailiffs, policemen, judges, jailors, hangmen’ (Marsden 1914a: 123–6). Following the outbreak of World War I, Marsden reaffirmed her support of syndicalism, defining the syndicalist as ‘an anarchist crossed with a mild egoist strain’, and asserting that ‘in sabotage or in the conception of the general strike’, there is a realisation ‘that to win large shares of the world’s spoils working men must be ready to string their hearts and consciences up to the pitch of being despoilers’ (Marsden 1914b: 303–6). This ‘stringing of hearts’ in response to the polarising effects of the general strike was just what Sorel had called for, but Marsden gave Sorel’s thesis an egoistic thrust. ‘To hold one’s own purpose so much in esteem’, Marsden continued, ‘is the first sign of power. . . . It is because syndicalism

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has raised its lip, and revealed a sharp gleaming egoist tooth, that it has earned such heavy execration as offending both God and Man’ (Marsden 1914b: 305). In the 1 July issue of The Egoist, under the pseudonym Bastien von Helmholtz, Pound proclaimed his own status as ‘a syndicalist’ who disbelieved ‘vigourously in any recognition of political institutions’ (von Helmholtz 1914c: 254), and he simultaneously called for a union of self-ruling egoists.10 Concurrently, Pound fabricated a Sorelian-inspired mythic divide between these egoists and their plutocratic and bourgeois oppressors. His opening salvo appeared in a February article on ‘The Bourgeois’, which identified that class as ‘a state of mind’ and ‘a term of opprobrium, used by the bohemian, or the artist in contempt of the citizen’. Pound describes the bourgeois as a philistine materialist who embodies ‘the stomach and gross intestines of the body politic’, and distinct from ‘the artist’ (Pound 1914b). This Bakhtinian commentary on class was then followed by Pound’s article on the Irish poet John Synge (1871–1909), in which Pound railed against the deleterious impact of bourgeois values in the realm of cultural criticism (von Helmholtz 1914a). Pound claimed that exceptional artists such as Synge were egoists shunned by the cultural establishment, and therefore the natural allies of the working poor in their war against the ruling plutocracy. Melding politics and art, Pound declared the realm of cultural criticism to be dominated by ‘a democracy of commentators who believe not only that every man is created free and equal . . . but that all books are created equal and that all minds are created equal and that any distinct and distinguishing faculty should be curtailed and restricted’ (von Helmholtz 1914a: 53). Here the homogenising, abstract concept of citizenship condemned by Sorel and Stirner has been extended to encompass the realm of art and culture. Pound asserted that, while democratising critics embraced mediocrity, it was the working poor who supported the exceptional artist – those ‘intellectual vagabonds’ celebrated by Stirner. Thus, while there would be ‘no truce between art and the vulgo’ there was ‘an irrefutable alliance between art and the oppressed’ (von Helmholtz 1914a: 54). Throughout history, those artists Pound judges to be exceptional have always been social rebels, finding their natural audience among the poor. Giuseppe Verdi, for instance, pointedly addressed his art to the peasantry and proletariat, while ‘the bitterest and most poignant songs have often been written in cipher’ to avoid the state’s censorship laws. ‘The people have never set a hand against their artists’, declared Pound, whereas the ‘half-taught’ and the ‘bureaucracy’ both ‘political’ and ‘literary’ have always done so (von Helmholtz 1914a: 54). In other texts, Pound left no doubt as to the status of himself and his Vorticist colleagues as the contemporary torchbearers of this ‘union of egoists’ (Levenson 1984: 74–9; Clarke 1996: 108; A. Antliff 2001: 76–7). In his February 1914 essay on ‘The New Sculpture’ of Gaudier and Epstein, Pound boldly announced that ‘the artist has at last been aroused to the fact that the war between him and the world is a war without truce’, adding that ‘the artist has been at truce with his oppressor for long enough’, and that ‘he has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly’ (Pound 1914f: 68). That April, in an article on fellow egoist Allen Upward, he called for the creation by artists of an anarchist ‘syndicat of intelligence’, and in his 15 August essay on ‘Edward Wadsworth: Vorticist’, Pound unequivocally declared Vorticism to be ‘a movement of individuals, for individuals, for the protection of individuality’ (Pound 1914c: 779–80, 1914d: 306).11 In this manner, Pound cast Vorticism as the cultural wing in the broader anarchist syndicalist revolt against democracy, the bourgeoisie and capitalism.

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Pound’s Cultures Wars Rebecca Beasley has perceptively analysed Pound’s typecasting of the London Times in the light of this syndicalist battle (Beasley 2007: 107–10), but what have gone unnoticed are the Sorelian strategies informing that criticism, and the Vorticists’ and The Egoist’s vilification of that newspaper as the philistine mouthpiece for academicism, the stylistic embodiment in the visual arts of democratising mediocrity. In his June 1914 essay on Wyndham Lewis in The Egoist, Pound called upon his fellow Vorticists to foment the cultural equivalent of class war, but he lamented the absence of a robust opposition. ‘It is hard to arrange one’s mass and opposition’, states Pound, when ‘one has such trivial symbols arrayed against one, there is only The Times and all that that implies’, whereas ‘Labour and anarchy can find their opponents in “capital” and “government”’. Nevertheless, Pound calls on his colleagues to cast The Times as the mythic symbol of an establishment mentalité to be fought against. ‘The really vigorous mind might erect The Times, which has no importance, into a symbol of a state of mind which The Times represents, which is a loathsome state of mind, a malebolge of obtuseness’ (Pound 1914h: 233–4). The ‘state of mind’ in question was of course that of the bourgeoisie and their plutocratic allies. The role of Vorticism in this campaign was made clear in Horace Brodzky’s drawing celebrating the publication of BLAST in the 15 July issue of The Egoist (Brodzky 1914: 272) (Figure 11.1). In the previous issue (1 July) Egoist editor Richard Aldington had announced the appearance of BLAST with the simple declaration ‘Death to The Times’, thereby echoing the opening line of Pound’s BLAST poem ‘Salutation the Third’: ‘Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”: / GUFFAW!’ (Aldington 1914; Pound 1914g). Brodzky augmented that proclamation in a drawing depicting Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis ‘Blasting their own trumpets before the walls of Jericho’, symbolised by a top-hatted bourgeois reading The Times in close proximity to the dates of Queen Victoria’s reign, ‘1837–1900’ (Queen Victoria died in January 1901). This simple caricature cast The Times not only as the vehicle for bourgeois values, but as the retrograde defender of the Victorian era, thereby echoing the Vorticists’ thundering

Figure 11.1 Horace Brodzky, ‘The Lewis–Brzeska–Pound Troupe’, The Egoist (15 July, 1914), p. 272.

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declaration to ‘BLAST years 1837 to 1900’ in the opening Manifesto of their new journal (Lewis 1914c: 18). Pound further satirised the newspaper in an article titled ‘Revolutionary Maxims’, composed solely of excerpts from The Times Literary Supplement, showcasing the philistine mediocrity of that paper’s target audience, its cultural pretensions and biases, and its nationalist tub-thumping (von Helmholtz 1914b). One excerpt informed The Times readers that ‘men have been tired of the merely intellectual pastime called thinking’, while another titled ‘Greek Art’ asserted that ‘No one will quarrel with the statement that though power of expression is the artist’s gift, the soul that shines through his work is the soul of the nation’ (von Helmholtz 1914b: 217). This complacent celebration of indolence, classicism and the subordination of individual expression to the ‘soul of the nation’ epitomised everything that the Vorticists and their anarchist allies vehemently rejected. Pound’s ‘Revolutionary Maxims’ also mocked The Times’ veneration for the Royal Academy. Thus, Pound cited The Times’ smug judgement that Lord Leighton, who was President of the Academy from 1878 to 1896, may have been ‘a little too cosmopolitan to be the head of a body of British artists’, as well as an article praising the Royal Academician George Dunlop Leslie, a painter of sickly sweet-genre scenes (Figure 11.2), for providing readers with the ideal guidebook to ‘the inner life of the Academy’ during the reign of Queen Victoria (von Helmholtz 1914b: 217).12 Similarly in Pound’s article on John Synge, condemning the suppression of exceptional artists, it is the editors of The Times who come in for special opprobrium. Having described the exceptional artist as an ‘inventor’, a ‘dynamic man’ who breaks with social and cultural convention, Pound typecasts his adversaries as ‘the capitalists’ who have as their cultural ally the ‘inefficient editor’. This ‘static man’, this ‘consumer, the digestive man’, ‘has no existence apart from his system’. Such orthodox rigidity reportedly reigned supreme at The Times, with its sea of editors who ‘know the accepted platitudes of every subject’ and are resolutely opposed to ‘the discoverer’. Pound identified such criticism as ‘scholastic’, a reference to the classical method of dialectical reasoning to reconcile contradictions through analysis (von Helmholtz 1914a). Thus

Figure 11.2 George Dunlop Leslie, This is the Way We Wash Our Clothes, 1887. Oil on canvas. 61 × 46 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool.

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The Times’ critics not only championed mediocre forms of classically inspired academicism, they did so using a normative system of thought originating in classical Greece. In a telling comparison, Pound associates such criticism with that of the writer and art critic Edmund Gosse, whom he describes ‘as what every Times reviewer would like to be’ (von Helmholtz 1914a). As we shall see, Pound’s Egoist article on ‘The New Sculpture’ was a systematic rebuttal of Gosse, who had first coined that very term to champion a group of academic-oriented sculptors exhibiting at the Royal Academy during the 1890s.

Aesthetic Appreciation and the Exceptional Artist To counter such homogenising criticism, Pound developed an anarchist-inflected vocabulary designed to foreground heterogeneity and celebrate individual difference. This programme took on special urgency due to a schism within The Egoist ranks between Pound and his literary protégé Richard Aldington, whom Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska condemned for upholding the same scholastic methods and classical precepts championed by Gosse and the writers for The Times.13 In an open letter critiquing Aldington, Pound announced that he and his artist allies Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska ‘have ceased to regard work as good or bad in accordance to whether it approaches or recedes from the “Antique”, the “Classical” models’ (Pound 1914b). Rather than judging all art against a fixed, classical canon, characterised as ‘a uniform and unattainable perfection’, Pound calls on both artists and critics to respond solely to their own emotions when creating or evaluating a work of art, thus asserting the anarchist individualist imperative. He then claims that, as an artist himself, he has chosen to be a writer primarily due to his emotional response to the written word, adding that ‘if I were more interested in form than in anything else I should be a sculptor and not a writer’. This recourse to emotion likewise guarantees that each artist responds in a unique way to the work of other artists. ‘Epstein’s working in form’, states Pound, ‘produces something which moves me, who am only moderately interested in form. . . . I, if I am lucky, produce a composition of words which moves someone else who is only moderately interested in words.’ In this manner, Epstein and Pound can admire each other, despite the fact that Pound is bound not to like a work of Epstein’s ‘for the same reason he [Epstein] likes it’ (Pound 1914b) (Figure 11.3). A work of art created following anarchist individualist precepts is first and foremost the expression of a unique temperament, and any shared admiration among those artists who embrace such methods is likewise structured around a celebration of difference. Pound concludes his critique of Aldington by asserting that this ‘faculty of being moved is not criticism but appreciation’ and that the ‘alliance’ he wishes to craft ‘must be with our own generation and usually with workers in other arts’. Within this configuration ‘no two of us will have precisely the same function, and it is certain that the universe will not so suddenly alter its methods that any two of us will suddenly come into complete understanding or accord’ (Pound 1914b). Aesthetic appreciation is simultaneity by means of which one develops individual creativity and the basis on which one forms alliances with other artists. It is, in short, a key element in the forging of a union of egoists, such as that of the Vorticists. Such thinking accounts for Pound’s declaration, in his August 1914 essay on Wadsworth in

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Figure 11.3 Jacob Epstein, Female Figure, 1913. Serpentine (flenite). 61 × 61.2 × 28.9 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Egoist, that ‘the Vorticist movement is a movement of individuals, for individuals, for the protection of individuality’, or the proclamation in the opening declaration of BLAST that the journal was designed to appeal ‘TO THE INDIVIDUAL’, to ‘the fundamental Artist that exists in everybody’ (Lewis 1914b). Pound and his colleagues also drew a sharp contrast between the concepts of heterogeneity and autonomy defining their egoist collective and the authoritarian values governing the Futurists. Thus, Lewis in the first issue of The Egoist declared that ‘futurism will never mean anything else, in painting, than the Art practiced by five or six Italian painters grouped beneath Marinetti’s influence’, while the Vorticists in BLAST dismissed the Futurist painters as Marinetti’s foot soldiers, whose representational art followed the dictates of the Futurist leader’s cult of the present and of ‘automobilism’ (Lewis 1914a).14

Academic Mediocrity vs. Vorticist Expressionism This allegiance to both extreme individualism and collective (syndicalist) identity led Pound to describe the Vorticists as united in their commitment to a new form of Expressionist abstraction, yet resolutely individual in their artistic praxis. Previous scholars have noted that Pound drew a sharp contrast between this egoist mode of abstraction and forms of mimesis, but to grasp the full ideological import of that distinction, we need to consider the specific institutions Pound associated with the latter category in this dyad. The mythic foil to such Expressionism was once again the art of the state,

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represented in this instance by artists affiliated with the Royal Academy and the newly minted Royal Society of Portrait Painters (which obtained the royal charter in 1911).15 Academic art, whether in painting or in sculpture, was cast by Pound as representative of the bourgeoisie, and academic technique led artists to voluntarily suppress the expressive potential of their chosen medium in favour of normative styles and conformity to classical precedents. These artists’ adherence to academicism was indicative of their status as mediocrities, catering to an equally mediocre audience. In articles in The Egoist on Lewis and Wadsworth, Pound took aim at the academic portraitists John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and John Collier (1850–1934) in this regard (Figures 11.4 and 11.5), drawing on the Sorelian rhetoric he had elsewhere deployed against the bourgeoisie and The Times (Pound 1914h, 1914c). Collier and Sargent had made their reputations as high-society portrait painters who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and Pound declared their very success evidence of their failure as artists. In an essay celebrating Lewis’s portfolio of drawings based on Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (1623), Pound claimed that ‘the rabble and the bureaucracy have built a god in their own image and that god is Mediocrity’ (Pound 1914h). By capitalising Mediocrity, Pound clearly wished to evoke Marsden’s and Stirner’s mocking of spectral gods and spurious absolutes. Those who worshiped Mediocrity reportedly lacked the self-affirmative qualities of the egoist: thus Pound compared such individuals to the quotidian ‘man in the street’ who ‘does not in the least respect himself for being

Figure 11.4 John Singer Sargent, Miss Mathilde Townsend, 1907. Oil on canvas. 157 × 101.6 cm. Gift of Mrs Summer Welles. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Figure 11.5 John Collier, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1910. Oil on canvas. 72.5 × 56 cm. Government Art Collection. in the street, any more than an artist would respect himself for being hung in the Royal Academy’ (Pound 1914h). These weak egos see themselves reflected in the mimetic art of academic mediocrities, and thus prove openly hostile to the abstract designs of Lewis, whose Timon drawings convey the emotional power of an exceptional artist, an egoist in full rebellion against artistic conventions and the status quo (Figure 11.6). Lewis’s work therefore appeals to an entirely different audience, namely ‘the man whose profoundest needs cannot be satisfied by Collier or by Mr. Sargent’s society pretties, the man who has some sort of hunger for life, some restlessness’ (Pound 1914h). It is this dynamic individual who takes the time to contemplate Lewis’s work to arrive at ‘some deeper understanding; to some emotion more intense than his own’. In the case of the Timon drawings, the emotion conveyed ‘in lines, masses and planes’ is that of ‘the sullen fury of intelligence baffled, shut in by the entrenched forces of stupidity’ (Pound 1914h). Lewis, according to Pound, fully identifies with his misanthropic Shakespearean subject, for he is ‘not a commentator but a protagonist’, ‘he is a man at war’, just as Timon is at war with the society that betrayed him. Timon is Lewis’s alter ego, and the themes of alienation, struggle and violence coursing through Shakespeare’s play are captured in the jagged, hard-edged forms in Lewis’s drawings that serve to congeal individual figures in an environment in which dynamism and movement are abruptly arrested or frustrated (Pound 1914h).16 The embattled energy and power of Lewis’s individual will are expressively conveyed through a maze of sharp, interconnected forms that vividly affirm Stirner’s concept of the embodied, corporeal ego. As Pound states, in these drawings Lewis ‘does not declare gaily that the intelligence can exist without the body’, but instead ‘that the intelligent god is incarnate in the universe in the struggle with endless energy’ (Pound 1914h).17 Pound applied a similar thesis to sculpture in a March 1914 edition of The Egoist, in which he relished the corporeal fecundity of Epstein’s primitivised sculpture of a pregnant female, describing the ‘green flenite woman’ as inspired by Egyptian art and expressive of ‘all the tragedy and enigma of the germinal universe’ (Figure 11.3). Epstein’s sculpture reportedly recalls ‘the gods of the Epicureans’; indeed, ‘it is as if some realm of “Ideas”, of Platonic patterns, were dominated by Hathor’ (Pound 1914d).18 Here Pound asserts that the Egyptian cow-goddess of fertility, in tandem with an Epicurean delight in sensual pleasure, has overridden the ethereal realm of

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Figure 11.6 Wyndham Lewis, Composition, 1912–13. Lithograph. 38.8 × 27.2 cm. From Timon of Athens (London: Cube Press, 1913). Private Collection. Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

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pure, disembodied ideas. Pound also describes Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska as solitary egoists alienated from a corrupt cultural establishment. Indifferent to the politics of this art world, these two artists ‘exist apart, unperturbed by the pettiness and daily irritations of a world full of Claude Philippses’ and the ‘constant bickerings of uncomprehending minds’. Thus, like Lewis, ‘they infuriate the denizens of this superficial world by ignoring it’ (Pound 1014e). In his essay on Lewis, Pound merged the sense of struggle animating Lewis’s drawings with the anarchists’ war against ‘capital’ and ‘government’ and the Vorticists’ cultural revolt against The Times, concluding that he and his fellow Vorticists will sweep away the enervated ‘voice of Victorianism’ exemplified by ‘the meowing of understrappers and sub-editors’, ‘waterlogged minds in administrative positions’ and especially ‘present members of the Royal Academy’ whom Pound derisively plans to banish ‘to Buenos Aires or New Zealand’ (Pound 1914h: 234). While all three Vorticists stand apart from their academic peers, they also distinguish themselves from each other by virtue of their egoist allegiance to Expressionist abstraction. In ‘Edward Wadsworth: Vorticist’ (August 1914), Pound claims that ‘differentiation’, which he allies to the very process of evolution, finds its fullest manifestation in the art of the Vorticists, ‘both in their works and in their modus vivendi’ (Pound 1914c). Thus the abstract patterns and designs in Lewis’s Timon convey the artists’ ‘restless, turbulent intelligence’, and as a rebellious individual ‘full of anger’ it is natural ‘that he would choose “Timon” for a subject’. By contrast ‘it is equally natural that Mr. Wadsworth should take his delight in mechanical beauty, a delight in the beauty of ships’ expressed by means of ‘a delight in pure forms’. In Pound’s opinion, Wadsworth’s woodcut print of the Dutch harbor, Vlissigen, is exemplary in this regard, for its ‘very fine organization of forms’ and ‘acute triangles’ are elegantly combined like ‘notes in a fugue’ (Figure 11.7). The ‘differences in temperament’ animating these two artists therefore have a plastic equivalent in the emotions, provoked by their ‘two groups of pictures’, which ‘arranges itself almost in a series of antitheses. Turbulent energy: repose. Anger: placidity, and so on’. Pound mounted the same argument in comparing Gaudier-Brzeska to the more mature Epstein: rather than casting Gaudier-Brzeska as ‘a follower of the elder’, Pound argued that they ‘approach life in different manners’ and are thus qualitatively distinct (Pound 1914d).

Figure 11.7 Edward Wadsworth, Vlissingen (Harbor of Flushing), 1914. Woodcut. 32.3 × 26.0 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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In a final riposte, Pound concluded that ‘a good expressionist painting’ by a Vorticist would never be confused with ‘a work of Mr Collier’ or that of ‘any R.A. [Royal Academician] or A.R.A. [Associate of the Royal Academy] or R.P.P. [Royal Portrait Painter] or anything of that sort’ (Pound 1914c).

The New Sculpture: Anti-Humanism and Direct Carving Pound’s integration of the mythic politics of class war into the Vorticists’ egoist rebellion against the Victorian era arguably took its most sophisticated form in his polemical critique of those artists associated with the late Victorian movement known as ‘The New Sculpture’ (Pound 1914g).19 Pound appropriated that very phrase as the masthead for his foundational article on Vorticist sculpture, published in the 16 February 1914 edition of The Egoist. The original New Sculpture movement took its name from a four-part article written in 1894 by the critic and poet Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), whom Pound had mocked as the writer most admired by critics affiliated with The Times (Gosse 1894).20 Gosse’s seminal text published in The Art Journal identified a new orientation towards greater naturalism among sculptors exhibiting at the Royal Academy, including the Academy’s President Sir Frederick Leighton and Gosse’s close ally, W. H. Thornycroft.21 Gosse celebrated the New Sculpture’s focus on the freestanding male nude, identifying works like Thornycroft’s bronze Teucer of 1882 as the embodiment of humanism, in terms of both subject matter and form (Figure 11.8). Thornycroft’s title referred to a warrior eulogised in Homer’s Iliad, and the nude’s pose was a variation on

Figure 11.8 William Hamo Thornycroft, Teucer, 1881 (cast 1882). Bronze. 82 in. Tate Britain.

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a pose commonly found in classical Greek sculpture. Gosse also praised the high degree of realism achieved by Thornycroft through his modelling technique and the surface qualities of his finely polished, life-size bronze statues (Getsy 2004: 64–72).22 In 1894, he waxed eloquent on this paradigm by citing John Millais’s claim that, had Thornycroft’s Teucer been excavated from Athenian sands, it would have been celebrated as a marvel of classical antiquity (Gosse 1894: 201–2; Getsy 2004: 73). In ‘The New Sculpture’, Pound took direct aim at Gosse’s thesis by lamenting that the veneration of ‘humanism’ had ‘taken refuge in the visual arts’ by virtue of artists’ and critics’ attempts to ‘lead and persuade’ humanity to embrace their spurious vision of the classical ideal (Pound 1914f). As a result, ‘there has been a generation of artists who were content to permit a familiarity between themselves and the “cultured”, and even worse the “educated”, two horrible classes composed of suburban professors and their gentler relations’. By contrast, Pound and his anarchist colleagues – the rebellious class – no longer believed that ‘the half-educated’, ‘the semi-connoisseur’ or ‘the sometimes collector’ could share their ‘delights’ or understand their ‘pleasure in forces’ (Pound 1914f). Thus Pound regarded the Vorticists’ rejection of humanism as integral to their revolt against democracy, the bourgeoisie and their cultural institutions. Pound also rejected Gosse’s praise for the mechanical tools and casting techniques employed by the New Sculptors to produce multiple copies of their work (Gosse 1894: 326–9, 1895). To Pound’s mind, academic techniques violated the egoist veneration of the unique, whereas Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein’s alternative method of direct carving ensured that the sculptor maintained a subjective and physical response to the artistic medium (Pound 1914f; GaudierBrzeska 1914a). Appropriately, Pound proclaimed primitivism – the antithesis of Greek classicism – to be the aesthetic model the Vorticists wished to emulate, noting that they regarded ‘the introduction of Djinns, tribal gods, fetishes, etc. into the arts’ as ‘a happy presage’ and that they wished ‘to live by craft and violence’ in emulation of the ‘Tahitian savage’ (Pound 1914f).

The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound It is with such thoughts in mind that we can examine Gaudier’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, a sculpture commissioned by Pound in early 1914 and completed in late March (Figure 11.9). Starting with a 4-foot block of Pentelic marble, Gaudier carved a primitivist image of Pound that has the startling effect of combining a portrait-bust of Pound’s head with the bulbous image of an erect penis (Figure 11.10). When seen from the front, the viewer is confronted with a totemic image of Pound’s head, modelled after the Easter Island statue Hoa Hakanani’a then on display at the British museum (Figure 11.11), but when viewed from the back, the bust resolves into a penis, a flamboyant display of male sexual desire.23 Hoa Hakanani’a had been directly carved out of basalt using a groove-and-keel method (Van Tilburg 2004: 45); thus it fully exemplified Gaudier-Brzeska’s and Pound’s goal of appropriating direct carving as a sign of their allegiance to egoism and primitivism. From an anarchist perspective, the work exemplified Max Stirner’s rebellious claim that Spirit cannot exist without the Flesh, and that the egoist seeks self-affirmation through the sensual enjoyment of his or her corporeal being. Whereas traditional portrait busts lay emphasis on the life of the mind and inner character by exaggerating the size of the cranium, forehead and hair, Gaudier-Brzeska highlights the link between mental and

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Figure 11.9 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914. Marble. 90.5 × 45.7 × 48.9 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Figure 11.10 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (back view), 1914. Marble. 90.5 × 45.7 × 48.9 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Figure 11.11 Hoa Hakanani’a. Moai collected at Ranu Kau, Orongo, Rapa Nui, c. 1400. Basalt. 2.42 m. British Museum. sexual fertility,24 dispelling any illusion that the human imagination exists as a freefloating entity, detached in its contemplation of the Classical Ideal. The revelatory effect of encountering two radically different images as the viewer moves around the statue not only embodies The Egoist’s and Pound’s endorsement of Imagism and the ideogram as literary metaphors for sensate egoism (Von Hallberg 1995: 63–79; Kadlec 2000: 54–89), but also evokes Henri Bergson’s conjecture, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, that ‘different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able through the convergence of their action, to direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on’ (Bergson [1903] 1946: 195).25 Marsden had drawn on Bergson’s theory in her definition of sensate egoism,26 and Sorel had referenced Bergson in his description of the general strike as a mythic ‘body of images’ in Reflections on Violence, thus further confirming the revolutionary import of Imagism. Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska’s choice of Pentelic marble also had ideological, tactile and Imagistic resonance, for as Jon Wood has pointed out, Pentelic marble was Greek, quarried near Athens, and the same marble used for the architecture and sculpture of the Parthenon, also on display at the British Museum (Wood 2004: 198). The use of such marble to create a brash ode to Pound’s virility was arguably an egoist means of further mocking the Royal Academicians’ veneration of classical Greek sculpture as an eternal Ideal.

Anarchist Anti-Imperialism More importantly, Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska’s choice to model the Hieratic Head after the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) statue Hoa Hakanani’a was an irreverent riposte to the status of classicism as a symbol of British imperialism. To understand this dimension of Pound’s project we have only to consider the circumstances under which Hoa Hakanani’a arrived on British shores and its installation at the British Museum. Hoa Hakanani’a and a companion monolith, Moia Hava, were transported by the British Navy as ethnographic curiosities to Britain in 1869, where they were then bequeathed to the British Museum by Queen Victoria. Rather than being exhibited within the walls of the museum itself, the two monoliths were

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Figure 11.12 An Easter Monday Group Gathered around an Easter Island Statue. From the Illustrated London News (9 April 1887). positioned on the east side of the front entrance portico, where they remained exposed to the elements from 1869 to 1940 (Van Tilberg 2004: 7–10). An illustration in the 9 April 1887 issue of the Illustrated London News gives us a clear sense of Hoa Hakanani’a ‘s status as an exotic object, treated with casual indifference by the local populace (Figure 11.12). The accompanying caption appropriately informs us that these ‘rudely-formed statues of unknown personages’ were not venerated as works of art, but instead regarded as an ‘ethnographic mystery’ by the visiting public (van Tilburg 2004: 8–9). As Rupert Arrowsmith has demonstrated, Hoa Hakanani’a and Moia Hava were deliberately positioned in the British Museum’s portico to provide a dramatic contrast with the humanist ideals signified by the architect Robert Smirk’s Ionic façade, and more pointedly with Royal Academician Richard Westmacott’s classically inspired pediment frieze on the theme of the Progress of Civilization (Arrowsmith 2011: 4–8).27 An 1892 guidebook to the museum described the pediment as containing figures in a ‘savage condition’ in the lateral corners, shown crouching among exotic vegetation and animals, but as one moved towards the centre, the figures became erect and formed a classically inspired allegorical grouping, celebrating ‘Mathematics, the Drama, Poetry, Fine Arts, Natural History, etc’ (Lee 1892). In the opening pages of his 1895 ode to the New Sculpture, Gosse chastised the British public for thinking that contemporary sculpture had no more relation to modern life ‘than the idols of Easter Island’ (Gosse 1895: 327). It is no surprise that Gaudier-Brzeska and Pound turned to these very ‘idols’ as the principal source of inspiration for their most famous collaborative project. Thus, Gaudier-Brzeska and Pound’s choice to draw on Hoa Hakanani’a as inspiration for the Hieratic Head was a symbolic affront not only to Gosse, but to the values of classical humanism enshrined at the British Museum as a sign of the United Kingdom’s imperial hegemony. Pound underscored the point in a March 1914 article in Poetry in which he denounced ‘the tyrannies and swindle of Empire’, while GaudierBrzeska in the 16 March edition of The Egoist proclaimed that the modern sculptor rejects the classical ideal and ‘works with instinct as his inspiring force’, thereby ‘continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth (for whom we have sympathy and admiration)’ (Pound 1914e; Gaudier-Brzeska 1914b).

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Conclusion In sum, I would argue that Pound’s Vorticist-related art criticism is integral to his deployment of a new, radical subjectivity in the context of a Sorelian war between classes. Having declared class to be a ‘state of mind’, Pound defined the consciousness of the proletariat and their bohemian allies as typified by a rebellious dynamism that found expression in cultural and political revolt. By reconfiguring art criticism as a form of art ‘appreciation’, Pound celebrated emotive affectivity as a stimulus for individual creation, and the basis on which artists would respond in a unique way to each other’s work. Such mutual appreciation laid the groundwork for a collective identity, even as it assured individual autonomy within that configuration. This union of egoists was the basis for the Vorticist project, and beginning in January 1914, Pound set about defining its Sorelian antithesis, the ‘state of mind’ represented by the bourgeoisie, as manifest in art criticism, humanism and the institutional style of empire, classicism. The polarising set of aesthetic dyads fabricated by Pound in the realm of the visual arts furthered this project by pitting Imagism, Expressionist abstraction, direct carving and primitivism against academic mimesis, sculptural casting and classicism. Thus, Pound’s Vorticist aesthetics was part and parcel of a revolutionary ‘modus vivendi’ that, having briefly flourished, quickly dissipated following the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 and the collapse of the anarchist movement.28

Notes 1. On Pound’s evolving Vorticist-related art criticism from his essay on ‘The New Sculpture’ in February 1914 to the completion of his ‘Affirmations’ series in The New Age in February 1915, see Beasley (2007: 49–111). 2. Marsden was editor of The New Freewoman (June–December 1913) and The Egoist (1914–19). Scholars have also pointed to Egoist contributor Allen Upward as influential on Pound’s turn to anarchism. In chronological order, those texts are as follows: Levenson (1984); Sherry (1993); Kadlec (1993); Von Hallberg (1995); Clarke (1996); Kadlec (2000); A. Antliff (2001); Beasley (2007). 3. On Pound, anarchism and Vorticist sculpture, see M. Antliff (2010a, 2010b, 2013b). 4. I have used Stirner (1993, trans. S. Byington), which slightly altered Byington’s original title, The Ego and His Own. In 1913, Byington contributed to the 15 September, 1 October, 15 October, 1 November, 15 November and 15 December editions of The New Freewoman and in 1914, to the 1 January, 15 January and 15 April editions of The Egoist. 5. On Pound’s developing friendships with Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein and Lewis, see Beasley (2007: 70); on his complex relations with T. E. Hulme, which began in May 1909, see Fergusson (2002). 6. Lewis, like Hulme, was a long-time admirer of Sorel and the anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin; Gaudier-Brzeska was a self-declared anarchist who moved in anarchist and anti-militarist circles in Paris and London; while Epstein’s interest in anarchism dated to his early years in New York and Paris, when he was friends with the prominent American anarchist Emma Goldman and Belgian anarchist Victor Dave. On Lewis’s exposure to Sorel and his sustained impact on Lewis into the interwar years, see Sherry (1993); Meyers (1980); and Edwards (2000). On Gaudier-Brzeska’s French anarchist and anti-militarist roots, see M. Antliff (2010a). On Epstein’s links to anarchist circles in New York, Paris and London, see M. Antliff (2013a). On A. J. Cook, see Holton (1976); on Hulme’s salon see Kadlec (1993: 1015–31).

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7. On Bowman, Mann and a synopsis of British strike action between 1910 and 1914, see Brown (1976: 12–13, 2011: vii–ix) and Bantman (2013: 167–78). 8. For a recent overview of Hulme’s interest in Sorel before 1914, see Mead (2015); for alternative accounts, see Sherry (1993: 30–42) and Gasiorek (2006: 149–67). 9. Sorel relates his definition of myth as a ‘body of images’ expressive of our faculty of ‘intuition’ to Henri Bergson’s theory of intuitive perception, defined by the latter as ‘empathetic consciousness’, or a form of ‘instinct’ that had become ‘disinterested’. Bergson wished to stress the role of human will in this state of consciousness, which he related to our capacity for creative action and thought. For a succinct analysis of Bergson’s impact on Sorel, see Vernon (1978: 50–61). 10. See A. Antliff (2001: 76–7, 2013: 142–3). Allan Antliff’s analysis of Pound’s and Marsden’s concept of egoist self-rule and its relation to Stirner’s union of egoists constitutes an important corrective to Clarke, who argues that Marsden rejected such egoist alliances. See Bruce Clarke (1996: 107–8). Levenson in turn attributes Pound’s embrace of the idea to the additional mediating impact of fellow Egoist contributor and Stirner acolyte Allen Upward. See Levenson (1984: 73). 11. On the impact of Upward’s egoism on Pound, see Levenson (1984: 68–74) and Clarke (1996: 108). 12. The text under review was George Dunlop Leslie’s The Inner Life of the Royal Academy with an Account of its Schools and Exhibitions Principally in the Reign of Queen Victoria (London: John Murray, 1914). 13. Gaudier-Brzeska accused Aldington of employing ‘false and arrogant scholastics’ (Gaudier-Brzeska 1914b). 14. For succinct analyses of the Vorticists’ critique of the Futurist cult of the present and of ‘automobilism’, see Levenson (1984: 77–9) and Edwards (2013). 15. For an historical overview of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, see their website: http:// www.therp.co.uk/society/about. 16. For an analysis of Lewis’s Timon of Athens portfolio, see Jameson (2013); Edwards (1998, 2010). 17. For an analysis of the egoist import of Pound’s statement, see A. Antliff (2001: 77–8). 18. For a comprehensive analysis of the anarchist import of Pound’s writing on Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, see M. Antliff (2010b, 2013b). 19. For a fuller analysis of Pound’s calculated riposte to Gosse, see M. Antliff (2013b). 20. Pound first read Gosse in 1903 at Hamilton College, and in August 1909, a full year after moving to London, Pound dined with the critic, whom he described to his parents as a timid thinker ‘who never gives voice to any critical opinion until it is so apparent that nobody can deny it’. Pound openly mocked the poet-critic in The Egoist, disparaging Gosse as the critic most admired by The Times editorial team in his article on John Synge (von Helmholtz 1914a: 54). See references to Gosse in L/HP 12, 31, 181. The most comprehensive study of the New Sculpture is Beattie (1983); also see Getsy (2004); Stocker (1985/6); and Droth (2004). 21. For a perceptive analysis of Gosse’s aesthetic theory and his relations with Thornycroft, see Getsy (2004: ch. 2). 22. For Gosse’s comments on naturalism and the surface treatment of Thornycroft’s sculpture, see Gosse (1894: 138–9, 200). 23. For analyses of the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, see Silber (1996: 131–2); Tickner (1993); and Wood (2004: 197–8). 24. The contrast between the traditional sculptor’s singular emphasis on the life of the mindand Gaudier-Brzeska’s overt linkage of mental and physical fertility was first made by Jon Wood (2004: 196).

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25. Bergson’s analysis of the image had a profound impact on the Neo-Symbolist and Cubist art movements as well as on Georges Sorel and the Italian Futurists; for an analysis of its impact on the Symbolist, Cubist and Futurist movements in France and Italy, see M. Antliff (1993: 48–54, 157–64). 26. On Marsden’s debt to Bergson, see Levenson (1984: 66–7); Clarke (1996: 99); M. Antliff (2010b: 49); and Beasley (2007: 55–8). 27. For an analysis of Richard Westmacott’s British Museum façade, see Read (1983: 218–20). 28. On the dissolution of the international anarchist movement in the wake of World War I, see Bantman (2013: 183–7).

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12 ‘Intelligence . . . Shut in by the Entrenched Forces of Stupidity’: Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis Paul Edwards

P

ound and Lewis first met in 1908 (in the Vienna Café, as Pound remembers in The Pisan Cantos), but did not become allies until about 1913. Lewis showed Pound how to be avant-garde and, in BLAST, how to make art out of invective. Touchy and jealous of his status, Lewis was never convinced that Pound really learnt either of these skills – or that he shook off his lingering aestheticism – and his 1927 criticism of Pound in Time and Western Man is as notorious as their earlier association is famous. Pound and Lewis were at their closest during the period from 1914 up to Pound’s departure from London in 1920. Lewis’s tributes, in various memoirs, to Pound’s energetic promotion of his fellow-‘Men of 1914’ are full and unaffected. It was through Pound that John Quinn amassed a large collection of Lewis’s paintings, including the now lost Kermesse and Plan of War. Pound was also the impetus behind the show of Vorticism that Quinn sponsored at the Penguin Club in New York in 1917. Pound sought a publisher for Lewis’s novel, Tarr, and used his connections with Harriet Weaver at The Egoist to arrange its serialisation and publication as a book after all other publishers had rejected it. While Lewis was in the British Army during World War I, Pound published many of Lewis’s shorter pieces in The Little Review. Pound even (in his own mind, anyway) collaborated with Lewis by adding letters of his own to Lewis’s story, ‘Imaginary Letters’ (PD 55–76).1 Lewis asked him to be his literary executor in case of his death at the front. In the summer of 1917, Pound collected from the defunct Goschen office the manuscript of Lewis’s never-published book ‘Our Wild Body’ and the sole copy of Timon bound with the play text. He printed ‘A Soldier of Humour’ and ‘Inferior Religions’ from the ‘Wild Body’ book in The Little Review, commenting about the latter that ‘it is perhaps the most important single document that Wyndham Lewis has written’ (Pound 1917: 3). It is perhaps the only Lewis work directly echoed in the Cantos.2 Though Pound’s and Lewis’s Vorticism were slightly different things, Pound fought to keep the movement alive in the public consciousness during the war. Pound left London, but he remained a supporter and admirer of Lewis; this chapter will trace their interaction up to, and even beyond, Lewis’s death in 1957. I will cover not so much who did what, when, as the deeper significance of their mutual influence – especially, in the first section, the importance of Pound’s understanding of Lewis’s work in clarifying the dilemmas he faced in writing The Cantos.

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I proceed to Lewis’s dissociation from Pound in 1927 and conclude with a consideration of their post-World War II relationship, when Lewis struggled with blindness and poverty in Notting Hill while Pound was detained as insane in Washington.

Timon and The Cantos: Meaning Modernity It was primarily as an innovator in visual form and design that Pound valued Wyndham Lewis – more highly than most subsequent art historians have. The portfolio of reproductions, Timon of Athens, was what convinced Pound that Lewis was one of the great European masters of design, and caused him to associate Lewis with Picasso and Mantegna as models for writers at the close of the Ur-Canto I in 1917 (PC 8). The Timon project occupied Wyndham Lewis from 1912 to 1914, and he briefly returned to it in 1919 in two minor drawings. It comprises a series of works on paper, some exhibited at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, some published as a series of sixteen plates in a portfolio by ‘The Cube Press’ in 1913, plus at least two important abstractions produced after that, one reproduced in the first issue of BLAST as plate v (Lewis 1914). The portfolio drawings were intended for an edition of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, but the text was printed in 1914 without spaces for the plates. The unique copy that Pound collected, with plates provisionally inserted in this printed text, survives in the Beinecke Library at Yale. Pound passed it to John Quinn on Lewis’s behalf in 1917, but he already knew it well as the portfolio: a set of plates with no text. Its importance to him is shown by his frequent references in The Egoist and The New Age, and by his hands-on approach: reporting in the 1914 ‘Wyndham Lewis’ how he spent six months trying to ‘get at’ it, ‘spoiling sheet after sheet of paper in learning just how difficult it is to bring forth a new unit of design’ (EPVA 187). Timon became a touchstone for Pound in his transition to the epic mode during and after World War I.3 Its importance is best clarified through one of the drafts of Canto IV, composed in 1916–17 at the time that Pound was reshaping the beginning of his poem.4 Lewis’s Timon appears as a possible solution to a methodological dilemma tied to the nature of language. The fragment is an expression of self-doubt, but more importantly a confession of the exhaustion of the method of self-doubt or self-questioning, which had been the psychological motor of the Ur-Cantos, a narrative method that introduced material under the dramatic pretext of introspective indecisiveness: ‘Pound Prologuizes’. In the fragment, Pound bemoans his own lack of directness, implicitly facing the dilemma that meaning is achieved at the cost of the dissolution of the thing itself into relations, or (more explicitly) into explanations that exert too much control over that proliferation: the wrong kind of clarity: ‘and I am all too plain, / Too full of footnotes, too careful to tell you / The how and why of my meaning “here was the renaissance”’ (PC 22). For it is precisely the relations that matter to him; ‘the “thing”’ to be treated ‘directly’ is actually a complex of relations that should not be treated ‘directly’ in an explanatory sense (‘dim lands of peace’) but should be discerned through images (LE 3, 5). But to guide the reader through such relations without explanatory gloss and mount towards the paradisal One in The Cantos (‘streak the barren way to paradise’; PC 21) tempts the poet into well-worn or ‘timeless’ poetic beauty that also negates the kind of direct treatment he desires: ‘Let undines hear me, and in cool streams / Redeck the muses’ gardens, green herbs and cress’ (PC 21). Alternatively, he finds himself

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‘too careful to tell you / The how and why of my meaning’, as when he proposes to himself to ‘call lights “souls”, / And say: The lights ascending . . . like a covey of partridges’ (PC 21). The dilemma seems to be both summarised and dismissed by Pound’s quotation from Dante: ‘trashumanar non si potria per verba’ (PC 21: ‘No words could express transcendence of the human’, as Bacigalupo translates), here a statement of the inadequacy of either horn of the linguistic dilemma as much as an aspiration to a transcendence beyond expression. An inward turn instead of the Symbolist direction from the known to the transcendent is then canvassed: ‘The soul starts with itself, builds out perfection’, and Gaudier-Brzeska (‘the best man killed in France’) is presented as an instance of this course. Both Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis ‘show a new way to the kindred arts [that is poetry]’ (PC 21), producing that dynamic complex of ‘thing’ through its relations (‘A bristling node’) that Pound aspires to. 5 ‘Lewis with simpler means / Catches the age, his Timon, / Throws our few years onto a score of pasteboards, / Says all our conflict, edgey epigrammatic’ (PC 22). On first reading we tend to infer a missing ‘that’ (‘says [that] all our conflict . . .’) and expect the sentence to continue with a statement of what Timon says about our age and its conflict. We are brought up short by the realisation that ‘our conflict’ itself is precisely what it ‘says’. The work itself here is the thing, and its relations (all our conflict) are, Pound thinks, simply enunciated without reductive explanation on the one hand, or poetic ornament on the other. The problem of meaning seems to be bypassed, leaving Pound’s own explanations as a ‘clattering rumble’ that says all too clearly what he means. ‘What he means’: one clue to Pound’s long fascination with Lewis’s Timon is surely the extraordinary statement he made in his Egoist essay on Lewis, published when BLAST was imminent, about a week after ‘Vorticism’ (Pound’s coinage, of course) had been agreed as the name for the movement that Lewis led. Referring to the plate ‘with the big circular arrow’ (see Figure 11.6) he writes, I think if anyone asked me what I mean – not what I mean by any particular statement, but what I mean, I could point to that design and say ‘That is what I mean’ with more satisfaction than I could point to any other expression of complex intense emotion. (EPVA 189) Pound is anxious to distinguish this particular sense of the word ‘mean’ as something referring to more than the intention behind an individual’s utterance; to its place in a whole, rather. To put it simply, instead of being the utterer, Pound is the utterance: constructed from the conflictual relations in which he is an active participant. So the ‘simpler means’ of Lewis’s Timon image suggests an escape from the linguistic dilemma, for it displays meaning, but says nothing. Its ‘content’ (nature) speaks for itself, but its form also expresses emotion. The plate that Pound contemplates thereby offers the poet’s whole significance: what he means as part of a whole. Such figure– ground relationships (cognate with that of the ‘thing’ and its relations) remained a central concern in the forms of Lewis’s visual art. In the calm countenance of the plunging or flying Timon at the bottom left of the plate, borne by its material maelstrom, Pound may well have seen his own face. Pound’s valuation of the visual in Lewis (and Gaudier) might be interpreted as being little more than a conventional conviction that one picture is worth a thousand words.

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But his reflections on the way Lewis’s images are constructed in Timon show that it was the building of wholes out of individual elements – a poetic as much as a painterly necessity – that really occupied him as much as the apparent nominalistic bias of visual signs. ‘Go in fear of abstractions’, Pound advises, fearful of dulling the image (LE 5), advice that reflects what Mark Antliff (2010b) has identified as his nominalism (‘nomina sunt consequentia rerum’; quoted and attributed to Aquinas, EPVA 207). On the face of it, this should go against Pound’s enthusiasm for ‘abstraction’ in painting. But for Pound, it is the medium itself (as much as its reference) – what the poem is made out of, from language to the things in this world – that must be real rather than ‘abstract’. The medium of Lewis’s visual ‘abstraction’, its language of arcs, grimy surfaces, intersections, angles and clashing forms, is true to his (and Pound’s) situation in the modern world; and it is created by his subjective emotion as well as by formally mimetic ‘realism’ in relation to his environment (see Pound’s letter to Quinn, 13 July 1916, EPVA 238–9). If this medium is true, it can provide a vocabulary for a constructive art. In the watercolour plates of Timon, through this limited vocabulary of forms, Lewis creates volume by chiaroscuro within ‘pattern-units’, as Pound calls them: ‘Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind – if the mind is strong enough. Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units, or units of design’ (P&P II: 8). Pound goes on to assert that the way such pattern-units are combined within a picture expresses a more complex emotion. Such combinations may reflect what the artist sees (the ‘objective’ illusion of plasticity), but images may also be ‘subjective’ and without resemblance to the external world. His argument abridges the linguistic dilemma by this direct transposition to the ‘image’: Not only does emotion create the ‘pattern-unit’ and the ‘arrangement of forms’, it creates also the Image. The Image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then ‘subjective’. External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original. (1915; P&P II: 8) What is outlined here resembles the traditional division of Cubism into ‘synthetic’ and ‘analytic’, with the former corresponding to Pound’s ‘subjective’, and the latter to his ‘objective’. Three of Lewis’s plates (A Masque of Timon, A Feast of Overmen and The Thebaid; Figure 12.1)) are more or less objective in Pound’s sense; the plate that inspired his 1914 praise, apart from its recognisably plunging or flying figure, is relatively subjective (see Figure 11.6, p. 204). In the same article, Pound praised ‘the design . . . marked Act III’ (EPVA 189). Like the Vorticist Timon reproduced in BLAST, these half-title pages for Acts are more obviously synthetic: pure black blocks and lines that construct, rather than imitate, images. The Timon portfolio can thus be seen to satisfy both of the directions Pound lays out as possibilities for poetry in his draft ‘Canto IV’: start from the objective world to its signification (‘call lights “souls”’) or, from within the subjective (‘the “soul”’ itself), ‘build out perfection’. The terms he uses here show the theological implications of the ‘image’, since in either direction it partakes of the soul, and hence the divine. The question of whether the ‘thing’ to be treated is objective

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Figure 12.1 Wyndham Lewis, Timon of Athens: The Thebaid, 1912. Photo-lithographic print. 26cm × 35cm. From Timon of Athens (London: Cube Press, 1913). By permission, The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

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or subjective is ultimately of technical interest only, for the resulting image partakes both of nature and of the mind, and is transcendently verified in an epiphany: Timon shows that ‘the intelligent god is incarnate in the universe’ (1914; EPVA 188). Pound’s nominalism carries within it the seed of an unexpected Neoplatonism. As we shall see, it was to the importance of Lewis in showing a way to combine these that Pound reverted in his reminiscent letters near the end of Lewis’s life. The portfolio as a whole contains narrative elements in an anti-narrative structure, undermining linear time by overlaying past and present. The unbound plates of the portfolio can be ordered however the spectator wishes. As well as catching the age and saying its conflict, it also says that ‘Timon lived in Greece, and loved the people’ (PC 22). The simple narrative is a sort of equivalent of Canto II’s respect for fact: ‘Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana’: an insistence on the necessity of objective narrative as a foundation of subjective emotion. A further chronological layer is fused into Lewis’s ‘Timon’, that of ‘the old play’, as Pound calls it. The portfolio therefore fuses the Timon of ‘history’ (see Plutarch’s life of Antony), Shakespeare’s creation, and a completely modern figure identifiable with Lewis – and even Pound himself. All expressed in a modern idiom that communicates emotion directly and ‘says our conflict’. It is ‘anti-narrative’ in that its emphasis seems to be less on chronology than on a simultaneous presentation of narrative ‘moments’ that combine in varying quantities the subjective and the objective. Its status as a ‘score of pasteboards’ (PC 22) that can be reshuffled into any order supports this anti-narrative reading, too.6 No doubt with his own ambitions in mind, in his ‘Affirmation’ of Vorticism, Pound sees great potential in this sense of form: ‘It is possible that this search for form-motif will lead us to some synthesis of western life comparable to the synthesis of oriental life which we find in Chinese and Japanese painting’ (EPVA 9). But Timon’s significance for Pound was more than formal, and with the launch of Vorticism he was tempted to paraphrase its ‘meaning’: Lewis ‘has in his “Timon” expressed the sullen fury of intelligence baffled, shut in by the entrenched forces of stupidity’ (EPVA 188, 208). It is above all to the Thebaid plate depicting Timon screaming out his cave-mouth at Alcibiades and his followers that Pound’s remarks seem to apply (Figure 12.1). Although the imagery of the fragment of the draft Canto IV is predominantly paradisal, Pound’s problem at this stage is really ‘to streak the barren way’ to Paradise, and that way has to go through the Hell of modernity. Lewis’s depiction of intelligence railing against stupidity encapsulates the inferno Pound needs to navigate before he is to reach Paradise. As Bush observed, Pound searched for a literary equivalent for this, finding it first in a struggle against The Times, as a symbol of ‘a loathsome state of mind, a malebolge’ (EPVA 188). Bush finds a direct link to the later ‘Hell Cantos’ (XIV and XV); but Pound was surely referring to his ‘Salutation the Third’, already set up in type for its appearance in BLAST: Let us deride the smugness of ‘The Times’: GUFFAW! ... O fools, detesters of Beauty. . . HERE is the taste of my BOOT, CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING. (B1 45)

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Leaving aside any critical objections that may be levelled against this as poetry, it obviously lacks the transhistorical resonance of Timon, and Pound was right to doubt whether this expression of hatred of British journalism was an adequate equivalent. Lewis’s treatment is modernist; the ‘content’ of the portfolio, paradoxically, is not, yet Pound rightly emphasised its contemporary relevance.7 Much closer to Lewis’s method in Timon, therefore, were Pound’s ‘translations’ in Cathay (including ‘The Seafarer’) and more especially Homage to Sextus Propertius, which is a completely successful poetic equivalent of the qualities Pound had found in Timon. Its apparently stiff and artificial idiom straddles the urbanity of Augustan Rome and the pompous Latinism of contemporary journalism; yet its delicate irony shades into authentic pathos, stoical courage and an educated sensuality comparable to Goethe’s Roman Elegies. The historical resonance thus lies, as in Timon, primarily in the idiom itself. Pound wisely withheld explicit statement of its ‘meaning’ until 1931, when, goaded by Harriet Monroe’s recollection of the poem’s ‘mistranslations’, he explained in a letter to the English Journal: it presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire. (SL 310) Pound’s Homage is superficially so utterly different from Lewis’s Timon that it is easy to overlook the parallels between Lewis’s protagonist, ‘shut in by the entrenched forces of stupidity’, and Pound, ‘faced with . . . infinite . . . imbecility’. The Homage follows Timon in its containment of narrative elements in an anti-narrative structure,8 as well as in avoiding modern content (apart from a few ironic anachronisms). Pound had used personae before, of course, but not in synchronic overlay with modernity. The very un-Lewisian persona of Propertius, withdrawn from the grand task of epic, is hardly promising for Pound’s great undertaking, however. Pound still wanted to give his verse contemporary relevance and shake the soil of Aestheticism from its roots, planting it firmly in the avant-garde – exemplified for him by Lewis’s other work, particularly his BLAST writings, but also by the novel Tarr, which Pound was attempting to sell (alternately with Joyce’s Portrait) to various publishers. Aestheticism in England contradicted avant-gardism mainly in tactics rather than social objectives (see Guy 1991), but the transition was difficult to manage for a writer as deeply rooted in Aestheticism as Pound. He evidently felt at first that Lewis’s lack of ‘aloofness’ (and his own in attacking the Times) needed comment and justification: And having done so, some aesthete left over from the nineties would rebuke one for one’s lack of aloofness. I have heard people accuse Mr. Lewis of a lack of aloofness, yet Mr. Lewis has been for a decade one of the most silent men in London. (EPVA 188)9 Lewis was far more at home in British culture (small ‘c’) than Pound ever could be, having lived primarily in England since arriving from America at the age of six. It may be said that Pound’s Cultural (large ‘C’) aloofness was reflected in his cultivation of an elite, rather conventionally defined, in his professional social life.10 Lewis astutely

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noted Pound’s social difficulties in England, his incompatibility with the people with whom he mixed: Those were the days when a man going on a long train journey would be apt to slip in his pocket a copy of The Iliad in the Greek text: and there was after all Lionel Johnson’s definition of a gentleman – a man who knows Greek and Latin. Ezra Pound seemed forgetful at times of these details . . . As to the learning, those possessing it usually did nothing with it, and [Pound] showed them its uses.11 (Lewis 1950a: 258–9) Lewis’s BLAST is thoroughly imbricated with modern culture, high and low, but Pound, whether in ‘Moeurs Contemporaines’ (published in Quia Pauper Amavi) or in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts, remains in the posh end of town (apart from an embarrassed detour to Ealing), attempting always to impress by his urbanity and refinement. There is as much of the patrician Henry Adams, who ‘for yet another year . . . lingered on these outskirts of the vortex’, visited the South Seas and wished to return there, ‘if it were only to sleep forever in the trade winds under the southern stars’ (Adams [1918] 1961: 349, 316; Dekker 1969) as there is of Henry James in Mauberley.12 Even the horror of war is measured by the waste of ‘Young blood and high [aristocratic] blood’. This is not to say that the poem is unconnected to Lewis or his version of modernism. Pound took Lewis’s Tarr as a self-portrait rather than a novelistic creation whose declamations are subject to chastisement by the Real. The apparently anti-vital aesthetic of surfaces Tarr expounds to his potential lover Anastasya (‘The lines and masses of the statue are its soul . . . It has no inside’; Lewis 1918: 300 – much cited by Pound) is combined with a life finally (if precariously) adjusted both to producing art and to satisfying his sexual appetites.13 The novel’s exploration of the dialectic interaction of art and life culminates in the presentation of Anastasya in this scene of aesthetic-discussion-cum-seduction. Anastaya is presented as a ‘work of art’, as well as the epitome of the erotic. The duality is echoed, though not reproduced, in the theme of sexual indecisiveness in Mauberley, where the female singer is transformed into a work of art whose porcelain and metal surfaces are its soul; but the sexually commanding Anastasya has deliberately constructed herself as ‘art’, with playful irony. Tarr utterly transforms Wildean Aestheticism for the modern world, but Pound apparently remains hypnotised by it, despite hoping to cast it off in this sequence as he shakes the dust of England from his feet.14 In contrast to his painting, Lewis’s writing was not so formally amenable to Pound. The ‘prose tradition’ for him went through the Goncourts, Flaubert, James and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), and like Hueffer he seems appalled at Lewis’s cavalier indifference to the novelistic techniques they had developed. Joyce (at least in A Portrait) continued that tradition, but Lewis’s writing was ‘faulty’ (LE 425). Tarr, for instance, proceeded ‘by general descriptive statements . . . where the objective presentation of single and definite acts would be more effective’ (LE 426). Lewis shatters the novel’s objectivity with his own ‘active and “disagreeable”’ subjective voice (LE 425). As for the generically unclassifiable Enemy of the Stars, the ‘play’ that Lewis published in BLAST no. 1, specifically as a literary equivalent of visual abstraction, Pound ignored it, at least until 1937, when he suddenly realised its profound innovation as ‘poetic drama’, still awaiting a technique for presentation (SP 424). Pound’s respect for generic

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decorum did not close his mind to Lewis’s opinions and arguments, though it perhaps obscured from him the extent to which Lewis wrote fiction, rather than fictionalised diatribes; but he did not immediately see that Lewis’s scorn for generic conventions might itself have a technical payoff in enlarging artistic form. Yet it is by his own violation of generic boundaries and decorum that Pound’s Cantos have attained literary significance. Lewis was arguably more important in this for Pound than Joyce. Pound knew that it was modernity – especially if modernity as he experienced it was a form of Hell – that his long poem needed to encompass. He distinguished between the generic functions of prose and poetry: poetry is positive, but prose has the essentially negative function of draining muck: collecting and negating the ‘rubbish’ of modernity.15 So Tarr shows ‘a highly energized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; cleaning up a great lot of rubbish’ (LE 429). Pound’s tireless efforts on behalf of writers who he thought made this modernity their subject, and his propaganda on behalf of a modern renaissance, distract from the absence of real modernity from his own poetry at this time. The draft manuscripts of Canto IV, in which he proposes Timon as a model, certainly attempt the ‘prose’ task of incorporating modernity as the beginning of the necessarily mixed style of an epic intended to progress through a ‘barren way’ ultimately to the purely poetic. The manuscript ‘Ur1’ of the canto (Froula 1984: 70–3) self-consciously incorporates ‘prose’ narrations of national identity (English, German, Japanese) that hark back to national traditions, and measures their persistence or damage in a modern world riven by war. It does so anxiously, however (‘I’m no Stendhal’; line 2), and none of this material survives into later drafts. The implied answer to the question, ‘what is the poet’s business?’ in line 2 of the draft of Canto IV that Froula calls ‘Ur2’ (Froula 1984: 74) was, like Lewis’s Timon, to ‘say all our conflict’, but by ‘Fragment 4B’ of these drafts the question is more limited: ‘What’s poetry?’ ‘Business’ has been dropped, and the recidivist answer limited accordingly to the evocation of paradisal memories: ‘There is a castle set, / The Auvezere, or it’s Dordoigne, chalk white and whiteish blue’ (Froula 1984: 104; PC 24). It was not until the current Canto XII that the modern world appears as itself in The Cantos, in a wouldbe comic narration about the perversion of nature by finance. Cantos XIV and XV, the ‘Hell Cantos’ that Bush links to Pound’s conception of Timon, constitute a second ‘Salutation the Third’, but are scarcely less embarrassing or more truly modern than the first.16 Pound hoped that Lewis might provide drawings to reproduce alongside them (P/L 139). Nevertheless, it was an appreciation of Lewis as a contributor to the ‘prose tradition’, a delineator of the modern inferno, but one whose true Penelope was not Flaubert (at least not the fastidious stylist), that alerted Pound to the need to break out of the generic decorum of the ‘poetic’, if he was to engage with the intractable prosaic material of the modern world as well as with the ‘timeless’.

‘My Only Critic’: ‘Speaking a Shell of Speech’ When Lewis returned – a changed man – from war service (most traumatically at Passchendaele), his alliance with Pound was still vital in the struggle for an effective avantgarde in England. Pound publicised Lewis’s war drawings (reviewing them twice), and when Lewis caught Spanish flu in 1919, it was Pound who proofread his The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex? The pamphlet attacked Bloomsbury aestheticism and reactionary French classicism, and argued for a transformed urban environment shaped by a Vorticist sense of form to increase zest and gusto in life.

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Figure 12.2 Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, 1920. Pencil on paper. 37 × 32 cm. The T. S. Eliot Foundation. By permission, The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

This was to some extent a joint campaign, also involving Edward Wadsworth (PA 73–6). Lewis was close enough to Pound to allow him to radically change a sentence disparaging contemporary writers compared with painters. Pound’s defensive revision eliminates the comparison: ‘Yet you find more vigour and conviction in that art than in literature; its exponents, Picasso, Matisse, Dérain [sic], Balla, for example, are more ^very^ considerable artists, ^very^ sure of themselves and of the claims of their business than most contemporary men of letters.’17 In return, Lewis defended Pound in a letter to the Observer against Robert Nichols’s contemptuous review of Homage to Sextus Propertius. ‘Mr. Pound . . . may conceivably know that Chaucer, Landor, Ben Jonson and many contemporaries of Rowlandson, found other uses for classic texts than that of making literal English versions of them’ (Lewis [1920] 1990: 168). Primarily, however, he immortalised Pound in a dozen or so portrait drawings of incomparable linear mastery and vitality (Figure 12.2). The persona projected is Pound as forceful avant-gardist, and Pound could have pointed to these drawings, too, in order to demonstrate ‘what I mean’. It is a persona unshadowed by the unconfident aesthete that Lewis knew also inhabited Pound’s exterior shell, and the drawings hint at a future of joint campaigns in London that were not to take place.18 ‘Then he left England in disgust, and of course England was the poorer and Rapallo not very much the richer’ (Lewis 1937: 281). Lewis kept Pound informed about his writing during the early 1920s (P/L 144–5), but became increasingly estranged from what passed as the avant-garde (now mainly domiciled, like Pound initially, in Paris: there was none but the Sitwells in Britain). His critiques of 1927, beginning with ‘The Revolutionary Simpleton’ in The Enemy (1927a, reprinted in Lewis 1927b), effect and explain this estrangement. The prime exemplar of

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the naïvety mocked by the title was Pound himself, though Joyce receives lengthier consideration. Lewis regarded the Parisian avant-garde with whom Pound now associated in This Quarter as dull, childish and self-indulgent. Pound’s new-found musical enthusiasm (that in one interview merged with a vision of mechanical labour as an industrial symphony) placed him alongside Marinetti (‘that intellectualist commis of Big Business’), against whose ideas Lewis’s Vorticism had defined itself: ‘Marinetti is rehabilitated by Ezra – music, provençal airs and ballads of Villon, as far as he personally is concerned, taking him paradoxically to the great throbbing, singing heart of the great god, Industry’ (Lewis 1927a: 64).19 Lewis presents Pound’s embrace of the avant-garde (including Vorticism) as due to a conventional love of excitement, for his poems are more remarkable for their passéism than for any real engagement with modernity. Pound’s Vorticism, as he tried to revive it and place it in the service of Fascism in the thirties, would indeed have little in common with Lewis’s originally dualistic aesthetic of 1913–14.20 Given this dualism, it would seem to be inconsistent to complain that Pound was both an avant-gardist and an old-fashioned aesthete. Such duality might be considered the basis of Vorticist creativity. But, according to Lewis, Pound’s conception of the avant-garde was naïve, and his grasp – particularly his poetic grasp – of modernity remained shallow and conventional. Lewis instances lines in Canto XIX about Spinder not needing ‘tew rent any money’, and declares that ‘They can never have illumined anything but the most half-hearted smile (however kindly) rather at Pound than at them.’ Neither does Pound’s lingering Aestheticism escape Lewis’s withering criticism. Concerning the evocations in Canto XVII of the Cave of Nerea and of Aletha, he writes: The way the personnel of the poem are arranged, sea-wrack in the hand of one, Aletha ‘with her eyes seaward’, the gold loin-cloth of another, etc., makes it all effectively like a spirited salon-picture, gold framed and romantically ‘classical’. It is full of ‘sentiment’, as is the Cave of Nerea; it is all made up of well-worn stage properties; and it is composed upon a series of histrionic pauses, intended to be thrilling and probably beautiful. (Lewis 1927a: 93) What is left intact from this critique is the lyricism of Pound’s younger (but now defunct) self and, more importantly, his almost mystical ability to inhabit the voices of the great poets of the past and bring them back to life – a power for which Lewis professes ‘reverence’. But the price is that Pound has become a sort of ‘intellectual eunuch’; he ‘for preference consorts with the dead, whose life is preserved for us in books and pictures. He has never loved anything living as he has loved the dead’ (Lewis 1927a: 90–1). As we have seen, it was Lewis’s example that Pound had attempted to follow both in shaking off Aestheticism and in accommodating modernity to his art. Lewis, at least, felt that Pound was unsuccessful in both. His criticisms could form, and – often without acknowledgement – have formed, the basis of a dismissal of The Cantos as anything more than a monumental failure from which occasional lyric evocations of tradition can be extracted. The trouble with this is that the poem turned out to be far more interesting than Lewis’s early critique allows for. Today Pound’s political obsessions, which increased year by year, dominate attempts to evaluate The Cantos. His political fanaticism may be related to what Lewis identifies as an inability to understand the modern world, but that was not a line that Lewis himself followed up (and during the thirties his own political antennae were hardly reliable). After World War

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II, his desire to help effect Pound’s release from incarceration no doubt restrained him, but he could not resist one impatient comment on Pound’s ‘incomprehensible intervention’ in the war, ‘when in some moment of poetic frenzy he mistook the clownish Duce for Thomas Jefferson’ (Lewis 1952: 41). We might ask whether Lewis had any understanding of Pound’s intentions and method in The Cantos, for he tends to treat the work merely as a collection of passages, good and bad. In fact, he was aware of Pound’s theories of transhistorical simultaneity and the relativity of time (which he discusses in ‘The Revolutionary Simpleton’), but regarded them as a species of the ‘time-philosophy’ he criticises in Time and Western Man (1927). Intellectual opposition was contradicted by imaginative sympathy, however – not only in the earlier Timon: Lewis painted a series of pictures (such as The Siege of Barcelona, One of the Stations of the Dead and The Inca (with Birds)), exhibited in 1937, which make meaning from the past, present, remote and timeless through a proliferation of internal and external relations formally similar to those of The Cantos. As a painter, though not as a writer, Lewis could learn from Pound the poet, just as Pound could learn from Lewis mainly as a painter. It is therefore appropriate that Lewis’s profoundest statement about Pound is the portrait of him he painted in 1938–9 on the occasion of Pound’s visit to London to deal with Olivia Shakespear’s estate (Figure 12.3). His portrait of T. S. Eliot had caused a stir when rejected by the Royal Academy in early 1938. Realising that the approaching war marked the end of an era, he adopted a commemorative mode both in his 1937 autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (‘We are the first men of a future that has not materialized’; Lewis 1937: 258) and in these portraits. Politically, he and Pound were now heading in opposing directions. Lewis (though still an appeaser) now repudiated Hitlerism and was ‘concerned to play down the political sympathies with which he had come . . . to be identified’, while Pound was beginning to admire Hitler for cooperating with Mussolini over the Munich settlement ‘to enlarge the area in which war could never break out again’ Cullis 1979: 7). Lewis’s portrait, which surely ranks as one of the greatest of the century, discreetly returns to his critique of 1927 (but to characterise instead of criticise), as Hugh Kenner’s classic account recognises: Ezra Pound, apparently asleep, reclines before Odysseus’ vast sea, but a painted sea, explicitly a painting, nailheads to hold a canvas to its stretcher running metrically down its edge. A folded newspaper denotes his concern with newspaper events, and three objets d’art – unused ashtrays, one crystalline, one with a dragon emblem – imply glazes and translucencies polarized toward the unpretentious and the oriental. Amid artifacts, since nothing but an art-world is visible, he dreams, drawn into ‘the obscure reveries of the inward gaze’, the face at ease but intent, caught in his dream (‘a man in love with the past’) and clearly more to be reckoned with than other men awake. (Kenner 1972: 499) The painted sea is as likely to be that of ‘The Seafarer’, for Lewis especially admired this translation, included in Cathay. He wrote that ‘Cathay – described by Hueffer as “the most beautiful book in the world” – was the first, as it remains the most magically beautiful, of versions of the Chinese poets’ (Lewis 1950b: 123). From this time on, their accounts of each other were mostly retrospective, though Pound took a keen interest in everything Lewis published after the war. From 1951, Lewis, blind from

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Figure 12.3 Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, 1939. Oil on canvas. 76 × 102 cm. Tate Gallery. By permission, The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

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the tumour growing in his skull, managed to write seven books before dying from its effects in March 1957. In 1962, The Paris Review published Pound’s ‘From Canto CXV’ (revised in Pound 1970b: 24), which is a kind of ‘Pour l’élection de son sépulcre’, a self-assessment prompted by the death of Lewis and informed by his critiques. Pound maintained (in a letter to T. S. Eliot) that Lewis ‘apart from 3 dead & one aged arcivescovo’ was his ‘only critic’ (quoted in P/L 225). In the poem, Pound sees Lewis as representing the last great flowering of the now dying European mind. He had always associated Lewis with mind and intelligence, from his 1917 citation of Lewis’s statement in ‘The Code of a Herdsman’ that ‘Matter which has not intelligence enough to permeate it grows, as you know, gangrenous and rotten’ (LE 280; Lewis 1917a: 5) to his acerbic comment that Lewis was ‘wrong about everything except the superiority of live mind to dead mind; for which basic verity God bless his holy name’ (Pound 1953: 17, quoted in Kenner 1954: xiii). It seems no more than a throwaway remark, but has a deep significance for Pound’s understanding of Lewis. For Pound had identified a permanent theme – more, a permanent dread – in Lewis’s writing: that mindless mechanical routines might usurp the freedom of human intelligence and replace living beings with empty automata governed by habit. This fear lurks behind all Lewis’s satire and comes to the fore in the late tragic novel, Self Condemned (1954), where the whole project of human consciousness (an ‘experiment’ that culminated in the flowering of the European Enlightenment) is seen as coming to a close in war. The novel’s protagonist himself begins to embody this fate, suffering periods of semiconsciousness while engaged in the ‘ant-like’ industry of producing writing for sale. At the novel’s end, he has become no more than a ‘glacial shell of a man’ (Lewis 1954b: 211–12, 407). Pound thought Self Condemned ought to win the Nobel Prize for Lewis (P/L 283). The intermittent consciousness described in the novel was Lewis’s own. The tumour that blinded him in 1951 gradually encroached on other mental functions and occasionally rendered him unconscious as he covered thousands of sheets of paper with writing he could never see. Lewis did not ‘choose’ blindness ‘rather than have his mind stop’, as ‘From Canto CXV’ dramatically puts it. In this respect, the earlier draft, ‘Wyndham Lewis taking blindness’ (Pound 1965) is more accurate as well as subtler, suggesting endurance at least as much as choice. The poem goes on to suggest a parallel between this extinction of the European mind (‘the intolerable necessity that something come to an end, that the hill is rotting, etc.’)21 and the inevitable cycle of nature and changing tides. In keeping with such cycles Pound himself is now ‘a blown husk that is finished’. Again, there is an allusion to Lewis in this self-assessment, though the phrase also recalls, with now placid irony, the poet’s earlier exasperation with the ‘thin husks’ of old men ‘speaking a shell of speech’ (VII/26). The last piece Lewis published on Pound was a fictional narrative of ‘doubles’: ‘Doppelgänger: A Story’, in which Lewis tried to do justice to his mingled scorn and admiration.22 It is prefaced by an imaginary dialogue in which ‘Lewis’ defends the (unnamed) Pound as a ‘great poet’ against the cynicism of his fictional editor. In the story itself, what Lewis always regarded as the inauthentic elements of Pound (‘Thaddeus Trunk’) are abandoned as an empty shell in their mountain retreat by his wife Stella in favour of a Stranger (Trunk’s double) who embodies all that Lewis sees as the true values of the private poet. The stranger has, indeed, surreptitiously been correcting and improving

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Trunk’s manuscripts. ‘Only a shadow, a shell, remained upon the mountain’ – Pound’s ‘husk that is finished’ (Lewis 1954a: 33; CXV/814). ‘But the light sings eternal’: Pound’s claim seems defiantly Neoplatonist and removed from nature (‘eternal’), but is immediately transformed into the more natural ‘pale flare over marshes’ (CXV/814) (no longer, it seems, a malebolge in need of draining). This blurred boundary between the natural and the transcendent is a fault line inherited by modernism from the naturalistic turn of Romanticism; it is a continual preoccupation for both Pound and Lewis, and even orthodoxy cannot entirely remove it for Eliot. Pound had seen Timon (with its ‘god . . . incarnate in the universe’) as, artistically, showing a way through that dilemma, though it is doubtful whether Lewis himself realised this. One of the last letters that Pound wrote to Lewis (5 or 6 October 1956) is relevant here. He welcomed Lewis’s introduction to the catalogue of his Tate Gallery retrospective exhibition as ‘one of the best statements yu hv/ ever made’ (P/L 299). Pound presumably has in mind the passage concerning Vorticism as a movement of abstraction in painting, for he continues, I dunno whether yu note convergence (from two quite distinct angles) on agreement of 1913 or whenever. At any rate there was a convergence not merely a connection. Not sure you had, or have previously so clearly defined what I converged TOWARD. (P/L 299–300) It was Lewis’s abstraction (that is, his ‘subjective’ constructive art) that had always been most important for Pound; he reaffirmed in his preface to La Martinelli, to which he directs Lewis in the letter, that Lewis and the early Picasso had revived a sense of form in Western painting (EPVA 177). Lewis calls ‘Visual Vorticism’ ‘dogmatically anti-real’ and an attempt to create ‘a visual language as abstract as music’ (Lewis 1956: 3). These are not startling ideas deserving of Pound’s high praise, one would have thought, yet Pound returns to the introduction in his next letter, two months later, reaffirming its importance and linking it to Plato and Plotinus. Perhaps it was Lewis’s mysterious statement about abstract form that reminded Pound of his convergence towards Lewis in 1913–14: ‘in the matter of form, a shape represented by fish remained a form independent of the animal, and could be made use of in a universe in which there were no fish’ (Lewis 1956: 3). Both Pound and Lewis seem to be thinking of a Platonic version of the mind as (in Marvell’s phrase) ‘that ocean where each kind / does straight its own resemblance find’. ‘Shape there before you can think’, says Pound, again attempting to accommodate a convergence of subjective and objective through the transcendent (P/L 301). Pound thought of this in medieval, scholastic terms. In his review of Tarr, he had drawn a doubtful parallel between Tarr’s aesthetic pronouncements to Anastasya and the ‘scholastic terms’ of Joyce’s (actually Stephen Dedalus’) aesthetics in A Portrait (LE 430). In his projected preface to Lewis’s letters, in 1963, he reverts to these terms to describe Lewis’s achievement during the Timon period: ‘one remembers somewhere a bull dog, as a sample of beauty as defined [by] St Thomas Aqui[nas] in his Summa . . . not that one thought of W. L. as neoThomist’ (P/L 305–6).23 Time and Western Man (Lewis 1927b), where Lewis’s criticisms of Pound were elaborated, in its philosophical portions worried precisely about the subject–object–god trinity and its boundaries,24 but in ‘From Canto CXV’ Pound repudiates the terms in

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which Lewis conducted his main polemic: ‘Time, space’.25 He also rejects Lewis’s criticism that he ‘has never loved anything living as he has loved the dead’: ‘neither life nor death is the answer’. Instead Pound deflects the personal criticism and places responsibility on human fallibility (‘Man seeking good, doing evil’),26 before concluding with what looks like a retreat into an acceptance of Lewis’s case: in Pound’s poetic world ‘the dead walked’ (as Lewis had claimed that the visionary Pound himself had walked with Sophocles by the Aegean) while ‘the living were made of cardboard’. Acceptance of Lewis’s critique of Pound’s unconvincing versions of modernity, maybe, but with an ironic Lewisian counter-implication that compared with the illustrious dead (including now Lewis himself), most of the living were ‘made of cardboard’ indeed.

Notes 1. Lewis’s ‘Imaginary Letters’ (properly ‘Letters from Petrograd’; P/L 88–9) is a story of the ‘biter bit’, but Pound seemed to take it as an exposition of ‘Lewisian’ opinions. 2. ‘Henri Fabre was in every way a superior being to Bernard, and he knew of elegant grubs which he would prefer to the painter’s nymphs’ (Lewis 1917b: 8). Compare ‘The green casque has outdone your elegance’ (LXXXI/556). 3. Ronald Bush’s account of the importance of Lewis’s Timon for Pound, to which I am indebted, remains the fullest and most perceptive (1976: 29–52). 4. The fragment is discussed and transcribed by Froula (1984: 18–19, 74–5) and Gibson (1995: 90–1), and given in a reading version in PC 21–2. 5. Compare Pound’s combined definition of an image/vortex as a ‘radiant node or cluster’ in the 1914 ‘Vorticism’ (EPVA 207). 6. Pace Michael Coyle, Pound seems to have come to his ‘anti-narrative’ sense of form as much through Lewis’s painting as through music (Coyle 1995: 172). Lewis placed the plates in the printed text (now at the Beinecke) with little regard for narrative sequence. Although ‘pasteboard’ has negative connotations for Pound (see Canto VII), as used here it emphasises the contrast between the flimsiness of the portfolio and the magnitude of its scope. 7. The portfolio engages with the contemporary cults of Bergson and Nietzsche, the latter encoded in the title of one of the images, A Feast of Overmen. See Edwards (2000: 86–92). 8. Pound ignores the narrative arc in Propertius’ four books. See Preda (2001: 109–10). 9. Ronald Bush sees the comment as symptomatic of Pound’s discomfort at ‘the “aesthete” part [of himself] he later attempted to exorcise in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1976: 48). 10. See Rainey (1998) for an account of Pound’s cultivation of the upper classes. Pound as ‘Walter Villerant’ writes: ‘Mayfair, let me say, is not stupid. Mayfair is, by contrast [with suburbia] fantastic. Fantastic arts have always come out of Mayfairs’ (PD 65). 11. The passage recalls Lewis’s 1920 letter to the Observer, quoted below. 12. There are parallels between Pound’s idea of the Vortex and Henry Adams’s ‘Dynamic Theory of History’ in The Education (Adams [1918] 1961). In 1922 Pound stated that Mauberley was ‘an attempt to condense the James novel’ (SL 248). Adams is the model for some aspects of The Ambassadors’ Lambert Strether. 13. See Nicholls (1994: 68) for the ‘relation between artistic endeavour and sexual passion’ in Mauberley. Nicholls connects it with Tarr, but does not touch on the novelistic context of Tarr’s exposition. 14. The pallid sterility of ‘Medallion’ (often noticed) may originate in Pound’s failure to grant reality to the Other, to realise the singer’s image as a self-projection and her erotic charge as more than a factor of ‘gaze’. Lewis, more of a novelist, avoids this. His aesthetic practice never accords entirely with the pure anti-vitalism expounded by Tarr, and he knows that objectification of the other is often cognate with solipsism.

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15. ‘Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation; is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detestable; of something which one wants to eliminate’ (LE 324). 16. Pound’s Dantesque infernal tableaux may be compared with the equally repugnant ones created by Lewis in Malign Fiesta (Lewis 1955: 372–80, 404–24). Again, it is novelistic context that gives deeper background to Lewis’s scene and makes it more than Eliot’s ‘Hell for the other people’ (Eliot 1934: 43). Eliot’s footnote instructs: ‘Consult Time and Western Man by Wyndham Lewis.’ 17. Poetry and Rare Books Department, University of Buffalo, proofs held in Map Case, MC4, 9. Compare Lewis (1919: 5). 18. The lost over-life-size portrait Lewis painted in 1919 is more complex: see Caracciolo (1984, 1986). 19. Lewis does, however, consider music the fitting medium for Pound, since it ‘says’ nothing and suits Pound’s subjective bias. 20. For an account of Pound’s attempts to establish Vorticism as the aesthetic of Italian Fascism see Hickman (2005: 89–131). For Lewis’s dualistic (and agonistic) Vorticist aesthetic, see (for example) the Vorticist Manifesto: ‘2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes. 3. We discharge ourselves on both sides’ (B1 30). 21. Quoted from Pound’s abandoned draft preface to Lewis’s collected letters, P/L 306. Rotting Hill, a collection of short stories by Lewis, was published in 1951. 22. Perhaps Pound’s exasperated comment that Lewis was ‘wrong about everything’ prompted Lewis’s story. Self Condemned had yet to appear. 23. The allusion is obscure, but I take Pound to be at least glancingly referring to Figure Composition (Man and Woman and two Bulldogs) (1912, Art Gallery of New South Wales), a work in the style of the Timon watercolours. 24. Pound is right to sense convergence rather than identity of views; Lewis thought human freedom depended on the separateness of the parts of this ‘trinity’. It was in art that the possible conditions of that separation are proposed and explored. 25. Writing to a prospective anthologist of Lewis’s prose in 1957, Pound maintained that the best of it was ‘NOT the philosophic meandering but the DELINEATION of people’. Quoted in P/L 305. 26. The earlier draft’s less generalised ‘men’ might be considered superior – and less defensive.

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13 Vorticist Photography, or The Three Angles of Ezra Pound and Alvin Langdon Coburn Ira Nadel

It takes a certain practice to understand what the eyes see. Paul Claudel, ‘Jules and the Poet’

‘Rectangular Personalities’

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here does one situate Vorticist photography and poetics in the context of early twentieth-century art and photography? And what was its impact on subsequent photography and painting? I am less concerned with the often-told story of the origin of Vorticist photography than with analysing its consequences, heeding the warning of the French theorist Pierre Taminiaux. Characterising modernity, he writes, is its simultaneous ‘passion for photography and its strong suspicion of it’ (Taminiaux 2009: 5). We can more or less define Vorticist photography, but have a less secure sense of its influence and effect. It appeared and disappeared quickly – or did it? My argument is that the geometry of the eye, or what Wyndham Lewis in BLAST 1 called ‘a sort of LIVING plastic geometry’ (B1 140) created by Vorticist photography’s new consciousness of technique and emphasis on the fragment, has been sustained by the work of major modernist photographers and painters. Both incorporate the kaleidoscopic imagery created by Coburn and reproduced by Pound in his poetry and prose. The modernist concentration on scattered fragments creating ‘rectangular personalities’, to quote the painter/writer Jessica Dismorr in her poem ‘June Night’ (B2 67–8), epitomises not only the intense portraits using multiple images created by Alvin Langdon Coburn’s vortographs, but also later works by figures like Malcolm Arbuthnot and Paul Strand in photography, and Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in painting. A concentration on abstract compositions of bold lines, sharp angles and planes in postmodern photography and painting demonstrates the afterlife of Vorticism. In its exposure rather than record of individuals, Vorticist photography created a new style of viewing as it answered the questions, ‘What should a photograph look like? What should a photograph do’? Vortography follows Cubist analytic procedures and is pictorial to the extent that it conceives of itself as a work of art along the lines of the contemporary analytical work of Picasso and Braque, as well as Lewis and his emphasis on the diagonal,

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while seeking to convey energy via the vortex. It also has its place at the beginnings of abstraction occurring in art, as well as photography, seen in the work of Paul Strand and A. O. E. Hoppé, in whose work representation gives way to abstraction. New York, Paris and London triangulate these developments between roughly 1902 and 1907. More specifically, Vorticist photography stood between the earlier pictorialists and the so-called ‘straight photography’ school understood as an image-making that required no retouching, no bag of darkroom tricks, as Walker Evans suggested. A camera should not be used to make a painting, Edward Weston declared, in opposition to the pictorialist approach which emphasised a self-conscious artistry in creating a painterly quality to the image (Lopes 2016: 10). By contrast, Vorticist photography, chronologically following the pictorialists and the Cubists, exposed (and exploited) the special potential of the medium, in this case the remarkable, if experimental, kaleidoscopic possibilities of the lens and camera. Agency combined with manipulated machine imaging and the concept of photography as an art formed the Vorticist photograph, which strongly appealed to Pound and Coburn, both interested in technique and technology.1 Both understood that a photographic image should not work to represent the world but exist as an aesthetic object separate from it. The vortograph achieved this through its revolutionary imaging of individuals via their multiple but overlapping images. The Vorticist portrait reminded viewers that a certain level of technical skill was required to reveal the subject, whether a portrait or an object, underscoring Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1859 remark that a photograph is a ‘mirror with a memory’ (in Lopes 2016: 7). A Vorticist, however, might slightly adjust the phrase, as he would adjust a camera lens to see the multiple in the individual, to say that a photograph is a ‘manipulated mirror with a memory’. Replacing accuracy, detail and the automation of image-making is the effort, through an altered perspective and sight line, to see in a radically different way the representation of a figure. Importantly, it was less the darkroom than the lens that defined the Vorticist style. Technology associated with the eye became the key. Temporarily, at least, Vorticism resolved the clash between the epistemic power of photography and its expressive potential by linking image and technique (Lopes 2016: 11). Using three pieces of a mirror as a prism to split the image from his camera lens allowed Coburn to see his subject in a unique way. It reassembles images as, and after, the shutter snaps. Foregrounded is the mechanical origin of the photographic image, resulting in oblique but revealing figures. The unexpected visual forms maintain the viewer’s interest inside the frame. Ironically, the mechanical (the altered Vorticist lens) extends the expressive, the resulting image. It mediates personal expression through extending the capacity of photographic tools which alter composition. In the pictorialist approach, the conscious manipulation of a photograph via exposure, composition and light created an image generating an artistic mood through dissolving forms. Responding to claims that a photograph was not simply an unmediated record of reality, Vorticist photography established a conscious staging between tension and energy, overlapping angles and image (Zumthor 2010: 18). Anticipating this goal were the Photo-Secessionists, who believed that the significance of a photograph was not what was in front of the camera but the manipulation of the image by the artist/photographer to achieve his or her subjective vision. Instead of mimetic

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representation, the photographic image presents an ‘arrangement’ that could express and compress the complex consciousness of the subject. The work of Alvin Langdon Coburn, a founding member of the Photo-Secessionist movement organised in New York by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) in 1902, most clearly represents this.2 In a statement in the magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz defined the goal of Photo-Secessionism as the advancement of ‘photography as applied to pictorial expression’, the freedom for artists to work out their own ‘photographic salvation’ (in Hoffman 2011: 39). An early Coburn work anticipated the diagonals in Lewis’s work, seen in Station Roofs, (Pittsburgh) of 1910, where the oblique elements create a dynamism transforming the roofs into abstract structures. In 1912 at the age of thirty, Coburn immigrated to England from the US, and the following year published his Men of Mark, a collection of eminent male figures ranging from G. B. Shaw and Henry James to Yeats, Roger Fry and Matisse. In 1913, Coburn also exhibited a series of images at the Goupil Gallery in London including The Octopus (1909/1912), which came close to the principles of Vorticist painting. The image is an overhead shot of a set of semi-diagonal paths in New York’s Madison Square Park taken from the newly built 700-foot-tall Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, suggesting the form of an octopus but more importantly, the ‘underlying abstract framework of a familiar scene’ (Cork 1976: 496). The image, seen from above, concentrates on minimal form. The House of a Thousand Windows (1912) records a skyscraper from above that dominates the air and reduces space to almost a single street to its left. Emulating Cubist contemporaries, Coburn nevertheless offered a modernist view of New York in advance of Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler or Alfred Stieglitz. The photos at the Goupil inspired such Vorticist works by Lewis as New York (1914) with its vertical and angled forms, buildings overpowering space, and Workshop (1914–15), also depicting powerful forms that eliminate any sense of unoccupied space.3 Coburn expressed the Secessionist goals, while suggesting Vorticist practice, in his 1916 essay ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography’, published in Photograms of the Year 1916. Modern art, he wrote, changed the world, but now it was time for photography to reflect that progress, and he singled out the microscope from a purely pictorial point of view: the ‘use of prisms for the splitting of images into segments’ was an especially rich approach (Coburn 1916: 24). The microscope analogy is telling, of course, because of the explicit scientific grounding of Vorticist photography, while displacement, not stability, becomes its key characteristic. We recognise, but cannot precisely identify, the subject. Splitting the image into segments was a Cubist technique, but reliance on the machine and matters mechanical was a distinctive mark of the Vorticists before the war; this distinguished them from the Futurists as well. Although the machine as a source for art became important in Paris in the 1920s, it was already valuable as an inspiring source and form for the Vorticists in London about 1914. According to Pound, the vortoscope, Coburn’s invention of late 1916, was the result of binding together three broken pieces of Pound’s old shaving mirror and rigging them below a glass light table; Coburn later more accurately described the process as placing the lens ‘of a camera within a triangular tube lined with mirrors’ and then shooting (in Normand 2010: 85). The mirrors, acting as a prism, divided the image formed by the lens into segments which Coburn used to produce his vortographs.4 The mirror device created an intercalated appearance ‘splitting the image formed by the lens into segments’, as Coburn wrote in his Autobiography (1978: 102).

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Pound was a key figure in the process and promotion of Vorticism. Although Lewis may have been the prime mover, Pound was its enthusiastic literary promoter. Preceding the first Vorticist Exhibition of 1915, he organised the manifestos and two editions of BLAST with Lewis, stressing the ‘confluence of energy’ crystallised in his language as the vortex, the literary and visual image representing a still focal point of intellectual energy and force. Coburn dissected the metaphor in his experimental photography, deconstructing the parts to reformulate a new whole that exposed the pieces. During these culture wars between Cubism, Futurism and Imagism, Pound steadfastly promoted Vorticism, even when it lacked attention. In America, he enlisted the support of John Quinn, lawyer and patron, who spent £438 in August 1916 purchasing work by Lewis, Roberts and Wadsworth, work carried to America in the luggage of T. S. Eliot (Cork 1976: 492). Quinn, in fact, underwrote the ill-fated Vorticist exhibition at the Penguin Club in New York, which opened on 10 January 1917, a show repeatedly celebrated by Pound, even after the disappointing reception of its seventy-five paintings and drawings.5 The presence of the fourth dimension (time) in the vortograph occurred through simultaneity, as numerous images – essentially fragments – overlapped. Coburn’s use of soft-focus lenses combined angular and geometric forms like Vorticist paintings, but they appear diffuse and almost feathered to the eye (Normand 2010: 87–8). Abstract design dominated, not narrative, as the Pictorialists created. The result, Pound wrote to John Quinn in October 1916, was the freeing of the camera from reality, letting one ‘take Picassos directly from nature’ (P&P 88). Subjects ranged from individuals to objects, such as wood and crystals. Coburn’s goal became to employ the technology of the camera to make art and images in as extreme a form as that expressed in painting or sculpture. Importantly, as Pound explained to his father on 22 September 1916, one no longer had to photograph what was in front of the camera but could rely, instead, on one’s sense of design taken from the object and then ‘shut out what you dont want, twist the “elements” onto the part of plate where you want ’em, and then fire. I think we are in for some lark. AND the possibilities are seemingly unlimited’ (L/HP 379). Coburn achieved additional, non-realistic effects through special filters, lens coatings and platinum printing, which allowed clarity without sharpness and softness without fuzziness. Interest in Coburn’s work led to a one-man show at the Camera Club in London in 1917, heavily promoted by Pound, who in the preface to the catalogue wrote that the vortoscope ‘freed photography from the material limitations of depicting recognizable natural objects’. Through its use, the photographer ‘can create beautiful arrangements of form for their own sake’ (in Andrews 2005: 2). Coburn was initially fond of the Vorticists, writing in More Men of Mark (1922) that these were artists who could ‘square and cube and Vorticize as the spirit moves them’ (Coburn 1922: 19). In total, he produced more than forty vortographs during his period of interest. The London Camera Club show consisted of eighteen of Coburn’s new photos and thirteen of his figurative watercolours. Pound’s anonymous catalogue notice dismissed the watercolours as ‘roughly speaking post-impressionist’ and offered little enthusiasm for the vortographs. Explicitly, he noted that although Coburn long sought to bring Vorticism into photography (something of a Poundian exaggeration), he could do so only with the ‘invention of a suitable instrument’, which Pound, of course, had a hand in constructing (McCauley 2013: 160).

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For Pound, vortography was ‘below the other vorticist arts in that it is an art of the eye, not the eye and hand together’ (EPVA 156). The vortoscope was only a useful tool. By contrast, Coburn viewed his photographs as created by an artist, his training in the visual arts ensuring a painter’s perspective for the images. He and the Italian photographer Bragaglia believed photography was superior to any other medium; only photography could represent subtle gradations of life and form. In a ‘Postscript’ to the vortographs catalogue, Coburn rebutted Pound’s utilitarian notion of photography, claiming that his work had a distinctive quality by virtue of luminosity and subtle gradations obtainable only in photography. Coburn also denied physiognomy as the distinctive element of a portrait, turning the figure into something abstract, stressing photographic technique more than the subject of the photo. Photography, therefore, became an autonomous form of art, not a tool for the reproduction of external experience. Experimental photographs depicted the multiple, the fictional, even the non-existent; sites became unrecognisable. The division of views between Pound and Coburn led to a break between the two men in 1917 (Cork 1976: 505). Coburn was not, however, originating something entirely new. The ‘Photodynamism’ movement of Futurism, led by Anton Bragaglia, anticipated some of his techniques. As a Futurist, Bragaglia was interested in photographing movement; the Vorticists were more self-reflexive, meditating on what an image is by multiple re-photographing (Figure 13.1). Nevertheless, Bragaglia’s The Bow (1911) or Young Man Swinging (1912) illustrate how Europeans were experimenting with photographic form and multiple exposures, while re-evaluating the artistic potential of photography.

Figure 13.1 Anton Giulio Bragagalia, Change of Position, 1911. Gilman Collection, 2005. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © Estate of Anton Giulio Bragaglia/ SODRAC 2018.

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Inspired by Bergson’s ideas on dynamic movement, Futurist painters began to adopt photographic motion studies of the French bio-physicist Etienne-Jules Marey and the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. Soon Bragaglia, working with his brother, developed a method to capture movement. Futurist Photodynamism (1913), a study by Bragaglia, emphasised that photo-dynamism was not to compete with painting but to act as a spur for the exploration of the fourth dimension and simultaneity. Another influence was the American Cubist painter-poet Max Weber (1881–1961), a friend of Coburn’s from the Photo-Secession period.6 As Coburn and Pound grew apart, partly because Coburn had included thirteen paintings with the eighteen vortographs at the 1917 Camera Club exhibition in London against Pound’s wishes, Coburn increasingly attributed the design of his abstract vortographs to Weber and the influence of his prismatic paintings such as The Dancers (1912). In his 1916 essay ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography’, Coburn includes a statement from Weber’s Essays on Art emphasising how abstract forms arrest ‘a perfect moment of time’ and give ‘body to space, or solidity to air, or coloured light to darkness’ (Coburn 1916: 23–4). This, he felt, came close to the principles of his Vorticism-inspired, abstract photographs. Anticipating the approach of Coburn and the vortograph, and one of the earliest influences on Pound at this time, was Ernest Fenollosa, whose Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art appeared in 1913. In it, he argued for a new way of constructing space, contending that the excellence of the art is in how ‘the lines, the spaces, the proportions lie in the structure of the thing itself . . . it is a question of spacing’. Furthermore, it is not ‘the representational element but the structural element’ that matters (in Hoffman 2011: 74). In BLAST 2, Gaudier-Brzeska would offer a similar aesthetic, writing from the trenches that ‘I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES. I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED’ (G-B 34). Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912) and The Chinese Written Character ([1919] 2008) emphasise that composition takes precedence over depiction, a critical concept for Vorticist photography. Indeed, Japanese or Asian principles of composition substituted for those of the Futurists, who initially rejected photography because it froze an instant, emphasising the static not the dynamic. The multiple exposures of the Bragaglia brothers – in one example, a number of ghostly hands flail about a typewriter keyboard – changed that, since they gave the impression of movement, although the Futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni excommunicated them and their photo-dynamism and any element of photography.7 Boccioni disavowed Futurism’s connection with photography and found the work of the Bragaglia brothers lacking in dynamism (Gayford 2001). But for the Vorticists, a creative compositional structure replaced imitation and, in the language of Fenollosa, spatial arts became visual music (Hoffman 2011: 74). Coburn actually took classes with Fenollosa and his assistant, Arthur Wesley Dow, an American artist/photographer who worked with Fenollosa at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and shared his admiration for the formal aesthetics of Japanese art. Dow emphasised an aesthetic of the line, the relationships of light and dark, and colour. He and Fenollosa also promoted the idea that imagination is ‘a process as clear and exact as mathematics . . . it is a visible integer’, stated in Fenollosa’s Imagination in Art (Fenollosa 1894: 3, 5). The association of imagination and science appealed to Pound

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and, of course, the Vorticists. Both Fenollosa and Dow conducted a summer school in Ipswich, MA: in addition to Coburn, among their students were Georgia O’Keefe and Coburn’s friend Max Weber (who would soon study with Matisse in Paris). In New York, Alfred Stieglitz had founded Camera Work (1903–17), which presented large-format photographic images with a visually dramatic text. Less explosive than BLAST, Camera Work is nonetheless a graphic precursor, with text set in heavy black ink, and red introducing the first heavily ornamented letter of each article. Wide margins enhanced the presentations. Each of the fifty issues was bound in grey-green paper covers with the title and edition printed in a lighter grey. Photogravures were separated from the text by blank pages and were given prominence at the front of each issue. Even advertisements were graphically designed and linked to photography: lenses, papers, cameras were featured. Coburn appeared in numerous issues and even had a one-man show at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York in 1909. Although Coburn’s early work was representational, including cityscapes and landscapes (a series shot in Yosemite anticipates Ansel Adams), he was also an experimentalist encouraged by the Secessionist movement before he visited England in 1902. He alternated between the two countries, but after his marriage in 1912, he settled permanently in Britain and soon connected with Pound.

‘The Penetrating Eye’ Pound commented on photography inconsistently, although he was displeased with the popular conception of it as a realistic, unimaginative medium. In his opinion, it generally lacked selectiveness, as well as suggestiveness, which he knew poetry could achieve. An early work from his first collection, the privately printed A Lume Spento entitled ‘On His Own Face in a Glass’, records his early awareness of the tension between the immobile image and the complex figure it represented. The experimental final line of the poem articulates this divided self in a minimalist portrait: ‘I ? I ? I ?/ And ye?’ (CEP 35). Pound did not yet know how to resolve this tension, which Vorticist photography would expose, but nine years later in ‘Three Cantos’ (1917), he realised that the fragment was more authentic than the falsely united.8 Its broken syntax, united by the line, embodied Vorticist ideas of disjointed unity. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) confirmed the structural value of fragments seen in The Cantos. Imposing visuality (the ability to discern the visible through the multiplied image) on the photographic subject to expose its interior character, creating a vortex of energy at the centre of the image, was suddenly the new goal, as Pound outlined in various essays with the variant title ‘Vortex’ or ‘Vorticism’. This is most evident in three chapters with such titles in his 1916 memoir Gaudier-Brzeska. Soon, the ‘penetrating eye’ (Weber 1916: 32) emerged out of the photographic print to confront the viewer. The vortographs of 1916, anticipated by Coburn’s creative portraits of Yeats in 1908 (photographed in multi-exposure while actually reciting verse) or of Max Beerbohm (with his eyes alternately open and shut, also 1908), illustrate Coburn’s experimentalism. The vortographs of October 1916 extended his interest with a more complicated device creating unexpected images. By February 1917, the public was let in on the secret (Coburn was private about his experiment) with his London Camera Club exhibit.

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The qualities Coburn celebrates can be studied in an early vortographic experiment, although he did not use that term: his portrait of the Mexican artist, caricaturist, essayist and gallery owner Marius de Zayas (1880–1961). First to interview Picasso and bring his work to the US, de Zayas, a Mexican-born artist, critic and art dealer, received his art training in Europe before moving to the United States in 1906. During his early career, he produced caricatures of political and theatrical figures for newspapers and magazines in Mexico, France and America. His association with Alfred Stieglitz and Stieglitz’s first New York gallery, 291, began in 1907. In the preface to his 1913 catalogue for an exhibition of his work at the 291 Gallery, de Zayas outlined a method that seems remarkably Vorticist: 1. the spirit of the individual is to be represented by algebraic formulas. 2. his material self by ‘geometrical equivalents’; and 3. his initial force by ‘trajectories within the rectangle that encloses the plastic expression and represents life’. (Bohn 1980: 439–40) De Zayas’s abstract caricatures, representing character through form, impressed Stieglitz, Picabia and Apollinaire. De Zayas sought the algebraic description of the spirit, somewhat similar to Coburn’s goals under Pound’s direction. De Zayas’s aim was to show how psychological representation depended on a system of abstract pictorial equivalents. He even applied Vorticist aesthetics to typography; his design for the pages of poems by Francis Rhoades and Agnes Meyer was one example. De Zayas developed a complex theory of abstraction between 1911 and 1913. The year of the Armory Show (1913), he exhibited a series of powerful abstract portraits at ‘291’. Combining algebraic formulas with ‘geometric equivalents’, the portraits use a variety of analytical techniques to produce a graphic ‘synthesis’ of an individual. An important contribution to New York Dada, they inspired Francis Picabia to create his mechanomorphic style in 1915, extending ideas of Vorticist linearity and efficient energy. In June 1914, de Zayas appeared in Coburn’s London studio following a visit to Paris where he had met Picasso and Braque and scouted objects for a planned exhibition that autumn at the 291 gallery. Coburn posed the elegant de Zayas before a Max Weber painting and then next to a bright window. He then had de Zayas move his head during multiple exposures on a single film negative. The result? The suit and tie are in sharp focus as the head shifts or turns on its axis. Adjusting the overlaid images, Coburn aligned the eyes. The subsequent image focuses on the piercing eyes staring out at the viewer from a fractured face. Coburn might have chosen this style because it captured the nature of the man, who not only had just spent time with Picasso but who, with Paul Havilland, had just published an explanatory text about cubism, A Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression (1913). Coburn would not use this technique again until he photographed Pound (Figures 13.2 and 13.3).

The Vorticist Gaze Instead of representing figures in a conventional manner, Coburn’s vortographs displace the subject so that he confronts or challenges the viewer in a dynamic quest for identity. The oblique pose reverses the process of realistic photography where a static image of the subject often avoids the gaze of the viewer. The Vorticist posture redefines

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Figure 13.2 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Multiple Exposure of Marius de Zayas, c. 1912. George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. © Fintry Trust for the Universal Order.

Figure 13.3 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Multiple Exposure of Ezra Pound, 1917. Clair Gallerie Zürich. Private collection of Margaret Fisher, used by permission. © Fintry Trust for the Universal Order.

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the gaze, reversing the Lacanian position that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realising that he or she is a visible object. To the contrary, the subject in a Vorticist portrait achieves a degree of autonomy through his or her visual independence and virtual anamorphosis.9 The subject in the Vorticist portrait demands to be viewed; we are not in control of our gaze just as the subject is not in control of his image. The multiplicity of the subject image in a vortograph caused by multiple exposures added to the mirror effects, engaging the viewer through a reciprocity of vision. We look and enter the vortex of the self, the still centre Pound celebrated (‘Centre of the Vortex’ was also one of Coburn’s phrases for his 1916 portrait of Pound) and earlier expressed by Lewis when he wrote, in ‘Long Live the Vortex!’ in 1914, that ‘the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!’ The three Vortex manifestos in BLAST developed the idea of concentrated energy at the centre of the Vortex (B1 11). We look and discover a figure whose multiple selves reveal themselves to us. The Vorticist photograph is not a photomontage of the self but a dynamic redefinition of the self through an image that simultaneously reveals and hides its subject. Carefully looking at the image, we see layers of the self, becoming in Pound’s words ‘the VORTEX from which and through which and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’ (G-B 92). Paradoxically, the lack of focus draws us deeper into the image. However, as he became more abstract in his images, Coburn became less successful in echoing the pictorial vocabulary of Vorticism, when he set out his own principles of abstract photography in his 1916 essay, ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography’. He began with the need for photographers to make ‘repeated successive exposures of an object in motion’ and emphasised that photography must become modern and be ‘alive to the spirit of progress’ (Coburn 1916: 23). He proposed an exhibition to be arranged where the extra-ordinary in form must be privileged above the representation of subject matter (Coburn 1916: 24). In Poundian language, the vortograph is an expressive arrangement recording the consciousness of a perception stated or captured visually and expressed by presentation rather than description. Fenollosa’s essay The Chinese Written Character helps. In his discussion of the Chinese ideogram, Fenollosa, via Pound, explains the ideogram as a sign in which the move to abstraction is arrested at the stage where the particulars remain visible. This liminality is the edge between identity and obscurity, energy and action in the vortograph. The centripetal is in tension with the centrifugal, leading us to the centre of the image and the image’s essence. The creative process remains visible and at work as Fenollosa stated, most visible in the portraits of Pound and de Zayas. Gaudier-Brzeska understood this. In BLAST 1 he wrote that the ‘PLASTIC SOUL IS INTENSITY OF LIFE BURSTING THE PLANE’; ‘VORTEX IS THE POINT ONE AND INDIVISIBLE! / VORTEX IS ENERGY’ (B1 156). Pound’s only designated and overt Vorticist poem is ‘Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess: Theme for a Series of Pictures’. Noting that the moves of the chess pieces ‘break and reform the pattern’, he exclaims: ‘Y’ pawns, cleaving, embanking! Whirl! Centripetal!! Mate! King down in the Vortex, Clash, leaping of bands, straight stripe of hard color Blocked lights working in. Escapes. Renewing of contest. (B2 19)

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There is an analogy between the lines of force on the chessboard and those of the Vortex. He valued the poem enough to reprint it in Lustra. In prose, Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir exhibits the Vorticist juxtaposition of materials ranging from letters to manifestos and articles by Gaudier-Brzeska, as Roxana Preda has shown. The text and Pound’s own writing on Vorticism display the ‘broken bundle of mirrors’ metaphor he introduces at the end of ‘Near Perigord’ (P 154). As Preda pointed out, instead of a single view, there are a number of partial views of Gaudier-Brzeska established by documents, memoir and correspondence, analogous to the mirrored and refracted images in a vortograph (2015a: 187–8). Coburn did not continue with vortography – partly because of unsympathetic critical response to the exhibition in 1917 (Clive Bell leading the way with a negative review of the movement in the Burlington Magazine that year) – but returned to more recognisable portrait making, yet always with character foregrounded as in his 1921 image of Stravinsky. Pound, on the other hand, sought to renew the vortoscope, attaching a version of it to a movie camera in Paris in 1923 in an effort to make an abstract film. He stopped, however, when he recognised better achievements in the medium by Léger and Man Ray.

Agitators Did Vorticist photography have an afterlife? A variety of photographers and painters indicate ‘yes’, beginning, perhaps, with the German-born British portrait photographer E. O. Hoppé (1878–1972). He became a member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood with Coburn, as well as Henry Robinson and George Davidson. Setting up a London studio, he photographed Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, V. Nijinsky, members of the Ballets Russes, the royal family and Pound. Hoppé’s early, non-portrait work combined Vorticist elements of line with abstract forms. A photo of a standing woman gazing upward between two gigantic but parallel vertical vents emphasises Vorticist geometric forms (with a sexual innuendo), which turn out to be pipes from the organ at the Royal Albert Hall. Man with Crane Hook, Camwell Laird Shipyard (1928) stresses verticality in the equipment and posture, while Stack of Propellers, De Havilland Aircraft Factory (1935) repeats strong horizontal lines offset by verticality in a Vorticist manner, anticipated by his 1928 image of elevated storage tanks from a factory in Nurnberg. The diagonal lines of Westminster Underground (1937) emphasise the dominance of Big Ben, echoed by a figure about to enter the station stairway, with a horizontal sign bisecting the image shot from below, while the earlier Gas Light and Coke, London (1934) profiles a figure on a rampart set against eerie, pictorialist and blurred rooftops. Hoppé remained part of the modernist photo group by co-founding the London Salon of Photography, which would succeed the Linked Ring Salon; in 1917 he became a member of the Plough Theatre Club, whose members included Coburn and the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Hoppé’s studio at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, the former home of Millais, would also become the studio of the painter Francis Bacon. Another photographer exhibiting Vorticist resonances was Malcolm Arbuthnot (1877–1967), British artist and the only photographer to sign the 1914 Vorticist manifesto published in BLAST 1. Elected to the Linked Ring, he favoured the blurred lines and multiple images later evoked by the Vorticists. The Russian photographer

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Alexander D. Grinberg (1885–1979) could be another example. In his soft-lens presentations of the body, one senses less of the disjointed imagery of vortography, but still a sustained engagement with entering the depth of the subject. As a pictorialist manipulating the photograph to create an image rather than merely record it, Grinberg found the body a site of constant fascination and renewal, often focusing on dancers in geometric shapes – to such an extent that he was sent to the Gulag in 1936 for the distribution of pornography. The American cinematographer Dudley Murphy, who produced some of the unusual prismatic sequences in the Ballet mécanique film which he made with Fernand Léger in 1924, found his method via the vortograph (Rasula 2016: 166). Anticipating Coburn and Murphy was the German-born Arnold Genthe, who settled in San Francisco in 1895. Trained as a philologist, he taught himself photography and focused on Chinatown and portraiture. He was celebrated for his off-focus technique which made sitter and setting blend together: ‘Genthe can photograph you so that you will have no idea that it is you’, one friend quipped (in Shields 2006: 185). Genthe published a collection of dance figures in 1916, the annus mirabilis of Vorticist photography. He relocated himself to Carmel, CA, called by the Los Angeles Times ‘a Vortext of Erotic Erudition’ in May 1910, before finally settling in New York in 1911 (Rasula 2016: 170). Paul Strand (1890–1976), American, further included elements of Vorticist photography. His pictorialist studies beginning in the 1910s paralleled those of Coburn, whom he probably met through Alfred Stieglitz’s inner circle in New York just before Coburn went to London. Others in that group included Max Weber, Georgia O’Keefe and Marius de Zayas. In 1917, in fact, Strand exhibited his photos, along with those by Charles Sheeler and Morton Schamberg, in de Zayas’s gallery on Fifth Avenue. That same year, Stieglitz devoted the entire final issue of Camera Works to the photos of Strand. Introduced to the work of the Photo-Secessionists at Stieglitz’s Little Galleries at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York, Strand developed a graphic softness of seemingly abstract subjects but with strong geometric lines, as in New York (1916), an angular composition shot downward from Strand’s apartment on 83rd Street. It replaces traditional axioms of perspective with diagonals formed by intersecting lines and light. The arrangement is complex but the forms simple, as in his Geometric Backyards, New York (1917). He sought to capture the rhythms of Manhattan: one of his best-known images is the geometric Wall Street (1915), where pedestrians (and their shadows) walk past the massive Morgan Building. He sought again to represent the movement of people in an abstract way while also limiting spatial recession, another feature of Vorticist photography. The spatial pattern is two-dimensional as he strove for pictorial abstraction. By March 1916, he had his first solo show at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. The intersection of shadow and form in Strand’s work created movement and depth in his images, similar in intent and practice to those of the Vorticists. He also created a pattern of tones by tilting objects and then rotating his camera to create abstractions, as evident in Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut (1916) (Figure 13.4). The image mixes strong vertical shadows cast by a fence upon a curved form, the edge of a table. Strand titled the table on its side so its edge contrasted with the parallel diagonals of the shadow of a railing. The function of the subject is obliterated, while the artist is fragmenting elements and putting an emphasis on their formal

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Figure 13.4 Paul Strand, Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 1916. Paul Strand Archive. © Aperture Foundation, Inc. relationships. He also accentuates the formal elements of the photograph by tilting the finished image ninety degrees from the angle at which it was taken. This moves the viewer further away from physical reality, as happens with Vorticist photography. The abstractness of Strand’s image, and that of Vorticist photography, offers a new, ‘other’ reality. The use of bold, simple geometric shapes and patterns aligns him with the Vorticists. There is also little concern for pictorial depth. Another example is Strand’s 1917 Still Life with Contessa Cigarette Boxes, an exercise in form and light, the stacked rectangular and striped cigarette boxes establishing shapes not formed by content or subject matter, only by their structure. He is freeing the objects from their use as the Vorticists freed their subjects from their stationary or given identity. In the process of doing this, he establishes an elaborate non-narrative display with an emphasis on the effects of light and form parallel to Coburn’s. Film soon interested Strand: he incorporated Vorticist elements in his 1920 work, Manhattan, considered by some critics to be the first avant-garde film in America. He later gravitated to documentary film and photographs, but his early work displayed Vorticist features. When he became interested in recording the city, Strand employed the Vorticist technique of a manipulated lens. Seeking to present slum life in the Lower East Side of New York, he rigged his camera with a false lens to distract attention. When approaching a subject, he turned ninety degrees away and aimed the false lens in the direction he faced. The real lens, on an extended bellows, stuck out just under his arm towards

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the person; Strand could see the subject by looking into his lens hood sideways. In this way, he could photograph his subject unaware. His portraits, like those of the Vorticists, were subversive alternatives to formal studio portraits. Like the Vorticists, he was interested in picturing the world, not merely reproducing it; a sense of inner life dominated his portraits. Nevertheless, like Coburn’s, his photographic interests shifted to the social and documentary and then to celebrating place with a series on Ghana and France. Surprisingly, perhaps, painters are equally heirs of Vorticist photography when they emphasise mirror images and fragmented figures. Two of the most visible are Francis Bacon (1909–92) and Lucian Freud (1922–2011). In a series of works by both painters, Vorticist principles reappear, a similarity that should not be unexpected. Coburn’s interest in experimenting with Vorticist images occurred partly through the influence of his friend the Cubist painter Max Weber, who in 1913 suggested that photography and the plastic arts must reorganise forms, reconstructing nature and realising ‘forms and visions of forms unit by unit’ (Rasula 2016: 196). The faceting of forms in vortography reflects this unit-by-unit vision of form, in contrast to what Coburn outlined in his 1916 article ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography’. There, he argued that objects should be depicted for their abstract rather than pictorial values. In Bacon’s 1968 Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, the sitter’s identity enters the work indirectly by means of mirrors that disrupt the unity of body and face. The mirror opens up a void in the pictorial space analogous to that generated by Coburn and his vortographs. One approaches the identity of the subject cautiously, caught between recognition and confusion. Bacon’s iconic 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud is, itself, a mirror refracting three images of Freud sitting on a cane-bottomed wooden chair within a cage, on a curved, mottled brown surface with a solid orange background. Behind each figure is the headboard of a bed, originating in a set of photographs of Freud by John Deakin, which Bacon used as a reference. Indeed, Coburn’s three mirrors to refract images in his vortographs have become the three sections of the triptych, each panel, in fact, bisected by a line that suggests two reflections. Mirrors and distortions open the picture up onto the reality of the viewers, Bacon’s formal devices implicating them (Lee 2009: 198). Bacon insisted his pictures be framed behind glass to emphasise distance, while the mirrors construct pictures within pictures, again echoing the photographic practices of the Vorticists. Bacon and the Vorticists see mirrors as a kind of screen that alternately intensifies and almost obliterates the image, as in Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror (1976). The image shifts from the expansion of its scale to its simultaneous decomposition. A conflict for the viewer emerges between what he or she can identify as belonging to the space of the image and what is alien to it. Two types of space simultaneously merge in the act of ‘de-figuring’ and re-configuring the subject. Lucian Freud is another inheritor of Coburn’s method, dividing and reformulating space often through mirrors. Freud actually had a favourite mirror, a 5-foot Georgian over-mantel mirror which he first saw in 1943 and took with him to various studios, along with a treasured stuffed zebra head. Until the 1970s, according to his friend William Feaver, he relied on the mirror to give him odd angles, distancing and a certain sense of behind-the-glass isolation. Freud’s Reflection (Self-Portrait) and Painter Working, Reflection are titles that display his reliance on mirror images. Interior with

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Hand Mirror (Self-Portrait) of 1967 remains a haunting rendering of how image and mirror unite. Through the layered paint of his work, energy emerges, offering, in its way, a vortex. This smaller mirror became a companion of Freud’s, ending up in the kitchen of the top-floor flat in Holland Park that became his studio in his last years. It appears in Small Interior (Self-Portrait), started in 1968, and represents a reflection of a reflection of his largest painting, seen in an early stage on an easel beside him. Additionally, he often presented himself in a hand mirror wedged into the frames of a sash window. When he went for a final review of his retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in 2002, Freud altered only one hanging, putting his hand-mirror self-portrait next to a small one of his mother, one image reflecting but connecting to another (Feaver 2012). The contradictory deployment of space transfers meaning to the simultaneous action of identifying and decoding, of recognising and reformulating the identity of the subject. One might argue that the Vorticist photographic image, one of disunity, requires the dislocation of identity from space to the frame. Perspective, alluding to Erwin Panofsky’s study Perspective as Symbolic Form, becomes symbolic form; images migrate freely between realistic and symbolic modes, rendering the subject unstable and calling attention to the size and shape of the photograph. The oscillation remains resolved in Vorticist photography, and that is the point. The overlapping, rhizomic images of Vorticist photography, capturing what Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth and Christopher Nevinson achieved in painting – Nevinson’s A Bursting Shell (1915) seems an appropriate final image of the Vorticist effort – did not disappear with the demise of the movement. Vorticist features migrated and were reincorporated into photography and painting both formally and in terms of content. As Paul Strand, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud so clearly show, forms, shapes and mirrors simultaneously reflect and redefine images. Freud’s Reflection (SelfPortrait) of 1985 is a portrait of the artist in angles equal to any work by Coburn. The tension between Expressionism and Vorticism originates in their reliance on diagonals and geometric forms to express the contained energy of the created image. Coburn’s claim to be a pioneer of abstract photography seems justified.

Notes 1. Dominic Lopes is helpful because he refashions the question ‘is photography an art?’ into the more nuanced ‘when is photography an art?’ (Lopes 2016: 4) 2. The following year, Coburn was elected to its British equivalent, the Linked Ring of London, both organisations committed to developing photography as an artistic rather than documentary form. 3. On the relationship between Coburn’s photographs and Lewis’s paintings, see Cork (1976: 495–505). 4. For a detailed account of the process, see McCauley (2013: 156–74). 5. For details on the failure of the show, see Cork (1976: 493–4). 6. On the Coburn–Weber friendship see Roberts and Robins (2014: 112–48). 7. Nevertheless, Bragaglia published a Futurist manifesto entitled ‘Fotodinamismo Futurista’ in 1912. It consists of a single paragraph which in part reads ‘a shout, a tragical pause, a gesture of terror, the entire scene, the complete external unfolding of the intimate drama, can be expressed in one single work’. See http://lorenweddings.com/blog2/2013/10/2/futurism-and-photography. See also Lista (1981).

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8. The lines read ‘I’ve strained my ear for -ensa, -ombra, and -ensa / And cracked my wit on delicate canzoni – / Here’s but rough meaning’ (P 243). 9. Anamorphosis is the procedure, at work in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), whereby a distorted image on the floor, examined from the right and at an acute angle, is revealed as a skull staring out at the viewer. Lacan cites this image in ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’. Mirror anamorphoses were first created in the late Renaissance (sixteenth century). With mirror anamorphosis, a conical or cylindrical mirror is placed on the drawing or painting to transform a flat, distorted image into a three-dimensional picture that can be viewed from many angles. The deformed image is painted on a plane surface surrounding the mirror. By looking uniquely into the mirror, the image appears undeformed. This process of anamorphosis made it possible to diffuse caricatures, erotic and scatological scenes and scenes of sorcery for a confidential public.

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14 ‘Creation and Action’: Ezra Pound and Italian Futurism Sean Mark

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zra Pound’s interest in Futurism – the only twentieth-century movement in Italian arts to elicit his sustained critical attention – extends from his early London years to the end of World War II. Though Pound’s initial response was polemical, his criticism of F. T. Marinetti’s movement attenuated once he had settled in Italy. The two phases of this engagement loosely correspond to Futurism’s first and second waves, from the artistic disruption of the avant guerre to the engaged art of the Fascist ventennio. In the latter phase in particular, Pound’s opinions on the movement were mediated by his relationship with Marinetti, whom he included as a character in the Cantos. Underlining poetic and political affinities between the two writers, this chapter traces and contextualises Pound’s considerations on Futurism, and how these affected his work. Conflating aesthetic, personal and ideological concerns, Pound’s judgements bespeak his changing attitudes to the wider societal role of the artist.

Something for the Modern Stage ‘We are not futurists’, Pound admonished a Russian interviewer seeking to assimilate the ‘rebel artists’ of Vorticism to their Italian counterparts – ‘First of all, we are not futurists.’ In the interview, conducted by critic Zinaida Vengerova and printed in the Petrograd-based avant-garde anthology Strelets (The Archer) in February 1915, Pound expands on the differences between his movement and F. T. Marinetti’s Futurism. Where Futurists ‘wish to erase and surpass what has already been said’, Vorticists pursue ‘only the present that is not subordinate to nature and does not just stick to life and limit itself to a perception of whatever exists, but creates a new, living abstraction out of itself’ (quoted in Markov 1968: 280).1 The interview articulates Pound’s rejection of Marinetti’s Futurism, on the cusp of the global conflict that would decimate its ranks and bring its first wave to an end. For all his exhortations to make new – Pound directs his interviewer’s eyes to a scrawl on the wall – ‘Marinetti is a corpse.’ Vengerova remained unconvinced, and the interview went to press with the title ‘English Futurists’. During the previous four years, since the inaugural ‘Futurist Speech to the English’ at the Lyceum club in December 1910, Marinetti had made several visits to London, where Pound had been living since 1908. The purpose of these trips was to build support for his new movement, and to counteract the largely satirical reception it had been accorded by the English press.2 In their founding manifesto, printed on the front page

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of Le Figaro in 1909, the Futurists announced their incendiary programme to revolutionise the arts. They called for the glorification of war and destruction, for patriotism and militarism, for industry and speed, for the destruction of museums and libraries, and condemned morality, feminism and cowardice. The reverberations were fast and widely felt – words, as Fredric Jameson puts it, ‘that echoed around the world like the pulsing telegraph waves upon the emblematic globe of the old newsreels’ (1981: 24). Soon after, the first Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters was held in London’s Sackville Gallery in March 1912, presenting work by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla. In the juncture of literature, art and performance, Marinetti’s incursions intended to disrupt the arts and cultivate a transnational presence of mass appeal at the heart of the empire. Two weeks after the exhibition opened, on 19 March 1912, both Pound and Marinetti delivered lectures in London, two foreign outsiders courting acclaim in the ‘place for poesy’ (SL 7). In the private gallery of Lord and Lady Glenconner, Pound spoke on the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, with tickets expensively priced and available only ‘on application’. Capitalising on the success of the Sackville show, Marinetti addressed the Bechstein Hall, slating the English as ‘a nation of sycophants and snobs, enslaved by old worm-eaten traditions, social conventions, and romanticism’ (Rainey 1999: 36–8). To the capital’s crowds (and Pound’s fiancée), Marinetti’s iconoclasm proved more enticing than Pound’s romance anamnesis; and the next day the newspapers were full of reports on the Italian’s address. The synchronicity of the lectures left no doubt as to who was the cannier cultural strategist, Marinetti’s invectives eclipsing Pound’s more elitist musings. Pound’s work first mentions Futurism later that year, in 1912’s ‘Patria Mia’. The text makes light of the Futurist manifesto ‘Against Passéist Venice’, of which its authors – Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo – had disseminated 800,000 copies from the Clock Tower of St Mark’s Square.3 The manifesto called for the destruction of romantic, decadent Venice, to make way for ‘an industrial and military Venice that can dominate the Adriatic Sea, that great Italian lake’ (FAN 67). Satirising ‘Mr Marinetti and his friends’ for their destructive designs, the defence of the city – where Pound had docked in 1908 and published A Lume Spento – is, however, an ambivalent one. When the Futurists ‘have succeeded in destroying that ancient city’, he writes in ‘Patria Mia’, ‘we will rebuild Venice on the Jersey mud flats and use the same for a tea-shop’ (SP 107). The quip becomes more striking when compared to the vision of Venice revered, four years earlier, in A Quinzaine’s ‘Night Litany’: ‘O God of waters, / make clean our hearts within us / And our lips to show forth thy praise, / For I have seen the / shadow of this thy Venice / Floating upon the waters, / And thy stars’ (CEP 61). It was precisely this Venice, symbol of the ‘fetishization of the past’ (Scappettone 2014: 141), that Marinetti and friends wished to raze. While the Venice of ‘Night Litany’ is in antithesis to Futurist designs, in its recreation as a Jersey teashop Venice is no longer the representation of the divine, but a profane simulacrum. Where Futurist iconoclasm attributes a begrudging value to the signifier it wishes to erase, its reproducibility here belies the ability for meaningful signification. Indeed, in the preceding paragraph of ‘Patria Mia’, Pound likens Venice to ‘a tawdry scene in a play-house’, its showy domesticity counterposed to the ‘out of doors’ beauty of the American megalopolis, New York, depicted as ultra-modern città che sale: ‘Squares after squares of flame, set and cut

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into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will’ (SP 107). Pound’s first dismissal of Futurism is thus imbued with the movement’s own rhetoric – the stars supplanted from theophanic contemplation to a celebration of manmade verticality. After their conflicting lectures, encounters between Pound and Marinetti during those years appear hindered by a similar sense of misconnection. Though the idea of Pound translating between Marinetti and W. B. Yeats bears some symbolic weight, accounts of the meeting between the poets in 1914 highlight its underwhelming nature. After Yeats read poems ‘which Marinetti would have thought disgustingly passéistes if he had understood them’, Marinetti was asked to recite something. A few lines into his ode to a racing car, Yeats had to interrupt the ‘stentorian Milanese voice’ as the neighbours were ‘pounding the walls, ceiling and floor’ in protest (quoted in Norman 1960: 148–9). That year, as the group of ‘rebel artists’, amongst others, Pound, Richard Aldington, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Helen Saunders, gathered around Wyndham Lewis to form their own art movement, Pound’s opinions of Futurism slid from dismissive to more openly contemptuous. The group published two issues of BLAST, a ‘magazine-cum-manifesto’ (Hickman 2005: xiv) edited by Lewis, in July 1914 and 1915. Its inaugural number sought to startle with its size and appearance – a blockcapital title, brash-pink cover on a foot-long folio – and presented the scattergun Vorticist worldview, dividing art, politics and culture by the antipodes of ‘blast’ and ‘bless’ (recalling Guillaume Apollinaire’s distribution of merde and rose in his ‘Antitradition futuriste’ manifesto of the previous year). In its acclamations and vituperations, BLAST made scant reference to Italy or Italian culture: a loud absence, given the resemblances to Futurism in the manifesto style, the fervour for technological innovation, the bombastic language and typography, and the vehemence of its prescriptions. The few remarks on the Futurists accused them of being a ‘sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870’ (B1 8), ‘fanciful and rather conventional’ (B1 144) purveyors of a ‘picturesque, superficial and romantic rebellion’, ‘Automobilists’ or just boring (B1 143). As many critics have remarked, numerous analogies exist between the Futurist and Vorticist projects. Most evident, perhaps, is the celebration of velocity, industrial development and machinery, ‘the greatest Earth-medium’ (B1 39). Jeffrey T. Schnapp situates Futurism ‘at the culminating point of an anthropology of speed and thrill that evolved over the course of two prior centuries’ (1999: 3), and the Vorticists come after this initial burst of velocity, temporally and artistically. The Vorticist aesthetics of rupture was also grounded on nationalism and the celebration of modernity: a ‘Modern World’ ‘due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius’ (B1 39). Both movements announced a vigorous campaign against ‘effeminacy’, in society and the arts, and its ties with fin-de-siècle aesthetics. Indeed, art should have a confrontational character, in which hyperbolic language played a central role – a stylistic flamboyance reflected in brash and arresting visuals. Pound’s writings of the time stress a fundamental divergence from Futurism. ‘The vorticist’, he writes, playing on the same phonic core, ‘has not this curious tic for destroying past glories.’ The reference to his Italian counterparts is clear, managing to belittle and pathologise at once. ‘I have no doubt that Italy needed Mr Marinetti’, he continues,

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but he did not sit on the egg that hatched me, and as I am wholly opposed to his aesthetic principles I see no reason why I, and various men who agree with me, should be expected to call ourselves futurists. We do not desire to evade comparison with the past. We prefer that the comparison be made by some intelligent person whose idea of ‘the tradition’ is not limited by the conventional taste of four or five centuries and one continent. (EPVA 206) Though Vorticism sought to blast away the residue of Victorianism in the arts, its relation to the past is more nuanced than Futurism’s. ‘To admire an old painting is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn’, Marinetti wrote in his founding manifesto, ‘instead of casting it forward into the distance in violent spurts of creation and action’ (FAN 52). For Pound, in its rejection of continuity with past art, in seeking to exorcise tradition as mortification, Futurism was directionless, profligate: ‘the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, DISPERSAL’. Where Pound’s vortex preserved a ‘still center’ (Kenner 1972: 239), Futurism’s unbridled veneration of a rootless modernity made it paradoxically derivative, an ‘accelerated sort of impressionism’ (EPVA 151). Pound’s view of tradition is here aligned with Eliot’s, based as it is on a ‘historical sense’ that involves ‘a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ (Eliot 1997: 40), and hinges on the fundamental connectedness of epochs and literary strata. Past tradition, its museums and archives, were vital tools for poetry, rather than its antithesis.4 ‘We do not desire to cut ourselves off from the past’, Pound wrote in The Egoist in June 1914, ‘from great art of any period’ (EPVA 190). When Marinetti and Christopher Nevinson published ‘Futurism and English Art’ in the Observer in June that year, encouraging ‘the English public to support, defend, and glorify the genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers’ (FAN 198) and including Lewis’s name among their ranks, Pound and Lewis composed an irate response. In 1915, Pound reiterated in The New Age that the principles of the two movements were ‘in direct or almost direct opposition’ (EPVA 23). The skirmishing subsided as World War I took its toll: the Futurists lost thirteen members, including Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia; the Vorticists lost Gaudier-Brzeska and, with public interest and financial resources waning, their momentum was dispelled.

Riot in the Gallery In The Futurist Moment, Marjorie Perloff argues that ‘Vorticism would not have come into being without the Futurist model’ (2003: 171) and that the group’s attempt to establish an independent identity, through the assertion of distinct and distant genesis, does not distract from the similarities between them. Boccioni, for one, had already described art as a vortex of emotion. And before the rivalries embittered, in early 1914 Pound alerted Joyce that: ‘Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste quarterly’ (P/J 26). Indeed, beyond the prescriptive strictures and satirisable bombast of Marinetti’s exhortations, the two movements shared comparable finalities. ‘Marinetti’s Futurism’, Jameson suggests, ‘had the liberating effect of a mere slogan, a static and external caricature of what the new twentieth-century linguistic apparatus ought to register’ (1981: 26). In the indeterminacy of this call to renew, and its contestation of the status quo, was a common desire to establish a watershed between the art of

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yesterday and the art of today. The insistence with which the Vorticists denied their affiliation with Italian Futurism, and the exacerbation of their nationalist rhetoric, was certainly galvanised by the Futurist propensity to lay claim to all avant-garde movements as offshoots of their artistic call to arms.5 Undoubtedly, Futurism proved much more successful and enduringly influential than Vorticism, which was met with a largely tepid response, and was swift in its ascent and in its decline.6 However, though Vorticism certainly arrogated some of the means and ends of the Futurist enterprise, it is reductive to consider it simply an Anglicised form of Futurism. Industrialisation and machine art had an altogether different cultural significance in British society from that in less developed, more agrarian Italy. In his autobiography, Wyndham Lewis’s rebuttal of Marinetti is telling: ‘We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s [sic] years. They’re no novelty to us’ ([1937] 1967: 34). Furthermore, the milieu in which Vorticism sprang up was less burdened by its reverence of the past. Differentiations must also be made with regard to Pound, who presents an altogether more complex case. Whereas, before BLAST, Lewis had been linked to Futurism, and maintained a cautious openness to it – applauding, even in 1915, ‘the vivacity and high-spirits of the Italian Futurists’ (B2 41) – Pound’s early verse bears very little of the Futurist aesthetic. If we consider, for example, the lines from ‘Night Litany’ quoted above, it is clear that his poetry ran far less of a risk of being received as Futurism’s derivative by-product than, say, Swinburne’s. Pound also had reasons for distancing himself from Futurism rooted in the movement’s fervent interventionism, uncritical notion of ‘Progress’ (‘always right even when it is wrong, because it is movement, life, struggle, hope’; FAN 100) and disregard of metrical and rhythmic forms. In all likelihood, however, his insistence on difference also seeks to veil the hallmarks of influence. Indeed, there are several ways in which the more adversarial and gregarious aspects of Pound’s London years would be difficult to conceive without Marinetti’s trailblazing. Peter Nicholls has noted Pound’s difficulties, during the Vorticist years, in translating the vigour of his polemical statements into fecund poetic experimentation. The poetry Pound contributed to BLAST – for Nicholls, ‘a mix of rather lame satire and coy epigram’ (1995: 174) – is indicative of the difficulties of his struggle towards a modern form.7 In ‘Salutation the Third’, he advertises his superiority over the conservatism of the literary establishment: ‘I will feel your hates wriggling about my feet, / And I will laugh at you and mock you’ (B1 45). In the programmatic attempt to address, irritate and offend – ‘You fungus, you continuous gangrene’, ‘You slut-bellied obstructionist’ – the content of the message becomes ancillary to the manner of its delivery. With its angry majuscules and lurid lexicon decrying ‘they who objected to newness’, it might be helpful to read these poems also as Futuristic attempts to ‘boldly make “the ugly” in literature’ (FAN 124). As shown by the reception of his lecture at Bechstein Hall in 1912, Marinetti’s contentious rhetoric and ‘anarchic’ attack on decorum and convention certainly provided an effective model for artistic provocation, which cannot have escaped Pound’s attention. Marinetti’s call, in 1909, to ‘exalt movement and aggression . . . the slap and the punch’ (FAN 51) is mirrored in Pound’s intentions, as expressed in 1913, ‘to save the public’s soul by punching its face’ (SL 13). I think the authoritarian and volatile nature of the Futurist project – an elusiveness that embraced contradiction and shirked espousal of a fixed position – appealed to Pound. ‘We fight first on one side, then on the other’, reads BLAST, ‘but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side

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or both sides and ours’ (B1 80). This ideal of strife and artistic struggle pursued for its own sake suggests a Futurist genealogy to the young Pound’s conception of the modern artist’s ‘violent gods’ (EPVA 181). Marinetti’s example was perhaps most formative with regard to the means of imparting a message to the widest possible audience. Causing a stir, aggregating acolytes, Marinetti thrived in the role of the cultural entrepreneur, employing theatricality and the language of advertising as a means of celebrating the modernity of which it was the idiom, and appealing to mass-market popular culture. Futurist art was no longer a Cubistic preserve of the atelier, but violently, unavoidably present in the everyday: in the spectacles and provocations, the manifestos snatching headlines or raining down from clock towers. First Marinetti, then Pound, played central roles in the dynamics of cultural propagation, energetically promoting their peers, exerting a pervasive editorial influence on the art of their times.8 Where Marinetti was often referred to as ‘the caffeine of Europe’, Joyce described Pound as ‘a large bundle of unpredictable electricity’ (quoted in Laughlin 1987: 3). The avant-garde idea of the artistic collective as movement, with its manifesto and aggressive self-promotionalism, is certainly forged in Marinetti’s wake. And in this light, we can read Pound’s shift beyond a preoccupation with defining the diktats of poiesis – say, the Imagist ‘Don’ts’ – to a more militant form of artistic praxis in the Vorticist experiment. Perloff has convincingly argued that Pound’s debt to Marinetti with regard to prosody, is the breaking down of the binary opposition between prose and verse. ‘Poundspeech’, she writes, ‘with its jagged lines, abrupt collage cuts and startling juxtapositions is closely related to . . . the parole in libertà of the various Futurist performances that were the talk of London in 1913–14’ (2003: 171). The disruption of the ‘typographical harmony of the page’ (FAN 149) becomes increasingly observable in Pound’s work as the 1910s progressed, in Propertius and the early cantos. But alongside such clear-cut dynamics of influence, there are also affinities deriving from the shared historical moment, and its innovations, both technological and artistic. Giovanni Cianci (1991: 156–7) has pointed out the centrality of the visual in the first wave of twentieth-century avant-gardes. Along with Roger Fry’s influential Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in London in 1910, the Futurists appeared at, and helped shape, a time in which experimentation occurred foremost in the visual domain. ‘As Blast attests’, writes Miranda Hickman, ‘London artists at the time were responding especially to the examples of the Cubists, the Italian Futurists, and Kandinsky’ (2005: 16). In Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), Pound speaks of a desire to ‘found a new school of painting, of “non-representative” painting . . . that would speak only by arrangements in colour’ (G-B 87). Tellingly, Pound’s expression of the ‘apparition’ of faces in the Parisian metro station of La Concorde comes ‘in little splotches of colour’: ‘a language in colour’ (G-B 87) is needed to convey the suddenness of aesthetic perception. In 1910, after painting the seminal Riot in the Gallery, which suggests the dynamism of an urban throng through juxtaposition of colour, Boccioni writes: ‘The gesture that we want to reproduce will no longer be a moment in the universal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself, perpetuated as such’ (FAN 64). The use of synaesthesia to depict sense perception in the here and now is a central concern of Futurist art, its ‘total painting . . . demands the active cooperation of all the senses’ (FAN 159). ‘Poetry’, writes Marinetti, ‘should be an uninterrupted flow of new images’

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(FAN 538). And for Pound, too, the synaesthetic articulation of the primary form is able to overcome the inherently static nature of the verbal. ‘Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form’, he writes in BLAST. ‘It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet SPENT itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing’ (B1 153). As Pound makes clear in the interview with Vengerova, in its Vorticist reformulation Imagism becomes a poetics of energetic dynamism; containing within it ‘every possibility, every conclusion and relationship which has not yet taken the form of a definite relationship, of a simile, and therefore has not yet become lifeless’ (quoted in Markov 1980: ix), it strives to preserve the vital potentiality of sensation from mortifying codification. The common pursuit of verbal dynamism, the aversion to simile, is also reflected in poetic diction; specifically, in its stripping down. Even before the Vorticist experiment, Pound’s Imagist principle of 1912 – ‘To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation’ (LE 3) – conveys a championing of greater verbal economy similar to that invoked in Futurist campaigns against rhetorical obfuscation. Indeed, adjectives were to be abolished ‘so that the noun retains its essential color’ (FAN 120). Similarly, the Imagist’s ‘Direct treatment of the “thing”’ (LE 3) is preceded by the concreteness and impersonality advocated by Futurist poetics: ‘Substitute, for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyrical obsession with matter’, ‘Destroy the “I” in literature’ (FAN 119–20). ‘It is imperative’, writes Marinetti in 1912, ‘to destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are born’ (FAN 119). And in 1913’s ‘Destruction of Syntax’ he expands: ‘the imagination of the poet must weave together distant things without connecting wires, by means of essential words in freedom’ (FAN 146). This reliance on the nominal, on the materiality of ‘things’, and elision of connectors has a lot in common with the ideogrammic poetics Pound was developing in those years, based on an interpretation of the Chinese written character. Pound’s fundamentally syncretic, rather than synthetic, method juxtaposes disparate elements in parataxis, suggesting the fundamental relation between them rather than asserting it through simile, or with the copula.

‘To the fighting line / as did old Marinetti’ (XCII/641) Pound’s relationship with Futurism changed after he moved to Italy in 1924. Settled in Rapallo, with Marinetti’s review Poesia printing his work, and Futurism’s second wave at the heights of its ascendancy, Pound began to revise his opinions of the movement. It is of course conceivable that as he acquired a more robust cultural presence in 1930s Italy, contributing to periodicals, supplements and newspapers, his polemical stance towards Futurism was tempered as a result of proximity and cultural assimilation. The Futurist room in the Venice Biennale, Pound wrote in a review of 1931 in L’Indice, ‘was the only thing that didn’t make my companion, more sensitive than I, weep with melancholy’. And two months later, in the same paper: ‘Every day that I remain in Italy I grow closer to Marinetti’s position’ (quoted in Zapponi 1976: 79; my translation). It is important to note, however, that though Pound’s tone grew more sympathetic to Futurism, this never translated into unreserved admiration; in his praise, the stress seldom rests on literary or artistic merits. He resisted Futurism in England, he says, and sees no use for it in American letters. These caveats preserve a distance:

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the movement’s necessity appears more an indictment of contemporary Italian arts (which Pound found rather dated) than an affirmation of any sort of universal value. What guarded praise he does proffer for Futurist art, however, is greatly amplified by Marinetti’s political significance. ‘I could find hundreds of distinguished, hyper-intellectual critics and respectable people in France, England and America’, Pound writes in the Rapallo-based weekly Il Mare in November 1932, ‘who would maintain that D’Annunzio and Marinetti write poorly, but for critical clarity I will point out that, to this day, Italy has possessed only two writers who have known how to act and write: D’Annunzio and Marinetti’ (quoted in Zapponi 1976: 87–8; my translation). Pound particularly admired Marinetti’s ability to combine literary production with political activism. In espousing this heroic figure of the poet-combatant, Pound succumbed, as Tim Redman (1991: 119) suggests, to the lionisation that Italian society afforded Marinetti. Two years later, in Pound’s 1935 study of government, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he wrote: Any smart schoolboy can make fun of some detail or other in Marinetti’s campaigns, but the same clever sneer-sprouter would find it much more difficult to match the mass record of Marinetti’s life, even if you limit it to his campaigning for public education in aesthetics and omit the political gestures, which any good writer might envy. You must judge the whole man by the mass of the man’s results. (J/M 107) The acknowledgement of Marinetti’s worth, despite his enduring susceptibility to satire, shows that artistic merit is no longer the sole variable in Pound’s estimation of the writer as ‘whole man’, that this is now bound to engagement in the practical life of the republic. It was in these years that the scope of Pound’s own militancy soared. Between 1933 and 1937, he ‘produced, in addition to his enormous correspondence, more than four hundred articles and letters-to-the-editor on monetary reform and politics’ (Stock 1966: 38). As his interest in economic policy and enthusiasm for Mussolini’s Italy grew, this engagement increasingly took the guise of propaganda for the regime, the pursuit of an art form ‘halfway between writing and action’ (SP 217). Pound visited Marinetti in Rome in 1932, and returned from his trip ‘loaded with futurist and fascist licherchoor’ (quoted in Carpenter 1988: 489); and alongside such meetings, the two men maintained a rich correspondence. A year later, for example, Marinetti writes that Pound’s contributions in Il Mare allow him to ‘savour the fruits of your intimate mysterious sea of American poetry, which in the embrace of our most voluptuous gulf becomes a little Italian’. Finding common ground with his ‘dear friend’ in the love of ‘the dynamite of new ideas, prodigious facts new colours and new images’, Marinetti extols ‘The male element made of synthesis inequality borders mechanical progress absolute patriotism heroic and simplifying constructive optimism (which today bears the great glorious name of Fascism)’ (quoted in Bacigalupo 1985: 45; my translation). Considering such exchanges, it is entirely possible that Pound’s advertised opinion of Marinetti, and lenience towards Futurist art, changed on purely political grounds, buoyed by increasingly confluent ideologies. Zapponi has spoken, in this sense, of Pound’s change of heart as dictated by a ‘tactical alliance’ (1976: 79); however, alongside the unquestionable strengthening of the poets’ political solidarity, it is also important to consider certain formal aspects of this consonance.

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The two writers shared an investment in Italian Fascism as a force engendering cultural rebirth, a fruitful collaboration between aesthetics and politics, in which they strove to play a guiding role.9 For Pound, Fascism was avant-garde politics, new, but ideally linked to ‘past glories’, which his ideas of economic reform and artistic renaissance, if advertised loudly enough, could help shape and develop. And Marinetti, who had distanced himself from Mussolini’s post-war reactionary turn and embrace of church and monarchy, gravitated back towards the regime as its powers grew more pervasive in the second half of the 1920s. Though he abandoned his early dreams of a Fascist revolution, Marinetti’s pandering to Fascist policy was a clear attempt to maintain cultural and political relevance, to cleave to a position of influence. Though largely disregarding Pound’s endorsements of the Fascist cause, Mussolini occasionally sought to corroborate the link between Fascism and Futurism. ‘I’d go so far as to say’, he declared, ‘that, without Futurism, Fascism would not have been able to establish itself at the vanguard of the real Italian revolution’ (quoted in Di Benedetto 2011: 198; my translation). The statement bespeaks an attempt to establish a juncture between the two, to foreground Futurism’s contribution in the formation of a Fascist style; it also emphasises an idea of art not only in the service of, but as catalyst for, political revolution. In 1936, Pound suggested to Marinetti that a Casa Littoria be built in Rapallo to house the local branch of the Fascist party, following the designs of Sant’Elia, the Futurist architect killed in combat twenty years before. Marinetti’s response was ‘Glory to Antonio Sant’Elia glory to fascist Italy so well architectured by Benito Mussolini’ (quoted in Beasley 2007: 200). It could certainly be argued that it was precisely this union of Futurism and/as Fascist art that made Pound reconsider his positions. Broadcasting from Radio Rome in 1942, Pound reviews the Venice Biennale of 1938 thus: The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct. An adjunct that proves the idea has other dimensions than the merely ideologic. It is a good idea, it is NOT a WHOLE idea. But it needs plastic expression: it has imperfect plastic expression, which is a sign of its force. But it does NOT arise from a plastic need. (EPS 194) What is striking here is that the political has subsumed the aesthetic: artistic expression, in itself, is secondary to the ideology to which it pays service. Although, for Pound, the Futurists execute it imperfectly, it is a conception of art perfectly in line with his views, expressed at that time, of literature ‘as communications service’: ‘The masterworks or the best of its time is like orders from the STAFF, from the high command’ (quoted in Paul 2016: 3). In Futurism’s second wave, drawing out the transmedial impetus that had characterised its early years, the movement shifted from being a new form of art to a new theory of art as aestheticisation of all aspects of life. Beyond the established domains of painting, sculpture and literature, it also aimed to renew cinema, gastronomy, language itself – to change the way people lived, interacted, communicated and fed themselves. With its nationalistic cultural programme (its domesticising neologisms, for example, to replace foreign terms) and its mission to impact a wider gamut of human experience, the movement became increasingly totalitarian, invoking, as Arnaldo Di

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Benedetto argues, ‘a new model of humanity’ (2011: 200). In this sense, this evolution reflects Pound’s changing view of culture, and the intellectual’s role in shaping it.10 As Pound wrote in Guide to Kulchur (1938): If I am introducing anybody to Kulchur, let ’em take the two phases, the nineteen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in Blast, and the next phase, the 1920’s. / The sorting out, the rappel à l’ordre, and thirdly the new synthesis, the totalitarian. (GK 95) Marinetti and Pound employed similar media to serve these comparable political ends. Aside from journalistic and editorial work, we need only think of Pound’s radio broadcasts from Rome to be reminded of his Italian predecessor. Both writers had experimented with the radio, from Pound’s early interest in the ‘wireless telegraph’ (LE XLVII) dating back to 1913, to Marinetti’s theorisation of the ‘wireless imagination’.11 For Marinetti, the radio also had nationalistic connotations, the ghostly ubiquity of Marconi’s invention evoking the primacy of Italian technological genius. Shedding the constraints of print, his ‘wireless imagination’ opened up new possibilities for artistic production: a constitutive novelty resistant to nostalgia and tradition. Radio was also able to salvage and bear within it the remnants of the ‘moribund’ theatrical medium, and as Timothy Campbell (2006: 90) notes, in Marinetti’s conception, parole in libertà depend heavily on the orator, or ‘a special declamation’ (FAN 151), to be understood. Like D’Annunzio, Marinetti conceived of the radio as an instrument of war. The staccato vocal affectations of Pound’s belligerent broadcasts from Rome have puzzled many critics, and his embracing of Marinetti’s ‘writing and action’ suggests a certain continuity in the ways both men used the medium. Pound and Marinetti’s political parabolas also share a similar trajectory. Both collaborated with the regime, were positioned rather uneasily within it, and exerted, by the 1930s, only a marginal political influence. Although also a complex matter, Marinetti’s relationship with Mussolini was more substantial and perhaps more opportunistic than Pound’s; the Italian’s fierce nationalism and actuation of, for example, Mussolini’s linguistic directives – coining lexical equivalents, as mentioned above, for foreign borrowings – were more readily exploitable than the curious anomaly of an American poet’s validation. Both poets also made very public antiSemitic statements.12 In November 1938, after Mussolini had promulgated the antiSemitic racial laws, Marinetti wrote a piece for the Giornale d’Italia exalting the ‘Italian spirit’ in modern art, from which the Jewish people were explicitly excluded, omitted from the Futurist revolution (see Di Benedetto 2011: 200). Both poets also supported Mussolini’s imperialist campaigns in East Africa; and as World War II – in which Marinetti served briefly, aged 65 – entered its final phase, endorsed the puppet regime of the Italian Social Republic at Salò. Having returned to Italy from the Eastern Front, Marinetti died in December 1944, five months before Pound’s arrest for his wartime broadcasts. In the throes of a war by then both global and civil, Pound included Marinetti in the pantheon of the Cantos’ heroic figures. Cantos LXXII and LXXIII, written in Italian in a medieval Tuscan style,13 were composed at the very end of 1944, but – suppressed due to their endorsement of the boys and girls who ‘portan’ il nero’, were ‘clad in black’ – would appear in English-language editions only from 1986. Mary de

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Rachewiltz recalls these Italian Cantos as ‘Full of vigor and images, exalting [Pound’s] old friends F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement, who, true to himself and his “interventism”, had gone to fight in Russia’ (2005: 197). Written shortly after, and occasioned by Marinetti’s death, Canto LXXII was also, in part, a eulogy of the poet, who appears as a Dantesque ghost. The text picks up where Marinetti’s final poem ‘Quarter-Hour of Poetry of the 10th Assault Vehicle Flotilla’ left off, with Marinetti inciting the youth not yet ready for paradise to battle. In Pound’s canto, Marinetti asks Pound to bestow on him his body to continue the war struggle and to avenge the Axis defeat at El Alamein. As Robert Casillo has pointed out, the recurrence of the words ‘presenza’ and ‘presente’ refer to Fascist martyr rituals – the latter term used, in unison, to fill the silence of the dead during roll call (1992: 102). Thus, in the Italian Cantos we find the old antagonist of avant-garde factionalism written into Pound’s threnody for the flailing republic. Where he once had been a ‘corpse’, Pound’s late homage exhumes Marinetti from the dead. Futurist poetics had already been broadly shaped by the time of Marinetti’s encounter with Pound, and the movement’s nationalistic ethos could evidently not permit allegations of ‘xenomania’, or contamination from an American source. Conversely, Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook reports Pound telling a journalist that: ‘The movement that I, Eliot, Joyce and others began in London could not have existed without Italian Futurism’ (2014: 72). Claudia Salaris also cites this declaration, taking it as Pound’s definitive avowal of Futurist filiation (1990: 251, 1992: 530). I am suspicious, however, of the throwaway nature of such a sweeping and unprecedented endorsement; as this unattributed article is unsigned by Pound, it is legitimate to question its authorship. As I have shown, Pound heaped little praise on Italian Futurism for its artistic merits: aside from the architecture of ‘Futurist genius’ Sant’Elia (quoted in Paul 2016: 302), it is difficult to find unqualified encomium of a particular poem or painting, painter or sculptor. Aspects of the Futurist project were unpalatable to Pound, and remained alien to his poetics. Despite his far-reaching interest in music, for example, he avowed scant interest in Futurist musical experimentation, bar the odd disparaging comment.14 His appraisal of the movement was always rather ambivalent, never warranting the mercurial enthusiasm or critical attention he reserved for Gaudier-Brzeska or Constantin Brâncuși, or later protégés like Enrico Pea or Saturno Montanari. In his early writings, Futurism was always explicitly other, something to react to or create against. Despite its goal of artistic renewal, the Futurist impetus remains, in Pound’s telling, a catalyst for creation, destined to leave little more than a trace when the (serious) artistic alchemy was complete. David Barnes has argued that ‘Pound’s identification with Marinetti in the Fascist context comes not as a volte-face, but as the culmination of his long interest in a political, nationalistic avant-garde’ (2010: 26); and there is, of course, a degree of continuity between the two phases of Pound’s relations with Futurism. Despite the many differences between the two men, talked up during their early rivalry, Pound’s later role as a cultural ‘insider’ in Italy and his enduring friendship with Marinetti proved pivotal in his re-evaluation of Futurism as an embodiment of Fascist aesthetics. Given this friendship, and his inclusion in the Italian Cantos, I believe that it was Marinetti, more than Futurism, that exerted a significant influence on Pound; and the

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synecdochal use of his name when discussing the movement’s merits is telling. While Marinetti’s disruptive poetics, and conception of the artist as agitator-cum-impresario, certainly helped shape Pound’s London years, it was the Italian’s engagement and interventionism in subsequent decades that enabled a re-evaluation on the grounds of aesthetic and political coherence.

Notes 1. For information on the interview – likely to have been conducted before the first issue of BLAST went to press – and Vorticist reception in Russia, see Beasley (2013) and Markov (1968, 1980). An Italian translation of the interview appears in Vengerova (1992). 2. Originally dated to the previous April following Futurist accounts, it now seems more likely that Marinetti’s visit to London took place later in the year (Wood 2015: 139). 3. This aerial bombardment, writes Jennifer Scappettone (2014: 138), ‘symbolically hijacked the timekeeping function of the venerable medieval Campanile . . . and ushered the leisure class into a new, accelerated tempo’. In her comprehensive study of modernism in Venice, Scappettone argues that Marinetti’s choice to target Venice as an antithesis to Futurism highlights the geopolitical urgencies driving the avant-garde’s logic of rupture with the past. 4. ‘Great poets . . . pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and then set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain’ (SR 162). 5. A decade later, in ‘Le Futurisme Mondial’ (‘Worldwide Futurism’), of 1924, Marinetti brands the experimental movements of the twentieth century as either avowedly Futurist or ‘Futurists without knowing it’, and describes Imagism as ‘Anglo-Saxon literary Futurism, modernolatry’ (quoted in Salaris 1992: 529–30; my translation). 6. Although, in most accounts, Vorticism is presented as a short-lived artistic movement and of limited consequence, for the movement’s influence on late modernism, see Hickman (2005) and Dasenbrock (1985). 7. ‘It was with regret’, Lewis conceded later, that ‘I included the poems of my friend Ezra Pound: they “let down”, I felt, the radical purism of the visual contents, or the propaganda of the same’ (quoted in Nicholls 1995: 171). 8. For a study of Marinetti’s work as editor and tireless promoter of Futurism, see Salaris (1990, 1994). 9. For Pound’s ties with Fascism, see Redman (1991), Morrison (1996), Feldman (2013) and Paul (2016). 10. ‘His prose treatises of this period’, writes Catherine Paul, ‘informed as they are by Fascist approaches to employing culture in the service of politics, come to show tremendous confidence in their own authority, and indeed trade on that authority as a means of shaping culture’ (2016: 8). 11. ‘The absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with disconnected words, and without the connecting syntactical wires and without punctuation’ (FAN 146). For Pound and Marinetti’s relationship with radio, see Tiffany (1995), Campbell (2006), and Cohen, Coyle and Lewty (2009). 12. In The Italian Army, a pamphlet of 1942, Marinetti decries ‘democracy communism Judaism’ as ‘dusty passéisms equally depressing or treacherous’ (quoted in Zapponi 1988: 163; my translation). See Zapponi’s essay for information on Futurism, anti-Semitism and Fascism. For Pound and anti-Semitism, see EPS, Flory (1999), Casillo (1988) and Surette (1999).

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13. For an annotated translation and discussion of Cantos LXXII and LXXIII, see Bacigalupo (1991); see also Casillo (1992) and Cockram (2000). See Pesaresi (1993) for a stylistic analysis of these cantos. 14. Pound was unmoved by the 1914 Futurist noise-tuner concerts in London. ‘The Futurists went in for impressions of noise, machine noise’, he wrote, years later. ‘It is not for me a question of taking an impression of machine noise and reproducing it in the concert hall or making any more noise, but composing, governing the noise that we’ve got’ (EPMA 76).

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15 Ezra Pound and Wassily Kandinsky: Inner Necessity and the PARADISO TERRESTRE Jack Baker

P

ound’s debts to the visual arts have attracted close scrutiny. The radical perspectives of Picasso’s Cubism and Gaudier-Brzeska’s Vorticism, in particular, are known to have shaped Pound’s early, idealising conception of the creative artist ‘as directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing’ (G-B 89). Kandinsky, too, enjoys frequent mention in accounts of Pound’s early development, as the painter’s emphasis on the intrinsic properties of colours and geometric forms provoked the young poet to refine and to compress his own idiom in the mid-1910s. These technical affinities are certainly arresting, but the spiritual dimension of Kandinsky’s thought also has implications for Pound’s verse – implications that have not been extensively explored. Kandinsky’s principle of ‘inner necessity’ asserts the latency of spiritual forces in abstract forms and colours: techniques adequate to the mere representation of external phenomena cannot, he argues, be accommodated to ‘vibrations of the soul’. In his association of primal emotion with elemental form, Kandinsky anticipates Pound’s conviction that the art object is essentially autotelic – a conviction central to the aesthetic of The Cantos. It is perhaps understandable that Poundians have been less anxious to explore the poetic implications of this principle, which is often characterised as latently Romantic, than to reflect upon the unimpeachably radical dictates of the Vorticists. But although Henri Gaudier-Brzeska dismisses Kandinsky’s spiritualism – ‘[m]y temperament does not allow of formless, vague assertions’ – Pound explicitly invokes the ‘inner need’ in support of his argument that ‘human dignity consists very largely in humanity’s ability to invent’ (G-B 33). Invention is central to the relationship between Pound and Kandinsky. One of the most common objections to Pound’s canonical status is that he lacks precisely the ‘ability to invent’; that the densely referential Cantos amount rather to a grand cultural larceny than to an original vision of the world. But my contention is that, in the lyric amplifications of his paradiso terrestre, Pound slips momentarily into an idiom more closely allied with Kandinsky’s theosophical visions than with his own, austere verse principles. Pound’s earthly paradise may reject Christian conceptions of the divine, but it answers nonetheless to an ‘inner necessity’ that charges his own concrete and ostensibly impersonal images with remarkable intensities of feeling.

Form and Colour Pound casts Kandinsky as the ‘mother’ of Vorticism (Picasso enjoys paternity), and repeatedly invokes the painter as integral to a profound shift in the collective consciousness:

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Whistler said somewhere in the Gentle Art: ‘The picture is interesting not because it is Trotty Veg, but because it is an arrangement in colour.’ The minute you have admitted that, you let in the jungle, you let in nature and truth and abundance and cubism and Kandinsky, and the lot of us. (G-B 85) These characteristically vaunting statements thumb their nose at scholarly inhibition. What kind of ‘truth’, exactly, is being ‘let in’? Is ‘abundance’ mere filler, or an intentional allusion to Henri Le Fauconnier’s Cubist painting L’Abondance (1910)? And is Kandinsky being pressed into a spurious fraternity – ‘the lot of us’ – that Pound has largely imagined? We can forgive Pound, as we can any burgeoning talent, for cutting such a dash. But the fickle charity of his prose, in which countless enthusiasms are named, but relatively few afforded prolonged consideration, can make the true extent of any single interest difficult to discern. Nonetheless, Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art undoubtedly made a great impression upon Pound when he first encountered it in 1914.1 This manifesto, originally published in Munich in 1911, exclaims the radical credo of a painter whose technical and philosophical preoccupations had undergone recent and dramatic change. Kandinsky came late to his vocation, abandoning a career as a teacher of law and economics to enrol, at the age of thirty, at a painting school in Munich run by Anton Azbé. His first efforts as a student, featuring naturalistic landscapes inspired by Russian folk art, were largely realist compositions – a realism that the example of the French Impressionists soon prompted him to discard. On encountering Monet’s Haystacks at an Impressionist exhibition in Moscow in 1896, Kandinsky was moved to a new pitch of awareness, which he recalled in his memoirs: ‘What suddenly became clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, which I had not understood before and which surpassed my wildest dreams’ (Kandinsky 1994: 363). Accordingly, Kandinsky’s work in the early years of the twentieth century – most famously Der Blaue Reiter (1903) – assimilated Impressionist techniques to the pursuit of a new purity of colour and form. But, from 1908, his style underwent further, radical evolution: Kandinsky began steadily to remove figurative subjects from his work, resulting initially in ‘transitional’ paintings, such as White Sound (1908) and Landscape with Factory Chimney (1910), in which representational objects are conveyed in a few, broad brush-strokes, while the fantastical landscape in which these objects rest conveys an abstracted, almost childlike vision, dominated by bold colours and soft lines. As Kandinsky refined these techniques, he was able to envision almost wholly abstract works, such as Composition VII (1913). Here it is still possible to detect representational outlines – the ghosts of form – but they are not organised according to an externally intelligible design. Instead, conventional perspective has been displaced by the interplay of abstract motifs, and by vividly contrasted blocks of colour. Kandinsky’s work had undergone a total shift from a representational to a non-representational mode in the space of a few short years; a process that began in 1908, and which was largely completed by 1913–14. Hence On the Spiritual in Art, appearing in 1911, should not be approached as a guarded or calculating work, in which the artist seeks to invest his development with a retrospective inevitability. Rather, like a lot of Pound’s early writing, it is written with an almost utopian zeal, in which the freshness of the perceptions more than outweighs any unevenness in the argument or haste in the conclusions.

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One of the most compelling similarities between Pound and Kandinsky is that their technical innovations serve culturally conservative ends. Just as Pound writes, in ‘The Tradition’, ‘A return to origins invigorates because it is a return to nature and reason’ (LE 92), so Kandinsky associates his abstractions with the rediscovery of theosophical and mystical energies occluded by a secularising, twentieth-century culture. In his pursuit of ‘the life of the spirit’, Kandinsky was profoundly influenced by traditional Chinese aesthetics, another preoccupation shared with Pound. As Philippe Sers observes, Kandinsky’s ‘artistic aims recall those of Chinese painters in search of Li, the “internal ordering principle” of neo-Confucianism’ (Sers 2016: 11). Li – literally ‘veins in jade’ – evokes the dynamism and telos of objects, as opposed to their inert or static appearance. The artist should honour the persistence of an essence, as opposed to the incidental properties of a static form: a principle that directly informs Kandinsky’s own description of the parallels between painting and poetry: Each true painting is poetry. For poetry is not made solely by use of words, but also by colours, organised and composed; consequently, painting is a pictorial poetic creation. It possesses its own means of being ‘pure poetry’. It is so-called ‘abstract’ painting that ‘talks’ (or ‘recites’) through its exclusively pictorial forms – an advantage it has over the poetry of words. The source of both languages is the same; they share the same root: intuition – soul. (Kandinsky 1994: 833) Kandinsky made these observations in 1933, having had ample time to codify the perceptual implications of abstract painting that Pound had grasped intuitively in the 1910s. In averring that ‘the image is the poet’s pigment’, the young poet draws self-consciously upon On the Spiritual in Art in order to project himself into the role of the graphic artist. Indeed, in his adaptation of Kandinsky’s principles to the exigencies of poetic form – ‘you can transpose his chapter on the language of form and colour and apply it to the writing of verse’ – Pound is exploring a possibility already envisaged by Kandinsky: ‘The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental’ (G-B 86; Kandinsky 1977: 20). It were well to be alive to these telling correspondences. For even when Pound, with characteristic swagger, asserts the immaculate conception of his own aesthetic theories – ‘when I came to read Kandinsky’s chapter on the language of form and colour, I found little that was new to me. I only felt that someone else understood what I understood, and had written it out very clearly, the phraseology invests the painter’s insights with a certain alienated majesty’ (G-B 87). Perhaps Pound’s most memorable commentary on the painterly aspirations of his verse appears in Gaudier-Brzeska, when he describes the genesis of ‘In a Station of the Metro’: saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and . . . I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening . . . I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. (G-B 86–7)

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Pound’s terminology, ‘equation’, is telling. It suggests the replacement of the poet’s shaping but subjective intelligence with an objective formula. Pound records that he initially wrote a poem of thirty lines to capture his experience, before destroying it. Six months later, he wrote another of fourteen lines, and gradually whittled this down to the fourteen words of the finished poem. The two lines of ‘In a Station’ are not syntactically integrated: they are paratactically juxtaposed. Indeed, if we recall Ernest Fenollosa’s three-phase model of dramatic action, we find here that the middle phase, ‘the stroke of the act’, has been suppressed (CWCMP 86). We are, in effect, left waiting for a verb that never arrives. Instead, the verbal element of the poem inheres in the flash of apprehension that it enacts. Hugh Kenner has called this poem ‘a simile with “like” suppressed’ (Kenner 1972: 185). But, in omitting the syntax that would make the simile clear, the poet forces his readers to replicate his own original moment of apprehension. As Pound puts it, ‘In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective’ (G-B 89). A good deal of this account – in particular, Pound’s sense of the ‘outward and objective’ stimulus being transformed into ‘a thing inward and subjective’, idealised though it may be – is consistent with Kandinsky’s descriptions of perceptive agency. These are the correspondences prized by Edward Brandabur in his instructive essay on Pound and Kandinsky, which argues that the poet and painter share a ‘distinct modern perceptual gestalt . . . without obvious precedent in the history of painting or in the history of literature’ (Brandabur 1973: 105). But this comparison, though compelling, is not the whole truth. Brandabur is less eager, quite understandably, to dwell upon the discrepancies between Kandinsky’s and Pound’s theories of art, which might begin to undermine his argument for their affiliation. For Kandinsky not only asserts the shaping power of the imagination: his theosophical theories finally amount to a wishing away of the material world, a transfiguration of matter into spirit, which jars with Pound’s poetic mission. Whereas On the Spiritual in Art glorifies ‘those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul’, Pound prizes ‘art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise’, and makes a virtue of the poet’s fidelity to the kernel of that which he describes (Kandinsky 1977: 14; LE 44). True, Pound never expresses the same irritation with Kandinsky as does Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: the sculptor dismisses ‘all his twaddle “of the spiritual in art”’ (G-B 33). But Pound’s perennial concern with the granular particularity of language might seem to defy spiritual reverie. Throughout Pound’s prose writings, linguistic precision is not merely asserted as an intrinsic good, but is credited with broader moral and political implications. In Guide to Kulchur, for example, Pound censures Aristotle for an approach to ethics that is merely theoretical, and therefore remote from embodied experience. In Pound’s terms: ‘Aristotle leaves a yawning chasm into which a mediaeval or neoPlatonic or even Mesopotamian god has to be shoved’ (GK 339). At the risk of shackling my own argument, I should like further to explore these apparent fault lines in the third section of this chapter, by juxtaposing Kandinsky’s principle of ‘inner necessity’ with Pound’s finest evocation, in Canto XLVII, of his ‘paradiso terrestre’. Do the lyric intensities of Pound’s Cantos conform more closely to Kandinsky’s aesthetic principles than to his own? The question is at least worth posing: we are well used to contrasting the iron injunctions of Pound’s early theories with the embodied complexities of his mature verse. In 1916, for instance, Pound opined that ‘the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to

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back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics’, an injunction that The Cantos repeatedly transgress (G-B 86). And yet, for all Pound’s bravado, he is, in one sense, a deeply religious poet, maintaining a faith in truths that persist independently of his own powers of articulation: ‘i.e. it coheres alright / even if my notes do not cohere’ (CXVI/817). Indeed, several of the late cantos, in Rock-Drill, Thrones and Drafts & Fragments, strive openly to establish a hierarchy of values upon which an earthly paradise might rest: ‘The sun under it all: / Justice, d’urbanité, de prudence’ (LXXXV/564). Pound is revealing on the ‘undiscussable’ quality of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘Sober minds have agreed that the arcanum is the arcanum. No man can provide his neighbour with a Cook’s ticket thereto’ (GK 292). Whereas Pound’s social and economic desiderata are attempts to pay our fare, his subtler lyrics do not lead, but rather point our way. Accordingly, the lyric achievements of Canto XLVII, which do not merely describe but embody Pound’s paradiso terrestre, evoke a wisdom somehow immanent in sensate phenomena, and so fulfil, at least in part, Kandinsky’s vision of ‘pure poetry’.

Pale Rider Kandinsky was not a populist. Like Pound, he conceived of the artist as an isolated figure, swimming against the tide of public sentiment: The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area. The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment. At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted. (Kandinsky 1977: 6) A good deal of this account foreshadows Poundian dicta. A similarly hierarchical conception of aesthetic insight emerges, for instance, in the poet’s early essays on Thomas Hardy and Henry James. In addition, Pound retains a keen sense of the artist as a thwarted sage, destined, at least in his own age, to be misunderstood: ‘Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists’ (LE 297). There are, however, important differences in tone. Kandinsky’s everrising triangle, with its implication of steady, generational improvement, is a more idealising calculus than we often find in Pound’s combative exhortations. This ideal of progress manifests itself most obviously in Kandinsky’s horse and rider motif, given formative expression in 1903, in Der Blaue Reiter. Here Kandinsky combines Impressionist and Expressionist elements: the vivid contrasts of the former; the subjective perspective of the latter. The subject is deceptively simple. A lone rider gallops across the foreground of a rural landscape, framed by trees and a darkening sky. These indistinct forms invite speculation: the substitution of blocks of colour for specific details compels our imaginative involvement in the scene. Is the hooded rider a fugitive? Do we

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detect, in vague outline, that he or she is sheltering a child? Is this journey a means or, like the painting, an end in itself? In Kandinsky’s colour schema, the rider’s blue cloak is propitious, connoting heaven and silence. And yet the eye is drawn from the bottom right to the top left of the painting, away from the horse and rider, following the angle of their shadows into unknown distances. These effects are easily assimilated to the archetype of the romantic wanderer, striving alone against the elements, yet animated by a surety of purpose. And, to that extent, they correspond to Kandinsky’s account, above, of the artist as a lone visionary. But the religious overtones embedded in the image of horse and rider are also pressing, and complicate the nature of the vocation implied: ‘And I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war’ (Revelation 19:11). Kandinsky returns to the horse-and-rider motif throughout his Expressionist, preabstract and abstract phases. Just as the later Cantos become self-referential, condensing Pound’s long-standing preoccupations to increasingly elliptical formulations, so Kandinsky steadily strips his signature forms to their barest essentials. In Lyrical (1911), the figures of horse and rider are limned in a handful of deft strokes, which, against all expectation, preserve an animate and three-dimensional image. It is intriguing that, as figurative details are abbreviated in Kandinsky’s art, his religious preoccupations become commensurately more overt. The eschatological imagery of Revelation dominates Kandinsky’s imagination in the early 1910s, and, in this daunting schema, his riders become horsemen of the apocalypse. Improvisation 28 (1912), for example, functions as an abstract, modernist response to Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement. Whereas Michelangelo subdues the variety of human experience to a horrifying dualism, with the saved ascending on the left and the damned descending on the right, Kandinsky also divides his canvas into apocalyptic and paradisal halves, but reverses the sequence. If we are habituated, as creatures of the codex, to ‘read’ the temporal arc of a painting from left to right, then Kandinsky’s vision, tending from darkness to light, seems more optimistic than Michelangelo’s. ‘Il Divino’ returned to paint The Last Judgement some twenty-five years after painting his great ceiling. So the later fresco is the work of an older, more solemn artist: his lissom, graceful human subjects have been replaced by an array of crudely corporeal figures, seemingly inadequate to the salvation they desire. Kandinsky, too, has his intimations of strife. To the left, in Improvisation 28, we find the insidious form of a serpent, and the outline of an ark and waves, connoting the flood. To the right, a couple embrace, and, on a lone hill, bathed in ethereal light, a church stands apart from the chaos. Meanwhile, superimposed in the foreground are thick black lines, initially confounding, which subtly evoke the swooping manes and necks of horses, as if to indicate that the rider, whether as artist or as demiurge, bestrides every possibility, from damnation to redemption. Pound’s factive heroes also have a dark potentiality. One thinks immediately of Sigismondo Malatesta, whose crusade against corrupt and philistine forces culminates in an extraordinary image: ‘In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it’ (XI/51). But Pound’s central ‘rider’, the one seeker after knowledge that most compellingly haunts his imagination, is surely Odysseus. And, just as Kandinsky’s motif encompasses the full emotional gamut of his art, from individual creative fervour to apocalyptic gloom, so Odysseus (‘polumetis’, ‘many-sided’) is a fitting foil for Pound. The Cantos begins with an act of necromancy, Tiresias being momentarily

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restored by Odysseus’ sacrificial offering: ‘Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody beaver / for soothsay’ (I/4). In Pound’s hands, this macabre and primal image invests his own poetic quest with seditious undertones. The poet’s – and by extension the reader’s – sublimation in the mythic foretime of Canto I defies the bland insipidity of the modern world. As Pound writes, in ‘The Tradition’, ‘A return to origins invigorates because it is a return to nature and reason’ (LE 92). Accordingly, Canto I begins in medias res: And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. (I/3) That Pound should begin his own epic with this particular Homeric episode is richly suggestive. Just as Odysseus’ departure from Circe’s island is a return to action, renewing the spirit and purpose of the epic after an artificial lull, so Pound, by implication, is similarly renewing Homer’s noble spirit, after a lull of nearly three thousand years. Pound’s infatuation with classical and pagan myth may afford a thematic contrast with Kandinsky’s explicitly Christian spiritualism, but it is no less deeply felt. His Cantos do not offer mere literary pastiches, as if following Homage to Sextus Propertius with homages to Homer or Dante. Nor are they exercises in nostalgia, seeming simply to contrast an aureate past with a fallen present. Instead, they record an audacious attempt to recover and to renew what has been lost. For Pound does more than lament the dying of the light: he makes of the past a living presence: Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. (I/3) These undulating, loosely dactylic cadences are married to an extraordinary sequence of images, which function as a condensed parable of human endeavour: moving from obscurity (‘deepest water’) to society (‘peopled cities’), and then reaching for heaven and the stars, before falling back into an enveloping darkness. Pound’s indebtedness to the rhythmical and metrical characteristics of Anglo-Saxon verse is reflected in the internal rhymes and dense alliteration that accelerate this long sentence towards its unbroken final line. The phrases ‘Sun to his slumber’ and ‘shadows o’er all the ocean’ each correspond to the internally rhymed Anglo-Saxon half-line, and are syntactically separated. But together the clauses also form an ideogram, and the alliterating sibilants

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‘Sun . . . slumber . . . shadows . . . ocean’ blur their separation, intertwining light with shade, and the intimacy of a dream with the ocean’s infinite expanse. Though an extended discussion of Pound’s verse principles is beyond the scope of this chapter, Canto I nonetheless exemplifies the applicability of Kandinsky’s principle of dynamic contrast to Pound’s preoccupations, both technical and thematic. Not only are the paratactic contrasts between individual images vital to Pound’s aesthetic, but the broader conceptual architecture of the Cantos also accords with Kandinsky’s association of colour with moral order. Indeed, the Cantos are suffused with images of light, which offer a source of lyric energy in the poem, coinciding with passages of visionary experience and direct, tactile expression. Particularly powerful are the repeated associations of light with water and stone, uniting its primal connotations of rebirth and renewal with more complex intimations of responsibility and enduring order. Pellucid individual images, from the ‘liquid and rushing crystal’ of Canto IV to the coolly redemptive moonlight of Canto LXXVI, gradually coalesce into a broader metaphorical pattern, in which the interplay of light and dark is conceived in part as a schism between order and chaos, contrasting the artist’s clarity of vision with the corrupting allure of money and the false illumination of the church. Not only do these tropes shape Pound’s own ambition ‘to build light’, but they also inflect the representations of his favourite historical exemplars, including Confucius, Malatesta and, of course, Odysseus. Their legacy conforms to a Platonic sensibility running throughout the Cantos and casting high art as that which bears the imprint of the ‘nous’, which, as Peter Liebregts observes, encompasses ‘both thought and the objects of its thought’ (2004: 24). As ever, the theoretical differences between Pound and Kandinsky should not be overlooked for the sake of convenient symmetries. It is perhaps unwise to assimilate Pound to an ideational spiritualism that is not his own. Even Kandinsky’s deliberately generic titles – Improvisation 28, Sketch for ‘Composition II’ and so forth – begin to suggest that his later works are not so much responses to the phenomenal world as provisional approaches to an abstract ideal, and here the validity of associating the spatial medium of painting with the essentially linear patterns of verse may be called into question. Pound’s famous injunction to ‘go in fear of abstractions’ can hardly be ignored. He upholds, even in the most abstruse and densely referential sections of the Cantos, that proximity to life so wonderfully described by Wallace Stevens: ‘The poem is the cry of its occasion. Part of the res itself and not about it’ (Stevens 1997: 404). So it is with good reason that Donald Davie argues that ‘Pound’s repeated assertion that the paradisal is real, out there in the real world, is a conscious challenge to the whole symbolist aesthetic’ (Davie 1991: 494). And yet, Pound’s commitment to a ‘direct treatment of the “thing”’ does not necessarily preclude the attribution of symbolic or figurative qualities to worldly objects. Lake Garda, for instance, is certainly associable in Pound’s mind with particular, personal experiences, but it is arguable that his poetic re-rendering of those experiences constitutes an imaginative transfiguration of reality that Kandinsky might readily approve: and the water was still on the West side flowing toward the Villa Catullo where with sound ever moving in diminutive poluphloisboios in the stillness outlasting all wars (LXXIV/447)

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These plangent phrases recall a particular occasion: ‘the water was still’; and they are spatially precise: ‘on the west side’, ‘toward the Villa Catullo’. But this singular experience is finally validated by a general measure, ‘outlasting all wars’, so that the particularities of the occasion become aesthetic tokens embodying a timeless moral order. Though Pound and Kandinsky certainly differ in their perceptual approach to the ‘real’, both ultimately establish a private symbolism that charges their personal images and tropes with more profound metaphorical resonance.

The Virtue of Myths Kandinsky is a believer: Pound upholds the architecture of belief. The poet’s Mediterranean paganism has an instrumental quality alien to the ‘spiritual’ element that the painter would apprehend. Ancient myth, in Pound’s eyes, can embody immutable human truths without necessitating the subjection of the intellect to doctrine that formal religious observance would entail. In an unpublished essay, ‘Convenit esse deos’ (c. 1940–2), Pound writes, ‘The virtue of the myths is that one does not have to believe them. The virtue of the myths is that no one can use Leda or Daphne in a revival meeting’ (EPMA 137). His foil here is T. S. Eliot, whom Pound credits with the desire to resurrect ‘monotheism, in some sort of mildly dry form’. Though playfully deprecating, this description is in keeping with Eliot’s somewhat anti-Arnoldian pessimism: ‘And certainly poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or . . . of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion, except by some monstrous abuse of words’ (Eliot 1928: ix). This disagreement creates an unlikely paradox. For all that Pound rejects monotheism – ‘a god in the singular’ – as a limiting imposition on human affairs, he is far more certain than Eliot about the cultural centrality of the religious imagination. To that extent, though Eliot shares a kernel of religious conviction with Kandinsky, Pound is the more temperamentally aligned with the painter’s theosophical attitudes. For Kandinsky, like Pound, makes the very highest claims for aesthetic experience: ‘Literature, music and art . . . turn away from the soulless life of the present towards those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul’ (Kandinsky 1977: 14). Kandinsky’s principle of inner necessity is presented as a confluence of three distinct impulses: the ‘element of personality’, ‘the element of style’ and the ‘element of pure artistry’. Of these, only the third gestures towards permanence: In the past and even today much talk is heard of ‘personality’ in art. Talk of the coming ‘style’ becomes more frequent daily. But for all their importance today, these questions will have disappeared after a few hundred or thousand years. Only the third element – that of pure artistry – will remain forever. An Egyptian carving speaks to us today more subtly than it did to its chronological contemporaries; for they judged it with the hampering knowledge of period and personality. But we can judge purely as an expression of the eternal artistry. (Kandinsky 1977: 34) ‘All ages are contemporaneous’, Pound writes in The Spirit of Romance, implying that certain experiences are both immutable and trans-historical (SR vi). In isolating ‘pure artistry’ from its contingencies, Kandinsky matches this claim. And a further,

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compelling similarity emerges in the painter’s apprehension that the surface elements of ‘personality’ in a given work may be inessential. For even as Pound trumpets the importance of poetry, he minimises the importance of the poet as an individual: ‘It is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes not a jot of difference who writes it’ (LE 10). This is not to argue that Kandinsky’s religious impulse and Pound’s reverence for myth are co-extensive in their aesthetic implications. Kandinsky’s theoretical dicta consciously preserve space for the ineffable, and so involve the kind of abstract and idealising vocabulary – ‘strivings of the soul’, ‘eternal artistry’ – with which Pound, at least in his prose writings, is notoriously impatient. We do well to recall that the paradiso terrestre is conceived in part as a rebuke to conventional conceptions of the divine. Indeed, Yeats remarks that artists are ‘not permitted to shoot beyond the tangible’, so Pound’s attempts to render explicitly the conditions of his earthly paradise are remarkable for their ambition alone (Yeats 1959: 340). And yet, Pound’s insistence that his paradise is proximate and knowable risks shackling his verse to a material schema: such metaphysical certainty may breed creative inertia. As the emotional urgencies of the later cantos amply demonstrate, Pound finds himself repeatedly torn between the immediacy of the physical present and intimations of a knowledge that lies beyond that physical realm: ‘The Gods have not returned. “They have never left us.” / They have not returned’ (CXIII/807). He strives to preserve an unabated vitality of spirit, even as he entertains a world in which personal and transient experience can be made somehow permanent and universal. The conceptual tensions inherent in Pound’s paradiso terrestre are most compellingly resolved in Canto XLVII. Here the connections between past and present, image and symbol, and private and collective experience are not merely asserted, but rather enacted in visual and musical patterns. Take the evocation of religious rites at Rapallo: The small lamps drift in the bay And the sea’s claw gathers them. Neptunus drinks after neap-tide. Tamuz! Tamuz!! The red flame going seaward. By this gate art thou measured. From the long boats they have set lights in the water, The sea’s claw gathers them outward. (XLVII/236) The fragility of these lamps, which are engulfed sonically and semantically by the orotund vowels of the ‘sea’s claw’, is doubly suggestive, capturing both the poignant uncertainty of individual lives and the redeeming majesty of their collective achievement. The image also, of course, frames Odysseus’ voyage as a perilous but noble pursuit. And, in the disarming simplicity of its diction, this passage surely recalls Pound’s early Imagiste poems. Here are the same monosyllabic purities, the same coolly disembodied voice, and the same distillation of vital perceptions into an elementary subject– verb–object pattern. The influence on Pound’s early verse of the Chinese ideogram, and in particular of Ernest Fenollosa’s definition of the sentence as a ‘unit of natural process’, is also germane to these effects (CWCMP 85). Like Kandinsky, Pound seems

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intent upon isolating the essential character of particular images. And, in describing scenes from which muddying contingencies have been stripped, the guileless diction of Canto XLVII creates the impression not so much of an individual’s account of reality as of a revelation of the truths somehow immanent in landscape and history. In other words, the poet’s ego is strangely remote, recalling D. H. Lawrence’s memorable depiction of the creative impulse: ‘not I but the wind that blows through me’ (Lawrence 1972: 83). There is, I suggest, a similar quality of revelation later in the canto, in the passage deriving from Hesiod: Begin thy plowing When the Pleiades go down to their rest, Begin thy plowing 40 days are they under seabord, Thus do in fields by seabord And in valleys winding down toward the sea. When the cranes fly high think of plowing. By this gate art thou measured Thy day is between a door and a door Two oxen are yoked for plowing Or six in the hill field White bulk under olives, a score for drawing down stone, Here the mules are gabled with slate on the hill road. Thus was it in time. (XLVII/237) At first, these austere phrases seem to resist rhetorical embellishment, as if such artifice might blur the clarity of their moral focus. Nonetheless, the initially instructive force of these lines is wonderfully overtaken by rhythms that suddenly evoke the tactile particularity of the landscape they describe. Note, for instance, the meandering beat of ‘valleys winding down toward the sea’, or the deliberative force gained by key verbs – ‘measured’, ‘yoked’, ‘drawing’, ‘gabled’ – in interrupting monosyllabic lines. Daniel Pearlman uncovers a devotional action behind the prosaic image in the line ‘Thy day is between a door and a door’. The noun phrase contracts to a verb – ‘adore’ in the sense of worship – which elevates the quality of religious feeling that infuses this passage (Pearlman 1969: 183). Not for nothing does Michael Alexander find in Canto XLVII suggestions of ‘a reconstituted pagan Deuteronomy’, a comparison that throws additional weight on the cryptic final line of this passage: ‘Thus was it in time’ (Alexander 1979: 180). Given that so much of this canto is hedged between immediate present and prophetic future tenses, it is especially intriguing to note this slippage into a retrospective mood. The poet’s temporal estrangement from the idealised circumstances he describes perhaps betrays an anxiety that we, as moderns, are in some sense out of time; that we are living after history. There might even be an implication that the spiritual consolations available to earlier civilisations may not be available to us, for all that this canto strives to make of the past a living present. The eventual, aesthetic resolution in the canto’s final lines of the metaphysical uncertainty that precedes them is infinitely more interesting to me than any expression

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of Pound’s political or economic convictions, because it tests almost to destruction his own poetic theories. Take the oft-quoted phrase from Pound’s letters: ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice’ (SL 277). A bracing principle; and yet how exactly, in a poem that courts religious insight, can one define the indefinable? What role is there, in verse so exactingly mimetic – so confident in the bond between res and verba – for the ineffable? When these questions are applied to Canto XLVII, it becomes newly apparent that many of its most arresting images exist in a state of febrile indeterminacy. I take the wonderful passage following the Hesiod section as a deliberate evocation of Tiresias. It begins: And the small stars now fall from the olive branch, Forked shadow falls dark on the terrace More black than the floating martin that has no care for your presence (XLVII/237) Whereas Pound’s paratactic method is usually an instrument to distinguish, contrast and classify successive subjects, here instead we find a subtly integrated vision, adequate to the timeless, spiritual ideal of enfolding the many in the one. So, for instance, the ‘small stars’ at the beginning of this passage recast the Pleiades – the daughters of Atlas – as the leaves of an olive tree; a delicate image in which symbols of celestial permanence are made transient and local, and so drawn into accord with the poet’s own mortality. Even as sequential images insist on a separation between the human and natural realms, their contingent associations bridge that very separation. Furthermore, the repetition of unusual, amphibrach rhythms forges a sonic connection between images that might otherwise seem estranged. So a metaphor for sexual failure, ‘Thy notch no deeper indented’, immediately softens into chthonic imagery, ‘Thy weight less than the shadow’, tempering implicit censure with a newly empathetic tone. The Tiresias passage ends in a flurry of affirmative questions that are not so much requests for information as exhortations to action, urging us forward into the redemptive vision of the poem’s close: ‘The light has entered the cave. Io! Io! / The light has gone down into the cave’ (XLVII/238). ‘Io’, in Greek, is ‘Hail’, but it is also, in Italian, the first-person pronoun. The implication seems to be ‘hail a new identity, hail a new mode of knowing’. This passage recapitulates insights already broached in earlier lines: we have the descent into the earth as a prelude to new life, the death of Adonis, the votive lights at Rapallo, the Pleiades of the Hesiod passage. As I have already suggested, Pound and Kandinsky each establish a private symbolism, in which certain images and tropes become a shorthand for more complex intuitions. But these recurrences are not only associative, they also impose aesthetic symmetries upon knowledge, and thereby conform to the principle, shared by poet and painter, that all the arts, at their zenith, approach the condition of music. Kandinsky happily referred to the visual symmetries of his paintings as ‘chords’, and drew inspiration for his vision of a single, sublimated art form – ‘the art that is truly monumental’ – from his friendship with Arnold Schönberg. Pound readily concurs: ‘The idea that music and poetry can be separated is an idea current in ages of degradation and decadence when both arts are in the hands of lazy imbeciles.’ Accordingly, Pearlman associates the structure

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of Canto XLVII with the structure of a fugue, in which the repetitions bring the various thematic motifs of the canto finally into accord. In the final lines of Canto XLVII, the first-person ‘I’ is, in strictly narrative terms, Odysseus; but the conflation of Homeric wanderer and exilic American poet, which has been building throughout the canto, is now complete. Odysseus has absorbed the insights of Circe and Tiresias, and adapted them to his newly enlightened perspective, extending the possibilities that they had imagined. So a progenitive coupling with the earth, which in the Tiresias section had seemed impossible, becomes an ecstatic reality: ‘The air is new on my leaf, / The forked boughs shake with the wind.’ In effect, the poet has become the light of understanding that he seeks, as the limpid images of this passage confirm the canto’s overall movement from ‘thou’ to ‘I’ as a movement from dark to light, and from ignorance to understanding. Indeed, I argue that in Canto XLVII, Pound comes closest to fulfilling his original ambitions for The Cantos, in particular the effect he described as ‘The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidien into “divine or permanent world”’ (SL 210). Intimations of permanence abound in these final lines, not least in the unhurried, periphrastic verbal actions: ‘go down to their rest . . . wind down toward the sea . . . puts forth its flame . . . brought to the altar’. The poem has become a rite of passage, through which the vital energies of the natural world, which had threatened to obliterate the human scale, are now brought within the compass of the poet’s shaping perception: ‘KAI MOIRAI’ ADONIN / that hath the gift of healing, / that hath the power over wild beasts’ (XLVII/239). These elemental phrases, distilling and compressing the poem’s earlier insights, seem to speak to us from the far side of silence, as distant echoes of an elusive but perfect knowledge. My final contention is that Pound’s greatest poetry honours Kandinsky’s principle of ‘inner necessity’ by leaving space for this ineffable wisdom. Instead of exhaustively delineating the moral or political circumstances in which revelation must, assuredly, arrive, the lyric cruces of Canto XLVII evoke a heightened state of perception, in which form is indivisible from feeling, and feeling thereby passes into meaning.

Note 1. Translated excerpts appeared, along with a commentary, in the first issue of BLAST, under the title ‘Inner Necessity’. Pound was evidently familiar with the complete essay, which he invokes, by its German title, in G-B 86.

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16 Agnes Bedford: An Invisible Helpmate Stephen Adams

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gnes Bedford (1892–1969) was a lifelong musical friend of Pound, who from his earliest years sought out accomplished musicians like Katherine Ruth Heyman, Walter Rummel and of course Olga Rudge. Bedford was a vocal coach and accompanist rather than a solo performer like Heyman or Rummel, so she worked behind the scenes. As a coach, she taught singers, both student and professional, elements of technique and interpretation: phrasing, timbre, articulation, diction in various languages, and the like. When she appeared in public, it was always in the subordinate role of accompanist, though she appeared with some major performers, particularly Blanche Marchesi, who was a noted recitalist and Wagnerian soprano, prima at Covent Garden for a number of years, and daughter of Mathilde Marchesi, one of the most important performers and influential voice teachers of her generation. Bedford can still be heard playing the piano behind Blanche Marchesi on a number of 78rpm recordings.1 In her relationship with Pound, Bedford was not an originator of ideas, but rather a musical mentor and a link to the professional musical world. She had a wide network of acquaintances. Her interests paralleled Pound’s: she followed developments in the post-Dolmetsch revival of early music and co-translated Henri Dupré’s book on Purcell; and she followed the advanced modernists as well. When Pound advised young poets to ‘dissect the lyrics of Goethe into their component sound values’ (LE 5), he was only advising what every coach of Lieder singers does every day for a living. Most importantly, she was a principal amanuensis who helped Pound write down the music for his first opera, and later, a crucial link with the BBC, which broadcast the first complete performance of Le Testament de François Villon in October 1931. Through Pound, Bedford also met Wyndham Lewis, and became a significant figure in his biography as well. Bedford’s name first appears in William Atheling’s review in The New Age for 20 November 1919, where he praises her as ‘excellent in her accompaniment’ (EPM 195). The recitalist was Violet Marquesita, a pupil of Blanche Marchesi, who later sang the role of Villon’s Mother in the 1931 BBC broadcast. As Atheling, Pound made a habit of meeting with performers and cajoling them into performing his favoured early music, which he lists conveniently in the last of his New Age reviews (EPM 239–40). The list includes not only then standard collections of arie antiche and folksongs, but his own versions of nine troubadour songs arranged by Walter Rummel as Hesternae Rosae (1913), and a new collection of Five Troubadour Songs (1920) issued that December by Boosey, with piano arrangements by Agnes Bedford. The songs were printed with original Provençal texts, but also, for singers who could not manage that language,

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with words by Chaucer adapted by Pound to fit the music. Pound was pleased with it, but for ‘one page full of misprints’ (L/HP 475). Bedford seems to have had influence with Boosey, since Pound suggests in a letter (13 August 1922) that she get them to print songs from his opera. Pound had cherished the idea of composing his own songs for many years, but he required help from a trained musician. The actress Grace Crawford recalls his efforts from as early as 1910 (Fraser 1970: 123–44)2 and he apparently tried to tap Rummel as well. But Rummel was busy with his own successful concert career – not to mention his liaison with Isadora Duncan – and Pound was fortunate to find in Agnes Bedford a musician with not only the expertise but the patience and personal devotion to take pains with him. She yielded gracefully to Antheil, who was at hand in Paris, but Pound returned to Bedford when Antheil went his own way. From the time of their meeting in November 1919 to Pound’s departure for Paris in January 1920, Pound and Bedford must have spent time together working on their troubadour songs and getting a start on her musical tutelage. Pound’s texts were at first troubadour poems, and the decision to set Villon seems to have come later, since verbal ‘music’ is not the most obvious quality of Villon’s work. In a letter of 18 December 1919, Pound writes of ‘Frères humains’, ‘I had never thought of setting until yesterday’, going on to praise a Cavalcanti sonnet ‘full of music’, and Stuart Merrill, ‘where the music is made, absolutely made, by the words’. When Pound started composing, he no doubt consulted Bedford frequently, but seems to have as yet hardly formed the opera project. Asked by a journalist about his plans in Paris, he announced that he would ‘devote himself to his study of 12th-century music’, and that ‘he is also writing a long poem’ (Stock 1970: 236). The equation of music with The Cantos is notable, but his focus was still the troubadours. When Pound left London, Bedford sublet his flat at 5 Holland Park Chambers, complete with books, papers and Arnold Dolmetsch’s clavichord (EPP I: 408). Thereafter, Pound pestered her repeatedly to hunt up and send him particular books or papers. Bedford also travelled to Paris, for Pound wrote to her on 26 March 1923, ‘Haven’t worked so hard since the fortnight I nearly killed you in Paris – perhaps three weeks more will see the end or a breathing space.’ As Bedford recalled thrity-six years later, ‘I took the whole Villon work down from Ezra’s singing, and performances at the piano that summer of 1921 in the Rue Jacob – I have my own scribbled pages from that time, and I suppose Ezra had the copies I made for him then & worked them over with Antheil’ (Bedford to Dorothy Pound, 19 November 1967). They worked four to six hours per day, even up to nine hours, Pound singing and picking out notes on Natalie Barney’s piano. He sang each of the six voices of ‘Frères humains’ separately, Bedford recalled, and they fit together perfectly – a miracle (EPP II: 18–19). On 2 November 1921, he wrote to Bedford that the opera was complete. Two years later, George Antheil worked from this version and produced his own revision of the score, dated 31 December 1923. Pound wanted his opera to honour the period style, including the bare, unharmonised tunes of the troubadours, but in a modern way that would not obscure the words or alter the verbal rhythms. His MSS (there are stacks of hundreds of pages of scored manila music paper) show him choosing the pitches, as he put it, for the tunes and sticking with them, but fussing endlessly over the rhythms, never satisfied. Even after Antheil

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had copied out the full MS of Le Testament, Pound prepared further performance versions in simpler notation, apparently not merely for ease of performance, but trying to capture the rhythms he heard more accurately. As he wrote to his father (2 March 1926), That 5/8 has taken about fourteen years to discover. i.e. neither Walter, nor Agnes, nor even young Jarge, had managed, for one reason or another to find out that most of my rhythms do not fit bars of two, three or four EVEN or equal notes, or rather they had ALL found out that, but none of em hit the simple division of two longs and a short (or the various equivalents). You will see the two Villon songs split into all sorts of bars; but the lot I have just fixed up for the June show has been, tentatively at least, laid out largely in 5/8. (L/HP 588) As early as 14 August 1926, he writes to Bedford that he prefers his own 5/8 redactions to Antheil’s notations. And on 21 January 1926, ‘Antheil version highly instructive, as measure of duration of individual notes, mhavvvelous, BUT no practical use, NO grasp of articulation, or phrase structure, nacherly, as he knows no French, and nawthing about any langwidg.’ Bedford is not heard in the 1931 BBC broadcast of Villon, but as Margaret Fisher writes, she was the rehearsal coach and ‘worked side by side with [Archibald] Harding for days on end’. She also reported on the internal tensions surrounding the project, and ‘the savage mistrust of everyone else in the building’ (Fisher 2002: 3, 74).3 The correspondence between Bedford and Pound is extensive, stretching from 1920 to 1968, including exchanges between Bedford and Dorothy Pound. The collection at the Beinecke Library contains mainly Bedford’s letters to Ezra, that in the Lilly Library his letters to her.4 The earlier letters offer a window into their collaboration, their opinions of various composers and performers, as well as a perspective on Pound’s deficiencies as a practical musician. Bedford’s network of professional acquaintances was vital for the casting of the 1931 BBC broadcast. Some of the correspondence shows her trying to round up singers. For the 1926 performance, she did not know Yves Tinayre, whom Pound met in Paris, but she did know Robert Radford, Beecham’s preferred bass, who sang the drunken Bozo. Pound tried to persuade her to come to Paris and play the harpsichord, but she protested that she had never played that instrument and felt ‘safer on piano, much as you dislike it’ (n.d., 1925). Bedford was also connected with Marchesi’s pupils, Violet Marquesita and Raymonde Collignon, who performed in the BBC broadcast, and she is responsible for persuading Gustave Ferrari to take on the role of Villon. She does not seem to have been jealous of Antheil’s intervention in the opera, writing that it was ‘a very good thing to have Antheil work on score’ (25 September 1923). And it was she who read through all of the William Atheling reviews in The New Age and selected the bons mots printed in Pound’s book on Antheil. Just ‘tell me exactly what you want me to do’, she wrote (25 September 1923). When the book appeared, she reassured Pound: ‘I don’t think your propaganda did anything detrimental’ (23 June 1924). She attended Antheil’s recital in London with Olga Rudge and relayed an anecdote: a lady ‘was reading your article in Criterion all through concert & seemed to approve greatly’, she said. A few ‘laughed through Antheil’s first item, but very quietly’ and ‘a good many

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left after it. All the remainder were most enthusiastic’ (23 June 1924). Shortly after, she declared that ‘Antheil’s playing was magnificent’ and that ‘Rudge played [Antheil’s Violin Sonatas] very well, with great precision and clearness.’ Bedford’s personal friendship was with Dorothy, not with Olga. Soon after meeting Olga, Pound asked Bedford to recommend ‘any book on early violin music’ (18 August 1923). But there were tensions. After the war, Bedford wrote to Dorothy, ‘In the matter of Mary Rudge, I only hope she is nicer than her mother, whom I never liked’ (7 January 1946). Bedford’s letters are also filled with comments on musical matters of general interest. Bedford was acquainted with the Dolmetsch family and attended their concerts: ‘Rudolf plays beautifully on all instruments, Carl very good on recorder’ (n.d., 1933). In 1939, she tried to arrange a performance by Rudolph, who was ‘excited at chance to conduct in Venice’. Pound replied, ‘Casella favorable to Rudolph Dolmetsch – plans for future concerts’ (17 December 1939), but the war intervened. She knew the celebrated Russian tenor Vladimir Rosing, whom Pound admired extravagantly: ‘If you are at Rosing concert in Paris, tell him I am splendid’ (10 November 1922). She seems to have known Adrian Boult (7 December 1939) and refers Antheil to meet the young Eugene Goossens, who recorded the Fourth Symphony after the war (25 September 1923). She had her own opinions of Pound’s French musical acquaintances: ‘You seem to admire or tolerate Satie – I not. I find more hope in Milhaud, though not liking him much’ (25 September 1923). She reports favourable opinions of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and one of Bartok’s string quartets, and perhaps most remarkably, in her last years she wrote to Dorothy Pound that she had heard Luciano Berio’s ‘Homage to Dante’ on the BBC and thought him ‘much the most interesting of the Italian modernist school . . . a very different kettle of fish from the Spoleto fellow [Menotti]’ (23 September 1967). Most revealing, perhaps, are the letters that comment on Bedford’s transcriptions of Pound’s melodies in Villon. She made the heroic first efforts to create practical performing texts, and in the process, mentored Pound in the niceties of musical notation, the capacities of the singing voice, and the effectiveness of accompaniment and orchestration. On 16 May 1921, Pound wrote, ‘I have done 116 pages of something that looks, at 1st glance, like an orchestral score’, and nine days later, ‘Do you remember the tune enough to correct my imbecilities.’ Among the imbecilities is the correct notation for the English horn: attempting to write it as a transposing instrument in F, Pound writes F# for B and needs to be corrected. An undated letter in the William Bird collection from this period suggests that Bedford had an intuition for Pound’s idiosyncratic accompaniments. Although she had supplied the troubadour songs of 1920 with conventional piano arpeggios and chords, she knew Pound’s opera demanded a wholly different approach. ‘I thought your list of instruments rather long. Personally I should use as little as possible – very few chords – what there are [supply?] cues – that is no “harmony”.’ ‘Continual contrapuntal treatment would be very worrying, unbearable I think, besides it’s not necessary.’ ‘The audience, as you rightly suggest, hears very little, if anything, of orchestral intricacies anyway.’ Their attention will be held by plot: ‘I still think great skill will be needed to make harmonization of these tunes satisfactory – not to the audience, I mean . . . to you & me . . . chiefly me!).’ ‘Tunes can lose half their quality or more when unsuitably arranged.’ She cites some bad examples, including Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott, and adds that it must be ‘very carefully done

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with wide unobtrusive pattern in orchestra or else no pattern to speak of . . . I think an ordinary counterpoint wouldn’t do.’ ‘I think you want certain bass instruments to be very firm with rhythm . . . & very little violin assistance.’ Sideways on the page she notes, ‘I don’t mean no orchestra. I mean no one will listen to anything but tune and words’ (YCAL MSS 4/147–9). At some point, Pound had introduced Bedford to his friend Wyndham Lewis. The two became close and, as Lewis’s latest biographer has revealed, they had an affair beginning in the 1920s, and there were even murmurs about marriage. Nothing is known about their relationship but the smattering Paul O’Keeffe divulges: she was ‘Miss Bedford’ in 1921, ‘Aggy’ in 1923, and later for unknown reasons ‘Twin’. The liaison ended when Lewis married Gladys, or ‘Froanna’ Hoskins in October 1930, and Lewis’s personal notes say ‘Cease to see Twin’ on a timeline with an arrow pointed between September and November (O’Keefe 2000: 569). Bedford’s assistance with Cavalcanti, Pound’s second opera, was less direct but just as vital. She recalled three decades later, I never transcribed the Cavalcanti from his dictation – As far as I know he did it all himself, as he had then mastered musical notation – He sent me copies of 6 or 8 pieces from it for my comments – advice – criticism – These are in his handwriting and I have them still – I was never enthusiastic about the Cavalcanti, and I imagine he dropped the idea of doing that as an opera – at least that’s all I know about it. (Agnes Bedford to Dorothy Pound, 19 November 1967) She was wrong, since Pound did in fact complete Cavalcanti. Nonetheless, since Pound’s writing had become more ambitiously operatic, she supplied practical help with vocal ranges. About ‘Sol per Pieta’ she asked, ‘who’s singing? [It] certainly seems to lie rather high.’ It would be difficult for any voice but a first class operatic tenor or dramatic soprano. . . . the optional C you speak of is really a C# on your copy attacked suddenly on its own after a low G#. I don’t think anyone could tackle it – as the lowest note seems to be E the whole song could probably quite well come down one tone if necessary. ‘Poi che doglia’ is ‘all right’, and ‘Guarda ben dico’ is the best of the lot for ‘easy vocalizing’, but ‘Era in pensier’ ‘seems to lie very low’. If transposed higher it would be just as difficult because the weight is at the bottom of the voice. I don’t know if Ferrari can do it. . . . am rather averse to showing him anything until it is fixed. . . . quite prepared to write any work over for himself. (YCAL 43 4/148) For guidance, she writes out the medium voice range ‘with extensions down’. The year 1933 also saw her writing about possible performances of two of the numbers, ‘Tos temps serai’ and ‘Io son la donna’. After completion of Cavalcanti, the correspondence shows a great deal of interest in the Rapallo concerts of 1933, 1934 and later, but little direct involvement.

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Pound makes one sidelong reference to the uncompleted Catullus opera: ‘I have been foolish enough to restart the Catullus’ (August 1932), but very little on the monumental effort to revive Vivaldi, which centred primarily on Olga Rudge. Although musicologists continue to credit Alfredo Casella, he was a figurehead; Olga was the moving force behind the Venice Settimana Vivaldiana of 1939, which laid the groundwork for Vivaldi’s post-war popularity with the rise of the LP record (Adams 1975). In 1948, possibly because of Olga’s immediacy, Bedford confessed to Dorothy that she was ‘not convinced as to exceptional interest of Vivaldi’, but that she had not heard performances (24 February 1948). During Pound’s confinement at St Elizabeths, Bedford continued frequent correspondence with both Pound and Dorothy. Suffering from arthritis in her hands, her opportunities for performance had dried up – she confessed to Dorothy in a 1946 letter that she had not played for years – but she continued going to concerts for a while, then became content staying at home with the BBC. In 1947, she reported going ‘to hear what remains of the Dolmetsch family’ (22 July 1947), and in 1948 described Wyndham Lewis and Peter Russell reading from the Pisan Cantos to a large crowd (26 November 1948). In 1948, Archie Harding at the BBC renewed interest in broadcasting Cavalcanti, but the music could not be found (Fisher 2002: 202). Bedford shared her curiosity about the rising newcomer Benjamin Britten: she had not yet heard Peter Grimes, but Albert Herring is ‘not funny, just silly’. The Rape of Lucrece is ‘much better’ (20 November 1947). Archie Harding, still at the BBC, proposed a ‘rapprochement with Britten’ and Ronald Duncan, once editor of Townsman and librettist of Britten’s Lucrece, ‘seems to favor it’: ‘I daresay it’s OK though I don’t quite see where it leads’ (26 November 1948). In 1950, she attended a performance of T. S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party and found it ‘a terrible let down’ (to Dorothy, 16 July 1950). By 23 February 1953, she reported ‘not being anywhere in music now’. She enjoyed Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, but her former life was eluding her. Although Raymonde Collignon was still in touch, ‘Ferrari has been dead for some years – Maitland I don’t know – where is Tinayre?’ She keeps being asked for the Antheil MS, which she has never seen. ‘My copy of the libretto is in the hands of Peter Russell.’ The whereabouts of various copies of the opera MSS is a recurring puzzle in the letters. When Bedford heard that Wyndham Lewis was blind and dying, she arrived with offers of help – offers that met with mixed emotions from Froanna, who gradually convinced herself that ‘Twin’ and her dying husband had resumed their affair. For her part, Bedford spent hours helping Lewis with correspondence and reading to him: Orwell’s novels, Toynbee’s Study of History (O’Keefe 2000: 569–70). Shortly after Lewis died, she wrote to Dorothy, describing a projected new edition of Time and Western Man: I was reading him that book – He was really distressed when we came to the chapter on EP & was discussing with me whether we could cut it out entirely or whether he should make apologies to Ezra in his new preface, or a repudiation or something. . . . I would like Ezra to know that was his intention – I was pleased, as it had been bothering me for 30 years. (Agnes Bedford to Dorothy Pound, 8 April 1957)

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After Pound’s release from St Elizabeths and when his final years of silence, illness and severe depression set in, Bedford was stunned to receive a letter severing their long years of friendship. Bedford’s reply is full of pain, but tempered with understanding: ‘Dearest Ezra’, she wrote on 7 September 1963, I suppose I ought to be reconciled to the fact that you are not interested to hear from me any longer. Naturally, after some forty years of regular correspondence, I miss our exchanges, but I bow to your rule. . . . I know you are ill, and fed up, and keep having to undergo horrible operations, but I can’t see why this makes you want to jettison all your works, and all your values, and throw us all overboard. In heaven’s name what stars are we supposed to steer by now? Nearly all the most agreeable things in my life have stemmed from you, so now, here I am standing up for you, against yourself. (YCAL 43 4/149) This moving letter includes a note reporting a visit from Pound’s grandson, as well as a visit from a young Canadian musician named Murray Schafer. Schafer of course went on to produce a second performance of Pound’s Villon for the BBC Third Programme, as well as edit Pound’s music criticism for New Directions, all with Bedford’s cooperation and blessing. ‘I was very interested to read Schafer’s letter – He has such a good mind, hasn’t he? One of the few people who really thinks!’ she wrote to Dorothy on 19 June 1966. ‘I do think he’s the perfect person for the job – Highly intelligent – extremely fine musician. Very sensitive, and yet so calm and capable’ (19 June 1966). By this time, Bedford herself was showing the weariness of a long, eventful life. Schafer had been pressuring New Directions to publish the Antheil score of Villon. Bedford approved, half-heartedly: ‘If Ezra does not object I suppose there is no reason why Laughlin should not print a copy of Ezra’s original MSS of the testament – I have not seen it [Antheil’s score]. . . . Like you, I can’t see any particular purpose in publishing it’ (to Dorothy, 19 November 1967). Her opinion was much closer to the mark back in 1948, when she wrote that she ‘Was, am, sensible of some highly exceptional quality in EP’s own music – which shone through any amount of clumsiness he may have shown in manipulating medium’ (to Dorothy, 24 February 1948). She gave Schafer what help she could with his projects, and he returned the favour by dedicating Ezra Pound and Music very appropriately to her memory.

Notes 1. She is named as accompanist on Blanche Marchesi’s recordings from c. 1936: ‘When I am laid at rest’ from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Reger’s ‘Nun wandre Maria’, Ernest Moret’s ‘La lettre’ and the traditional ‘Sicilian Cart Driver’s Song’. This last is released on a CD entitled Prima Voce Party (Nimbus: NI7839). There may be others, as an accompanist’s name was often not credited. Other singers associated with Pound’s operas have left recordings. Yves Tinayre, for example, recorded much early music, now hard to find. At the time of writing, I have found several of these online at YouTube, including Blanche Marchesi with Agnes Bedford, Yvette Guilbert with Gustave Ferrari, Raymonde Collignon and Basil Radford.

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2. In 1968, Bedford was surprised to learn of Grace Crawford: ‘Many years before I knew him she was trying to notate his compositions – what she described was exactly what I remember – the difficulty of interpreting the sounds he sang & the picking out notes on the piano, & the impossibility of barring his rhythms’ (Agnes Bedford to Dorothy Pound, 6 January 1968. Lilly Library, Pound Mss. II). 3. Bedford was frustrated by what she saw as ‘incompetence’ at the BBC (Fisher 2002: 129–30). 4. The Beinecke holdings are held in YCAL MSS 43, Box 4, folders 147, 148, and 149, and in the William Bird Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 178, Box 1, folder 2. The Lilly Library holdings are mainly in the Dorothy Pound collection (Pound Mss. II), and some in the D.G. Bridson collection.

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PART III PARIS 1921–1924

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17 Constantin BrâncuŞi, Vorticist: Sculpture, Art Criticism, Poetry Roxana Preda

The marble form in the pine wood, The shrine seen and not seen Ezra Pound, CX/801

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rown weary with London, sometime in 1920, Ezra Pound finally decided to let the English save their souls as they knew best and move out. The reasons for the move were various: the artistic mediocrity of the milieu, the political climate, the cost of living, all contributed.1 Paris, the centre of multicultural modernism, seemed the obvious choice for an artist who sought to be at the core of a cultural vortex. However, in order to play a significant role in this pot of divergent modernisms, Pound had to develop his network of contacts to the other artists living and working in the city. The friendship between Pound and the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi, which flourished in the poet’s Paris years, was marked by a rather one-sided admiration of Pound’s for a more mature fellow artist, who unlike himself seemed to have arrived at a final artistic vocabulary full of beauty and repose, two qualities which Pound was also striving to introduce into his poem The Cantos. Though engaged in a totally different artistic medium and methodology, Pound was prepared to receive and understand correctly what the sculptor had to say: he brought Brâncuşi’s artistic project together with his own and integrated both into a general modernist aesthetic. Ezra Pound had schooled himself in art criticism in London in the years leading up to World War I. His interaction with painters and sculptors of the modernist avantgarde, especially Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, resulted in his attempt to articulate the differences between art and poetry and to formulate the principles of Vorticism, which he presented in the journal BLAST (1914, 1915) as a personal poetic manifesto. Pound’s aims and methods in poetry were to develop in parallel with his activities as an art critic and manager of artists. The encounter with Brâncuşi happened at a time when Pound was on the brink of taking momentous decisions concerning the form of his long poem; his interest in sculpture, which had receded into the background since 1915, flourished again upon ruins and memories. By looking at Brâncuşi’s artistic practice and Pound’s methods of poetic composition together, we gain an insight into two versions of modernism, which may seem to have little in common at first glance, but which on closer examination share important strategies of expression and much agreement on general principles. The contact between Pound

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and Brâncuşi became very slight after 1924, when the poet moved to Italy and ceased writing art criticism. Nonetheless, the sculptor’s importance made itself felt at key moments of the poem. The harmony between Brâncuşi’s life and his artistic vision, his devotion to formal perfection and beauty, and the sacred aura of his objects showed ways in which the temporal and the eternal, the mundane and the artistic could be reconciled. This set the blueprint for Pound’s personal paradise, the oases of stillness and contemplation that he created as spaces of retreat from history, of repose and happiness in the later sections of his poem.

Vorticist London, 1913–1915 Pound’s art criticism began in London before the Great War, emerging as a result of his interaction with a circle of artist friends: the painter Wyndham Lewis and the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.2 All of them were part of a wider circle of intellectuals and artists who met regularly at T. E. Hulme’s lodgings on Tuesdays during 1913 and 1914. Hulme’s lecture ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, delivered at the Quest Society on 22 January 1914, was a powerful incentive for Pound to print his own understanding of the work of his friends. Hulme’s lecture was derived from his reading of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907) and closely followed the German historian’s views on the relationship between primitive man and his art. In Worringer’s view, primitive abstraction was not the outcome of a lack of craftsmanship, but an aesthetic choice expressing the horror of space that characterised man’s relation to the universe. In considering Palaeolithic paintings, Worringer described them as providing oases of repose for human beings constantly subject to the dangers of wild beasts and the fury of the elements ([1907] 1953: 15). Abstraction derived from the necessity for contemplation; it was a resting point which the spirit, bewildered by the mutations and diversity of nature, needed. Primitive abstraction was hieratic, impersonal and public; it provided the guidelines that the modern artist needed in order to loosen the ties that connected art to the imitation of nature and to personal expression. Worringer maintained that the sense of fulfilment the primitives sought in art consisted in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of eternalizing it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of tranquility and a refuge from appearances. Their most powerful urge was, so to speak, to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context, out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependences upon life, i.e. of everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable, to approximate it to its absolute value. ([1907] 1953: 16–17) Following Worringer, Hulme argued that the modern interest in primitive art was a symptom of a new sensibility, imbued with a similar separation between the individual and the world. This sensibility generated an artistic impulse which veered away from humanism and the mimetic presentation of the human body and preferred abstract designs which emulated the mechanical perfection of engineering draughts (Hulme 1958: 97). Pound was greatly impressed by Hulme’s exposition (North 1985: 113) and

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was moved to write his first article on art, ‘The New Sculpture’, which appeared in The Egoist on 16 February 1914. Pound had become aware of the universe of forms which Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska had created as a world apart from the convulsions of history, a realm where stillness and certitude gave meaning to sculptures which ‘did not strive after plausibility’ (EPVA 181). In a further article, published in The Egoist on 16 March 1914, Pound commented on Epstein’s latest work: ‘The green flenite woman expresses all the tragedy and enigma of the germinal universe: she also is permanent, unescaping. This work infuriates the superficial mind, it takes no count of this morning’s leader; of transient conditions’ (EPVA 183) (see Figure 11.3, p. 201). In later articles, published between 1914 and 1919, Pound articulated his conviction, derived from Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, that modern sculpture diverged from the tradition in its reliance on the formal treatment of its subject. The new sculpture did not strive to represent nature, but was to be understood solely as a disposition of masses and planes and communicated its meaning by formal, not representational, means. In Pound’s view, three-dimensional form was the essential principle of sculpture and should be the only criterion by which its merits were to be judged. An artist’s repertory of forms stood by themselves as expressions of his pure creative energy, as eruptions of the sculptural feeling proper to his personality. Pound quoted Epstein as having said: ‘Form, not the form of anything’ (EPVA 13). Pound emphasised Epstein’s and Gaudier-Brzeska’s preference for carving directly in stone rather than moulding in plaster, a preference which they had in common with Brâncusi, whom they had both met.3 Carving directly was of primary importance as an axis of reference which distinguished the work of the London avant-garde not only from the tradition of sculptural mimetic representation best embodied in the work of Rodin, but also from Futurist and Impressionist art. Moulding involved a provisional, ever-changing view of the yet unfinished object: in the process of production, the sculptor could change his original design, be influenced by external factors and allow new ideas or impressions to impinge on his work. Moulding allowed more room for expressing subjectivity, emotions and spontaneity; it was more personal and mimetic. By contrast, carving consisted in paring down every element that did not belong to the design: it allowed no going back, no mistakes, hesitations or corrections. Accidentals, contingencies and excrescences were eliminated in order to arrive at an essential statement of an idea in stone. Carving was necessarily impersonal and public – the effort of its practitioners to reduce detail naturally brought them to a presentation of the essential and the abstract (North 1985: 124). In his articles on modern art, Pound indicated that his comments were not based on prior study, but were rather the result of conversations between friends, emphasising that real criticism can only be made by practitioners, on their own terms. He championed the value of carving over moulding, praised the reliance of modern sculpture on form, and articulated its allegiance to contemplation, stillness and impersonality. At the same time, he was careful to delimit and define the separation between poetry and sculpture by saying, as far back as his article ‘The Caressability of the Greeks’ of March 1914, that: ‘If I were more interested in form than in anything else I should be a sculptor and not a writer. Epstein working in form produces something which moves me who am only moderately interested in form’ (EPVA 185). This separation, which had begun to outline itself in Pound’s confrontation with the work of his sculptor friends, became clearer as a result of his involvement with

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BLAST. The metaphor of the vortex, which Pound had used for the first time in his poem Plotinus in 1908 (Materer 1979: 15), enabled Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and Pound to articulate a manifesto for their work and give definitions of the vortices specific to their arts. Lewis’ ‘Vortex’ was a rather unfocused and anarchistic call to ‘forget the past’. By contrast, Gaudier-Brzeska’s manifesto for sculpture, also titled ‘Vortex’, started by giving a formal definition of his art, which Pound would adopt and reiterate in his articles: ‘Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes’ (B1 155).4 In his own contribution, ‘Vortex’, which appeared in the same issue of BLAST in June 1914, Pound unexpectedly abstained from delivering a proper definition of the term and introduced a new concept, that of the primary pigment: Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound, to music; if formed words, to literature; the image, to poetry; form, to design; colour in position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement to the dance or to the rhythm of music or of verses. (B1 154) This was Pound’s first attempt at classifying the arts, understanding the defining quality of each, and carving out a place for poetry in their midst. The Vorticist artist was to rely solely on the essential principle of his art and not look for qualities that are strange to it. Pound saw himself involved in the effort to talk about each of these arts on its own terms and promote an interpretation based on the ‘primary pigment’, on the distinguishing trait or capacity of that particular art.5 He repeated for emphasis: The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art. The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE. The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concept or emotion to drag itself out into mimicry. (B1 154) In this way, Pound defined the fundamental difference between sculpture and poetry: sculpture had a different primary pigment, it was based on three-dimensional form (masses and planes) and had to be defined in terms of that criterion alone. Moreover, sculpture had to be non-representational in order that attention be concentrated on form alone and not be lured away by what the form might be imitating or suggesting. At the same time, Pound staked out the province of poetry by stressing the status of the image as its primary pigment. He came closer to what his own poetry would finally become when he presented the idea of the ‘turbine’: All experience rushes into the vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW. (B1 153)

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The concept of ‘form’ as primary pigment, together with the absolute rejection of representation, remained the fundamental criteria for Pound’s description and/or praise of modernist sculpture. At the same time, the idea of the turbine pointed in a totally different direction: that of creating a vortex of significant past characters, events and narratives, which would be meaningful for a future still waiting to be created. The turbine was the blueprint for the ‘Vorticist’ poem Pound intended to write: a first group of Three Cantos, begun about May 1915, were to be his first attempt at recording this energised past (L/HP 347). Not satisfied with the results, he would start revising them even before their publication in Poetry in 1917 and would finally discard them. During 1919–21, he would go on to write and publish four more Cantos (IV–VII) and establish his poetic method as a collage of fragments relating the historical world to the mythical realm (Bush 1976: 183). As structural principle, Pound would institute what he called ‘subject rhyme’ (SL 210), a practice of analogies linking the fragments together in a tenuous balance of narrative and suggestive presentation. The image remained the basic unit of design. However, Pound’s first attempts in the ‘Three Cantos’ resulted in a pageant of historical and mythical figures whose relevance for the modern world was not readily apparent. Though intensely visual, the world sketched in these cantos did not seem to hold together – it was derived from his readings and ‘literary’. For Pound, the image was a form of maximal intensity: it served, like good prose, for the examination of truth through direct presentation. ‘Vorticism’, Pound had declared in 1914, ‘is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary applications’ (G-B 88). Still, as was obvious from the ‘Three Cantos’, Pound had to face a transition from the unit of composition, the image, to the question of how to relate these small units together in an architecture of design within each canto, and further to a meaningful relationship among the cantos themselves. The Great War changed the fate of the Vorticist avant-garde and finally destroyed it. Gaudier-Brzeska and Hulme were killed in the trenches. Lewis went to the front and was no more able to edit BLAST, which ran only two issues in June 1914 and July 1915. In the new post-war climate, he and Epstein turned away from abstract art, fundamentally revising their artistic strategies of 1913–14. From around 1915, Epstein’s main work would consist in moulding clay portrait busts. His repudiation of his abstract work of 1912–14 would be so complete that in his Autobiography he would include only his Rock Drill as illustration for this period. When Lewis came back from the war in 1918, he too interrupted his participation in formalist modernism, turning more decisively representational in his later war scenes, compositions and portraits. Gaudier-Brzeska’s death was Pound’s most severe personal loss of the war. After publishing his memoir of him in 1916, there seemed no further reason to be personally involved in the post-war art produced on English soil. Dissatisfied with his own poetry, and in a desire to turn away from an aesthetics that seemed too small-scale and alienated, Pound wrote Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, considering it as a farewell to London and to the kind of work he had done in the past. The imperative was to ‘give up th’ intaglio method’, the well-wrought shorter poem conceived as an aesthetic object, and turn his attention to the messy material of history. The idea of the turbine, the dynamic presentation of the energised past relevant for the present and future, would underlie the collagistic form his poem was to take.

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Paris, 1921–1924 As he considered the London intellectual climate exhausted,6 Pound moved to Paris and was active in looking for new contacts he could use for his position of associated editor with The Dial and The Little Review. His earlier interest in sculpture, as well as his acquaintance with John Quinn, who was Brâncuşi’s most important patron,7 prompted him to seek out the sculptor.8 Their first meeting on 23 April 1921 (Pound 1994b: 218) gave the poet a renewed opportunity to play roles that were by now familiar to him. In his London years, he had been the helper, promoter and critic of his artist friends; he wanted to be the same for Brâncuşi. His most important move in this direction was to use his contacts with The Little Review, which was due to reappear as a quarterly in the autumn of 1921, to organise a special number dedicated to the sculptor. This issue, containing twentyfour photographic reproductions of sculptures and an essay by Pound, marked the emergence of Brâncuşi criticism and was to form the foundation of the art studies devoted to him. The essay, however, displeased the sculptor, who did not wish others to publicise him, whether through articles, books or photographs. He found Pound’s later intention to write a book about his art particularly offensive: the poet felt obliged to send him a letter of apology for having had this ‘infamous’ idea.9 ‘Ils sont empoisonnés par la gloire’, the sculptor commented about ‘the others’. Brâncuşi’s own solution to the thorny question of self-promotion and sales was to stay away from the fray of competition and control the process of viewing from his studio. Because of the scandal surrounding his Princess X at the Salon des Indépendants the previous year, when his sculpture had been removed by the police because of indecency, he had ceased exhibiting his work in Parisian galleries; he did not want articles or books written about him; he forbade viewers or even friends to take photographs of the sculptures in his studio. Brâncuşi chose to perform roles that other artists usually delegated to others: he was his own curator, critic, photographer and dealer. For exhibitions in America, he relied on old friends like Edward Steichen, Walter Pach and Marcel Duchamp; nevertheless, he felt that the presentation of his sculpture in his immediate environment was his own responsibility and he controlled it with an iron hand. Since Brâncuşi was no writer, his reflections on his own work are restricted to orally transmitted maxims or to statements written down by people with whom he had a personal acquaintance. He did not permit others to comment on his work or explain it. His antipathy towards commentary on his art was so extreme that when in the late 1940s, Carola Giedion-Welcker told the sculptor that her monograph about him was about to come out, his reply was ‘Give me the name of the publisher so that I may take action.’10 Avoiding glory meant in principle turning the studio into the only valid museum of his work. Brâncuşi’s unpleasant experience with exhibitions11 gradually convinced him that no other collection could show his sculptures in a legitimate manner. In the studio, his pieces did not have to compete with other art for attention as in museums; they did not primarily serve decorative, status or investment purposes as in the house of a collector; no curator could determine their manner of display; they could be shown to their utmost advantage in the ever-changing phases of light and shade proper to their place of origin. The studio functioned as a sanctuary for his art in which the sculptures acquired a hallowed, religious aura. Viewing was tuned to this sacredness; it was a rite of initiation. Brâncuşi’s practice was to select guests by recommendation; he led

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them through the studio and patiently explained to them his views on art. Restricting himself to his immediate environment, the sculptor was often able to orchestrate the viewing experience on a one-to-one basis. He could also determine what the initiates were allowed to see and the way they saw it. By turning the studio into a temple with himself as the only officiating priest,12 he offered a new concept of sculpture as collage, where the arrangement of individual pieces could be seen as parts/fragments of a whole and where light, the framing of the studio’s walls, and the interaction between artworks and domestic life became part of an overall concept, (see Figure 2.6 p. 48). He was thus able to control the disposition of objects and their relationship to one another; he could provide a picture of their embeddedness in their context of production, and create an image of himself as an artisan-peasant-priest, whose life was devoted to the sacred ideal of beauty and perfection. The studio itself became a total work of art. Like all the other guests, Pound was very sensitive to its magic spell: ‘The effect of Brancusi’s work is cumulative. He has created a whole universe of FORM. You’ve got to see it together. A system. An Anschauung. Not simply a pretty thing on the library table’ (EPVA 308).13 In spite of his apparent unwillingness to deal with the sordid, terrestrial details of sales and advertising, Brâncuşi assumed them and very reluctantly allowed Pound promotional or managerial functions, the way the poet’s other friends Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce had done. Maybe the age difference also played a role: Brâncuşi was nine years older, having come of artistic age in 1907; he was disinclined to relinquish control over his work like a beginner. Moreover, at the time when Pound met him, Brâncuşi had already established channels for patronage, sales and foreign exhibitions. His work was selling, his friendships were established. He trusted Marcel Duchamp to organise the American exhibitions in New York and Chicago. His friend Henri Roché was aiding him in his sometimes difficult relationship with his main patron, John Quinn. Pound came on the scene late in Brâncuşi’s life, and besides, he was a writer and part-time art journalist, occupations which the sculptor fundamentally distrusted. Despite these negative considerations, Brâncuşi did agree to supply the photographs for The Little Review number and later for The Dial (January 1922 issue) even though he was deeply averse to Pound’s comments as a critic.14 In retrospect, Brâncuşi’s attitude did much to boost the poet’s position as his first commentator. Since Pound was one of the very few to print his observations in the sculptor’s lifetime, the poet’s ideas acquired a foundational status in Brâncuşi studies as a first and influential position on his art. In his dealings with sculpture in his London years, Pound did not count himself among Brâncuşi’s admirers. In a letter of September 1917, he commented to the editor of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson, that the sculptor was ‘sperm untempered with the faintest touch of intelligence’ (Pound 1988b: 124). Once he had seen the studio, however, Pound changed his mind and came to regard Brâncuşi as a fellow Vorticist: he recognised in the sculptor’s work the same concept of created, non-imitative form he had seen in Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska before the war, the same allegiance to carving directly in stone or wood, the same allure of the contemplative retreat from the chaos of the modern world. There is therefore a continuity between Pound’s sculpture criticism of 1914–17, his Brâncuşi article in The Little Review (1921) and his comments scattered in The Dial (1922) and elsewhere. Pound himself declared openly, writing in his ‘Paris Letter’ for The Dial, that ‘Brancusi, contemporary of Epstein or

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somewhat older, is in many essentials in agreement with the best work of Epstein and of Gaudier’ (EPVA 171). Developing his practice separately from the Vorticists, Brâncuşi’s inner artistic impulse had led him to a similar aesthetic: he had started his apprenticeship in art doing busts and naturalistic representations of the human body. He soon lost interest in this kind of sculpture and henceforth disparagingly called it ‘beefsteak’. From 1907, at roughly the same time as Picasso’s gradual move towards Cubism, Brâncuşi started mutilating his objects, carving fragments, erasing the particularity of the sitter to arrive at a denaturalised statement which he felt to be his personal expression. Effacing the markers of the natural and particular became a lifelong procedure in Brâncuşi’s art. Considering the various versions he provided for certain sculptural ideas such as ‘the bird’ or ‘the sleeping muse’, the viewer can follow the turn from mimesis to the abstract idea, from the mutilated, stylised imitation to a work of art presenting the visual correlative of a concept. The banishment of ‘meaning’ was closely related to the rejection of mimesis. To a Vorticist like Gaudier-Brzeska or Epstein, the interest of the work of art consisted in the external disposition of surfaces and masses, rather than in a subject matter for which the form could serve as representation. The viewer was supposed to appreciate the quality of the sculptural statement spontaneously, on the basis of an intuitive response to its formal merits. Brâncuşi seemed to concur with this view when he said: ‘Do not hunt for obscure formulae, nor for mystery. It is pure joy that I give you’ (Brancusi 1923: 16). The sculptor was looking for innocent viewers who would have a gut reaction to his art and not philosophise, weave stories or hunt for symbols. The ban on other people’s criticism and commentaries during his lifetime was an integral part of Brâncuşi’s anti-intellectualist bias and expressed the sculptor’s total allegiance to the concept of form in his art. Apart from the exclusive attention to the disposition of masses and planes, the Vorticist artist respected the material in which he was working and did not demand from it qualities or effects alien to its nature (EPVA 212). This respect for the material, which Pound had noticed in Epstein’s use of flenite and Gaudier-Brzeska’s of alabaster, loomed large in Brâncuşi’s statements and aphorisms about his work and was congruent with his rejection of mimesis. The sculptor aimed to work in the direction dictated by the material, suiting his idea to its requirements, even allowing it to suggest the theme of his art. When subjecting it to his purpose, he saw it as continuing its life through his effort. If working in marble, for instance, he used its veining (Mademoiselle Pogany, 1920, 1931); if carving in wood (The Sorceress (1920), Nancy Cunard (1925–7)), he used the grain to enhance the visual impact. The viewers were meant to intuit the natural language of the material and learn to discern its contribution to expression.15 In an unsent letter to Quinn, which was preserved among his papers, he declared: All I am trying to do is attune what is in my mind to the materials that come my way. Each material has a particular language that I do not set out to eliminate and replace with my own, but simply to make it express what I’m thinking, what I am seeing, in its own language, that is its alone (which is part of the beautiful). So, you will understand that wood, or for that matter marble, is by no means the result of a fluke; it comes from very hard and very long work and from a concern for absolute impartiality. (quoted in Chave 1993: 206)

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As a guest at the studio, Pound also observed another similarity with the attitude of sculptors he had known in London: the retreat into contemplation. In his article ‘The Caressability of the Greeks’ (March 1914), Pound had commented that Vorticist sculptures existed in and for themselves, entirely removed from the mundane superficiality of modern life. They represented the ‘immutable, the calm thoroughness of unchanging relations’ (EPVA 183). In his retreat from the world, Brâncuşi was even more radical than the Vorticists, since he lived in his studio, used carving tools to cook, ate and slept on slabs of stone. During his visits, Pound observed this continuity between life and art, which were both brought into harmony with the contemplative ideal. As Pound pointed out in his ‘Paris Letter’ to The Dial: Brancusi has created a universe, a cielo, a Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms, and a cavern of a studio which is, in a very old sense, a temple of peace, of stillness, a refuge from the noise of motor traffic and the current advertisements. (EPVA 172) The studio seemed to have the antidote to the diseases of the age, the war, the hurry and the ugliness. Pound would later write that its beauty could wash the soul clean like a bath in the Gulf of Tigullio in the sunlight of a June day (EPVA 307). He must also have had in mind another unforgettable studio, Gaudier-Brzeska’s, a meagre space under a railway arch in Putney, with the sides boarded up and often flooded, lit by the intelligence of conversation and the liveliness of the young sculptor (EPVA 195). Pound compared their discussions to the ones he imagined Raphael and Castiglione must have had in Urbino at the end of the fifteenth century. Brâncuşi’s atelier must have struck him as a sculptor’s paradise, a mystical fulfilment of Gaudier-Brzeska after death. In his essay about Brâncuşi in The Little Review, Pound naturally drew parallels with the Vorticist work he had known in London. At the same time, he was aware of elements that made the Romanian sculptor include, yet somehow transcend the Vorticists. In a Neoplatonist vein, he remarked that Brâncuşi seemed to integrate all forms into one form. He must have observed the recurrence of the ovoid shape in particular, in the form of Mlle Pogany’s head and eyes, in the series called ‘Sleep’, in the breast of the Maiastra bird and in the various versions of the Newborn. In Pound’s view, the sculptor had found ‘the master-keys to the world of form – not “his” world of form, but as much as he had found of “the” world of form. They contain or imply, or should, the triangle and the circle’ (EPVA 213). This last reference was to the geometry used by Gaudier-Brzeska in his Red Stone Dancer, a piece that Pound much admired (see Figure 5.1, p. 99). Brâncuşi had not only gone farther in conceptualising primary essential forms, but had given his work an aerial, spiritual quality that was missing in Vorticist sculpture, which by contrast, tended to be compact, squat, and massive (see Figures 5.1, 11.3, 11.9, 11.10, pp. 99, 201, 208). Pound interpreted this as a ‘revolt against one sort of solidity’ (EPVA 213) and as an anti-rhetorical statement implying a greater simplicity, modesty and impersonality. However much Pound was championing the concept of form in sculpture at this time, his own poetic practice was diverging fundamentally from the requirements of this ideal. In his last important London poem suites, Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, he had pondered the terms on which he could transform his

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work from its quality of small-scale detached aestheticism to a poetics of involvement in history and modernity. He chose not to withdraw from the world, but to engage in it. Though the first cantos were only hesitantly historical and political, liberally meshing myth, the troubadours, antiquity and medievalism with a protest against the war, Pound chose to refine his involvement in public affairs and use rhetorical strategies to match it. This meant a radical departure from the contemplative stance he so admired in Brâncuşi. He declared: ‘The symbolist position, artistic aloofness from world affairs is no good now. It may have assisted several people to write and work in the 80’s but it is not, in 1921 opportune or apposite’ (P&P IV: 156). This did not mean that he aligned Brâncuşi with the Symbolists – he was too much aware of the sculptor’s status as a radical innovator; rather, he rejected the retreat from the public as incompatible with the position of a post-war writer who has something interesting to say. In 1923, Pound revised the cantos that he had already written and added new ones to form the first instalment of his long poem, which he published in 1925 under the title of A Draft of XVI Cantos. The method he chose for what was to become his master opus was diametrically opposed to the sculptural form he championed in his art criticism. While admiring a sculptor whose work represented essential forms lifted out of history, Pound introduced a wealth of historical detail into his poem. Whereas Brâncuşi was committed to presenting the essence of the natural object as a distillation of its natural appearance, Pound affirmed his total allegiance to the concrete and the particular. By condensing, simplifying, and erasing natural specificity, the sculptor was creating a repertoire of separate, clearly delineated forms, which in their turn suggested concepts: beginnings (Newborn), repose (The Sleeping Muse), flight (Bird in Space), gliding (Fish). A similar process of condensation resulted in Pound’s case in a jagged configuration of apparently heterogeneous particulars. The same modernist practice of paring down redundancies had ended up creating two visions of modern art: in the case of Brâncuşi, it was the single form, one sculpture, one idea; in that of Pound, it was the luminous detail, the fragment that acquired its meaning by being placed in relation to others in a collage. In the divergence between Pound’s and Brâncuşi’s artistic practices, we may follow two opposing trends in the movement and development of modernism: on the one hand, the reliance on form as unit, where expression concentrates upon giving visible shape to a single idea; on the other hand, the disjunctive practice of bringing together bits and pieces, the collage principle that Picasso and Braque had brought to the attention of artists and public in 1912.16 As one might expect, Brâncuşi and Picasso had little respect for each other.17 The former strove for the truthful shaping of a few forms, limited in number, whose various versions would approximate perfection and beauty; the latter experimented with the visual in ephemeral artefacts, which could be later discarded. If Brâncuşi worked humbly at the shrine of art, Picasso was questioning and deconstructing it by undermining art’s claim to permanence and beauty. Both artists used the cut as starting point in their endeavours: while Brâncuşi was cutting away and simplifying to create an effect of harmony and repose as a retreat from the turmoil and ephemerality of history, Picasso conveyed a sense of disjunction without redemption where neither continuity nor resolution could be achieved, or even expected (Chave 1993: 63). The process of discarding traditional art assumptions through the technique of the cut, evident in the work of both artists, served different aims: for Brâncuşi, it was a road to overcoming the fragmentariness and incoherence of the outside world

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in a realm of certainty and rest. Cutting served the endless refinement of the polished surface into unity and perfection. Picasso used cutting in a different way: he foregrounded the procedure so as to exhibit mutilation and fragmentariness. The viewer of Brâncuşi’s work could have a single startling epiphany and an intuition of mystery, whereas a viewer of Picasso’s collages was meant to be an ‘analytical’ viewer/reader who could make sense of the agglutination and superposition of particulars. It is obvious that Pound’s understanding of the cut as a method in his long poem is analogous to Picasso’s. When the poet took it up, collage was an established visual form, a technique that the Cubists had invented. In spite of the diversity of practices and instantiations in all art forms throughout the successive decades of the twentieth century, it is nevertheless possible to isolate characteristics that are common to all forms of collage: the cut as basic invariant and procedure; flatness, that is the reliance on surface and texture, not on depth of perspective; and finally, heterogeneity, the constant tension between fragments, or rather between the new, alien element and the rest of the composition. Pound was one of the first experimenters with the form in literature and developed it over the years to a true encyclopaedia of techniques. While composing the ‘Malatesta Cantos’, which he published in July 1923, he went one step further in combining Cubist strategies with the Vorticist requirement of greater intensity. In attempting to make poetry as well written as prose, Pound decided that historical documents had the virtues of simplicity, directness and truth; they possessed therefore the qualities of the image, hence of poetry. He included quotations of documents in his poem without poeticising them, but rather foregrounding their mundane, functional, prosaic, even fragmentary and context-bound qualities. In his presentation of historical events, Pound turned his attention from image to action, from noun phrases to verbs, thereby shifting his diction from a poetic, contemplative vision to the roughly phrased testimony of an eyewitness: Down here in the marsh they trapped him in one year And he stood in the water up to his neck to keep the hounds off him, And he floundered about in the marsh and came in after three days (IX/34) Pound’s thorough immersion in the mutability of history, his changes of method and deliberate use of prosaic subjects and prose-like lines gave the texture of The Cantos the character of ragged materiality teetering on the brink of chaos. At the same time, however, Pound strove to create a sense of coherence and hoped to achieve it at the end of his effort, when his poem was to be considered completed. He was deeply disturbed by the demands for form and hoped to be able to clarify ambiguities, order ideas and resolve the dilemmas of the disjunctive texture within a larger harmony. In this sense, we must understand his repeated attempts at providing keys to understanding The Cantos as a whole (using various tropes like ‘tale of the tribe’, ‘periplum’, ‘Dante’s journey’) as well as his injunctions to his readers to have patience and evaluate the opus when it is finished. His commentary on W. C. Williams’s work (1928) tells us much about Pound’s own defensiveness concerning the path he had chosen:

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Very well, he does not ‘conclude’; his work has been ‘often formless’, ‘incoherent’, opaque, obscure, obfuscated, confused, truncated, etc. I am not going to say: ‘form’ is a non-literary component shoved on to literature by Aristotle or by some non-litteratus who told Aristotle about it. Major form is not a non-literary component. But it can do us no harm to stop an hour or so and consider the number of very important chunks of world-literature in which form, major form, is remarkable mainly for absence. (LE 394) Pound could defend the standpoint that form was not necessary on the ground of his Vorticist conviction that every art has to rely on the ‘primary pigment’. In his view, it was only sculpture that had form as its fundamental procedure. In poetry, it was the image which was the primary pigment. The reliance on the concreteness and particularity of the image as the necessary fundamental ingredient of poetry led Pound quite naturally to small, heterogeneous units of presentation as soon as his decision to write a long poem started to take shape. The allegiance to the image may also explain Pound’s emphasis on the particular, on the item of perception, an emphasis which may have led to a certain literality, a refusal to interpret the given as a metaphor for something else (Perloff 1981: 181–2). This apparent absence of form was perceived by Pound’s first critics as a fundamental failure and was one of the main causes for the rejection of his poetry. The ‘unbridged transitions’, the ‘nervous obsession’ and the ‘stammering confusion’ noticed by W. B. Yeats when reading the Cantos emerged into a contemporary world where the ‘full, sphere-like, single’ form was felt to be ideal (Yeats 1936: xxiv). Since heterogeneity and ruptures, not coherence and unity, were the obvious elements of Pound’s poem, critics and reviewers like Richard Blackmur and Yvor Winters agreed that disjunctiveness was the aesthetic principle of a man who was ‘neither a great poet nor a great thinker’ and who ‘at his best is a maker of great verse rather than a great poet’ (Blackmur 1981: 124). The incoherence was simply the surface of a deep lack of logic, an apparent characteristic of The Cantos that the New Critics were quick to notice and condemn. Blackmur declared that The Cantos was an explicit, literal poem, that it had no depth: one needn’t ‘pierce’ language to a level of meaning hidden behind it: in short, after the edifice of allusion was elucidated, the poem did not require interpretation. All its difficulties were related to the surface, to the verbal texture. The New Critics felt deeply uncomfortable with the flatness and explicitness of The Cantos and searched for underlying structures that would overcome and suspend disjunction. They felt that a poem in need of no interpretation cannot be important, that a surface without depth left readers only with a bag of rhetorical tricks ennobling themselves with the help of historical allusions. Their discourse was marked by a desire for resolution, and a wish to overcome ruptures within a vision of formal unity and wholeness. To conclude, what a New Critic like Allen Tate required from The Cantos was a certain version of modernity that was best represented by Brâncuşi’s art: a coherent form . . . There is nothing mysterious about coherent form. It is the presence of an order in a literary work which permits us to understand one part in relation to all the other parts. What should concern us in looking at the Cantos is the formal irresponsibility. (1970: 511)

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At first sight, the differences between Brâncuşi’s formal principles and Pound’s are obvious. The one created semi-abstract, apparently whole, unified objects; the other collated fragments, partly taking them from texts written by others. One retreated from the turmoil of history to the eternal realm of essential forms; the other immersed himself into the particularity of the outside world. The contrasts prevail: between the a-temporality of the sculpture and the historical approach of the poem; between the unity of object and the threading together of fragments; between the mystery and the mythical aura of the sculpture and the factuality and literalness of the texts. Pound had found in Brâncuşi a sculptor of prime Vorticist intensity. On the other hand, Pound’s poem, based on the doctrine of the image, was always in danger of losing that quality in the myriad of fragments and quotations. Though The Cantos is a poem unified by its method, collage was so radically disjunctive that it obscured and dislocated the perception of form, making it difficult for readers to go beyond the impression of fragmentariness to the poet’s underlying ideas. Yet, if we go beyond the surface contrast between their practices, we might discern certain similarities of aesthetic principles, or at least a kind of convergence that is disturbing in artists so very different. The use of the fragment, the drive towards simplification, and the search for underlying meaning were common to both. Pound regarded his fragments as ‘luminous details’ that, when presented in a certain arrangement, would transmit a radiant, ideogrammic meaning. In spite of superficial first impressions, Brâncuşi too extrapolated from the fragment to the whole, since his objects, though they gave the illusion of unity and completeness, were in fact fragments. This was noticed not only by careful art historians, but also by reviewers of Brâncuşi’s exhibitions in America: Many of the heads have no eyes, ears or noses. The genitals of a young man have been lopped off, a young French girl has been left armless and a woman in prayer has no left eye [misprint for ‘arm’]. The ‘Sleeping Muse’ has ears placed so far to the rear that they almost join at the back of the head and a sister muse has a bulging hypergoitrous throat. And then there are combless cocks, finless fish, legless turtles and wingless birds. (David L. Shirey, quoted in Chave 1993: 287) Apart from radically reducing and simplifying their artistic statements, both artists chose to use repetition as a method of composition. Brâncuşi returned to the same sculptural motif over and over again, providing several versions of it at various times. If we take the theme of sleep as an example, we notice in the successive versions that the particularities of the natural object gradually disappeared so as to enable the representation of the abstract idea. In the first attempt at this theme (Sleep 1908), Brâncuşi had made it seem that the human head buried in the marble had just emerged from the inside of the stone to the outside. However, this traditional strategy of presentation, which was derived from the aesthetics of Michelangelo, did the theme an injustice, since it ‘revealed’ the face, offering itself directly to the gaze of the outside world. By contrast, in his ‘Sleeping Muse’ series (1909, 1914), the features are lightly carved so as to suggest that the mind turns itself inward and sinks into the world of sleep. If in the first version, the human features are naturalistically represented and clearly carved, in the later ones, they seem to disappear back into the stone (Figure 17.1).

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Figure 17.1 Constantin Brâncuşi, Sleeping Muse, 1910. Marble. Washington, DC: The Hirschhorn Gallery and Sculpture Garden. © Succession Brancusi - All rights reserved. ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.

Brâncuşi’s various versions of the same theme were experiments or necessary steps on the way to greater simplicity and more precise expression. For Pound, on the other hand, versioning certain chunks of text was not necessarily a step to greater refinement. Repetition was important for emphasis, since meaningful details could get lost in the sheer mass of the work and continuous addition of fragments. One of the themes of A Draft of XXX Cantos, for instance, was the significance of individual constructive effort, a theme that Pound followed and illustrated with examples ranging from the Renaissance condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta to American entrepreneurs. Here is a facet of this ideogram, which Pound repeated and varied for emphasis: ‘J’ai Obtenu une brulure’ M. Curie, or some other scientist ‘Qui m’a coûté six mois de guerison’. and continued his experiments. (XXIII/107) ‘J’ai obtenu’ said M. Curie, or some other scientist ‘A burn that cost me six months in curing’, And continued his experiments. (XXVII/129) This example shows that perfecting a certain expression was not Pound’s primary goal. Rather than polish, his purpose seemed rather to remind, re-contextualise, find a different lighting, choose from the mass of possible formulations the one that would

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‘get off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register’ (GK 51). Various versions of the same statement were placed in the web of the poem to serve his essentialist goal: the truth of the detail, the signification of complexity through simplicity. The process of simplification led both artists away from the pinnacles and barnacles of ‘art’. They had both learned the rules and practices of their craft in their youth by working along traditional lines. With maturity, they arrived at forms in which craftsmanship was so refined as to become invisible – objectivity became natural to their art. Brâncuşi aimed at sculpting forms so perfect as to seem not made by human hand. His own constraints forbidding rhetoric, ornament or signs of authorial expression gave his work an effect of purpose and serenity. Through endless polishing, the presence of the human was effaced in his objects, since they had no rough surfaces, holes or bulges to suggest emotion. As he declared: ‘there must be none of oneself in it – no impertinence, no pride’. Approaching something akin to the correct measure meant for the sculptor finally ridding his work of himself (Bach, Rowell and Temkin 1995: 272). Pound, on the other hand, hid artistry behind quotations and historical documents. He very seldom let himself be seen in his poem; the collage form and the citationary practice he had chosen undermined the signature of a single writing authority. He was occasionally the scribe recording events in history: ‘ego, scriptor cantilenae’, ‘an old man’. Moreover, the view of Brâncuşi as a sculptor correlating a single object with a certain abstract idea has to be relativised to a certain extent and completed by what Friedrich Teja Bach called ‘the combinatorial dimension’ (Bach, Rowell and Temkin 1995: 26). Traditional Brâncuşi criticism (not least Pound’s) addressed the sculpted figure and also the bases, but considered them separately, neglecting the interplay between them. Newer perspectives on the sculptor (Chave 1993; Bach, Rowell and Temkin 1995) have drawn attention to the tension that is sometimes present in this relationship. Brâncuşi experimented continuously with the versioning of the interplay between sculpture and base by combining forms, colours and textures, a practice that exhibitions of his work continue to this day. Take his piece of 1917, La Timidité (see Figure 2.6, p. 48): it is made of polished marble and has the roundness and white purity of supreme introspection and innocence. Its base is taller and larger than the piece itself. Whereas the sculpture is made of the noblest stone polished to perfection, the wooden base reminds of columns and ornamentation used in Romanian peasant houses: it is coarse, with rounded edges, split and porous, as if damaged by time and rain. The contrast between perfect and imperfect, light and dark, smooth and rough, eternity and time, artist and artisan splits the supposed unity of the sculptural object. Brâncuşi would later complicate matters by providing three or four bases of various shapes and materials to serve as plinths for some of his objects. He further adapted those with combinatorial ideas, for example in the Newborn II of 1923. It is made of polished bronze and mounted on four bases: polished bronze disc, reflecting the head like a mirror; white marble cruciform; large head-like base of wood with a huge hole gaping in the middle; low limestone drum. We find here a similar tension between form, colour and texture to that seen in Timidité. However, the head-like wooden base, being larger than the bronze ovoid on top, does seem to take the upper hand and usurp all the attention (Figure 17.2). Moreover, this is a form that the careful viewer has seen before: it is the enlarged head of Socrates that Brâncuşi had made the previous

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Figure 17.2 Constantin Brâncuşi, Newborn II, c. 1923. Paris: Musée Pompidou. © Succession Brancusi - All rights reserved. ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018. year. In this reading, the Newborn (the bronze ovoid) acquires narrative and analytical qualities: it is a creation of Socrates’ mind, since it is mounted on his large speaking head and is reflected there in the mirror of the disc. The low limestone drum at the bottom could be considered a neck or a collar, rather than a support. The attention of the viewer is therefore no longer concentrated on the ovoid head, for which the four bases serve as a support, but on the speaking large wooden head that is supposed to be its base: sculpture and bases are taken in together and are parts of the same idea. Since the Newborn is made of fragments taken from sculptures made before, one may consider it similar to a collage. Socrates itself owes something to this impulse: in that work, the head is poised on top of a column of the same shape that Brâncuşi had used to make the legs of The Little French Girl (1914). Parts of former sculptures could be used as components for another. Brâncuşi was quoting himself. His combinatorial impulse took another form in arranging sculptures into ensembles. One example of this experiment was John Quinn’s purchase of 1916: The Kiss, made of stone, was placed at the centre of a space delineated by Gate, Bench and Caryatid, carved in wood, commemorated in another of Brâncuşi’s photographs. Another combination, to be seen in a Brâncuşi photo, was Little French Girl with Column and Cup, which the sculptor wanted to call ‘The Child in the World: Mobile Group’ (Bach, Rowell and Temkin 1995: 154). But if one is looking for a fully developed instance of the collage principle in Brâncuşi’s practice, one can find it in his studio: there he combined wholes and fragments, finished and unfinished work. Household objects and sculptures lost their fixed boundaries and served as items in each other’s domains.

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Ideas and materials, sculptures and tools, bases and furniture made up a collage Gesamtkunstwerk. The idea of the studio in which finished objects emerged as foci of intensity amid a chaos of work in progress, discarded material and unformed materiality is similar to the Cantos, in which plateaus of coherence stick out of the jagged territory where textual elements, often in foreign languages, might not seem to combine at all. Both studio and poem were defined by their provisionality during the time of their creation, the ever-shifting balance between old and new elements, constantly revised placements and lighting. The continuous experimenting with the forms and principles they worked with eventually led Pound and Brâncuşi to grapple with structures that defied closure. In the case of the unified object, the open form could be achieved through the repetition of the single unit, as in the sculptor’s Column of the Infinite; in collage, through the consistent application of the same principle of cutting and adding fragments. In an open structure like The Cantos, the final cut is forever deferred, since no fragment can sum up all the preceding ones and be an adequate representative for everything that had been written before. In Pound’s formulation, ‘there is no substitute for a lifetime’ (XCVIII/711). Though creating open structures was not Brâncuşi’s primary purpose in art, he envisaged the perfection of his objects as open-endedness and regarded his Column of the Infinite as his best achievement. As he declared: ‘I think a true form ought to suggest infinity. The surfaces ought to look as though they went on forever, as though they proceeded out from the mass into some perfect and complete existence’ (Soby 1955: 50). Brâncuşi became aware relatively early that his striving for perfection would bring him to the representation of the infinite, since in the catalogue to the Brummer exhibition in 1926 he referred to his column as an object which, if enlarged, could touch the sky. By contrast, despite continuously experimenting with the collage principle, Pound was unable to foresee its implications – his conclusion, ‘it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere’ (CXVI/817), showed that his desire to signify a unified whole through a configuration of brilliant particulars ran against the form he had hit on: a form that is fundamentally open and virtually infinite, a matrix whose additive impulse admits local structuring but not closure or coherence. The critical literature has often commented on the unfinished character of The Cantos (see Bush 1993; Stoicheff 1995; Preda 2001: 139–54). Critics and editors have sought to fix the poem, to ascertain its beginning and ending, locating the latter in the Drafts and Fragments volume, especially in Canto CXVI, in the Olga fragment, which Pound would have liked as a closing statement, or else in Canto CIX, the last poem of Thrones. Following Pound’s own desire for conjuring coherence, the critical tradition has sought a thematic continuity and a sense of resolution in the poem. None of these readings have provided a stable basis for giving sense to the poem, as a whole. The reason may be that the method itself, which Pound started calling ‘ideogrammic’, does not admit of resolution, since one cannot find at the end of the poem a formulation or a fragment that might include and redeem all the others. Like Pound, who started The Cantos somewhat tentatively, naming its first cycle ‘A Draft of XVI Cantos’, Brâncuşi started his magnum opus, The Column of the Infinite, in 1917 and versioned it to the end of his career. The column idea had a humble origin, since it evolved from a wooden base that the sculptor used for Chimera in 1917 and then for later sculptures, like Golden Bird, Bird in Space or the Torso of a Young Man.

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By 1925, Brâncuşi had made four columns of wood (Miller 1995: 205). A further column in plaster was made in 1930–1, inaugurating an opening towards other materials, textures and colours. For a long time, the sculptor played with the idea of putting one of his cups or birds on top. There are six columns in all (Miller 1995: 205): the tallest is the monument at Târgu Jiu, Romania (1938); it is made of cast iron and is about 30 metres high. It consists of fifteen rhomboidal modules, which Brâncuşi called ‘beads’, held together by an invisible pole of metal running through the middle (Miller 1995: 202). The sculptor never ceased dreaming of erecting higher structures; towards the end of his life, he was negotiating a 400-metre column in Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Involving himself with the idea of the infinite meant that he had to go on building ever higher structures by testing various materials and new environments. Brâncuşi attempted to go on, as well as up, by producing several versions of the column and making it higher and higher (Miller 1995: 209). The Târgu Jiu version was an intermediary phase, but proved to be the best instantiation of the column idea. Though it is a monument (to the victims of World War I) and stands in a public place, it subverts the very concept of the monumental. It starts directly from a flattened base, standing on half a module, whose other half seems to be buried underground. It ‘ends’ in another half module, open to the sky. If the column continued by repeating itself, The Cantos proceeded from a fragment to the next in endless irregular stitching. Not only did the whole body of work have an uncertain and arbitrary ending; games with open endings were played at the level of individual cantos. Pound could question the final cut of his poems, ending some of them in continuations, like ‘so that’ (Canto I), ‘and’ (Cantos II, VIII), ‘:’ (Cantos LI, LXXXV), ‘,’ (Canto LXXXIX). Sentences begun in a canto could continue in the next, over the blank space imposed by the book (Cantos XL–XLI), or else the last word of a canto could be taken over and repeated at the beginning of the next (Cantos XVIII–XIX, XX–XXI). The idea of the book as a closed artefact is the enemy of endless writing and a bad container for the collage method: it was largely responsible for the attempts to supplement The Cantos with a ‘transcendence effect’, with a sense of fulfilment, a conclusion that would embrace and justify the heterogeneity of the poem and provide a powerful closing statement. If we disregard the material constraints on the open form, like the book for Pound or the specific context or material for Brâncuşi, we might spot certain similarities that are important to signal. Neither structure has a visible beginning: the foundation of Brâncuşi’s monument at Târgu Jiu is a pyramidal steel base encased in concrete, 5 metres below the ground. This foundation is invisible, as is the middle pole holding the modules together one on top of the other, like beads on a string. The column looks as if it has grown, like a tree, out of the earth. Looking at it, the viewer cannot imagine that there might be something else in the ground, just a continuation of the module, strung to another invisible one, like a kind of sculptural ‘and’. Pound’s poem begins with ‘And’ and thus points to older stories and older poetry which are the invisible part of the written. For his Canto I, Pound went as far as possible in search of origins: he chose the ‘trip to Hades’ episode of the Odyssey in the conviction that this story was older than Homer’s epic. He thus turned Homer from the originator of literature into a kind of intermediary between our world and a much older submerged stratum of stories. Moreover, he presented his own rendering of this episode as an item in a relay, as it had been handed to him in a translation by Andreas Divus, written in the

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sixteenth century. Wherever we might look for beginnings in The Cantos, they are deferred and invisible. Both the poem and the column have open endings and could proceed ad infinitum on the strength of their method: repetition of a single unit in Brâncuşi’s case and stitching together of fragments and luminous details in Pound’s. Both works are governed by the sign of the ‘and’; they are additive chains which are virtually endless. The sculptor dreamed of huge columns in Central Park or on the shore of Lake Michigan, projects which were not realised. The poet wanted to write about 120 cantos but had to stop at 109, plus some drafts and fragments. The work of both, as it stands, is an intermediate phase in projects that were meant to be never-ending, expressions of an ever-repeatable principle.

Afterword Both artists had begun experimenting with the ideas of their master opus before they met in 1921. The trajectories of their lives and the development of their artistic careers were already leading them in opposite directions, away from each other. However, the encounter with Brâncuşi consolidated Pound’s Vorticist convictions and healed part of the pain and loss caused by Gaudier-Brzeska’s death and the failure of the English avant-garde. Brâncuşi had survived the war and had stayed true to his commitment to form. He had not been bent by hardship and had not recanted on the modernist experiment. His work was a luminous instance of what Gaudier-Brzeska’s might have become, had he lived. In this sense, the encounter with the Romanian sculptor bridged the gap between the glorious years of Vorticist sculpture (1913–15), which had been the time of Pound’s first theoretical groping towards a new direction in his poetry, and 1921–4, when the first cycle of The Cantos was completed. Pound’s take on Brâncuşi as a Vorticist has proved to be an original and unique contribution to criticism: it has value both on its own and as a means of clarification by contrast, configuring an artistic way that he admired, but would not follow. By the time they met, both artists had shaped a few units of design, which they would attempt to combine into larger structures. Brâncuşi had created his bird, fish, ovoid and sleeping muse, designs which he would repeat in various materials and recombine in various locations with several types of bases. The sculptor’s studio was the most powerful statement of the combinatorial dimension of his work, his universe of forms placed in the ideal environment. At that time, Pound’s units of design did not have the same degree of certitude. By 1921 he had only written three cantos which would retain a stable form through the process of revision (IV, V and VII). It was only after he had consistently applied his principle of making poetry as factual and precise as prose in the ‘Malatesta Cantos’ that he achieved the degree of Vorticist intensity that would enable him to establish his own provisional studio of forms. By 1925, A Draft of XVI Cantos had taken a shape that included and superseded Pound’s earlier work. The cycle established a form in which the contingency of everyday life was connected to historical recurrence and mythic permanence through a vast constellation of analogies. By means of this form, Pound arrived at a degree of certitude similar to that which he had admired in Epstein and Brâncuşi. At the same time, this method would be potentially infinite, permitting a virtually endless addition of units

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of design. Sculpture itself would be integrated into this constellation and associated with permanent, spiritual values. However, Pound’s decision to turn his poem and all his intellectual activity towards the public sphere, though generous in intention, proved disastrous. His involvement with the economics of Social Credit and the combination of its principles with the realities of Mussolini’s Italy led him to embrace and defend Fascism in his journalism of the 1930s and finally in the radio broadcasts he made during World War II. The consequences are well known: an indictment for treason, a plea of insanity, and thirteen years spent in a mental institution. Pound was forcibly cut off from the realm of the public, locked away and denied any responsibility of rational utterance. This may be the reason why, after the great public and personal disaster of World War II, the importance of Pound’s memories of Brâncuşi, his atelier, his work, his take on art and life became again poignant. The cutting away from the public was sudden and absolute, but Brâncuşi’s example had shown Pound the supreme ways in which he could heal this rift. The darkness and unhappiness of his internment in a cage at Pisa made Pound turn inward and search for the possibility of finding a way out of hell and creating a personal paradise on earth. For that he needed to remember the beauty he had experienced in his best moments and invoke it, recreate it in words, combine it with everything he knew and recontextualise it in his imagination. The memory of Brâncuşi’s work would be not just an element of Pound’s late paradise, but its very blueprint (North 1985: 160; Beasley 2007: 184). Spots of stillness and beauty would occur at various points in the texture of the poem. Brâncuşi’s art was an oasis of repose; the contemplation of a manmade object in a certain natural environment brought forth a revelation of the transcendent, a spiritual experience. Pure form, the combination between perfection and roughness, polish and porousness, the manmade and the natural remained in Pound’s memory and distilled in his imagination: Brâncuşi’s bird In the hollow of pine trunks. (Notes for CXVII et seq./821) Brâncuşi’s life had been a luminous instance of the way an artist could live in a selfmade, private paradise away from the turmoil of the world. His shrine of marble, wood and bronze left its trace in the Cantos as a place of happy certitude, a portal through which beauty, coherence, meaning and transcendence could again be felt.

Notes 1. Pound lost sources of income because of his participation in the journal BLAST, which had caused considerable indignation in literary circles. After World War I, it became evident that his intransigent attitude, criticism and lack of tact had alienated people who could have provided publishing outlets (EPP I: 357, 398). T. S. Eliot wrote to John Quinn that Pound’s poetry was not reviewed and that he was becoming forgotten (T. S. Eliot, 25 January 1920; Eliot 1988: 356). In this respect, he agreed with A. R. Orage, who in January 1921 wrote in The New Age that: ‘Mr. Pound, like so many others, who have striven for the advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have

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for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy’ (quoted in EPP I: 410). Pound’s lifelong friendship with Wyndham Lewis began in 1909 (Materer 1979: 21). His acquaintance with Jacob Epstein is first mentioned in his letters in November 1913 (SL 63). Pound met Gaudier-Brzeska at an exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1913 (G-B 44) and praised him in a letter to W. C. Williams in December the same year (SL 27). Epstein had met Gaudier-Brzeska in 1911 (Epstein 1963: 44). Epstein had met Brâncuşi in Paris in 1912, while working on the tomb of Oscar Wilde (Epstein 1963: 48). Gaudier-Brzeska met Brâncuşi in 1913, when the Romanian sculptor contributed a piece to the Allied Artists’ exhibition in London (Materer 1979: 95). Materer argues that it was due to Brâncuşi’s influence that Brzeska began carving directly in stone, a practice that was unusual at the time. The young sculptor perceived carving as a more truthful way of releasing the energy of the object. Pound reprinted Gaudier-Brzeska’s manifesto twice, in his memoir of the sculptor, GaudierBrzeska: A Memoir (1916) and in his Guide to Kulchur (1938), a testimony of the high regard he had for that text. The idea of classifying the arts was not simply a youthful impulse. Pound repeated it in Guide to Kulchur: ‘My generation found criticism of the arts cluttered with work of men who persistently defined the works of one art in terms of another. For a decade or so we tried to get the arts sorted out. . . . For a few years paint and sculpture tried to limit themselves to colour and form. And this did I believe clarify the minds of a small group or series of people’ (GK 49). ‘The intellectual curiosity of this island [Great Britain] is nil. The desire for more precise ideation, for better prose, for international standards, is zero; and the young American who wants external stimulant for this thought would do better to turn his attention to Paris’ (P&P IV: 147–8). Between 1913 and his death in 1924, John Quinn helped not only Brâncuşi and Pound, but also T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis by buying their work, lending money, aiding publishing, and mediating between artists living in Europe and institutions in America. In 1921, Quinn was also de facto Brâncuşi’s most important patron, having collected his art since 1914: he built up the most extensive collection of Brâncuşi’s works, which got dispersed at Quinn’s death in 1924. Most of it was bought by Louise and Walter Arensberg, who donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1950. The following review of the anecdotal side of the Pound–Brâncuşi encounter covers approximately the same ground as Rebecca Beasley’s chapter on Brâncuşi in her Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (2007). Though sprung from the same sources, our arguments nevertheless diverge, focusing on different aspects and implications of Pound’s relationship with the Romanian sculptor. The book that Pound intended to write was probably the discarded project Four Modern Artists (Lewis, Picasso, Brâncuşi and Picabia). He described the plan in a letter to Lewis on 27 April 1921, just six days after he had met Brâncuşi (SL 230). It was the sculptor’s opposition which made him drop the idea a few months later. Pound wrote to him on 14 October: ‘Caro mio – J’étais bête, bête, bête vous proposer cette sacré livre. Regrette beaucoup que ça vous empêche travailler. Je l’ai remis au kalends grecques remis remis. On est tellement stupide – on veut toujours faire quelque chose – battre un tambour pour faire pousser les oiseaux. Au fond je sais que ça ne sort à rien = affichage = = on veut être amical. Aider les étoiles à circuler aider le soleil = c’est bête = je dois écrire des poèmes et de la musique = et puis et bien. C’est remis’ (quoted in Hulten, Dumitresco and Istrati 1986: 141). Because of the sculptor’s opposition, Giedion-Welcker was able to publish her monograph only in 1959, after Brâncuşi’s death. For more information on the sculptor’s attitude in the matter of his artistic reputation see Chave (1993: 1–4).

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11. The case of Princess X was followed by less spectacular instances which are just as significant: in her article ‘Brâncuşi and His American Collectors’, Ann Temkin recounts that at the ‘Contemporary French Art’ exhibition in New York (March–April 1921), Brâncuşi was grieved because ‘his sculptures were lined up side by side against the wall, were mixed among sculptures by others, and almost touched the paintings and drawings that Quinn had described hopefully to Brâncuşi as “background” . . . the wooden Cup, a gift to Quinn, was displayed upside down and Chimera was shown without a base’ (Temkin 1995: 57). 12. The aura of a temple in the studio was not simply the realisation of an aesthetic ideal or the craving of a religious soul; it had a moral dimension. Brâncuşi declared to Alex Liberman: ‘No religion . . . I took things from Jesus Christ. Love each other. Rid yourself of evil. Save your soul. If you live well, if you purify yourself, you go up into heavens and stay there. If you live badly you come back into this earth or another earth. Earth is a hell’ (quoted in Chave 1993: 272). 13. What Pound was privileged to see in Brâncuşi’s studio was not the same as what the contemporary visitor sees in the small museum dedicated to the sculptor today. Pound was witness to a work in progress where finished pieces were informally cohabiting with bits of material, unfinished or discarded work and the tokens of mundane domestic life. What we now see is a cleaned-up space determined by the sculptor in the last years of his life: the pieces are ready and representative, the tools are in order, the dust wiped off. 14. Quinn incurred the sculptor’s wrath when he respectfully referred to Pound’s ‘illuminating article’ in a letter (Chave 1993: 286). 15. Art critics like Carola Giedion-Welcker, Friedrich Teja Bach and Anna Chave have pointed out that such aims or statements of purpose are not to be taken too literally. Brâncuşi produced various versions of the same sculpture in marble and bronze, using their different qualities to create, enhance or deconstruct effects in his objects. He also struggled to overcome the weight of the material so as to create an aerial, spiritual effect. The stone often broke when he attempted to make slender forms poised on a single point, or slim transitions between object and its base. See Bird in Space (1923, 1924, 1927, 1931–6) and Fish (1922, 1926). 16. The career of modern collage officially began with Braque’s Compotier, which he made at Sorgues in 1912. At that time, he and Picasso were working together; the two painters experimented with the form until 1915, when they gradually came back to painting, keeping the typical patterns of their collages. By 1920 they had ceased using the technique altogether, but by then they had already established it (Janis and Blesh 1962: 15–20). 17. Picasso’s dismissive remark about Brâncuşi is recorded: ‘a housewife always scrubbing at his pots’. By the same token the sculptor called Picasso a ‘cannibal, who consumed the energy of others’ (Chave 1993: 287).

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18 Percussive Music for a Triangle: Ezra Pound’s Relationship with George Antheil and Olga Rudge Mauro Piccinini

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hile Pound’s theories on harmony and his contribution to the history of music have been already researched and analysed by scholars such as Margaret Fisher, Robert Hughes, Stephen J. Adams and R. Murray Schafer in his Ezra Pound and Music, curiously, Pound’s relationship with his most important musical friend and collaborator, the composer George Antheil, has received less detailed investigation.1 There are some excuses for this lapse; first of all, the breakup between the two at the end of the 1930s led to the resentment of Pound and his circle in Antheil’s references to Ezra in his autobiography Bad Boy of Music (1945) and in his FBI testimony, when he was interviewed, with many of Pound’s other friends, in advance of Pound’s trial for treason (Leick 2008: 105–25). In turn, Pound published some unflattering words on Antheil in his 1938 Guide to Kulchur: ‘He has gone to hell and to Hollywood a “subMedean talent”, he has made himself a motley and then some. He was imperfectly schooled, in music, in letters, in all things’ (GK 94). By 1938, their relationship had definitely ended and they never exchanged letters afterwards. Before that date, however, and beginning in 1923, their relationship had been very close: Pound launched Antheil’s career in Paris, wrote a booklet partly dedicated to him (Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony), financed Antheil’s concerts out of his own pocket, and even commissioned three violin sonatas from the young composer. For his part, Antheil notated and edited the score of Pound’s Le Testament (1923), wrote eulogies to Pound’s music, and tried, with little success, to organise a premiere for the opera. Their remaining correspondence, whose bulk covers mostly the years 1924–6, amounts to sixty letters from Pound and ninety items from Antheil. That said, the real nature of their relationship is not simple to determine: both seemed to need the help of the other, and recognised the value of the technical and practical knowledge they had in their respective fields of activity: Antheil probably did not care much about Pound’s literary output, but he surely envied his ability to act as a sort of press agent, his many connections on both sides of the Channel, and his entrée to most of the renowned Parisian salons. He definitely gave Pound the strong impression of knowing exactly what he was after, especially in his demand for a strong, rhythmical music, opposed to that of French Impressionism. So much so, that Pound asked him to revise his opera on Villon’s text which he had composed with the help of Agnes Bedford in 1921. This was but the artistic side of a much deeper attraction, which took the shape of a father–son relationship, to the point that the epithets ‘uncle’

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Figure 18.1 Ruth Asch, Portrait of George Antheil, c. 1929. Courtesy of Princeton University Library. or ‘father, favver, ole favver’ were adopted by both, in reference to Ezra. And even when Ezra, in his letters, used his typical vituperative jargon, harshly scolding George, one can perceive a real affection for the young ‘Bad Boy’ (Figure 18.1).2 When they first met, Antheil was not yet 23 years old, Pound was 37. From the beginning, their relationship evolved as a trio, with the addition of Olga Rudge, the gifted violinist born in Ohio, but raised in Europe. Olga, due to her age and musical career, liked Antheil’s companionship, but at the same time became Pound’s secret mistress. Over the course of the next fifty years, she and Ezra had a daughter, as Olga moved through the roles of muse and companion to secretary and, at the end, nurse. Antheil never knew anything about this, and in the course of the next ten or so years, this situation brought much misunderstanding on every side of the triangle. Olga met Ezra in Paris in the autumn of 1922 and she was instantly fascinated by him (Conover 2001: 3). Pound evidently liked the company of musicians, and during the following months frequently visited Olga’s apartment in rue Chamfort, asking her to play his own music. Meanwhile, from July 1922 until June 1923, Antheil made a name for himself as a ‘pianist futurist’, as his programmes stated: when he decided to accept Stravinsky’s invitation to come to Paris, he was already known from some extraordinary reviews he had received. Not that the critics were particularly fair to him, but scandal was a sign of renown.

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It was at a tea given by the Picabias in honour of singer Georgette Leblanc that Antheil met ‘a Mephistophelian red-bearded gent who turned out to be Ezra Pound . . . He was unusually kind and gracious to me; and as I left he asked for my address and said that he would someday come around to see me’ (Antheil [1945] 1990: 117). Pound soon asked Antheil if he had written anything about his musical aims, and he took all of Antheil’s early manifestos, published and not, most seriously. ‘Among other things I said that melody did not exist, that rhythm was the next most important thing to develop in music, and that harmony after all was a matter of what preceded and what followed’ (Antheil [1945] 1990: 117–18). Antheil’s account, written at a safe distance of more than twenty years, implies that Pound took his early writings and out of them composed his book, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. But actually Pound had been developing his own theories, beginning with his reflection on rhythm, as early as 1910 (in his preface to his translations of Cavalcanti) and, by 1923, he already had more than three years’ experience as music critic (under the pen name William Atheling, for The New Age). However, a comparative study between Pound’s theories and Antheil’s early writings (not all of them published at the time) must still be undertaken. Pound immediately wrote to Dorothy, his wife, reporting that Antheil approved of his orchestration of the Villon opera, and even offered to put the thing on in Berlin, where he still had many contacts.3 Antheil quickly won Pound’s complete trust, and monetary assistance through ‘a hurry-up call for several violin sonatas’ (Antheil [1945] 1990: 121). He planned a concert where he could launch Olga as a soloist. At this concert, he explained, he would take care to see that all who were important in Paris were present. Pound soon introduced Antheil to Rudge and they heard her play. Antheil was impressed: She was a dark, pretty, Irish-looking girl, about twenty-five years old and, as I discovered when we commenced playing a Mozart sonata together, a consummate violinist. I have heard many violinists, but none with the superb lower register of the D and G strings that was Olga’s exclusively. (Antheil [1945] 1990: 121–2) Pound and Sylvia Beach (the owner of Shakespeare & Co., the famous bookshop in rue de l’Odéon, above which Antheil rented a flat) paved the way for Antheil’s new life in the French capital by also introducing him to all the important writers, first among them James Joyce, with whom Antheil planned an opera in the following years.4 Other writers with whom he was able to establish a friendship, or a relation of mutual esteem, were Ernest Hemingway, Bob McAlmon, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau and William Carlos Williams. Soon, Antheil started composition, probably at the end of July 1923, but during the following month, Olga and Ezra ‘disappeared’ for a walking tour of Dordogne, while Antheil left for Marseilles and then Tunis with Böske, his young Hungarian fiancée. Both couples were back by mid-August. Pound meanwhile decided to ‘collect his wits’ for an article on Antheil, which would eventually appear in The Criterion in April 1924. On 23 September, Antheil finished the first sonata for Rudge, and soon after had his first public exposure as a pianist and composer. On 4 October, on a very special occasion, Antheil played his most outrageous compositions at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, where filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier needed to shoot a scene of a riot for his new movie L’Inhumaine (starring Georgette Leblanc). Although it was a semi-private affair, Antheil’s name became instantly known to the Paris that mattered.

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One of the artists who appreciated Antheil’s music was Fernand Léger, who had probably discussed with Pound the idea of making a movie. This would be, in the end, the famous Ballet mécanique. What is largely unclear, however, is Pound’s role in its initial conception. Pound, Antheil and Léger may have discussed it as early as September 1923 (L/HP 519), but it was Ezra himself who sketched the first ideas in a notebook now at Yale (YCAL MSS 178 3/130). The first ten pages show a sort of parade of different objects and images and their relation to Antheil’s Mechanisms, a set of seven piano pieces (now lost), which Antheil had composed and premiered in Germany. In them, Antheil seems to have analysed the different ways of giving an impression of movement in music. Other tangible cues that relate Pound’s sketches to Ballet mécanique are the mention of four pianos (or player-pianos), and some framed images depicting geometrical elements: three cylinder-shaped objects, a big circle and a big triangle, which will all become parts of the final film (Figure 18.2). By mid-October, another character showed up on the Ballet mécanique scene: Dudley Murphy, whom Pound had encountered in Venice in 1908 as a kid (L/HP 520). Murphy was a young director: his films, such as Soul of the Cypress (1920) and Danse macabre (1922), were musically inspired short features, tending to realise a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and had to be synchronised with the music they accompanied. As Murphy had a camera of his own, he seemed the right person to

Figure 18.2 One of Pound’s sketches, showing initial ideas for an Antheil–Léger project which developed into Ballet mécanique. In the lower part, some geometric shapes included in the final film.

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realise the budding film: none of the others had any technical cinematic knowledge. Before starting work with Léger, Murphy had already shot some images together with Man Ray. When Murphy ran short of funds, Ray let him keep the footage already done, and Pound and Léger agreed to help him finish the work, giving it, however, a more structured shape. From then on, the film was shot in interiors, in Pound’s and Harry Lachmann’s studio (Lachmann was a book illustrator, set designer, painter and, later, director).5 Pound’s part in the movie conception was later minimised, even by Pound himself: in his ‘Machine Art’ essay, written 1927–30, he stated that there was a part of the Ballet which was ‘finally rejected’ because made of ‘a few metres of interesting and highly unsatisfactory film’ (EPMA 76). Anyway, when Pound went to Rapallo, Italy, in the following January, he left Murphy in Paris with an unfinished film, and summed up his experience in a letter to his father: ‘Work on vorticist film . . . experiment interesting – but probably Murphy hasn’t brain enough to finish a job in my absence or without pushing’ (L/HP 522). Antheil began writing the music score only on 1 January 1924, and finished it exactly one year later, but in that time the composition really outgrew its initial purpose. When finally scored, it turned out to be almost thirty minutes long, against the eleven to sixteen minutes of the finished movie (which, like Antheil’s scoring, had different versions in the following years). During November 1923, Antheil also finished the composition of the second violin sonata for Olga and found time to revise Pound’s Villon manuscript, slowly recopying it in a new edition. He transformed Agnes Bedford’s traditional rhythmic notation into a system of variable micro-rhythms (most impractical for performers). Pound then took over as Antheil’s and Rudge’s press agent, contacting his acquaintances in the news agencies and the local American newspapers. By December 1923, Ezra began advising Olga, ‘it wd be wise for you to practice the Mozart and Bach, for a couple of days, by themselves. I mean DONT play the Antheil at all; but concentrate on the B. and M., so as to EEEElimminerate the effects of modern music’ (Conover 2001: 8). Pound went on releasing interviews. On 11 December, the day of the concert, even Francis Picabia, a friend of Pound’s, wrote something for L’Ère nouvelle.6 That same evening, at nine o’clock, the crowd was made up mainly of musicians, artists and writers, and, of course, a large delegation from the Latin Quarter. Mr and Mrs James Joyce, with their daughter Lucia, were there, as were also Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford (who had also visited during the rehearsals), Francis Picabia, Harold Stearns, William Bird and Aaron Copland, who would never forget ‘Ezra Pound, with his striking red beard much in evidence, [who] passionately turned pages’ (Copland and Perlis 1984: 75). Those gathered were so sympathetic that one commentator noted that ‘no one wanted to be soothed. Most of those there wanted to be exhilarated, lectured, given a new vision. They sat on the edge of their seats and waited for shocks. And they got them’ (L. Schneider 1923: 1). The old critics were mostly adverse. Louis Schneider, dean of the music critics at the Herald, considered Antheil’s output to be almost improvisatory, stating that there was no music in that ‘abuse of the ascending or descending “glissando” of the piano’, in those ‘chords struck at hazard’ (L. Schneider 1923: 6). When Schneider wrote that ‘a jazz band seems melodious beside these works of Mr. George Antheil’, the young composer replied in a letter to the Herald’s

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Mailbag: ‘Cher Monsieur, such was the composer’s intention.’ Irving Schwerke, of the Chicago Tribune, praised Olga Rudge, not only for ‘her sonority’, which was ‘remarkably ample’, but also for ‘having enough courage to sacrifice on the altars of Mr. Antheil’s conceited art’. Pound’s pieces, with their melodic charm, ‘won their share of applause’, but as for the two violin sonatas by Antheil, Schwerke adopted a mockingly impartial, quasi-scientific distance: We can and do make record of it viz: – that the tone produced by Miss Rudge and Mr. Antheil in the latter’s compositions, frequently imposed a severe strain on the naked tympanum; that both pianist and violinist ‘threw’ themselves heartily into their instruments and their music, and that their strenuous exertions had at least this result, – the ear drank hence a copious draught of sound, which in the memory of some listeners was classified as ‘music’ pure and absolute, in that of others as degenerate noise and crash. (EPM 248) The reviewer of Le Monde musical, an important weekly publication, commended ‘the talent of the violinist, with her sober playing, pure tone, supple bow, her musicality always sympathetic and of a fine quality’. For Pound, too, there were words of praise, but as for Antheil’s sonatas, he invoked chaos and disorder, ‘epilepsy of rhythms ending in a catastrophic fistfight’ (E. Schneider 1923: 408; my translation). It is astonishing that none of the critics was able to say something rational about the music, its structure and development. Not one mentioned, for example, the distorted quotations in the Second Violin Sonata, made up of old melodies well known to the American expatriates, such as ‘In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree’, ‘HoochieKoochie’, ‘Darling, You Are Growing Older’ or ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. However, from December 1923, Antheil and Rudge were put on the map and became synonyms for the American avant-garde in Paris. On 1 January 1924, Antheil penned his foreword to the Villon opera, in which he reiterated his distrust of the interpretative abilities of musicians and singers: As the opera is written in such a manner so that nothing at all is left to the singer, the editor would be obliged if the singer would not let the least bit of temperament affect in the least the correct singing of this opera, which is written as it sounds! Please do not embarrass us by suddenly developing intelligence. (T 14) What Pound had accomplished in these six months was the orchestration and, for the moment, the definitive edition of his opera, done by a young and very promising composer who seemed to understand his need for a very strongly rhythmical, ‘horizontal’ music. Pound had launched Antheil’s career in Paris and at the same time strengthened Olga’s. He had made a name for himself as a composer and he oversaw developments of an avant-garde film. His article on Antheil was already in the hands of T. S. Eliot, who would print it in the April 1924 issue of The Criterion. These were not the only seeds Pound sowed in the fertile Paris ground: he and Olga had fallen in love during the same month of December 1923. ‘I’m like a pricked balloon since you’re gone – so is George – only he says its because he has had a bath.’ So he wrote to her a few days before Christmas from the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine where he had been admitted for appendicitis.7

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Figure 18.3 Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound and George Antheil at Olga's Apartment in 2, rue Chamfort, Auteuil, Paris, 3 September 1924. By permission of the Estate of Peter R. Antheil/Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The first signs that something was changing are to be found in the pneumatiques Pound and Rudge exchanged during December, such as ‘chere [sic] = you might bring my keys with you = + not give them . . . in ostentation before Monsieur Antheil’8 (Figure 18.3). On 8 January 1924, Pound and his wife took a sleeper to Rapallo, where he hoped to recover his health, get some much-needed rest and probably protect himself from the flood of people who visited him constantly in rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Ezra’s departure did not discourage Olga, and the love notes continued (14 January ‘amore’; 22 January ‘innamoratissima’). In Paris, Antheil learned very quickly how to handle reporters, and went on playing Pound’s game even without him. The financial side of his career seemed to be improving in accordance with the publicity he was able to receive from the American newspapers in Paris: he had pupils; he now got a monthly stipend from his patroness in Philadelphia, Mrs Curtis Bok; and many of the rich people, especially English and American, who were gravitating to Paris were ready to send him money, in a sort of chic competition. Most of these new friends were not musicians, and when it came to judging his avant-garde compositions, no one had the ability to do so (apart from Joyce). Pound appointed Antheil as a sort of musical editor for Ford’s transatlantic review, which in February 1924 published his brief Sonata 3 (Sonatina Death of Machines). It is understandable, or at least so we think, that a 23-year-old boy, son of a travelling salesman from Trenton, New Jersey, developed a superiority complex. He began committing his ideas and projects to print, announcing his ‘electric opera’ (based on

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the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses) which he was planning with Joyce. While Antheil was busy building the foundation of his future success as the genius who could outcompete Stravinsky, Pound settled in Rapallo, at the Hotel Mignon, where he received a proposal to stage his opera at the newly established Théâtre Bériza, but he had to refuse it because, as he explained to Agnes Bedford: ‘As I havent gone over Antheil’s score + as a lot of this are on another mss – it wd have meant more work than I am yet fit for so I had to refuse – until my return to Paris.’9 It was László (Ladislas) Medgyes, the Hungarian scenic designer working for Marguerite Bériza’s new theatre company, who invited Pound to submit his score for a series of gala evenings of modern operas for April. It would have been heard with Lord Berners’s La Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement and Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat in its French premiere.10 What Pound did not confess to his first collaborator, Agnes, was that he did not have much time to dedicate to his opera because Olga had come to Rapallo in mid-February 1924. When he put her up in the same hotel where he was staying with Dorothy, Olga left, angry at the indiscretion, to settle down in Montallegro, a couple of miles away in the hills. There she waited until Ezra went up, leaving his wife alone, after five days during which Olga refused to answer the phone. When Dorothy, after a week, followed Ezra to Montallegro, Olga in turn left for Florence, and the chase started again in March, when he reached her in Tuscany.11 Pound sent Antheil two cheques during March and late April, so that he could travel with Olga to London, where they had a concert coming up. They arrived in London on 25 April (with some trouble at the Dover passport control because of Antheil’s visas and ‘slightly Bolshy appearance’ – Olga’s words).12 Meanwhile, Pound had finished his Fiddle Music: First Suite for solo violin, probably his only piece of ‘absolute music’, unrelated to any poem or external source. It is a series of six unsophisticated pieces, sometimes expressive and melodic, with a Celtic flavour. He also continued his musical research, copying some early songs from manuscripts in Perugia. Even from a distance, Pound was present: a timely article on Antheil (later a part of the Treatise) was published in The Criterion. He wrote to Bedford that ‘the InfAntheil either is or will shortly be on the London scene’, and asked her to send him ‘definite opinion re/ my violin scraps – senza complimenti’.13 In London, Olga was ‘rather fed up’ with Smitty (as the couple called George, after Walter Berndt’s comic strip syndicated in the Chicago Tribune). He was volatile, unreliable, ‘homesick for Trenton’ (as she was ‘homesick for anything that isn’t England’).14 Dorothy was then in London, and took care of George, while Olga was introduced to Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy’s mother, who found her a charming girl. The concert on 10 May was similar to the one given in Paris in December, with Pound’s new suite and Antheil’s six little piano sonatas to replace Mozart (see note 6). Critics were almost uniformly unfavourable, but more regarding Pound’s ‘trivialities’ than towards Antheil, who at least received some praise for his piano playing. The Observer called Pound’s musical compositions ‘childlike pieces’, adding that ‘the poet is apparently as easily pleased with the monotonous repetition of a few rhythms and scraps of tune as is an infant who arranges and rearranges his bits of coloured glass’. Not much better was the critique of Antheil’s mixture of jazz and Stravinsky: His ‘music’ is not without effect, however. After the first movement of the first sonata three people left the hall; after the Andante one retired; and at the conclusion of the Presto thirty-seven sought the air – and did not return.15

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As on the previous occasion, Olga Rudge received compliments more for her heroic choice of authors than for her actual playing. She was ‘a violinist whose tone is powerful, if a little rough and insufficiently modulated’.16 The Times was a bit more complimentary to Olga, but its critic considered Pound and Antheil both ‘primitive men’, although each in a different fashion. Mr. Pound has, like primitive man, a preference for perfect fourths, and like him again, augments them now and then for a change. We did not notice any other structural device, and, of course, your primitive simply goes on till he is tired, or his listener, without feeling the need of a close. But the music is quite negligible really, being only a fumbling with the notes of C major and not a glorious adventure among the cave-men at all.17 To Pound’s circle of friends, it had been a successful concert. Agnes Bedford thought that ‘Antheil’s playing was magnificent’, and that Rudge had played his music ‘very well, with great precision’.18 Pound seemed happy about the unfavourable critique, ‘which is as it should be’, he commented to his father (L/HP 530). Ezra recommended Olga not to play there in the future: ‘[You] should EMPHATICALLY NOT book in London, NO strategic point in doing so at this time. . . . Give the book time to do its work.’19 The three planned another joint venture: a concert by invitation only, pretentiously entitled ‘MUSIQUE AMERICAINE (Declaration of Independence)’ to be held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, where Pound returned to organise it. Ten days before the concert, Pound had the good fortune to run into a new precious ally for his music, tenor Yves Tinayre, who would be the first Villon and would sing two airs from the opera at short notice and with few rehearsals. Tinayre, being native French, could better interpret Villon’s words, and he was an accomplished scholar who would go on to specialise in early music. In a word, he could add value to Pound’s music better than anyone else. As for the concert itself, it included the Musique du XV siècle editée par Ezra Pound (two pieces by Petrus Convitortio and the Duke of Bourgogne, both found in Perugia).20 At the last moment, Pound added a fanfare for violin and tambourine to salute George’s entrance. A second sequence of pieces consisted of the piano sonatas by Antheil (although whether all of them or not is not clear), followed again by pieces by Ezra (the Fiddle Music: First Suite – here too, it is unclear, as in London, if Olga played all of the six pieces), plus an arrangement (Strophes de Villon) of Mort, j’appelle and Je renye amours with an accompaniment especially composed for Olga’s violin only. Then, before the interval, Antheil and Rudge reprised the Second Violin Sonata and after it, Rudge and three French musicians introduced Antheil’s First String Quartet, entitled Hungariana.21 The reviews varied. The Paris Times praised Ezra’s music, especially the ‘two songs given last night, [which] were music in a graceful form and gave an impression of sincerity and pathos. With a pleasant antique flavor, as of Provence, they seemed quite novel.’22 Irving Schwerke utterly criticised the idea that such music as Pound’s could be called radical or revolutionary: If Mr. Pound has a place among modern composers, it must be among the tuneful ones. He does not abjure melody. And, to add insult to injury, neither does he abjure emotion, which one hearing of the ‘Strophes de Villon’ quite suffices to prove. (Schwerke 1924)

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Pound was satisfied overall: Tinayre had sung well, and when he and Olga were not together, the public could not detect mistakes, especially in the exact duration of notes. As for Antheil’s music, Schwerke had only sarcasm. That summer Antheil remained in Paris to work on Ballet mécanique and, later on, during October and November, on the third Violin Sonata for Olga.23 After a trip during the second part of July, Pound was back in Paris, playing tennis with Hemingway. Something dangerous could have happened when Böske left for Hungary for two weeks and Antheil, feeling alone, invited Olga to dinner and the cinema, probably more than once, and at the end, unequivocally made a move on her: I couldn’t sleep because I suddenly had a terrible desire to sleep with you. On the way home I knew that I should have to tell you about last night, just as surely as I had the desire – and so here it is – and let’s not talk about it again.24 All this had happened while Ezra was still in Paris with Dorothy, but it is not clear how the thing ‘developed’. In October, word of the possible peccadillo reached Ezra, who simply disregarded it as gossip. In Paris, Antheil was now being constantly interviewed by reporters and writers from the US. One of these, Robert Forrest Wilson, had flattering words about Antheil and Pound: he placed them, together with Joyce, Ford and Bill Bird, in the ‘bookshop crowd’ revolving around Shakespeare & Co., but defined George as ‘quite the most engaging figure of the whole group’. Pound and his opera were amply discussed: ‘Ezra Pound’s musical compositions are almost photographically medieval . . . in himself Ezra Pound has regenerated a musical consciousness which last existed in ancient cloisters and serf-haunted forests before Bach came along to revolutionize music’ (Forrest Wilson 1925: 254–5). Pound and Antheil also used the space left them as musical editors in the transatlantic review to publish much of the forthcoming Treatise on Harmony,25 plus other laudatory articles, written by friends, such as Böske’s ‘Art in Modern Germany’.26 All this self-referential activity reached its peak when the two composers wrote paeans to each other and had them published: Pound’s Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony and Antheil’s article for the Sunday magazine of the Chicago Tribune, where he compared Pound to Henri Rousseau for the clarity and precision of their art (EPM 513). As for Pound’s Treatise, criticism of it arrived from unsuspected quarters. Olga Rudge, who in the meantime had left Paris for Venice, sent a six-page letter, confessing that ‘she doesn’t honestly think it his chef d’oeuvre – or that it is likely to be understood by people’. Furthermore, she pointed out that Antheil’s notation of Le Testament was ‘impossible to use’ – though it was an exact record of what was done at the time’ (Conover 2001: 54).27 Olga found Antheil’s musical interventions invasive: ‘Georges butting in in your thing irritates me intensely.’28 But everything changed in their lives when Pound and Olga met by mid-November and conceived a child, by mutual consent, but mostly at Olga’s insistence. While the Pounds definitely settled in Via Marsala, 12 in Rapallo, Olga had to address the pregnancy from an economic and a social point of view. She decided to rely on her father’s allowance and sublet her Paris apartment at a higher rate. In any case, when she and Pound met in Rome in February 1925, it was agreed that Olga would take care of the child, leaving Ezra free to continue his work and marital life.

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In the next months, Olga stayed far from Ezra and avoided places where her state might be noticed. She chose northern Italy for her confinement, and in Bressanone (Brixen) Maria (Mary) Rudge was born on 9 July 1925. It was a difficult and premature delivery. Olga underwent an operation, found to her dismay that the baby was a girl, and that she could not nurse her. Ezra sent a contribution of almost four thousand lire, but remained in Rapallo. Olga left the baby with the wet nurse, Frau Marcher. As soon as Mary was settled with the Marchers, Olga returned to Florence. In October, she visited Mary, and by November, was practising daily to improve her technique for a concert at the end of the month. A whole year had passed since she last saw George, who in the meantime had been looking for her, writing alarmed letters to Pound. Ezra, protecting Olga’s and his own privacy, instructed her on how to react to Antheil’s many proposals for concerts and tours together: ‘DONT EXPLAIN TO G. (not until you are ready to give him the entire facts. . . . which I take it wd. be imprudent, UNTIL one is ready to announce the matter in the Herald).’29 Partly as a consequence, Antheil spent most of 1925 without public performances. He was well aware of the great expectations held of him, but was hanging back and finishing his opera with Joyce – or so he declared. Antheil’s health was deteriorating, most probably as a consequence of the gonorrhoea he had contracted in Berlin, and of living under constant pressure. He became slightly paranoid: believing that other composers would steal his ideas, he refused the League of Composers’ proposal to premiere the Ballet mécanique in New York when they asked him to submit his musical score. He saw ‘enemies’ in other successful composers: between George and Ezra discussion could run amok, especially when Antheil thought Pound was accusing him of being too much swayed by Stravinsky’s music: Please get me straight. This is the last time I am ever gonna mention Strawinsky’s name in my life in this connection. I AM NOT GONA REVISE THE 1ST SONATA. I NEVER SAID I WAS GONA CUT THE STRAWINSKY OUT OF IT.30 Pound took a more aggressive stance than simply using the shift key. His letters to Antheil from these years contain a catalogue raisonné of contumelious opening sentences: ‘You goddamblasted piffling altogether crumbusted IDIOT’, ‘You last collywoblical clutch of the romantico-Chopinian Berceuse’, ‘My dear LoonyTICK’, ‘SHUT UP, you blithering and bloodfoozelling IDIOT’ – and these were only the opening notes. However, Pound was also helping Antheil financially, and in February 1925 recommended him to the newly founded Guggenheim Foundation (to no avail). Moreover, when Olga complained about George’s vague concert proposals or incoherent behaviour, Ezra tried emphatically to understand and condone his excesses: For the rest: giovinezza!!! A little excess zubberdustiness, let it blow off, he ’as so few pleasures. . . . Also, people must have been trying to sit on him ever since he wuz two years old. They always used to sit on ME. OV course it has produced a beautiful character in my case, but I am not interested in Smit’s character. Besides it wd. never be as beautiful as our in any case.31 Ballet mécanique was ready by mid 1925, at least in a first version. Antheil talked and wrote as if the coupling with the movie were still possible, but actually he aimed at giving a premiere of the music only.32 Antheil, who had received a big sum from

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Mrs Bok to help with his concerts, asked Pound for help with publicity. ‘If you do this, I will use every cent of the money to produce our “Testament” here in Paris in the best way.’33 Pound contacted Bird to ask for his help in Paris, making clear his feelings towards Antheil’s self promotion: ‘I nacherly of couse dont want to push Geo’s stuff to the detriment of my own beeyewteeful litterchure, or so as to breed horstility emong the brefren, waitin breafless fer their own masterpeeces to appear.’34 Bird, however, was not interested in this too overt intellectual prostitution, and declined the offer. So Antheil thought it was time to act himself, and, before leaving for Tunis, entrusted his pupil Bravig Imbs, who worked as proofreader for the Chicago Tribune, with some propaganda. Imbs duly launched the ‘fake news’: the composer, seeking tribal rhythms, was now lost in the Sahara. It worked well: just a week later most of the American and English newspapers had headlines such as ‘Friends of Composer Antheil Fear He is Lost in African Desert’.35 Launching the ballyhoo, however, was simple; how to announce that Antheil was not dead at all was another can of worms. Antheil wrote to Sylvia Beach from Trieste, where he was hiding ‘waiting telegraphic instructions’.36 In the meantime, he moved to Budapest, where, on 4 October, he married Böske, and then, on the sly, returned to Paris. When in Africa, Antheil had also accepted an offer from Paul Whiteman to write a piece for his orchestra. So, while his Ballet mécanique underwent private and public performances during the latter part of the year, Antheil finished a piece he had started in 1923, calling it Americana for Paul Whiteman, later retitled A Jazz Symphony. Sending the score in November, Antheil posed some conditions: he wanted to also play the Second Sonata for Violin with Olga Rudge, and then tour with the Whiteman orchestra. He asked Olga to be ready for a possible tour of America and then of Europe.37 Pound was cautious: ‘There is no sense of Olga’s going to America at her own expense until something is settled.’38 Olga was now in Paris rehearsing for a concert on 30 November 1925 organized by Léger for the international exhibition L’art d’aujourd’hui.39 However, something in the harmony of the duo was not right and Olga complained that Antheil wasn’t able to play anything but the last thing he had written. Pound was not astonished: ‘Puffinkly natrl. The creative as opposed to the histrionic talent. Very likely one can ONLY hear him a few times in each product. M’etonne pas de toot.’40 Antheil, on the other hand, half a year later could still not forget Olga’s performance: I’m scared of Olga after that program – to say nothing of nervousness she gets in concert, with II Sonata, after having played said II sonata in private dozens of times, giving me blue fits afterwards as per usual in the grand concerts. . . . She could play it if she would devote 2 weeks of practicing with me instead of usual stunt social program.41 They were probably both right: Antheil played only his own works extremely well, and only when they were still fresh from composition. On the other hand, Olga’s technique, after so many months of partial activity, was no longer as secure as it once had been. From this concert on, however, both looked for new partners. Antheil had his sonatas played (at least privately) by his new young friend Zoltán Székely, who was in Paris during spring 1926. Olga opted for Alfredo Casella, the Italian composer, pianist and conductor, with whom she gave a concert in Rome at the Sala Sgambati in May.

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Here Pound was present, as was T. S. Eliot, his wife and the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi. Antheil did not come, nor did he give permission for his First Sonata to be played.42 Olga premiered Satie’s Choses vues à droit et à gauche on 6 May. ‘Nothing else as good as G.A.’, Pound concluded in a letter to his mother (L/HP 599). Olga also gave the first performance of Ezra’s Hommage à Froissart, and music by Pizzetti, Ravel, Malipiero and others. In Paris, during the same days, Antheil met Virginia Randolph Harrison, then wife of the first secretary of the American Embassy, Christian Gross.43 An heiress, pianist and patroness of the arts, she thought it a good idea to have a series of ‘teas’ at her apartment (with champagne afterwards) where she could sponsor the music of Antheil and Virgil Thomson (a new friend of George’s). So a series of concerts of music by Thomson, Antheil and Pound (with Olga playing all the main violin parts) was organised (Figure 18.4). Another new acquaintance was Vladimir Golschmann, one of the few emerging conductors in Paris who had premiered new music, especially Satie and Les Six, and also the Italian Futurists, whom he introduced to Paris. During 1926–7 he agreed to conduct Antheil’s music in a series of public concerts with his own orchestra of the Concerts Golschmann. Antheil proposed that Golschmann also conduct Le Testament and Ballet mécanique at the home of Mrs Gross. Pound was, for once, enthusiastic:

Figure 18.4 Virginia Randolph Harrison (c. 1922), the rich patroness who, in 1926, hosted (as Mrs Christian Gross) a series of concerts with music by Pound and Antheil in her Parisian home at 1, Avenue Charles Floquet. Photo printed with permission.

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Why dont I LET Golschmannnnn do the Villon ???? / Yes, lett him, iss it?? Iss he will pay the musizians, and the zinkers, und the operas und the stagemanns ???? Let him! Iss it. Mit vergknugen. Does he vandt to???44 Pound, beginning in mid-1925 and for the whole winter of 1925–6, had struggled with Le Testament and Antheil’s notation. He discussed with Agnes Bedford selections for a concert version and the best instrumentation for a reduced orchestra, and at the same time he worked assiduously on the simplification of Antheil’s notation, finding that some of his arias could be better notated with 5/8 bars, which he considered a ‘remedy’. In March, Tinayre, who was Pound’s first choice following the good results of two years before, suggested Robert Maitland as bass baritone. Even Joyce’s son Giorgio was considered, but his voice was of a higher register.45 In the end, Tinayre’s younger brother, Paul, also joined the company, and played the harpsichord. An ‘idiot’, according to Ezra.46 When June came, it seemed the decisive moment for both Antheil’s and Pound’s recognition, at least in the French capital. In Paris, Ezra started copying parts for the performance of Le Testament at the Salle Pleyel (again, a private affair). The newspapers were dutifully alerted, so much so that on 15 June the Chicago Tribune published a biography of Olga Rudge, with picture, in the column ‘Who’s Who Abroad’. Rudge ‘does not compose, but she innovates’, said the unknown contributor, adding that ‘her revolutionary career began in 1923, when she took up the works of Antheil and Pound’. Her readiness to play in public the works of new composers, which other performers were unwilling to essay, was much lauded. The first concert was the most ambitious. On 19 June, Golschmann conducted Antheil’s Ballet pour instruments mécaniques et percussion (a ‘reduced’ version of the original score) and his Symphonie en Fa, his latest, purely orchestral and openly neoclassical composition, at the Champs Elysées Theatre, whose 2,500 seats were full. Everybody of importance in the Anglo-American community in Paris was present (mostly by invitation). Pound was one of the most eye-catching, according to Imbs: ‘Mr. Ezra Pound was much in evidence, jumping up from his seat in the parterre like a Jack-in-the-box. He was wearing a bright blue shirt, open at the neck, and waggled his red beard at everyone he knew’ (Imbs 1936: 99). And when the expected riot during the Ballet started, Ezra was also the most vociferous. Taking advantage of a momentary lull in the clamour, he jumped to his feet and yelled, ‘Vous êtes tous des imbéciles!’, with the French inflection, although the audience was anything but French. The Ballet was the last Antheil work that Ezra Pound publicly defended. Antheil’s overtly neoclassical symphony showed Ezra that not only was Antheil not able to free himself from Stravinsky’s influence, but that he was simply following Stravinsky at a distance: whereas the Ballet mécanique showed rhythmic and harmonic methods taken from Les Noces, the Symphonie en Fa traced Pulcinella and the Symphonies d’instruments à vent, a fact so evident that the French critics, almost en masse, did not fail to notice it in their frankly adverse criticism. On 29 June it was Pound’s turn, this time at the Salle Pleyel. He opted for an expanded concert version of his opera. When Pound was unable to enlist a contralto, Yves Tinayre, the lead tenor, doubled in the Old Prostitute’s role in falsetto with a shawl draped over his head. Robert Maitland, whom Pound found ‘magnifique’, sang Bozo, the brothel-keeper. The chamber orchestra featured Olga on violin, Jean Dervaux and Edouard Desmoulin on tenor and bass trombones, a clavichord, and a

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Figure 18.5 Programme-invitation, ‘Airs and Fragments from Le Testament’, Salle Pleyel, 29 June 1926. The Maurice J. Speiser Papers, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, Columbia, SC. five-foot cornet de dessus (medieval horn) played by Paul Tinayre, plus Ezra himself on the cymbals. No riots, no departures, and when Yves Tinayre botched the first three songs, once again the public wasn’t much aware of it.47 Thomson’s judgement, often quoted, remains: ‘it was not quite a musician’s music, though it may well be the finest poet’s music since Thomas Campion’ (Thomson 1966: 83). But how many poets have composed music since then (see Figure 18.5)? Pound, however, again seemed satisfied: ‘Dare say it went fairly well = various people seemed to take it’, he commented to Bedford, missing her presence.48 The concerts at the home of Mrs Gross continued: on 2 July, Antheil reprised works from his repertoire, and Thomson introduced his Five Phrases from the Song of Solomon. On the following occasion, on 12 July 1926, Pound gave some of the Villon arias another hearing, this time with Maitland and Olga only (see Figure 18.6). Soon after, Antheil gave the premiere of his Third Violin Sonata, again with Olga. The last concert of the series was a rehearsal of the Ballet mécanique with one pianola, two pianos, three xylophones and full percussion (including a fan with paper inserts, simulating the sound of an airplane propeller, plus electric bells and loudspeakers). The day after, 17 July, the Ballet was given again, for the third time in less than a month, at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées, a minor hall in the same building as the premiere. Bravig Imbs noted that after the concert, Antheil was caught up in a whirl of receptions and teas and parties:

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He seemed depressed, now that he had ‘arrived’, but I sensed it was because his success had not been absolutely world-overwhelming as he had hoped . . . He had wanted the impossible: the position of a Vincent d’Indy or Saint-Saens, although he was not yet thirty. The American society in Paris, fragile and frivolous, was perfectly willing to accord him this position, but they forgot so easily that their assurance meant nothing. (Imbs 1936: 103) Antheil took refuge in Tunis, as always, where he went with Walter Lowenfels, the poet, who in the following years would help him with the libretto of Glare, his next opera project. Antheil’s main dissatisfaction was now Olga’s playing of his own sonatas, to which he had given her exclusive rights. I hev told so many people politically that Olga is the seventh gate of violin playing that Olga doesn’t take the trouble (so it seems TO ME) with my violin music that she did ONCT! . . . Fuck! They’s no use telling people they’re doing swell when they’re just so cockeyed sure they know an old piece that they forget it. You gotta snap’em back into the pace.49 Pound’s interest in Antheil’s music seemed to decrease in the following years, only to be reawakened when George composed a political opera in the style of the

Figure 18.6 Programme, private concert at the home of Mrs Gross (Virginia Harrison), 12 July 1926. Printed with permission from the Estate of Peter R. Antheil/Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Figure 18.7 ‘Three distinguished American composers living in Paris were snapshotted on the terrace of a Left Bank café the other day. All three augur well for the future of American music abroad. They are Ezra Pound, George Antheil and Julian Freedman.’ From the original caption of the Chicago Tribune, 15 October 1926. Press photo retouched, private collection. German Zeitopern, premiered in 1930 in Frankfurt am Main. However, Pound’s activity as concert agent of sorts for Olga continued, and Antheil’s name, with overcrowded concerts almost everywhere, guaranteed her an audience. Pound and his wife had stayed in Paris after the summer season 1926. Dorothy, pregnant, gave birth to Omar on 10 September while Ezra continued his bohemian life with Olga in Paris. The Chicago Tribune published a picture of him with Antheil and Julian Freedman, all of them ‘composers’ (Figure 18.7). Pound then left for Italy, where he tried to organise a new concert for George and, possibly, Olga in Milan. On a protracted vacation, Böske and George arrived in Budapest in December. Here Antheil suddenly put into action a rather undecided plan to give a concert with Olga. He also accepted publisher Donald Friede’s proposal to arrange a concert for him at Carnegie Hall in April, where George would perform the Ballet mécanique, full version. One of the works Antheil wanted as a showcase in New York was his Second Violin Sonata, but he had already decided to dump Olga, even if, quite unexpectedly, at least by Antheil, in Budapest Olga played extremely well. Probably the time spent with her daughter during Christmas gave her new strength, after a year with postnatal depression. On 12 February 1927, George wrote to Friede from Florence that he needed ‘an excellent fiddler’: Kochanski would have been the first choice, but no mention of Olga was made.50 When Ezra discovered that Antheil was going to the States under the

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management of Friede (who was vice-president of Boni and Liveright, Pound’s publisher in the US), he got in direct contact with Friede and took the liberty of suggesting that Olga was the only violinist able to play Antheil’s sonatas. He also provided some good stories to publicise Antheil: for example, that his concert in Budapest with Olga caused discussions and riots outside the building, which went on during the night and gave rise to political demonstrations in front of the Parliament, with 250 people arrested. Of course, these real facts had nothing to do with the concert. The artistic relationship between Antheil and Rudge was deteriorating, even if in Budapest Antheil had started, but not finished, a Sonata for Violin Solo for her. Olga wanted to give a more ‘classical’ concert in Rome without Antheil, and she had already found a good pianist, a graduate composer, pupil of Respighi, Daniele Amfitheatrof.51 Pound agreed with her decision, but left the door open for George, who at the last moment decided to join in, and play his own sonatas. Meanwhile, Antheil had done his best to convince Pound not only to help him, but also to accompany him to America: Listen Ezra, you have been my artistic father and mother and although the physical fighting has been hard now and then because of my slender health I’ve never let you down . . . I feel that there is a chance you might come, Christ knows I hate America, and I don’t know how I shall face it without someone like you to put ’em in place.52 Pound reported the proposal to Olga: ‘Next he Jawg want ME to go to America, as chief HORN. Break it gently to him, that my minimum figure is 10,000 bucks.’53 (Even Pound had a price!) He also asked Olga to ‘turn Marinetti onto Jawg and US (he is an excellent press agent)’54 and, as an afterthought, begged her to tell George not to insult the founder of Futurism, as he could always be useful to them. When the Roman concert came, Pound sent a telegram to the Sala Capizucchi, the ancient hall in a sixteenth-century palace: ‘Auguri viva il fascio.’ (He hoped Mussolini would appear at the concert.)55 Again, Olga received better notices than George did, including from the Italian reviewers. ‘Artista valentissima’, commented one newspaper – ‘a very talented artist’, with sure and ample bowing, and stylistic purity.56 But Mussolini did not attend. Through Lilian Gibson, the Herald’s Rome correspondent, Olga was able to give a private performance later at Mussolini’s private residence. Antheil was already back in Paris, and she played accompanied by Amfitheatrof only. The dictator behaved like a gentlemen, complimenting her, talking about Vivaldi and a Cesare Mussolini, his ancestor composer, in London after 1780. He played for her himself, and Olga found that he did well ‘for an amateur’ (Conover 2001: 71). Ezra probably regretted that Antheil was not there to play his own music to the Duce. In a letter to Bird on 4 March 1927, he gave some background details about the meeting: Muss prefers classics, but O. did what she cd. to pave way for an Antheil audition later, bringing talk round to modern music and machines. The lowdown Greek Rhooshian Amphitheatre tried to crab Gawge and spake contempshus of people who take piano for ‘percussion instrument’. ‘So it is’, sez Muss, taking the wind out of Mons. Circus Minimus. (SL 208)

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On 24 March 1927, Antheil sailed for New York and, while on the boat, he received a telegram from Friede which read, among other things, ‘Pound suggests Rudge essential Stop do you agree = Friede.’57 ‘Rudge has never succeeded in playing second sonata so don’t want her for it Stop’, replied Antheil, on the same day.58 Antheil lost his temper (his outbursts were legendary, but he had always been more guarded with Pound). For crap’s sake, I do not see why you told him that, knowing as well as Olga and me that Olga dont play it. We have tried and we have 3 separate times utterly and completely messed it . . . [Olga is] a fiddler who has no feeling for jazz in a superjazz country no matter how truly superlative she plays my other fiddle music.59 The artists for the concert were already chosen and hired before Antheil even disembarked. Sascha Jacobsen would assist the composer in his sonata for violin, piano and drum. The Ballet mécanique, closing the evening, would be led by Eugene Goossens, with ten live pianists, among them Copland, and with Antheil at the playerpiano. A jumble of articles, interviews and ceremonies would precede and follow, and a complete chronicle of the Carnegie Hall concert would take at least as many pages as the present chapter. What happened is that the ‘Antheil Era’, as Josh Epstein calls it (Epstein 2014a), ended with one of the most colossal fiascos in the history of music, and probably the biggest in the American artistic annals. Too much advance publicity had antagonised the critics, and, moreover, no composition could live up to such expectations. During the concert, a series of accidents distracted the audience’s attention from the music and so did the shadow of Ezra Pound and his Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, both attached to Antheil and his music, as if the two were inseparable. Read, for example, Ford Madox Ford’s Vanity Fair article: Americans should read the poems of Mr. Pound and see that the works of Mr. Antheil are performed often and with applause. That is bound to come some day. It would be well if it came soon – for that would really be the New World redressing the balance of the Old. (Ford 1927: 64) When news of the concert reached Ezra, he observed to Olga: ‘Jawg’s show seems to have gone over BIG as circus; dont think Jacobsen got much out of it, ad. val. mainly on circus.’60 From that circus, and the following slating, Antheil would never recover. He went back to Paris disheartened and broke, as the earnings had only balanced the costs. If life for George went from bad to worse, Olga seemed to be having her moment of glory, especially in Italy, where after a concert with Ernesto Consolo in Florence (on 30 March), she played with Gabriele Bianchi (another pianist-composer) in Venice on 15 July, and privately with Giorgio Levi at the Vittoriale, D’Annunzio’s retreat at Gardone Riviera. In June, Pound was with her in Venice (Dorothy was in London, visiting Omar), and later he himself, alone, descended on Frau Marcher, to find Mary with whooping cough. Later, it was Olga who spent Christmas with the baby, and the week after, she rejoined Ezra. Writing to Agnes Bedford, Pound staunchly promoted Olga (since the 1924 London concert she had ‘put a good deal of work on Mozart. Played with Landowska’, and so on), but he objected to Olga’s musical connections, so much so that he asked Agnes to act as Olga’s accompanist, and if possible manager,

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in England. ‘Antheil is no use save for his own work. Casella too busy, etc. etc. etc. question of offering the tea in packages readily recognized by the publicke.’61 But Olga did not stay often in England, preferring to find an accompanist in Italy or in Austria. In October 1927, she was in Paris, and reported to Ezra on George’s financial condition. Pound tried to relieve Antheil’s worries with a bit of paternal empathy: Of course you’re at a bad time of life, I can more or less remember being that age, no longer the white hope of boy prodigism, and not yet the homme fait. It’s a damn bad quarter of an hour.62 On 28 April 1928, George was in Vienna, where he signed a contract with the Universal Edition publishing house, and Ezra joined him the day after, staying at the Hotel Österreichischer Hof, in Fleischmarkt. Pound couldn’t believe that George had composed the ‘jazz opera’ he was announcing. He spent more than a month with Antheil, carving out for himself another occasion to spend some time with Olga, who reached them in a few days. In Vienna, Pound was looking for a contralto able to tackle the character of Heaulmière in Le Testament, and he found her in Emmy Heim, for whom he made a copy of the Testament aria. She seemed to think she could have a small orchestra at her disposal for one of her autumn concerts, and moreover she was ‘capable of reading Jawg’s fancy notation’.63 Encouraged by her willingness, Ezra thought of a new setting ‘for 4 or 5 instruments (oboe, cello, contrabass, – in place of harpsichord.) + to get a bit more orchestre or instrumental practice’.64 Pound found Vienna most congenial, it seems. He visited many intellectuals, sought out books by Leo Frobenius (his latest ‘discovery’), and even released an interview where he declared his love for the city and the hope of finding there what he could not find in Rapallo: My art is a synthesis of literature and music. That is why I have always looked for literary and, on the other hand, musical milieus. After I have found in Rapallo a place of poetry, I hope to discover here with you the ideal musical ambience. . . . I want to work with Vienna. (Pound 1928b: 6, 7; my translation) An unforgettable encounter (6 June 1928) was that with Arthur Schnitzler, who opened the doors of his Viennese house to his niece, Böske, when she joined Ezra and George in June. The old writer showed much interest in the Parisian literary scene and was very curious about the Surrealists, but disappointed Ezra by not knowing he was a writer too: ‘Well, don’t be discouraged. – concluded Schnitzler – I published at least ten books before anyone took any notice of me at all.’ (Antheil [1945] 1990: 218) George and Ezra got along well again. Less successful was Olga’s venture in the Austrian capital. It is unclear if she was looking for an accompanist or a teacher, but in both cases, she did not impress with her technique, or her reliability and consistency in performance. Antheil’s plan was to have Olga join him in some concerts of a German tour he was planning, even if Olga had chosen another pianist, the young Lili Kraus, as possible accompanist. Pound was even ready to pay for Olga’s concerts in Vienna and Berlin, but she decided to take some lessons with Eduard Steuermann, a famous pianist, pupil of Busoni and Schönberg. Steuermann, however, advised the

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agency against Miss Rudge. He didn’t like her playing, and did not consider her ready for a tour. Going to Steuermann (Antheil wrote to Pound after he and Olga had left) was a mistake: ‘She should have remained the great, secret, wonderful violinist, simply visiting Vienna for fun.’65 Olga returned to Venice, a place she liked very much, and then travelled to Capri with a friend. She had many plans for concerts and Pound did not tell her of Antheil’s explicit warnings. He advised her to stop playing with George – or George’s music – and concentrate on possible concerts in London, where her connection was Harriet Cohen. Cohen, one of the leading pianists of Great Britain, would have made a wonderful duo with Olga, especially as a psychological support to Olga’s love affair with Ezra, Harriet being in the same relationship with married composer Arnold Bax (she would be his lover for forty years). But Olga preferred enjoying life in Capri, sometimes flirting with young men unaware of her liaison with Pound, trying to make Ezra a bit jealous – to no avail, it seems. She was thirty-three, and her musical career had not yet taken off. Even her father wrote from Ohio, asking how much he could send her to finance a professional appearance in the United States. But she preferred to use his money to buy a little three-storey house in Venice, at 252 Calle Querini, where she would live the rest of her life. Pound, in the meantime, leaned on Olga to improve her technique, and she piquantly replied that one cannot master technique in six weeks. This time it was Olga who was the object of Pound’s ire: ‘If it takes one month to produce a photogenique plastique of the abdomen, how long does it take to produce a technique trascendentale du violon?’66 But Olga could not study on command. Simply, she had not enough peace of mind to accomplish anything in other people’s houses, or hotels, and especially when she was unhappy due to her love for a married, narcissistic poet. There was almost a break between the two, with accusations of female vampirism on one side, and indifference on the other. When the planned tour waned, Antheil asked Hans Heinsheimer, his publisher and friend at Universal, to take care of a possible concert tour with Olga. Everything now depended on the success of Antheil’s opera, answered Heinsheimer. While waiting for its premiere, in February 1929, George and his wife went down to Rapallo, having definitely abandoned Paris and their nice apartment in Rue de l’Odéon. Richard Aldington recounted the event: George Antheil turned up . . . and for a day Ezra vanished. Meeting him after lunch next day I asked where he had been, and he answered importantly that he had been ‘in conference’ with Antheil; adding with impressive gravity that he had been amazed to find that the two greatest minds in Europe had been thinking on the same lines. (Aldington 1941: 336) Two days later, Antheil collapsed while walking, due to exhaustion, overwork and bronchitis. He was put to bed while Böske looked for an apartment of their own, which she later found in Via Paolo Zunino 6. Rapallo was then full to the brim with writers and poets; not only the permanent residents, such as the Nobel Prize winners Gerhart Hauptmann and William Butler Yeats, or Max Beerbohm, but also Emil Ludwig, Basil Bunting, Franz Werfel and Richard Aldington with Brigit Patmore. While lying in bed, George found a brilliant way to prepare New York for his possible

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comeback (with Transatlantic, the new title for Glare, which was then submitted to the Metropolitan) and at the same time to remove a pebble from his shoe which had been bothering him for almost two years: Donald Friede, whom he thought responsible for his New York fiasco. Maybe it was Pound who finally suggested the expedient of a ‘propaganda novel’. So George set himself to write a detective novel.67 In the course of the book, which was read and corrected by many of the aforementioned writers, all of them crime novel aficionados, Antheil managed to kill Friede’s mother, his wife and his brother, as well as a psychiatrist (Louis Berman) whom he had met in New York through the Friedes. The novel, Death in the Dark, written under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, and recently republished, had wonderful cathartic effects on George, who, after that, was able to compose the incidental music for Yeats’s Fighting the Waves, in time for its opening in August (Piccinini 2016: 183–92). Olga, from Venice, encouraged Ezra to profit from George’s presence and the arrival of the Dolmetsch clavichord, recently delivered from London to Rapallo, to get the Villon into shape so that it could be handed to a conductor. Pound assured her that he had consented ‘to let Jawg do the Villon and Jawg has agreed on condition that I be handcuffed at dress rehearsal etc.’.68 A few days later he added: ‘We settled some problemz of german production. Spoken prolog etc. yesterday.’69 George, however, had much revising to do for his own Transatlantic, for Fighting the Waves and, during odd moments, for his crime novel, too. Pound left Rapallo at the end of March for Venice, where he (probably) stayed with Olga at the Pensione Seguso. From Venice they moved to Paris, stopping in Rapallo, where George took some shots of an elegant Olga in a cloche hat, posing on the dock (Figure 18.8). When, finally, news reached George that the opera had been accepted for performance in May of the following year, during the famous Frankfurt State Opera festival, his life became (more than ever) a whirl of travels, meetings, discussions. He spent Christmas in the States, where he met John Erskine, pianist and writer, who would collaborate on his next opera, Helen Retires. Erskine was chosen for ‘political’ reasons, as he was also the President of the Juilliard School of Music, where Antheil thought he could gain money, prestige and performances.

Figure 18.8 Olga Rudge posing on the docks of Rapallo, April 1929. Enlarged frame taken from an Antheil family movie, 9.5 mm. Printed with permission from the Estate of Peter R. Antheil.

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The situation for Olga worsened after the stock market’s so-called Black Friday (28 October 1929), which affected her father too. With her allowance curtailed, she would have to rely on concerts and violin lessons to support herself. Ezra was pulling back, if not withdrawing entirely, from the relationship, preferring to send cheques for Mary, which sometimes proud Olga did not cash. Not for the first time, she considered suicide (Conover 2001: 91). Ezra too was not feeling well, and became cantankerous and misogynous. However, when he recovered, he climbed up to Sant’Ambrogio, a hamlet of Zoagli, overlooking the same Gulf of Tigullio as Rapallo, where he found a cottage for Olga. From then on, for many months a year, Olga would reside there, less than one hour’s walk from Via Marsala (Conover 2001: 86–102). Finally, Transatlantic was being rehearsed. This time publicity was supervised by Universal Edition, where they did not like the scandal-seeking blurbs so typical of the American press. Antheil had to be more prudent, so he warned Pound not to feed the newspapers anything about its being a political satire. ‘However, do say something, fer Crap’s sake. Tell ’em America aint treated me right.’70 Even if he did not want scandal, Antheil had nothing against a clique of friends coming to watch and applaud on the first night, 25 May, but they had to conform to Antheil’s diktat: No American should attract attention to himself in the audience. No American should begin the clapping if any, but should take their cue from the Germans. Don’t clap to demonstrate in any way after the first act. They shouldn’t speak too darned much English in the foyers between acts.71 On 20 May, Pound reached Frankfurt and stayed at the Hotel Excelsior, where the Antheils also lodged. The opera was, evidently, Antheil’s last hope of conquering Europe and finding a place for himself in the history of music. Being a Zeitoper, an opera of modern times, and dealing with the election of the President, it was a satire which reflected his experience in the United States. Such operas were well accepted in Germany, where political sensibility was growing in accord with the exacerbated debate between left and right. The first night was a success, and there were more than twenty curtain calls at the end, but, when the Americans left, there were only three repeat performances, and during these, the public remained mostly cold, or divided. Perhaps the work was too far ahead of its times; in any case, it had been a personal success for George among the American expatriates. For Pound, instead, the opera sounded like an additional step backwards, from neoclassicism to neoromanticism (he termed this popular influence the ‘Spewchini’). Most obviously, all Antheil’s promises about concerts with Olga, violin concertos, violin sonatas and so on, ended up on the scrap heap (at least for George). In August 1930, Antheil moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, a little spot in the south of France where he could live on nothing. He invited Pound to visit and solicited his opinion on possible librettos for his next opera. When Antheil insisted on Pound’s judgement about Louis Aragon’s libretto for Faust III, Pound lost his temper, and his answer was vitriolic: ‘As fer advisors!!! the val. of advice depends somewhat on whether it is taken or left on shelf in bottle.’72 He also heavily criticised Antheil’s own attempt at a libretto, Candide, after Voltaire. It was a personal criticism, a sign of lost temper. The ‘ole favver’ had hoped his ‘son’ would grow up as his musical doppelgänger, but it did not work out.

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Don’t be a GOD DAMN IDIOT . . . . Until you can set at least ONE line of rhythmic language to music you are unlikely to be able to set 40 pages. I incidentally have several things to occupy my time and have none of the latter to spend on people who are dead set in a course that does not interest me.73 But Antheil didn’t let himself be pushed around, and answered with his own reasoning: As I ain’t never tried to set booteeful rhythmic language to moosik . . . not even one page, and you haint ever seen any attempts of mine to set beeooteefool ri-it-muck langwidge to mooskik. . . . I consider your criticism of me libbyretto, which you aint read, and me beeootifool ryoimithical languwidge music, which I aint writ yet. . . . PREMATOOR. . . . Well fer crap’s sake, Ez, pull yrself together.74 In looking over piles of librettos he had received during his quest for a collaborator, Antheil had been struck with the predominance of ‘literature’, and the absolute minimum of ‘theater’. He tried to explain to Pound: It is not words! words! As you write me . . . but theater! theater! I understand that this will come unsympathetically to you for a number of reasons, chief among which are the fact that you have written one of the swellest untheatrical operas ever written. I do not chide you. It is a point of view. My point of view is another. . . . I am damned sorry, as I felt from the beginning that you would be one person who would and might understand this new operatic movement, and help it, if you but tried.75 There was nothing more Antheil could do to salvage their relationship, first humanly, then artistically (for Pound the two things were more intimately related than for Antheil). In April 1931, George and Böske sailed to New York, where they spent the rest of the year, therefore missing the BBC broadcast of Pound’s Villon from London (in a patchwork of different versions, as the orchestra declared Antheil’s score unplayable). Olga was in Rapallo then, after a whole year of struggles, partly relieved economically by two last drafts for one thousand francs each from her father, and the help of some old friends, such as the Princesse de Polignac, who engaged her to play Bach and Schumann privately in Venice. However, it was not enough to make ends meet, and Pound found her some translation jobs (beginning with Cocteau’s Le mystère laïc). After a year of silence, spent back in the US, where he had now received the longawaited Guggenheim Fellowship ($2,500, renewed for 1932–3 for half that sum), Antheil arose from nowhere with a telegram to Pound: ‘Offer Olga tour next season five hundred dollars garanteed [sic] and boat rail expenses paid.’76 Pound immediately wrote back with a more mild-mannered opening than in some of his last letters: Dearly beloved bro/ Was glad to hear you hadd got a Gugg. (high time) Re/ telegram recd. this a.m. which I am forwarding to the lady.77

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Olga cabled acceptance, but admitted doubts about Antheil: ‘I am not filled with great confidence in Mr. Antheil – I have noticed his good intentions with me usually coincide with some service he wants “you” to render him.’78 But the proposal had no strings attached. Antheil answered all of Ezra’s and Olga’s doubts: she would be guaranteed her boat fare, round-trip, plus all train fares incurred during the concert tour. The tour was to take place the following spring, with profits to be split 50:50. At the end of June, George travelled back to Cagnes, where he invited Olga to discuss the plan of rehearsals to be held. During Antheil’s absence, Olga had been very active, constantly practising, and Ezra wrote her a Ghuidonis sonata for solo violin, which she premiered at a teatime concert in Paris (Conover 2001: 104). Pound had new musical friends, most notably the Hungarian violist, violinist and composer Tibor Serly and the German pianist Gerhart Münch, who lived in Rapallo for a time during the 1930s. Serly had a very negative opinion of Antheil, and defined him as a ‘petty improvisator [who] has never even mastered elementary academic harmonic structures . . . Rhythmically he has even less to say, and does not even monkey Stravinsky, Bartok, or Jazz-rhythms with any understanding.’79 Did Serly’s point of view affect Ezra Pound’s opinion of Antheil? Probably, as Serly was the first composer who had gained his respect for his active knowledge of music and his help with Pound’s own compositions, and who, simultaneously, was not seen as the ‘enemy’, or as old-fashioned. Serly visited Pound and brought to Rapallo another Hungarian, Géza Frid, a pianist and composer (both were pupils of Zoltán Kodály). Olga visited the Antheils, finding them ‘both much improved + very stimulating – after my winter social circle. . . . George full of good intentions + proper sentiments – Tu ne voudrai pas venire ici for a week? Don’t swear!’80 Ezra instructed her not to talk about Frid and Serly, or to mention their visit to him. She complied and asked if Ezra would object if she could ‘wangle ride back [to Rapallo] in Antheils car? They are anxious to see you.’81 George and Böske’s 1932 visit to Rapallo was, it seems, the last time they saw Pound before the war.82 Antheil remained in Cagnes-sur-Mer until August 1933, when the political and artistic situation in Europe changed. Nothing ever came of the planned American tour for Olga. When his yearly subsidy from the Guggenheim Foundation expired, and the premiere of his Helen Retires approached, Antheil sailed for New York alone. At the earliest opportunity, Pound sent him a clipping of the Turin daily La Stampa, where Olga’s playing in the first ‘Concerto del Tigullio’ was much lauded. Ezra was proud: Our friend was plain’ on a dud fiddle but she has what she hadn’t years ago in Vienna, namely a technique. . . . Two days later our friend ran over yr/ I st. snoter, yester. GOD DAMN IT/ THAT was the right road and you are b/y BBBBBBBBBB/DDDDDYYY idiot not to go along in that direction.83 In Rapallo during that summer of 1933, Pound had started a series of concerts, which he would go on to organise during the rest of the decade. After the success of a first Mozart Week, the mayor offered Pound and his friends, including Rudge and

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Münch, the use of the great new Rapallo Town Hall. A new decade opened for Ezra and Olga, but Antheil was no longer the third element of the triangle. Olga continued her social and concert life and, in September, she was invited to the Settimana Musicale Senese, an international music festival held annually at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. The contact with the Academy proved very useful: in 1933, she became its administrative secretary, in which position she would be able to make the most of her fluent French and Italian, her knowledge of music and musicians. From the States, Antheil still wrote letters, asking Pound’s advice when his opera Helen Retires flopped at the Juilliard School in New York. In 1937, Antheil ‘helped’ Olga with her request for a Guggenheim Fellowship: writing to the Foundation’s secretary, he declared his esteem for Olga, calling her ‘a very fine violinist’ and ‘a very fine musician’, but adding: ‘She also often plays for Mussolini privately, although I should hardly call this a recommendation. It shows you nevertheless the high esteem in which Europe holds her.’84 She did not get the subsidy. After that, no more letters between the three of them, except for an exchange in 1937, and a last letter from Ezra, dated 8 January 1938, where Pound commented on Gershwin, and scolded Antheil: ‘even soivunt goils thinks the bloke who writes about glands CAN’T be the same Antheil’.85 This and other misunderstandings prompted Antheil to write about his relationship with Pound as a misconceived one: Ezra was never to have even the slightest idea of what I was really after in music. I honestly don’t think he wanted to have. I think he merely wanted to use me as a whip with which to lash out at all those who disagreed with him, particularly Anglo-Saxons; I would be all the more effective in this regard because I was an ‘unrecognized American’. (Antheil [1945] 1990: 120) By 1936, however, Olga had already begun her Vivaldi research, which led to a Vivaldi renaissance in Italy. Her job at the Accademia was steady, and Ezra and Dorothy, after Olivia Shakespear’s death, were relatively rich, and did not need to work. Ezra could write his Cantos almost undisturbed. Things changed with the war, as we know, and with Pound’s Fascist propaganda. The Paris years were then distant, as was George Antheil in Hollywood. The latter worked steadily in the film industry until 1940, when he had a second and bigger personal and artistic crisis, partly due to the death in the war of his beloved brother Henry Jr. Antheil became increasingly dissatisfied with his music and preferred going on writing articles, working for the radio and even inventing a radio-controlled torpedo with actress Hedy Lamarr (Rhodes 2011). During the last year of the war, he started to compose again, although in a more romantic and popular vein. As Virgil Thomson noted, his own estimate of George as ‘the first composer of our generation’ was not justified, since ‘it turned out eventually that for all his facility and ambition, there was in him no power of growth’ (Thomson 1966: 82). The Ballet mécanique, which Antheil revised in 1953, remained his most original piece, a piece of the Pound Era. When Pound was transferred to Washington, in November 1945, he discovered that Antheil had just published his autobiography. To Dorothy he commented: ‘Antheil still advertised as the bad boy of music. – yester snows’ (L/DP 211).

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Notes 1. Notable exceptions are Henderson (1983), Templeton (2009) and Epstein (2014a, 2014b). 2. We find a touching witness of these feelings in Böske Antheil’s incomplete and unpublished autobiography written in the 1960s: ‘George still had his asthma and one afternoon, while he was walking with Ezra, he fainted. Ezra picked him up like he were a child (George was quite a bit shorter than he) and carried him to the local doctor just around the corner’ (typescript draft; Library of Congress, George and Böske Antheil Papers, 17/2, p. 13). 3. Ezra Pound to Dorothy Pound, 28 June 1923. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. III, box 1. 4. One drawn from the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, and the other based on Lord Byron’s Cain. See Piccinini (2002). 5. ‘Murphy experimenting with cinema camera here, when awake’ (Ezra Pound to Dorothy Pound, 28 October 1923. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. III, box 1). Information about shooting in Lachmann’s studio appears in Murphy (1966?: 44). 6. Here is a transcription of the programme: ‘Gaucelm Faidit. Plainte pour la mort du Roi Richard Coeur de Lion, ed. Ezra Pound; 2) J. S. Bach. Gavotte; 3) Ezra Pound. Sujet pour violon (resineux) 4) George Antheil. I-ère Sonate pour violon et piano. Première audition. 5) W. A. Mozart. Concerto en la majeur, transcribed for violin and piano; 6) George Antheil. 2-ème Sonate pour violon et piano. Première audition’ (EPM 249). 7. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 22 December 1923. YCAL MSS 54 1/2 8. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, [December 1923]. YCAL MSS 54 1/3. They often met in rue Chamfort, in Olga’s apartment. See Figure 18.3. 9. Ezra Pound to Agnes Bedford, 21 February 1924. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II, box 1. 10. The two operas were performed on 24, 25 and 27 April, together with Henri Sauguet’s operetta Le plumet du colonel. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, 24 April 1924. YCAL MSS 54/7. Pound thought well enough of Medgyes to suggest him to Ford as an ideal contributor to the transatlantic review. 11. I owe much of the information about Olga Rudge’s life to Conover (2001), particularly her chapter 5: ‘A Marriage That Didn’t Happen. 1924–1926’, pp. 50–69. 12. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, [26 April 1924]. YCAL MSS 54 1/8. 13. Ezra Pound to Agnes Bedford, 29 April 1924. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II, box 1. 14. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, 4 May [1924]. YCAL MSS 54 1/8. 15. W. R. A., ‘Yesterday’s Music / A Futurist Composer and his Audience’, The Observer, London, n.d. [11 May 1924], Library of Congress, George and Böske Antheil Papers, Scrapbooks, box 35. 16. Ibid. 17. ‘Weekend Concerts: Miss Rudge and Mr. Antheil’, The Times (London), 12 May 1927, p. 9. 18. Agnes Bedford to Ezra Pound, [c. 12 May 1923]. YCAL MSS 178 1/2. 19. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 29 October 1924. YCAL MSS 54 1/16. 20. Respectively Tu soi [sic] nel fiore della tua bellezza (Convitortio) and Madame trop vos me spremes (Le Duc de Bourgogne), Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, MS 431 (formerly G 20). The transcriptions, as for all of Pound’s violin music, can be found in Pound (2005b). 21. Announced only as Quatuor à cordes on the programme, it was later destroyed, or probably reworked as Antheil’s First String Quartet (1925). 22. ‘Futurist Music Heard in Paris’, Paris Times, 8 July 1924. 23. Earlier during May or June Antheil composed for Olga another little solo violin piece called Printemps. 24. George Antheil to Olga Rudge, 7 September 1924. YCAL MSS 54 33/915.

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25. Pound published his ‘Notes for Performers’ by ‘William Atheling’, with marginalia by George Antheil, in transatlantic review 1:2 (February 1924), pp. 111–15; 1:5 (May 1924), pp. 370–3; 2:2 (August 1924), pp. 222–5. Antheil printed his article ‘Mother of the Earth’, transatlantic review 2:2 (August 1924), pp. 226–7; ‘Fanelli’, transatlantic review 2:5 (November 1924), pp. 563–5, plus a letter to the editor, p. 558. 26. Signed ‘Boské Markus’, dated ‘Budapest, 1924’ and published in the transatlantic review 1:3 (March 1924), pp. 105–8. 27. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, [c. 20 December 1924]. YCAL MSS 54 1/25. 28. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, 24 May 1924. YCAL MSS 54 1/12. 29. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 19 April 1925. YCAL MSS 54 1/31. 30. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [c. 13 June 1925]. YCAL MSS 43 2/69. 31. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 18 May 1925. YCAL MSS 54 2/34. A confession that casts light on Pound’s mechanism of projection towards the younger American composer. 32. The two works were performed together publicly, as far as we know, only in 1931, but only the first roll was used. 33. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [c. 10 August 1925]. YCAL MSS 43 2/69. 34. Ezra Pound to William Bird, 15 August 1925. Lilly Library, Bird, W. MSS. 35. Chicago Tribune (Paris edition), 25 September 1925, p. 1. 36. George Antheil to Sylvia Beach, [telegram from Trieste], 25 September 1925. Princeton University, Sylvia Beach Papers, 1/35. 37. George Antheil to Olga Rudge, [8 November 1925]. YCAL MSS 54 33/916. 38. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 14 November 1925. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. 39. Programme contained in the catalogue of the exhibition organised by Fernand Léger, inaugurated with music by Antheil (Violin Sonatas 1 and 2 with Olga Rudge, plus Ballet mécanique in a pianola-only version) and Jacques Benoist-Méchin. 40. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 3 December 1925. YCAL MSS 54 2/47. 41. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [c. 13 May 1925]. YCAL MSS 43 2/70. 42. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 12 March 1927. YCAL MSS 54 3/58. ‘1st snat. might be given as “Il triunfo [sic] del FASCIO”.’ 43. Virginia Randolph Harrison (1901–93) had married Christian Channing Gross (1895–1933), a war hero and diplomat, in Algiers in 1922. After her divorce from Gross, in 1928, she married Marius de Zayas (1880–1961), a Mexican artist, writer and art gallery owner. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Crocker, was a celebrated railroad tycoon. But in her lineage there was also Oliver Cromwell's general Thomas, Lord Fairfax, while her father, Francis Burton Harrison, as governor general of the Philippine Islands under the Wilson presidency, had prepared and made possible Philippine independence. 44. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 16 May 1926. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. 45. Joyce probably liked the song Mort j’apelle, because in 1930 he gave it to John Sullivan to sing at a concert in Dublin in April 1930 (Lucia Joyce to Ezra Pound, 22 February 1930. YCAL MSS 43 26/1114; and Ezra Pound to Dorothy Pound, 20 April [1930]. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. III). 46. I sum up here Pound’s extensive correspondence with Bedford: letters of 26 November, 27 December 1925, 7 and 21 January, 1 February, 8 or 9 April, 3 and 29 June 1926. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II. 47. Ezra Pound to Agnes Bedford, 30 June 1926. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II, box 1. 48. Ibid. 49. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, 13 August 1926. YCAL MSS 43 2/70. 50. George Antheil to Donald Friede, 12 February 1927. YCAL MSS 838/15. 51. Amfitheatrof (1901–83) was another pianist-composer, and would later become Antheil’s colleague in Hollywood. 52. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, 11 February 1927. YCAL MSS 43 2/71.

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pound, antheil and rudge 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

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Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 12 March 1927 (2nd letter). YCAL MSS 54 3/82. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 16 February 1927. YCAL MSS 54 3/83. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 19 February 1927. YCAL MSS 54 3/84. Olga Rudge alla Sala Capizucchi, clipping without source or date [but 20 February 1927]. Library of Congress, George and Böske Antheil Papers, Scrapbooks, 36/1. Donald Friede to George Antheil, 25 February 1927. Princeton, Sylvia Beach Papers, 1/37. George Antheil to Donald Friede, 25 February 1927. Princeton, Sylvia Beach Papers, 1/37. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, on board the R.M.S. Ascania [c. 26 February 1927], YCAL MSS 43 2/71. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 22 April 1927. YCAL MSS 54 4/94. Ezra Pound to Agnes Bedford, 22 January 1928. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II, box 1. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 30 October 1927 (I Letter). Lilly Library, Pound MSS. box 1. Ezra Pound to Dorothy Pound, 21 May [1928]. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. III, box 2. Ezra Pound to Dorothy Pound, 31 May [1928]. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. III, box 2. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [c. 9 July 1928]. YCAL MSS 43 2/72. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 28 July 1928. YCAL MSS 54 6/154. T. S. Eliot was also a passionate whodunnit lover, and he would champion the book at Faber in 1930. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, [8 March 1929]. YCAL MSS 54 8/186. Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 11 March [1929]. YCAL MSS 54 8/187. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [20 April 1930]. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II, box 1. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [9 May 1930]. YCAL MSS 53 1/18. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 3 September [1930]. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 26 November [1930]. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [c. 29 November 1930]. YCAL MSS 43 2/73. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, [c. 30 December 1930]. YCAL MSS 43 2/73. George Antheil to Ezra Pound, 1 May 1932, enclosed in Ezra Pound to Olga Rudge, 2 May 1932. YCAL MSS 54 12/312. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 2 May 1932. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, 7 May 1932. YCAL MSS 54 12/313. Tibor Serly to Ezra Pound, 31 December 1931. YCAL MSS 43 48/2096. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, 1 August 1933. YCAL MSS 54 13/320. Olga Rudge to Ezra Pound, 4 August 1933. YCAL MSS 54 13/320. Böske visited Olga and Ezra in Venice sometime around the end of the 1960s, almost ten years after George’s untimely death. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 29 June 1933. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. George Antheil to Henry Allen Moe, 7 September 1937. John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Archives, New York. Ezra Pound to George Antheil, 8 January 1938. Lilly Library, Antheil MSS. Endocrinology and glandular criminology were two of the many Antheil’s hobbies. He published not only Every Man his Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology (1937) but also a series of articles for Esquire and a syndicated column (Boy Advises Girl).

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19 ‘Like Coins out of Circulation’: Reframing Ezra Pound’s LE TESTAMENT Scott W. Klein

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n hearing Ezra Pound’s opera Le Testament, American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson wrote, ‘The music was not quite a musician’s music, though it may well be the finest poet’s music since Thomas Campion . . . it bore family resemblances unmistakable to the Socrate of Satie; and its sound has remained in my memory’ (Thomson 2016: 257). When noticed by critics at all, Le Testament has been treated as poet’s music, understood largely in the context of Pound’s techniques with language, rather than in the more general context of opera and technical innovation in music. Almost alone among commentators, Daniel Albright has suggested a musical lineage for Pound that stretches from Schönberg (the non-repetitive Sprechstimme of Erwartung) to the contemporary medievalisms of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (Albright 2000: 143, 148). Yet Pound’s opera can be seen as blending several of his aesthetic and thematic interests: in the poète maudit, in the circulation of value, in aesthetics, economics and artistic influence. The opera engages with the content of Villon’s late medieval poetry, while also presenting Pound’s attempt, with the notational help of composer George Antheil in the now-published score revised in 1923 from the 1921 original, to create a work of music theatre that blends contemporary avant-garde compositional practices with Pound’s own ideas about rhythmic text setting. Pound’s innovations, as both Albright and Charles Mundye suggest (Mundye 2008), draw upon practices that were active in the musical avant-garde of the 1920s, such as fragmentation of vocal lines and Webernian atomistic musical accompaniments, but blended with techniques that Pound found in his studies of medieval troubadour songs from centuries earlier than the time of Villon. In both technique and theme Le Testament explores the relationship of the present to the past. And in exploring the poet’s relation to the past and to tradition – even to the then-emerging traditions of avant-garde musical innovation – Pound and Antheil, largely unnoticed by mainstream composers, intervened in the thematic practices of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera. By creating a rhythmically hyper-complex form of poetic setting, Pound intervened in the musical practices of twentieth-century word setting and, with Antheil’s help, also prefigured formal innovations in the rhythmic notation of concert music.

Pound and Villon Villon’s poetic interests, and his cultural status in his own time, must have struck Pound as prefigurations of his own. Just a few years beyond the period of Vorticism,

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Pound no doubt saw the French poet as an early exemplar of the bard as outsider, one whose work blended lyric beauty and formal rhyme schemes with, at times, extreme scabrousness. Villon may have seen himself, as literary history came to see him, as a figure on the borderline between two poetic periods and sensibilities. He marked a transition from the heroic sensibility of medieval poetry to a mode of realism and attention to the everyday new to the early Renaissance. Much as Pound may have considered himself to be a kind of classicist purged of Romanticism, but with an affiliation to the beauties of the past, he wrote of Villon: ‘He is utterly mediaeval, yet his poems mark the end of the mediaeval literature’ (SR 170–1). Villon’s Testament, the basis for the libretto, is structured as the product of a poetic sensibility purging itself of lingering nostalgia. Villon begins the poem in the received medieval genre of the ubi sunt, contemplating the loss to time of the noble and mythic pasts. He then predicts the losses of both his life and his meagre possessions, and finally imagines his mock testament, passing on to his friends – mostly drinking companions and prostitutes – a comical set of mainly worthless legacies. These seem, from twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury perspectives, to leap well beyond the sensibility of the Renaissance, becoming something like antecedents to the worthless object legacies of Irish novelist Samuel Beckett’s modernist vagabond Molloy. Villon’s Testament moves from the high register of the past to the low register of the present, ever gesturing towards the ambiguous status of the presumed future. Villon’s poem emphasises the movement between the beauties of the past and the losses of the future, the migration of poetic genres and registers from noble to popular forms and subjects, and the sense of being on the cusp between different eras and styles. Pound’s opera, with its juxtaposition of Walter Rummel’s speculative reconstruction of a thirteenth-century chanson and mock-medieval drinking songs, addresses similar poetic and stylistic concerns. Although his libretto discards the details of most of Villon’s listings of bequests to friends, Pound’s opera raises some of the aesthetic questions implicit in Villon’s poem: in a time of transition of poetic sensibilities and ways of life, what beauties have been lost? What beauties, perhaps, must be lost? Can the scabrous poète maudit transform those losses into future beauties? Pound explicitly ends the opera with a chorus of hanged men, a text he borrowed from a separate poem by Villon, in which the dead implore the men of the future not to judge them harshly. This textual addition underlines the question implicitly posed by the adaptation as a whole. Can the poet/amateur composer leave new techniques and beauties to the future? If so, how will they be received?

Le Testament in Musical Context These questions have obvious echoes in Pound’s early poetic projects. His translations from the Anglo-Saxon, his moving away from the strictures of blank verse, even the extreme vulgarity of ‘Salutation the Third’, the early poem he published in 1914 in Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist journal BLAST, show these interests. But what of musical history? Pound’s interest in Villon and in the earlier medieval music of the troubadours occurred in several intersecting musical contexts. Villon had attracted the attention of European musicians, particularly in France, as a source for song settings. Composers in Pound’s early modernist ambit who had set Villon’s poetry included most notably Debussy, but also André Jolivet and the Dutch composer Bernard Van Dieren. There

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are even early song settings, in 1921, by Olivier Messiaen.1 At the same time, from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s, musical culture was undergoing a series of other rebellions and rediscoveries. In Britain, the medieval music of Provence was being rediscovered by musicologists such as Ford Madox Ford’s father Francis Hueffer; Peter Heseltine (also known as Peter Warlock) began to reclaim the Renaissance song; Pound himself had collaborated on two editions of medieval songs, with Walter Morse Rummel on Hesternae Rosae (1913) and with Agnes Bedford, who also assisted him with the notation of the original 1921 score of Le Testament, on Five Troubadour Songs (1920). Arnold Dolmetsch, about whom Pound wrote several approving magazine articles in The New Age, revived interest in building early Baroque instruments such as the clavichord, a specimen of which Pound owned. (This increased interest in early British music may be seen in such places as Stephen Dedalus’s apparent interest in Dolmetsch, Dowland, Farnaby, Byrd and Bull in James Joyce’s Ulysses; Joyce 1986: 540.) These currents emphasised specifically medieval and Renaissance music. By the 1920s, however, there was a pervasive neoclassical rebellion against the Romantic inflations of nineteenth-century music by composers such as Igor Stravinsky and his epigone, and Pound’s musical collaborator, George Antheil; both took Baroque and classical forms and harmonies as models for a new kind of modern music. In these contexts, Pound’s yoking together the urban and Parisian Villon with musical ideas based in the earlier Middle Ages of the south of France served not only as a rebellion against music of the Romantic past, but also as an idiosyncratic intervention into the highly selective ways in which his contemporary musical culture was rediscovering the old and making it once again new. If Villon could be represented through musical allusions both familiar and foreign to his own milieu, why could the modern – and non-Parisian – world not be illuminated through Villon? Even calling his Villon setting an ‘opera’ was itself a provocation. Le Testament is more of a staged song-cycle than a real opera. While Pound creates ‘characters’ who sing parts of Villon’s text that in the original poem appear as Villon’s own, or his projected, voice (such as Ythier, Heaulmiere and the Brothel Keeper), these ‘characters’ are simply excuses for different voices to declaim different parts of the text rather than fully imagined characters. Calling his work an ‘opera’ forces the listener to understand Pound’s stark text settings as rebelling not only against earlier settings of Villon by the likes of Debussy, but also against the pervasive faux-medievalisms of English late Victorian poetry (by, say, Swinburne) and art (by the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris), and also against the entire history of opera. From the time of André Grétry, opera used scenarios drawing heavily upon romanticised versions of medieval life, particularly stories of the nobility. Many masterpieces of nineteenth-century opera, from Wagner to Verdi, were set in medieval or early Renaissance times, in some cases (as in Verdi’s Il Trovatore [1853] and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg [1868]) drawing explicitly upon the figure of the troubadour and upon singing competition. In this context, Pound’s non-narrative style, choice of idiosyncratic instrumentation and pervasive use of non-repetitive homophony stand in stark contrast even to revisionist operatic tradition. Indeed, the immediate inspiration for Le Testament was Pound’s negative reaction to an opera that was itself a claimed reaction against Wagnerianism, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). Although Debussy intended Pelléas to be an antidote to Wagnerian pomp, Pound still found its lushness, and its literary origin in the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, unbearable. He wrote to Agnes Bedford

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in April 1921: ‘am encouraged – encouraged to tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do the thing if necessary on two tins and wash-board. Anything rather than that mush of hysteria, Scandinavia strained through Belgium plus French Schwärmerei’ (SL 167).

Musical Innovation Tearing up harmony by reducing it to a bare minimum, and limiting the vertical aspects of music to vocal lines that are in turn only occasionally reinforced by a nonstandard combination of instruments, are Pound’s twin musical innovations in Le Testament. Other composers had already experimented with non-standard instruments and ensembles, if not quite Pound’s nose flutes and African drums. These include the typewriter, foghorn and pistol that Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau included in the score for Parade (1917), the unprecedented ensemble and means of vocal production in Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), even Stravinsky’s use of percussion and multiple pianos – an instrument that Pound loathed – in his Les Noces (1923). But Pound’s radicalism derived from a different and significantly more cross-disciplinary origin. He wanted to reclaim what he saw as the basic relationship between speech and rhythm that had been lost to centuries of Western music, and at the same time to make that reclamation the source of a newly modern music that could stand side by side with the previous decades’ innovations in the plastic arts. As he wrote explicitly in his Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, ‘The Vorticist Manifestos of 1913–14 left a blank space for music; there was in contemporary music, at that date, nothing corresponding to the work of Wyndham Lewis, Pablo Picasso, or Gaudier-Brzeska’ (ATH 37). Pound’s post-Vorticist search to fill that blank space with the archaic and conjectural practices of medieval music is comparable to the exoticism of the translations from the Chinese and Anglo-Saxon in Cathay (1915) and the pared-down aesthetic of Imagism. But it derived most immediately from the troubadours’ ideas that song should ideally be a melding of motz el son, words and melody, a phrase that Pound probably found in such troubadour verses as those by Bernart de la Fon (Aubrey 1996:78), and which was part of a troubadour tradition that Pound respected even in his poetic contemporary Rabindranath Tagore. This was in keeping with Pound’s sense of the importance of both voice and the horizontal line in music. In his early essay suite ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ (1911–12), he describes his basic beliefs about the relation of words and music, with particular interest in rhythm, stating that ‘the rhythms of poetry should not be unreasonably ruined by the musician setting it to music’ (EPM 31). According to Pound, musical history sustained a loss when homophony gave way first to counterpoint and then to the textures of harmony. Excessive attention to harmony by definition deflected attention from rhythm, and in text setting, diverted attention from the horizontal aspects of music – movement forward in time – to the vertical presentation of differing notes in simultaneous sonic relationships. Pound claimed that the divorce of the two arts [poetry and music] had been to the advantage of neither, and that melodic invention declined simultaneously and progressively with their divergence. The rhythms of poetry grew stupider, and they in turn affected or infected the musicians who set poems to music. (EPM 4–5)

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In reaction to this aesthetic ‘stupidity’, Pound throughout his music writings consistently lauded text settings where the natural rhythm of the poetry determined the flow of the musical argument, rather than vice versa. For instance, he wrote in The New Age (7 November 1918): The perfect song occurs when the poetic rhythm is itself interesting, and when the musician augments, illuminates it, without breaking away from, or at least without going too far from, the dominant cadences and accents of the words, when the ligatures illustrate the verbal qualities, and when the little descants and prolongations fall in with the main movements of the poem. (EPM 5) Such attention to verbal rhythm determining the musical cadence led George Antheil to claim in his introduction to the manuscript score of the opera: This opera is made out of an entirely new musical technic, a technic, for certain, made of sheer music which upholds its line through inevitable rhythmic locks and new grips . . . a technic heretofore unknown, owing to the stupidity of the formal musical architecture still busy with organizing square bricks in wornout and formal patterns. . . . a powerful technic that grips musical phrases like the mouths of great poets grip words. (T foreword; punctuation from autograph)

The Tyranny of the Bar Line: Complicating Rhythmic Notation Antheil’s rhetoric, like Pound’s, is self-consciously avant-garde, self-promoting and utopian. It attempts to break down both metaphorical aesthetic walls and, more immediately, the tyranny of the bar line, the notational marker of musical ‘architecture’ that regulates temporal flow into consistent sets of rhythms. Pound’s hatred of the bar line appears markedly in his musical criticism of the period, noting even when a conductor fell prey to overly metronomic performances of classical repertoire. Of a concert of Mozart by Eric Coates he wrote, the Overture to ‘Le Nozze’ was presented with the bar divisions clearly marked. Mr. Coates seemed to have ingurgitated the music on the basis of those little perpendicular lines, and the idea of music as a structure of larger pieces of rhythm did not emerge. (EPM 207) More generally, Pound lamented that British musicians, singers in particular, needed training in more flexible ideas of rhythm than were offered by the contemporary academy, suggesting they should have access, among other remedies, to such non-classical training devices as ‘Oriental finger drums’: [W]e have felt an even deeper need for some system of inculcating rhythm: some means of teaching the British practitioner that rhythm is not made by cutting a piece of paper called a ‘bar’ into little sections called notes. A rhythm unit is a shape: it exists like the keel-line of a yacht, or the lines of an automobile-engine, for a definite purpose, and should exist with an efficiency as definite as that which we find in yachts and automobiles. (EPM 232–3)

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Figure 19.1 Ezra Pound, Le Testament, ed. George Antheil, ‘Et Mourut’ measures 1–8. © 2011 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

Pound’s quasi-Futurist rhetoric here suggests that like the yacht and the automobile, the musical line is a mechanism of modernity – an element of a ‘technic’ – that cannot and should not be contained within the received forms of the recent past. In response, over the course of several drafts of Le Testament, Pound and Antheil developed a hypercomplex system of rhythmical notation. Most of the arias of Le Testament are notated in a constantly changing series of time signatures that seldom last longer than a handful of bars, where the rhythms of each given bar are idiosyncratically asymmetrical, and where even within those units such asymmetrical rhythms are subdivided into even more complex configurations. For instance, see the first part of the vocal line of the opera (Figure 19.1). This opening passage begins with a conventional single instrumental bar in 4/4 time, but proceeds through a series of atypical time signatures that change every bar – a not atypical condition throughout the score, which, in such places as the aria ‘Dame du ciel’, features such unusual time signatures as 17/8 and, in one case, 23/16. The opening bar, already in the idiosyncratic metre of 11/16, further subdivides itself into triplets; and to add to the complexity, those triplets are themselves subdivided using a dotted rhythm. The result, curiously, is a form of rhythmic notation so complex – even, according to composer Ned Rorem, needlessly so; he called it ‘much more finicky for the eye than it need be for translation by the ear’ (Rorem 1968: 4) – that even Pound recognised that his accompanying musicians would be likely to get lost if they tried to count measures according to traditional practice. In a marginal note, Pound added later to the manuscript score this instrumental advice: ‘I doubt if the instrumentalist will get much help from “counting measures.” Let him learn the words + & make his noises when the singer reaches the syllable the instrumentalist is to emphasize’ (T, beneath Antheil’s foreword). As this admonition suggests, the complexity of the notation that Pound developed with Antheil was intended, paradoxically, to suggest a simplicity seldom found in notated music. Human speech – both poetic and demotic – contains so many minute variations of rhythm that the ‘natural’ sounds of verbal cadences almost completely elude their representation by traditional musical notation. Pound’s and Antheil’s text setting paradoxically aimed to use complexity towards a higher simplicity, much as Pound’s turn towards a modernist recension of medieval musical lines paradoxically aimed to return newness to concert music by integrating into it materials from outside the received world of the high German and Italian traditions. Their joint attempts, however, were not unprecedented in late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century compositional practice, even if Pound and Antheil

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Figure 19.2 Melody from the district of Hustopeče. Reproduced from Hollander 1963: 98.

Figure 19.3 Leoš Janáček, The Cunning Little Vixen, 1923, p. 10. Reproduced from Hollander 1963: 98.

may have been unaware of this in the early 1920s. Both the Czech composer Leoš Janáček and the Hungarian composer Bela Bartók had earlier sought to capture the rhythms of demotic speech in text setting, recognising that the rhythms and melodies of their national folk musics required flexible adaptations of traditional musical notation. Janáček relates in his memoirs as early as 1879 that he had begun to study the inflections of speech and the musical motifs – what he called ‘speech-motifs’ (napevky) – derived from these (cited in Hollander 1963: 54). Janáček began to collect folksongs in 1885, and measured the melody and even the duration of their single notes with the aid of a watch and a metronome. Thus, for instance, his notation of a folksong from the district of Hustopeče requires asymmetrical bar lines – moving from 5/4 to 4/4 to 3/4 – and irregularly grouped rhythms, sextuplets and quintuplets within those basis rhythmic framings (Figure 19.2). Janáček learned, in turn, to introduce such rhythmic variations in the vocal lines of concert works, as in the excerpt shown in Figure 19.3 from this later opera The Cunning Little Vixen, from 1923, the same year as Le Testament. Bela Bartók also did extensive work on Hungarian and Bulgarian folk music, and as early as 1904 identified a distinction between what he called ‘tempo giusto’ (or strict) and ‘parlando-rubato’ rhythms, with the former adhering to regular rhythms based on motions of the human body such as work or dancing, the latter incorporating the subtle rhythmic variations – rubato – implicit in speech and illustrated by the folk musics of Central Europe (Bartók 1931: 9). Pound was not, of course, aiming for the same kinds of aesthetic effects as Janáček and Bartók. But these technical affinities suggest that Pound was not working in a

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musical vacuum, even if he may have been unaware of these precedents, or if he tended, as did many modernist artists, to discount the influence of preceding artists. He was reacting against received ideas about musical content and form in ways that were separate from, but parallel to, those practised by other composers of the time who also sought alternative forms of theatrical music and dramatic presentation. These included, in different realms, Hugo Ball, Satie, Schönberg and even, as Albright has suggested, Kurt Weill (Albright 2000: 140–1), who integrated non- or pre-Romantic classical sources into serious concert music (as Stravinsky did in Les Noces), and who rendered more flexible the possibilities of the rhythmic notation of speech.

Circulations of Value Being both part of, yet separate from, such a larger ‘group’ of innovators underlines the complex and even paradoxical relationship to tradition and innovation represented by Pound’s score. His intent was more self-consciously avant-garde than that of some of his innovative peers in text setting and notation. Neither Janáček nor Bartók intended to upend the operatic tradition, but rather aimed to extend it. Like Villon, however, who rooted his long poem in the medieval tradition of the ubi sunt only to turn towards a more radical poetic practice, Pound’s aesthetic practices do not entirely leave tradition behind, even if he and Antheil do their best to cover their traces. Some of Bartók’s ideas of flexible text setting (illustrated, for instance, in his own opera Bluebeard’s Castle, 1918) derived from Debussy’s Pelléas: despite Pound’s distaste for the ‘mush of hysteria’ of Pélleas he could scarcely have been unaffected by its innovations. And even though Pound also wrote to Agnes Bedford that he found Satie’s 1918 Socrate ‘damned dull’ (SL 167), Virgil Thomson heard sufficient echoes of Satie’s attempt to set text prosodically and non-repetitively in Pound’s own music to name it as an aesthetic predecessor. Even Antheil hedged his bets in evaluating Pound’s relationship to the music of the past by writing in the Chicago Tribune: I am convinced that no other music today is so completely free from the developments of music during the last three or four hundred years, yet the music is as tight and as built up upon inner and strict laws of its own, as if it were built upon hundreds of years of musical tradition. (EPM 513; Antheil 1924: 9) Antheil’s rhetoric here frames his and Pound’s achievement in Le Testament both within and outside of history. He posits their return to the music of the distant past as a transcendence of histories (of Western classical music, of post-Monteverdian opera, even of the growing contemporary body of work positioned progressively against those previous traditions). But he also claims that the music’s ‘inner and strict laws’ serve as a kind of paradoxical alternative tradition. As an avant-garde recension of the past, like Pound’s own early poetry, such music posits a technic that is new precisely to the degree that it – like Villon – both mourns and revivifies the past. To what degree, then, can Le Testament be seen to offer models for a future musical history? The simple answer is ‘not at all’. Le Testament has been largely unknown and unperformed, despite a handful of performances in part and in whole, including a broadcast of an edited version on BBC radio in 1962. (For a complete list of known performances, see EPP II 318–20.) As a work by a knowledgeable but amateur composer, it has been without discernible direct influence on composers who have

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followed. Yet one of the most memorable songs of Le Testament, ‘Or y pence’, features elderly whores who compare themselves and their faded beauties to ‘coins out of circulation’ (‘Ne que monnoye qu’on descrie’, T 52–6). In other words, objects or conditions of value may become lost to the larger economy due to the passage of time or to inattention. Pound himself uses a version of this metaphor later in his Guide to Kulchur when he recognises the potential permanence of Bartók’s chamber music, noting that ‘The Vth Quartet may “go into culture,” as gold dust may go into a coin’ (GK 516). Le Testament never ‘got into culture’ in the same way as the Bartók quartet did. It failed to circulate. Like the sexuality of Villon’s whores, its failure to survive over time (at least in the active concert repertory) threatens to erase the value it had in its active contemporary moment. But that is not to say that Le Testament is without persistent value – as the ‘gold dust’, perhaps, of prediction rather than the coinage of culture itself. For despite being the work of an amateur composer, Le Testament self-consciously attempts to reframe its relationship to the musical and operatic past, and anticipates some musical practices that would only be rediscovered as valuable, in some cases, decades after the fact.

Predicting Technical Innovations We can divide these practices into several categories: juxtaposition and historical disruption of musical and historical styles within the same work; experimentation with non-standard instruments and rejection of traditional harmony; and notational hypercomplexity that is intended to convey to the ear both the illusion of regularity and continuous rubato. Some of these juxtapositions – of high material and low, for instance – are already implicit in Villon’s original. Pound’s substitution of the name ‘Jean Cocteau’ in the libretto at one point for Villon’s ‘Jean Cotard’ in ‘Père Noé’ (T MSS 80, bars 215–71) is one example of this kind of in-joke (a nod, perhaps, to Villon’s own love of names embedded acrostically in his verse). So, in another register, is the earthiness expressed in musical terms: the bar before the final curtain, featuring an octave bass glissando down to a reinforcing sfz note on the trombone, marked in Pound’s hand ‘dying belch’ (T MSS 82, bars 311–21). Other juxtapositions are overtly parodic, bringing together archaic and modern styles that Albright has compared to Joyce’s near-contemporaneous ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter of Ulysses, where satiric recreations of archaic rhetoric jostle cheek by jowl with contemporary slang (Albright 2000: 165). Thus, Pound mingles a mock-medieval drinking song (‘Père Noé’) with a serious but mock-medieval incantation (‘Dame de ciel’), with an aria for male voice and trombones that features bitonal harmonies unacceptable to both medieval and later Western harmonic practice (‘Si j’ayme et sers’) – and juxtaposes to them all transcriptions of actual medieval music, the thirteenth-century Vergine pucele of Williaume li Viniers (sung in langue d’oc) and the anonymous thirteenth-century ‘Gaita de la tor’. Such juxtapositions of past and present music are not unprecedented in compositional history. So-called parody masses of the sixteenth century used polyphony to work pre-existing pieces of music, such as a fragment of a motet, or a secular chanson, into their larger harmonic fabric. Bach’s Mass in B Minor, to name a different kind of magisterial example, is a veritable encyclopedia of Baroque musical forms that also incorporates many examples of the stile antico, techniques of Renaissance cantus firmus that were typical of choral

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composition of the centuries that preceded the Baroque. Pound’s use of explicitly medieval music, however, and his stark juxtaposition rather than layering of styles, prefigures two later kinds of composition. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1935 and 1936) – whose use of piano and percussion may owe something to the example of Antheil’s Ballet mécanique as well as to Stravinsky – although aesthetically very different, similarly explores texts from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Orff emphasises, as does Pound, both homophony and verbal rhythm, although in a more populist and ostinato mode that lays stress on repetition and pattern. Benjamin Britten’s later theatrical church parables, beginning with Curlew River, similarly start with medieval (and Noh) stagecraft and early medieval music in the form of Gregorian chant, to create a new kind of British chamber opera. Both Orff and Britten, of course, worked in more conservative musical modes than Pound. Their musical techniques, like Bach’s, were intended to demonstrate modernist continuity over time rather than avant-garde disruption. A more comparable later experiment in the mode of Le Testament may be found in the radical early chamber theatre-music works of Peter Maxwell Davies, particularly his 1969 Vesalii Icones. In this satirical work, Davies superimposes, on an investigation of the stations of Christ’s cross, two early modern counter-texts: the anatomical drawings of the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius and the St Thomas Wake pavane by English composer John Bull. Like Pound, Davies calls for a rebarbatively avant-garde, anti-operatic theatricality, and non-standard instruments (such as a saucepan and a biscuit tin filled with broken glass). He juxtaposes its serious Renaissance musical subtext with demotic music: in Davies’s case a foxtrot representing the Antichrist, rather than Pound’s drinking song. Davies surely did not intend to write, as it were, a new Testament – unlikely, given the paucity of Le Testament’s performance history. But these parallels do suggest that Pound was attempting to forge a new kind of music-theatre using techniques partly learned from the avant-gardes of the early 1920s that would be reclaimed independently by later composers. Such is even more true of Pound’s, and Antheil’s, American cohort of contemporary experimental composers. Perhaps the closest parallel to Pound’s attempted reclamation of homophony, avoidance of periodic musical repetition, and rejection of harmony is found in the works of John Cage, particularly in his early works for piano and for piano and voice, such as The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942). Like Pound, Cage rejected the structures and harmonic textures of Western art music, rebelling (as Pound did in his own way) even against such revisionist composers as his one-time teacher Schönberg. Cage sought a kind of ‘blank’ text setting that subordinated musical invention to rhythm, and he treated the piano (most notably in his works for prepared piano) not as a harmonic instrument capable of conveying multiple layers of simultaneous musical information, but as a percussion instrument subsidiary to voice. Pound’s setting of ‘Dame du ciel’, with its vocal part spanning little more than a sixth, and its use of only the lowest register of the piano as a kind of percussive reinforcement for bells, is proto-Cagean in everything except for its choice of a medieval text. (Cage, moreover, shared some of Pound’s even grudging sources, turning to Satie’s Socrate as the basis for his late and almost completely monophonic 1969 piano work Cheap Imitation.) Where Cage’s own later aesthetic took him in the direction of chance procedures and graphic notation rather than precise notation of complex rhythms, another strain of post-World War II American composition rediscovered aspects of Pound’s and

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Antheil’s hyper-complexity of rhythms and attempt to notate independently of bar lines. This notational practice undoubtedly accrued with subsequent drafts and with Antheil’s heavy involvement. Brad Bucknell illustrates how the opening set of measures from ‘Et Morut Paris’ appeared in three different notations of varying complexity: the early version Pound created with Agnes Bedford, the most detailed manuscript version edited by Antheil, and a somewhat simplified version intended to expedite the premiere performance in Paris in 1926 (Bucknell 2001: 84). The existence of such a simplified ‘performance’ version suggests that Pound’s and Antheil’s graphic gestures were as much idealist as a practical guide to performance. But these hyper-complex attempts to suggest the continuous rubato of speech and to create rhythmic figures unconstrained by bar lines are also found in some of the signature scores of American music written decades thereafter. In the later works of Morton Feldman, for instance – a member, with John Cage, of the so-called New York school of composition – subdivisions of single bars into polyrhythmic groupings are common, as is the further subdivision of such groupings into asymmetrical note values. Figure 19.4, for instance, shows the opening bar of his piano work Triadic Memories (1981). Parsing these rhythms is scarcely more straightforward than coordinating the triple divisions of a bar of 11/16 on the opening page of Le Testament. Yet in both cases the composer’s intent is less to insist upon a mathematically detailed asymmetry (although scrupulous interpreters will do their best to count carefully) than to suggest an ebb and flow of natural rubato – an assumption underscored by Feldman’s own recorded interpretations of some of his scores, where presentational lyricism trumps mathematical precision. Notational complexity, in this case, as in Pound’s, is meant to suggest a higher degree of freedom – that of the micro-variations of rhythm in the real world – than can be typically captured by regular bar, metre or note divisions. Such rhythmic subdivisions can also be used to express layers of complexity that suggest a regularity belied by bar lines. In Elliott Carter’s first String Quartet (1951), for instance, the second violin is given a series of figures that register to the ear as being

Figure 19.4 Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories, 1981. Bars 1–3.

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Figure 19.5 Elliott Carter, String Quartet #1, 1951. First movement, second violin, bars 22–3. completely even, but to the eye are notated as a series of asymmetrical chords consisting of five sixteenth-note beats each, which is entirely out of audible synchronisation with the traditional 4/4 measure or with the other instruments against which it plays (Figure 19.5). This example is yet more complex than anything attempted in Le Testament. Although at various points Pound and Antheil notate voices and instruments in simultaneous yet competing metres, such as 33/16 against 8/4 in ‘Dame du ciel’ and 4/8 against 3/8 in ‘Père Noé’, the intent is comparable: to create, in Antheil’s phrase, ‘rhythmic locks and new grips’ – a new technic by which rhythmic complexity can be conveyed by performers with new precision and subtlety. Such complexities, paradoxically, are for the reader of the score and the performer more than for the listener. And, as such, these notational practices in a sense join together the two most significant poles of twentieth-century art: a quest for both heightened complexity and heightened simplicity. Hyper-complexity of notation in these examples serves not simply to capture extreme complexity of sound, but to make evident to the ear natural symmetrical patterns in textual and musical rhythms, revealing that such regularities in such rhythms may exist independently from the visual tyranny of the bar line.

The Status of Le Testament Noting these technical parallelisms and larger historical and musical contexts may seem to make outsized claims for Le Testament’s importance. As a work of finished art, it must be admitted, Le Testament is an eccentric experiment, ultimately of central importance neither to Pound’s poetic work nor to Antheil’s own compositional history (which in any case subsequently turned to a more modish neoclassicism, of which neither the younger Pound nor the younger Antheil himself would have been likely to approve). But it does show a major figure of literary modernism grappling with music more thoroughly than did, say, Ford Madox Ford, with his brief musical sketches in his papers housed at Cornell University; or than James Joyce did, with his single published song, a setting of his poem ‘Bid Adieu’ (with a musical arrangement for piano by Edmund Pendleton, and published in 1949, after Joyce’s death). The minor status of Le Testament does not make it any less intriguing as a kind of missing link, one that operated both inside and outside of the musical history into which it attempted to intervene. It is both operatic and anti-operatic; it experimented with vocal rhythms in ways parallel to other modern attempts to revise received song and operatic

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tradition, yet askew from them; and it innovated in aesthetic and technical ways that would only be rediscovered by other composers well after the fact. All of this may be seen as already implicit in Villon’s poetry itself, and with Pound’s interest in Villon as a kind of disruptive model and prescient self-portrait, with his nostalgia for the past but desire to revise it, his revelling in the vulgarity of the present, and his concern for the (serio-comic) nature of the poet’s legacy. As such, Le Testament may be seen as a kind of rogue outlier in an operatic tradition that has always been tempted by the combination of medieval subject matter and progressive musical vocabularies. Such recent operas as Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise (1983) – written by another composer obsessed with rhythmic techniques – and Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain (1991, 1994 and 1999 in revised versions) demonstrate that even composers feel a pull towards exotic medieval settings and avant-garde stagecraft. Moreover, two of the most widely acclaimed mainstream operas of recent years not only turn to the Middle Ages for their settings and stories – particularly of doomed love – but specifically to the lives and work of the troubadours. Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin (2000) takes as its subject the twelfth-century Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, and its libretto by Amin Maalouf includes excerpts from Rudel’s lyric poetry. George Benjamin’s Written on Skin (2012) bases its libretto by Martin Crimp on the vida (brief biography), presumably written by Uc de Saint-Circ around 1230, of Occitan troubadour Guillem de Cabestany – who figures also (as ‘Cabestan’) in the fourth of Pound’s Cantos. (For a fuller listing of such contemporary operatic projects, see Sturges 2015.) Pound ends Le Testament with the work’s only fully harmonised chorus, on a text taken from elsewhere in Villon. A group of hanged men plead to those of the future, ‘Brother humans who live on after us / Don’t let your hearts harden against us’ (Villon [1965] 1977: 209). This may arguably be the final message of Le Testament, and of its creators, to the artists of the future. If like Villon itself, the opera breaks the rules – lives, as it were, on the fringes of acceptable theatrical and musical procedure – its creators are nonetheless aware that in doing so they are trying, with whatever fragility, to bring new techniques and beauties into the world. That its successes are partial, and that some of its modes of experimentation would only be taken up and rediscovered independently by a later generation of composers, should not occlude the ambitions of its attempts. Like coins out of circulation, the values of Le Testament have long been lost to mainstream musical history; but its original attractions nonetheless help to illuminate the relationship between pre-Baroque and modern music, and techniques of vocal representation, in both twentieth- and twenty-first-century composition.

Notes My thanks to Josh Epstein for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and to Amy Bauer for renotating the musical examples. 1. See Claude Debussy, Ballades de François Villon (1910), song cycle for voice and piano (or orchestra), L.119; Bernard Van Dieren, Ballade (1917); Olivier Messiaen, Deux ballades de Villon (1921); and André Jolivet, Trois Rondels de François Villon (1929).

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20 Ezra Pound as Music Theorist: ANTHEIL AND THE TREATISE ON HARMONY Gemma Moss

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Treatise on Harmony (1924) is Pound’s most decisive attempt to position himself as a musicologist. His theory of harmony, which he called ‘absolute rhythm’, encourages a new way of thinking about musical composition: through rhythms and frequencies instead of harmonic progression.1 Pound had been developing this idea for over fourteen years, since he began studying the troubadour poets. Writing about Guido Cavalcanti in 1912, Pound declared, ‘I believe in an “absolute rhythm,” a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed’ (EPM 469). Here, ‘absolute rhythm’ is poetic metre that precisely renders the emotion, informed by the sounds and rhythms of Cavalcanti’s verses that seemed, to Pound, to communicate something beyond the sense-meanings of words. Music was integral to Pound’s early poetics: verse should be composed ‘in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome’, as he famously declared in his 1912 Imagist principles (LE 3). In the Treatise, though, Pound’s appreciation of melodic musical phrases is absent, and instead he advocates using ‘hard bits’ of rhythm (ATH 46). By 1924, the theory of ‘absolute rhythm’, which began as a way of describing and accounting for rhythmic excellence in poetry, had solidified into a conviction that musical harmony should be approached as the mathematical study of time and rhythm, rather than pitch and chords: ‘The element most grossly omitted from treatises on harmony up to the present is the element of TIME’, he explains (ATH 9). There is thus a significant difference between Pound’s initial approach to music and his attempt, in the Treatise, to explain musical sounds ‘from the point of view of mathematics’ (ATH 15). The Treatise is part of an intricate negotiation in Pound’s thought. He felt that music had a distinctive expressive capacity and wished to harness this in poetry. Yet what Pound felt music offered poetry was distinct from language, which made it difficult to articulate, leading him away from his own doctrines of linguistic precision, and frustrating his desire for ‘direct presentation’ outlined in the Imagist principles. Pound’s solutions to the problems posed by music are manifested in a shift towards mathematics and empirical observation in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, and are influenced by two French writers whose impact on this text are not widely appreciated: Théophile Gautier and Rémy de Gourmont. Pound had in mind Gautier’s comparison between poets and sculptors in the poem ‘L’art’ when he used the phrase ‘hard bits’ to describe the rhythmic precision of music by Antheil and by Stravinsky. Initially, ‘Treatise on Harmony’ was published as an article in transatlantic review in 1924, but later that year Pound added an essay on Antheil from the Criterion and published Antheil and the NTHEIL AND THE

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Treatise on Harmony as a book, showing that the theory does not stand alone, but is validated by and endorses new music. Specifically, the theory of ‘absolute rhythm’ promotes the forcefully rhythmic music of Antheil over that of composers such as Debussy, Fauré and Wagner, who are criticised in the essays comprising the final, 1927 version of the book.2 Pound’s rejection of these composers was informed by his study of de Gourmont, who disapproved of art that appealed primarily to the emotions, claiming that this bypassed faculties of judgement and discrimination. In the Treatise, Pound rejects what he calls the ‘atmospheric’ composers who work on the senses instead of the intellect, and uses the language of maths and science to validate his ideas about pitch and the value of specific compositions. In Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony Pound tries to manage music’s esoteric qualities, champion new artists, and modernise his aesthetics.

The History of ‘Absolute Rhythm’ Although The Treatise itself contains little information about how the ideas in it relate to poetry, Pound’s study of music was initially inspired by his research into historical European poetics. Pound’s early conviction that iambic pentameter should be avoided grew out of his study of Arnaut Daniel and Guido Cavalcanti, whose intricate and unusual rhythms he thought should educate the modern poet. Later, in the Pisan Cantos, Pound refers back to this as the genesis of his struggle to save poetry from centuries of rhythmic and ideological atrophy: ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave’ (LXXXI/538). As Pound sought to liberate poetry from rigid metrical patterns, thinking carefully about rhythm through music provided new ways of constructing metrical verse. The phrase ‘absolute rhythm’ first appeared in 1912, when Pound introduced his translations of Cavalcanti’s sonnets thus: I believe in an ultimate and absolute rhythm as I believe in an absolute symbol or metaphor. The perception of the intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions in the cadence. It is only then, in the perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word, that the twofold vision can be recorded. (Pound 1912: 11) A rhythm can be ‘ultimate and absolute’ because it can be perfectly suited to the word, and combine with language to create a ‘twofold vision’. For Pound, using language with the right rhythms – which, unlike repeated lines of iambic pentameter, ought to be unique to what is being described – can allow something new to be seen. In his translations, Pound is committed to recuperating his sense of Cavalcanti’s work as a totality: he explains his attempt ‘to bring over the qualities of Guido’s rhythm, not line for line, but to embody in the whole of my English some trace of that power which implies the man’ (Pound 1912: 12). The evocative capacity of rhythms and sounds becomes as important as the sense-meanings of words. This informs Pound’s style of translation, which pays close attention to the rhythms of the original poem, reaching for its tempos, sounds and tensions instead of attempting a word-for-word transformation. Pound’s musically inspired attention to sound over literal meaning challenged the concept of translation. He also used this technique to translate the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’. Often collected and anthologised, it exemplifies Pound’s rejection of

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established academic discourses in favour of what he called ‘“The New Method” in scholarship’ (Pound 1911b: 107). First published in The New Age in November 1911, this translation was the first instalment of the twelve-part essay series ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’. In Part X, subtitled ‘On Music’, he elaborates on motz el son: the troubadour’s art of combining words and music which shapes Pound’s approach to translating ‘The Seafarer’ (SP 35–7). For Michael Alexander, this poem is a ‘nonstarter’ if judged as a registration ‘of the dictionary meanings of the words of the original’, but Pound ‘preferred to render its sound as well as its sense’ (1979: 72, 74). Pound equated music with the irrational, setting it up in opposition to language and rational meaning as something that can endow poetic language with emotive and communicative capacities that go beyond the signifying functions of words. This is how Pound’s interest in music began, but he takes a very different approach, using the language of maths and science in the Treatise.

Pound among the Musicians From this starting point to the publication of the Treatise and beyond, Pound sought to establish himself as an authority on music. Arriving in London in 1908, he was already close friends with American pianist Katherine Ruth Heyman, entering the social scene, he said, ‘more or less under her wing’ (SL 147; Carr 2009: 34–5). He befriended pianists Walter Morse Rummel and Agnes Bedford, collaborating with both on settings of troubadour songs (Pound and Rummel 1911, 1913; Bedford 1920). Between 1917 and 1921 he wrote concert reviews for The New Age under the pseudonym William Atheling (EPM 57–241). He studied Arnold Dolmetsch’s book The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, which became both the driving force behind the vers libre technique (free verse) and the subject of several articles and reviews (EPM 35–50). Work by Helen Carr (2009) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (2002) has uncovered the influence of Florence Farr, who worked with W. B. Yeats on the connection of words and music, and whose book The Music of Speech (1909) inspired Pound’s interest in Dolmetsch and the Provençal poets. Pound never acknowledges Farr’s influence, but Carr notes that Farr’s insistence on the link between music and poetry undoubtedly made a considerable impact on Pound, for it was only after meeting her that he began to research seriously the musical accompaniment to Provençal poetry, and to emphasise the musicality of verse. (Carr 2009: 179) Disillusioned with Britain after World War I, Pound moved to Paris in 1921, attracted by its thriving literary community, which included James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He met violinist Olga Rudge, who became his lifelong partner, and George Antheil, becoming enthused by the vibrancy and newness of the young American composer’s music (Conover 2001: 1, 6; Cockram 2010: 241–9). Antheil helped Pound to complete a second version of his opera Le Testament de Villon in 1923. An earlier version, completed in 1921, had been written with the guidance of Agnes Bedford (EPP II 19). Pound settled in Italy in 1924, where he ran a series of music concerts in Rapallo’s city hall during the 1930s with Rudge and Gerhart Münch (EPM 242–320; Bacigalupo 2010: 250–60). In Guide to

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Kulchur (1938), he attempted a further musical theory: ‘great bass’, which develops on ‘absolute rhythm’ (GK 73). Musicians and music were a constant feature of Pound’s life and his wide-ranging independent study, yet his approach to music was far from consistent, and the Treatise represents one significant turning point.

The Treatise on Harmony In Paris, Pound tried to immerse himself in its music, painting and intellectual life. A. David Moody (EPP II 6) writes that it was there, in the early 1920s, that Pound decided to ‘contend against the tyranny of the commonly accepted order of things’, and it is in this spirit that Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony should be approached. Its premise is simple, and thoroughly modernist: compositional techniques urgently need to be rethought, and if music of any value is to be written, the whole art form must be approached with new eyes. Pound claims that composers have spent too long paying attention to pitch, and compositional techniques need to be modernised to account for the neglect of rhythm. He makes a compelling exhortation to really start ‘listening to the sound’ of music, but this is framed within a somewhat ambiguous and sparingly described theory (ATH 16). The Treatise is more interesting and valuable as a deliberately provocative modernist gesture, designed to shock people out of entrenched ways of thinking and behaving, than as a practical or useful theory. Since Pound goes to great lengths to make the theory appear practical, though, it requires some analysis. Pound describes harmony as that which has a ‘strong lateral or horizontal motion’, concluding that it should be approached, not as something ‘static’, but as an art of movement (ATH 11): the term ‘Harmony’ is applied to the science of chords that can be struck simultaneously; and the directions for modulations have been worked out for chords that can follow each other without demanding a strict or even interesting time-interval between their emission. (ATH 12) For Pound, the amount of time that passes between notes that are played sequentially should structure compositions, rather than functional harmony, which, being based on chord progressions, primarily organises notes that are sounded simultaneously.3 Since sound ‘consists of vibrations’ that happen over periods of time, Pound claims rhythm (as measurements of pressure occurring over time) the most important and hitherto neglected aspect in a musical composition (ATH 23). ‘There is nothing whatever in music’, Pound writes, ‘but a composition of frequencies’ (ATH 30). Pound is interested in how time alters the way these frequencies combine: ‘The question of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation, has been avoided’ (ATH 9). The Treatise thus makes two central claims: that music is ‘pure rhythm’, and that a sense of ‘absolute rhythm’ should structure music, which should be composed with perfectly timed intervals between notes. At its inception in 1910, and in its fuller form in the Treatise, ‘absolute rhythm’ imagines that there is a ‘law of rhythmic accord’ – as yet unknown – to which great compositions adhere.

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Rhythm is perhaps the most primal of all things known to us. It is basic in poetry and music mutually, their melodies depending on a variation of tone quality and of pitch respectively, as is commonly said; but if we look more closely we will see that music is, by further analysis, pure rhythm; rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation in rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these varied rhythms. When we know more of overtones we will see that the tempo of every masterpiece is absolute, and is exactly set by some further law of rhythmic accord. (Pound 1912: 11–12) Pound argues that ‘masterpieces’ arise when the composition and performance tempos are perfectly balanced so that each note has exactly the right length of time separating it from the next, producing sounds perfectly blended together. The same idea underpins the Treatise, although by 1924 Pound leans much more heavily on the existence of mathematical equations that would, in theory, verify his claim that: the simplest consideration of the physics of the matter by almost the simplest mathematician, should lead to equations showing that A SOUND OF ANY PITCH, OR ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, MAY BE FOLLOWED BY A SOUND OF ANY OTHER PITCH, OR ANY OTHER COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged. (ATH 10) A mathematical formula, Pound suggests, could explain the length of time that ought to pass between notes to create a pleasing effect, and this would provide evidence for his theory of harmony. In the absence of these rules, however, composers should just ‘really listen to sound’. A particular relation between two chords, he says, ‘is probably perfectly sound. I mean from the point of view of mathematics’, but he gives no further explanation, and claims ‘it seems unlikely that any mathematician will bother’ to decipher these rules (ATH 15). Asserting that a precise mathematical principle would prove the theory, if anyone could work it out, lends it the appearance of objectivity, while the lack of verification is useful: it allows Pound to frame his own judgements about music as empirically true and mathematically verifiable, while ensuring he does not have to alter any of his existing ideas about which compositions and composers are valuable. Pound is looking for ways to validate his aesthetic judgements by claiming great compositions adhere to laws of physics and maths that give them universal and unchanging significance. The theory is a way of arriving at what Stephen J. Adams (1980: 63) calls a ‘Pythagorean music of the spheres’: a fundamental law or ordering system for music. Pound gestures briefly to Pythagorean observations about musical sounds and their relationship to ratios when he says, ‘music as the ancient philosophers say, arises from number’ (ATH 24). Pythagoras is credited with discovering the relationship between musical pitch and mathematical ratio, noticing that strings of the same material and tautness with the length ratio 2:1 will produce sounds an octave apart: an observation that appeared to point to coherence in the natural world, and a connection between mathematics and aesthetics. ‘Absolute rhythm’ extends Pythagorean observations about the relationship between mathematical order and beauty by

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claiming that the best compositions, such as those by Bach, are those that abide by natural laws: ‘The secret or part of it probably is that Bach, consciously or unconsciously, never thought of using two chords except as parts, integral parts, of a progression, a rhythmic progression’ (ATH 13). Bach, Pound says, was ‘consciously or unconsciously’ following the rules in the Treatise, and other accomplished composers have followed the rules naturally, without conscious effort, while music is the result of imprecision. The difficulty of the Treatise has split critical opinion. Pound’s didactic writing style claims a level of authority that is not matched by the understanding on show. His claims are often allusive and vague since he declines to explain the mathematical justification for his ideas. The Treatise’s claims about the temporal aspects of harmony have similarities to those in Katherine Heyman’s book The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music (1921: 54), in which she argues for a ‘rhythm of what we would call in music “Interval”’. Pound does not point his reader in the direction of this much more detailed and theoretically sound text, which would certainly help readers to understand the ideas that he gestures towards.4 For Erin E. Templeton, the Treatise is full of ‘abstract and fanciful’ claims (2009: 71). The disparity in critical receptions of the work indicates the difficulty in deciding by what standard it is appropriate to judge it: as a practical theory, or as a provocative encouragement to think differently. Suggesting that myriad composers have failed to properly listen to sound is confrontational and inflammatory, as Pound well knew: remarking on his own writing, he said, ‘They will hang me possibly as an academic but scarcely as a dynamitist’ (SL 167).

Strategies of Modernisation The Treatise is evidence of Pound’s attempt to modernise not just musical composition, but his own aesthetics, too. He acquired a great appreciation of even metre during the 1920s, even though he had previously been very suspicious of it. ‘Stravinsky’s merit’, he claims in the Treatise, ‘lies very largely in taking hard bits of rhythm and noting them with great care. Antheil continues this’ (EPM 258). This is a very different kind of music from that which features in Pound’s 1912 Imagist principles: 1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. (LE 3) The ‘sequence of the musical phrase’ refers to the rhythms of melodic phrasing, so that music offers poetry melodic and tonal qualities combined with rhythms. Regular beats, like those of a metronome, were to be avoided at all costs. Writing in The New Age in 1919, Pound reiterated that his rhythms were ‘not merely clock-work of the barlengths. Measured time is only one form of rhythm; but a true rhythm sense assimilates all sorts of uneven pieces of time, and keeps the music alive’ (EPM 472). Here Pound’s rhythm is holistic and deeply connected to life, like the rhythms of the seasons or the human body. Pound thus appears to have significantly changed his opinion about rhythm in the Treatise, where he advocates the clockwork rhythms he previously criticised. He finds these rhythms in Antheil’s music, which draws on the sounds of machines:

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Music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new content. (ATH 53) Using Antheil as the prime example, the Treatise seeks to show that music can speak to contemporary existence by communicating the rhythms of new technology. In Antheil’s music, Pound heard the sounds of a particularly modern sensibility, perfect for the expression of contemporary life. Pound connects the sounds and movements of machinery to music as a rhythmic, temporal and sonic art form, reasoning that music can communicate rhythms of life that are now mediated by the factory, and technologies which have altered relationships with time. Antheil’s ‘musical world’, Pound said, ‘is a world of steel bars, not of old stone and ivy’ (ATH 62). In other words, his music is of a new world created of the same vertical steel that constructs the factory. It is built differently, from new materials: the architecture of a new age. As Pound modernises his approach to music, away from ‘the sequence of the musical phrase’, its connection to poetry disappears: there is little indication in the Treatise about what music can offer poetry. For Josh Epstein this shift is specifically due to Pound’s friendship with Antheil. Epstein (2014a: 101) recasts the title of Hugh Kenner’s (1972) critical biography to argue for the composer’s influence on Pound’s thought: it is not The Pound Era, but ‘The Antheil Era’. To be sure, Antheil is integral to the ideas in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony – as the title indicates. As the self-styled ‘bad boy’ of contemporary music, Antheil provided the ‘new music’ Pound claimed he had been looking for since ‘the Vorticist manifestos of 1913–14’ which ‘left a blank space for music’ (ATH 37). Antheil appears in each section of the book. In Part I, ‘The Treatise on Harmony’, Antheil is proffered as an expert who agrees with Pound, having ‘known for some time that the duration of the notes and the duration of the time-intervals between them made a difference to the way the harmony sounded’ (ATH 22). Part II is Pound’s warm appraisal of ‘Antheil’, first published in The Criterion in 1924. To bulk out Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony for publication in book form in October that year, and again in 1927, Pound refines and curates his writing on music from different publications. Part III, ‘Atheling’, collects extracts of Pound’s music reviews written under his pseudonym, William Atheling, which are interspersed with approving comments and asides initialled ‘G. A.’ (George Antheil). The younger composer is mobilised to lend some weight to Pound’s musical judgements. The final chapter, ‘Varia’, reproduces sections of essays on music printed in New Masses and New Criterion, and Antheil is prominent here, too: they begin with an appeal to ‘take note of Antheil’ (ATH 138). Central as Antheil is to Pound’s book, his music did not provoke Pound’s shift from ‘the sequence of the musical phrase’ to ‘hard bits’. Epstein (2014b: xxviii) notes that Pound’s championing of the quotidian music of the factory is indebted to thinkers from whom he wilfully asserts his difference: ‘Pound railed against Marinetti and Russolo on one hand while cribbing liberally from them on the other.’ The Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti’s (1998: 256) ‘wish to destroy the sublime Art-with-a-capital-A’ motivates Pound’s desire in the Treatise to find a ‘new music’. Russolo’s ‘Art of Noises’ underpins Pound’s admiration of Antheil’s ‘hard bits’ of rhythm that provide the music of machines, moving away from art as separate from everyday concerns and

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reconnecting music to daily life. Pound found having a musician to give credibility to his ideas useful, but in Antheil’s Ballet mécanique he discovered the perfect demonstration of an aesthetic of precision that he had been developing for some time: something that was influenced by Théophile Gautier’s poetics and Rémy de Gourmont’s ideas about the importance of judgement and discrimination.

Gautier and de Gourmont The phrase ‘hard bits’ was directly derived from Gautier, who shaped the rhetorical language of the Treatise. In ‘The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry’ (1918b), Pound refers to Gautier’s poem ‘L’art’, which compares the poet to a sculptor who works in a tough, recalcitrant medium. Gautier ‘exhorts us to cut in hard substance, to cut, metaphorically, in hard stone’ (P&P III: 55). Constructing verse, like sculpture, becomes hard work; just like cutting stone, working with language is difficult if something great is to be achieved. By claiming that Stravinsky and Antheil work in ‘hard bits’ of rhythm, Pound claims a level of difficulty for their music that Gautier describes as characteristic of the best art. Pound found Gautier unique among nineteenth-century French writers, most of whom he did not admire. In 1913, lamenting British ignorance about the Provençal poets, he complained that few knew ‘anything beyond Verlaine and Baudelaire’, who ‘beget imitation and one can learn nothing from them. Gautier and de Gourmont’, on the other hand, ‘carry forward the art itself, and the only way one can imitate them is by making more profound your knowledge of the very marrow of art’ (SL 23). Gautier’s metaphor of hardness and sculpture was suitable for Pound’s poetics of linguistic precision: it fitted with the Imagist principles of direct treatment and economy of language, as though cutting away at excess words to produce a carefully crafted poem. When transferring this metaphor onto music, though, Pound uses it much more literally. In ‘The Golden Bird’ he [Antheil] was not wholly freed of Debussy, but he did succeed in making the ‘solid object’. This term suggests sculpture and is intended to, just as Debussy intended to suggest apparitions in mist. By solid object ‘musically’, I suppose we mean a construction or better a ‘mechanism’ working in time-space, in which all the joints are close knit, the tones fit each other at set distances, it can’t simply slide about. (ATH 48–9) Since music does not signify in the same way as language, and often does not appear to refer to objects or ideas, it cannot be judged by the accuracy of what it represents, and Pound needs another way of using Gautier to think about music. Pound transports conceptual hardness (rather than difficulty) onto music, and in a simple way, advocating harsh sounds and jolting rhythms. The more nuanced aspects of Gautier’s claim about the effort required in artistic production are lost when Pound discusses music, which becomes quite simply the ‘solid object’. Pound chooses not to judge Debussy, for example, on the precision or artistry with which he represents ‘Le vent dans la plaine’ (‘The wind in the plain’) or ‘La mer’ (‘The sea’), which might be performed with just as much rhythmic precision as a composition that includes harsh sounds. It is as though it is Debussy’s themes, being wind and water rather than ‘solid objects’, as

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much as the music itself that make an appropriate comparison with Gautier’s aesthetic of hardness. Pound’s shift towards the ‘solid object’ and ‘hard bits’ of rhythm in the Treatise was another modernisation strategy: with this language he distanced himself from nineteenth-century aesthetics by constructing an opposition between his hard precision and the vague softness of the Romantics and Symbolists. As early as 1915 Pound had felt under pressure to change his poetics, of which music was a central part. He knew Imagism was being compared to Symbolism, so much so that he had to declare outright: ‘Imagisme is not symbolism. The symbolists dealt in “association”, that is, a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word’ (G-B 84). Pound rejected the Symbolists’ propensity, as he saw it, to make words into symbols, codifying language and removing the powerful potential of the word. For Pound, this technique abstracted language from its true meaning and resulted in an absence of precision. Like the Symbolists, however, Pound was interested in something beyond ‘the word’, which he felt music could provide for language. Pound’s vers libre, which sought to combine poetry and music via melodic phrasing, was rooted in a belief that music could energise language: ‘the perception of the intellect is given in the word, the emotions in the cadence’ (Pound 1912: 11). While rhythm becomes all in the Treatise, the earlier Pound was interested in musical pitch: ‘cadence’ refers to the shared tonal qualities of music and verse, and not just rhythm. The idea that music is particularly suitable for expressing the emotions has a great historical precedent, and Schopenhauer is a central reference point for music as a form of absolute communication that gets directly to the emotions. For him, music does not express this or that individual or particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves, abstractly. (Schopenhauer 2014: 289) For Schopenhauer, music is a direct expression of the emotions, rather than a description. The abstract and emotive qualities of music towards which Pound reaches belong to a long tradition of associating music with essences, as opposed to language, which merely points to things. As Bucknell (2001: 3) notes, modernist appeals to music as a model for expressing the emotions are ‘a kind of strange recuperation of a romantic belief in the expressive potential of music and in its capacity to go beyond the mere rationality of language’. This conceptualisation of music is present in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wagner, Nietzsche and Pater, to name but a few, as well as in the literary traditions of Symbolism and Decadence more broadly. The similarity between aspects of Pound’s thought and that of Mallarmé, for example, is well documented (Albright 2000: 75; Bucknell 2001: 17, 72; Scott 1992). Pound did not, however, wish to be associated with the Symbolists, whom he argued dealt in abstractions rather than specifics. The poet, he said, following on from Gautier, should ‘Put down exactly what you feel and mean! Say it as briefly as possible and avoid all sham of ornament’ (P&P I: 99). When trying to describe what music offered poetry, however, Pound was not able to abide by his own doctrines of linguistic precision. Describing vers libre, for example, he runs into problems: it is for ‘when the

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“thing” builds up a rhythm more beautiful than a set of metres, or more real, more a part of the emotion of the “thing”, more germane, intimate’ (LE 9). As Pound makes multiple attempts in this sentence to explain what music is for, he falls into using the allusions and abstractions to which he was so averse. Pound thought music was essential for poetic composition, but since Pound could not always clearly describe what he felt music offers poetry, it presented him with a dilemma. He wanted to harness its unique qualities of expression to communicate ‘the emotion of the “thing”’, but when describing how to incorporate music into poetry he often resorted to the abstract verboseness of which he disapproved. Pound’s aesthetics of clarity and precision were foiled by his inability to describe music in precise terms. By 1924, much had changed: this language and conceptualisation of music are notably absent in the Treatise, which suggests a (hypothetical) objective mathematical principle by which great music could be judged. Although Pound is unable to offer the formula, the Treatise reveals how keen he is to use mathematics and pseudo-scientific approaches – or to appear as someone who is able to use the sciences – to explain and justify his position on music. Rémy de Gourmont influenced this drive towards an objective, mathematical way of measuring musical value. Pound had been reading de Gourmont since at least 1915, and had translated his Natural Philosophy of Love in France in 1921, publishing it in 1922. De Gourmont had an entirely different understanding of music. While motz el son, or words and music, remained an integral part of Pound’s poetics, for de Gourmont music was a dangerously affective art form. Music and sound, which vibrate the body, could directly affect the nervous system, stimulating the emotions before the effect could be properly processed by the rational mind, impeding objective judgements. Vincent Sherry has explored the history of these ideas and their political implications, explaining how in Revolutionary France, the capacity of music to affect the body and create group feeling, specifically empathy and solidarity among the masses, created discourses of music and sound as overwhelming, and as appealing to base instincts (Sherry 1993: 1–23). De Gourmont favoured the visual arts, because he found the eye capable of a greater level of discrimination and judgement; something that Sherry argues pushes Pound to ‘conceive of music in visual terms’ (Sherry 1995: 184). This is everywhere in the Treatise’s language of vertical and ‘horizontal’ music, of music as the ‘solid object’, and of Antheil’s compositions as constructed of ‘steel bars’ (ATH 11, 48, 62). We can see Pound digesting the ideas of de Gourmont, whose book he was then translating, in the language he used to describe Fauré in a letter to Agnes Bedford in 1921. Pound wrote to Bedford that he had ‘Sat through the Pélleas’ (Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande) and, outraged by the ‘mush of hysteria’ that he associated with the composer, found himself ‘encouraged – encouraged to tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do the thing if necessary on two tins and wash-board’ (SL 167). Pound rejects Debussy’s ‘mush’, finding it ruined by a lack of precision, while ‘hysteria’ gestures to his suspicion of music that creates irrational, uncontrolled emotional responses. The Treatise ‘tears up’ harmony by arguing for an entirely new way of thinking about composition, which rejects anything that arouses the emotions in favour of a scientific way of measuring music’s value. For Pound, Debussy belonged to the ‘atmospheric school’ which was creating a dangerous kind of emotionally intoxicating music, for which Antheil’s rhythmic precision was an antidote. Composers, Pound said, have ‘rotted their melodies by trying to find schemes which “harmonize” according to a concept of “harmony” in which the

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tendency to lifelessness was inherent’ (ATH 19). Pound’s metaphors of death and decay liken functional harmony to rotting organic substances. Standard harmony becomes an infectious disease in Pound’s language, destroying compositions from within. Pound’s preoccupation with disease and the body shows how he is thinking about art through discourses associated with science and natural history. Again, he came to these ideas through de Gourmont: Natural Philosophy of Love sought to explain human development, emotion, interaction and artistic production in biological terms. De Gourmont argued that civilisation did not bypass natural ability, but accentuated it: ‘The taste for brilliant things, another human instinct, is frequent enough in birds; it is true that birds have not yet made anything of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary arts’ (de Gourmont 1922: 188–9). Valuable and accomplished art, for de Gourmont, was produced by individuals who had reached the pinnacle of human evolutionary development, while poor art and poor judgements were made by people with poorer cognitive abilities: physiologically inferior people and races. Pound’s rhetoric of progress and degeneration also serves to position him at the top of a hierarchy, as someone capable of making accurate judgements about the state of the arts. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony is Pound’s attempt to justify what constitutes great art through the sciences, and to cement his position as a talented artistic commentator with an advanced capacity for aesthetic judgement. Together, Gautier and de Gourmont provided Pound with a new way of thinking about music. Informed by de Gourmont’s claims that emotionally affective music was toxic to reason and critical thought, Pound rejected Impressionist and Romantic music. In line with de Gourmont’s conviction that the skilled aesthete could make careful, objective judgements, Pound sought to validate his ideas about valuable music through mathematics. He used Gautier’s sculptural metaphor to provide a language suitable to talk about music as an art of precision, which he united through the metaphor of hardness with the harsh rhythms in Antheil’s music. Through this language, he was finally able to talk about music without resorting to allusion and metaphor, and he promoted avant-garde music to support and modernise his aesthetic judgements. Pound’s position on music is not consistent, though. In ‘How to Read’ (1929), he is still committed to an idea of music that cannot be explained as ‘pure rhythm’. Music, he writes, is ‘a force tending often to lull, or distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is poetry on the borders of music and music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe’ (LE 26). Pound retains a commitment to notions of musical transcendence, describing melopoeia (musical language) as that ‘wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning’ to something that is ‘practically impossible to transfer or translate’ (LE 25). The shift from his early advocacy of musical melody to rhythmic precision is thus part of a complex negotiation on Pound’s part as he tries to harness music’s indescribable essence for use in poetry, describe it accurately, and carve for himself a unique space among the radical innovators of the early twentieth century.

Notes 1. Pound refers to ‘absolute rhythm’ in a number of texts written between 1910 and 1927, and these are collected in Appendix I of EPM 467–80.

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2. The various manifestations of the four essays that comprise The Treatise on Harmony are helpfully collected by Schafer, who indicates the changes made between the article and book versions (EPM 253–65). 3. Pound’s designation of functional harmony as being concerned with ‘static’ chords lacks nuance. Compositions are also organised through harmonic progressions, which means the relationships between successive chords are considered. As is often the case with Pound’s writing, it is unclear whether this demonstrates his lack of knowledge, or whether he does this intentionally to make his own ideas appear more significant. Claiming that theories of harmony deal only with notes sounded simultaneously is not quite accurate, but it does create a space into which Pound’s own theory can be neatly inserted. 4. Pound may have harboured anxieties about being compared with Heyman, despite their close friendship and his admiration for her. Writing to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 12 October 1914, he describes ‘a rather longish article’ he is preparing for The Egoist ‘announcing the College of Arts’, in which Heyman and Dolmetsch are listed as teachers. The letter also contains the request that ‘Miss Heyman’s article might precede Rodker’s. Please do not put it next to mine’ (SL 41). For Pound and Heyman’s relationship see Bowers (1973: 53–66).

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21 The Expansion of a Theory: Great Bass and BALLET MÉCANIQUE Margaret Fisher

Origins of Great Bass

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n autodidact in music, Ezra Pound theorised about the influence of rhythm on harmonic relations in the Introduction to his 1910 Cavalcanti translations:

Music is . . . pure rhythm . . . for the variation of pitch is the variation in rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these varied rhythms. When we know more of overtones we will see that the tempo of every masterpiece is absolute, . . . set by some further law of rhythmic accord. (Pound 1912: xxii) The 1927 essay ‘Workshop Orchestration’ set the terms of ‘rhythmic accord’ as ‘great base’; ‘Machine Art’, of the same time period, as ‘great bass’; Guide to Kulchur, as ‘Great Bass’ (Pound 1927: 21; 1996a: 74; GK 73–5, 233–4). While ‘rhythm’ refers to any one of the interdependent constructions of tempo, metre and note duration, Pound intends a combinatory effect that exerts incontrovertible influence on the perception of musical sound, with tempo flagged as the ultimate determinant of successful musical expression. The ‘absolute’ tempo secures concordance across the spectrum of rhythmic construction. The contingency of tempo to overtones shifts the discussion of masterpieces to the extremities: tempo, the inaudible pacing (measured in beats per minute), and overtones, integral multiples of the waveform of a fundamental tone (measured in cycles per second or vibrations per second). Overtones add colour and effect to the sound, their audibility varying with each instrument. A ‘law’ of accord would dictate that the rhythmic parts, like overtones, express integral multiples of a comparable waveform of a fundamental rhythm. The notion that these different time scales (rhythm and tone) can be considered within a single continuum (beats per minute and vibrations per second) forms the crux of Pound’s Great Bass theory. The idea resurfaces in the theoretical writing of Henry Cowell ([1930] 1996: passim), Pete Seeger (1977: 1–15) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1959: 10–40). Among nineteenth-century precursors of this notion, George Lansing Raymond’s Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music stands out for its citations from the 1865 seminal study of acoustics by Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone (first English edition 1875), and for a conclusion that presages Pound’s own:

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Music is no more than an artistic adaptation of the laws of rhythm, of a part of which, as related to duration, the mind is conscious; but of another part of which, as related to pitch – i.e., to the rhythm resulting from tone-vibrations, – it is unconscious. (Raymond 1894: 223)1 Consciousness of duration would include the pacing and rhythmic patterning of sounds, but not the amount of time it takes for the waveform of a musical pitch to complete one cycle (the period). With the introduction of Vorticism in 1914, Pound temporarily shifts focus from rhythm to the ‘primary pigment’ specific to each art form, such as sound or colour. Taking its cues from physics, Vorticism proposed overcoming stasis, infusing a maximum of energy, and finding relations and accords among the parts (EPVA 151). Antje Pfannkuchen points to the importance of Helmholtz’s ‘On Vortex Motion’ (1858) to Vorticism’s approach to contemporary art (Pfannkuchen 2006: 65). Pound, however, ultimately sought answers relevant to all art, past, present and future, and on a new scale: ‘The artist is very gravely concerned with the bases of his art, and with the relations of that art to everything else’ (ATH 55). The immediate concern was that the art of vers libre had no base. Music offered a mathematically rigorous system of interdependent rhythmic constructs to replace the prosody that vers libre had rejected. Pound’s term ‘absolute rhythm’ seeks non-subjective parameters for perception in the composition of poetry and music – an innate ability to gauge pace and duration with precision. ‘Absolute rhythm’ is the temporal twin of perfect pitch (‘absolute’ pitch in Pound’s day) (ATH 9; T 154–9). And, indeed, one finds in various recordings of Pound’s recitation of Mauberley (1920) no significant variation in tempo, or in the line, syllable and phrase durations (T 160, 168, 173). Pound then turned to composition. His settings of François Villon’s Le Testament attempt recovery of Villon’s psychology (perception and temperament) as if it were fossilised within the rhythms of the words. Pound completed the score in 1921 with the help of his musical amanuensis Agnes Bedford. But in 1923, he engaged George Antheil to revise the rhythms to precisely notate Villon’s speech-rhythms as Pound heard them – in ‘absolute rhythms’. Antheil revised the metres, retaining the 1921 melodies and the idiosyncratic harmonic textures drawn from a sparse orchestral accompaniment that exploits overtone production in bass clef instruments of different timbres (bassoon, trombone, cello, contrabass). Antheil also helped Pound articulate a theory of ‘great base’. The poet would test this theory in a different time-based medium: cinema.

Ballet mécanique The French painter Fernand Léger (1881–1955) and two Americans, cinematographer Dudley Murphy (1897–1968) and photographer Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890–1976), are credited with the making of the 1924 short silent film Ballet mécanique, ‘one of the most influential experimental works in the history of cinema’ (Museum of Modern Art 1984: 167). Ballet takes viewers on a roller-coaster ride through hundreds of film fragments in a fast-paced montage that juxtaposes objects, people and machines in surprising and unpredictable ways, and at such dizzying speeds as to produce a sensation of cacophony in the imagery and randomness in the approach.

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Pound provided financing, suggested Vorticist effects and brokered commitments from Léger and Antheil to work with Murphy. This chapter introduces Pound as designer of the film’s rhythms. Only recently has he received credit for an authorial role – no minor event, given the importance of Ballet mécanique to American and European avant-garde cinema (Posner and Matamoros 2017). An article published by Léger in the form of a précis states the film’s objectives and techniques. An accompanying diagram of the film’s rhythmic construction predicated on the theory of ‘great base’ clarifies Pound’s role as designer. Evidence to support this claim follows an overview of the collaborative efforts that produced Ballet. Léger describes Ballet as ‘objective, realistic and in no way abstract’ (Léger 1924–5: 42–5). Its subject matter includes numbers, shapes, words, common objects, facial close-ups, and long shots of people in various environments, their shadows and reflections. Save for a few scenes, the portrayal of humans in the film, including close-ups of the painter-model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), was for plastic effect only, an investigation of surface, rhythm, pattern, light and shadow. Such treatment was as much a premise of Vorticist principles as of Léger’s philosophy of cinematography (EPVA 155; Léger 1926: 7–8). Contrasting shots described by Léger as ‘cartes postales’ (‘postcard imagery’) offer depth: scenes of the dancer Katherine Hawley (Murphy’s wife), amusement park rides, parading troops and speeding cars (1924–5: 43). The montage contains still shots as well as blackout footage that conveys no visual information. Plot and narrative are absent. Murphy’s goal was to make a ‘pure’ film independent of the other arts (Freeman [1987] 1996: 31). His philosophy of cinematography prioritised ‘rhythmic pattern or tempo’ in order to create ‘rhythmic suspense as opposed to the usual plot suspense’ (Reilly 1926: 209). The owner of Visual Symphony Productions, he enjoyed some success directing short films of choreographed activity in picturesque locations, performed to a single uninterrupted musical symphony. In a droll perversion of the mad scientist in the laboratory, he would shoot and re-shoot motion experiments for Ballet, accumulating a great number of film fragments classified by rhythm and subject, but not chronology. Fragments were key to the modernist aesthetic, rooted in experiments in perception and cognition carried forward from the nineteenth century. With shots as brief as a fraction of a second, Ballet mécanique tests the viewer’s threshold of visual perception and suggests a new way of experiencing time. Today, viewers are prepared by modern media to recognise image fragments at breakneck speeds. Though Ballet’s shock value has lessened, its montage of objects from everyday life still wars against the viewer’s experience, perceptual limitations and psychological habits. The battle is won in the first minute and a half. The force majeure: rhythm.

Background The story of Ballet mécanique varies from one account to another, including those by the principals, and warrants further study. The following overview describes two diverse projects that were under way when one of them, a Pound–Léger–Antheil project, was reconceived as Ballet mécanique.

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Best known is the Murphy–Ray collaboration. The two artists shot footage in Paris for a loosely defined project sometime between summer and mid-October 1923. Activity ended when Ray, not expecting to finance expenses, withdrew, permitting Murphy use of footage he had shot (Ray 1963: 266–7). Léger meanwhile drew Pound into his orbit as he created set designs for ballet and film. The two men, neighbours since Pound’s 1921 arrival in Paris, developed a strong friendship over studio visits. The painter dedicated his lecture L’esthétique de la machine to Pound (Léger 1923), who in turn wrote Léger’s World War I experiences into The Cantos (XVI/72–4). Also in June, Pound wrote to his wife Dorothy that he had met the 22-year-old Antheil.2 Hoping to keep him in Paris, Pound proposed steady employment with three violin commissions for his friend Olga Rudge, a new music specialist, and the above-mentioned revisions to Le Testament. Pound also wrote to Dorothy of vague plans for a ‘spectacle musicale’ that may have intended film.3 This was the Pound–Léger–Antheil axis. The two embryonic projects merged after Murphy, just three years older than Antheil, visited Pound on 18 October. Intrigued by the filmmaker’s description of the art of cinema, the poet wrote to his wife that he offered financial help and ventured an experiment: ‘Have thought up a new stunt for him if he comes again Tuesday.’4 Murphy did return, entering Pound’s sphere of friends and influence and acquiring Léger and Antheil as collaborators. He began experimenting with Pound’s threemirror vortoscope, originally built for the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1916.5 To produce the ‘vortographs’, as Coburn referred to them, ‘the mirrors acted as a prism splitting the image formed by the lens into segments’ (Coburn 1978: 102). Having a solid background in optical lenses, Murphy developed numerous techniques to exploit the effects obtained with prisms. Under the guidance of his technical prowess, Ballet became a novel exercise in rhythm and motion created by masks, mirrors, prisms, re-photography and the editing process itself (Figure 21.1). William Moritz writes that Pound and Léger ‘hounded [Murphy] in the editing room’ (Moritz 1996: 129). With no training in film, the poet was guiding the filmmaker in the making of the earliest montage. He was, in fact, hosting two projects tangential to poetry, each of which exploited rhythm as its primary organising principle. From early November, when he installed a grand piano to facilitate Antheil’s commissions, his flat at 70 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs headquartered both projects (EPP II 57). Before long, the poet was migrating the rhythmic revisions to his opera over to ‘his’ film. On 16 and 19 November, Murphy wrote that a film made with and paid for by Pound was almost complete (Delson 2006: 52; Freeman 1996: 33 n.19) (Figure 21.2). December saw the premieres of the commissioned first and second violin sonatas, as well as two musical works by Pound. Antheil finished the Testament revisions and, in January, turned to composing music for Ballet (T 104; Whitesitt 1983: 219–20). Instead of synchronisation with the film, however, he would steer the music into concert venues.6 By month’s end, Pound’s activities were curtailed by an attack of appendicitis and hospitalisation. On 8 January, he left Paris for Rapallo where he wrote, ‘work on vorticism [sic] film – experiment interesting – but probably Murphy hasn’t brains enough to finish the job in my absence or without pushing’ (L/HP 522). Moritz concluded, ‘There can be no doubt that Dudley Murphy was the primary filmmaker’ (Moritz 1996: 129).

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Figure 21.1 Still frame from Ballet Mechanique (English title). The film's editor Dudley Murphy with a metronome arm subjected to the prism effect. From the project ‘Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894–1941’. Used by permission.

Figure 21.2 George Antheil, Dudley Murphy at Work. Caricature. George and Böske Antheil Papers, 1922–4, 42. Library of Congress. Used by permission. Prismatic effects, Pound’s conception realised by Murphy, accounted for about 20 per cent of the film at the time of its premiere. Years later, Pound tried to regain authorial footing by invoking the 1916 and 1923 vortoscope experiments, despite their rejection in favour of Murphy’s alternative approaches to multiplying the image (EPMA 76). The poet also acknowledged Léger’s importance to the finished film:

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The genesis of the ‘Ballet Méchanique’ [sic], especially the part finally rejected goes back at least to 1916 . . . We took a few metres of interesting and highly unsatisfactory film. Man Ray with his brilliant record and long experience produced something infinitely better; Murphy combined with Léger and got some interesting results. (EPMA 76)7 When Léger became senior artist, producer and director, the film’s length and visual palette expanded considerably. The rhythmic design remained unchanged. Busy with diverse music projects in Italy throughout May, Pound returned for the summer to his Paris flat. It is likely he learned that the film was nearing completion and Léger was preparing a project report (Pound 2005b: 30–48; EPP II 61; Delson 2006: 57). Léger finished the précis on 24 July. Frederick Kiesler, producer of the film’s Vienna premiere on 24 September 1924, printed the précis in the programme booklet for his Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (‘International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques’). The Little Review then published the English translation (Léger 1924–5: 42–4). Murphy’s biographer Susan Delson identifies ‘four distinct versions’ of Ballet that survive, plus ‘variants’. The first, embodying Murphy’s authorial priorities, has been lost. Léger was in possession of a print from which he subsequently generated new versions. The earliest of these is believed to have been screened at Kiesler’s exhibition (Delson 2006: 199 n.2; 206 n.113).8 Film critic Judi Freeman calls the Kiesler print the ‘definitive version’ (Freeman 1996: 45). Structural variations in subsequent prints include the truncation, elongation, division, removal, addition, substitution and redistribution of fragments. Despite all the changes, rhythm continues to be the defining structural feature.

Rhythm in Ballet mécanique: Periodicity in Image and Sound The most obvious of Ballet’s rhythmic procedures is its display of periodic motion. After the titles, the film opens onto a pastoral scene of Hawley on a garden swing. The rapid flashing of random still shots follows, plunging the viewer into an unknown world of visual cacophony. These two sequences introduce three generic kinds of motion in the film: periodicity (predominant), non-periodic or irregular motion (occasional) and stillness (occasional). To understand the differences between the first two types, Helmholtz offers a useful analogy with this distinction between noise and tone: A noise is accompanied by a rapid alternation of different kinds of sensations of sound . . . On the other hand, a musical tone strikes the ear as a perfectly undisturbed uniform sound which remains unaltered as long as it exists . . . Those regular motions which produce musical sound have been exactly investigated by physicists. They are oscillations, vibrations, or swings, that is up-and-down or to-andfro motions of sonorous bodies, and it is necessary that these oscillations should be regularly periodic. By a periodic motion we mean one which constantly returns to the same condition after exactly equal intervals of time. (Helmholtz 1954: 7–8) Periodicity may have characterised footage from the Murphy–Ray collaboration. We don’t know if this was intentional, or if the new team selected certain

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footage from the earlier collaboration precisely because it contained periodicity. Periodicity aligns with Pound’s decade-long interest in musical frequencies. It can also be attributed to Léger, who produced designs with oscillating elements for Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’Inhumaine (Freeman 1996: 36). This quality of periodicity attests to aesthetic and artistic convergence across three stages of the film’s construction. In the Kiesler print, oscillating, spinning, pulsing, pumping and pendular motions with more or less periodicity (never absolute) dominate almost all spatial and temporal axes. A slight detour to discuss periodicity in the context of music prepares us to better characterise Ballet’s rhythmic structure in general, and in the context of Pound’s theory.

A Poundian View of Periodicity in Music: The Fundamental and its Parts Helmholtz’s expanded research into physiological acoustics paved the way for composers to treat perception scientifically rather than programmatically.9 Challenging the orthodoxy that assigns each musical element a unique function, some composers related rhythm and tone ‘through overtone ratios’ (Cowell [1930] 1996: xi).10 A sound wave oscillating between two points, such as that created by a violin’s vibrating string, divides into 2, 3, 4, 5 equal parts. With division, the fundamental tone continues vibrating as one undivided part and becomes the first partial, while each smaller division, the second, third, fourth partial, and so on, vibrates with a proportionately greater frequency of oscillation. All partials except the first are overtones. The relationship of each partial to the first is expressed as a ratio: the octave at 2:1, for example, vibrates at twice the frequency of the first partial during a single cycle – the period. Waveforms of all the partials coincide at the end of the period of the first partial.11 Pound, like his contemporary Henry Cowell, presupposed this behaviour to pertain to musical rhythm as well.12 Keeping in mind that rhythm can be a physical waveform below the threshold of hearing or a conceptual construct (such as tempo, metre or a sixteenth note), Pound’s response as a composer was to conflate the periodicity of all rhythm and tone into a single continuum – the key that unlocks his definition: ‘I use the term “great bass” to designate the frequencies below those which the ear has been accustomed to consider as “notes”’ (Roads 2001: 55; EPMA 74). His statement regarding the range of oscillations, ‘from 10 to the minute or era up to top harmonic 8vo and 32mo [sic] above treble stave’ (GK 233), further conflates frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum of wavelengths with the passage of time itself (the ‘era’). Building on ‘great bass’, Pound introduced his harmonic theory in the March issue of transatlantic review (1924b: 77–81; P&P IV: 318–21). It states that harmony arises from the time intervals between notes (P&P IV: 318; ATH 10). He would later recommend composing with the frequencies of machine sounds heard in the factories, ‘You will take, say, 256 to the minute instead of to the second as your “tonic” . . . And the “idea” comes to me, or came in part from Antheil (who did not for the moment develop it)’ (Pound 1927: 137–41). The proposed ‘256 to the minute’ would be among the fastest machine tempos of Ballet mécanique.

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Practical Applications of the ‘Great Bass’ Continuum in Pound’s Music and in the Film The slim volume Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony appeared in October 1924 from William Bird’s Three Mountains Press and was republished by Pascal Covici in 1927. In it we find the notion of the continuum: The percussion of the rhythm can enter the harmony exactly as another note would. It enters usually as a Bassus, a still deeper bassus; giving the main form to the sound. (ATH 27)13 One way to think about this approach to harmonic form is to apply the principle to poetry: The percussion of the rhythm [for example, caesura, exclamation, accent] can enter the words exactly as another word would, giving the main form to the verse. Thinking about film, the statement might read: The percussion of the rhythm [projection speed, fast cuts between still images] can enter the shot sequence in film exactly as another image would, giving the main form to the picture or scene. Murphy restates the idea in his 1926 interview for Moving Picture World: [The] percussive rhythm [in Ballet mécanique] beats a note that obtains the same visual reaction as the drum obtains orally. (Reilly 1926: 209) Viewing the film, one finds a clear example near the midpoint: fast cutting between two discrete shots gives the illusion of a single shot.14 Close-ups of Kiki’s eyes and nose alternate with close-ups of her upturned face – eyes, nose, mouth – producing the illusion of continuous action on a single plane. My computer analysis of the digitised film shows this animation technique is then applied at twice the speed, the 2:1 ratio. A second example occurs within two contrasting rather than similar shots: rapid cutting between a circular hat and a horizontal shoe produces the illusion of a third image. Rhythm enters the sequence to give form to the picture.

Cross-Pollination: The Migration of Ratios from Opera to Film One of Le Testament’s most dissonant arias, ‘Dame du ciel’, provides evidence of cross-pollination between the opera’s newly revised rhythms and those of Ballet. The 1921 score drew the aria’s harmonic accompaniment from two contrabasses and cello, where 2.5 octaves separate the basses from the mezzo-soprano’s tonal gamut. Descending pitches in the contrabass sound three ledger lines below bass staff (A2, G#2, F2, D#2); three to four of their overtones sound below the cello’s middle c, filling in the harmony.15

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Antheil’s metrical revisions called for continuous change, where time signatures in the voice – 22/16, 11/8, 27/16, 31/16, 33/16, 21/8, 36/32 (irrational mixed metre) – simultaneously play against those in the bass clef instruments – 5/4, 6/4, 4/4, 8/4 (rational mixed metre) (T 57). Harmonic intervals are easily identified in these bass signatures: 5/4 = 5:4, a major third; 6/4 = 3:2, a fifth; 4/4 = 1:1, unison; 8/4 = 2:1, the octave. Presuming a continuum from rhythm to pitch, we can say that the contrabass metres also participate in the harmony. Antheil added tremolo in the contrabass to produce fast, intermittent, asynchronous beats that destabilise tonal continuity. The aria’s dissonance, then, arises from both rhythm and pitch. To synchronise the parts, he assigned the opera’s first metronome mark, MM = 105 beats per minute. Conversion of tempo-to-pitch yields A2, the contrabass’s first pitch. Tempo and the recurring A2 are brought into unison or accord.16 The harnessing of tempo and metre to reinforce the harmony was a breakthrough in Pound’s understanding of rhythm; it confirmed his intuition that tempo must be the starting point for achieving ‘rhythmic accord’. Despite the poet’s recitation of Mauberley at a steady tempo to produce musical proportions in the verse lines, the poet-as-composer tried to obliterate the feeling for underlying tempo with the notation of Villon’s speech-rhythms dependent solely on the rhythmic durations of the notes. With Antheil’s help, he was able to harness the tempo to influence the tone, ‘The 60, 72, or 84, or 120 per minute is a BASS, or basis. It is the bottom note of the harmony’ (GK 233). Curtis Roads summarises Pound’s conceptual reach as the attempt to have ‘an entire composition . . . viewed as one time spectrum of a fundamental duration’ (Roads 2001: 73). ‘Dame du ciel’ and Ballet mécanique offer cross-disciplinary approaches to this view. The working methods were typical of Pound’s approach to collaboration: he secured his influence, brought well-formed ideas to the table, moved freely between disciplines regardless of his technical training, and motivated his collaborators to create something new. Seeing potential in the abstract possibilities of interlocking rhythms governed by a ‘great base’, he introduced the innovations of ‘Dame du ciel’ to Ballet.

A Diagram of Ballet mécanique’s Rhythms From one end to the other the film is subjected to an arithmetical constraint, as precise as possible (number, speed, time). (Léger 1924–5: 43) Ballet’s images have been catalogued and analysed, but, surprisingly, the film rhythms have not; and attempts to correlate them to the diagram in the précis have proven speculative (Lawder 1975: 135). The diagram published in Kiesler’s programme booklet appears redrawn from one subsequently published in The Little Review (Figures 21.3 and 21.4). Both depict three axes of interlocking speeds that determine rhythmic sequencing in the film’s montage. Rectangles in the Kiesler diagram are drawn more accurately and with more consistency in the line lengths. The diagram relocates the left origin of the dashed line, and changes the placement and number of squiggles. To identify ‘arithmetical constraints’ within the film’s construction, I took measurements from the Kiesler diagram.

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Figure 21.3 The Kiesler diagram. The diagram published in Kiesler’s programme differs from an earlier hand-drawn version in the dashed line, size of the boxes, character and placement of the line squiggles. © 1924, Frederick Kiesler.

Figure 21.4 The Little Review diagram. An early diagram dated July 1924 and marked for layout in The Little Review, autumn/winter 1924–5. Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. ‘Two coefficients of interest upon which the film is constructed: The variation of the speeds of projection: The rhythm of these speeds’17 (Léger 1924–5: 43). This quotation discloses the self-reflexive nature of Ballet’s construction: projector speed, an external source of film motion of which the audience is generally unaware, has a major role in Ballet. Like the metronome mark in ‘Dame du ciel’, it sets the terms of rhythmic accord. But unlike ‘Dame’, it is variable. I use the term ‘self-reflexive’ because the projector is responsible for the illusion behind all film art: film images do not move. Rather, a thin strip of black film separates each still frame. The viewer sees a flicker when the projector does not meet a speed threshold corresponding to the retina’s ability to blend images (16–24 frames per second, or fps). With optimal projection speed, each subsequent image blends with the previous one to give the desired illusion. Now, it is possible that the diagram had little bearing on actual projection speeds at which the film was screened. But taken at face value, the diagrams purport to chart the following:

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Projector speed. The dashed diagonal line, ‘Tension toward speed’, indicates constant acceleration (Léger 1924–5: 44). Its slope indicates rate of change; its right terminus, maximum projector speed (and possibly duration). Image speed. Seven rectangles indicate discrete groups of image content that divide the film ‘into seven vertical parts . . . which go from slow to rapid’ (1924–5: 43–4). Contrasts in speed to create variety. Eleven curved and angular squiggles indicate an interruption to the rhythms of an image group.

To determine relative image speed, I measured the rectangles in category (2) above and converted their proportions to ratios (Figure 21.5). Using a digital metronome, I then recorded the tempos of the slowest shots, using a digitised file of the Kiesler print. MM = 50 is the ‘tonic’ speed of Ballet mécanique’s first image group (Figure 21.6).18 Multiplying each ratio by 50, I can obtain speeds for all the image groups in the diagram: 50 × 1:1 = 50, 50 × (9:8) = 56, 50 × (3:2) = 75, 50 × 2:1 = 100, 50 × (9:4) = 113, 50 × 3:1 = 150, 50 × 4:1 = 200 (Figure 21.7).

Figure 21.5 Table 1. Measurements of the rectangles in millimetres and their corresponding ratios. Source: Kiesler 1924 programme. © Margaret Fisher.

Figure 21.6 Note, the first rectangle is not a true square. A diagonal line drawn along the upper left edges of the rectangles shows that relative sizes intend rectangle 1 to be square.

Figure 21.7 Table 2. Beats per minute extrapolated from measurements and ratios. Source: Kiesler 1924 programme. © Margaret Fisher.

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Figure 21.8 Table 3. Musical intervals extrapolated from measurements, ratios and beats per minute. Source: Kiesler 1924 programme. © Margaret Fisher.

Figure 21.9 The Circle of Fifths. These particular ratios, representative of common intervals of the musical scale, reveal the full musical paradigm of the design. The ratios in series, the unison (tonic), 2nd, 5th and octave, then repeats, ratios of the 9th and 12th having the same position in the scale as the 2nd and 5th, but one octave higher. The repetition confirms the ratios are neither coincidental nor randomly chosen (Figure 21.8).19 The series holds additional interest as it involves only prime numbers: 2 and 3. With these two primes, one can produce all twelve tones of the Western musical scale. This is demonstrated by the Circle of Fifths, a teaching tool for music theory known to composers and string players. It involves only the primes 2 and 3, and the ratios (3:2), the perfect fifth, and (2:1), the octave (Figure 21.9).20 The unexpected discovery reveals the richness of conception behind Ballet’s rhythmic design. It also identifies the designers of Ballet’s rhythmic construction to be musicians: Pound and Antheil. The reduction of speeds to musical ratios, further reduced to prime numbers, which in themselves have the potential to generate the entire chromatic scale, adumbrates the poet-composer’s theory of a ‘great base’. Pound surely needed Antheil’s help to render such a plan.21 The two diagrams portray the initial projector speed differently, as seen in the origin of the dashed line at its left point. The diagram from The Little Review has it intersect the faintly drawn baseline of the rectangles, indicating a shared value. As there can be no fractional frames or fractional speeds, the value here must be 1, shown in Figures 21.7 and 21.8 as the ‘base’ speed.

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At a speed of 1, however, film stock would melt or ignite under the heat of the projector lamp. This impracticality is mitigated by the position of the originating point, well before the first image group. Transposing Pound’s definition of a ‘great bass’ to film, we could say that this origin lies below what the eye is accustomed to considering as film motion. Projection + still frame = the ‘great bass’ of motion pictures. In the Kiesler diagram the originating projector speed occurs at 40 per cent of the height of the first rectangle, whose value is 50. This yields a viable projection speed of 20 fps. The origin of the line is implied. It intersects the rectangles precisely at their centre point, maintaining consistent 2:1 tension between projection and image speed.

Speeds in the Kiesler Print Sampled speeds in the digitised Kiesler print were measured as events occurring on the beat and have a margin of error ± 5. Simultaneous tempos within a shot are represented by two+ images to a row. Recurring shots have multiple entry points logged in multiple left-hand columns (Figure 21.10).

Figure 21.10 Table 4. A sampling of the approximate tempos within individual shots. © Margaret Fisher.

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Findings in the Kiesler Film While the sampled speeds are dependent on the transfer speed used to digitise the film, arguments about relative speeds and ratios hold at any transfer speed.22 The sampling shows concurrence with the diagram speeds in Figure 21.7. Speeds do not, however, follow the diagram’s trajectory of incremental increases or zoning specific to image groups. The terms ‘speed’ and ‘tempo’ are used interchangeably below, with ‘speed’ used more generally, and ‘tempo’ used when the shot rhythms suggest a musical analogue. The speeds apply to both image and editing rhythms. Editing and image rhythms with ratios of 2:1 and 4:1 appear frequently enough for us to conclude they are intentional. The ratio of the octave is the backbone of the film’s rhythmic organisation. The fastest speeds have a ratio of 5:1, or five times that of the tonic speed (two octaves + a major third – the same 2.5 octave gamut as ‘Dame du ciel’). Concurrence with tempos indicated in Figure 21.7 is at times fitful, often due to damaged film frames and truncated sequences. Tempos most frequently logged in the film are 50, 55–6, 100, 200 and 240+. Tempos of 75 and 113 are least frequent. Findings showing concurrence between film and diagram are bolstered by images of a working metronome in three discrete shot sequences, one of which features Murphy’s face, and all of which have a tempo of MM = 50, the diagram’s tonic speed.23 It appears Murphy tried to achieve specific tempos in the photography and the montage. Other than a first image group, I was unable to positively identify other image groups in the film based on the diagram’s zoning of speeds. Identification of the ‘penetrations’ is facilitated by obvious contrasts in speeds, but inconclusive without secure identification of the image groups. The tempo 150 enters halfway through the film and is, for all intents and purposes, the tempo Antheil assigned to his music for the film, MM = 152 (Antheil 2003: xvi). With this scheme, Antheil’s percussive music could not fail to coincide with the image rhythms a good percentage of the time, even though he did not compose to the image. This finding prompts the question: did Antheil structure his music according to values shown in the diagram? After the opening titles, the film imparts the general feeling of an underlying tempo of 100, reinforced throughout by tempos at half, double and triple the speed. This finding contradicts the diagram. Incremental increases in projection and image speed would undermine the feel for an underlying tempo. While Léger’s text points to variable projection speeds, it is possible that he intended to account for variability across different screenings of the film, rather than variability within a single screening, in essence stating that the strict relations of the parts will hold at any speed. This would not be true for a plot-driven or narrative film. Further, while it is tempting to read the diagram as a timeline from left to right, one could also view it as a palette of ratios from which to draw, similar to a palette of colours, which need not be taken in order. Irregular rhythms characterise some of the film’s most notable animation sequences: a Chaplinesque puppet that opens and closes the film, a jumbled sequence of shots with durations of three to six frames each, and a sequence featuring news headlines towards the film’s end.

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The First Image Group The first image block that follows the film’s titles can be readily matched to the diagram. Two shots of equal duration bookend the sequence: Katherine Hawley on a swing, right side up, then upside down. Like the overture to the ‘Sirens’ chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this group previews the entire film: images, animation techniques, editing techniques, contrasts, and the predominant recurring tempos of 50, 55, 100, 200 and 240+. Simultaneous tempos occur when Hawley, a trained dancer, fits two head movements at MM = 100 inside the time her swing takes to complete half a cycle at MM = 50, an example of the octave ratio 2:1 that proves so important to the film’s rhythmic structure.

Concluding Remarks Ballet mécanique grew out of the desire of Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy and Ezra Pound to produce a pure film according to each artist’s definition, one constructed solely from fragments, its montage developed according to rhythm rather than narrative. The use of periodicity across three distinct stages of the film’s assembly attests to a remarkable convergence of creative minds even as the footage reveals each artist pursuing his own aesthetic. Diagrams of the film’s construction, published by Léger in 1924 and 1925, chart speeds of relative value. When converted to musical ratios, these speeds reveal a model of rhythmic accord realised as ratios in series, the basis of which rests on two sources responsible for the film’s motion, but hidden from the viewer: the projector and the still frame. These particular ratios – multiple integers of the film’s fundamental speed (with a value of 1, below what the eye sees as motion) and its tonic speed (with a value of 50) – are predicated on the same logic that informs Pound’s emerging theory of ‘great base’. It appears the film’s sequences were shot and edited with some success to match speeds indicated in the diagram, as seen in the earliest surviving print; but they conform only fitfully if the diagram is read as a timeline. Like a watch too tightly wound, the diagram’s exercise in speed may have proved self-defeating. Any direct or indirect influence Pound had on the film waned with his January 1924 relocation to Italy. He did return to Paris that summer when the Kiesler print took definitive shape, and may have helped to write the précis-with-diagram published under Léger’s name. Pound later referred to this diagram as ‘abstract design, or a modus of presenting forms moving’. In a moment of hubris tinged with disappointment, he described himself as overarching and overreaching, ready to take up with Arnaut Daniel, Arnold Dolmetsch, Propertius, or any photographer in search of abstract design, or a modus of presenting forms moving . . . It is doubtless a marvelous and sinister coincidence that . . . I should . . . even waste time with a few young Americans who had also looked at machinery, or taken an interest in forms. (EPMA 76–7) Unexpressed here is Pound’s respect for Léger, the other senior artist on the project who undoubtedly understood the conceptual rigour of the diagram’s design and its importance to Pound’s intellectual production. With the advantage of hindsight, we

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can say that Léger’s willingness to attach a partly fulfilled schematic to the précis, unattributed, reflects the same spirit of camaraderie that led Pound to include Léger’s voice in Canto XVI, also unattributed.24 The published entries denote a turning point in each artist’s embrace of machine aesthetics. The film’s transfer to DVD gives viewers a better opportunity to understand the film as the result of extraordinary collaboration. As Fernand Léger’s only film, Ballet exploits the medium to investigate the close-up as the best method to portray plastic values associated with objectivity, and rejects the subjective viewpoint usually attributed to the camera. As a visualisation of musical structures, Ballet demanded exactness in the cinematography and editing. It is the most notable achievement of Dudley Murphy’s early production. While George Antheil remained on the periphery of the film’s construction, we know from his drawings that he was witness to the process. It was Pound, the active participant and didactic presence at 70 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, who, with Antheil’s counsel, peddled the conceptual approach to rhythm he had previously tested in poetry, photography and music. The film’s rhythmic organisation as conceived by Pound survives as one of Ballet mécanique’s most objective and lasting qualities.

Notes I am particularly indebted to Bruce Posner, film archivist responsible for the 2001 digital transfer of Ballet mécanique, and Paul Lehrman, music editor responsible for the 2000 syncronisation of Antheil’s music, who kindly granted permission to transfer the film’s digital file to my computer for analysis and furnished critical information about the history and naming of the film’s various prints. I am grateful to Mauro Piccinini, George Antheil’s biographer, for generously granting me access to documents at the core of his research, and for meticulous review of facts and arguments. Composers Larry Polansky, Ami Radunskaya and Bob Hughes brought unparalleled expertise in music ratios and mathematical models to bear on their reading of this chapter, answered many questions and made invaluable suggestions. John Shepard at the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley and Archivists at Getty Research Institute Library, and at the Library, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, arranged access to Kiesler’s programme for the Vienna Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik. 1. Sidney Lanier’s The Science of English Verse (1880) offers additional perspective on the nineteenth-century interest in the quantification of music and verse. 2. Ezra to Dorothy Pound, 24 June 1923. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II. 3. Ezra to Dorothy Pound, 3 November 1923. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II. 4. Ezra to Dorothy Pound, 20 October 1923. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II. 5. Ezra to Dorothy Pound, 28 and 30 October 1923. Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II. 6. George Antheil to Ezra Pound (undated, May or June 1925). YCAL MSS 43 2/69–74. 7. The English title of the film with this spelling – ‘F. Léger and Dudley Murphy present BALLET MECHANIQUE’ – appears in the 1924 film print held in New York’s Anthology Film Archives. The same print gives a second title in French, ‘IMAGES MOBILES de Fernand LÉGER Dudley MURPHY Synchronisme musical de Georges ANTHEIL’. The film is now referred to as Ballet mécanique, often seen with all letters capitalised. 8. Also see Lehrman (2010: 191–205). Kiesler’s widow donated the print to New York Anthology Film Archives in 1975. 9. Thomas Campion in 1613 wrote of the ear’s active participation in constructing elements of the harmony not seen in the written music (Campion 1967: 55). 10. An excellent description of overtones is in Henry Cowell and Robert L. Duffus (1921). 11. The fundamental can refer to the longest waveform of either pitch or rhythm. To avoid ambiguity in the use of the term going forward, it will be applied in a more general sense,

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12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

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unless qualified. The terms ‘basis’, ‘bassus’ and ‘great bass’ will refer to a fundamental of rhythm. The term ‘tonic’ will indicate the first in a series (sometimes also called the fundamental), such as the first pitch of a musical scale, or the first in a series analogous to a musical scale. Cowell (1897–1965) made the same arguments in 1919 but did not publish until 1930 (Cowell [1930] 1996: 67). He concluded, ‘ratios express a single physical relationship which is heard as rhythm when slow and pitch when fast’ (Johnson 1997: 27–8). Percussion refers not to instruments but to unpitched regular and irregular rhythmic events that occur on or off the beat. References in this section are to the Kiesler print. YCAL MSS 53 45/1001; EPM 475–6; Fisher (2003a: 23–41). Pitch names indicating octave are from the Harvard Dictionary of Music (2003: 663). ‘The average person hears only three or four [overtones]’ (Cowell and Duffus 1921: 64). R. Murray Schafer identified strategies in Testament leading to Great Bass: the ‘incorporation of percussion directly into the fabric of the arias’, and ‘megaphonic pedal tones on double bass [notes sustained below the changing harmonies]’, whose ‘palpable’ lower frequencies define underlying form in the music (EPM 295, 475–6). See also Fisher (2003a: 23–41). Calculated as “tempo/60 = vps × 27” (where vps is vibrations per second). The resulting 224 vps gives the pitch A2 (a pitch somewhat higher than tuning with A = 440) (Frequency to ‘Cents’ Conversion Chart 1970, Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Wharton IL). That is, the image and editing rhythms are affected by the projection speeds. Note that my speed values are not fps (which are tied to projection speed), but beats per minute (bpm, as transferred to digitised media). I used a digital metronome to sample speeds in the 2006 DVD made from the 1924, 35mm b/w print (Frank and Lehrman 2006: disc 2), digitised by film archivist Bruce Posner and underwritten by Cineric, Inc., New York (www.unseen-cinema.com) (Léger, Murphy, Pound and Antheil [1924] 2005). Measurements from The Little Review diagram (Figure 21.4) show variable widths and heights within each figure, rendering results unreliable. Ratios obtained from the Kiesler diagram suggest it is drawn to scale. This is supported by the finding that the diagonal lines of the two diagrams are of equal length if one includes in the measure of the Kiesler diagonal the implied length required to intersect the base or horizontal line of the rectangles (faintly seen in The Little Review diagram). I am grateful to Paul Lehrman for cautions concerning its limited relevance to pitches derived from the harmonic series. Léger had no aptitude for maths or science (Freeman 1994: 232). Nothing in Murphy’s biography suggests he would generate this idea for film. Trained in music and optics, he undoubtedly understood the principle behind ratios. Antheil would have known the Circle of Fifths, as would Pound, who studied the classical music textbooks (Fisher 2003b: 16n.41). But Antheil’s role was admittedly supportive: ‘I know you’ve got your stuff and the only way I can pay you back is by lending you my slightly more expert practical knowledge. When you took advantage of this I had some way of paying you back. When you don’t as per recently – I aint’ (George Antheil to Ezra Pound, 13 August 1926, YCAL MSS 43 2/74). Pound’s ‘stuff’ would have been the talent for theorising about rhythmic forms across disciplines. The intended speed of projection is unknown. Digital transfer to DVD at 20 fps worked best for synchronisation of the music with image (p.c., Bruce Posner to author, 18 August 2016), while ‘apparent rhythmic synchrony between the film and the music will occur at just about any [music] tempo’ (p.c., Paul Lehrman to author, 29 October 2016). A metronome is also used in Man Ray’s independent 1923 artwork, ‘Indestructible Object’. See The Cantos Project, XVI: Calendar of Composition, for more information on the composition of Canto XVI. http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantosoverview/canto-xvi?showall=&start=3.

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22 Renaissance Man: Ezra Pound’s Search for a Contemporary Colour Palette Through His Solo Violin Works Leslee Smucker

A

n anecdote from a vida of one of Ezra Pound’s favourite troubadours, Arnaut Daniel, goes as follows:

It supposedly happened at the court of Richard I (Lion-Hearted), Eleanor’s son. Another troubadour had boasted that he could compose a better poem than Arnaut and challenged him to a contest. The king confined the two poets to different rooms in his castle, stipulating that at the end of the day they were to appear before him and recite their new poems, whereupon Richard would determine the winner of the bet. Arnaut’s inspiration failed him; but from his room he could hear his rival singing as he composed his song, and learned it by heart. When the time of the trial came he asked to perform first and sang his rival’s song, leaving the latter to look like the copycat. (Taruskin 2009: 2602) I often wonder what Pound would have done in Arnaut Daniel’s place. Surely his inspiration wouldn’t have failed him, and if he had taken the other troubadour’s song, he would have made at least a few tweaks. Instead of Richard I’s stuffy room, Pound found himself at a café in London or on the Rapallo shoreline, translating and transposing music from chansonniers of the fifteenth century – the closest thing he could find to a room next to Arnaut Daniel. I still ask myself which place he would have preferred. The anecdote, though probably not true, still gives us some information about the troubadour’s art and process. First, it was oral tradition: the other troubadour conjured up the song by singing, and Arnaut learned the whole work by ear. It wasn’t until at least a hundred years later that these works were written in commemorative chansonniers. This story also presupposed the troubadour’s works were a union of poetry and song, with the music and poetry composed simultaneously. The perfect blend of poetry and song – more accurately called motz el son – was the raison d’être for Pound. He yearned for the twelfth-century aesthetic he thought lost. In his essay ‘Mediaeval Music and Yves Tinayre’ he whined: The aesthetic culture of the twelfth century, or at any rate the literary and musical culture, was focused in a particularly intense manner on one problem, that is, the joining of word and tune. This form of civilisation has declined since then in an almost uninterrupted downward curve, relieved by an occasional rise. (EPM 397)

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Seeing no curve upwards, no way forward in the musical and literary world, he knighted himself as the troubadour of the twentieth century – or so I imagine. What might he have said to his beloved Arnaut Daniel had Pound been in Richard I’s court that day? Pound’s essay entitled ‘The Renaissance’ gives us a clue: I suppose no two men will agree absolutely respecting ‘pure color’ or ‘good color’, but the modern painter recognizes the importance of the palette. One can but make out one’s own spectrum or table. (LE 215) The day in Richard I’s court, Arnaut Daniel lacked originality and ultimately invention – a misstep for a modern artist. In Pound’s quest to revive the art of the twelfth century, he found inventions that crossed medium lines as his way of achieving a modern colour palette that reflected motz el son. In every area of his artistic process, he showed himself to be a Renaissance man, pulling music into his poetry, layering poetry into his music and meshing one artistic allusion with another.

The Colour Palette The concept of a colour palette in ‘The Renaissance’ essay is a metaphor for the accumulation of procedures performing particular functions that makes an artist’s work unique. The cultivation of Pound’s unique colour palette is rooted in the works of ancient artists he respected as inventors. In an attempt to highlight the deliquescence of instruction, Pound also revealed his reverence for artistic invention, and the degradation art suffers upon codification, in his chapter ‘Treatise on Metre’: I A master invents a gadget, or procedure to perform a particular function, or a limited set of functions. Pupils adopt the gadget. Most of them use it less skillfully than the master. The next genius may improve it, or he may cast it aside for something more suited to his own aims. II Then comes the paste-headed pedagogue or theorist and proclaims the gadget a law, or rule. III Then a bureaucracy is endowed, and the pin-headed secretariat attacks every new genius and every form of inventiveness for not obeying the law, and for perceiving something the secretariat does not. (ABCR 200) In part, the Renaissance was attractive to Pound because of artists’ inventiveness, not merely their output. These specific, technical aspects of Pound’s compositional devices, what we will call colour gadgets, make up his artistic colour palette. Inventiveness was integral to Pound’s compositional method not only poetically, but also musically. A variety of similar procedures crop up in Pound’s oeuvre regardless of medium, and it is the cultivation and use of these procedures across medium lines that made Pound an inventor, or Renaissance man, of the twentieth century. By dissolving lines of genre and medium, Pound’s specific musical and poetic colour gadgets are made clearer when we study poetic and musical works in tandem. Colour gadgets that cross genre barriers include: conception of metre, insistence on rhythmic integrity, use of sense units, treatment of image, and form- and pattern-making. By

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examining colour gadgets that make up his colour palette, in both his musical and poetic works, we are drawn to a larger, conceptual, essential trend in Pound’s output: the blend of music and poetry. Many aspects of Pound’s colour palette are inherently tied to a modern music sensibility; however, these aspects are rooted in his study and cultivation of palette through ancient texts and his contemporary poetic palette. Pound may have been swayed, influenced and even helped by other twentieth-century composers (like Stravinsky and Antheil), but his works are uniquely his – characterised by the special bond they keep with all his artistic endeavours. There are a decent number of academic writings and even performances of Pound’s larger musical works, including his opera Le Testament from 1921. While works like Le Testament provide us with examples of how Pound used prosody and instrumentation, as well as many of the colour gadgets used in his poetic works, the violin works will be the sole area of focus for this chapter for a few reasons. First, the solo violin works show a more personal and exploratory side to Pound’s music. Smaller solo works perhaps did not need as much attention or guidance from his musical counterparts, and some were unsupervised all together, specifically Sestina: Altaforte. Spanning ten years, the solo violin works also represent a compendium of Pound’s aesthetic and compositional devices. The very nature of a solo violin work forced Pound to strip the composition down to the essentials of his musical ideas, allowing the simplicity of genre to offer a bridge to his poetry. Even in the absence of words, the violin works show his contemporary palette to be composed by the principle of motz el son – showing his true power to be the ability to write music poetically. The two categories that make up Pound’s violin works are transcriptions and original works. Of Pound’s twelve pieces for solo violin, five are transcriptions (some of them only fragments of unfinished sketches). Found in Robert Hughes’s Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound 1923–1933 (Pound 2005b) chronologically, the first solo violin work is a transcription from 1923: Plainte pour la Mort du roi Richard Coeur de Lion by Gaucelm Faidit of the twefth century. Later that same year, from August to October, Pound tried his hand at an original composition – Sujet pour violon (resineux). The next year, 1924, houses two works that are especially alluring – Pound’s musical Sestina: Altaforte and his transcription of Le Duc de Bourgogne’s Madame trop vos me spremes. By the end of a ten-year span of violin compositions, a different style emerged in his work Al Poco Giorno. Over the course of his solo violin works, Pound effaces medium and genre lines by creating an all-encompassing colour palette through his study of the classics and the act of transcription.

Transcription and Translation Pound’s curation of procedures for his modern colour palette often involved consultation with ancient texts and figures. In his essay ‘Date Line’, translation and exercise in a certain period served as a way to evaluate and control a set of procedures: 1. Criticism by discussion . . . 2. Criticism by translation. 3. Criticism by exercise in a certain period.

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As you would not seriously consider a man’s knowledge of tennis until he could either make or had made some sort of show in a tournament, so we can assume that until a man can actually control a given set of procedures there must be many elements in them of which he has but an imperfect knowledge. (LE 74) To be able to control a set of procedures was particularly important to Pound. Beyond his desire to be bulletproof in his often harsh criticism, the ability to show control over a set of procedures was a way to intimately know the art of a different age and time. Whereas Pound was writing about literature, his musical transcriptions worked the same way. Transcribing acted as both a creative and a learning process. Pound sought manuscripts of ancient texts and song as a way to learn from the troubadours he held in high regard. Many of the troubadour melodies were commemorated in chansonniers from the late fifteenth century. In Figure 22.1, the decorative chansonnier shows the beautiful mixture of word and tune surrounded by ornate drawings and intricate details, further proof of the aesthetics of combined artistic mediums. The tune is written in mensural notation – a system that could show precise rhythmic durations by defining different note shapes.

Figure 22.1 Duc de Bourgogne, Madame trop vos me spremes. Page of a Chansonnier in Biblioteca Augusta de Perugia 69v–70r MS G 20.

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These in turn allowed a hierarchy between note values. Pound taught himself mensural notation (used between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries), and he would copy the score in the library to transcribe later. While only fifty scores of medieval music were known before 1900, the turn of the twentieth century witnessed the discovery of a mass of medieval and Renaissance sources (Kreutziger-Herr 2005: 82). Transcription of these sources then became a possibility, and many of them were taken on by musicologists. Unlike them, Pound took the manuscripts as a starting point and expanded the works through his own modern conception. Pound’s motivation for digging up and learning ancient musical texts perhaps stems from his work and philosophy surrounding poetic translation. He had a profound effect on both the conceptual and procedural terms for translation as a literary product (Yao 2010: 33). He asserted ‘English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translations’ (LE 33). Pound elevated the status of translation as a key component in the revival of an age of superb art. We will examine two specific works that exemplify Pound’s study of the classics: his lengthy poetic translation Homage to Sextus Propertius, and his musical transcription of Le Duc de Bourgogne’s Madame trop vos me spremes. Both offer a bridge to similar procedures in Pound’s general colour palette, and can show the development of his colour gadgets by way of a modern motz el son. In turn, we’ll see the additional gadgets Pound procures through each work manifest in his original, creative musical works. Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius (published in 1919) sets Propertius’ work as a pastiche, not a literal or even faithful translation. In his celebration of Propertius’ work, Pound cultivates and accumulates modern colour gadgets that make up his literary colour palette, with the help of Propertius’ influence. Of his Homage Pound said, ‘My job was to bring a dead man to life, to present a living figure’ (SL 149). Propertius’ work was written in the elegiac tradition. A selection of Propertius’ original Latin shows his strong syllabic Latin prosody; it is the protagonist receiving a letter from his mistress inviting him to come to Tibur: Nox media, et dominae mihi venit epistula nostrae: Tibure me missa iussit adesse mora, candida qua geminas ostendunt culmina turres, et cadit in patulos nympha Aniena lacus. (Propertius III: XVI; 1912: 232) A literal translation would run like this: ‘’Twas midnight when a letter came to me from my mistress bidding me come without delay to Tibur, where the white hills heave up their towers to right and left and Anio’s waters plunge into spreading pools’ (Propertius 1912: 233). In Homage, Pound took inspiration from Propertius’ original, rather than have recourse to a faithful translation: Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress: Telling me to come to Tibur: At once!! ‘Bright tips reach up from twin towers, Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.’ (P 209)

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Homage is just what the title suggests: a tribute to Propertius. Yet Pound’s unique compositional style rears its head and brings the Latin poet into the twentieth century – sounding completely new. Pound’s transcription of Le Duc de Bourgogne’s Madame is also a pastiche. In the late spring of 1924, Pound consulted the original manuscript and presented the French duke as a living, modern figure through a transcription process that is uniquely Pound’s. The colour gadgets relate directly to Pound’s literary palette, showing off the poet’s cultivation of motz el son. Madame is a simple and flowing transcription, housing two melodic lines (a top and bottom voice manifested by double stops in the violin) – something Pound preserved from Bourgogne’s original fifteenth-century manuscript.1 Even though a small amount of text is found in Bourgogne’s original, Pound abandons words all together in his solo violin transcription. It is this lack of words where we find deeper poetic and musical relationships by the cultivation of similar colour gadgets in Homage Sextus Propertius. There are a few different theories on the way Pound cultivated Propertius’ technical methods in Homage, specifically when considering versification and metre. Propertius’ Elegies were written in the elegiac couplet tradition, with a hexameter line followed by a pentameter. An assertion, made originally by Ronald Bottrall, that Homage was written ‘in subtle approximation to Latin elegiacs’ was then developed by several other scholars. J. P. Sullivan, in his book Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius, disputes this claim, stating that Pound did not approximate to an elegiac couplet, and had he tried he would have been mistaken (1964: 77). Sullivan suggests a different way of looking at Pound’s versification in Homage, and asks his readers to consider Pound’s verse in terms of sense units, as a sort of structured vers libre. Pound was not attempting to revive the elegiac couplet, but rather followed his own sense of what each unit of Propertius’ poem elicits. If we look at the scansion of the first line of Propertius’ Latin, it follows the classic elegiac hexameter: – – u | u – u | u – u | – u u| – u u | – – Nox media, et dominae mihi venit epistula nostrae Pound’s verse, however, is free and not an approximation of hexameter. In Homage, Pound listens to Propertius’ cadence and creates a free verse that still holds rhythmic integrity. The importance of artistic sense and listening cannot be overstated in Pound’s cultivation of his colour palette. In his ‘Treatise on Meter’ he writes: You don’t ask an art instructor to give you a recipe for making a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. Hence the extreme boredom caused by the usual professorial documentation or the aspiring thesis on prosody. The answer is: LISTEN to the sound that it makes. (ABCR 201) In both his literary and musical oeuvre, Pound’s work is often curated by his senses. This applies to his construction of phrases and units, as well as to his fascination with patterning notes and forms. The rhythm and metre of his works are guided by his modern sensibility, with no traditional constructs followed. He curates these

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Figure 22.2 Ezra Pound Madame trop vos me spremes, bars 1–11. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission. senses and creates his own palette, from which he draws in both his musical and literary works. Madame’s rhythm and metre are shaped and cultivated in a similar way to Homage’s poetic ones. Pound’s musical metre in Madame is not a regurgitation of Bourgogne’s manuscript; instead, it is constructed by the whims of Pound’s own palette. Figure 22.2 shows the start of Pound’s transcription of Madame. The starting three beat bar hints at the possibility of a dance movement in three, and despite the changing metre, the feeling of a slow dance remains throughout. Though simple and lilting on first listen, Madame is modern in the execution of metrical construction. In Figure 22.1, the absence of time signatures and the abundance of varied beats in each measure creates an abstracted sense of traditional metre. Even though the metre changes abruptly and constantly, the overall rhythmic pulse still remains intact, by indicating that the eighth note must be constant throughout. Pound also adds accents to almost every note in the first line. The addition of these accents is perhaps more closely related to Pound’s poetic, vocal rhythmic determinations than to a secluded musical compositional device. The rhythmic specificity and complexity suggest Pound’s transcription process revolved around listening to the sound he conceived in Bourgogne’s original, and reconceptualising the sound into his modern palette. Musical phrases in Madame were not tied to a metronome, but linked to the sense unit and free rhythmic structure of stresses, similar to the way Pound had broken with Propertius’ elegiac verse. In Figure 22.2, Pound uses a caesura to create a space between sense units. A caesura (indicated by a double slash) is a common musical marking; however, the mark originated in poetry – an indication of pause and cadence in natural speech patterns. The marking is both functional and suggestive. While it indicates the end of a phrase, it also reminds the performer of the duality of the work: a musical poem originally written by Le Duc de Bourgogne. Pound’s insistence on rhythmic integrity coupled with a reconceptualisation of metre and verse in both Homage and Madame allowed him the freedom to break traditional musical and poetic conventions. He also reconceptualised the divisions of phrase and pause according to his own palette. In his manifesto on Imagism, Pound presented three core ideals he used throughout his practice and original work:

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1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. (LE 3) Pound reconceptualised ancient texts and characters into his own modern palette. His direct treatment of the ‘thing’ resulted in a succinct presentation while simultaneously cultivating his own tools to elicit a similar reaction to that created by his ancient predecessor. Through his cultivation of palette, a new sort of metre occurred – one that was not bound by traditional metronomic structures. Using the duration and length of words and syllables as a basis for the proportions in his poetry, he applied the same ideas to his music. His rejection of the confines of the metronome created a heavy emphasis on the creation and proportionality of sense units. Pound’s overall treatment of each sense unit in relation to the next was a cultivation of his Imagist musings. In the excerpt from Homage, we can see how Pound strips the model of content he deems superfluous. Propertius’ mistress tells him to come to Tibur and in Pound’s version ‘at once!’ the image of the river flashes in Propertius’ memory. The crucial word ‘where’ in Propertius’ original creates the description of Tibur. Instead, Pound presents the image of Tibur without the connecting word ‘where’, allowing the image to act as its own object or association, not a description. By getting rid of any extra bridging language (like ‘where’), Pound created an abrupt and effective change to the direct presentation of the image. In a musical sense, dramatic dynamic shifts and changes are similar to the Imagist colour gadget Pound used in Homage. Madame is a particularly quiet work with few dynamic changes. However, each abrupt change acts as definition between sense units. In Figure 22.3, the texture quickly shifts from chordal, robust movement with accents to a denuded, sweet, lyrical pianissimo phrase. At the division, a one-line caesura is used to segment sense units. Perhaps it’s a musical colour shift between the protagonist’s martyrdom and his relinquishing hope for the lady. In any case, the abrupt change is a testimony of Pound’s disposition to rid his compositions of bridging material. Pound also divides sound through the addition of unusual performance directives like the marking ‘echo’. In Figure 22.4, Pound signifies ‘echo’ as a differentiation between units. With no dynamic markings prior, the ‘echo’ directive comes as a surprise. The small, two-measure ‘echo’ tag at the end of the A section again suggests Pound’s musical notation as a direct result of the sound he wished to hear.

Figure 22.3 Ezra Pound, Madame trop vos me spremes, bars 32–6. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

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Figure 22.4 Ezra Pound, Madame trop vos me spremes, bars 22–5. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

On a larger scale, Pound’s rhythmic determinations were driven by patterning notes or words, instead of adherence to traditional metre, or to musical structures from a nineteenth-century idiom. His preoccupation with pattern also influenced his use of ancient forms as a guide (for example, his use of the sestina, notably in the poem ‘Sestina: Altaforte’). Rooted in his need for a renewed sense of structure, the direct treatment of notes or words by way of form and pattern skipped over the conventions and traditions of nineteenth-century music and poetry. In his essay ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’ he wrote: When any man is able, by a pattern of notes or by an arrangement of planes or colours, to throw us back into the age of truth, everyone who has been cast back into that age of truth for one instant gives honor to the spell which has worked, to the witch-work or the art-work, or to whatever you like to call it. (LE 432) By using patterns, structure and form, Pound threw the listener back to an ‘age of truth’. It is the spell (or the end result) that created a desired reaction, experienced through a set of new and reconceptualised techniques. What Pound offered to any artist was a way or path to create the spell. Pound’s use of pattern-making defies traditional verse and prose, specifically of the nineteenth century. Where another author might have been tempted to write a homage to Propertius in an elegiac and hexameter tradition, Pound found other ways of using the form and pattern to suit his own inclinations. In the excerpt from Homage, there is a recurrence of similar syllabic usage and alliteration. Using the first word ‘Midnight’, Pound creates an echo-type effect (similar to Madame) when moving to the word ‘mistress’, ending the line. Capitalising on trochees beginning with the letter ‘m’, Pound uses alliteration and rhythmic stress to differentiate from the second phrase where he sprinkles ‘T’: ‘Telling me to come to Tibur, At once!! “Bright tips reach up from twin towers”’. The ‘T’ sound dominates the second phrase and carves out a different articulation on the palate from ‘M’, which creates space between the narration of the first phrase and the contents of the letter in the second.

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Figure 22.5 Ezra Pound, Madame trop vos me spremes, A section, bars 1–11, and B section, bars 26–9. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

In Madame, Pound shows the same fascination with pattern-making as in Homage. He keeps the musical form simple (AB), highlighting the simplicity of Bourgogne’s text and tune. Pound then twists and turns the beginning A-section material into the B section by way of patterning and arranging notes and durations. Along with Pound’s abandoned metre dictations, notes functioned more like a pattern of words or colour planes in Madame, reorganising and developing patterns from section A into the material of section B. Musically, Pound uses a developing variation-style writing, as a part of his transcription process and as a cultivation of his palette. Starting with the skeleton pitches from the first line of the A section (C, B, G, A, B), the B section provides a similar echo of notes presented. The top voices of the A and B sections in Figure 22.5 are similar in pitch content, but Pound elongates and modifies the rhythm of the melody in the B line. Despite this elongation, the first phrase of the B section takes up four measures, while the first phrase of the A section takes five. Pound also kept Bourgogne’s modal structure of D dorian mode, which seems to serve a dual purpose: getting acquainted with Bourgogne’s modal composition while simultaneously upending traditional tonal function. After the Baroque period, normative rhythmic organisation dictated that strong beats (commonly the first and third in a fourbeat measure) contain the strong harmonic movements. In both Madame and Homage, Pound surmises that the traditional tonal and rhythmic dictates of a nineteenth-century idiom are unnecessary and impede his path towards developing a modern palette. Homage and Madame elicit a modern reverberation of their authors. Colour gadgets successfully cross boundaries of medium and allow Pound’s quest for motz el son to thrive. This aesthetic shaped the full range of his work, not by sequestering different techniques through medium, but by joining the processes into one. The freedoms Pound took with Bourgogne’s composition are similar to the freedoms he allowed himself in Homage. Pound’s transcriptions and translations were centred on his impulse as an artist first and foremost, regardless of medium. These works allowed him to find his own colour gadgets based on inspiration from ancient masters.

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Pound treated the translation and transcription process as an art, not merely a regurgitation or purely academic endeavour. His curation of devices and colour gadgets through translation and transcription was essential to his original works, most employing similar gadgets procured in his transcription process. Set in motion by his desire to achieve motz el son, his discovery of new inventions he found in transcriptions and translations guided his creative works as well. A reverberation of ancient influences ran throughout Pound’s creative works, making a seamless connection between his transcriptions and translations, and his original works.

Original Works: The Sestinas Arnaut Daniel may have bungled Richard I’s competition, but he was the father of the sestina, a poetic form Pound found perfect for musical composition. The sestina is a highly cyclical, structured form that uses the same line-ending words in each stanza. Traditionally, it has six stanzas of six lines followed by an envoi. Pound wrote three sestinas for solo violin: Sestina: Altaforte, Sestina in Homage and Al Poco Giorno. There was something very suitable about the sestina as a bridge between musical and poetic forms that inspired Pound to return to it. He described the sestina as ‘a thin sheet of flame folding and infolding upon itself’, and captured this quality in his musical version (EPM 11). Weaving the fabric of music and poetry tightly together in each work, he used colour gadgets developed in the transcription process to achieve his desired motz el son in his original works. Sestina: Altaforte was based on Pound’s poem of the same name from the 1909 collection Personae, and is the only musical work he based on his own poetry. The musical work acts as a transcription of his own poem and creates a bridge between the practice of translation and original creative work. In the poem, Pound takes the voice of Bertrand de Born, a Provençal troubadour: Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace. You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music! I have no life save when the swords clash. But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson, Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing. (P 26) The poem exhibits Pound’s obsession with pattern-making, imagism and objectivity at its height. We are keenly aware of the sound that he creates through syllabic strength and disjunct metrical feet. If one isn’t convinced by reading it aloud oneself, the 1939 recording of Pound’s own performance at Harvard is truly blood-curdling. Along with his vicious, bellicose performance he added a drum beat in the background. His musical version of ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ exemplifies the literary colour gadgets he explored in his poem. Metrical complexities we examined in Homage and Madame echo in both Pound’s poetic ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ and his musical composition. Based on his delight in freeing metre – seen in both Homage and Madame – Sestina: Altaforte does not disappoint. Madame housed no time signatures, but contained a different number of beats in almost

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Figure 22.6 Ezra Pound, Sestina: Altaforte, lyric assignment, sestet 1. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

every measure. Sestina: Altaforte goes one step further, including irregular metre designations while also changing the time signature in almost every bar. The beginning of the work presents what we may think Pound’s most eccentric time signatures: 3/16, 5/8 and 3/8. Yet, as the musical work progresses, metres become more and more abstract, including a 10/16 and a 21/32 measure. If the performer wasn’t already scratching their head by the fourth sestet, Pound continues to surprise by abandoning metre designations and bar lines altogether. In the fifth sestet, the return of bar lines and metrical designations is almost a welcome addition for fear of getting lost in the complexity of the rhythmic durations. Of course, these complex rhythmic structures and constantly changing time signatures make it almost impossible for a performer to use a metronome when playing the Sestina: Altaforte. Reminding us of Pound’s third commandment in his Imagist manifesto, Figure 22.6 shows no consistent time signature, but the common denominator of a sixteenth note. Pound uses this sly colour gadget to free performers from a metronome, yet chain them to rhythmic integrity. Pound’s adherence to rhythmic integrity was partially in debt to his fascination with the rhythm of speech. He went so far as to base the rhythmic skeleton of his musical Sestina: Altaforte on the speech structure of his poem of the same name. In Figure 22.6, the lyric assignment by Margaret Fisher shows the way speech-rhythms were used to shape the first line (Pound 2005b: 33). What’s even more fascinating is the complexity of Pound’s rhythmic interpretation of his own poem. In turn, the focus on speech structures allows him to treat the lines of music directly, and not extra-musically (or programmatically). In a feat of musical imagism, objective speech-rhythm obscures any programmatic ideas a listener may have. Instead, the work as a whole, with its spiky, chordal, obtuse changes, encourages the same emotion as a performance of the poem may. The treatment of notes and chords used throughout Sestina: Altaforte is important in Pound’s pattern-making colour gadget. In a similar way to his transcription of Madame, no key signatures are designated. In Madame, there was an emphasis on the notes D and A, signalling to the listener the Dorian mode; but in Sestina: Altaforte, the mode is harder to decipher. Dorian mode could be considered because of the emphasis he places on the open strings (G, D, A, E); however, Pound uses every possible chromatic tone, showing a further abstraction of the common perception of key or even mode. The emphasis on open strings could be a tricky colour gadget that

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forces the violinist to utilise the string’s resonance and ferocity. The sheer difficulty of the double-stops for the violinist also forces a gruff and unwieldy use of the instrument. Giving no time for the performer to indulge in the sound enforces the direct and rhythmic approach Pound was looking for. His use of pitch may be more speech- and sense-driven than anything musically minded. By listening to the sound, Pound’s pitch determination creates the same reaction of a fierce sound the performance of his poem might (Figure 22.7). Form was central to Pound’s goal of whipping music and poetry into one. The sestina, to Pound, was a tighter, more disciplined form, and through this structure, he explored the connection he saw between music and poetic form. Before even writing one note of Sestina: Altaforte, he took six sheets of staff paper and assigned each sheet a number in the corner of the page, to signify the musical sestets. He then assigned a musical line to correlate with the poetic line order of his sestina, which he also indicated. After the first line of Sestina: Altaforte, the musical rhythms are not based on Pound’s poem, but the intention is to elicit the same reaction as a recitation of the poem. The development of form in Sestina: Altaforte also reminds the listener of Pound’s manipulation of form in his transcription of Madame – creating the B section through the reorganisation of the A-section material. To grasp the specific pattern-making colour gadget in Sestina: Altaforte, it may be interesting to analyse the first lines of each stanza. Poetically, the equivalent would be to examine each line that contained the word ‘peace’ as its ending. In Figure 22.7, for each chord that Pound uses in the first line of the entire work, I have given a letter to signify that distinct chord (so sestet one shows chords J, K, L, M, N, O and P). Pound uses the material from the first sestet to create each subsequent iteration of the line one, in a way similar to the colour gadget we saw used in Madame in sections A and B. In Figure 22.7, Pound’s speech-rhythm structure is the basis for the first line. As we move to the first line of sestet two, the same chords (J, K and L) are used, and while the L chord stays the same rhythmically, J and K are elongated in rhythmic duration and metre, doubling the 3/16 metre to 3/8. Where we might have expected silence, or the M chord, Pound substitutes O – a flash of the J chord, and back to O. Finishing sestet two, the rhythm of P and Q are elongated. Occasionally, as we see in the Q chord of sestet two, the composition of the chord is changed by a half step or step. In Figure 22.7, for those moments, I’ve added a ‘~’ as an indicator of a quasi-chord. These slight changes show Pound’s distaste for exact repetition and a development of each chord. The third sestet starts with the K chord, in a rhythmic pattern that reminds the listener of the first sestet’s rhythmic motive. The passage then jumps to quasi-O, followed by a string of quasi N, O and P. The J chord that was missed in the beginning makes its way to the end of the third sestet. The last three sestets (4, 5 and 6) seem to relate to one another more than to the first. The fourth sestet folds even more onto itself, using Q as its beginning statement. The rhythmic pattern of the fourth is then repeated in the fifth, and finally the sixth as well. Everything in the sixth sestet is in elongated form, even the quasi J iteration originating in sestet four. At the end, the first sestet has folded and infolded upon itself to create a whole new statement by sestet six, creating not only a completely original reverberation of itself, but also a new way of patterning chords and rhythms.

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Figure 22.7 Ezra Pound, Sestina: Altaforte, lyric assignment, first lines of sestets 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

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If we agreed on an objective colour scheme for Sestina: Altaforte, it might be crimson. The fierce, blood-curdling sestina is an example of one of Pound’s most disjunct compositions. His sestina Al Poco Giorno from 1932 is made up of a different colour (let us suggest maroon), yet still springs from the same palette. In Pound’s theory of absolute rhythm, he reminded fellow writers that the rhythm of each poetic musing needs to correlate with the exact emotion that is expressed. In his treaty on harmony, he specified that the rhythmic (time) relationships dictate how the listener perceives pitches. The perfect proportions that Pound saw in certain poets’ work, he considered absolute rhythm: I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm’, a rhythm that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm must be interpretive, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, anticounterfeiting, uncouterfeitable. (LE 9) In the case of Al Poco Giorno, Pound makes good on his promise to convey and utilise a different rhythmic sense from that of a composition like Sestina: Altaforte. The difference in emotion, however, does not mean his colour gadgets or palette are abandoned. He uses the same essential colour gadgets in highly different ways to connect subject with technique. Through the differences in compositional style, Pound shows his ability to change subjective aspects (like the addition of gradual dynamic changes) while still following the sensibility and functionality of his unique modern colour palette (Figure 22.8). Al Poco Giorno gives us a glimpse of Pound’s most mature musical writing – with more help and influence from Olga Rudge and George Antheil. The work is a sestina, like Sestina: Altaforte, but this time the transcription is not of Pound’s own poem, but of a poem by Dante called Al Poco Giorno which is a sentimental, melismatic work that reflects Dante’s subject: the ambivalence of a love. Dante’s line-end words – ‘hills’, ‘grass’, ‘green’, ‘shadow’, ‘stone’ and ‘lady’ – show a contrast between the first three words (illustrating the poet’s enduring, fertile love) and the last three (illustrating an uninterested shadow of a lady). More emphasis on the melodic line (in contrast to Sestina: Altaforte) gives Al Poco Giorno a flowing

Figure 22.8 Ezra Pound, Al Poco Giorno, mute and key change. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

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and lilting quality. Triplets and dotted rhythmic figures flow throughout the whole work, leading from one sestet to the next. The first sestet sets the recurring pattern in motion: To the short day and its great arc of shadow, I’ve come, alas, and to the paling hills, now that all colors vanish from the grass; yet this my longing does not change its green, rooted as it is still in the hard stone that speaks and hears as though it were a woman. (Hughes 2004: 72)2 In Al Poco Giorno, Pound uses the same rhythmic structuring colour gadget as his speech-rhythm in Sestina: Altaforte. In this case, however, he used the whole first stanza from Dante’s poem as his speech structure (created by Margaret Fisher), shown in Figure 22.9 (Hughes 2004: 69). The fourth line especially shows Pound’s melismatic writing in contrast to Sestina: Altaforte’s spiky and disjunct nature. The floating melody in Al Poco Giorno was used as Pound’s object of manipulation, rather than his use of chordal movements in Sestina: Altaforte. With an emphasis on melody, a recurring, melodic, rising third-step figure is present in musical lines one, two and four. Pound used this figure to twist, turn and infold upon itself throughout the work. When he leaves the speech-structured verse for exploration and development, a flurry of grace notes, trills and mordents occupy Al Poco Giorno, appropriately conveying to the listener the sentimentality of Dante’s poem (Figure 22.10). Pound’s metre colour gadget, again, forces the performer to abandon the metronome, but still adhere to irregular and complex rhythmic durations – the sixteenth

Figure 22.9 Ezra Pound, Al Poco Giorno, lyric assignment, sestet 1. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission.

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Figure 22.10 Ezra Pound, Al Poco Giorno, sestet 1. © 2004 Second Evening Art Publishing. Reproduced by permission. note always constant. He abandoned any time signature designations, but included faint double lines as a determinant of each sense unit or poetic line. The direct segmentation of the unit reminds us subtly of his page and line numbering system in Sestina: Altaforte, and the caesura sense unit divisions in Madame. A similar division of units suggests that while Pound’s working compositional knowledge may have widened, he still used the same gadgets (just notated differently) to achieve the underlying principle of motz el son. Another interesting development in Pound’s musical writing between Sestina: Altaforte and Al Poco Giorno is a use of dynamic changes. Perhaps it is the sentimental nature of Al Poco Giorno that led him to incorporate sweeping dynamic changes, including crescendos and decrescendos along with frequently used mezzo piano and mezzo forte dynamics. Between lines three and four in the first sestet, shown in Figure 22.8, a change between mezzo forte and mezzo piano establishes a concrete distinction between the two sense units. The echo colour gadget is also deployed, however, by way of a much more common violin device: a mute. The mute serves as a sound change from the previous sestet and a direct differentiation between sense units. In this case, Figure 22.8, there also happens to be a key change simultaneously with the mute addition. The key change is striking for Pound: there were, after all, no key designations in either Madame or Sestina: Altaforte. In Figure 22.8, the key of B major is used, yet naturals and additional sharps abstract from any connection to a common use of tonality. The key is likely to be an effect of Pound’s widening musical power, but still does not adhere to any idiom that preceded him. Even with a widened knowledge of musical writing, Pound’s colour gadgets elicit an emotional reverberation from Dante’s poem. It could have been tempting for any other composer to illustrate Dante’s sestina with a musical rendition of paling hills,

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or a bell toll of lost love. Pound was not tempted to do so and focused on form, pattern-making and sense units to deliver an experience of Dante’s poem musically. Even Dante’s formal dictates didn’t survive throughout the work, as Margaret Fisher points out: ‘As [Al Poco Giorno] progresses, [Pound] becomes less concerned with its strict relation to Dante’s formal dictates, increasingly permissive of the growth and imagination of his musical compulsions’ (Fisher 2006: 71). Pound’s own musical compulsions are at the heart of each of his compositions. Homage, Madame and Sestina: Altaforte are similar to Al Poco Giorno in their ability to exemplify Pound’s interest in curating his own colour gadgets taken from the inspiration of a master. Through the development of his colour gadgets in Al Poco Giorno, he allowed Dante’s work to be a synaesthetic, musical experience of a poem. Not interested in a banal copy, Pound explored his own colour gadgets as a renewal of energy through composition. While Sestina: Altaforte may seem like a spiky modernist work, and Al Poco Giorno a sentimental echo of Romanticism, Pound’s compositions represent a mix of a twelfth- and a twentieth-century aesthetic cultivated by bringing music to poetry and poetry to music. His cultivation of colour gadgets throughout the span of his oeuvre secures his development of a contemporary colour palette. The precision of form and developing variations-type composition suggest some relation to a Schönbergian method, yet there is little calculation and few numerical values in the analysis. The bombastic character and metrical displacement of Sestina: Altaforte may suggest Stravinsky’s influence (Pound was fond of Stravinsky), but Pound’s methodical process of studying and critical approach also seem unique to him. The effort to align his musical compositional process to musical counterparts seems fruitless and possibly pointless. It’s in a defeat of genre and medium that Pound’s works are unique. With ancient artists as his teachers, his reconciliation of motz el son became a reality, allowing a violinist to perform a poem without words. With the addition of music to Pound’s canon, his medium becomes blurred. Throwing away the confines of a single art, in troubadour style, Pound’s core concepts shine through even brighter. He may be known for his poetry, but the examination of his musical works inspires the same rethinking and reawakening that his poetry does. By mixing the attributes of poetry and music, he helped bring his motz el son aesthetic to life. This aesthetic is even more powerful when we examine how similarities in his musical and poetic processes flow side by side. It’s through these that he established his colour palette and secured his place as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. In each area of his art, the listener is thrown into an age of truth, where the art of the twelfth century meets the twentieth, whether it be music or poetry.

Notes 1. While the music from the Perugia MS 431 (see Figure 22.1) used by Pound only carries the first line, Fisher and Hughes located the rest of the surviving five-line roundel in the Wolfenbϋttel Chansonnier in the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbϋttel, Germany. The English translation was generously contributed by Paul Makin. Ma dame, trop vous mesprenés Quant vers moy ne vous gouvernés Autrement qui l’oseroit dire?

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leslee smucker Car oncque saint tant de martire N’endura que vous me donés. (Pound 2005b: 44) Madame, you go wrong too much When you do not repress your scorn towards me; Who could say otherwise?

For never saint endured such martyrdom as that which you give me. 2. The sestina is translated from Dante’s original by Joseph Tusiani.

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PART IV THE ITALIAN YEARS 1925–1945

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23 Ezra Pound’s Artistic Thinking and Relations in Italy, 1925–1945 Massimo Bacigalupo

D

uring his years in Italy, 1924–45, Ezra Pound devoted himself increasingly to economics and politics, yet his artistic productivity did not diminish. His ‘totalitarian’ view implied that there was a close relationship between economics and the arts; another main tenet was that discoveries should lead to action. Hence his tireless proselytising, chiefly in the cause of the new economics and of Fascism, which he defended with the same vigour he had used in championing writers and artists. In fact, Fascism was to him a form of art in action, and Mussolini the Artist or Artifex, who moulded not clay or words, but society. Living on the Italian Riviera, Pound may have been less exposed to Fascism’s violence and thuggery directed against opponents. On the other hand, he would ignore evidence and warnings from friends and acquaintances that went against his stubborn and foolhardy beliefs. Yet his production both of a series of notable prose volumes outlining his worldview and of the first seventy-three cantos (published between 1925 and 1945), his editing, and his contributing to many journals in English and Italian show that he still devoted much time and thought to his creative and critical activity in the arts. He was also much involved in writing music and arranging for concert series in Rapallo, and he initiated musicological projects concerning the rediscovery and performance of old music, especially that of Antonio Vivaldi. It was Gerhart Münch’s arrangement of Francesco da Milano’s ‘Canzone de li uccelli’ (1546) that Pound held particularly dear and introduced in Canto LXXV (which can be read as a Vorticist or Futurist address to/portrait of his pianist friend and collaborator Münch).

The Art of Printing In the middle and late 1920s, Pound oversaw the printing of limited editions of Cantos I–XVI, XVII–XXVII and I–XXX, which were followed by the aborted de luxe edition of Cavalcanti (1932). These are all experiments in printing seen as a form of art in its own right, in fact as a Gesamtkunstwerk. In June 1925, writing of A Draft of XVI Cantos in a letter (in Italian) to critic Carlo Linati, Pound claimed that this was perhaps the first American book in which author, designer and printer have collaborated to create a unity. Since they could not build another Baptistery of Parma, and didn’t have the money for a unity of the arts in a single architectural structure, they have chosen to integrate three arts in a small thing: drawings, capitals, as in the manuscripts of the Middle Ages. (Pound 1980b: 96; my translation)1

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Enraptured by his visions of Italy even more than Ruskin and Browning before him, Pound expressed a desire to emulate great medieval artefacts in his latest modernist venture. He was an exponent of a kind of ‘medievalist modernism’, among whose antecedents are doubtless the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris, also producers of hand-printed editions. In fact, Pound was shortly to write his essay ‘Medievalism’ (1928; LE 149–55) as a preface to Cavalcanti: Rime, asserting that medieval poetry and the Italian art of the quattrocento presented a clarity and vision and perhaps collective feeling that had been lost since the sixteenth century and which could be used as ammunition against nineteenth- and twentieth-century decadence and obscurantism: Nobody can absorb the poeti dei primi secoli and then the paintings of the Uffizi without seeing the relation between them, Daniel, Ventadour, Guido, Sellaio, Botticelli, Ambrogio Praedis, Nic. del Cossa. All these are clean, all without hell-obsession. (LE 153) This position recurs in the contemporary Canto XXVII where examples of modern imbecility are contrasted with the Middle Ages, when ‘All rushed out to build the duomo, / Went as one man without leaders / And the perfect measure took form’ (XXVII/130). In turn, the art of printing and its crucial role in early modern culture are the subject of the closing passage of Canto XXX, a quotation from the printer Girolamo Soncino’s preface to his great edition of Petrarch: ‘and here have I brought cutters of letters / and printers not vile and vulgar’. It is no accident that Pound chose to end his first major instalment of The Cantos, I–XXX, with this celebration of the printer’s art and of an important, elaborate and innovative edition. It is as if he were saying indirectly to his reader what he had said more openly in the letter to Linati: ‘This is my new book, rich and innovative like Soncino’s volume of 1503.’ Around this time, Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man denounced Pound’s medievalising and mocked the purple grandeur of Canto XVII (‘And Aletha, by bend of the shore, / with her eyes seaward, / and in her hands sea-wrack’ – repetition of final words is a trick of Pound’s). He was no less dismissive of Pound’s portrayal of the heteroclite modern world in Cantos XVIII–XIX (‘Waal haow is it you’re over here, right off the Champz Elyza?’) (Lewis 1927b: 89–90). Certainly Yeats, who stayed in Rapallo in 1928–30, was duly impressed by Canto XVII and included it in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Desmond Chute (1885–1962), an English priest, draughtsman and associate of Pound in Rapallo, remembered Yeats showing him Canto XVII in the de luxe A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. Chute drew fine portraits of both poets at this time.2 The decorated capitals in Cantos 17–27, published by John Rodker in London in 1928, were the work of Gladys Hynes, a British painter whose neo-medieval style, Catholic background and commitment to social causes have parallels in her better-known contemporary Eric Gill, the prominent sculptor and illustrator. Gill was a friend and mentor of Desmond Chute, who in turn had a lifelong friendship with poet and painter David Jones, also a disciple of Gill. Thus, through Hynes and Chute, Pound may be said to have been at least indirectly connected to a set of English artists who championed economic and spiritual reform, and whose work continued the Arts and Crafts tradition of Ruskin

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and Morris in the changed conditions of post-war Europe. For example, Gladys Hynes’s initial ‘S’ for ‘The Nineteenth Canto’ is surmounted by a puppet booth, with formally dressed puppeteers, probably bankers, manoeuvring three figures: an officer, a royal personage and a businessman (Figure 23.1). The message and (to some extent) design can be compared to engravings by Eric Gill like The Purchaser (1915), in which a well-dressed, cigar-smoking burgher offers coins to a worker and a prostitute, but is actually a woodenlegged puppet propped up by a devil (Gill 1929: 6). These artists are all concerned with ethics and produce unambiguous images which have the directness of advertisements, much in the spirit of Pound’s virulent denunciations of war-profiteers, slum-landlords and usurers in the Hell Cantos and elsewhere. In comparison, the artwork by the American Henry Strater for A Draft of XVI Cantos, which Pound extolled to Linati, was much less forceful, merely illustrative, and wholly eschewed the modern world. When in 1930 Pound collected A Draft of XXX Cantos for Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press in Paris, he turned to his wife Dorothy Shakespear (acknowledged as ‘D.S.’ in the colophon) for Vorticist-style designs of capitals. This return from neo-medieval illuminating to sober abstraction reflects to some extent the ‘call to order’ of the late 1920s and 1930s. In Guide to Kulchur Pound endorsed Jean Cocteau’s Rappel à l’ordre, the title of a 1926 volume of essays that advocated a return to classicism after the excesses of the avant-garde, and he summarised his artistic endeavours with this in mind: If I am introducing anybody to Kulchur, let ’em take the two phases, the nineteen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in Blast, and the next phase, the 1920’s. The sorting out, the rappel à l’ordre, and thirdly the new synthesis, the totalitarian. (GK 95) As he clarifies in a later passage, Pound sees avant-garde work like The Cantos and Béla Bartók’s string quartets as ‘record of a personal struggle’ (GK 135), as opposed to the order, stillness and synthesis of a Boccherini quartet, a Mantegna fresco or the carvings in Venice’s Santa Maria dei Miracoli. This is his version of what Eliot called ‘dissociation of sensibility’ ([1921] 1951: 288), that is, the loss of the masterful unity of emotion and intellect available in the ‘metaphysical’ ages of Dante and Shakespeare. Just as Eliot attempted a neoclassical synthesis in Four Quartets, Pound in the same years struggled towards order and synthesis: ‘Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity’ (GK 135).

Futurism, Surrealism and Usura Pound did not take his friend Wyndham Lewis’s attack of 1927 to heart.3 He was too involved in seeing Cantos 17–27 through the press, editing The Exile, researching Cavalcanti, explaining ‘How to Read’ in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune, and entertaining W. B. Yeats, George Antheil and others in Rapallo. He worked on and off on an essay on ‘Machine Art’ – not a medieval subject. In the early Italian years, he abandoned his previous animus against Futurism, which was mainly due to the Vorticists’ desire to dissociate themselves from their Italian forerunners. ‘Machine Art’ is clearly a project with Futurist associations, though Pound’s 1931 summary of his argument refers to ‘Fernand Léger and co.’ and is careful to ‘Damn sentimentalizing

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Figure 23.1 Gladys Hynes, Illumination of Canto XIX title page. From A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (London: John Rodker, 1928).

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about machinery’ – probably a dig at Futurism.4 Pound met Marinetti in Rapallo and Rome, and was happy to find in him another enthusiastic pro-Fascist. (Marinetti had been elected in 1929 to the Italian Academy, a Fascist creation, with Luigi Pirandello, Guglielmo Marconi and other non-opponents or supporters of the regime.) Eventually Marinetti’s ghost was to appear in Canto LXXII, written in Italian shortly after his death, there to discuss with Pound their differences: ‘I sang war, you wanted peace / Both of us blind’ (LXXII/433). ‘Peace’ is a recurrent leitmotif of the early cantos, whereas the Futurists had campaigned for Italy’s intervention in World War I: war was, they wrote, ‘the sole hygiene of the world’ (Marinetti 1909). Very blind indeed. After visiting the 1930 Biennale of Modern Art in Venice, Pound noted that the only work of interest to him ‘and my more emotional companion’ was in the ‘Futurist Room’.5 He went on to say that in the past the Futurists had been more interested in ideas than painting. (On the other hand, the perceptive Wyndham Lewis had recognised in the 1915 BLAST that ‘as artists two or three of the Futurist Painters were of more importance than their poet-impresario. Balla and Severini would, under any circumstances, be two of the most amusing painters of our time’ (B2 26). Only later, commenting on the 1932 Biennale, did Pound write that ‘the best works of Boccioni and Sant’Elia satisfy Vorticist criteria’ (P&P V: 381). Pound was equally dismissive of the whole 1932 Biennale, with faint praise for the British selection (which included Eric Gill, Stanley Spencer, and his former fellow Vorticist Edward Wadsworth): The American Pavilion parades work by three dead or sixty-year-old painters. . . . Better than two years ago, when fifty colourists revealed their incompetence in fifty irrelevant paintings. . . . The English Pavilion does itself justice; only the most restless painter is missing. The life and true dynamism of contemporary painting and sculpture are contained in the works of Rousseau (physically dead), and of Picasso, Picabia, Wyndham Lewis, Salvador Dalí, Fernand Léger, Arp, Miró, Ernst, Bracque [sic], Gleizes, Marcoussis, Man Ray. . . . Hiler’s exhibition this year in Paris was worth all the English and American exhibitions at the Biennale. In fact there is no way of measuring the abyss that separates them. (Il Mare, 12 November 1932; P&P V: 379–80) Though showing interest in surrealism (Ernst, Dalí), Pound favoured painters who worked with flat surfaces and sharp edges. Hence his praise of Henri Rousseau’s seemingly childlike compositions, and his enthusiasm for Hilaire Hiler, two of whose works were reproduced, with statements by the artist, in the Mare Literary Supplement edited in Rapallo by Pound and Gino Saviotti, 1932–3. Pound described Hiler as a ‘good “Rousseauist” American painter’.6 As for Max Ernst, Pound saw in his Surrealist collages of popular engravings and in the texts of his books La femme aux cent têtes and Rêve d’une pétite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel a send-up of the psychological novel: ‘After this book some literary genres must disappear. Ernst is a liberator, as was Laforgue. . . . Ernst is “a terrible man”, apparently placid and serene’.7 On the other hand, Pound recognised in Ernst a fellow creator of visionary clarity: ‘Grosseteste on Light . . . throws onto our spectrum a beauty comparable to a work by Max Ernst’ (GK 77). We know Pound owned two frottages by Ernst, one of which he loved, while the other he described as inferior to

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an early drawing of himself by Wyndham Lewis: ‘The Max that I had from him (Max) seven years ago is very fine. In fact, it goes away and the other Max approaches revolving.’8 This observation suggests that Pound wanted paintings that ‘went away’, that maintained a distance, rather than ‘approach revolving’ (which would seem closer to Vorticism). This is related to his insistence on stillness. Like Max Ernst, one could be ‘terrible in resistance’ (LXXIX/512) while apparently being placid and serene. Thus, Canto XLIX, a poem descriptive through translation of a series of Japanese drawings of Chinese landscapes, closes with an invocation of ‘the dimension of stillness / And the power over wild beasts’ (XLIX/245). There is the quiet but there is also the wish to control, which Pound unfortunately sought to exercise on the social forces he deemed destructive of that Apollonian quiet. Hence his own untrammelled violence of speech and resentments. ‘How mean thy hates, / Fostered in falsity’, as Pound himself half-acknowledged in the medievalising setting of the ‘Pull down thy vanity’ chorus of Canto LXXXI. In the Usura Cantos of the mid-1930s (XLV, LI), Pound invokes a world uncorrupted by usury and to do so lists (or alludes to) some of the early artists he most admires: Mantegna, Duccio, Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Beato Angelico, Ambrogio de Predis, Hans Memling. The names are listed for their sound-value also, together with the equally sonorous medieval churches of St Trophime in Arles and St Hilaire in Poitiers, and the (minor) sculptor Pietro Lombardo. It is a private pantheon, related to Pound’s travels in France and Italy (and his visits to the British Museum), a collection of loved art exhibited in one of his most public and prophetic poems. It allows us to see how his visions of art and economics come together in the systematisation of his epic. Art is essential to human well-being and the breakup of this ideal connection is the subject of Canto XLV’s lament, which, however, is not elegiac since Pound believes that remedy is at hand in the new totalitarian Europe which is being born, as made explicit in the repetition of the Usura litany in the plain language of Canto LI. Still, Pound is most effective in imagining the life of the people in the presence of great religious and lay art: ‘with usura / hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall . . . seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines’ (XLV/229).

Italian Parallels and (Missing) Links In the whirlwind of his activities in the 1930s, Pound found little time to appreciate the Italian artists who were working in similar directions, like Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), who returned to the example of Giotto’s early Renaissance classicism. Pound was on good terms with Pier Maria Bardi (La Spezia 1900–São Paulo 1999), an influential critic and gallery owner who enjoyed the protection of Mussolini. In 1930, Bardi gave Pound his book Carrà e Soffici, illustrating the work of the two painters and explaining in the ample introduction how they had left behind the ‘carnival’ of Futurism. Pound did not respond, though he praised in his Italian articles Bardi’s book on his Russian travels and particularly his Belvedere dell’architettura italiana d’oggi (1933), a book which revalues the Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia and, while celebrating the new Rationalist Fascist architecture, is polemical with mainstream architects of the period, like Marcello Piacentini. When a design by Sant’Elia was allegedly adapted for the Rome exhibition of the Fascist ‘Decennale’ (the first decade of Fascist rule, 1922–32), Pound endorsed it and was generally enthusiastic about the exhibition.9

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In 1936, when plans were made for the construction in Rapallo of a ‘Casa Littoria’ (Fascist Party headquarters and cultural centre), Pound wrote in Il Mare that the visionary projects of ‘the great architect Sant’Elia’ (who had died in 1916) should be considered as a possible model (P&P VII: 40). Thus, there is little evidence of Pound’s taking an interest in contemporary Italian artists. In the painting of Carlo Carrà and Mario Sironi and the monumental sculpture of Arturo Martini he could have found confirmation of his tenets (clarity of outline, return to order and so on) and work surely not inferior to those he championed. In the chauvinist atmosphere of much Fascist cultural debate, it is strange to find Pound always insisting on importing the few writers and painters he admired from England and America while mostly ignoring the best Italian work. His articles often complain that the many American writers published in Italy are worthless, while he would like to see ‘some knowledge of the two Adams’s (Brooks and Henry) . . . and an anthology that would represent the degree of consciousness and knowledge of my colleagues for whom I have some respect’.10 He is always dictating reading lists. In Rapallo, Pound befriended the young painter Rolando Monti (Cortona 1906– Rome 1991), whose work of the period has analogies with Carrà’s in the previous generation, and commissioned from him portraits of his father and mother. These were preceded by Monti’s notable large portrait of Pound in half-figure walking with his stick on the Rapallo seafront (1932), a work which does justice to the poet’s dynamism (while walking forward, left leg outstretched, he is looking back and thus presented in half-profile) (Figure 23.2).11 Among more prominent painters sojourning in Rapallo, Pound had contacts with Enrico Paulucci and Enrico Prampolini, both of whom sketched the poet as he promenaded the seafront – Paulucci’s drawing being the most elaborate.12 Another Rapallo artist, Edgardo Rossaro (1882–1972), is remembered mainly as co-signatory with Pound of a ‘Manifesto of the Writers of the Tigullio’ of February 1944 in support of the Republic of Salò; Rossaro’s work is undistinguished, while Paulucci and Prampolini are important figures of the time.

Kay Sage and Heinz Henghes In Paris and Rapallo, Pound also was friendly with Kay Sage, who, however, at the time of their acquaintance was a socialite, her career as a significant American Surrealist still in the future. Sage remembers Pound in her autobiography China Eggs, describing an occasion in Paris when he insisted on bringing a dispirited T. S. Eliot to her home despite her being unwell. Sage also mentions Pound’s connection with the sculptor Heinz Henghes (Heinz Winterfeld Klussmann, Hamburg 1906–Bordeaux 1975). Impressed by Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, Henghes travelled to Rapallo in the early 1930s. Pound helped him by providing him with a studio and stone to carve; he also introduced him to Kay and her sister-in-law Virginia Agnelli, who purchased his work. Kay and Heinz held a duo exhibition at the Milione Gallery in Milan, and Heinz introduced Kay to the Surrealist milieu and her second husband, Yves Tanguy, with whom she returned to America. Kay’s paintings, reminiscent of Dalí, often show statuesque figures in a desert landscape, and so are to some extent sculptural. Henghes’s sculptures recall the organicism and naturalism of Gaudier-Brzeska and Henry Moore. According to Sage, Pound was ambivalent about Henghes because of his Jewish background; he is said to be the

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Figure 23.2 Rolando Monti (1906–91), Portrait of Ezra Pound, Rapallo 1932. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Estates of Rolando Monti and Mary de Rachewiltz.

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‘perfect schnorrer with the voice of an angel’ described none too flatteringly (and rather pointlessly) in the ‘Mitteleuropa’ Canto (XXXV/174). Yet Henghes remained grateful to Pound for his support, and friendly with the Rapallo circle, especially with James Laughlin (who published one of Henghes’s autobiographical writings, Ecce Ego: The First Thing, and used his Centaur drawing as the New Directions colophon). Laughlin was often to mention Pound’s connection with Henghes, for example in the poem ‘Ezra’ (Laughlin 2005: 86), with the unstated intent of showing that Pound championed a Jewish artist. Hiler was also Jewish-American, and Pound’s support of him is on record, whereas he is silent about Henghes except for the passage in Canto XXXV, which he probably intended as humorous and exemplary. Pound was unfortunately willing to generalise about entire countries and ethnic groups from a few instances, as if the behaviour or statement of an individual could possibly reveal the attitudes, values and deficiencies of a whole people. One of the recurrent motifs in his writings of the 1930s is that nothing good can be expected from England and France (with the usual exceptions). Great language, he goes so far as to say, can now be found in the dicta of statesmen like Mussolini rather than in weak novels or poems (Broletto, December 1938; P&P VII: 398). This may explain why he was not interested in major Italian modernist writers like Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti: the former was clearly too ‘crepuscular’ for him, but Ungaretti, who supported Fascism in the early years and wrote extremely streamlined poems, could have qualified for one of Pound’s reading lists. But Pound’s time was limited and much was owing to chance encounters, like his discovery and championing of the regional Tuscan writer Enrico Pea, or the even more fortuitous encounter with the verse of a young poet killed in the war, Saturno Montanari.13

Art at the Venice Biennale Pound’s response to contemporary painting was lukewarm, with the exceptions noted above.14 However, in 1931 he mentioned, in an article on the upcoming 1932 Venice Biennale, that for America, it is enough to consult Edward Alden Jewell’s magnificent book Americans, published by Knopf, to see what one can do in the field of art. The contents of one wall would be enough, if chosen by Hiler or Demuth, not to mention that one should know the work of an Italian-American whose name is Stella, openly Futurist in kind.15 But, as noted above, the American selection for the 1932 Biennale, which included Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri and John Sloan, disappointed him (‘three dead or sixty-year-old painters’). This was also probably his response to the 1934 selection, as suggested by his letter of 30 May 1935 to the New English Weekly: The best American painting is, in great part, done in Paris. Naturally, the local halfwits in New York don’t see it; and send the parish prize doilies instead. . . . Until people like the directors of Il Milione and P. M. Bardi are put in charge of the

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Biennale, or until order comes from ‘above’ to get the best painting and damn the bureaucracy and the dealers, the Biennale will stay what it has been. No Brancusi, no Picasso, no Douanier [Rousseau], or at any rate none of the first rate painters, until they are matters of history. Venice had a memorial show of Boldini, who is what Ojetti probably LIKES. (P&P VI: 290) We note the mention of Pound’s associate and correspondent Bardi (who in 1946 moved to Brazil to become a museum director), and Pound’s wish and belief that such lapses could be remedied from ‘above’, that is, by the Duce (had he time to consider such matters!). However, the list of what Pound would like to see at the Biennale is unexceptionable, and the final dismissal of the popular salon painter Giovanni Boldini in accord with his ascetic high modernist taste.16 The same valuation of Boldini is to be found in a post-war draft: ‘No Boldini, not me, you can paint my dog’ sd/ Judith Gautier a question of values, the result used to hang under a great red and gilt plank from the far orient but the height of our paideuma, per Brancusi saying: One of those days when I wd/ not have given 20 minutes of my time for anything under heaven. (PC 147) The Brâncuşi quotation was to find its place at the end of the first Washington canto, LXXXV, as a comment on Pound’s intense dealings with the Chinese history classic in those forbidding pages. It is meant to convey the intensity and purposefulness of the artist concentrated on discovery. This is the attitude and excitement that Pound often manages to create in his poetry, evoking the moment in which one emerges ‘Out of heaviness where no mind moves at all’ (XC/627). Pound’s response to the Biennale of 1938, the last year of peace in Europe, was similar to his previous strictures, but reveals a narrowing of his focus: In the teeth of current snobisms I have pointed out that the German pavillion at last year’s Venetian biennial exposition was the best pavillion. The visitor [with] any kind of unperverted form sense should have seen this. The failure to understand the new turn in the arts is due partly to dulness, but even more to stultification by art-merchants propaganda (which has gone on with steady infection for at least 50 years). (Pound 2001: 227) These comments appear in a paper intended for a German audience, so Pound may be overstating his appreciation for the German selection. However, the German exhibition offered only officially approved rural scenes of peasant life and busts of the Duce and the Führer, while the Italian pavilion presented reputable modernists like Felice Casorati, Carlo Carrà and Giacomo Manzù (later to become famous for his religious art, for example the Door of Death at St Peter’s Basilica).17

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That Pound could have been blinded by ideology to the point of preferring Germany’s state-sponsored National Socialist banalities to Italy’s thoughtful modernist work is tragic. One wonders if he might even have agreed with the Nazi denunciation of ‘Degenerate Art’ in the exhibitions of that title (1937 and later), which included some of the best avant-garde artists (Klee, Ernst, Kandinsky, Kokoschka) and proved a popular success in Germany, because under the cover of denouncing degeneracy, they gave the public a unique opportunity to view outstanding, albeit banned work. Pound seems not to have changed his mind about his approval of governmentsponsored German art at the 1938 Biennale, for in 1956 he referred to it obliquely in his last statement on the arts, ‘Total War on Contemplatio’, written for a booklet of reproductions of works by his protegée Sheri Martinelli: Picabia [said]: ‘J’attends le jour qu’on offre au public une merde sur un plat’. By 1937 or ’38, whichever year they held the Biennale, it had been done in every pavilion save one, which no journalist ventured to mention. Gourmont long before that: ‘The essence of a religion is its art. Or l’art religieux est mort’. (P&P IX: 177) It is instructive to note, in relation to Picabia’s comment, that in 1961, the Italian Dadaist Pop artist Piero Manzoni was in fact to exhibit some tins labelled Merda d’artista (whether they truly contained his own excrement I do not know). They are expensive collectors’ items today. Pound’s responses over the 1930s to the Biennale (which he visited regularly, since he usually spent several weeks in the summer in Olga Rudge’s Venice home) are an index to his developing attitudes. At the end, there is a hardening, indicative of the bad times to come, but essentially his position remains opposed to the art market (which, inevitably, international showcases like the Biennale reflect) and in favour of a few outstanding artists like Brâncuşi, whose mastery is still widely acknowledged. That he did not perceive the value of equally important contemporary artists, with some of whom (like Sironi and Martini) he also had a political affinity (since they were sincere believers in the Fascist ‘Revolution’), is one of the missed opportunities of cultural history. Much later, in his 1967 Venice interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pound said (or was reminded to say by the solicitous Olga Rudge) that painting to him had always been of secondary interest, and that sculpture was really the visual art he cared for most.

Architecture and Cinema Among Pound’s Italian contributions, there are observations on architecture in connection, as mentioned above, with Bardi’s criticism and the revaluation of the Futurist Sant’Elia. In January 1933, writing enthusiastically in the Mare Literary Supplement about his recent visit to the Mostra del Decennale, the Roman exhibition for the first ten years of Fascist rule, Pound applauded the construction of the Via dell’Impero, the controversial avenue between the Coliseum and the Capitol which was built over parts of the Forum by demolishing blocks of old buildings (‘medieval squalor’, as Pound calls it). He saw in this an example of Fascist determination or willpower:

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Between last April, when I was in Rome, and December, Mussolini has done more to reveal this glory than all the popes from the 7th to the 19th century. With the aid of modern machinery? This aid counts only for 5% in the matter. What has disencumbered the Via dell’Impero is WILL. (P&P VI: 9) At the Decennale exhibition, Pound was much impressed by Pietro Francisci’s documentary on the achievements of the Fascist Era, and announced to readers of Il Mare: Pietro Francisci is an authentic genius, a genius who could not remain unknown for three weeks in Paris or Berlin . . . He has no betters in his art. I don’t think there are more than five or six people in Italy that are capable of judging the force of his results. (P&P VI: 9) After the war Francisci was to make his name with ‘peplum’ movies about Hercules with Steve Reeves and others. Pound wrote several times about the narrative possibilities of cinema, arguing that it made some kinds of novels obsolete: ‘The technique that was sufficient to a pre-cinema novelist was very much more limited than what is necessary today’ (P&P V: 386). He collaborated in 1932 with the filmmaker Ferruccio Cerio (1904–63), whose name appears among the associate editors of the Mare Literary Supplement, on a script about Fascism, tentatively titled Le fiamme nere.18 Pound contributed chiefly to the section devoted to the March on Rome, where, in order to describe Mussolini’s ability to gather and direct a variety of forces, he introduces the image of the rose in the steel dust which he had used in ‘Medievalism’ (LE 154) and was to recall movingly in the finale of the first Pisan canto (LXXIV/469). Writing on the cinema in 1940 for the cultural weekly Il Meridiano di Roma, Pound insisted that the essence of this art is not ‘photography’ or ‘sentiment’ but movement, action (from the Greek kinéo), and he qualified his appraisal of Francisci: I applaud the great technical progress noted by me last week in three Italian movies. But the totalitarian sense is lacking. Franceschi [sic] wanted to make films with artistic photography and feeling. He has disappeared. Ferruccio Cerio had a more correct idea, that is, that film is action. I don’t know why he hasn’t yet been able to create something with it. Perhaps because his scripts have not been considered by the directors of the cinema industry? (P&P VIII: 12) It is worth recalling that Pound was also conversant with the Surrealist cinema. In an article of 1931 (P&P V: 278), he mentions the riots occasioned by Buñuel’s L’age d’or. (The Paris cinema where it was screened was vandalised, ironically, by Fascists.) When in Rapallo in January 1965 he was shown Stan Brakhage’s Prelude, a silent and largely abstract American underground movie, a despondent Pound commented that he had seen work of the same kind in the old days. But he is said to have enjoyed broad comedies in the Rapallo years, and his daughter recalls that he was spellbound by Disney’s Snow White when he took her to see it in Rome during the 1938 Christmas holidays. There was a child-like naïvety in Pound, which perhaps explains his uncritical faith in Mussolini (in whom Hemingway immediately detected

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the opportunistic bluffer). He was equally moved by Disney’s sentimental squirrelfilm Perri (1957), which he saw in Italy after his release, and which occasioned a broken line in the very last completed canto: ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’ (CXVI/816). This is an example of Pound’s organicism, or of his nature-worship. The presentation of the natural world in Disney (howbeit factitious and doctored to our disenchanted eyes) is more helpful and certainly more popular than metaphysical speculation. Or, returning to art and religion, ‘To replace the marble goddess on her pedestal at Terracina is worth more than a metaphysical argument’ (‘A Visiting Card’; SP 320). Even Pound’s late discovery of, and fascination with, the Himalayan Naxi culture is part of this naturalistic and organicist pattern, as is his indictment of human vanity: ‘Learn from the green world’ (LXXXI/541). Art is to respond to natural form, the sculpture emerges from the marble, ‘the wave pattern runs in the stone’ (LXXX/530), and the artist is only there to reveal these patterns, and ‘let the wind speak’.

The Imaginary Museum of The Pisan Cantos The Pisan Cantos, composed in the summer and early autumn 1945, are a poetic postscript and summary of Pound’s thoughts and feelings about art and life. They are testamentary and motivated by an urge to preserve fragments to shore against ruin – the disasters of war and the ‘enormous tragedy’ (LXXIV/445) of Pound’s dream, by which he means the failure and defeat of his social, economic and political hopes and their unlikely representatives in the real world. The dream, however, survives and though negated in history becomes ‘in the mind indestructible’ (LXXIV/450). Making an inventory of what ‘remains’ despite defeat and loss, Pound lists in his poetic stream of consciousness the art, music, literature and events that he recalls, which are essential and subsidiary parts of his world, addressing an ideal reader and providing so much information both as testimony and as a recapitulation for his own benefit. He must put it all down, and often manages to do so in the relaxed and occasionally irate and elegiac tone of writing as speech. Music, as mentioned above, is presented in Canto LXXV by way of a score that has personal associations (the Rapallo concerts, Olga Rudge, Gerhart Münch) but is also an example of the eternal recurrence of form through various guises (GK 151–2), just as Venus appears in myth and art as one and different goddesses (Athena, Artemis, Circe, Helen) and in history and life as real women (Eleanor of Aquitaine, Cunizza, the poet’s partners, even the Madonna ‘Immaculata’). In LXXXI, Pound’s vision of Venus by way of Chaucer (‘Your eyen two’) is preceded by a ‘libretto’, that is, a composition for music, which speaks of the composers Lawes and Jenkyns and the instrument maker Arnold Dolmetsch. It is through the ancient airs played on recreated ancient instruments that we may gain access to the vision of light and love. Even here Pound is the teacher, since the libretto’s refrain tells us: ‘Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest / Dolmetsch ever be thy guest.’ The Pisan Cantos are of one piece with the whole poem in their mixture of notation and didacticism, and of course Pound’s economic theories are tirelessly (perhaps tiresomely) reiterated in these pages. Music as a subject and as a structural model is often present, most clearly in Pound’s fanciful reading of the birds on the electric wires as musical notation (‘three solemn half notes . . . on the middle

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wire’ LXXXII/547). Bach, Puccini, the Salzburg Festival ‘reopening’ after the war are all recalled. The last of these leads to the comment ‘Qui suona Wolfgang grillo’: Pisa’s Mozart is a cricket, that, however, ‘must not sing after taps’ (LXXVIII/500). Pound makes clear once again what music he considers of the first order, ‘in contending for certain values (Janequin per esempio, or Orazio Vechii [sic] or Bronzino)’ (LXXIX/505). Jannequin, Vecchi and Bronzino are two composers and a painter of the sixteenth century, and represent various forms of mastery. Bronzino is in fact somewhat late for inclusion in Pound’s preferred list of artists from the quattrocento, for example those who worked for Malatesta like Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini and Agostino di Duccio. The last two appear on the very first page of the Pisan sequence: but a precise definition transmitted thus Sigismundo thus Duccio, thus Zuan Bellin, or trastevere with La Sposa Sponsa Cristi in mosaic till our time / deification of emperors. (LXXIV/445) Just as Sigismondo Malatesta recorded ‘a precise definition’ of his personality in the unfinished and composite Tempio, so Pound in the unfinished and composite Cantos. And just as the Tempio was severely damaged but finally survived the bombing of World War II, so do The Cantos. In the latter case the war damage was all for the better, for it led Pound to rethink his whole position and make a concerted and successful effort to record his views for himself and posterity (‘but if the gelatine be effaced whereon is the record?’; LXXVIII/499). A few pages into the first Pisan canto Pound invokes his sculptural ideal: stone knowing the form which the carver imparts it the stone knows the form sia Cythera, sia Ixotta, sia in Santa Maria dei Miracoli where Pietro Romano has fashioned the bases. (LXXIV/450) ‘Cythera’ is probably Venus as represented in Agostino di Duccio’s ‘Rimini bas reliefs’ (LXXXIII/548), Isotta (Malatesta’s love) is carved on a medal by Matteo dei Pasti, and Pietro Lombardo (not Romano) carved the much-praised sirens in Venice’s Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Pound’s use of Italian in the third line is just part of his incorrigible plurilingualism or play with language, which one may claim is also a maddening part of his instructorship. Matteo de’ Pasti recurs a few pages later: for praise of intaglios Matteo and Pisanello out of Babylon they are left us for roll or plain impact or cut square in the jade block. (LXXIV/457)

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As the third line suggests, Pound is again shoring fragments that have survived ‘Babylon’, which is shorthand for the forces of destruction and darkness. He insists on incision, ‘intaglio’, clear borders, the sculptural, just as he does in his thought about writing: ‘and in this war were Joe Gould, Bunting and cummings / as against thickness and fatness’ (LXXIV/452). Pisanello returns in association with the resurgence of Venus and the notion of fragments recovered in Canto LXXVI: ’AƟANATA, saeva. Against buff the rose for the background to Leonello, Petrus Pisani pinxit that a cameo should remain in Arezzo an altar fragment (Cortona, Angelico). (LXXVI/482) Pisanello’s famous portrait of Lionello d’Este (now in Bergamo) includes three roses in the background of his buff jerkin. The rose is a symbol of Venus, and Pisanello’s very name recalls Pisa. Pound calls him here ‘Petrus Pisani’, involuntarily misleading his readers, just as Giovanni Bellini becomes Zuan Bellin (Venetian dialect form). (Pisanello’s real name was Antonio, not Pietro.) But the processes of memory are one of the themes of these cantos, so (mis)remembering is understandably foregrounded. Venus is immortal (‘’AƟANATA’) and occasionally merciless (‘saeva’), but also loving (the rose). Love and destruction confront each other, and the poem is written in order ‘that a cameo should remain’. Then other cities (Arezzo, Cortona) and artists (Angelico) associated with the quattrocento are named. By evoking cameos and altar fragments, Pound clarifies his aesthetics, and presents his imaginary museum. ‘Beauty is difficult’ is a recurrent leitmotif, a phrase of Aubrey Beardsley’s suggesting the difficult search for synthesis and simplicity, not necessarily the difficulty of the work of art, which must speak directly, as Pound in his own way does in these pages. Pound includes in his gallery works that have spoken to him personally during his lifetime, as when he lists ‘Degas Manet Guys unforgettable’ (LXXIV/455) or three ‘portraits in our time’ by Marie Laurencin, Lucien LévyDhurmer (‘somebody’s portrait of Rosenbach’)19 and Whistler – works that do not necessarily conform to his more exacting standards but are part of his own history. This is also the case with the Velázquez works he remembers contemplating as a young man in Madrid: ‘Are they all now in the Prado?’ (LXXX/513) – again the theme of surviving apocalypse. Yet in a famous passage Pound once again instructs his readers that the real breakthrough, the revelation of Venus if you like, is to be found before the ‘thickness and fatness’ of the seventeenth century, which he sees as a dark period of dissociation: pale eyes as if without fire all that Sandro knew, and Jacopo and that Velásquez never suspected lost in the brown meat of Rembrandt and the raw meat of Rubens and Jordaens. (LXXX/531)

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This is a form of art criticism. Possibly in his imaginary museum Pound would not throw out the great masters of the seventeenth century, but he will insist that the vision of Venus is presented only by his beloved Renaissance painters Sandro Botticelli and Jacopo del Sellaio. They offer the ‘lost’ synthesis and simplicity which he wishes to reclaim, as he does in the visual passage of the eyes visiting him in his Pisan tent (LXXXI/540), or in the haunting music of the address to the lynxes in Canto LXXIX. This closes again with a vision of Aphrodite being ‘brought’, carried as in a pageant, to be invoked and adored. Among the works of art most often recalled in the Pisan sequence are the Schifanoia frescoes in Ferrara, where besides scenes of contemporary activities of lord and people there are triumphs of gods and goddesses drawn on carts. These images are in the background of Pound’s own display of the epiphany of the love goddess, who is clearly a central theme of his poetry. Compare the reference in the opening of the sequence to ‘La Sposa / Sponsa Christi’ – the Spouse, seen as religion, eroticism and art (‘in mosaic till out time’). There is little of contemporary art in the Pisan Cantos, except for personal recollections of Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis. The poetry itself is a manifesto for the difficult ‘rappel à l’ordre’ which Pound valued in his favoured contemporaries. The process of reaching a direct statement is continuously re-enacted in these pages, so that we participate in the effort and are thankful when it succeeds: mint springs up again in spite of Jones’ rodents as had the clover by the gorilla cage with a four-leaf. (LXXXIII/553) Ironically, the man in the gorilla cage was in luck. And so are his readers.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Pound’s Italian writings are mine. His Italian articles on literature and art have been usefully collected and annotated by Luca Cesari (Pound 2005c). 2. Reproduced in Chute’s memoir (1956: 15) and in Bacigalupo (1985: 7, 65). 3. See Pound’s comment in ‘Storicamente Joyce (e censura)’, L’Indice 1:11 (September 1930): ‘It is rumored that after an attack by Lewis (which Pound finds just and unjust, and to which he does not reply) W. C. Williams became less tolerant in a discussion that took place in New York. To the question: “Doesn’t Lewis say that Pound is interested in the past, that he has only interest in past things?”, Williams responded: “Yes, at one time Pound was interested in Lewis”’ (P&P V: 233). See also a response to Lewis in the notes on ‘Machine Art’ (EPMA 76). 4. EPVA 217; P&P V: 328. Wyndham Lewis was quick to detect and denounce Pound’s ‘rehabilitation’ of Marinetti under the aegis of ‘the great god, Industry’ (Lewis 1927b: 58). 5. L’Indice, 25 February 1931; P&P V: 279. 6. ‘Appunti’, Il Mare, 15 October 1932; P&P V: 379. Reproductions of Hiler’s Bal musette (1922) and La chanson de la rue (1929) were printed on the front page of Il Mare, 10 December 1932. See photograph in Bacigalupo (1985: 36). In a letter to ‘Dear Heelair’

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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15. 16.

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of March 1937, planning three art numbers for a forthcoming journal, Ronald Duncan’s Townsman, Pound restated his preferences among painters: ‘We think the first [art number] ought to be a Hiler (as most unknown in Lunnon), the second a Leger based on the mass of L’s work . . . For third art issue, I see nowt better than Ernst-Dali-Arp-Mirò. . . . I dare say W. Lewis would be better if Lewis will show sense and collaborate’ (SL 291). The Hiler number of Townsman was to be the magazine’s second, April 1938 (Parker 2016: 11). Indice, 25 May 1931; P&P V: 295. SL 319 (10 December 1938). This letter clarifies that while Pound had (possibly purchased) directly from Max Ernst the ‘very fine’ painting he appreciated, the Ernst he disapproved of had been ‘introduced here circuitously’ by James Laughlin. For a reproduction of the latter, now in a private collection, see Mamoli Zorzi (2004: 82). The Ernst that Pound favoured is illustrated in Scheiwiller (1991: 78): ‘Paysage, ca. 1922, 38 × 46 cm’. Pound also owned a notable watercolour by Léger (untitled, 38.5 × 30 cm), dedicated ‘A Ezra Pound en toute amitié’, at least one work by Hiler (‘Cagnes, 1930, tempera, 15 × 21 cm’) and George Waldemar’s pamphlet Hilaire Hiler et la vision panoramique (1932) (Scheiwiller 1991: 74, 79). ‘Ave Roma’, Il Mare, 7 January 1933; P&P VI: 8–9. On 8 April 1933, the Rapallo Mare devoted its front page to the Decennale exhibition, with large photographs of the façade and of artwork by Mario Sironi and others. For pictures of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the added façade for this ‘Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista’ (29 October 1931 to 21 April 1932) see Paul (2016: 196). Maestrale, 1 June 1940; P&P VIII: 37. Reviewing Elio Vettorini’s major Italian anthology of American literature, Americana (1941), Pound expresses his disagreement with the editor’s choices and laments the exclusion chiefly of Adams, Jefferson, ‘perhaps an allusion to Thoreau’, Williams, McAlmon and Cummings. The editor should also ‘have given more importance to Stephen Crane and recognized the Jewish effort and influence on writing and above all distribution’ (Meridiano di Roma, 3 May 1943; P&P VIII: 209). The review does not mention Anderson, Fitzgerald, Callaghan, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe or Caldwell, who were all included, with many others, in Americana – a remarkable publication, since Italy was at war with the US by the time it was distributed. Thus, Pound disregarded mainstream reputations not only in Italy but also in the US and England. A large selection of Monti’s work is reproduced in the catalogue of a posthumous exhibition in Rome (Margozzi and Marullo 2009). Early and late drawings of Pound are included in Bacigalupo (1985: 90–1). Prampolini’s sketch (1934) is reproduced in black and white in Scheiwiller (1991: 141) and in colour in Scheiwiller (1955: 2). Paulucci’s drawing (1943) is reproduced in Bacigalupo (1985: 10). Born near Ravenna in 1918, Montanari died in Greece in February 1941, aged twentythree. Pound praised his poetry in two articles of 1941 (P&P VIII: 121, 125) and after the war made five versions (or ‘Guides’) of his poems in the style of The Confucian Odes (P&P VIII: 548, IX: 37; PT 1114–16). On Pound’s appreciation of Montanari, Pea and another regional writer, Federigo Tozzi of Siena (1883–1920), see Zapponi (1976: 116–25). See also ‘And the Remainder’ (1930): ‘What accommodation has America for an Apollinaire; a Picabia, a Man Ray, or a Marcel Duchamp. Admitting that one or two of these gents occasionally visits Manhattan as an anonymous and diverted spectator’ (P&P V: 216). Ambrosiano, 29 December 1931; P&P V: 333. The memorial show of Giovanni Boldini (1842–1931) was held in the 1932 Biennale. The journalist and critic Ugo Ojetti was one of the Biennale’s curators.

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17. Also exhibited was a work by Pound’s old Venetian acquaintance Italico Brass, whose painting The Bridge of the Dead is described in an important draft poem of 1908, ‘For Italico Brass’ (CEP 253; see Mamoli Zorzi 2004; Mamoli Zorzi, Gery, Bacigalupo and Casella 2007: 52–3). ‘Brassitalo’ was to appear in The Pisan Cantos (LXXVI/481). The US selection for 1938 was largely retrospective (George Bellows, Arthur Davies, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassan, Robert Henri and so on), while British art was represented by Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Christopher Wood and Jacob Epstein. 18. ‘Fiamme nere’ (‘black flames’) was a name of the Arditi, an elite special force of the Italian army in World War I. Hemingway speaks of them admiringly in several works. However, Cerio and Pound were probably thinking of the Fascist Black Shirts. 19. Identified and reproduced in Kenner (1972: 479).

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24 Music Recollected: Ezra Pound’s CAVALCANTI Charles Mundye

C

omparing Pound’s translations of the medieval Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti to those of D. G. Rossetti, Roxana Preda has observed ways in which the nature of any translation reflects upon the cultural moment of the translator: Translations of the same original have sedimented along the centuries. They may not have achieved anything final, but one of the things they give us is an insight into the ideologies of their age. Versions of a given original made at different moments in time let us glimpse the moral and political arrangements of their era, because it is these arrangements that at least in part have determined which rhetorical choices were seen as ‘right’. (Preda 1999: 218) This is certainly true of Pound’s Cavalcanti, and especially so where the acts of translation across his career are not only linguistic but generic, where Cavalcanti’s lyrical poetry is translated by Pound into twentieth-century music drama, as it was in the early 1930s. That Pound wrote two operas about the idea of the artist in opposition to violent authority is also perhaps unsurprising in respect of the moral and political arrangements of his own era. The genesis of his first opera, Le Testament, is coeval with Eliot’s The Waste Land, another text where aspects of the medieval are translated into an engagement with the anxieties and crises of the modern situation of post-war Europe. It also follows on from Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, his elegy for a poetic persona ‘out of key with his time’, a man adrift from the post-war ‘accelerated grimace’ of modernity, for whose epitaph is chosen a line from Villon’s own elegy in ‘Le Testament’: ‘He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme / De son eage’ (P 185). Mauberley’s situation as an artist out of step with his immediate culture is held alongside the barbarities of war, and specifically, World War I, which for Pound resulted from the imposition of violence in hypocritical defence of a valueless culture: There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization (P 188) Certainly the drama of Le Testament, and the later Cavalcanti, reflects on ways in which the serious and aspiringly truthful artist can be out of step with presiding

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authority, to the point of exile and death. Further, their drama implicitly suggests that barbaric governance and ignorance or absence of the serious artist go hand in hand. In ‘How to Read’, Pound explains that the relationship between literature and the state ‘has to do with the clarity and vigour of “any and every” thought and opinion. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself’ (LE 21). That was written in 1929, but in the following years Pound moved away from thinking about the relationship as a kind of linguistic maintenance towards a terribly problematic and direct engagement with political ideology. It should come as no surprise, given the nature of twentieth-century history and the benefit of hindsight, that both operas in this respect seem also remarkably prescient of Pound’s own incarceration for treason in the American Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa, and consequent threat of potential execution. In the Pisan Cantos his thoughts return again and again to the fragments of culture that survive the ruins of his own actions and those of Europe as a whole, from the troubadours and the Albigensians, victims themselves of destructive authoritarianism, inter alia, to memories of Mauberley’s London. There, too, Cavalcanti maintains a centrally important place. However, the drama of Pound’s opera Cavalcanti is not confined to its politics, and indeed in many respects it takes as its subject the limited possible practical engagements between the political and the artistic. Nor should we think about the opera only in terms of its dramatic life. In its musical setting of medieval Italian poetry, Pound believed that he was reinterpreting Cavalcanti’s life and work in ways that can stand alongside, and possibly be more effective than, his English translations of and critical commentary on the medieval poet. As he wrote to the scholar Etienne Gilson, ‘I have since set a good deal of the text to music, having, let us hope, more chance of convincing by that argument than philologically’.1 That this recovery of ancient text is also at the heart of a very modern project is highlighted by Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Thinking about what might have attracted Pound to Cavalcanti in particular, she identifies ways in which the Italian poet is representative of Pound’s own modern outbreak, in much the same way that François Villon represented a different aspect of the contemporary: Discourse on Cavalcanti involves a discourse on the whole notion of poetry, in which medieval culture reveals itself as a source for precisely the new kind of poetry sought by modernism. The exclusion of inspiration and romantic subjectivism, the refutation of nineteenth-century psychologism, the attempt to connect the new forms of knowledge to the language of poetry – all these are among the reasons for Cavalcanti’s importance for Pound. (Ardizzone 2002: 10) This identifies with Pound’s medievalism, by which I mean his representation of the past in the terms of his immediate present. Pound’s music is not simply historical reconstruction, but instead a medievalising recreation of a lost tradition in a contemporary idiom.2

The Road to Pound’s Cavalcanti Pound’s first significant discussion of the medieval Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti appeared in 1910, in the chapter of The Spirit of Romance entitled ‘Lingua Toscana’,

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followed by the translations of his Sonnets and Ballate, collected, with an introduction, in 1912. Returning to his subject between 1927 and 1929, Pound planned a ‘Complete Works’ of Cavalcanti, an ambitious project which collapsed with the bankruptcy of the publisher, and from which he salvaged the privately printed Guido Cavalcanti: Rime (1932). In addition, Pound wrote a lengthy essay entitled simply ‘Cavalcanti’, which first appeared serially in The Dial, and was subsequently printed in Make it New (1934) and Literary Essays (1954). In a note to the Literary Essays reprint, Pound states ‘the essay as a whole must be dated 1910–31’, tellingly identifying the year of completion as the same in which he began composing his opera on the poet (LE 149). Indeed Pound indicated that he considered the opera itself to be an important culmination to and justification of his previous work, commenting in his essay ‘Date Line’: It is, I feel, obvious that only a limited number of authors are worth the attention there (Rime, Marsano edition) demonstrably given to Guido, it is I think arguable whether, even there, such attention would have been wisely spent had I not later set a good deal of him to music. (LE 85) Pound dedicated the translation of ‘Donna mi prega’ in his essay ‘Cavalcanti’ ‘To Thomas Campion his ghost, and to the ghost of Henry Lawes, as prayer for the revival of music’ (LE 155). In translating Cavalcanti into English for a contemporary readership it is remarkable that he should invoke the spirit of two English Renaissance composers, neither of whom was contemporary with his Italian original. It is remarkable, but not ultimately surprising, as these composers remained two of Pound’s touchstones for a way of thinking about song where the ‘complexity squared’ (Ratcliffe 1981: ix) of the song text reflects an equal and indivisible sense of value between music and word together. Later, in Canto LXXXI and under significantly changed circumstances, Pound was to return to Lawes and his contemporaries, and also one of his own London contemporaries and fellow reviver of a disappeared musical tradition: ‘Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest / Dolmetsch ever be thy guest’ (LXXXI/539). Arnold Dolmetsch, whom Pound once described in an essay as ‘the God Pan’ (LE 431), was responsible for a significant proportion of the early music revival of the twentieth century. He is an invited guest in the poem precisely because he translates the lost values of an older tradition into an accessible and paradoxically modern idiom. Similarly, back in 1931, Pound was preparing not just to restore, but to restore by recreating from scratch, a musical aspect of the lost tradition in the image of his own time. As Lawrence Venuti has observed in reflecting on Pound’s retranslations: ‘An alternative intertextual relation is metonymic: a translation might focus on recreating specific parts of the foreign text which acquire significance and value in relation to literary trends and traditions in the translating culture’ (2004: 32). With this dedication to Lawes and Campion as a point of departure, Pound begins to focus on the lost musical aspect of his source text. He translates Cavalcanti’s poetry into song, a transformation that was in part artistic archaeology, recreating the original relationship between text and music.3 In this context I see Pound’s ‘Donna mi prega’ dedication as highlighting a culture rhyme between creative intellects with shared artistic values, separated by language and historical period, but united in an artistic end. Pound needs

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such spirits as Lawes and Campion on his side to enable a necessary revival of their musical values. But this revival itself is part of the contemporary twentieth-century spirit; the opera dramatises the social and poetic life of late thirteenth-century Italy for a contemporary audience, and the music serves to reintroduce and expand the formal scope which was lost when the poems of Cavalcanti were consigned to their silent life on the page. So far in this chapter I have briefly outlined Pound’s theoretical and practical engagements with Cavalcanti prior to his decision to compose a second opera based on Cavalcanti’s poems. Such theoretical engagements are sometimes uncomfortable bedfellows with the practicalities of composition and performance. Theory and practice have of course a close relationship, but the distance between the two is often best negotiated with a degree of pragmatism and trial and error. The experience of producing several versions of Le Testament for a variety of circumstances, audiences and media would certainly have prepared Pound well in this respect, and the genesis of his second opera was indeed even more fraught with earthly torments, such that its real premiere took place fifty years after it was written, and more than a decade after Pound’s death.4 Nevertheless, Pound did produce a second complete opera, remarkable in its own right and for its stylistic and circumstantial differences from his first. It was born in a different climate, culture, country and language, treating a different, if related, aspect of the medieval past as its subject, and it was associated with a later, if no less restless, period of Pound’s life. That said, the narrative of Cavalcanti has much in common with Pound’s first opera, Le Testament, in which the hero is also an outcast who is finally executed by the forces of the state. As a further point of comparison, Margaret Fisher argues convincingly that: Both works are concerned with the importance of a poet’s legacy. Villon is quite capable of bequeathing his poetry; Cavalcanti appears incapable of direct bequest because of an excessive sensitivity and temperamental personality rendering him unable to overcome his circumstances. (Fisher 2002: 147) Nevertheless, such practical considerations of politics and legacy are indirectly bequeathed in both operas through Pound’s music, and interrelated with a discourse on the detailed conceptualisations of love and death, which is the subject and substance of so many of the Cavalcanti poems turned here into song. The libretto of Cavalcanti includes seven of Guido Cavalcanti’s ballate, the canzone ‘Donna mi prega’, the first stanza of the canzone ‘Io son la donna’, and the short poem ‘Gianni quel Guido salute’. In addition to these Cavalcanti poems there are three further songs in the opera with texts from other sources. Two of these belong to the troubadour Sordello: ‘Ailas’ and ‘Tos temps serai’, imported, as Pound remarks in Guide to Kulchur, to provide ‘the contrast in melodic shape’ (GK 366), but which also introduce important dramatic material. The other, ‘Guarda ben dico’, sung by the Cobbler, has previously been ascribed to Cavalcanti; however, it is clear that Pound agreed with modern editors that this poem is apocryphal. Pound included the poem, and the Sordello, probably for reasons of dramatic and musical diversity, in much the same way that he included texts beyond Villon’s ‘Le Testament’ in his first opera. As in Le Testament, the poetry is generally set to music in complete units; the poems are not manipulated or fragmented, although they are occasionally interrupted, and

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consequently the opera relies on the juxtapositions and contextual scenarios of the songs to provide its dramatic and narrative life. Cavalcanti is in three Acts, each Act beginning with a spoken introduction, which provides a synopsis of the dramatic situation and setting, written primarily for a radio narrator. However, as the editorial note explains: ‘Although the following text was prepared in anticipation of radio broadcast and can be used as a text for an interlocutor, it can also be used as background information for stage directions’ (Cav 1b). Each act is constructed around at least one dramatic episode, some original to the work, and others derived from a range of medieval biographical sources.5 These dramatic episodes are acted out by the various characters and voiced in a spoken AmericanEnglish idiom contemporary with its 1930s audience, very much in the style of the BBC radio version of Le Testament, which became the practical compositional model for Cavalcanti.6 As in the radio version of the earlier opera, this spoken drama contrasts with, and provides the framing context for, the various songs, which are delivered in the medieval Italian and Provençal of the original poems. Of these episodes, the opening confrontation between Cavalcanti and Betto Brunelleschi in Act I is based on a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron; the nailing down of Cavalcanti’s coat in the middle of Act II derives from an anecdote recorded in Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentenovelle (LXVIII); and Cavalcanti’s dispute with Corso Donati Buendelmonte and final exile are recorded in Giovanni Villani’s Croniche Fiorentine (particularly book VIII, chapter 42). Pound thought this additional drama was necessary to the opera to compensate for a degree of dramatic absence in the poetry of Cavalcanti: ‘The “Cavalcanti” needed a lot more extraneous work. It needed much more play written. There was not in Guido the variety of theme and drive of the Villon text’ (GK 366). The period setting for the opera is the late thirteenth century, and the action takes place in Florence, and latterly Sarzana, a marshy camp outside the city, and Cavalcanti’s place of exile. The drama charts a course of artistic, political and philosophical resistance and non-conformism, depicting a journey from a local squabble in Act I to Cavalcanti’s exile and death in Act III. The opera requires fairly small-scale musical resources of eleven singers and nine orchestral players, and this can be reduced further to five singers and eight players if adept staging is employed.7 The full orchestra comprises an assortment of drums, including three timpani, a tambourine and cymbals, flute, cor anglais, bassoon, trombone, violin, cello and double bass. The role of Cavalcanti, like the role of Villon, requires a baritone with a wide range. There is a choice between boy soprano and light tenor for the role of Guido’s page Ricco. The other singer characters required are as follows: Betto Brunelleschi (tenor); three Cerchi friends of Guido sung by tenor, baritone (named Gianni Lapo) and bass; the Cobbler (baritone or bass); a French Soldier (high baritone); and the Seneschal (bass baritone). Two female sopranos are required to sing Vanna, once maid to Cunizza, and the goddess Fortuna. Pound’s canvas is deliberately small, eschewing the traditionally expansive resources of the mainstream operatic tradition for the more intimate and immediate atmosphere of something closer to chamber opera, or small-scale music theatre. Pound’s melodic language in this second opera is almost always characterised by fluidity, and whereas the shifting jaggedness of rhythms in his first opera, Le Testament, creates an astonishingly complex modernity of sound, the melodic line in Cavalcanti is more conventionally measured and mellifluous in style. Still, it is rare

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that the harmonic language even suggests a tonal or modal conventionality. Pound, like many of his contemporary composers, mostly resists such a musical vocabulary, his tendency to prefer two tone chords to triads militating against traditional harmonic progression. His interest is in timbre rather than harmonic architectonics, in producing a musical language without the explicit and autonomous goal-oriented structure of traditional harmony. Musical structure is instead closely allied to, and an amplification of, poetic structure. Pound’s prefacing notes to the score included general directions to the orchestra: I mean when one instrument is left alone with the voice, it is to make about as much noise as the singer, not quite as much but almost. When two or more instruments sound together, the lot of them are to moderate their noise so that all together they will make about (but not quite) as much noise as the voice. (Cav xb) Such practice, which denies the more traditional possibilities of autonomous crescendos in the instrumental parts, ensures that the voice is given equality even when outnumbered. His priority is always that orchestral accompaniment and melodic shape should not so distort the sound of the words as to render them aurally, or indeed, emotionally, unintelligible.

Act I: Wars of the Heart Pound wanted an overture for Act I, making a note that it might be drawn from one of his own sonatas for violin, a lead followed by Robert Hughes, who collates two fairly short melodic sections from a Pound sonata and motifs from the second act: Since the Sonate Ghuidonis (October 14–30, 1931) predated the opera and served as a serious study for the melodies of a number of the opera’s arias, the Music Director is free to choose material from the entirety of the Sonate to form an overture. (Cav 2b) The opera begins with Cavalcanti, alone on a stage imagined as a cemetery, positioned near a tomb, and singing, in baritone range, the melancholic song ‘Poiché di doglia’, a setting of Cavalcanti’s first Ballata. The song explains the poet’s helplessness: ‘Love’ has made him grieve, and its pleasurable destruction has proved an enervating turmoil. Musically the opening lines demonstrate a typically careful response to both the structure and sound of the poetry, and to its mood (Figure 24.1). The vocal line at the start is isolated, unemphatic and gloomy, struggling under the burden of prospective pain to rise through the vocal register. Ponderous minims create a deliberate musical reluctance, and the atmosphere is one of barely resisted resignation. The melodic phrase of the first line echoes Pound’s Ghuidonis Sonata, and falls naturally into two halves, with the heart, ‘cor’, in the middle of the line, and accented, as it is also the centre of the poem’s preoccupation. Following this emphasis, the melody rises by the interval of a fifth, which musical distinction marks the beginning of the second descending half of this first melodic phrase. Consequently ‘convien ch’io porto’ descends in pitch to the penultimate durational stress on ‘por-’ of ‘porto’,

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Figure 24.1 Opening vocal line of ‘Poiché di doglia’ (Cav 3–4b). © 2003 Second Evening Art Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. which, in the nature of the Italian verse, is the strongest syllable of the line. These two constituent musical sub-phrases are differentiated by the change in direction of pitch, responding to a natural rhythmic division of the line into a first section of six syllables, and a second of five syllables. Underlying this differentiation, however, is also a durational symmetry, characteristic of the melodic patterning also heard in Le Testament, with the temporal phrasing unfolding from the line’s middle in mirror image, albeit that the bar lines, which dictate accent, fall in different places, so that durational symmetry is tempered by accentual variation. As in Le Testament, the attention to detail is once again in this temporal patterning, in the concentration on the minor hurries, delays and weightings of the sounding of the syllables in patterned relation. The larger musical structures emerge from the accumulation of such relationships, rather than from harmonic relation, and the music is characteristically linear in this strict sense. This is a song about the effect and inspiration of love: Io dico, che miei spiriti son morti, E’l cor, ch’ha tanta guerra e vita poco. E se non fosse che’l morir m’è gioco, Fare’ne di pietà piangere Amore. I tell, with senses dead, what scant relief My heart from war hath in his life’s small might. Nay! were not death turned pleasure in my sight Then Love would weep to see me so offended. (Cav 177b)8 The lyrical voice has been overwhelmed by desire and the senses assailed, such that the life of the heart is overwhelmed by the strength of love’s war. The only remaining pleasure is in the thought of death, because in death, and only in death, whether

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literally or figuratively, there will be some kind of alleviation. Pound chooses to begin with a lyric in which the fundamental concerns and roles of Cavalcanti’s poetry are concentrated: the beloved, the pining lover, the heart, grief, pain, love and death. The drama between these aspects informs much of the poetry itself, and one major aspect of the drama of the opera as a whole. The mistress is only mentioned directly at the end of the song, and the intensity of her effect is registered by the graphic image of the heart of the poet being physically entered by the object of desire, which returns us to the ineluctable relationship between the physical and the emotional world, and, in a differently abstract way, to war and conquest and imprisonment. This final and explicit figuration is made physically and metaphorically manifest at this point by the nature of the orchestral accompaniment. The vocal line is accompanied predominantly by a sparse and moody orchestration of trombone and cello, which is embellished by the violin and double bass. The orchestration generally follows the rhythm and pitch direction of the vocal line, and characterises the intensity and despair of this vocal line programmatically with emphatic low registers. However, the penultimate line announcing the mistress is accompanied by a flute, playing two octaves above the vocal line, contrasting with the male voice and trombone, and yet shadowing the vocal line note for note, an implied orchestral symbolism bringing together the feminine and masculine, but also embodying the close shadow relationship between love and death, joy and pain (Figure 24.2). In this way, the mistress becomes fleetingly and symbolically present in the musical text, still without words, but not without a voice, embodied in the musical texture, and the flute’s entrance makes audible the fleeting physical union as she passes through

Figure 24.2 Penultimate line of ‘Poiché di doglia’ (Cav 8b). © 2003 Second Evening Art Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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his heart. However, this is not a conjoining as much as an invasive conquest. Pound’s translation in particular highlights her emerging the winner in this particular erotic economy: ‘Che se ne porta tutta mia speranza’ (‘And in her passage all mine hopes were spent’; Cav 177b). At the end of the opening song kettle drums accompany the subsequent entrance of Betto Brunelleschi and his gang, political rivals to Cavalcanti, and the lyrical investigation into the war and captivity of love is displaced by a more immediate and physically manifest dramatic confrontation. Brunelleschi has Cavalcanti cornered, and the mugging which ensues is of a strangely artistic nature. Brunelleschi has Cavalcanti captive in order to sing ‘Sol per pietà’ at him, which unsurprisingly irritates Cavalcanti for any number of reasons, not least as we are to understand this is an earlier song of Cavalcanti’s which no longer pleases the poet.9 During this song, a cobbler enters the courtyard from his shop, and watches the ensuing events from a discreet distance. ‘Sol per pietà’ is a setting of Ballata XIII in Pound’s Sonnets and Ballate, a poem now generally considered not to be by Cavalcanti. Its melody is punctuated throughout by a series of rhythmic snaps, creating a jerky melodic line which sounds in contradistinction to the fluid and easy melodic material of Cavalcanti’s preceding song, and as the song reaches its conclusion, there is a forced musical climax in which the tenor singing Brunelleschi’s part is asked to reach a high C#, a deliberately strained flourish without sufficient conceptual or musical context. Throughout Cavalcanti, Pound presents the songs and the dramatic action in separated blocks, with no music to accompany the spoken drama, and with the medieval Italian poetry of the songs contrasting with the contemporary prose English of the spoken dialogue. However, this dialogue soon makes clear its relationship with the lyrical material, with Cavalcanti responding to Brunelleschi’s singing: ‘[Guido:] Showing the influence of earlier and inferior authors, AND badly sung. Why don’t you pronounce the words?’ (Cav 18b). This familiar Poundian preoccupation with exactness is redolent of ‘Canto XLV’: ‘with usura the line grows thick / with usura is no clear demarcation’ (XLV/229). Here, the need for precision is transposed into Cavalcanti’s requirement for accurate enunciation, an exactitude that becomes of key dramatic significance in the final Act of the opera. In his chronicle of Florence, Dino Compagni characterises Cavalcanti as ‘courteous and bold, but disdainful, solitary and intent on study’ (1906: 56). Pound’s Cavalcanti dramatically represents these qualities at various moments, both implicitly in the songs, and explicitly in the spoken drama, and his impolitic dismissal of Brunelleschi here causes a more direct confrontation through the staging of the Cavalcanti anecdote told in Boccaccio’s Decameron.10 Brunelleschi and his gang are puzzled and offended by Cavalcanti’s remarks, and they threaten him. He in turn insults them, as recorded by Boccaccio, saying ‘You are gentlemen, in your own house’, which means they are as good as dead, being so at home in the cemetery (Cav 18b). Cavalcanti then exits athletically by leaping over a tombstone, leaving the cobbler, who throughout the exchange has been an amused spectator, to explain the insult. This is the first of two escapes from dangerous confrontation in Act I. In Acts II and III, where the stage imagines similarly constricted spaces, Cavalcanti is increasingly restricted in his movement: in Act II, his coat is nailed to a bench, and in Act III, a fortress wall surrounds the central stage area of his deathbed, and his declining fortunes are embodied in his physical immobility and captivity. However, in Act I, his

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vitality enables him to keep on the move. Brunelleschi and his gang exit, insulted and vengeful, and Cavalcanti reappears to greet the entrance of his friends and allies, the three Cerchi. In quick succession, we have seen the solitary Cavalcanti, lyrical and philosophical, and his subsequent engagement with his enemies, and then his allies. The Cerchi sing ‘Gianni quel Guido’, a light-hearted lyric in which Cavalcanti replies to a poem written by his friend Gianni Alfani, in which Alfani requests help in arranging a liaison between himself and a young woman. In the reply, Cavalcanti agrees to assist, but also warns his fellow poet of the possible consequences. This lyric provides a musical expansion in the vocal trio, and in addition presents a more humorous and light-hearted song for dramatic variation. The first section of the song replies directly to Alfani with a degree of ironic formality, with the courtesy of the exchange highlighting the potential indelicacy of the request. The poet refers to himself in the third person, and such distance from the private self establishes the tone for the rest of this ‘frottola’ or quip, which represents a public demonstration of poetic prowess. Pound recognised the formal fascinations of this poem, commenting: As it is we must admit, whether we like it or not, that not only certain phases of thought, but also certain rhythmic developments became the property of a few individuals before they became the property of the cultured mob. (Pound 1983: 271) Pound responds to these developments in the opera by expanding his musical form through the intricacies and relations of the simultaneous and varying combinations of the three voices (bass, baritone and tenor: see Figure 24.3). The changes in vocal combination here respond to the delineation of the poetic form, clear also from Pound’s arrangement of text in his Cavalcanti editions: Significastimi In un sonetto Rimatetto. (Cav 179b) Such divisions are arranged in this way to emphasise the particular rhythm and rhyme of the phrase, as, in its transposition to song, ‘Significastimi’ is sung by bass and baritone, and the following phrase ‘In un sonetto’ is differentiated both by the shift to bass and tenor, and by the change in the rhythmic pattern through the introduction of a triplet, with the pattern completed by the return to bass and baritone for ‘Rimatetto’. The penultimate stresses of these lines are delineated in the music by their coincidence with the first beat of their respective bars. In this way the introduction of three voices allows for a different sort of formal response to the text. Further, the text itself is manipulated at certain points for predominantly musical considerations. It is important to Pound that the text of the song remains clear throughout, and he does not obfuscate the words through polyphonic writing, or large-scale textual dislocation. However, phrases and words are separated and repeated to allow for a musical expansion, as in Figure 24.4, with the phrase ‘fa di me’. In addition to the formal aspects of this repetition, the echo in the three vocal lines emphasises the part of the text which is, no doubt, of most salacious interest to the group: ‘Please dispose of me / As contributes most / To your ease’ (Cav 179b). It is an

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Figure 24.3 From ‘Gianni quel Guido’ (Cav 20–1b). © 2003 Second Evening Art Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Figure 24.4 From ‘Gianni quel Guido’ (Cav 22b). © 2003 Second Evening Art Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. obviously comic parody in which the three male voices attempt to emulate the reported speech of the young woman. The sparse orchestration at this point, the instruction piu piano and the rising vocal motif are perhaps designed to create something of an ironic feminine mood as imagined by the male company, and consequently undercut by the deep rumblings of the bass voice and cello. In the more serious Cavalcanti texts, Pound

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responds faithfully to the shape and sound of the original poem, but here he takes the opportunity of the lighter lyric to introduce more play into the musical variations on a poetic theme. However, the formal expansion of the song is most obviously realised in the repeat with variations of the whole of the first half of the text, a repeat which creates a basic ABA form characteristic of the more traditional operatic aria. The second half of the text, which is positioned in the middle of the song, provides the warning to Alfani: Guarda dove ti metti Che la Chiesa di dio Si vuole di giustizia vio. But have a care where you stand; God’s church Wills not That justice be left in the lurch. (Cav 179b) This warning is delivered though musical dissonance, contrasting with the previous mellifluousness, but is immediately followed by a repeat of the opening section, as the warning is ignored, and the liaison will proceed anyway, according to the typical pattern. The music of this textual repeat does, however, provide some significant variation on its first sounding. The initial light-heartedness returns, but this second time it is tempered by the warning of potential retribution through the mechanism of church justice, and the change in music reflects this growth in experience. Such light-hearted warnings have a proleptic significance, and point to the way in which the poet will be destroyed by the mechanisms of state justice at the close. Following this bawdy trio, another Cavalcanti ally rushes on stage with news of the imminent presence of yet more enemies. Cavalcanti, deciding that he is equal to the challenge of Corso Donati Buendelmonte and his eleven followers, rushes off stage on his own, and a skirmish ensues. His friends err on the side of caution, and exit via the cobbler’s shop. Cavalcanti is heard fighting, and escapes by kicking a flower pot onto the head of Buendelmonte. The Buendelmonte gang re-enter, dishevelled, and exchange words with the cobbler: Buendelmonte: Cobbler: Buendelmonte: Cobbler:

I’ll make this town too hot to hold him. Guarda ben, dico. [. . .] What are you? A cobbler, sir, not much of a Guelph, sir. (Cav 28b)

In characteristically modernist mode the cobbler’s first line here is given in medieval Italian amongst the contemporary gangster-American, and his collective remarks make implicit the way in which this incident, here treated for largely comic-dramatic effect, reflects more seriously on the political turmoil of late thirteenth-century Florence, and once again proleptically figures the trouble at the end. The gang exits,

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leaving the cobbler alone to deliver his song: ‘Guarda ben dico’, a warning to ‘be on guard’, which echoes, this time more seriously, the warning shot from the previous song. The cobbler, a member of the ‘popolo minuto’ (‘little people’), claims no political affiliation, and warns against the catastrophic results to the individual of an engagement with political conflict. The dialogue ostensibly implies that the warning is aimed at Buendelmonte, but the generalised content of the song ensures that the message is applicable also, and more importantly, to Cavalcanti: Guarda ben dico, guarda ben ti guarda, Non aver la vista tarda, Ch’ a pietra di bombarda Arma val poco. Guard thee well guard thee well I say Lest seest too late that ’Gainst stone of bombard steel vaileth little (Cav 180b)11 This suggests in its dramatic context that the individual weapon, wielded in this first Act figuratively by Cavalcanti, will be subsumed figuratively by larger-scale and indiscriminate fire, and that political forces may overwhelm the individual spirit. The cobbler’s voice adumbrates political developments, implied but never wholly specified, that will lead to Cavalcanti’s eventual exile and death. Cavalcanti is heedless of the general warning, and his refusal to listen is reflected by the interpolation of his pastoral ballata ‘Era in pensier’ into the cobbler’s song, during which interruption the cobbler beats time ‘now and again with his shoemaker’s hammer’ (Cav 45b). Having secured immediate safety from Buendelmonte, Cavalcanti delivers this recollective song from his balcony, and his distance from the cobbler’s warning and its import is physically manifested, with Cavalcanti above and the cobbler below. This interpolated song describes his passionate love for the Lady Mandetta. Its mood of contemplation and confession presents yet another aspect of love, picking up the thread of the first two songs in the Act, and the cobbler’s advice is temporarily displaced by the dramatic landscape of the song itself, in which Cavalcanti describes an encounter with two beautiful nymphs, who themselves are singing a song of love that recognises its aspects of joy and fertility: ‘E’ piove / Gioco d’Amore in nui’ (‘The rains of love are falling, falling within us’; Cav 181b) . He asks them not to think him base because he has been brought low by a wound of love. They, seeing the intensity of the wound, and understanding love’s nature, diagnose his complaint. One of the nymphs has been herself metamorphosed by joy into a figure of love, such that she is able to bestow the mercy with which she is replete and advise him to address directly the cause of his suffering. In response he identifies that he has been struck to figurative death by the gaze of a lady in Toulouse, and it is to her that he realises he now must send and dedicate his poem in the envoi, asking for her mercy. In the contrasting cobbler’s song heavy beats are further accentuated by the frequent staccato markings, and also by the considerable percussive support from the timpani, which ponderous musical emphasis reinforces its dramatic opposition to Cavalcanti’s

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ballata, in which the vocal line is delivered mp – leggiero, and the melody is allowed considerably more fluidity, without the emphatic accentuation. In the closing bars of the envoi the melody moves towards a rare tonal resolution, and the tentative suggestion of D major supports the poet’s entreaty that the ballata go to his beloved and seek her grace. The woman to whom the poem is so addressed is to be found in the church of Notre-Dame de la Daurade (‘la Dorata’) (see Nelson 1986: 109): Vanne a Tolosa, Ballatetta mia, Ed entra quietamente a la Dorata . . . E s’ella ti riceve, Dille con voce leve: ‘Per mercé vegno a vui.’ Speed Ballatet’ unto Tolosa city And go in softly ’neath the golden roof . . . Then if thou get her choice Say, with a lowered voice, ‘It is thy grace I seek here.’ (Cav 182b) The poem appeals for grace to the Lady Mandetta, who embodies mercy within the confines of the church, and who consequently either stands in for the Madonna, or more likely, becomes indivisible from her.12 In his chapter ‘Cavalcanti as Mask’ James J. Wilhelm has observed the way in which this poem shares common ground with aspects of feminine representation within the Cantos: The Pagan nymphs who open this poem yield to a beautiful woman inside a sacred temple in a holy city (Toulouse to Pound was a much-admired Albigensian fortress). This ideogram of woman-temple-city is one of the major image clusters in the Cantos. (1974: 72) I would describe ‘Era in pensier’ not so much as a yielding of one aspect to another as a bringing together of various manifestations of the sacred feminine, including the pagan, the Albigensian (which is for Pound at the heart of the troubadour cult of love) and also the cult of Mariolatry. All of these manifestations are united here in the figure of the beloved. That the woman is also a manifestation of Aphrodite might remind us as well of ways in which that goddess’s appearance in the Cantos is often itself inseparable from other forms of the female divine. As Leon Surette has observed: Aphrodite, by which name Pound most commonly identifies the goddess, is a highly ambiguous figure in the Pisan Cantos. She is deliberately confused with Artemis and Persephone – becoming rather like Robert Graves’s three-personned White Goddess. (1974–75: 493)

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Indeed, the interrelation in the opera of powerful female manifestations is also redolent of Graves’s triple Goddess, who, as simultaneously mother, lover and taker of life, is perhaps the presiding spirit over the whole, and further embodied in the final manifestation of Fortuna herself. Act I does not close with the reflective ‘Era in pensier’, as its close leads attacca into a resumption of the last few lines of the cobbler’s song, and the recapitulation of Cavalcanti’s forthcoming danger. The cobbler’s warning is further indication that Fortuna’s wheel is turning, and the final resolution of the opera is foreshadowed at the close of this first Act, a foreshadowing accompanied by a solo melody played on trombone and bassoon, Pound’s own favoured instrument.

Act II: The Beginning of the End The courtyard of Cavalcanti’s town house provides the imaginary setting for Act II, at the heart of which is Cavalcanti’s poetic phenomenological study of love, the canzone ‘Donna mi prega’. Cavalcanti begins by singing ‘Se m’hai del tutto’; another lyrical love song which Anderson notes has a close relationship with ‘Donna mi prega’: ‘[“Se m’hai del tutto”] follows “Donna mi prega”, very effectively taking up the “mercede” of the last strophe’(Pound 1983: 267). ‘Se m’hai del tutto’ suggests that love can transcend the potential pitiless indifference of the beloved, and that the woman addressed who shows no mercy cannot affect the poet’s faith in love itself: Che quando quel piacer mi stringe tanto, Che lo sospir si mova, Par che nel cor mi piova Un dolce amor sì buono, Ch’io dico: ‘Donna, tutto vostro sono.’ Thence, when that pleasure so assaileth me, And the sighing faileth me, Within my heart a rain of love descendeth With such benignity That I am forced to cry: ‘Thou hast me utterly.’ (Cav 182b) The song is written in the key signature of B major, but the melodic and harmonic response to the poem consistently avoids establishing a sense of this key. The inclusion at various points of accidentals further distances the melody from its tentative tonic home, and the accompanying cello plays colla voce throughout, but its simpler line, sustaining minims below vocal crotchets, provides both fleeting moments of harmonic confluence and dissonance. This has both stabilising and destabilising effects, providing a subtle programmatic representation of the two moods implied in the poem, which can be broadly outlined as the potential pain caused by lack of reciprocation, and the transcendence of that pain. The final bars of the song, however, resolve the tonal diffidence, as the accidental E#, which has been used up to this point in the

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Figure 24.5 End of ‘Se m’hai del tutto’ (Cav 70–1b). © 2003 Second Evening Art Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. song to destabilise the melodic directionality, works towards providing a tentative resolution into the key of F# major. The cello supports the final vocal cadence with a confluential note from the tonic triad, creating an implied but incomplete harmonic conclusion to underpin the melodic resolution, a resolution that underlines the potential transcendent ‘surrender’ which concludes the text (Figure 24.5). However, such temporary musical resolution is soon overturned by the intrusion of everyday annoyance. Ricco, Cavalcanti’s young page, causes a disturbance, Cavalcanti tells him to ‘shut UP!’, and in response Ricco begins to fiddle with Cavalcanti’s coat tails (Cav 71b). The same three friends who deliver the light-hearted ‘Gianni, quel Guido salute’ in Act I enter to sing another, equally light-hearted, trio, the pastoral ‘In un boschetto’, which separates ‘Se m’hai del tutto’ from the extended analysis of love in ‘Donna mi prega’. The text of this trio describes a chance erotic encounter between the poet and a shepherdess. On the subject of this poem Wilhelm observes: There is no doubt that the romantic vision ends in a sexual act. This is not phantasy for the sake of phantasy. One has both the realistic act and the vision to contain it. After his translation of the ‘Donna mi prega’ in Canto 36, Pound includes the line ‘Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu’ (Holy, holy the illumination in coitus). Guido, Pound felt, supplied both the romance necessary to cover the act with dignity, and also a frank awareness of its necessity. (1974: 72)

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But the vision of the sacred in coitus relates to the more intense engagement of ‘Donna mi prega’, and not the generically degraded, if entertaining, pastoral mode and its largely escapist eroticism, which may indeed capture an aspect of the sacred possibilities inherent in physical love, albeit that its simplicity will stand alongside the more intensely explored visionary possibilities of ‘Donna mi prega’. Pound underlines the essence of the generic limitations of this particular pastoral in its musical and dramatic manifestation, prefacing the song with a stage commentary: The second song begins with a good deal of rowdyism. You can remember that these poems were actually sung by the people and that Dante got into two celebrated squabbles, one with a mule-driver and one with a blacksmith, because he didn’t like their manner of singing. The words of ‘In un boschetto’ gradually get the better of the horse-play, as is shown in the music. (Cav 72b) Musically this ‘rowdyism’ is created by the fragmentation of the text amongst the three singers. Although the complete text is set in proper sequence, the voices cut in and out of the vocal line, sometimes singing only individual syllables from words, to create a musical dislocation which is augmented by the overlapping at certain points of the end of one phrase and the beginning of the next. There is also a deliberate comic incongruity in the use of three combined male voices to deliver the first-person singular narrative and the direct reported speech of the shepherdess, and the tensions created between the tenderness of the poem’s personal encounter and the public ‘horse-play’ of the three singers are outlined in the orchestral textures, where the momentary sweetness of the occasional flute and cor anglais passages cuts across, but is quickly subsumed by, the coarser bass textures of the trombone and cello. In this way the song provides contrasting context for the last two songs of Act II, ‘Donna mi prega’ and ‘Tos temps serai’. During the distraction of ‘In un boschetto’, Ricco nails down Cavalcanti’s coat to the bench, as recorded in Sacchetti, and the various company on stage exploit this imprisonment to goad the reluctant Cavalcanti into singing his masterwork, or capolavoro ‘Donna mi prega’, which extensive and difficult canzone is interrupted at various points by its puzzled but admiring listeners. It is clearly designed to be at the heart of the opera, just as Le Testament’s ‘La Vieille En Regrettant’ provided ‘the fireworks of the piece’ in the earlier work (see Hughes 1973: 16). Its contemplative text and mellifluous melodic line, however, provide a very different musical experience from the earlier opera’s star number. Pound himself struggled with ‘Donna mi prega’ through various translations, culminating in the version that occupies the major part of Canto XXXVI, and which was written shortly after the opera’s completion. The inherent musicality of the words in the poem is created primarily through its intricate rhyme scheme, in which, as Pound comments, ‘each strophe is articulated by 14 terminal and 12 inner rhyme sounds, which means that 52 out of every 154 syllables are bound into pattern’ (LE 168). This technical complexity is allied to argument and description of considerable conceptual difficulty, where the shadings of meaning are fine and exacting, and the images used to portray these meanings sustained and detailed. The poem’s internal drama has the poet answering a series of questions about the nature of love that have been asked of him by a woman. He explains in stanza 1 that an understanding of love is only available to a select and worthy few:

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charles mundye Perch’i no spero ch om di basso chore A tal ragione portj chonoscenza Having no hope at all that man who is base in heart Can bear his part of wit into the light of it. (Cav 184b)

The poem continues to reflect on the substance and manifestation of love, declaring it to be a ‘mist of light’ (‘Diafan dal lume’), an idea to which Pound variously returned throughout the Cantos. Wilhelm, for example, identifies its subsequent appearance in Canto XCIII: The effect here is truly metamorphic in an Ovidian sense, for we have events from the natural world . . . suggesting a blurred world in which actual forms merge with ideals: a mythical flower goddess, Flora, blends with the fountain of Castalia, where she might well be sitting; Cavalcanti’s woman, Giovanna, or Lady Vanna, is placed there, along with Cavalcanti’s philosophical but highly imagistic word ‘diafana’. (1974: 79) Indeed within Cavalcanti’s poem love itself is a force reminiscent of Ovidian metamorphosis. Stanza four describes ways in which love ‘moves changing state, / Moves changing colour, or to laugh or weep’. Such is its elusiveness, changeability and exclusivity (again, in stanza four, the poet underlines ‘None can imagine love / that knows not love’) that its nature, and the poem’s manifestation of that nature, remain almost impossible for the internal audience to follow (Cav 186b). Indeed, after the first three stanzas, one of his companions declares in abject frustration: ‘Frankly, I DO not understand’ (Cav 108b). This difficulty of comprehension is leavened in the fourth stanza by a comic exchange in which an attempt is made to grapple with the content, a dramatic interruption which degenerates from an attempt at understanding the relationship between such philosophical terms as substance, accidence and effect to a contortion of the accident into a threat of violence: Orlando: Bianco 3:

. . . An effect does not enter a subject as a nail enters a wall. He will never know a nail from an effect, but he might understand a nail as an accident. (Cav 113b)

But this is not to detract from the struggle to understand; rather it is part of the process, with Pound enacting the full human drama of comedy and violence and friendship at the same time as giving half-understood voice to the variousness of love’s manifestation. As Gugelberger writes: ‘The fourth stanza defines the actual essence [of love]. It constantly moves, changing colour, alternating laughter and weeping, becomes the wheel of Fortuna, or the full circle, where the styles alternate from comedy to tragedy’ (1973: 170). This is a particularly enlightening suggestion of a metamorphosis of love into Fortuna, which will have further significance at the opera’s close.

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Figure 24.6 Motif from ‘Donna mi prega’ (Cav 108b). © 2003 Second Evening Art Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. As elsewhere, Pound through-composes the melody for this song, a decision which importantly distinguishes his music from what he understood to have been thirteenthcentury song practice, in which ‘the strophes of canzoni are perforce symmetrical as the musical composition is only one-fifth or one-sixth the length of the verbal composition and has to be repeated’ (LE 171). However, the through-composed melody allows a response to the particular and individual rhythms of the lines, and not just to their underlying metrical framework. In the absence of a melodic repeat for each stanza, the extensive vocal line requires other means of formal organisation, which can be demonstrated with reference to the fourth stanza of the song. Here, the melodic line builds its shape and integrity from the combination and variation of small rhythmic blocks, with the beginning of the first line establishing a basic pattern, as seen in Figure 24.6. Of the fourteen textual lines of this stanza, five begin with exactly this simple rhythmic motif, three others with close variations, and there are also echoes throughout the setting of the rest of the stanza’s text. The melodic line encompasses various organisational patterns which grow out of the rhythms of the poetry, but which also allow the melody to re-form itself from its own past. This melodic coherence becomes part of the way in which the argument unfolds, in a song where the nature of love is held in the mind in its various, related, complexities. The final manifestation of love just before the envoi returns us not only to these complexities within the poem, but also to the explorations in ‘Se m’hai del tutto’ and in particular to the nature of mercy as explored in ‘Era in pensier’. In ‘Donna mi prega’ mercy is born from love alone: Fuor di cholore essere diviso Asciso mezzo schuro luce rade Fuor d’ongni fraude dice dengno in fede Chè solo da chostui nasce merzede There, beyond colour, essence set apart, In midst of darkness light light giveth forth Beyond all falsity, worthy of faith, alone That in him solely is compassion born. (Cav 187b) ‘Merzede’, which Pound translates later in Canto XXXVI as ‘mercy’ and not ‘compassion’, recalls the earlier poem in which this quality was withheld by the woman. In these few lines of ‘Donna mi prega’ the issue is somewhat clarified. ‘Merzede’ is not ultimately within her power, but is born in love. The woman, in her

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various manifestations, acts as an intercessor between the poet and love. However, love itself, separate in essence, is the sole provider of ‘merzede’. The importance of this is underlined musically, with the phrase ‘nasce merzede’ being, unusually, repeated in the song. At the close of this fifth stanza one companion interrupts before the envoi, believing it to be the end: Bianco:

Caro maestro (with reverent but not quite convincing voice), perhaps not all of it, but the line . . . eh . . . eh . . . well, perhaps on a second hearing. (Cav 118–19b)

This final interjection by one of Cavalcanti’s companions acknowledges dramatically the overreaching artistic and intellectual ambition of this central poem. Such problems of comprehension are further acknowledged on stage by Cavalcanti himself, where, immediately after ‘Donna mi prega’, the maidservant Vanna sings ‘Tos temps serai’, a short song of Sordello, and the juxtaposition causes Cavalcanti to remark ‘damn, damn, damn, I ought to simplify’ (Cav 125b). Pound commented that he introduced the Sordello songs for melodic diversity, and certainly the lively concentration of this first Sordello song provides musical relief after the exhaustive expansion of ‘Donna mi prega’.13 The ensuing dialogue between Vanna and Cavalcanti reveals that she remembers the visit of Cunizza da Romano, a noblewoman and once Sordello’s lover, to the Cavalcanti house, an incident which Pound speculates would have inspired the young Cavalcanti: And that years after the fall of Eccelin and the weakening of Ghibbeline (or imperial) party a princess Cunizza came to the house of the Cavalcanti in Florence where she may well have fired the imagination of Guido Cavalcanti, then fifteen years old. (Cav viib) In this way, the servant, and the song she sings, are important links to a previous age, and make historically manifest on stage the understood cultural continuity between the Provençal and Tuscan artistic traditions, at the same time drawing a distinction between their relative characteristics. Cavalcanti eventually recognises the origins of the song, unknown by the servant to be by Sordello, and its simplicity and beauty cause him to express his own doubts about his art. Vanna’s is one of only two voiced female presences in the entire opera, the other being the goddess Fortuna. Margaret Fisher identifies this imbalance of voice, and sees in it a reflection of Pound’s thematic preoccupations: In the Villon, Pound scored the music for a diversity of female personalities. . . . The Cavalcanti contains two short songs for female voice, one for the undeveloped character role of Vanna at the end of act II, and the other for Fortuna at the end of act III. The overriding theme of a poet’s legacy rationalises the absence of women as lovers in an opera of lyric love poetry. The opera’s subject is the lyric poet and his poetry; the drama takes place in the soul of the poet. Love’s perfection, the feminine ideal formed in the mind and retained in the memory, is never seen. The physical presence of a woman would be a distraction to the themes in circulation, for love in

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this opera is always unfulfilled, always straining. Pound’s portrayal of the feminine has a specific alternative function: woman is a vessel for the poet’s work, protecting it for posterity. (Fisher 2002: 166–7) This is a convincing hypothesis, but whilst Cunizza da Romano is a memory in the opera, confined in one sense to the commentary and dialogue, she is essential in another, as she figures as the dramatic conduit through which the song has survived to sound in the ears of the internal audience of Cavalcanti, and the contemporary audience listening to the opera. This gets to the heart of the theme of legacy and tradition, and this seemingly marginal character carries a good deal of signifying weight. Cunizza also has a significant presence in the Cantos, where her famed act of manumission is returned to, as Stefano M. Casella has observed, ‘with Cunizza’s projection in a mythical dimension, a kind of divinization of this noblewoman’ (2000: 79). Casella further indicates ways in which Cunizza becomes associated for Pound with Aphrodite–Venus and Diana–Artemis, and, by extension, with the Egyptian Isis. Peter Makin also observes a conflation of female divinity associated with Cunizza: But in the passages surrounding Montségur in the later Cantos, Pound fuses ecstatic copulation with its opposite, virginity. ‘Golden rain’ is obviously the sun’s light, but here ‘To another the rain fell as of silver’, the light of the moon – ‘La Luna Regina’. Pound asks ‘that no blood sully this altar’; it is obviously the altar of Diana, who appeared as ‘la scalza’ in one of the other landscapes associated with Montségur. There she said ‘Io son’ la luna [I am the moon] and they have broken my house’ and Pound said the huntress in broken plaster keeps watch no longer Yet a few lines earlier she had been placed right next to Cunizza, who in Dante and in Pound is another incarnation of Venus. (1978: 249–50) Makin concludes from what he perceives to be the displacement of Venus by Diana here that Pound is somehow gesturing towards a necessary containment of the sexual impulse. But in writing ‘“Io son” la luna’ with those quotation marks around ‘I am’, we are left with the phrase and culture rhyme from Cavalcanti and the opera: ‘Io son la donna, che volga la rota’ (‘Lo! I am she who makes the wheel to turn’; Cav 191b). Later, in Canto XCVII, Pound tells us repeatedly, ‘All neath the moon, under Fortuna’ which makes explicit a connection between the moon and Fortuna herself, as later in the same Canto he quotes directly from Cavalcanti’s lyric and the substance of his opera to note Fortuna rejoicing, ever changing, ever blamed: Earth under Fortuna, each sphere hath its Lord, with ever-shifting change, sempre biasmata, gode. (XCVII/697)

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As Robert Graves points out in a contemporary and corresponding observation of divine connection: ‘Nemesis carries a wheel in her other hand to show that she is the goddess of the turning year, like Egyptian Isis and Latin Fortuna’ (1948: 230). Of course, for Graves, such a goddess overseeing the ever-changing turning year is a further manifestation of aspects of the triple female divinity, giver of both life and fertility and taker in death, and I argue that such a realisation underlines Pound’s poetic overlayering of these different divine and human manifestations. In Cantos LXXIV, LXXVI and LXXVIII Cunizza is repeatedly associated with the phrase ‘e al Triedro’,14 a phrase which Terrell identifies as ‘a place where three roads cross’ (1993: 391). Such a phrase describing the meeting of three paths underlines also the triple aspect of Pound’s ‘divinisation’ of Cunizza. This triple aspect is also inherent in the subject and drama of his opera, where Fortuna / Diana / Aphrodite are manifested through the presiding ‘Donna’ in her various forms, made flesh through dramatic metaphor in the unfolding drama. The transmission of the Sordello song from noblewoman to serving maid has its major significance, and whilst dramatically it is very swiftly overturned by the ensuing quotidian dramatisation of political failure, it provides a thematic foreshadowing of the final denouement of the drama, which will lie beyond the immediate political contexts. In astonishment, and then irony, Cavalcanti discovers that the government of the Florentine state has decreed his exile from the city, a decree countersigned by his one-time friend Dante Alighieri himself. He is exiled beyond the city boundaries to the ‘swamp at Sarzana’ (Cav 125b), a decree that Pound suggests in his introduction to Sonnets and Ballate resulted from Cavalcanti’s fight with Corso Donati Buendelmonte, the confrontation which figured in the previous Act: For upon his return from the pilgrimage, which had extended only to Toulouse, Guido attacks Corso in the streets of Florence, and for the general turmoil ensuing, the leaders of both factions were exiled. Guido was sent with the ‘Whites’ to Sarzana, where he caught his death fever. (Pound 1912: 7)

Act III: Death and Transformation Cavalcanti’s exile is announced at the end of Act II, ‘for the welfare and tranquillity of the Florentine State!’, and Act III is set in the place of exile, a ‘sort of terrace or porch under the wall of the fortress’ (Cav 127b). Towards the back of this imagined area is what appears to be merely a statue of the goddess Fortuna, a statue that becomes animate towards the end of the Act. It is evening on stage and it is also the evening of Cavalcanti’s life, and another song of Sordello’s, ‘Ailas’, sung by an old soldier passing in front of the fortress walls, provides yet another reminder of the disappearing Provençal tradition. The simplicity of Sordello’s mastery is once more affirmed in a song detailing the figurative death caused by the distance between the poet and his beloved. Cavalcanti sings immediately after this, as if in answer and to complement, ‘Quando di morte’. This is his last solo ballata, in which he sings further of the despair of love, mingling with a prefiguration of his approaching death, and intensifying the description of figurative death in Sordello’s song. It begins with a series of questions exploring how the spirit of love might survive in the face of overwhelming sorrow:

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Quando di morte mi convien trar vita, E di gravezza gioia, Come di tanta noia, Lo spirito d’Amor d’amar m’invita? Come m’invita lo mio cor d’amare? If all my life be but some deathly moving, – Joy dragged from heaviness – Seeing my deep distress How doth Love’s spirit call me unto loving? How summon up my heart for dalliance? (Cav 189b) The two central melodic stresses of the first line concentrate the attention towards ‘morte’ and ‘vita’, highlighting the conflict of a life almost extinguished by emotional devastation, and the accentual and durational emphasis on these two words combines with the closely grouped low note pitches to underline the paralysis of sorrow and grief. However, love’s spirit is ineluctable, and despite the cruelty of the beloved, the poet is the captive of love: M’affanna, laond’ io perdo ogni valore. Quel punto maledetto sia, ch’Amore Nacque di tal maniera, Che la mia vita fiera Gli fu di tal piacere a lui gradita. O Mistress, spoiler of my valour’s store! Accursed [be] the hour when Amor Was born in such a wise That my life in his eyes Grew matter of pleasure and acceptable! (Cav 189b) ‘Quando di morte’ presents the culminating description of the pain caused by an unsympathetic woman, a presentation which is counterbalanced in the following song, ‘Perch’io non spero’, in which the woman is implicated in a process of elegiac redemption. Georg M. Gugelberger has persuasively argued that: The basic mood of Cavalcanti is tragic. Every critic has been impressed by the prevailing sadness of his love, the suffering and the ‘morte’, which amount to a peculiarity of his. A brief comparison between Pound’s rendering of the exile ballad and Rossetti’s version, which is untouched by the elegiac mood, will support this Poundian awareness of the basic tone in Cavalcanti. (1973: 164) Gugelberger identifies a robust and secular sense of the permanence of loss in Pound’s Cavalcanti that, he believes, is rather elided from Rossetti’s particular translation of this poem. Pound’s translation leaves his Cavalcanti without any hope of

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return to Tuscany, and facing exile followed by inevitably impending death. That this is a self-elegy about the nature of loss is well observed. That it is a poem about what survives of us is also important. Anne Paolucci emphasises in particular the survival through and of the poem itself: ‘What Cavalcanti seems to be saying, in effect, is that his soul and something of his rational power will survive him – not in a Christian sense – but through the voice and the ballad, in close, constant contemplation of the beloved’ (1960: 263). What remains is the poem itself, the direct subject of the address of the poet, and not only in the practical sense of a poetic legacy. The song is also figured as the means through which his soul and mind can not only survive the physical fact of death, but also find their way out of exile and back to his beloved, and a sense of home: Ah, Ballatetta, to thy friendliness, I do give o’er this trembling soul’s poor case. Bring thou it there where her dear pity is, And when thou hast found out that Lady of all grace Speak through thy sighs, my Ballad. (Cav 190b) In this the woman redeems the cruelty outlined in ‘Quando di morte’, and the language of worship and adoration transcends a simple division of the physical and the spiritual, as the concept of the goddess becomes physically manifest, as does grace itself. Metaphorically, the poem carries a form of life and speaks to the living. In the immediate context of the opera, this song, in places sung jointly by Guido and Ricco the page, has a purpose beyond countering elegiac loss with redemptive metaphorical possibility. Indeed, this redemption is complicated by its dramatic situation, in which it bears a concomitant political significance and sense of failure. It contains a cipher to be delivered to Cavalcanti’s friends in Florence, a cipher contained not in the words but in the music. Cavalcanti insists that if Ricco can learn the melody, the message can be transmitted in safety. Pound’s prefatory note to Act III tells us: Many people have tried to find a cipher in these songs. This song is all important to Guido as it is the last cipher message to his party in Florence. The cipher is not in the words but in the music where only another musician can find it. (Cav 127b) The specific nature of this cipher and its method are not revealed, but it is somehow related to Cavalcanti’s insistence on the exact pronunciation of the words, and he sings various sections of the melodic line with Ricco in order to teach and to prompt: Guido, violently: DON’T buzz up your z’s. Don’t pronounce a G like a Z. . . . For God’s sake try to remember that if you don’t learn this song you’ll never be let back into Tuscany. And don’t ask me to explain it. You’ve got to learn the damn thing. (Cav 147b)

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The successful transmission of the message depends on the accuracy of the singing, and it seems that the mispronunciation of even a single letter may be disastrous in this respect.15 This dramatic plea for accuracy is indicative of a general aesthetic attitude to exact definition, the loss of which is enacted in the opera by the death of Cavalcanti, and Ricco’s ultimate failure to learn the complexities of this particular melody. Cavalcanti’s death is Pound’s dramatic realisation of the import of ‘Perch’io non spero’, that he has no hope of returning home from exile.16 There follows a brief exchange between Ricco and the Seneschal, Cavalcanti’s jailer, in which Ricco mourns both his master’s death and the loss of the music to the ballata, which he has failed to learn. In the opera’s context, this loss represents immediately a political failure, as Cavalcanti’s message to his party cannot be transmitted. Ricco’s failure also concentrates the attention on the artistic loss because Cavalcanti has recorded the words of his songs, but not the music, a consideration that is of course partly addressed by Pound’s reconstitution of the music in the opera. The political drama of the opera is concluded by Cavalcanti’s untimely death in exile, and the music and drama are suitably mournful. However, the drama closes not with Cavalcanti’s death but with the song ‘Io son la donna’, and with the manifestation of the goddess Fortuna providing a resolution of both the spoken drama of the opera and the internal drama of the songs. The text of this song is set twice, as Pound explains in the prefatory note to the Act: the Seneschal not understanding is suddenly possessed by the spirit of the statue, and losing himself, losing his sense of his own personality, begins the song of Fortune. But then the goddess herself enters her statue, and her own voice is heard – serene, inhuman, immortal – above the voice of the Seneschal. (Cav 127b) This startling dramatic device has rightly attracted a good deal of explication. Stephen J. Adams recognises that it is part of a musical-dramatic tradition with some significantly important antecedents and potential models, noting at the same time that it picks up on the equally startling denouement to the first opera: ‘Now the device of a statue coming to life on stage is probably not as original a coup de theatre as the motet from the gibbet [in Le Testament], but both Shakespeare and Mozart have at least proved it to be stageworthy’ (1996: 162). Hughes and Fisher’s observation that we should consider it in terms of the Ovidian poetic technique and subject of metamorphosis is particularly important, as indeed is their connected observation that here Pound is deploying a structure that has all kinds of analogies with one of his plans for the Cantos, where in a letter to his father of 11 April 1927 he outlined not only the fugal structure of his epic, but also the centrality of the theme of metamorphosis, of the everyday becoming divine: The opera’s final number provokes a re-assessment of Pound’s sources for his dramatic structure. Inhabitation of the Seneschal by the goddess Fortuna is both Ovidian metamorphosis and Noh mystery. The dead Guido and sobbing Ricco are suddenly removed from focus when the Seneschal or prison guard, a potent symbol of time locked up and unchanging, ‘busts through from quotidian into “divine or permanent world”. Gods, etc.’ (Cav 116a)

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The initial manifestation of Fortuna in the voice of the Seneschal implicitly reinforces the universality of her powers, as the wheel has turned for Cavalcanti, and his fall is manifested in death in exile. The words of the song, spoken through the Seneschal, the representative instrument of that exile, reflect upon the poet’s fate: Io son la donna, che volga la rota . . . Dico, che chi monta convien che cali Lo! I am she who makes the wheel to turn . . . Who clomb must fall; – this bear ye well in mind. (Cav 191b) However, the phrase has general application, and the strength and ascendance of Cavalcanti’s enemies and jailers are also implicitly subject to the revolution and resolution of Fortuna’s wheel. Fortuna’s singing provides a contrasting musical atmosphere, for, though the rhythmic patterns of the melodic line are fairly similar, the style of delivery creates important differences. The Seneschal sings in a low register, with strong accentuation, supported by a combination of timpani, trombone and cello, in contrast to the light musical textures of the same line sung by the soprano, more than an octave higher, and supported by flute and violin. Such differences provide a programmatic representation of the high and low of Fortuna’s wheel. Indeed the turning of this wheel is also musically embodied, as the melodic phrase which begins, with slight variation, both musical settings of the text is repeated three times at the end of the soprano song to provide the final musical phrase of the opera, representing and re-enacting the cycle. This final scene raises various and significant questions. What is the relationship between love, which in its various guises has been the motivating force in many of the songs of the opera, and the political vicissitudes of the dramatic action? Further, what does Fortuna signify? Fisher persuasively argues that the presence of Fortuna in this opera marks merely a stage in the larger plan of Pound’s operatic trilogy. For Fisher, Pound is withholding the emergence of Aphrodite as the divine manifestation of love for the third opera, Catullus, in which the resolution to a higher plane of divinity was to have been completed.17 This line of argumentation sees the manifestation of Fortuna as a tracing of the earthly constraints inherent in the medieval love cult of which Cavalcanti’s poetry is the apotheosis: Pound seems to be saying that the whole of the troubadour tradition as it culminates in Cavalcanti was a love cult whose ruling goddess could only be Fortuna, responsible for love’s effects in the second stage of perfection, the lived experience. To see through the unbearable light of the flames of love was to see one’s bondage to Time and to Fate. (Fisher 2002: 180) Despite such earthly bondage, Fisher sees in Fortuna a clear embodiment of the significance of poetic legacy: ‘Cavalcanti’s voice after his death is literally and sonically carried forward into history within Fortuna’s aria “Io son la donna”’ (2002: 148). In other words, this is the song that finally endures, the song which even defines

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Fortuna’s existence, as she requires the poet-composer’s imagination and technique for her embodiment and apprehension. Cavalcanti’s realisation of the earthly limitations imposed by mortality is the subject of various commentaries that see in his writing an outbreak of clear-eyed modernity. By way of example, Wilhelm remarks: ‘Guido is an Averroist sceptic who does not believe in life after death, in union with the Agent Intellect, or in any of the other comforting ideas of his day’ (1974: 84), and in this respect he is also seen as sympathetic to a sceptical twentieth-century consciousness. In reflecting on Pound’s translations of Cavalcanti’s sonnet ‘Chi e questa’, Roxana Preda reinforces the sense of Pound’s own version of Cavalcanti as a religious sceptic who nevertheless worships at the altar of beauty: ‘The mind of man, straining high, cannot comprehend it, Cavalcanti tells us; but the loved lady is an incarnation of the mystery of beauty which overflows the boundaries of language and intellect’ (1999: 227). But this elides the metaphorical possibilities in which the divine can become the human and vice versa, and where physical beauty is manifest in intellect and language, and specifically in the language of poetry made music. Further, the sacred is made manifest amongst us through metaphorisation, or, put another way, through metamorphosis in the Ovidian poetic sense, through one thing becoming another, through the statue becoming the animate goddess and through the mediation of a breathing singer’s voice which represents the coalescence of intellect, body and word in song. As Peter Makin observes, ‘Metamorphosis in Pound is the making visible of that otherness which is the divine in the universe’ (1978: 182). Fisher, as we have seen, identifies the lack of a presiding Aphrodite at the end. But consideration should also be given to the ways in which the different aspects of the embodied female divine are simultaneous throughout Cavalcanti. The ancient world made many and various syncretisms and conflations of Isis (the goddess of myriad names), Aphrodite and Fortuna.18 Each in turn is an aspect of the great goddess, as apprehended metaphorically and metamorphically by Robert Graves: ‘the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female spider or queen-bee whose embrace is death’ (1948: 20). Alongside Cavalcanti’s immediate fate at the hands of this goddess stands the manifestation of love described in ‘Donna mi prega’, and the access it gives us to mercy. The means by which the poetic voice experiences, apprehends and gives voice to love is through its engagement with the various aspects of the goddess, as manifested in the female beloved, in Cunizza and in Fortuna herself. Reflecting on correspondences between Giordano Bruno and Shakespeare, Ted Hughes frames a Neoplatonist theory of love in terms which have some correspondence with Pound’s Cavalcanti: ‘This agglomeration of forces . . . is for Bruno, and, as I shall argue, for Shakespeare too, Divine Love – the ectoplasmic or magnetic, vital substance of the Goddess of Complete Being herself’ (Hughes 1992: 24). Of course the closing atmosphere is elegiac, and the work of mourning returns us from grief for Cavalcanti’s immediate political situation and death to that which remains, which is ‘all neath the moon’ (XCVII/690), including the poetic legacy, its discourse on love, and its musicalisation and dramatisation. After all, in Pound’s later poetic realisation paradise is also beneath the moon, and the ‘divine and permanent world’ inherent in the ‘magic moment’ of an occasional earthly revelation.19 Shortly after Cunizza’s appearance in Canto LXXIV he writes:

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charles mundye Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel but spezzato apparently it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage, the smell of mint, for example, Ladro the night cat (LXXIV/458)

Coda Pound’s poetic oeuvre is inextricable from the concept and practice of translation and metamorphosis, and his musical projects require us to consider further transpositions of medium and genre in the modulation from poetry to song, and from the lyrical to the dramatic. Pound worked variously to reposition Cavalcanti’s poetry and its associated system of philosophical thought through repeated translation and criticism. The opera draws on and extends this work, recreating a lost music, and reinventing that music in a contemporary idiom. Modernism’s desire to recollect and reincorporate the artistic past, to stage recovery, is nowhere more apparent and fully realised than in Pound’s Cavalcanti. This profoundly complex work of music theatre demonstrates a practical movement beyond the merely theoretical or metaphorical interrelation of, and translation between, the arts, and as such it seems most suited to a critical mindset now more than ever focused on the necessity of interdisciplinary thinking. It is inevitable that this text will increasingly attract a diverse and sustained criticism, and, now that a proper performance edition of the opera has been so assiduously prepared and published by the editors Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, further performance of Cavalcanti should go some way to recollecting and restoring to us one of the great lost texts of modernism.

Notes 1. Ezra Pound to Etienne Gilson, 6 November 1932, cited in Ardizzone 2002: 170. 2. See Mundye (2008) for a detailed account of Pound and musical medievalism in relation to his first opera, Le Testament. 3. ‘And therefore a canzone appears to be nothing else but the completed action of one writing words to be set to music. Wherefore we shall call canzoni not only the canzoni of which we are now treating, but also ballate and sonnets, and all words of whatever kind written for music, both in the vulgar tongue and in Latin’ (Dante 1969: 95). Pound drew attention to Dante’s comments on poetry and music in his essay ‘Cavalcanti’, placing his comments on this essential point just before the Italian text of the canzone ‘Donna mi prega’: ‘The other dimension of the poem is its lyricism, in the strictest sense of the term. It is made for song, not for rhetorical declamation; on which count Dante twice mentions it in De Vulgari Eloquio, II, 12’ (LE 163). This is further reinforced at the beginning of the section of the same essay entitled ‘The Other Dimension’: ‘The reader will not arrive at a just appreciate [sic] of the canzone unless he be aware that there are three kinds of melopœia, that is to say, poems made to speak, to chant and to sing. This canzone, Guido’s poetry in general, and the poems of medieval Provence and Tuscany in general, were all made to be sung. Relative estimates of value inside these periods must take count of the cantabile values’ (LE 167). Pound further comments on the absence of any surviving musical accompaniment

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

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contemporary with the poetry: ‘we are without any such comparable guide for “Dante and his Circle”. I know of no manuscript containing music of that particular period; the one “item” in the Siena Archivio is not a fragment of melody, but two lines of police record’ (LE 171). For a detailed account of the opera’s history and eventual performance, see Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, ‘Epilogue’ (Cav 120–4a). The publication in 2003 of Pound’s Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound, edited by Hughes and Fisher, saw the opera’s full score published for the first time, under the title Cavalcanti: A Sung Dramedy in Three Acts. That volume also contains an extended and ground-breaking prefatory analysis of the opera and its contexts. The analysis and score are separately paginated and distinguished in the abbreviated references here as Cav a (analysis) and Cav b (score). The opera received its premiere on 28 March 1983, under the direction of Robert Hughes. For a sense of the tradition of representing Cavalcanti, see Ardizzone: ‘Guido Cavalcanti, the first friend of Dante, has been depicted as a proud, solitary man by a tradition that runs from Boccaccio until at least the Renaissance’ (2002: 3). See Fisher’s seminal Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas (2002: passim) for a full account of the genesis and development of both operas as early works of radio music drama at the BBC. See editorial note (Cav iib). The Italian texts of the songs, and Pound’s English translations, are taken from the published score, where they are derived from Pound’s Guido Cavalcanti: Rime (1932). See Cav 177–91b. Although in the ensuing analysis I provide Pound’s translation of the text wherever possible, I have not restricted my thinking to one reading of the text, and the interpretation is based also on a reading of the Italian, and of other translations. See Pound’s own synopsis: ‘You will hear him interrupted by a bore who sings him an earlier poem, one of his own earlier poems which no longer suits him’ (Cav viiib). See Novel IX of the Decameron: ‘Guido, seeing that he was surrounded, presently answered: “Gentlemen, you may say to me what you please in your own house.” Thereupon he laid his hand on one of the great tombs, and being very nimble, vaulted over it, and so evaded them’ (Boccaccio 1930: 81–2). The editors note that the text for this song, and Pound’s translation, were provided by David Anderson. The editors also note that this text is now known to be by Antonio di Matteo di Meglio and not Cavalcanti. Cavalcanti’s Sonnet XXXV, translated by Pound but not included in the opera, provides a parallel for this particular elision of Lady and Madonna. Pound includes a preface to his translation of this sonnet, ‘To Guido Orlando, he explains the miracles of the Madonna of Or San Michele, by telling whose image it is.’ In Pound’s translation the poem begins ‘My Lady’s face it is they worship there, / At San Michele in Orto, Guido mine, / Near her fair semblance that is clear and holy’ (Pound 1983: 122–3). Pound wrote in retrospect: ‘the contrast in melodic shape had to be imported from poems of Sordello’s’ (GK 366). See, for example, Canto LXXIV, where once again the connection between moon and Fortuna and Cunizza is made apparent: ‘E al Triedro, Cunizza / e l’altra: “‘Io son’ la Luna”’ (LXXIV/452). Fisher identifies a possibly hidden cipher in three bars of the melodic line, using a version of the sol-fa notation to decode a phrase in Latin about contemplation, light and kingship. The phrase she identifies in this manner does not, and could not, have any real dramatic, or indeed poetic, significance, unless it in itself is a code that unlocked another meaning. The world would still turn and Cavalcanti still die (Fisher 2002: 187–91). See Fisher: ‘Pound changes historical fact, overruling the meticulous documentation by Villani: Cavalcanti will die in exile rather than in Florence’ (2002: 177).

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17. See Fisher: ‘Pound’s seemingly transparent intention regarding the appearance of Fortuna at Cavalcanti’s death is complicated by this exclusion (doubly underscored) of Fortuna as a potential cause of love. The image is a dense one that builds, ply on ply, Pound’s theories of passion, prosody and the pantheon of the gods about him. Meanwhile, Pound holds in reserve the goddess of Love, Aphrodite, and the god of marriage, Hymen, for his nascent “Catullus” opera’ (2002: 154–5). 18. See, for example, Sharon Kelly Heyob: ‘From an early time the cult of Isis–Aphrodite was in evidence at Alexandria, at Delos, and in many villages of Egypt and Greece’ (1975: 49). For the connection between Fortuna and Isis, see J. Gwyn Griffiths’s commentary on Apuleius of Madauros and his Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass): ‘A striking equation is implied: Isis is herself Fortune, but a Fortune that is in no way blind. Clearly there is a correspondence here to the composite Isis–Fortuna or –Tychê, a well-known artistic form in which Isis in her Hellenistic guise is accompanied by two symbols of Fortune, the cornucopia and rudder’ (Apuleius of Madauros 1975: 241). 19. See letter from Ezra to Homer Pound, 11 April 1927 (SL 210).

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25 VIDA SIN FIN: Ezra Pound and Gerhart Münch Roxana Preda and Heriberto Cruz Cornejo

Sero, sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua quam nova. GK 287

I

n the summer of 1933, on Olga Rudge’s recommendation, Ezra Pound struck up a professional friendship with Gerhart Münch, a German pianist living in Italy.1 Olga had heard him play Bartók with the Hungarian Quartet in Venice and thought he could be a good partner in the concert series Ezra was keen to organise (Conover 2001: 116). A year before, Pound, remembering an unforgettable concert Manlio Dazzi had organised in Cesena and emboldened by the model of a civilisation in a small town that Sigismondo Malatesta had created in Rimini around the 1450s, conceived the concert series as his chance to put his own cultural stamp on the city of Rapallo. After Katherine Ruth Heyman, Walter Morse Rummel and George Antheil, Münch was the fourth friendship with a pianist in Pound’s life. By 1933, the poet had written music criticism and a treatise on harmony, had taught himself musical notation and orchestration, and had composed two operas and a series of violin pieces. He was thus ready for new projects at a time when his own tastes, impulses and didacticism were well established. Some of these were old, formed in his London years: for instance, a dislike of the piano and contempt for classical and Romantic musical composition. Pound’s musical universe had no place for Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann or Wagner. In matters of modernist music, Pound was definitely against post-Romantic composers like Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. He did not deign to notice the former, but wrote an article against the latter.2 Pound’s aversion to Symbolist composers like Debussy was well known to his friends (SL 167). To top it all, Pound had not yet found a spiritual home among the composers of his own generation. In 1933, he still thought Stravinsky had not arrived and that Antheil’s period of musical experiment and radicalism was short-lived. Satie was boring, les Six . . . oh well. Like his art critic persona William Atheling back in the day, Pound still felt with Arnold Dolmetsch that Bach was the last composer (EPM 259). His new friend must have given him a feeling of déjà vu at a time when the old musical collaboration between himself, Olga Rudge and George Antheil had exhausted itself. The idea of a concert series with Pound at the helm putting his specific agenda into practice could be an exciting new experiment for the poet but not especially compatible with Münch’s own inclinations.

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Münch had grown up as a piano prodigy in Dresden. Son of a professor at the Conservatory in the city, he had given his first recital at the age of nine and his first concert performance at fourteen (Frisch [1979] 2014: 4; Medina 1998: 13). He graduated from the Conservatory of Dresden at fifteen (Medina 1998: 22). His first compositions are two chamber concertos (the first premiered by Paul Aaron in 1924, the other by Hermann Scherchen in 1926) and a series of short pieces, called Sechs polyphone Etüden fur elektrisches Klavier (‘Six polyphonic studies for pianola’). Several other composers were investigating the relationship between music and machines at the time – Pound’s previous pianist friend George Antheil among them. Listening to these pieces today, we may be struck by the contrast between the machine-created impersonality of the pianola, in line with the contrapuntal, Bach-like structure of the music, and the all too evident pathos of dark emotion that infuses and counteracts both the blank rationality of the medium and the order of the contrapuntal form. Antheil’s Sonate sauvage of 1923 could conceivably be a comparable piece, but the Expressionist treatment of counterpoint makes Münch’s studies more poignantly anticipatory of extreme suffering than Antheil’s buoyant pianistic energy and flamboyant American positivity. The studies displayed what would be a constant dissociation in Münch’s musical world: the tension between an artistic discipline ingrained in a thorough study of Bach and the emotional exuberance and sensitivity displayed by his own preference for the Romantic music of Chopin and Schumann, culminating in his lifelong commitment to his favourite composer, Scriabin. The earliest impulse of his youth was a dark Romanticism held in check by a piano technique and educational discipline steeped in counterpoint.3 It is not known if or when Pound listened to the Etüden, or to the chamber concertos (Medina 1998: 61). Münch at the age of twenty-six, when Pound met him, was young and desirous to perform and compose. The two artists may have approached the idea of a concert series in Rapallo from angles that were different, if not opposite. Pound was keen on juxtaposing early with contemporary music, in an effort to display continuities and contrasts of musical form between modernity and pre-tonal music; Münch wished to play his own compositions in the context of a diversity of music styles taken from all historical periods. Pound had a didactic and musicological agenda and he had a public to teach. First, demonstrate the virtues of pre-classical music, which in the first concerts he combined with Debussy and Ravel, to make the contrasts unmistakable and vibrant. Then, impose the criterion of non-usury: management of the concerts was to be reduced to the minimum and all earnings were to be distributed among performers. These in their turn had to be local, solid musicians who delivered responsibly on the pieces presented – Pound’s animus against diva performers was deeply engrained since his London days. Third, the concerts had to be based on archive research, which was an old impulse in Pound’s own activities on the musical front. He may have remembered that in 1911 he had to dash from London to Milan to copy two songs by Arnaut Daniel, which Walter Morse Rummel transcribed from neumatic to modern notation in Paris. This time, the situation was immeasurably improved, as Pound had the archive, so to say, in his back yard. He and Münch had access to Oscar Chilesotti’s papers, which happened to be in Rapallo at the time. Researchers on the significance of Chilesotti as lute performer and musicologist have compared him with Arnold Dolmetch, Pound’s only musical idol in London, presenting him as a champion of the revival of old music at

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the turn of the twentieth century and one of the first professionals of musical palaeography (Zaniol 1987: 125). The concert series gave Pound the wondrous opportunity to do research in old music again, this time in the lute music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Chilesotti had died in 1916 and left behind a rich archive of unpublished scores, mainly transcriptions of lute tablatures into modern notation. This archive was unmined and stood open for research and performance. It was an unexpected opportunity and a rich gift. Pound pushed the concert series in the direction of the regular performance of medieval and Renaissance music found in Chilesotti’s archive, presented in contemporary adaptations for piano and violin. Münch’s work thus had an important musicological side that informed both the performance and the compositions he engaged in at this time. It was hard work and very focused on old music. Münch adapted to this programme and worked on research and transcription. In November 1933, he could present a first composition that was midway between an anonymous medieval dance suite and himself: he called it ‘Fantasia contrappuntistica’ (EPM 350). When the Princesse de Polignac, who attended the concert, singled out the Fantasia for special praise, Pound replied that it was more Münch than an authentic recreation (SL 254). Incidentally, producing a work of art between an old forgotten text and a new one, a sort of old/new creation, was what Pound’s own poetic practice had relied on since its beginnings. Pound was not only teaching his public to appreciate pre-classical music, but giving Münch’s compositional practice an impulse along his own lines of preference. For Münch, this was not new, as he had studied counterpoint and liked Buxtehude and Bach since his days in Dresden. In the letter to Polignac cited above, Pound also mentioned that Münch had continued this special interest in his Paris days, where he had made adaptations from the lute tablatures in Antoine Francisque’s Trésor d’Orphée (1600). This collaboration lasted for two seasons, 1933–4 and 1934–5 (with the added three concerts of March–April 1937, when Münch was invited to Rapallo). During this time, Münch did research in the Chilesotti archive and also in the Querini stampalia in Venice, bringing into the concerts an important German old music component. At the same time, he performed contemporary music in Rapallo: Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky. However, the question of his own compositions was crucial: only on three occasions in 1934 did he manage to present small pieces of his own (a fantasia on 31 March, two fugues on 8 May and a four-dance suite on 8 November).4 Pound’s programme must have been both time-consuming and highly restrictive to Münch’s sensibility. Occasionally, he played Chopin – Pound allowed it, knowing that the Romantic repertoire would help him in his career. The Italian public was deliriously enthusiastic: to Münch, it must have felt like a breath of fresh air.5 After the second season, in the summer of 1935, he bolted. He wrote Pound a letter telling him that he had moved to Anacapri to live cheaply while being engaged in a major composition. Life was especially difficult financially, as Münch was making no headway with a performing career in Italy. Though in his letters he constantly discussed his economic difficulties and possible concert programmes, Münch did not return to Rapallo until the spring season of 1937: Olga and Pound had to manage the concert series without him. They did, by inviting other pianists like Renata Borgatti and Luigi Franchetti to play. The Hungarian Quartet also performed Haydn and Bartók regularly in Rapallo. The transcriptions from Chilesotti vanished from the programmes – they had been the hallmark of Olga and Gerhart’s repertoire together.

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With Gerhart’s departure, Pound did not drop his didactic agenda, but modulated it with Olga’s help towards Vivaldi. At the same time, over the years, by attending the concerts of the Venice Biennale, he schooled himself in contemporary music. He changed his mind about Stravinsky and acknowledged him as the supreme composer of the century (EPM 372, 412); his friendship with Tibor Serly opened his sensibility to the modernity of Bartók, a composer whose work Münch also performed in Rapallo in 1937; Pound listened to and loved Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher (EPM 411). At the same time, he educated his Rapallo public about Vivaldi by involving himself wholeheartedly in Olga’s project of cataloguing Vivaldi’s compositions, by transcribing scores and organising seminars (Paul 2016: 175–98). Münch took part in this project, first by sending photostats of Vivaldi manuscripts from Dresden and then by doing a transcription of a Vivaldi concerto, Op. 1 No. 6 in G minor, which is preserved in the Rudge Papers at Yale, and possibly performed in the concert of 1 April 1937.6 Gerhart held out in Italy for some years, but he could barely survive. Exhausted by economic pressure, on 9 May 1937 Münch told Pound he thought of moving for a while to a cheap ‘country like Greece or North Africa’. He met American poet and journalist Vera Lawson.7 Later in June, they discussed moving to the USA and Gerhart wrote to Pound on 16 June: ‘I still don’t know if we go to America and stay there. The German-Question politically embarrasses me.’ By July, they finally decided to seek financial help from Münch’s parents in Germany. In September 1937, Münch married Vera, and in October 1937 they were already in Dresden. In November, they headed to Munich and established themselves there in the hope that Gerhart would be able to make progress both as a performer and as a composer in Germany. Pound never ceased trying to get Münch back into the Rapallo concerts and possibly into the new musicological project of the Vivaldi research that Olga had started in 1936. But after his return to Germany, Münch focused his energies on composing. The catalogue of his works compiled by Tarsicio Medina shows a profusion of compositions in Münch’s German years, from 1938 to 1947 (with a break at the height of the war, between 1944 and 1945). The earliest piece extant in the Münch–Medina Archive, the Trio of 1938, suggests a creative space allowing Münch to explore a Romantic expressiveness which he was sure wouldn’t have pleased his admired friend Ezra Pound. He wrote to the poet that he was ‘writing a Cello-Sonata and a Trio, but too romantic for being used in Rapallo’ and that he was ‘sure you will disapprouve [sic] with the compositions but there is not much to do about ones Credos’.8 Though Gerhart had been optimistic about opportunities to show the trio and the cello sonata to the larger public, he did not succeed in having these works or the 1936 ones (Midnight Mass, Concerto de camera and a String Quartet) performed. After so many years spent abroad in France and Italy, he came to a German musical scene that was not aware of his capabilities as a performer. A year went by before he was able to perform for the first time in Munich. The Münchs might have chosen Munich because of its southern location (as close to Italy as possible), but probably did not at first realise that they had moved into the very dark heart of Nazi Germany. As is evident from his letters to Pound, Gerhart had no intention of involving himself in politics and avoided becoming a member of the Nazi Party, even if this would have been beneficial to his career. In the words of Vera Lawson’s memoir:

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The climb to recognition was grilling up-hill work for my husband. Neither of us could wag our tails like well-behaved poodles in the ‘salons’ to which we were once invited and usually never again. Neither of us would have any contact with a party organization. (Lawson 2017: 20) Münch told Pound in a letter of 12 April 1938: ‘I could work with the Party, but until now preferred not to do so’ (Cruz Cornejo 2016: 45). But in spite of his political reticence, Münch’s career was taking off as a pianist. The concerts of October and November 1938 were tremendously successful and led to two more recital seasons in March and December 1939. Word spread quickly and Gerhart was soon regarded as a pianist ‘who belongs to the first rank of German pianists, way above the level of the star virtuosi’; ‘the last scion of an extinct race of giants’; ‘a master of the piano of the highest class’ (Cruz Cornejo 2016: 46, 60). Judging from the twenty-three rave reviews kept in the Münch–Medina Archive (spanning 1938–43, some of them referring to the same event), it can be easily inferred that Münch would have had a brilliant career in Europe – probably similar to that of Walter Gieseking, to whom he was compared – had the events of World War II not prevented it. Critics noticed the discrepancy between his piano ability and his fame, and attributed it to his having spent the last ten years (1927–37) away from the German piano scene. In writing about Münch’s performances, most German critics agreed on an ‘organic sense of form, an outstanding technical skill, strong expressiveness, and ample dynamic range’ (Cruz Cornejo 2016: 48). Finally, by 1940, Gerhart felt that he was coming into his own and had the kind of professional life he deserved. His money problems also seemed solved: I gave 8 concerts. Grand success. Got Herman Kempf, Konzertdirektion, Frankfurt am Main who made a contract with me offering 5000 Mark a year as minimum garantie. Probably I’ll get much more. They consider me now as ‘one of the best’ pianists of Germany, some consider me ‘the best’. Got engagements in every big town also for orchestral concerts. Got the promise for six concerts in Italy during the next season through the Austauschamt. So you see that one can eventually come to the point one wanted to reach. . . . The Propaganda Ministerium wants me to become free from military service; I am still waiting for the official confirmation.9 All the impetus that Gerhart’s career was taking on was stopped by the war. He was drafted to the army in the spring of 1940, probably very soon after the hopeful message to Pound (Lawson 2017: 104). It seems that the Nazi administration had a system of exemptions whereby German artists that were considered by the regime to have merit were not sent to the front. But Gerhart was new on the scene and not a party member. Vera tells in her memoir how, in desperation, she burst in upon a colonel to plead her husband’s case. Gerhart was sent to organise and perform concerts for the army in the relative safety of Augsburg. Even that was too much for him. His health was fragile: he had often complained of nervous exhaustion in his letters to Pound, and the war must have exacerbated his problems. Vera recounts that her husband was held in a hospital in Belgium for nine months (Lawson 2017: 118). It is not clear how towards the end of the war he managed to find his way to Dresden, where his old mother lived. Dresden was supposed to be safe from bombing and a haven for refugees. However, the unthinkable happened in February 1945: while Gerhart was in

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Dresden, the bombardment destroyed the city. The memory of the six-metre piles of corpses he saw in the streets never left him. Gerhart had barely escaped with his life: there was nothing and nobody left in the city he knew. He made his way towards Bad Wiesse on foot: when Vera reached him, he was ill with diphtheria and barely alive. He told her: ‘I could not find my mother’ (Lawson 2017: 228). Pound could only imagine Gerhart’s tribulations: he had been arrested on 5 May 1945 and moved to a so-called Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa. For the first weeks he was held in an open cage. When he had a nervous breakdown, he was allowed to stay in a medical tent and write his poems. Out of the depths of his personal hell, Pound started writing the Pisan Cantos. By September, he was allowed to resume communications with his wife, Dorothy, after a complete silence of five months. She told him that his friend John Angold had died in action. It was natural for Pound to worry about all his friends and to ask himself who survived. About Gerhart, he knew he was in Dresden, which means that the two friends kept in touch beyond the written communication that is now available to us. But Pound was not sure if Gerhart had survived the Dresden bombardment and wrote Canto LXXV as a homage to his friend. The canto is for all practical purposes Münch’s score of Pound’s favourite song of the 1930s, ‘Canzone de li uccelli’, which the poet had included time and again in his musical criticism from 1933 onwards. Pound introduced the score by a few lines of verse to show who wrote it and why it was included in the Pisan Cantos. The canzone was a sixteenth-century choral song by the French composer Clement Janequin; Chilesotti had transcribed in modern notation a version for the lute by Francesco da Milano; Münch had found it in the Chilesotti archive and made a version for piano and violin. The piano part was lost; the score, as a sort of testimony to its creator’s absence, is only for the violin part, and the writing shows it: like a monument attacked by bombs and ruined by time, it has long pauses meant for the absent piano part and indications for a ‘tastiera’ (keyboard) that appeal only to the reader’s imagination. Canto LXXV is the facsimile of an autograph manuscript and has musicological value insofar as it is a document in Münch’s hand from the Italian period of lost compositions, 1929–37. Pound tried till very late in life to persuade his publishers to create a printed version of the score (Ten Eyck 2012: 30),10 but as it stands, it is an objet trouvé, à la Duchamp. When the Pisan Cantos were published in 1948, Gerhart and Vera had already emigrated to America and were trying to get a foothold there. Professional engagements in the USA did not match Münch’s expectations: apart from the lack of work and his own destitution, he was appalled by the universal commercialism that confronted him every day. Vera’s family, though well off, was hostile not only to Gerhart but also to his profession. This time, Pound could not help him. They met again, as Gerhart visited Pound at St Elisabeths very soon after his arrival in the States in 1947.11 Both friends needed help – but what could a destitute pianist with no contacts do for a prisoner in a madhouse? And what could a poet indicted for treason do for a German pianist in America after World War II? After eight months of desperate unhappiness in Salem and Boston, trying to make ends meet and find work, Gerhart and Vera moved to California in April 1948. Inspired by The Colossus of Maroussi, where Henry Miller lamented his own return to the USA and presented the vital authenticity of his experiences in Greece, Münch sought to contact the writer in California. Miller’s reply elicited a response from Gerhart which reflected his sense of alienation:

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It happened that the minute I saw your handwriting I felt very peaceful and less lonely, although I had not yet opened your letter . . . it is not only the ‘moral’ help, but merely the fact that somebody else, and a genius, is part of the same world in this country of utter isolation where one feels like Ovid must have felt in his exile on the Black Sea while he ‘groaned and lamented his tristitime’.12 After the move, Gerhart managed to perform, but despite the enthusiastic reactions his recitals elicited, he did not have the brilliant career a pianist is entitled to expect if called by the critics a ‘master of the pianistic techniques on a level with the foremost concert artists of today’13 or a ‘music titan’.14 Münch’s frustration at the lack of concrete results following the usual favourable press comments on his playing is reflected in a 1950 letter to Henry Miller: ‘If you think – like Swasey – that my playing is as good as Horowitz, for instance, you will better understand how I feel! That is to say: raving mad!!!’15 Münch’s career as a composer did not go much better, as his compositions were scarcely performed. To make things worse, it was uninspiring to teach students whose idea of the meaning and purpose of musical composition was ‘commercial success’.16 One might wonder to what extent a post-war American anti-German feeling might account for the limited scope of Münch’s impact on musical life in the USA. Gerhart told Henry Miller that the novelist Vicky Baum ‘flatters herself to be what I am myself: anti-german. If I were in France or Italy, I’d laugh it off. But here it is no joke. Hatred plus Hatred plus Hatred plus Hatred’.17 Yet we might suggest that Münch’s own quest for an Erdleben (‘life on earth’) in places where twentieth-century modernity had not yet made its mark partly accounts for this situation. Let us remember that all his life he kept away from the main urban and cosmopolitan centres. In the time he spent in Italy (1930–37), he did not live in Rome, Naples or Venice, but in Rapallo and Anacapri; in the United States, his home was not Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, but Pasadena, Altadena and finally Big Sur, where he would join an artists’ colony, along with Vera. Later in Mexico, he chose to live not in Mexico City, but in Tacambaro, a tiny village in the western part of the country. Some of Münch’s discontent with his social interactions in the USA was shared by other emigrants of the war and post-war period. His criticisms may appear familiar to those who have read Theodor Adorno’s ‘Aldous Huxley and Utopia’. For Adorno, the production of identical human beings from a single zygote in Huxley’s Brave New World was no less than the nightmare of the ‘regulated smiles’ of those millions ‘cut by the communications industry’ in America (Adorno 1997: 95). Were not these ‘regulated smiles’ the same ‘eternal smiling’ that Münch found everywhere and identified as ‘nothing but a commercial device’18 frustating every possibility of authentic communication? For Gerhart and Vera, the new world was already a dystopic dictatorship, not very different from Hitler’s Nazi Germany: American Egotism is totally different from other forms of egotism. To begin with, it is purely conservative. I. I Am One of the 140 Million Kings, I the King, I Free. And worse slaves have never been seen. As they are too uncritical even to make a choice between two or three or more possibilities because there is only one way, the American Way, (United States Way), they do not even realize what slaves they are. That is what Hitler had in mind when he thought that one day one would only know the hitlerian doctrins [sic]. But how on earth has that been accomplished here, I wonder.19

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This strong criticism was grounded in a larger one, which regarded his epoch as second rate, due to the triumph of rationalism and mechanisation. Never before had human life been ‘as profane, as un-sacred. Ezra is terribly aware of it in the Pisan’s.’20 Therefore, greatness was to be found only by ‘digging out age-old truth (E.P’s road from China over Greece to Provence and Villon with the weak modern appendix we both know)’.21 Münch’s poem San Juan Capistrano (11/8/1948) is an elaborate Imagist conceit, a reverberation from H.D.’s and Pound’s innovations of 1912–14. It is inspired by an eighteenth-century Spanish mission in California and reflects Gerhart’s relief from the ageless wooden American architecture and his nostalgia for Latin Europe, foreshadowing his interest in what at that point was only a dream, Mexico: Praise to you and seashell songs Brown-skinned Mescal Maria At the yellowish edge of bone-encrusted deserts Praise to you, sun-fed sea star! Commemorating more modest forms Deprived of a homely country Here, behind iron gratings In the shrine penetrated by sun arrows The still oceanic Organ tubes Freed from misty coasts Are caught up in you! (Muench 2007: 114) Not only Münch’s poetry but also his music of the period looks back to the past. The majority of his music works at this time integrate Renassaince or Baroque forms, for instance, Fuga Chromatica (1950) and two Ricercares (1950, 1952). In addition, the majority of them have Italian or Latin names referring to a distant past: Quartetto per Archi (1949), Labyrinthus Orphei (1950), Tumulum Veneris (1950, opera), Celebrazione Concertante a cinque (1952) and the two ricercares. It might be suggested that these references might have a double dimension. The first could be related to Münch’s personal history as a performer and researcher of early music alongside Pound in the early 1930s. The second could point to his own philosophical stand as a ‘laudator temporum antiquorum’ (‘singer of praises to antique times’).22 Münch once referred to the birth of polyphony and to the terms of fugato, canon, ricercare, basso obstinato and invention as musical forms which were witnesses of ‘the speculative spirit of a humanity who showed ever more ingenuity at discovering new intrinsic values, the more it was losing its old ties to community’ (Muench 2013b: 254). Is not this historical perspective applicable to Münch’s own personal circumstances as an immigrant who identified himself with exiled Ovid, cut off from society? The answer is provided by Gerhart himself in a letter to Dorothy Pound on 4 January 1949: ‘I have composed a curious string quartet full of ancient tricks, ricercares, madrigals, fugas. Yes fugas in order to escape.’ The references to early music forms in Münch’s work of this period overlap with modernist music approaches. For instance, Münch developed a new harmonic system he called chromotonality, which he used for his work Labyrinthus Orphei

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(for oboe, bass clarinet, viola and harp), whose movement titles – ‘Introitus’, ‘Incantamenti Centrum’, ‘Exitus’ – suggest the work can be seen as a metaphor for the artist (Orpheus) trapped in the labyrinthine hell of modernity. Ricercare (1950) displays a poly-stylistic harmonic and rhythmic construction, and its intention is to transmute into sounds the watercolours of Henrici Molitoris (Henry Miller), to whom it is dedicated.23 The challenging Fuga Chromatica (piano solo) mixes Bach’s counterpoint with Scriabin’s late complex harmonic system. The dialogue of modern and early music forms is displayed in the internal structure of the work. This can be easily seen in Ricercare (1952) as well, which exhibits highly chromatic melodic lines structured in polyphonic writing, similar to Bach’s two-voice inventions (Figure 25.1). The dialogue of early and modern music forms reappears in later works by Münch in Mexico, although this time the co-existence of past and present is exhibited by juxtaposition, resembling the structure of the Rapallo concert programmes, which opposed sixteenth-century compositions in the Chilesotti manuscripts to modern pieces by Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. Añorando-Anhelando (1966–71) is made up of fourteen inventions for two pianos. Its title hints at the tension between nostalgia for the past (Añorando) and yearning for the future (Anhelando). The odd-numbered pieces (Añorando) refer to Renaissance or medieval music (by combining characteristic elements such as dance rhythms, modality, plain chant melismatic style, canons, fugues and isorhythmic structures) (Figure 25.2). The fragment of the seventh invention of Añorando-Anhelando, for instance, resembles the melismatic melodism of medieval Gregorian chant. The very first four notes in the right hand (piano I) are identical to the corresponding first four notes of the ninth-century chant Veni Creator Spiritus, but the very fact the piece is written for two pianos situates it far from the Middle Ages: it is not meant to be a simple

Figure 25.1 Gerhart Münch, Ricercare, Montecito, California, 3 December 1952. Score fragment. From Muench (2013a: 96). Courtesy of Tarsicio Medina.

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Figure 25.2 Gerhart Münch, Añorando-Anhelando, part VII. Score fragment. From Muench (2013a: 284). Courtesy of Tarsicio Medina. imitation. Its expressiveness depends on ‘accents’ placed irregularly in both piano parts. These accents enhance the awareness that despite the apparent homophonic writing, there is still polyphony emerging, placed irregularly in both piano parts. The even numbers (Anhelando) refer to the musical vanguards of Münch’s time (dodecaphony, extended techniques, very ample use of the pitch register, semi-aleatoric structures) (Figure 25.3). Piece no. VI of Añorado-Anhelando shows a feature shared by the other evennumbered inventions of this work: the continuous change of metre. This invention quotes Schönberg’s Op. 19 No. 2: the two compositions share an obssesive motif of major thirds (G and B) which persists from beginning to end. It is interesting to note, however, that Münch seems to question the principles of atonality that Schönberg followed in his Op. 19 by incorporating dense late Scriabin chords. For instance, in the 4/8 bar of this example we find a chord with its root in D#; it also has minor and major thirds (F# and G), just and augmented fifths (A# and B), major sixth (B#), major seventh (Cx) and double ninths (E and F). Extended techniques in the sixth invention include slaps on the woodwork of the piano (Figure 25.4). These two different ways of writing, one reminiscent of medieval music and the other using the innovations of modernist music, were vehicles of expression which Münch used in similar contexts in other works, such as Cuatro Ecos de Roger (1973), Tessellata Tacambarensia No. 8 (1974), Noctis Texturae (1983) and Ayer-Yesterday (1982). The aesthetic similarities of this approach to Pound’s Cantos are inescapable: inclusion of quotations and methods from past works, pastiche, writing in certain old styles and juxtaposing them with stark modernist experiment in a tense relation of antiquity and modernity are common to both artists.

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Figure 25.3 Gerhart Münch, Añorando-Anhelando, part VI. Score fragment. From Muench (2013a: 280). Courtesy of Tarsicio Medina.

Figure 25.4 Arnold Schönberg, fragment from Sechs kleine Stücke für Klavier, Op. 19 No. 2, from which Münch took the repetitive motif in thirds (G-B).

Gerhart and Vera in Mexico In the late 1920s, Münch had left Germany to pursue ‘the glistening thread of the sun through Gallic France and Roman Italy’ (Lawson 2017: 5–6). Once in the States, in early 1948 he and Vera left New England for California, where they found aspects of old civilisations equally interesting: ‘You have the Mexicans for instance. Their placidity and warmth is the nearest to our contadini’, wrote Münch to Dorothy.24 Nevertheless, the horizon was not promising. Vera was selling milk from door to door. ‘If we could live at least in Mexico’, wrote Münch to Dorothy on 12 October 1948. Gerhart started learning Spanish in the same year ‘in the hope of crossing that border, with some luck’.25 Vera and Gerhart stayed in the USA until July 1953 (Medina 1998: 12). A few days before embarking for the country that would become their home for the next thirtyfive years, Münch played an all-Scriabin recital in the University of California at Los

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Angeles: sonatas 4, 5, 7, 9 and 10, Op. 32, Op. 36 as well as two études were Münch’s farewell to Ezra Pound’s home country.26 By December, Münch was already premiering ‘Homenaje a Jalisco’, a piano concerto that the Mexican writer and then governor of the state of Jalisco, Agustín Yáñez, had comissioned (Medina 1998: 12, 41). Although life and professional career were not easy for Münch in Mexico, he did have a powerful impact on Mexican music life during his lifetime, thanks to his intense activity as performer, composer and educator. He described his music activies to Miller in an undated letter, probably written in 1967: Meanwhile I have become a succesful ‘voice’ in Mexican music life. Am professor of the university (for lire) – (quel bourgeois!) – All my works are played – Produced a flock of youngsters – give conferences in many languages – and ‘advise’ – introduced the ‘New School of Composers’ such as Boulez, Pousser, Nono, Berio, Stockhausen. [27] The latter came to visit us, stayed for an hour talk and left dedication to me on a foto of his ‘to the Dragon of Mexico’. So, you see, ‘the only genius of Big Sur’ has found his place! Münch’s musical legacy has not had full recognition in the twenty-first century, but it is still traceable today. His own recitals and premieres are still remembered in Mexico, and Rodolfo Ponce Montero, a former piano student of his, is actively giving piano recitals.28 Although during his lifetime a vast number of Münch’s compositions were performed by the finest Mexican musicians and orchestras, there are still several compositions that have not been premiered. Twenty-first-century musicans, musicologists and historians have in Münch’s oeuvre a treasure yet to (re)discover. Another former piano student of Münch’s in the early 1960s, Tarsicio Medina Reséndiz, has been working over the last thirty years to keep Münch’s legacy alive. After Medina’s return from his studies of conducting in Hamburg, he assumed the baton of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Michoacán in 1976. From then on, Münch and Medina would be on the stage together on numerous occasions, performing works by Münch, Beethoven, Brahms, Franck, Liszt, Schumann and Strauss. Münch dedicated three large works to Medina: Vida Sin Fin (‘Life without End’ for orchestra and piano), Sortilegios (orchestra) and Exaltación de la Luz (for soprano, male choir and orchestra). Apart from these three works, Medina also premiered Münch’s Paysages de Rêve and conducted many other works by his then friend and colleague. As Gerhart’s and Vera’s health declined, Medina took care of them and became ‘the son Münch never had’.29 Münch declared Medina the heir to his works, and entrusted him with his papers. His instinct did not fail: over the last three decades Medina has edited more than 100 music scores by Münch, the poetry collection Labyrinthus (2007), the essay compilation Metaphysische Marginalia und andere Schriften (2013), Vera’s wartime memoir Germany 24 Hours a Day (2017) and Uwe Frisch’s Gerhart Muench o De la Poética y Metafísica de un Compositor ([1979] 2014). He also curated various CDs of Münch’s own works and performances of Chopin and Scriabin. Münch’s last letter to Pound, in 1957, was telling his older friend that he had finally arrived: Mexico was a country where he had found all the possibilities and professional channels he needed for a fulfilled life. In retrospect, it is strange to think that the encounter between Ezra Pound and Münch in the early 1930s and their

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friendship, alive for more than twenty years, meant an ending for Pound and a beginning for Münch. Canto LXXV was the last instance in which music was allowed to occupy an important place in Pound’s career. His musical activities definitely ended when he left Pisa in November 1945. No more musical composition, no more friendships with musicians, no more archival research or concert organising. Pound’s incarceration at St Elizabeths meant a farewell to music as he had known and practised it. At the same time, Münch’s modest piece of 1935, ‘Canzone de li ucelli’, occupies pride of place among his first compositions that have been saved from the tribulations of wandering, war and emigration: it is the only composition from his time in Italy preserved and protected between the covers of a book. It is said that literature makes nothing happen. Yet Pound knew that by writing Canto LXXV the way he did, he would save his friend from the ‘muerte sin fin’30 to strengthen him for a ‘vida sin fin’ (‘life without end’, the hopeful name Gerhart gave a piano composition of 1976 dedicated to his disciple Tarsicio Medina). The young apprentice that Pound knew during his Wanderjahre in the 1930s blossomed out into a productive, experimental, intellectually challenging modernist composer.

Notes The authors are particularly grateful to Maestro Tarsicio Medina for the unrestricted access to and advice on all the archival materials on Gerhart Münch, and hope he will find his knowledge and insights reflected in this chapter. Heriberto Cruz especially thanks him for his generosity and mentorship over the past ten years. He would also like to express thanks for the tutoring of Robert Kolb, who has wisely pointed out important research perspectives on Münch. Special gratitude is due to Emmanuel Pool Castellanos, who has kindly provided high-resolution reproductions of scores. Citations of letters between Münch and Henry Miller in this chapter rely on the Henry Miller papers, 1896–1984: 1930–80 at the UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library. Citations of letters between Münch and Dorothy Pound refer to the Pound Papers at the Lilly Library, Pound MSS. II 1900–1973. 1. The dates around Gerhart Münch’s early life are uncertain. Pound had it from his friend that he had left his parents’ house at twenty-one (GK 197). That would have been 1928. Münch’s wife, Vera Lawson, wrote in her memoir that she and her husband had lived eight years in Italy on their own before their marriage in 1937 (Lawson 2017: 4). Bearing in mind that they left Italy for Germany that same year, Gerhart was probably already living in Italy around 1930, which would leave about two years for a Paris interlude, 1928–30. 2. The article ‘Against Scriabin’ (EPM 333–4). In it, Pound announced Münch’s all-Scriabin recital of 12 July 1933 at the Villa San Giorgio. 3. This inclination towards dark pathos was reinforced by Münch’s preferences for the literature of German Romanticism, particularly E. T. A. Hoffmann and Friedrich Hölderlin. He wrote to Henry Miller: ‘E. T. A Hoffmann means to me as much as Dostoyesky to you’ (Münch to Miller, 15 February 1950; see also 12 April 1953). ‘Only some of Hölderlin, or some of Ludwig Klages would give one this: to undergo a transformation, to live what you lived – to receive reality, not truth’ (Münch to Miller, 22 November 1948). 4. His compositions of his Italian period (1933–7) have not been preserved, though we can now catalogue their titles from the Rapallo concerts and correspondence with Pound. 5. ‘A quando un altro concerto con pubblico più affollato ancora?’, the reviewer of the Chopin recital Münch gave on 11 December 1934 asked himself (EPM 367).

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6. Schafer does not specify which adaptation by Münch of a Vivaldi concerto was performed on 1 April (EPM 425). We may suppose it is the Op. 1 No. 6 in G minor which Münch mentioned in the letter to Pound of 13 February 1937 when discussing the programmes to perform in March: ‘we could stick into this my transcription of Vivaldi’s sol minore Concert’ (YCAL 54 159/3724; Cruz Cornejo 2016: 59). 7. Until moving to Mexico, Vera Lawson wrote poetry and occasional freelance pieces of journalism. Münch told Pound how proud he was that Vera had sold an article to Harper’s Bazaar for $75 (22 February 1938, YCAL 43 36/1503). 8. Münch to Pound, 20 May 1938, YCAL 43 36/1504. 9. Münch to Pound, 1 April 1940. Postcard, YCAL MSS 43 36/1505. 10. David Ten Eyck reproduces a fragment of a letter from Olga Rudge to Peter Sautoy of Faber & Faber concerning additional material to be included in a projected volume of Selected Cantos (Faber 1967). Olga’s request was made in Pound’s name: ‘If you would like to add a few more pages for Selected Cantos, he [Pound] suggests you might care to add Canto LXXV entire – he would very much like to see it with legible music – all editions – everywhere – reproduce the transcribers (very bad) writing in reduced facsimile – if this could be printed instead readers would bless you!’ Sautoy rejected this request on the grounds of the small format of the Selected, which would have made the score even smaller and harder to read. 11. Gerhart arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in September 1947 and visited Pound in December (Münch to Olga Rudge, 26 January 1948, YCAL 58/1581). His first letter to Dorothy after arrival is dated 5 November 1947. 12. Gerhart Münch to Henry Miller, 27 June 1948. 13. Roland Scofield, Santa Barbara New Press, 22 October 1952, in the Münch-Medina Archive. 14. David Hatmaker, ‘Muench Overpowers San Francisco Audience with Virtuoso Piano Technique’, Daily Californian, 27 October 1951, in the Münch–Medina Archive. 15. Münch to Miller, 15 February 1950. Horowitz had once heard Münch practice and said ‘ce pianiste joue aussi bien que moi’ (Conover 2001: 119). 16. Münch to Miller, 17 June 1949. At that time, Münch was teaching at the Southern California School for Music and Art. 17. Münch to Miller, 14 January 1949. 18. Münch to Dorothy Pound, 13 July 1948. 19. Münch to Miller, 14 June 1949. 20. Münch to Dorothy Pound, 13 May 1948. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. The dedication of the Ricercare (1950) is located in the Münch–Medina Archive. Miller would recall that sometimes he painted while Münch practised on Miller’s broken piano: ‘It was while Gerhart was going over and over the “Scarbo” [Ravel, Gaspard de la nuit, 1908] that I suddenly lost all control and began to paint music. It was like thousand tractors going up and down my spine at high speed, the way Gerhart’s playing affected me’ (Miller 1957: 100–1). 24. Münch to Dorothy Pound, 3 August 1948. 25. Münch to Dorothy Pound, 20 October 1948. 26. The programme of the 15 July 1953 piano recital is preserved in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. 27. Gloria Carmona and Tarsicio Medina also mention Münch as an important introducer of music by Pousseur, Krenek, Ligeti, Boulez, Stockhausen, Messiaen and Berio in Mexico (Carmona 1995: 35; Medina 1998: 15).

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28. Heriberto Cruz Anguiano recalled in conversation seeing Münch as ‘an old man walking onto the stage with great difficulty, this painful image immediately transformed into fire and power as he started playing’. Piano professor Eduardo Montes commented in 2016 that Münch’s piano performances ‘could take you to the highest peaks and then to the deepest abysses in one second . . . As encore, he once played the twelve etudes of Chopin’s Op. 10’ (unpublished videotaped interview of Eduardo Montes y Arroyo by Heriberto Cruz, December 2016). 29. In this regard, Eduardo Montes said: ‘Maestro Tarsicio Medina was a great support for Münch until he died, Tarsicio was the son Münch never had’ (ibid.). 30. Muerte sin Fin, piece for orchestra, 1959. Even if the title of the composition (‘death without end’) is borrowed from the poem by José Gorostiza, it expresses the memory of the horrors Münch had experienced in the war and the destitution and hopelessness of his life in the brief period in the United States.

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PART V WASHINGTON: MENTORING THE YOUNG IN THE 1950s

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26 Sheri Martinelli: The White Goddess Alec Marsh

PAINT me out of here, Cara. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli 1

E

zra Pound’s Cantos XC–XCV are well known as the poet’s hymn to Sheri Martinelli, whose goddess-like presence rescued him – at least in spirit – from years of durance in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. The sequence is framed by allusions and references to Leucothea, a sea goddess who rescued Odysseus when his raft was destroyed by unforgiving, relentless Poseidon in Book V of The Odyssey. By giving him her veil, Leucothea preserves the epic hero to land safely ashore at Phaeacia. On the biographical plane, Leucothea is Sheri Martinelli. More in keeping with the Bohemian hipster Martinelli, ‘My bikini is worth your raft’ becomes Pound’s jaunty way of putting Leucothea’s offer – possibly the first use of the word ‘bikini’ in a literary context. He says it twice, once in Canto XCI (XCI/636) and again in XCV (XCV/665, although here Leucothea is called Leucothae, probably via a printer’s error). Leucothea is the deified Ino, daughter of Cadmus, ‘KHADMOU THUGATER’, a motif in these cantos (XCI/635, XCIII/643, XCV 664), but Leucothea literally means ‘white goddess’, who in The Odyssey surfaces from the briny deep, to become a compassionate seabird: ‘Leucothea had pity’, Pound writes, ‘mortal once / who now is a sea-god’ (XCV/667) helping him reach the land of the Phaeacians – the paradiso terrestre that was to focus Thrones (Figure 26.1).

Figure 26.1 Sheri Martinelli (Leucothea), drawing on back of envelope. Undated. Ink on paper.

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Sheri Martinelli was an important late twentieth-century muse figure and minor painter who inspired, before Pound, Anatole Broyard and William Gaddis, and after him, Charles Bukowski.2 Although they knew each other from 1952, when she first visited him (BNAC 16), Martinelli began serving as Pound’s muse at St Elizabeths from 1954, after a blitz of letters from the poet persuaded her to return full-time to Washington. Her influence on him was strongest from that summer to 1957,3 when he was writing Rock-Drill and the first cantos of Thrones. Richard Taylor opines that Sheri ‘can be said to have had almost as much influence on Ezra Pound as he on her’ (2000–1: 98). Likewise, Steven Moore observes that Pound found ways to work Martinelli’s paintings into the cantos he was composing. In other words, her paintings did not merely ‘illustrate’ Pound’s poem, but also inspired it (BNAC 21–2): each drove the other and together they tried to kindle paradise. Martinelli brought with her paradisal energy – love. Moody concludes: ‘Pound’s “Paradiso proper” starts here’ (2015: 357), with Sheri’s coded epiphany in Canto XC, attended by a plethora of goddesses, from Kuthera Aphrodite to Leucothea. It is by now agreed that Pound was ‘joyfully in love with her for a time’ (EPP III 312); that is, until she was supplanted in his affections by Marcella Spann – a type of Nausikaa – in the months before his release in the spring of 1958. Neither Taylor nor Moore stresses just how close Martinelli was to the group I think of as ‘right-wing Bohemians’ that Pound impatiently called his ‘Kindergarten’. These were the extreme right-wing activists (and after the Brown v. Board decisions of 1954–5, energetic segregationists) surrounding Pound in Washington and gathered at the ‘Make It New’ Bookshop on Bleeker St, Greenwich Village, near where Martinelli lived until moving south to be near ‘the Maestro’. These included Dave Horton, John Kasper, Eustace Mullins, David Wang and others. Of these others, Edward Stresino and Bill McNaughton may be said to have had crushes on Martinelli. Stresino wrote poems to her, Wang wrote to Pound he would have liked to have a child with her – if Pound didn’t get there first.4 Dave Horton corresponded with Sheri till the 1980s. Following their master, the ‘Make It New’ circle treated Martinelli with tender regard. They called her ‘Gea’ and ‘the Sybil’ and saw her as she wished herself to be seen, as something of a goddess, or high priestess to the goddess (BNAC 215). Pound led the way, often referring to Martinelli as ‘her Ladyship’ and linking her to Aphrodite in letters. Consider a 1954 letter dated ‘Venerdi Giorno di Kuthera’ and time-stamped ‘4:35 (or sooner)’ by the disconsolate poet, penning it minutes after his visiting hour with her had to end: ‘THERE it is, the light goes out/ life suspended till Lunedi, 1p.m. or sperata. That is why one would like to get OUT ze boGHousz. Not for anything but the worship of the Queen of Heaven if that is yr/ program.’5 ‘Queen of heaven’ is an epithet that finds its way into Canto XCV: ‘Queen of Heaven brings her repose’ (XCV 664). When in Washington, Sheri was a constant visitor in the few afternoon hours allowed. Many of Kasper’s early letters to Pound concern Martinelli and her problems, especially with heroin use, a vice she had picked up during her years as a fashion model. When Pound finds himself ‘mid dope-dolls an’ duchesses’ in Canto XCVII, he probably has in mind Martinelli and Dorothy respectively (XCVII/700–1; see also BNAC 21). In 1953–4, Martinelli was struggling with her addiction, and in 1955 she was busted for possessing marijuana,6 which is one reason Kasper let his bookstore be used for yoga

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classes (yoga was thought to cure addiction, and provided an alternative ‘high’) and why dope becomes a theme in the later cantos. Pound himself composed a sign advertising these classes that, copied by Florette Henry, duly appeared at the bookshop.7 Partly because of Sheri’s drug habit and partly through her jazz musician friends, Pound and his disciples were convinced that narcotics were part of a wider JewishCommunist conspiracy to derange artists and stupefy the masses (Henderson 2009: 370–2). Martinelli told Bukowski that Pound’s lament in Canto XCII, ‘Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel / but is jagged / For a flash / for an hour / Then agony / then an hour / then agony ’ (XCII/634) was written ‘when the cruel Miz Martinelli was his beloved & she was out . . . down in Spade-town. . . . turning on . . . and sweet gramps was locked up inside St. Liz . . . longing to protect his fragile butterfly’.8 I find Martinelli’s reading of Canto XCII compelling; it recalls Pound’s lines that directly precede the ones Sheri remembers in her letter: But in the great love, bewildered farfalla in tempest under rain in the dark: many wings fragile Nymphalidae, basilarch, and lycaena, Ausonides, euchloe, and erynnis. (XCII/639) ‘Farfalla’ is butterfly; the names in the final lines are those of butterfly families. Pound was explicit with Sheri that poetry was not dope: poetry was not a way to get off; it was not Baudelaire’s artificial paradise. In a note that Sheri preserved dated ‘Dec. 17, 1957 9:30 p.m.’, continuing a conversation they must have been having earlier that day, Pound wrote her ‘NO, damn it, it is NOT dope. The construct, image, verse, does NOT poison, it does NOT have distressing after effect. It stays SOLID, 2000 years something still there.’ And this afterthought: ‘NOT dope it is FOOD.’9 Sheri is the fragile butterfly in need of solid food, the sustenance of poetry, not drugs.10 Poetry, Pound told Martinelli, is like a pyramid: ‘Think of pyramid, SOLID, it does not wobble.’11 Alas, for all of her goddess-like virtues, Sheri was no solid pyramid, or pyramidal fulcrum, but ‘tender as a marshmallow’. As ‘Flora Castalia’, goddess of inspiration, and the flower of the Castalian spring, she was fragile as a butterfly, as transitory as petals (XCIII/652). Martinelli was John Kasper’s sometime roommate – as the FBI noticed. Pound wrote to her at Kasper’s place and then at ‘The Bookshop’ on Bleeker Street, where she painted at the back. Kasper reported on a show of her work there at the beginning of May 1954.12 The confluence of Martinelli’s successful painting and her troubles with heroin seems to have triggered Pound’s massive epistolary offensive beginning in May that year. ‘Sir,’ Kasper reported, ‘your letters are the most wonderful counsel for her, and I beg you to keep writing every day. She is very upset when she doesn’t hear from you. It often makes the difference for the day’ (Figure 26.2).13 When Sheri was strung out or tempted back to drugs, Kasper and friends would search her out and rescue her whether she wanted rescue or not. Before she moved down to Washington (where she shared an apartment for a time with Horton [BNAC 16] and later, Bill McNaughton [EPP III 316]), Kasper would drive her down on his

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Figure 26.2 Sheri Martinelli, decorated page of a letter, 1958. Ink on paper.

regular trips between ‘the Needle and the Dome’, the Empire State building and the Capitol, to see the man they called ‘Granpaw’, or ‘Gramps’. Martinelli was invested in the poetry primarily. Pound’s politics was important as it taught her what to be wary of in this world of illusions; the real world was invisible

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to all but the adept: ‘yr poetry truly superior’, she wrote to him, ‘one has the inner knowledge/conviction/sense wotever – that you are not so much watching yr emotional system . . . as looking at wot things are doing . . . so your eye is on the real world & not on any impression of it’.14 Although Pound’s conspiratorial worldview deeply affected her vision, Sheri was most interested in his poetic process, in which she saw herself as a spiritual partner. He reciprocated, writing in a July 1954 letter, ‘who the hell else can collaborate?’ And complaining that everyone else has to be ‘TOLD, TOLD TOLD’ what to do; their minds were mechanical, they expected him to ‘blow their nozez’; everything he wanted done had to be tediously explained;15 whereas Sheri intuited what was needed. As she wrote to Bukowski: When Ezra was in his room writing ‘you are as tender as a marshmallow my love’ I was in a car . . . & suddenly touched my soft bozum – being so intelligent – I’ve never done it before in my life – the only time I realize I’m a female is when I’m impassionately [sic] in love . . . it was a strange thing for me to do & and I said ‘why I’m as tender as a marshmallow’ . . . was of course astounded when Ezra handed me my poem with those words in/ It happened several times.16 Their collaboration extended on astral wavelengths. ‘My poem’: that would be Canto XCIII, a poem that is indeed in constant conversation with Sheri; it mentions two of her paintings17 and it is full of other female figures – Venus, Iseult, Isis – whom Martinelli’s presence called to the poet’s mind. His love for Martinelli is the warp of the poem; the woof is political and didactic, where Pound’s Jew-hate, coded in ‘Aesopian language’, breaks through the erotic shimmer, the ‘lux in diafana’ of the goddess, with that irruption of racism: ‘Hyksos, butchers of the lesser cattle’ (XCIII/643). Writing to Bukowski years later in the letter quoted above, Martinelli understandably forgets the implicit criticism of the context: ‘You are as tender as a marshmallow, my love, / I cannot use you as a fulcrum’ (XCIII/652). The fulcrum is undoubtedly a ‘hard’, solid, ‘masculine’, ’manifest not abstract’ look at how the world really works from Pound’s point of view, with artists and culture-bearers in mortal conflict with Semitic Hyksos (XCIII/645). ‘Without guides’, Pound worries, ‘having nothing but courage / Shall audacity last into fortitude?’ (XCIII/652). Martinelli and her friends had the audacity to challenge the status quo, but were unguided; that is, if they didn’t listen to the poet and ground their revolt on Pound’s spiritual, racial and ethical values, their efforts would dissipate into countercultural utopian dreaming. ‘The rock-drill’, Pound wrote to her, is necessary to educate his followers till ‘kindergarten diplomas can be issued’. He was writing Rock-Drill, he said, ‘to save you some strength, from 30 years war’, so that ‘the descent into hell is not wasted’.18 Martinelli always felt guided by Pound and, in her own way, even after the poet’s eventual rejection of her for Spann, she still felt she was his guide, his Beatrice, a role she plays in Canto XCIII and pervasively in Rock-Drill, where Dante’s Convivio and Paradiso are cited constantly. ‘I return from Paradise’, she wrote in the same letter to Bukowski quoted earlier, ‘had I gone to Italy with Ezra we’d have had some Paradisal Art . . . as it is we shall have a Paradisal Spirit’ (BNAC 133). Sadly, this Paradisal spirit was saturated with Pound’s right-wing, racialist outlook. Insofar as Martinelli was Pound’s ‘white goddess’, his Leucothea, the emphasis could fall equally on ‘white’. As she wrote to Pound:

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I’m NO actress I live/ and do my job/ which is: BEING A WHITE FEMALE WHO IS CRAZY ABOUT HER GODS HEROS HER ANCESTORS ARTS & CRAFTS IN A WORLD THAT IS OUT TO MURDER PRECISLEY [sic] THAT.19 ‘and’ she admitted to Bukowski, ‘for six years of love of the ONE white man in the world . . . she inherited the smear/’ of anti-Semitism (BNAC 137). Writing to Bukowski, on 15 December 1960, Martinelli complained, I got so sick of them bleeding heart white apologists saying ‘white’ soupremacy that I finally wrote a letter to der hediterr & told him that one is NOT ‘white’ one IS WHITE & not about to feel any guilt for it . . . not natural; moral; or ethical to make it legal to banish the song of the nightingale because the crows caw & hawk/ . . . and I am bored with it/ MOCKING MY OWN SKIN OR MY MAW OR PAW OR MY TRADITIONS & MY CULTURE OR MY RACE . . . DEGRADING MY RACE OR MY SEX OR COLOUR OR GOD AIN’T GONNA ELEVATE THE NIGGERS OR US EITHER. (BNAC 120–1) She concluded her letter to the editor by advising him to read Frobenius (BNAC 121); ‘Frobenius’ having become a sign meaning something like ‘Afrocentricity’ in the St Elizabeths circle. ‘Frobenius’ will hip Afro-Americans to their real African heritage so they will leave white folks alone with theirs. Martinelli got Pound interested in the extravagant Aryanist theories of L. A. Waddell, an author she had encountered through her reading at Kasper’s bookshop. She would have read Waddell with excitement, given her lifelong identification with Isis and Egypt (BNAC 214–5): ‘i come out of egypt & return there’, she wrote to Bukowski, and claimed that it was ‘sheri at st. liz that got the hieroglyphics into the cantos’.20 Her letters to Pound are often decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphic animals and, as she told Bukowski, she saw herself as an avatar of Isis and other mythic deities – just as Pound portrays her in his poem (Figure 26.3). Insofar as she ‘was born OUTSIDE of CLASS . . . SEX . . . OR POLITICS. I SEE what I SEE. I AM as I AM.’21 Martinelli partakes of the androgynous spirit of the princess Ra-Set whose boat ‘moves with the sun’ of Cantos XCI, XCIV and XCVIII. Having absorbed Waddell, who believed that the so-called ‘dynastic race’ of ancient Egyptians were Aryan ‘Goths’, not Africans, there would be no racial complication here in Martinelli’s mind. Isis too is a white goddess, albeit of the air, not the sea – Isis is ‘my Lady of the Skye’, that is, heaven, as we see in Canto XCV (664).22 In the Aesopian mode of these cantos, Martinelli is Leucothea and Isis; she is also the supportive and inspiring ‘Sibylla’ of Canto XC, as well as ‘Isis Kuanon’ (XC/626), goddesses of resurrection, care and compassion; ‘Quan yin is one of the many names of my Goddess’, Sheri explained to Bukowski.23 Martinelli stands for a white-goddess complex in the poem; as muse, she is an embodiment of this goddess to Pound. Writing to him, ‘The Invisible moves me as wind doth ripple water. I act upon such bidding tho’ men call me reckless. My discretion is in the hands of my first ancestor who is now Goddess & Mother.’24

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Figure 26.3 Sheri Martinelli, Isis of the two Kingdoms. From La Martinelli (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1956).

Her compelling eyes, which are a typical feature of Martinelli’s paintings, also peer out of the cantos composed under her influence: ‘that your eyes come forth from their caves’ (XCI/ 630). Figuring himself as Francis Drake (who shared Pound’s redgold colouring), and Martinelli as Queen Elizabeth, ‘he saw it, / in the green deep of an eye: / Crystal waves weaving together’ (XCI/ 631). Mary de Rachewiltz has shown me Martinelli’s idealised self-portrait, featuring her magical magnetic eyes drawn in ball-point pen on the flyleaf of Pound’s copy of The Cantos that he used at St Elizabeths, inked that the poet could draw inspiration and encouragement from them as he worked. Martinelli gloried in her relationship with Pound and was prepared to live with the political consequences because she took her muse role seriously, and saw herself as his spiritual partner in making The Cantos. There is no question that she had a hand in them, sometimes even correcting his headlong notebooks into legibility. Pound’s letters to her, often written in instalments late at night, show they must have been in intense conversation about these poems, which are still constantly cited in Martinelli’s letters to Bukowski written years later. A letter that Martinelli dated ‘late 53 or early 54’ contains the first mention of Ra-Set: ‘As the oars move Ra-Set’.25 We encounter this synthetic divinity in the Martinelli–saturated Canto XCI (XCI/632) and it remains a motif through the late cantos (see XCIV/661, XCVIII/704). A blue-jay feather remains taped to this letter – a talisman and augury of the lines near the opening of Canto XCIV: ‘Blue jay, my blue jay / that she should take wing in the night’ (XCIV/653). Since blue jays are not nocturnal creatures, this must be a lover’s call.

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Pound found Martinelli’s mind quicker than others: after 9 years among people [in] whose minds NOTHING happens (and I do not mean patients, I mean visitors[ )] E.P. has COMFORT when a mind is full of fish and birds/ But imagine those whose minds merely WALK, trying to follow the dive and flight.26 Pound ‘translated’ Martinelli to bird, cat and fish, telling her: ‘a Martin is a bird – large-size swallow – it can have a diminutive but a uzeo can’t purr lightly oiseau – martin pescatore + of course she is plural one martinella wouldn’t cover all the space’.27 If auditors found Sheri’s conversation oracular and bewildering at times, it was also compelling, hypnotic, full of infinite promise: ‘Her voice was high pitched, soft’, Taylor recalls, and thin, rather childlike, and her words flowed evenly, almost endlessly, and without pause or juncture. She often ignored differentiation of pitch and tended to mark stress by sounding syllables separately. The effect was extraordinary; altogether unforgettable. Rather than incantatory, her piping speech was mesmerizing. (2000–1: 106) Moore too, loved her voice, and treasured their long phone calls as ‘the most enchanting conversations’ he had ever had (Moore 1998). This quality helps us understand what is behind Pound’s urgent letters scrawled after their meetings, his feeling that his existence is ‘suspended’ as though hanging on the faint reverberations of her enchanting voice. ‘AND natcherly, there is a whale of a lot to TALK about/ and it is the suspense / hung up till Fri/.’ He feels heightened, alive, awake with her: ‘Everybody else can go to sleep’, he complains, ‘they NEVER wake up anyGODAMhow Anyway, we cannot go to sleep/ if we do WHO sees?’28 What was their relationship exactly? According to Torrey Fuller, ‘by Martinelli’s own admission, she and Pound were lovers’ (quoted in Carpenter 1988: 802–3), and Moore, in a 2005 addendum to his better-known Gargoyle article, reprinted her remarkable ‘Homage to Grandpa’, which states baldly that Pound ‘could fuck better than any man and that includes men of many colors’ – so there it is. Martinelli stressed the ideas ‘he flows through a woman’s mind whilst he flows through her body’ (Martinelli [1961] 2005). Here, Pound and Martinelli are literally engaged in the poet–muse relation: ‘Beatific spirits welding together / as in one ash tree in Ygdrasail’ (XC/625). Martinelli told Bukowski about ‘“education” in the way gramps meant it . . . he had one hand on my breasts & one eye on me . . . & one hand on Ovid’s metamorph & one eye on th’ book & his mouth on mine . . . dear Educational Gramps’ (BNAC 54). His mouth on hers, his hand on Ovid; he almost physically transmitting his poetic knowledge to her; she physically offering aid and comfort and inspiration to him. Pound makes this oblique comment in a December 1954 letter: ‘Damn it ALL physical contact should be ART @ level of Flora Castalia. You know that.’ Love, even in a relationship as sexually charged as Pound’s and Martinelli’s was, aimed towards ecstasy, not orgasm, as Sheri tried to explain without success to Bukowski in a late letter (BNAC 352; see also EPP III 312–13).29

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Still, writing to Pound in the first pain and disappointment of his rejection of her, she reminded the poet she was Pound’s ‘paper-daughter’, that he had in a sense adopted her.30 Later, she would reassert herself as his Muse, disparaging the poems in Thrones inspired under the influence of ‘Texas’, Marcella Spann, because they ‘lacked the paradisal spirit’, complaining that Pound was being ‘smothered in breasty hens/ that AINT PARADISE and the THRONES shows it – face it Mon – you need your Paradisal Spirit back again’.31 In the myth logic of The Cantos wholesomely beautiful ‘Texas’ Spann should have featured as Nausikaa; as it is, she is linked, as Nausikaa is in The Odyssey, to Artemis (CXIII/809).32 For his part, Pound undertook to boost Martinelli. ‘I shall use best endevours to see that the damn buzzards black yr/boots’, he promised, ‘at any rate I will not lie down on THAT job’.33 In Moore’s words, Pound’s ‘letters of 1955 are full of exhortations to correspondents like Archibald MacLeish, and James Laughlin . . . to do something for Sheri: grants, foundation support, publication, museum showings, anything, but nothing came of his efforts’ (BNAC 17–18).34 Pound wrote to Robert MacGregor, an editor at New Directions: Nothing has been better painted than the ‘Patria’ head [by Martinelli] since 1527 in THAT kind of thing . . . Here is an amurikun wot has never been to yourop / and stuff can stand up against anything now done in YOUROP . . . this is an UNUSUAL talent. (L/JL 237, 238) (See Figure 26.4.) Norman Holmes Pearson was encouraged to buy her work and Pound got Vanni Scheiwiller to publish reproductions of Sheri’s paintings in La Martinelli, one of his miniature books in 1956, with an introduction by Pound himself (BNAC 18). And he did what he could by putting Martinelli and her paintings in the cantos (see XCIII/648, BNAC 18). In his rather incoherent introduction to La Martinelli, he links her to Giotto and an obscure sense of ‘occidental composition’ (Martinelli 1956: 7), which may have Aryanist resonances.35 Moore quotes a letter advising Sheri to ‘stay between Giotto and Botticelli’ (BNAC 17). The advice did draw Martinelli away from the abstract work she had been doing hitherto towards allegorical portraiture and mythological subjects. Her ‘simplicity of line’ has some of the naïvety a lover might associate with Giotto. Regardless, big-eyed, erotic sylphs – Martinelli’s dream of herself – peer out in pastel colours from her paintings and drawings, and, as mentioned, from Pound’s own copy of The Cantos.36 Lux Diafana and Ursula Bennedetta, praised along with the artist (‘Creatrix oro’; XCIII/648), are of this sort (and are reproduced in black and white in BNAC). Sheri was in the habit of drawing her own muse-eyes in closing letters to Pound. She was uninterested in painting the world as it appears; instead she painted what for her was the real world, the invisible, ‘anagogical’ world of poetic meaning and idealised essences. Her poetics might be summed up in the statement that tumbles down the page next to one of her sibylline self-portraits closing a letter to Pound of 12 December 1958: ‘it AINT/ WOT’S/ ON/ the paper/ it is/ WOT streams/ FROM/ it/ [/] the/ “message”/ as the Spades put it / [/] it EVOKES/ what in turn will/ re-NEW the same / [/] it is the OPPOSITE/ from/ the WORD’.37 This statement is useful for reading these cantos, too; it helps explain the positive aspect of Pound’s ‘Aesopian’ technique. In fact, Pound had written to Martinelli that ‘wot Ez is lookin for is the MEANING of the WHOLE picture wot comes OUT of the painter

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Figure 26.4 Sheri Martinelli, Patria. From La Martinelli (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1956). not what painter has copied or even mixed’.38 Seen this way, Aesopian language is not just a defensive screen, but a special way of sending a ‘message’. This is probably what Pound and Martinelli mean when they use the term ‘anagogic’, which occurs occasionally in Pound’s letters to her and later titled her Anagogic & Paideumic Review.39 The ‘anagogic’ is the fourth sense of reading according to Dante in Il Convivio, occurring when a text is spiritually expounded even though, or because, the literal sense already gives intimation of higher matters (see Adams 1971: 121); it is usually associated with Christian readings of the Old Testament, in which events of Jewish history are read as anagogical foreshadowings of the meaning of Christ.40 Pound was reading Dante’s Convivio in the summer of 1954 – the phrase Dante quotes from Aristotle, that man is a ‘compagnevole animale’ (‘companionable animal, friendly spirit’) is from the Convivio, and appears in Cantos XCIII and XCV (XCIII/ 646, XCV/663). Some sort of ‘message’ is meant to be streaming from the intense eyes that constitute Martinelli’s ‘signature’ in this and other letters. Martinelli is riffing on the passage from Richard St Victor that frames Canto XC: ‘Animus humanus amor non est, sed ab ipso amor procedit’ (‘The human soul is not love but love flows from it’; XC/625). Pound himself plays changes on the Latin at the end of the canto: ‘Not love but the love that flows from it’, ending the poem, ‘UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST’ (‘WHERE LOVE IS, THERE IS THE EYE’) (see Terrell 1993: 540, 541, 544), the phrase that Martinelli alludes to in her many drawings of her huge-eyed, hypnotic goddess-self. In March of 1958, just before his release, and perhaps because Dorothy Pound knew that would come soon, Martinelli was suddenly dismissed from Pound’s court and encouraged to go off to Mexico to paint, a trip that turned into a fiasco when a

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promised fellowship and place to stay failed to materialise.41 The poet was in these last months of captivity engaged deeply with Sheri’s rival, Marcella Spann, in the production of ‘the Spannthology’ (L/JL 259) Confucius to Cummings. In April, when she heard of his release, Martinelli wrote bitterly to Pound from Guadalajara about how meanly she was ‘repaid with ingratitude’ for her faithfulness to him: does it not grieve you a little that the day of your freedom comes and I am not there to share it . . . when I worked hard to keep your heart light . . . I beg of you do not ask me to return in any way . . . for I hold you in such contempt it would disease my soul to show you favor . . . break my mind’s clarity . . . pity. Trifling man twisty Breaker of word Liar and dishonorer it was for speaking truth you abandoned me. Can you recall your written words? Deny the paintings? They were builded with shining energy & clarity of vision. Truth. Then she added: ‘I was promised canto 99. If it has my drawing on or perhaps it hasn’t, I expect it by mail.’42 Martinelli blasted the ‘sneaky and silent Marcella’ who had stolen the poet’s love from her. On 6 May, Pound wrote her his final letter: Her Highness the Martinelli, That two commets [sic] cannot remain tied together, therefore go with the sea gods, be blessed, The myths are recurrent, you can refer to Leucothea, return to the seagods in the unplumbed depths ADITON THALLASES (possibly spelled wrong) of ocean. He signed it ‘B’ for ‘Bun’, his love-name (derived from Br’er Rabbit, BNAC 86), adding the Greek letters for Aditon Thallases in green pen with temenos, also in Greek, then closed; ‘the sacred an inviolable depths of the sea/ as Temenos for temples on terra firma’.43 Martinelli spoke to Pound from the depths of his unconscious life. When he had called her from those deeps in that onslaught of passionate letters in May and June of 1954, she had swum up – ‘that your eyes come to the surface / from the deep wherein they were sunken’ – an undine to share some time on the St Elizabeths rocks (XCI/630) and quicken their barrenness. In the spring of 1958, having served her purpose, having ‘elevated’ him into another, higher sphere (XCI/626–7), she was returned from whence she came.

A notorious article by a 17-year-old Dartmouth undergraduate, David Rattray, in The Nation, titled ‘A Week-End with Ezra Pound’ (Rattray 1957), showing the poet amongst his acolytes, including Sheri and her huge magnetic eyes ‘like a cat’ (ET 54), reached H.D. in Switzerland, when it was brought to her by her psychiatrist, Erich Heydt (ET 5). Encouraged by Heydt and Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D. began to write End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, published posthumously in 1979. Feeling an archetypal kinship with Martinelli, in whom she recognised herself, H.D. opened a correspondence with her that lasted till H.D.’s death. The elder poet called Sheri ‘Undine’, recognising her as a water-nymph and linking her, as Pound did, to Leucothea, the white goddess who came to Odysseus’ rescue, bringing him to the Phaeacian utopia. H.D.’s care and attention meant the world to Sheri, and encouraged

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her through dark times on the West Coast. After H.D.’s death, Sheri dedicated two issues of her mimeographed Anagogic and Paideumic Review to H.D. (May and June 1970); both exist among the Martinelli papers at the Beinecke. ‘H.D. is the perfect girl of the white race’, Martinelli begins – to the initiated, another avatar of the white goddess.

Notes Many thanks to Roxana Preda for her suggestions, editorial help and encouragement and to Mark Byron for running down references, while in the midst of other work at the Beinecke. 1. Quoted in Heymann ([1976] 1990: 226). 2. Readers interested in Martinelli depend on two valuable biographical essays, one by Stephen Moore (1998) and the other by Richard Taylor (2000–1). Moore’s essay was reprinted and supplemented with Martinelli’s invaluable addendum rescued from a 1961 issue of Light Year, ‘Homage to Grampa, in 2005: stevenmoore.info/martinelli/index/ shtml. Moore’s introduction to his edition of Martinelli’s correspondence with Charles Bukowski is another version. Published in 2001 under the repellent title Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960–1967 (BNAC) as one of Black Sparrow’s endless supply of Bukowski books, it is my major source here, along with Pound’s letters to her, which have finally been brought together at the Beinecke Library at Yale: YCAL MSS 868 (Box 12 / 17 folders). Otherwise, the letters from Martinelli to Pound are contained in two collections, YCAL MSS 43 (Box 33 / folders 1389–1393, from 1954) and YCAL MSS 53: Box 12, Folder 277, 1962–1963 (in fact, these letters begin in 1961, not 1962 as stated), and Folder 278 (1964–1969). These contain Martinelli’s letters to Pound after his removal to Italy. Presumably, they were in Olga Rudge’s possession and only got to Beinecke with her papers. There are no replies from the poet. Folder 277 has many clippings, only one marked by his red crayon, re mental illness in rural areas. Clippings include a big sports-page spread of 1962 World Series Giants vs. NYY, an obituary of William Carlos Williams, an article on Mosleyites being attacked during a march in the UK, an article on the curative powers of LSD, a traffic pile-up with Martinelli’s comment ‘this is USA today’, and a letter to editor about the civil rights movement as Communist conspiracy. 3. According to a John Kasper letter to Pound dated 26 April 1954, she had not seen Pound for almost two years (YCAL 43: 26/1126). 4. David Wang to Ezra Pound, 9 September [1957], YCAL 43: 54/2486. 5. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, June 1954, YCAL 868: 12/6 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Jul’. 6. Martinelli insisted to Pound that the pot was planted, the charges a frame-up (Moore 1998). 7. The sign, evidently written by Pound himself and displayed at ‘Make It New’, read: ‘POT SMOKERS who want to quit. Correct use of breathing exercises described in these books will give you ALL the remarkable sensations you can get from marijuana ANYWHERE! It won’t cost you a dollar a stick and won’t send you to the NEEDLE! It is not smart to use HEROIN. The reds have been using drugs as a POLITICAL weapon since 1927. Don’t be a Rooseveltian dupe’ (John Kasper to Ezra Pound, 7 July 1955, YCAL 43: 26/1131). 8. Sheri Martinelli to Charles Bukowski, 10 October 1960, BNAC 87. 9. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 1957, YCAL 868: 12/13 ‘Pound, Ezra 1956–1957’. 10. One thinks of William Carlos Williams’s contemporary ‘Asphodel: That Greeny Flower’ (1955) where he concludes that ‘men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there’ in the ‘despised’ form of poetry (1992: 318). 11. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 25 January 1958, YCAL 868: 12/15 ‘Pound, Ezra 1958.’ 12. John Kasper to Ezra Pound, 24 April 1954, YCAL 43: 26/1126. 13. John Kasper to Ezra Pound, 7 June 1954, YCAL 43: 26/1127.

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sheri martinelli: the white goddess 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

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Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 3 May 1960, YCAL 43: 33/1392. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 14 July 1954, YCAL 868: 12/6 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Jul’. Sheri Martinelli to Charles Bukowski, 28 December 1960, BNAC 131–2. These are Lux in Diafana’and Ursula Benedetta (XCIII/642). Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 10 June 1954, YCAL 868: 12/4 ‘Pound, Ezra June 1–10’. Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 12 December 1958, YCAL 43: 33/1391. Sheri Martinelli to Charles Bukowski, 19 April 1961, BNAC 215. The hieroglyphics leading off Canto XCIII came from Boris de Rachewiltz. Perhaps Martinelli means that she persuaded Pound that they should be put into the poem. Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 1 May 1957, YCAL 43: 33/1390. Sheri Martinelli to Charles Bukowski, 11 December 1960, BNAC 215. Sheri Martinelli to Charles Bukowski, 15 December 1960, BNAC 120. Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 11 February 1958, YCAL 43: 33/1391. Note in Martinelli’s hand attached to undated letter, YCAL 868: 12/1 ‘Pound, Ezra 1952–53’. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 3 July 1954, YCAL 868: 12/6 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Jul’. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 4 October 1954, YCAL 868: 12/9 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Oct’. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 14 July 1954, YCAL 868: 12/6 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Jul’. Martinelli’s ringing endorsement – he was ‘a stud’ – goes far to explain the strong feelings he elicited in women like Nancy Cunard, who knew Pound had rare gifts as a lover. See a long letter to Mary Rudge of 10 May 1958 in which Sheri Martinelli uses this phrase to describe herself: YCAL 868: 7/6 ‘Martinelli to Pound, Ezra 1957–1959’. Later, Martinelli would write to Ezra: ‘you are my paper father – you wrote it down yourself & as your paper daughter I will take arete upon Omar for his propaganda’ (20 October 1961, YCAL MSS 53: 12/277). Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 1 February 1960, YCAL 43 33/1391. Spann’s struggle with Martinelli for Pound’s attention became intensely competitive. David Wang wrote to the poet: ‘Keen observers will note that it is Marcella who’s jealous of Sheri, not Sheri of Marcella. Personally I recommend segregating Sheri from Marcella. I actually saw La Marcella buying a bottle of booze and giving it to Sheri. Not being able to prevent Sheri from drinking and actively helping her go on a binge are two completely different matters’ (David Wang to Ezra Pound, 9 September 1957, YCAL 43: 54/2486). Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, July 1954, YCAL 868: 12/6 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Jul’. Pound’s view to the contrary, judging from the few I’ve seen at Brunnenburg (perhaps secondary work) unglamourised by reproduction, Martinelli’s actual paintings can only be described as kitsch. But as Pound was in love with Sheri, he preferred to see her work in the pre-Raphaelite tradition (L/ORA 225). In September 1953 Kasper inquired of Pound ‘She, Sheri, wants to know what you mean by the “Giotto”? We both think you mean that very little painting on wood of “Madonna and Child”. As soon as we know we will have the proper frame made and put it on permanent exhibition in the shoppe’ (John Kasper to Ezra Pound, 27 September 1953, YCAL 43 26/1124). The cover and endpapers of David Moody’s first volume of his Pound biography, Ezra Pound: Poet, vol. I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (EPP I), feature Martinelli’s Zagreus in lively saffron colour. Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 12 December 1958, p. 4, YCAL 43: 33/1392. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 4 October 1954, YCAL 868: 12/9 ‘Pound, Ezra 1954 Oct’. The Anagogic & Paideumic Review was a mimeographed affair, of fifty copies each, started in 1959, and was for sale at City Lights Bookstore, publishing in it such poets as Bukowski, Bob Kaufman, Clarence Major, Charles Richardson and others. By 1960, Martinelli would announce to Bukowski that she was the ‘Queen of the Beats’ (BNAC 54). Copies are among the Martinelli papers at the Beinecke.

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40. Dante’s example is the people of Israel coming out of Egypt to Judaea, the land the Lord had promised. Anagogically, this intimates the soul’s progress from concerns with earthly matters to salvation in Christ. 41. ‘At Pound’s suggestion, José Vazquez-Amaral, another member of the Ezuversity who would eventually translate The Cantos into Spanish, had arranged for an art scholarship for Sheri in Jalisco. He also arranged for her and Gilbert to stay with a friend at his country house in Cuernavaca “in case the Jalisco scholarship fell through. It did”, Vazquez-Amaral later wrote. “After a while the fiery and imaginative Sheri was also unwelcome at the Cuernavaca place” ([Vasquez-Amaral 1970:] 20). The Mexican authorities expected someone who would paint pretty landscapes and glorify the republic, but Sheri was more interested in sketching beggar girls and exploring Aztec temples (ET 53). After about six months Sheri and Gilbert left Mexico for San Francisco’ (Moore 1998). 42. Sheri Martinelli to Ezra Pound, 4 October 1958, YCAL 43: 33/1391. She probably means Canto XCVIII, which begins under the sign of the boat of Ra-Set. Canto XCIX as published is a series of prescriptions in critical conversation with Carsun Chang’s Development of Neo-Confucian Thought vol. 1 (1957), which Pound had read in manuscript. See letter from Pound to Vittorio Vettori, 30 July 1957, in which he writes, ‘Carsun Chang’s history of Neo-Confucianism is promised for this month. [I] have already used it in Cantos, from typescript he lent me’ (YCAL 43: 54/2445). 43. Ezra Pound to Sheri Martinelli, 6 May 1958, YCAL 868: 12/15 ‘Pound, Ezra 1958’.

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27 Art ‘in the Solid’: Ezra Pound and Michael Lekakis Galateia Demetriou

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n 1950, James Laughlin edited and published ND: New Directions in Prose & Poetry 12, which concludes with photographs of seven sculptures by Michael Lekakis (1907–87), the sculptor with and for whose work Ezra Pound was to develop a strong affinity and admiration. According to Alec Marsh, that publication, comprising more than 400 pages and dedicated to the poet Kenneth Patchen, was the source of Pound’s acquaintance with the sculptor’s art (2015: 29). Lekakis was born in New York City, the son of Greek immigrants who left Greece in 1888. He attended Art History classes and worked in the family’s flower business, experimenting with the form and natural shape of wood and plants in a way that was to define his later art. He published poetry and took part in a number of exhibitions before reaching greater recognition in the 1940s. By the time he was included in the New Directions anthology, Lekakis had had three solo sculpture shows, beginning with one in 1941 at the Artists’ Gallery in New York. He was, moreover, already in correspondence with many poets and artists; Charles Olson, for instance, was interested in involving Lekakis in theatre productions at Black Mountain College and valued his ability to read Homer’s Greek (Olson 2000: 99–102). The pieces in the New Directions publication are entitled Bronze Figure (1947), Solar Dancer (bronze) (1948), Root Form (1949), Root Form: Conception (1949), Earth God (lignum vitae) (1946), Earth Goddess (red sandstone) (1946) and Sphinx (Philippine mahogany) (1949), and were powerful in igniting Pound’s love for Lekakis’s work (Lekakis 1950: 557–64). These pieces, at once reminiscent of the agility of Brâncuşi and the formal suggestiveness of Gaudier-Brzeska, seem to retain their humanity, reflected in their uneven, textured surfaces, and bring the decisiveness of geometry and the fluidity of organic form to the permanence of sculpture. Their flawed materiality, palpable in the imperfections of wood, metal and stone, spoke to Pound’s interest in sculpture itself as an art form and his ideas of a poet as sculptor: the chiselling away at the superfluous material to attain the hard edges necessary for poetic expression. Additionally, Lekakis stood as a symbol of unattainable ancient culture through his knowledge and understanding of the Greek language and metre. As he was of Greek origin, he acted as a source for Pound’s inquiries relating to Greece (Figures 27.1 and 27.2). Lekakis’s pieces also unite and balance the old and the new, using ancient tradition as their starting point and reflecting the contemporary post-war disillusionment with their rough surfaces and unevenly textured material. The specific selection in the

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Figure 27.1 Michael Lekakis, Root Form, 1949. Wood. From New Directions in Prose and Poetry 12, 1950.

Figure 27.2 Michael Lekakis. Earth God, 1946. Lignum vitae. From New Directions in Prose and Poetry 12, 1950. New Directions publication suggested a sculptural imagination spanning continents and millennia; in so doing, it offered its readers a unique series of spatial and temporal intersections in Lekakis’s work and development. This nearly transcendent quality must have felt familiar to Pound, whose work also programmatically integrated parameters of time and space. Pound had seen only photographs of Lekakis’s work and that was a fact of which he was entirely aware, as evidenced by a letter to the Canadian poet Louis Dudek, wherein Pound writes that he has ‘only seen fotos’ but ‘the real judgement ob skukkchoor requires seeing it in the solid’ (1974: 68). Despite that, Pound committed to Lekakis’s art and demanded that other friends and acquaintances visit the Greek sculptor’s studio and experience his art in person, as Pound was unable to do for himself. A telling example of Pound’s urgings can be found in a December 1951 letter from St Elizabeths to E. E. Cummings in which Pound asks: ‘HAV yu goddamittBEEN to look at Lekakis’ sculpture 57 W. 28th, jus’ roun’ deh Korner / phone

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MU 9–5391 and do yu kno Paul Sachs, an NIF not WHY not? and why aint he been took to Lekakis??’ (Pound and Cumnmings 1996: 312). The urgency of this question reveals the enthusiasm with which the poet responded and encouraged others to respond to Lekakis’s work. Pound also wrote to his devotee John Kasper and told him to contact Lekakis along with Dudek, who was, at the time, studying at Columbia. Kasper and Dudek met in the summer of 1950 and decided that one of their shared goals would be the promotion of Lekakis’s art (Marsh 2015: 29). Marsh comments, however, that the enthusiasm of that first meeting did not translate into immediate action. Furthermore, the correspondence between George Seferis and Zissimos Lorentzatos, two Greek poets and translators of Pound, testifies to the fervour with which Pound initially responded to Lekakis’s work. Specifically, Lorentzatos informed Seferis that Pound had written him to acquire information for ‘a very admirable sculptor’ who, Pound mentioned, inspired him to purchase sculpture for the first time after he had not been able to afford a Brâncuşi (Seferis and Lorentzatos 1990: 122–3). Even though the artist referred to in this letter is not named, a fact which led the two poets to wrongly assume that Pound, in the midst of some form of mental confusion, was seeking information about Gaudier-Brzeska, one can safely assume, based on the fact that Pound chose to write to two Greek poets, that the sculptor was Lekakis. Moreover, such an assumption is strengthened, if not unequivocally proven, by a letter to Lekakis by Dorothy Pound in which she uses the same wording to state that Pound ‘wanted’ the Lekakis sculpture. Pound himself was able to meet Lekakis on a number of occasions during the 1950s when the latter travelled to Washington, DC to visit the poet, and the two continued to correspond throughout Pound’s incarceration and following his release, when he returned to Europe. Their letters, currently unpublished and held in the Michael Lekakis Papers at the Archives of American Art and the Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Library, span this decade and stand witness to the respect the two men felt for each other. They also reflect what was perhaps a difference in idiosyncrasies, which did not, however, hinder their relationship: Pound’s notes are mostly typed, often undated and feel fragmentary, while Lekakis’s letters are neatly handwritten using capital letters throughout. Overall, they feature a rather formal, businesslike tone and focus mostly on practical arrangements. Often during the poet’s incarceration, Lekakis looked for updates about legal matters pertaining to Pound’s release and did not hesitate to comment on unfavourable news coverage. The main topics covered were Pound’s numerous suggestions about important professional contacts for the promotion of Lekakis’s art, cover designs for projected editions of the Analects and Women of Trachis, and the possibility of staging a charity performance in Greece of Pound’s translation of Sophocles. Throughout these discussions, it becomes clear that Lekakis had gained Pound’s trust. When giving Lekakis directions for the cover of the Analects, for example, Pound, using the third person as was common in his letters to personal correspondents like Dorothy Shakespear and Olga Rudge, wrote to the sculptor: LEK in TOTAL freedom to make cover for Analects expressing Lek’s feeling about the Analects’ and asserts ‘I CANT see how to get TWO words on cover WITH a good design / but LEK knows damsightmore about design and form than Ez/.

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He furthermore insisted that John Kasper, who was issuing his translations of the Analects for his Square $ series, would not interfere with Lekakis’s cover, allowing his virtù to shine through. Pound’s instructions to Lekakis were very specific: ‘the other details re/ Which Kasp/ is bothering, apply to TITLE page, NOT to cover display of LEKAKIS’ virtu’. The 1951 Square $ edition of the Analects does not acknowledge the designer of the cover, but the lettering used alongside the ideograms indeed points to Lekakis, echoing the minimalism of the sculptor’s handwritten letters to Pound and the sharpness of a Hellenistic or ‘hellenized’ (as Pound phrased it to Lekakis) alphabet. Pound’s insistence on promoting Lekakis is similarly made palpable concerning the book edition of Women of Trachis, the Sophocles tragedy that Pound had translated and published in the Hudson Review in 1954. Pound persistently asked him for sketches of Mount Olympus in Greece and even a road map ‘to cover Thessaly and Epirus’ because, as he informed him, he would ‘like to hook a few of ’em to the TRAXINIAI, in one way or another’. On 17 September 1953, possibly responding to and rejecting a suggestion to use a cover other than the one designed by Lekakis, Pound wrote to the sculptor: ‘I had “seen” it as a tail piece / hoping for some of Lekakis solar splendour as frontis – if so you deem’d.’ It is unclear whether Pound was envisioning a collaboration with Lekakis for the first publication of the translation, the book edition by New Directions that materialised in 1957 with a different cover or, possibly, a Greek publication of Pound’s translation (never finalised), mentioned by Lekakis in a letter dated 10 November 1953 (YCAL 43 29/1234). In addition, in keeping with the aforementioned tireless efforts to get Lekakis noticed, the unpublished letters supplement the information already available with requests of equal fervour. In his letters to Lekakis, the poet suggested ‘the Texas marigolds’ go to see his work and provided him with Marcella Spann’s New York City address so he would, presumably, be able to extend an invitation to her. There is no evidence in the correspondence as to whether or not Lekakis contacted Spann in that instance. When the poet Harold Norse invited Pound to take part in an anthology he was working on, Pound found another opportunity to express his admiration for Lekakis’s work and to reaffirm his enthusiasm for his art. He wrote to Lekakis: Having no intention of submitting ANY poEM of his to chance EYElustrator, has been waiting return of Lek/ fer to ascertain IF Lek/ has any drawing which wd/ go in company with any passage of E.P. and which cd/ be etched, or whatsodam process Norse is using/ AND on the margin of which EP cd/ then scribble a few lines/ sech fer EZampl as: What gain with Odysseus. Pound here is referencing the following lines from Canto XX: ‘What gain with Odysseus, ‘They that died in the whirlpool ‘And after many vain labours, ‘Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowingbench, ‘That he should have a great fame ‘And lie by night with the goddess? ‘Their names are not written in bronze ‘Nor their rowing sticks set with Elpenor’s;

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‘Nor have they mound by sea-bord. ‘That saw never the olives under Spartha ‘With the leaves green and then not green, ‘The click of light in their branches; ‘That saw not the bronze hall nor the ingle ‘Nor lay there with the queen’s waiting maids, ‘Nor had they Circe to couch-mate, Circe Titania, ‘Nor had they meats of Kalüpso ‘Or her silk skirts brushing their thighs. ‘Give! What were they given? Ear-wax. ‘Poison and ear-wax, and a salt grave by the bull-field, ‘neson amumona, their heads like sea crows in the foam, ‘Black splotches, sea-weed under lightning; ‘Canned beef of Apollo, ten cans for a boat load.’ Ligur’ aoide. (XX/93–4) It is worth noting that again on this occasion Pound approached Lekakis as a direct path to Greek culture and chose to collaborate with him on an excerpt that draws from Homer’s Odyssey and would be suitably illustrated by a Greek artist sensitive to the deeper nuances of the poem’s allusions. Pound continued to demonstrate his appreciation directly when writing: ‘Mebbe N/ has already done his portfolio / mebbe Lek/ dont wanna be seen in such company as gorNOZooo whom Norse has KOlektd. anyhow/ EP saw a chance to affirm his esteem of Lek whether private or pubk.’ As ever, one notices Pound’s deep affection for and belief in Lekakis’s work, to which, it seems, the poet wished to add his lines as a collaboration of equals, rather than merely use them as illustration. Alongside these specific book projects, Pound was keen on involving Lekakis in a revival of Greek and Latin because, as he wrote him, ‘How the HELL yu CreeeKKKZ eggspect revival of classiKKK studies if nobody tells nobuddy nuffink??’ Pound repeatedly encouraged Lekakis to take action ‘instead of pickin’ dasies [sic]’ and ‘step on the gas’, which meant translating and publishing important Greek literary works. Pound also turned to Lekakis to inquire if he knew ‘of ANY buddy with guts who is interested in revival of greek and latin studies’. Lekakis offered to act as a mediator between Pound and Theodore Scourles, a Greek poet and scholar living in New York City at the time. Not only did Lekakis suggest Scourles be appointed as head of a projected committee for the regeneration of classical studies, but he also offered to bring him to St Elizabeths so that Scourles could discuss getting more translations of Pound’s work into Greek, further establishing his role as a promoter of Pound’s work rather than simply a sculptor flattered by the poet’s enthusiasm (YCAL 43 29/1234, 1952–3). Meanwhile, Pound was continuing with his personal study of Greek and on numerous occasions turned to Lekakis for bibliographic information, especially concerning editions of philosophers and historians of the Byzantine era, such as Michael Psellos. He also sought Lekakis’s opinion on his translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis; the sculptor responded with deeply complimentary comments. Specifically, in an

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undated letter probably from the early 1950s, Lekakis mentioned he found it to be ‘the best translation’ of a Greek play in English and continued with his praise, stating that ‘it has a life of its own, powerfully projected, the choruses work with the dialogue’. However complimentary his first impressions were, Lekakis refrained from offering Pound a more detailed analysis because, as he indicated, he would like to read the translation more slowly, ‘to contrast it with the original’ (YCAL 43 29/1234). Even though a response on Pound’s part has not made it into either Pound’s correspondence folder at the Beinecke or Lekakis’s at the Archives of American Art, Lekakis clearly positioned himself as an equal interlocutor, strengthening the special bond at the foundation of their exchange. Frustrated with the art world’s fascination with artists after their death, Pound acted as a mediator for Lekakis’s commissions and consistently encouraged him to write to museums and emphasise that he was the ‘ONLY’ sculptor whose work Pound had purchased since Gaudier-Brzeska – though he again repeated he had wanted but could not afford a Brâncuşi. ‘Skupptoors mus’ eat’, he wrote to Lekakis in a note suggesting another ‘suitable acquaintance’. Indeed, while in Washington, Pound purchased a little head by Lekakis that Kasper delivered, as confirmed in the aforementioned letter in which Dorothy affirmed Pound’s wish to own a piece by the Greek sculptor. It is unclear from their exchange whether it was a drawing or a sculpture, but she and Pound seemed quite pleased with it. ‘The Head is beautiful’, she wrote. Other correspondence further reveals that after his release, Pound sought to acquire a Lekakis drawing as soon as such an action was practically feasible. Ultimately, then, what started as an introduction to a new sculptor in the pages of the New Directions anthology became for Pound the unearthing of a sculptural genius whom he held in the same regard as his other favourite sculptors, if not altogether favourite artists, Gaudier-Brzeska and Brâncuşi. This initial acquaintance led Pound to seek out, correspond with and fiercely promote the sculptor in what became a substantial artistic exchange that culminated in Pound’s ability to finally see Lekakis’s work ‘in the solid’.

Note All quotations in this chapter are from the Michael Lekakis Papers, 1940–1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Reels 3090–1, unless otherwise stated.

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28 A ‘Transference of Power’: Ezra Pound and the Cinema of Hollis Frampton Daniel Hackbarth

I held for a time a similar hope that Pound might learn enough Greek to give us an Odyssey. He won’t. He has done something far more difficult: prepared the English language for an Odyssey. Stravinsky has prepared a musical language of a similar tensile resiliency. (Hollis Frampton in Andre and Frampton 1980: 47)

W

hen Hollis Frampton wrote the above words on 18 November 1962, sharing a typewriter with the sculptor Carl Andre as the two conducted a leisurely dialogue ‘On Music and Consecutive Matters’, neither of the young artists had yet produced the bodies of work for which they are now well known. Not until 1969 would Andre create any of the low-lying, metal ‘floor pieces’ that have become both mainstays of contemporary museum collections and icons of Minimalist art. And though Frampton completed his first motion picture within a few weeks of this dialogue, his earliest films were all lost before they could figure in his critical reception.1 In 1962, Frampton was primarily a still photographer, a chapter of his career that had itself been delayed by his devotion to poetry, especially that of Ezra Pound. As film critics and historians routinely note in passing, Frampton never completely shed Pound’s influence. To the contrary, when he characterised Pound’s accomplishment as one of preparing the English language to support a yet unwritten epic, Frampton foreshadowed his own parallel experiments in the language of film. This response to Pound’s poetry, in which the filmmaker tested its tenets within the cinematic medium, provided significant impetus for Frampton’s celebrated and highly varied body of work, notable for its playfully rigorous investigation of both the materiality of film and the conventions of cinematic language. That Frampton typically sustains such self-referential exercises for the entirety of a film has led to his persistent classification (despite his own protestation) as a ‘structural’ filmmaker in whose work ‘the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film’ (Sitney 2000: 327). 2 As Frampton’s motion pictures meaningfully intersected with several pivotal art movements, including not only structural film but also Minimalism and early digital experimentation, his relationship with Pound offers compelling evidence of the poet’s significance to post-war visual art. Transcribed into a late twentieth-century media environment, this influence often took unexpected forms. As is well known among those familiar with Frampton, his connection with Pound went far beyond that of a casual reader. Before he withdrew from Case Western

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Reserve University in 1957, Frampton struck up a correspondence with the poet and moved to Washington, DC, where Pound resided as an internee at St Elizabeths Hospital. Frampton had initially relocated to conduct research at the Library of Congress for his translation of Leo Frobenius’s Erlebte Erdteile, a project he had taken up at Pound’s suggestion. However, the dim prospects for publication of this translation soon led Frampton to abandon it, at which point near-daily visits to St Elizabeths became the focus of his DC residency. Arriving after Pound had completed Section: Rock-Drill and recently begun Thrones de los Contares 96–109, Frampton joined the coterie of Pound’s disciples at a particularly fortuitous moment. In the course of his visits, Frampton recalled, ‘Pound undertook to read aloud and to footnote live or to make oral scholia on the entirety of The Cantos – the whole shooting match.’ Concurrent with this ‘most meaningful exposition of the poetic process’, Frampton remembers, ‘I came to understand that I was not a poet’ (Frampton 2009: 183). As the numerous references to Pound throughout the 1962–3 dialogues suggest, the poet’s legacy continued to exert a significant pull upon Frampton long after the latter left the immediate orbit of the former. This influence is most notable in Frampton’s cinematic exploration of the ‘tensile resiliency’ he professed to admire in Pound’s writing. Frampton’s unusual turn of phrase acknowledges a critical tension between the individual word or image and the durational totality of a poem or film, a condition that led both figures to investigate how the discrete signifier might be both rigorously defined in itself and meaningfully engaged in the temporal character of a work. In his theoretical writings and poetry, Pound presents several solutions to this problem, including the telegraphic concision of his Imagist poems, his conception of the ‘vortex’ as a spatial configuration of signifiers, the compression of complex ideas within individual ideogrammic signs, and the overall fragmentation of his Cantos. Frampton’s films similarly explore the radical reconfiguration of signifiers and the compression and distension of meaning within a work. However, this kinship is often difficult to discern, for while Pound attempted to energise the otherwise static signifier to create a form of direct presentation, Frampton more often does the opposite. Rather than allowing his audiences to enjoy the dynamic illusion that the cinema so effortlessly conjures, his work instead breaks the smoothly flowing stream of sound and image into discrete signifiers, forcing us to grapple directly with flat pictures, disconnected words and the materiality of the cinematic apparatus itself. As a result, even as his films subvert core principles of modernist poetry, Frampton’s reception of Pound evinces a deep fidelity to the legacy of his former mentor.3 Frampton often mentioned Pound in interviews and in his published essays, and film historians often dutifully reference the former’s pilgrimage to St Elizabeths, occasionally venturing to speculate, in general terms, on the impact of this encounter. Yet these observations typically remain undeveloped asides within arguments that otherwise concentrate solely upon the filmmaker’s work. To date, the scholarship lacks a focused study of Pound’s impact upon Frampton like those that have been written about the poet’s influence upon the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage (Elder 1998). Since a very different sensibility guided Brakhage’s filmmaking – invested, as it was, in grandiose mythological themes; a primitive, childlike visual aesthetic; and a hypnagogic viewing experience – the conclusions of these scholars are seldom transferable to Frampton. Typical within the existing remarks on the Pound–Frampton relationship is Simon Field’s insight that Pound’s notion of the vortex inspired the

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visual density of certain still photographs by Frampton, as well as Christopher Phillips’s similar observation concerning his preference, throughout his work, for forms of direct presentation (Field 1972: 26; Phillips 1985: 68). The film theorist and critic Noël Carroll has made the more expansive claim that Pound’s interest in the literary canon inspired Frampton’s own engagement with issues of history, a topic of central importance to the closing section of this chapter (Carroll 1996: 313–17). More recently, Federico Windhausen has traced the genealogy of Frampton’s all-important understanding of film as a device for epistemological inquiry to the stimulating Pound scholarship that Hugh Kenner published between 1962 and 1971 (Windhausen 2004). Windhausen’s essay further serves as a welcome reminder that genealogical connections form through a complex network of mediations, even when members of successive generations had the opportunity to meet face to face. This chapter approaches the topic of Pound’s influence upon Frampton through an extended analysis of the latter’s acclaimed 1970 film Zorns Lemma before offering a brief account of his unfinished film cycle Magellan, a work that echoes the immense scale and ambition of the Cantos. Throughout the course of this chapter, the two artists’ theoretical and critical writings serve as essential points of reference, highlighting the re-emergence of Poundian tropes in often surprising forms. I trace these transformations to two main factors, the first of which concerns the differences separating the mediums of film and the written word. As I argue, Frampton understood the cinema as Poundian by default – that is, as inherently energised, concrete, ‘hard’ and presentational in its character. However, content neither to freely experiment with these qualities nor to summarily distance himself from Pound, Frampton instead wove a startling number of references to the poet throughout his films and theoretical writings. He thereby established a great deal of his output as a searching commentary on and critique of Pound’s legacy. The second factor concerns Frampton’s relationship to the modernist tradition. As his films amply demonstrate, Frampton was acutely aware that he belonged to a transitional generation of artists that was unable to fully distance itself from modernism, even as it bore witness to the increasing obsolescence of that paradigm. From within this milieu, Frampton developed his knowingly revisionist practice of ‘metahistory’, in which he elaborated upon the project of abridging the poetic canon that Pound set forth in works such as his ABC of Reading. The result is a playful subversion of the poet’s relationship to history, in which recreation and even fabulation represent valid refinements of the record. In aspects of Frampton’s work such as this knowing upending of Pound’s ideals, we witness the filmmaker most thoroughly working through the poet’s legacy and, thus, at his most Poundian.

Elementary Education Over the course of its hour-long duration, Frampton’s 1970 film Zorns Lemma thoroughly dismantles some of the cinema’s fundamental conventions. Portions of the film alternatingly plunge the audience into darkness and strand it in utter silence, sacrificing the melopoeia and phanopoeia found throughout conventional films in favour of a rarefied form of logopoeia sustained by the metronomic rhythm of spoken and written words. When there are images to be seen, the film’s visual language oscillates between the extremes of a bewilderingly rapid montage and a patience-testing long take. Meanwhile, its intermittent soundtrack, consisting entirely of voices reciting centuries-old

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texts, is likewise deeply challenging, requiring audiences to consider these passages both within their unstated historical contexts and, more immediately, in terms of the associative meanings they engender in the course of the film. However, Zorns Lemma does not merely demolish the audience’s expectations but also constructs in their place a complexly imagined and assiduously executed new cinematic system. Narrative is one part of this scheme, though in the absence of any conventional protagonist, it appears in surprising – and surprisingly numerous – forms.4 As the film progresses through sections devoted to spoken words, still images and, finally, motion pictures, it recapitulates Frampton’s artistic trajectory from poet to photographer to filmmaker. Concurrently, it traces the emergence of familiar cinematic forms, from the completely black screen of its opening minutes, to fragmented motion picture footage, and finally to its depiction of human bodies in motion. While critics and historians have thoroughly dealt with these dimensions of Zorns Lemma, its central theme of education and didacticism only fully unfolds in dialogue with the work of Pound. During the film’s opening minutes, the audience hears the voice of a woman reading a series of twenty-four rhymes, each of which exemplifies one letter of the Roman alphabet, such that ‘In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all’ and ‘Zaccheus, he / Did climb the Tree / His Lord to see’. Frampton appropriated these verses from the first school text intended expressly for use in the American colonies, initially published in the late seventeenth century as the New England Primer.5 With this history in mind, the voiceover addresses both the indoctrination of young pupils into a regime of language founded upon rote learning and the development of a national consciousness based in Puritan ideology. Indeed, Zorns Lemma is no exception to the film critic and historian P. Adams Sitney’s thesis that all Poundians conduct ‘an archaeology of origins’, even if its search for this source cuts across the grain of Pound’s thought (Sitney 2015: 150). Frampton eschewed the grand narratives originating in classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance that were Pound’s favourite points of reference to instead highlight a younger and less monumental origin story. By giving us occasion to recall the dullest aspects of our own education, Frampton suggests that history burdens us as much as it productively grounds us. In order to establish a viable path forward, he posits, each individual must construct a historical allegory to legitimise their own creative project. After the final rhyme draws to a close, the screen flashes to life for the first time, displaying, in surprisingly rapid succession, the twenty-four letters of the abbreviated alphabet.6 This interlude sets the brisk tempo of the film’s long, montage-based second section, in which each image occupies roughly twenty-four frames of film or one second of screen time, representing the standard ‘frame rate’ sustaining the illusion of motion.7 Each isolating a single word, the majority of these images depicts a piece of Manhattan signage, though a number shows still lifes, collages and other studio constructions displaying a printed word (Figures 28.1–28.4). After several cycles through the alphabet, the pattern seems to break, as a one-second shot of a roaring fire appears where one expects to see the letter x represented. In subsequent cycles, a continuation of that footage appears in the same alphabetical position, where it is joined by other such ‘replacements’: rolling ocean surf in place of the letter z, plumes of steam instead of q, undulating cattails for y and, once this representation of the four elements has been introduced, a selection of footage that in most instances wryly references aspects of the cinema. Examples include footage of a house-painter rolling paint onto

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Figures 28.1–28.4 Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma, 1970. 16mm film stills. 60 minutes, colour, sound. Anthology Film Archives, New York. © Estate of Hollis Frampton. an interior wall (a reference to the flatness of the image), the manufacture of starshaped cookies (the Hollywood ‘star’ system), and a meat grinder at work (the cranking of a film projector or camera)8 (Figures 28.5–28.8). The viewer thereby experiences a sense of increasing continuity as the overwhelmingly numerous word-images gradually cede to a limited selection of these actions until the latter occupy, in the final cycle, all twenty-four positions. While none of the replacement images recalls the letters they have supplanted, we find ourselves nonetheless dutifully attempting to recount these letters as their substitutes appear. Following these remarkable forty-six minutes of film, one is left with the palpable sense of having undergone an intensive lesson in an alternate alphabet – or an alternative verbal thinking – temporarily overwriting one’s previous education. The overtly didactic character of Zorns Lemma echoes a quality that Frampton admired in the most ambitious modernist works: that they carry out ‘a process of training the spectator to watch the film. The work teaches the spectator to read the work’ (MacDonald 1988: 65). Similarly, Frampton regarded the modernist canon as a training ground for a new generation of artists and writers. According to his interpretation of Pound’s essay How to Read, ‘one learns to write mainly by reading those texts that embody “invention”, a quality that itself results from “direct insight into

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Figures 28.5–28.8 Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma, 1970. 16mm film stills. 60 minutes, colour, sound. Anthology Film Archives, New York. © Estate of Hollis Frampton. the dynamics of the creative process itself”’ (Frampton 2009: 149). Such originality, Frampton continues, is possible only when one identifies the principles tacitly governing the work of one’s predecessors, then succeeds in ‘the excernment, castigation and transvaluation of that axiomatic substructure’ (Frampton 2009: 150). However, rather than simply continuing a tradition of identifying, transgressing and rewriting rules, Zorns Lemma represents this pattern directly. Through this form of ironic over-identification, Frampton both acknowledges his debt to the modern tradition and distances himself from it. The third and final section of Zorns Lemma expands upon the theme of didacticism presented in the previous two to comment on the nature of knowledge itself. Immediately following the first and only cycle of images without word-pictures, the viewer suddenly leaves the fragmented environment of one-second shots and arrives upon the stable visual ground of a snow-covered field. There we observe three figures as they casually traverse its extent (Figure 28.9). Matching the audible click of a metronome set to the sixty-beats-per-minute tempo of the previous section, four female voices alternate words as they recite a text ‘On Light, or the Ingression of Forms’ by Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) as Frampton translated it from the Latin (Frampton 2009: 194–5).9 Though he served as Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 until 1253, Grosseteste’s

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Figures 28.9 Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma, 1970. 16mm film stills. 60 minutes, colour, sound. Anthology Film Archives, New York. © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

thought was not limited to Christian theology, but also drifted into Neoplatonist philosophy, a tradition with which Pound had a noted affinity.10 As Peter Liebregts has remarked, the poet considered De Luce (‘On Light’) important enough to reference in his Guide to Kulchur. Moreover, Grosseteste’s writings play a particularly significant though somewhat indirect role in Canto XXXVI (GK 77; Liebregts 2004: 214–18). By having the chorus intone Grosseteste’s assertion that ‘Form is Light itself, and light is also the origin of the four elements’, Frampton retroactively establishes yet another narrative with his film. This arc begins with the fragmentation of the alphabet enunciated in the first section and depicted in the second, resolving in ‘the place of unity’ Grosseteste identified with light (Frampton 2009: 194–5). Along precisely these lines, in the film’s closing seconds the scene fades to a white screen, reflecting the unadulterated light of the projection beam. Nonetheless, as will become clear in the course of this chapter, Frampton’s reference to Pound by way of Grosseteste ultimately serves as an ironic critique of the poet’s reference to light ‘as an image to depict man’s awareness of the permanent, a literal flash of insight’ (Liebregts 2004: 108). For neither Frampton’s understanding of the cinematic medium nor his worldview more generally accommodated the trope of enlightenment as Pound subscribed to it. The film’s title, Zorns Lemma, provides a terse rejoinder to such notions of revelation. Frampton invokes this theorem, put forward by the mathematician Max Zorn in 1935, in order to highlight the multiple, overlapping categories into which we might arrange the elements of his film, ranging from the obvious (words, images) to the arbitrary (‘all shots containing the color red’; Frampton 2009: 195). With its goal of

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apprehending order and disorder – even recognising the inevitability of the latter – Frampton’s invocation of set theory counters the very presumption that the universe is organised according to a clear hierarchical arrangement, the logic of which might dawn upon us suddenly. For Frampton, the certitudes and stochastic uncertainties of mathematics made the parameters of the cinematic medium a more certain point of reference than either received historical conventions or the whims of a particular author. Accordingly, while a great deal of humour and invention is evident within the individual one-second shots displayed in the course of Zorns Lemma, this element of subjectivity remains strictly subordinate to the set formula of the film’s overarching structure.

Word and Image My own reading of the 45-minute central section of Zorns Lemma, in which the image that is statistically before one passes gradually from a language-dominated one to a continuous non-language-dominated one, is a kind of allegory, an acting out of a transference of power from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. Of course, that was nowhere within my thinking of the film when I was making it. (Hollis Frampton quoted in MacDonald 1988: 59) In placing the entirety of Zorns Lemma under the sign of set theory, Frampton highlights a peculiarity of the film’s structure. Rather than presenting words and images as belonging to an organic whole, Zorns Lemma instead enumerates these elements as the otherwise disconnected constituents of a collection Frampton assembled while perusing obscure historical texts and roaming Manhattan with his camera. Looking beyond the forms of narrative continuity that have preoccupied most commentators, the film more fundamentally presents a catalogue of word–image relationships. The audience first hears words uttered in the conspicuous absence of images, then sees the former inset within the latter. One by one, motion pictures recording actions and processes overtake the abecedarian structure until, finally, a single long take unfolds alongside, but with notable freedom from, a recited text. However, what never once emerges is a directly motivated connection between word and image, such as the description of a picture, the illustration of a text, or a diegetic voice originating in a depicted space. In the unusual absence of such obvious correspondences, Zorns Lemma deals almost solely in arbitrary combinations of pictures and words.11 If, as is often remarked, Frampton’s films are unusually invested in language,12 the inverse is true of Pound’s poetry, which he often based on explicitly visual models. However, whereas Frampton focused primarily upon the arbitrary juxtaposition of word and image, Pound sought in the image a means of investing language with both power and purpose. The most commonly referenced accounts of Pound’s project – his self-described efforts to ‘energize’ and ‘concretize’ language, producing what he most tellingly characterised as a mode of ‘presentation’ rather than representation – all speak to his effort to break through the arbitrary relationships of signification first systematically described by Ferdinand de Saussure, to instead recover direct and reliable connections between language and its referents (Saussure 2006). One way in which Pound endeavoured to strengthen this link was by manipulating the reader’s temporal experience through novel configurations of word and image.

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Take, for instance, Pound’s well-known account of composing his Metro poem, part of his most widely referenced description of his Imagist aesthetic. Struggling to find a means of describing the tableau of faces he encountered upon a train platform, Pound ‘found, suddenly, the expression’ in ‘a language of color’, which he eventually rendered in a poem of just two lines: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough’.13 Though the poem’s remarkable brevity helps to convey the author’s sense of astonishment, it is not alone responsible for that effect. As Kenner argues, the hokku, a clear model for the final version of the Metro poem, depends upon a ‘reversal of the situation’ providing ‘perspective by incongruity’ (Kenner [1951] 1985: 62). This startling disjuncture emerges between the Metro poem’s two lines, as it shifts, suddenly, into metaphor, creating a juxtaposition that the reader recognises in a flash. Elsewhere in his Vorticist writings, Pound describes a form of writing that, rather than short-circuiting the temporality of language, instead compounds it. Rejecting the conventional linearity of text, Pound characterised the figure of the ‘vortex’ as ‘the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not SPENT itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing’ (B1 153). By spatialising the text, conceiving of it as a figure comprising numerous vectors, the vortex activates its reader in assembling the potential ‘expressions’ arrayed across its topography. Pound thereby exploits the dual temporalities of the image, which both presents itself at once in its entirety and provides the opportunity for an open-ended process of reflection. Similarly, his ideogrammic method grew from a largely erroneous understanding of the Chinese character as a form of ‘shorthand picture’ depicting ‘actions or processes’ and thus partaking directly in the ongoing dynamism of nature (CWCMP 53). In seeking to reclaim the autonomous power of the word, Pound looked to the ways in which, rather than indirectly representing a referent, language might instead bring an action or process to bear directly upon the text. Throughout these phases of his career, Pound conceptualised his poetry as a spatial configuration of discrete signifiers. While scholars have come to terms with such fragmentation as a structural principle within the Cantos, the significance of montagebased operations to his earlier work has been less appreciated (Preda 2001: 117–38). However, writing in 1914, the poet described his Imagism as functioning through a ‘super-position’ of ‘one idea set on top of another’, that is, as comprising otherwise discrete concepts that have been mounted together (EPVA 205). Furthermore, like Fenollosa, Pound understood the ideogram as a composite picture formed through the amalgamation of shorthand ‘radicals’. But before the monteur can join together such disparate fragments, those parts must first be pared from their original contexts. This activity of cutting likewise figures large in the theoretical underpinnings of Pound’s poetry. As Fenollosa wrote, Western languages are themselves based upon elements extracted from the natural order. ‘A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature’, he wrote. ‘Things are only the terminal points or rather the meeting points, or actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots’ (CWCMP 46). If nature is a motion picture, he implies, Western languages present us with stills that we might (if only with great difficulty) reanimate poetically. This rhetoric of cutting carries a more positive connotation in the writings of both Pound and Frampton. In his ‘Treatise on Meter’, for example, Pound asserts that ‘Rhythm is a form cut into TIME, as a design is determined SPACE’, valorising, as he often did, the musical qualities of poetry

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(ABCR 198). Understood in this way, the cadence of a text directly hews the temporal substrate of our experience, creating a form of presence anterior to all signification. Frampton would attribute similar priority to the act of cutting when analysing the ‘camera arts’ practised by both still and motion-picture photographers: The photographer’s whole art may be seen as a cutting process. The frame is a fourfold cut in projective space. The selection of a contrast curve of a given slope and shape, and the mapping of bright and dark zones on that curve, are clearly operations that cut the intended from the possible. (Frampton [1965] 2009: 8) While we are quite accustomed to describing a photograph as an image ‘taken’ from the world, Frampton enriches this understanding of photography by characterising it exclusively as a process of delimitation in which the photographer demarcates the image’s expanse and delineates the range of values it registers. Cinematic montage, moreover, consists solely of cuts, which Frampton understood as both ‘the deliberate act of articulation’ and the ‘dimensionless entity’ that transforms the source material in joining and juxtaposing its parts (Frampton 2009: 21, 196). Owing to the pervasiveness of such operations of cutting within the cinema, Frampton could take many qualities that Pound strove to achieve in written language – a directness, a hardness, a form of objective presence – as the very point of departure for his films. Though Frampton had at his disposal a particularly powerful means of objectively capturing the world and of directly shaping the experience of his audience, he flatly rejected Pound’s attempt to recover a heroic potency for art. Instead, Frampton undertook a critical revaluation of Pound’s techniques, overturning the very premise of linguistic purity upon which they were based. Rather than allowing one to jumpstart the inherent powers of language or excavate its primitive essence, Frampton’s word– image hybrids point to an inescapable condition of mutual reference. ‘The system of words’, Frampton explains, ‘cannot state the conditions of its own completion, since it remains unable to define the terms of a metalanguage to describe its own limits’ (Frampton 1983: 9). Writing and picture each ‘resolves, at last, into an orderly collection of impressions, bearable or useful only to the extent that its degree of inexactitude is known . . . and forgiven’ (Frampton 1983: 11). As opposed to the confidence in the power of language that Pound expresses, Frampton dwells upon and aestheticises the limitations that constrain both it and its twin, the image.

A Better Seismography All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transference of power. This type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. (CWCMP 47) In order to meaningfully engage with the world, Fenollosa asserts, language must reflect the continuous processes that define the natural world. Mere description of this activity is insufficient: an expression must instead tap directly into those energies that it purports to represent, emulating the elemental montage that binds ecological forces

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to the earth. Pound also understood language and the arts as interacting with forms of energy anterior to human activity, such that ‘An organization of forms expresses a confluence of forces’ (EPVA 7). Scattered throughout his Vorticist writings is a wealth of vivid imagery articulating his belief that the artist functions as a conduit for energy.14 While these images function metaphorically they also signal Pound’s underlying belief that sublime immaterial forces literally coursed through the artist’s person, as well as through his or her creations. To him, the ‘new form’ of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Vorticist sculpture was ‘energy cut into stone’, activating ‘its fit and particular manner’ to express forces beyond its formerly inert mass (EPVA 22). Elsewhere he likens the artist to a magnet surrounded by a field that ‘can bring order and vitality and thence beauty to a plate of iron filings’ (EPVA 7). Like Fenollosa in the preceding quotation, Pound also gravitated towards geophysical metaphors when describing the magnitude of the energetic forces that the artist must channel: The good artist is perhaps a good seismograph, but the difference between man and a machine is that man can in some degree ‘start his machinery going’. He can, within limits, not only record but create. At least he can move as a force; he can produce ‘order-giving vibrations’; by which one may mean merely, he can departmentalize such part of his life force as follows through him. (EPEW 295) Thus understood, the artist condenses and controls energies from the environment through his or her work. ‘The best artist’, Pound explains, is the heroic individual ‘whose machinery can stand the highest voltage’ (EPEW 295). Like Pound, Frampton built a body of work around the activity of measuring and sampling the energetic charge within the surrounding world. And in a manner similar to Pound’s condensation of the poetic canon in How to Read and ABC of Reading, and his citational practice in the Cantos, Frampton recapitulated select moments from the history of the cinema in films like Gloria! (1979), with its extended passages taken directly from early silent films. However, whereas Pound struggled against linguistic convention to charge his poetry with energy, Frampton proceeded from the assumption that the cinema is inherently energetic. ‘The photographic machine’, he wrote, ‘is a device for accumulating energy’, its aforementioned function as a ‘cutting’ tool serving to delimit segments and aspects of the energetic environment (Frampton 2009: 44). By discounting Pound’s faith in the productive potential of the artist – that is, his or her ability to autonomously create ‘order-giving vibrations’ – Frampton arrives at a theory and practice of art-making that is thoroughly invested in the activities of charting, tracing and sampling, and therefore rigorously ‘seismographical’ in character. Zorns Lemma builds upon this understanding of the photograph as an image of energy by exploring the relationship between the accumulation of light within the camera and its subsequent emanation from the motion-picture projector. This dimension of the film only becomes clear during its final section, a single long take depicting a man, a woman and a dog as they stroll away from the camera. As these three figures make their way across a snow-covered field, the audience hears four female voices reading passages from Robert Grosseteste’s ruminations in De Luce. This thirteenthcentury treatise argues that light represents ‘the first bodily form’, with the expansion of its ‘noble and excellent essence’ bringing form and dimensional presence to matter

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(Frampton 2009: 194). In this context, Neoplatonist cosmology serves, quite stunningly, as a gloss on the mechanisms of the cinema. Not only does the projection of a film stage the expansion of light between the lens and the screen, but this light directly generates the spatial illusion of the cinematic image, rather than merely revealing a pre-existing space. In this context, the notion of an energised signifier is neither a metaphor nor a matter of the deep ontological basis of film. Rather, it proceeds from the cinema’s simple ontic character, its banal, literal qualities that serve as foundation for all cinematic art. Considered in these terms, the entirety of Zorns Lemma presents a commentary on the role of energy in the cinema. Beginning in complete darkness and continuing through a long passage of rich, full-colour shots, the film concludes with an overabundance of light energy. As the three figures progress across the field, their dark forms diminishing in size as the falling snow further obscures them, the screen is gradually inundated with light. Frampton filmed this final scene using five one-hundred-foot rolls of film, each of which he held aloft before loading into the camera, intentionally allowing daylight to fog its outer layers (James 1989: 256). Produced beyond the confines of the camera, this additional layer of the photographic record becomes visible during projection as a warm glow at the sides of the screen and as a hazy white flare that partially obscures the lap dissolves joining the sections of film. Both threatening the spatial illusion upon the screen and illuminating the space of the theatre, this element of cameraless photography suggests an immediate connection between the enclosed viewing space and the snowy field where Frampton filmed this sequence. Energy, Frampton asserts, belongs to our quotidian experience as much as it does to the work of art, and it is no more concentrated in the latter than it is in the former. Much to the contrary, he presents overexposed film as bearing the most highly energised photographic image, identifiable as such by its lack of definition. While Zorns Lemma offers a remarkable account of the cinema as an art of light energy, Frampton also attends to our common assumption, encoded within the very terms ‘movie’ and ‘cinema’ (from the Greek root kinema), that film is defined by its representation of motion. Keeping pace with the film’s steadily intensifying illumination, the viewer’s experience also becomes increasingly kinetic throughout the film’s three sections. Beginning the film obediently listening to the voice of Frampton’s ‘schoolmarm’ in a darkened room, one becomes pointedly aware of the disciplined, forward-facing comportment expected of moviegoers. Although they are themselves remarkably static, the appearance of Frampton’s word pictures distracts us, to a large degree, from this sensation of immobility. (He filmed the majority of these shots with a handheld camera, resulting in a nervously quavering image.) As action-shots gradually replace these semi-static words, we experience both surprise and relief at the dynamism one normally expects from the cinema. In its treatment of both light energy and the illusion of kinetic energy, Zorns Lemma first establishes a state of sensory restriction, then methodically removes those constraints to our auditory and visual experience. This format is fully in keeping with Frampton’s conception of ecological energy – and, to a lesser degree, cinematic energy – as unvarying constants that the ‘cutting’ mechanism of the camera and the filter of a celluloid filmstrip can only modulate subtractively. And while, for Pound, the energised signifier presented a solution to the problem of a generally enervated language, for Frampton, the cinema’s fundamentally restrictive function was a means of parsing

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a surplus of energy into comprehensible signifiers: in opposition to Pound’s concentration of signifying force within the poem, Frampton’s films chart the dispersion of meaning throughout the world. This is borne out especially during the second section of Zorns Lemma, where the prominent materiality of the words Frampton photographed and the detail-rich scenes that frame them continually distract from the ostensible signifieds of these photographs, with new words steadily taking the screen before the viewer has satisfactorily absorbed the last. Frampton described the unrelenting pace of his montage as creating a reversal of figure and ground in which ‘what you see consciously most of all is the one-second cut or pulse’, shifting the viewer’s attention from the images to the splices that separate and join them (Frampton 2009: 196). As the twenty-four-character alphabet designates a clear beginning and end to the series, its repeating lines define a grid-like structure that is paradigmatic of Frampton’s enterprise more generally. In the absence of symbolic or compositional focal point, our attention turns to the totality of this regular pattern, which serves as a matrix structuring our reception of both found texts and the imagery that Frampton cut from the fabric of his experience with the help of his camera. Whereas Pound’s work reflects a deep confidence in the artist’s capacity to heroically remake the world, Frampton has abandoned such aspirations. His work instead insists that the artist’s agency is limited to capturing and reordering found material.

Histories of History ‘The beauty of machines (A.D. 1930)’, Pound wrote, ‘is chiefly to be found in those parts of machines where energy is most concentrated’ (EPMA 57). Pound’s decision to explicitly date his assessment was indeed prescient, as the ‘machine aesthetic’ has since taken on a nostalgic patina. Writing in 1971, Frampton put a somewhat finer point on this prognosis, using a hyperbolical past tense in writing that a machine ‘was a thing made up of distinguishable “parts”, organized in some imitation of the human body’ (Frampton 2009: 135). This roughly anthropomorphic scale had ensured, he explained, that how a ‘machine “worked” was readily apparent to the adept, from the inspection of the shape of its “parts”’ (Frampton 2009: 135). From our present vantage, Frampton’s statement seems prophetic. Over the course of the filmmaker’s lifetime, the rise of electronic technologies such as radar and video and the emergence of powerful and inexpensive microprocessors established the foundation of our digital era. Today, engineers no longer exclusively configure objects in space but more often work in the abstractions of code, which makes no direct appeal to the senses, as did the objects that Pound aestheticises in his ‘Machine Art’ essay.15 We witness the earliest intimation of this shift in Frampton’s thought in his otherwise peculiar preoccupation with mathematics, and especially set theory, as a means of dealing with purely notional quantities. By the final decade of his life, Frampton began to grapple fully with what we now readily identify as a digital paradigm in the arts, defined both by the grid of discrete possibilities offered by binary code and by the streams in which such data is transferred and processed. Situating himself as a transitional figure between these ‘ages’, Frampton considered the cinema ‘the Last Machine’, representing a ‘typical survival form’ of this paradigm (Frampton 2009: 135–7). On the one hand, the motion-picture camera and projector are both clearly organised machines. But on the other hand, the sequence of still

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images that they together generate outstrips our ability to differentiate between individual frames, thereby anticipating the flows of abstract data that computers produce and transmit. Frampton’s introduction of intentional ‘errors’ into the middle portion of Zorns Lemma underscores this intermediary status of the cinema. Though several of the word-pictures are represented with twenty-three or twenty-five frames instead of the standard twenty-four, the difference is nearly imperceptible to the viewer, demonstrating the tenuous connection of these basic units of the motion picture to our cinematic experience. This increasingly uncertain relationship between part and whole in post-war media technology deeply informed Frampton’s assessment of Pound’s work. Specifically, Frampton dismissed Pound’s assumption that works of art might maintain a coherent, organic relationship with ‘history’, ‘economics’ and ‘culture’, a doubt that is borne out in Frampton’s damning assessment of the Cantos as a whole. As he mused in one 1978 interview: If very much of modernist poetics rests upon an extension of the rhetorical figure called metonymy, the substitution of the part for the whole, the Cantos is the supreme test of that. It is the vastest of all metonymic works. In its failure – and I believe that as a poem, as a whole work of art, it is a failure, as Pound believed – it represents an incredible catastrophe within modernist poetics. It is one of the supreme attempts, and it is one of the supreme failures. It is an immense catastrophe. (Frampton 2009: 183) Despite the ardour of this statement, Frampton is notably vague in his characterisation of the Cantos’ failure. One possibility is that he considered the work a failure of poetic form. Indeed, Frampton had some reason to believe that this had been Pound’s own final judgement of the work. In ‘Ezra Pound: A Memoir’, Daniel Cory drew upon a 1966 conversation in which the poet characterised the Cantos as ‘a botch’, comparing his source materials to ‘a shop-window full of various objects’. Pound went on to explain, ‘I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make . . . a work of art’ (Cory 1968: 38). Frampton clearly put more stock in Pound’s occasionally dismal assessments of his own poetry than does, for example, the Pound scholar David Moody, who attributes Pound’s moments of greatest negativity to bouts of depression (EPP III 505). Without the benefit of such recent assessments, Frampton might have indeed believed that an unintended, ruinous fragmentation resulted as the poem collapsed beneath its massive metonymic burden. But immediately following this claim, Frampton modulates his assessment of the Cantos, making clear that its success or failure does not rest solely upon its formal coherence. I don’t think it’s possible – and I suppose here my theoretical Marxist leanings begin to emerge, at least – possible or feasible to bring off a project of those dimensions without a theory of history, in a word. And I don’t think Pound had one. Thereby unfortunately depends the anti-Semitism. Pound didn’t have a theory of history; he had a child’s view of history – namely, that it was quite clear that everything was going downhill. And he set out to look for a culprit. And, of course, he found the culprit, because when one sets out to look for the villain of the piece, one always finds the villain. And that villain, of course, was not the Jew; that villain was a kind of recurrent state of mind that Pound came to call ‘usury’. (Frampton 2009: 183)

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Frampton invites some criticism for dwelling solely on the negative cultural diagnosis found in the Cantos and for not attending sufficiently to Pound’s intention that the work serve as a remedy to this same condition. But even more significant – and problematic – are Frampton’s specifications for the theory of history that must undergird any such grand metonymic project. His insistence upon this point is quite unexpected: Frampton did not adhere, in any obvious way, to Marxist doctrine and, were it not for this statement, his avowed orientation might be entirely overlookable within his published work. Indeed, it would seem that he considered no ‘theory of history’ to merit complete conviction; such theories are instead, at best, worthy of certain ‘leanings’. A double bind therefore emerges, as the historically oriented artist may be neither wholly without nor overly committed to any theoretical perspective. In suggesting that theory serve as a necessary but not entirely reliable heuristic, this contradiction is wholly in keeping with the thorough and even exaggerated scepticism that, much more than any ‘theoretical Marxism’, informed the filmmaker’s understanding of how artistic practice and history relate. Beyond Frampton’s theoretical quibble, there remains an aspect of Pound’s approach to this task of artistically engaging with history that was manifestly unacceptable to the filmmaker. In his analysis of Pound’s importation of ‘whole slabs of the [historical] record’ into his poem, Michael Coyle illuminates the relevant oversight in Pound’s method: If Pound’s notion of ‘a poem including history’ indicates that he regarded history as but one element within a matrix of other elements, it also indicates that he imagined that larger matrix in ahistorical terms. That is, he believed the historical element of his poem to be restricted to the historical texts that he included, to be something apart from his own combinatory procedures. Pound did not regard form itself as inherently historical, but felt that he could alter form without altering meaning. (Coyle 1995: 195) As Coyle suggests, Pound imagined himself working from an Archimedean point, as he compiled the ‘gists and piths’ of history. If, as Preda has convincingly argued, Pound adopted certain principles of Cubist collage in making fragmentation programmatic to his work, he had not fully absorbed the lessons of Dadaist montage, which emphasised the transformed meaning that objects, images and texts take on once integrated into a new composition.16 Instead, for Pound history was an anterior demanding of an accurate portrayal, rather than a retrospective construction, in which we in the present necessarily intervene. It is around precisely this blind spot within the Cantos that Frampton inverts Pound’s project, reflecting an acute awareness of how the act of compilation transforms its source material. The result was a form of cinema that, like a mirror image of its Poundian prototype, strikingly resembles that model even while reversing its premise. Frampton’s name for this practice was ‘metahistory’, by which he distinguished a search for broader organising principles within the historical canon from the historian’s concern with the more granular details of the record.17 Though Frampton’s metahistory does internalise a hypertrophied historiographical consciousness, it should not be confused with historiography in the generic sense, which the term ‘metahistory’ is more commonly used to designate. Neither should it be conflated with the form of metahistory practised by Hayden White, most notably in his highly influential account

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of the representational tropes, narrative forms and ideologies underlying nineteenthcentury historical writing (White 1973). Rather, Frampton’s metahistory of the cinema is concerned solely with the young history of that medium, cutting through its stifling quantity of ‘instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic cinematography, and much, much more’, to identify a group of works that might function as one of several possible canons. In this respect, the undertaking is well aligned with Pound’s project of isolating an abbreviated curriculum of truly innovative works for the student of poetry, as he first set it out in How to Read and later elaborated upon it in ABC of Reading (Frampton 2009: 136). But whereas Pound regarded poetic invention as an absolute emerging periodically throughout the historical record, Frampton, like White in his own metahistorical project, suggests that any canon is ideologically contingent even in its basic outline. Similar to Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’, an essay first published just three years before ‘For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses’, Frampton asserts tremendous agency for the media consumer (Barthes 1967; Frampton 2009: 131–9). But he also goes well beyond Barthes’s focus on the reception of individual texts to consider the forms of cohesion we collectively attribute to groups of films. ‘The metahistorian of cinema’, Frampton explains, ‘. . . is occupied with inventing a tradition, that is, a coherent, wieldy set of discrete monuments, meant to inseminate resonant consistency into the growing body of his art’ (Frampton 2009: 136). However, this act of ‘invention’ is not limited to selecting canonical works from an existing archive. As Frampton goes on to explain: Such works may not exist, and then it is his [the metahistorian’s] duty to make them. Or they may exist already, somewhere outside the intentional precincts of the art (for instance, in the prehistory of cinematic art, before 1943). And then he must remake them. (Frampton 2009: 136) Poundian historical retrospection becomes Framptonian retroaction, and the filmmaker pursues this reverse temporality to the point of asserting that ‘for our purpose, the whole history of art is no more than a massive footnote to the history of film’ (Frampton 2009: 154). In following this resolutely ahistorical line of thinking, Frampton dramatically critiques Pound’s assumption that his selections from the history of poetry would be preserved unchanged within the substrate of his long poem. At the same time, however, Frampton recapitulates, in revised terms, the periplum of Pound’s original endeavour, more fully acknowledging its inevitable subjectivity and contingency so as to withstand the then-burgeoning enterprise of postmodern criticism. During the 1970s, at a moment when the future of modernist aesthetics seemed uncertain, Frampton worked to shore up the Cantos as a ‘catastrophe within modernist poetics’ in order to prevent it from creating a catastrophe of modernism as a whole. True to the origins of the word ‘catastrophe’ in ancient Greek dramaturgy, Frampton asserts that it is a ‘downturn’ staged, rather than one that is absolute, even going so far as to re-enact that tragic fall.18 None of Frampton’s works commits more fully to his metahistorical project than Magellan, the expansive cycle of films he began planning in 1972 and pursued until his death in 1983. Over time, his plans for this project became increasingly elaborate, and by 1978 he imagined it as having a nearly thirty-six-hour total running time spread

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over some 377 screenings. The films Frampton made expressly for Magellan range from the long meditation of Winter Solstice, a study of incandescent molten steel in a Pennsylvania foundry, to sequences of computer animation, to the short films (many as brief as a few seconds) that Frampton referred to as Pans, abbreviating the word ‘panopticon’ while also referencing the lateral movement of the motion-picture camera. As part of his metahistorical project, Frampton imagined Magellan as a compendium that would also include found footage from the early history of the cinema, as well as films by his peers and contemporaries. He planned to assemble these diverse parts according to a scheme similar in its rigour to that of Zorns Lemma. With instalments of the cycle screened over the course of more than a year and works of particular significance coinciding with annual celestial events, the calendrical format of Magellan references the passage of time writ large, metonymically echoing its daily and annual cycles in an extension – and a travesty – of Pound’s ‘poem including history’. Similarly, in invoking Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521), the first explorer to circumnavigate the globe, the work also lays metonymic claim to the entirety of the earth’s surface. Beyond its encapsulation of the history of the cinema, Magellan more broadly references modernisation’s conquest of space and time through means as diverse as colonialisation, rationalisation and technological innovations including the cinema, these grandiose allusions with tongue firmly in cheek. At the same time as it represents the culmination of Pound’s influence upon Frampton, Magellan also treats the grand ambitions of modernist poetics in a decisively parodic manner. As he continued to create short films for Magellan, Frampton concurrently worked in the development of software systems, founding the Digital Arts Laboratory at the Center for Media Study, State University at Buffalo, in 1977. Magellan was to include examples of Frampton’s animated computer graphics, with the clear implication that, according to this metahistorical account, they belonged to the history of the cinema. However, Frampton also understood that the tables would soon be turned, with digital media overtaking and remediating what we once knew as film. With this in mind, it is telling that we find one of the few complete representations of Frampton’s plans for Magellan in CLNDR, a dot-matrix printout listing each screening within the cycle as a numbered line of computer code (Figure 28.10). Although digital transfers of the completed Magellan cycle would not be undertaken for a matter of decades, Frampton already foresaw a future in which the cinema had ceded its privileged status to a computerised medium. At that point, the entire Magellan cycle might itself serve as one ‘monument’ within an as-of-yet unimaginable metahistory.

Conclusion As the phrase ‘transference of power’ appears in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, it refers to the recapitulation of natural processes that Fenollosa considered essential to effective verbal expression. The truth of this mimesis, he posits, is guaranteed by the continuity linking the actuality of the world with its representation. As Frampton used this same phrase some forty years later, it sets out a very different function for representation. In contradistinction to the ideogrammic method of Fenollosa and Pound, the filmmaker’s description of a ‘transference of power’ between linguistic and visual regimes implies that the latter is no less dependent upon conventional codes. Indeed, as we encounter images in Zorns Lemma, appearing in

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Figure 28.10 Hollis Frampton, CLNDR ,1978. Printout on paper, 15 pages, double-sided. Collection of John Knecht. © Estate of Hollis Frampton. one-second pulses and arranged according to an alphabetical grid, they are subject to forms of fragmentation characteristic of verbal communication. Frampton makes no presumption that such signifiers establish an essential connection with their referents. Within his cinematic work, even light-energy, the natural phenomenon par excellence, emerges alongside words and images as their unassimilated excess. We arrive, then, at a nearly categorical distinction between Pound’s and Frampton’s respective theories and practices separating the referentiality of the former and the equally persistent self-referentiality of the latter. In placing this account of Frampton’s Pound reception under the sign of a ‘transference of power’, I have also used this phrase to suggest a genealogical connection, specifically a transmission of influence and ambition between generations of artists. However, as I have argued throughout this chapter, an unproblematic and unimpeded ‘transference’ was not possible for an artist such as Frampton, who was so cannily aware of his own historically specific perspective. As Frampton assumed aspects of Pound’s project, he transcribed it not only from the medium of poetry to that of the cinema, but also from the perspective of a member of ‘the generation of the 1880s’ to that of a post-World War II artist working in a more complex and rapidly changing media environment. Within this context, Frampton was forced to face the obsolescence of his chosen medium head-on. Rather than partaking in a tradition that stretched back to antiquity and extended forward into an indefinite future, Frampton worked in a medium that, despite defining much of the mid-twentieth century’s media

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culture, had only a loosely established history and was moreover seemingly already on the wane. Breaking from Pound’s approach to the poetic canon, Frampton never endeavoured to resuscitate a past state of the cinema, but instead anticipated its remediation through digital media entirely divorced from the materiality of film. Frampton took from Pound his discontinuous, recursive model of history, in which reference to past instances of invention represented necessary stimulus to future invention. However, whereas Pound put great stock in connecting to a tradition of innovation that lay scattered in fragments throughout history, Frampton contended that any such historical thread is constructed retrospectively. In late 1962, when Frampton wrote of Pound ‘prepar[ing] the English language for an Odyssey’, he unknowingly foreshadowed the idiosyncratic temporality of his coming metahistorical project. Frampton’s metahistorian is concerned overwhelmingly with the design of systems, such as the matrices of both our calendar and the alphabet, as both repositories for fragments of the past and a means to ‘inseminate resonant consistence’ in future works. In this manner, the metahistorian evacuates the present as a site of significant invention while stretching his or her attention between past and future. Through this act of temporal displacement, the metahistorically inclined artist therefore displays a form of ‘tensile resiliency’, like that which Frampton, writing in 1962, located in Pound’s renewal of the English language. Here too we might identify a perverse fidelity to Pound’s poetic project: as Frampton calls all forms of historical continuity into question, he simultaneously explores how the signifier might resound beyond the immediate work into both the historical past and a speculative future.

Notes 1. Frampton’s earliest surviving film is the 1966 black-and-white short Information. Prior to that, he had made a total of four films (Jenkins 2012: 13). 2. P. Adams Sitney published the first version of his ‘Structuralist Film’ essay in summer 1969, concluding the piece with an analysis of Frampton’s film Artificial Light. 3. As Federico Windhausen has argued, Frampton drew his understanding of art-making as a game-like activity from the criticism of Hugh Kenner, a critic and historian perhaps best known for his work on Pound (Windhausen 2004). 4. The key to understanding Zorns Lemma as a narrative film is found in the filmmaker’s wittily titled 1972 essay ‘A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative’. In it, Frampton refers explicitly to Hugh Kenner’s influential chapter ‘Knot and Vortex’ in inquiring as to which semi-stable ‘patterned integrities’ define the cinema. He concludes that narrative is one such pattern, a presence that film cannot help but ‘conjure’, despite all attempts to exorcise it through unconventional cinematic form (Frampton 2009: 140–8; Kenner 1972: 145–62). 5. Frampton cites The Bay State Primer, published c. 1800, as the source of these abecedarian rhymes. However, they are clearly based upon (and differ only slightly from) those that first appeared in The New England Primer, the earliest existing copy of which dates to 1727 (Frampton 2009; 192; Crain 2000: 15–52). 6. Though the letters appear as monumental metal reliefs, they are actually bits of tin foil imprinted in a typewriter and enlarged with a close up (Gidal 1985: 94). This technique was significant to Frampton, as he had learned to read and spell by depressing the keys of a typewriter under his grandmother’s guidance (Frampton 2006: 150) 7. Frampton intentionally included twenty-four ‘metric errors’ by asking an assistant to select twelve images to receive twenty-three and twenty-five frames each (Frampton 2009: 198).

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8. For a list of these replacement images and gloss of their significance, see Frampton (2009: 200–1). 9. For the complete text, see Grosseteste (1942). 10. Liebregts (2004: 9). As A. D. Moody wrote of Pound and The Cantos in 1994, ‘The Neo-platonism is being practiced, not expounded’ (quoted by Liebregts 2004: 9). 11. Only at the level of broad allegory does any parallelism between word and image become apparent. The lightless screen at the film’s outset recapitulates the privation of Protestant education, the fragmentation of the film’s second section recalls that of our modular alphabetical system, and the dazzling reflected light of the final scene serves as a rough example of Grosseteste’s De Luce. But these corollaries are remarkably few and general considering the sheer profusion of words and images that Frampton presents. 12. For the most complete account of the role of language in Frampton’s films, see Michelson (1985). 13. More relevant than both his decidedly painterly characterisation of this language as comprising ‘little splotches of color’ and his explicit reference to the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky’s synaesthetic theories in explaining his experience are the words the poet ultimately used to convey the ‘patterns’ he glimpsed with his mind’s eye (G-B 86–7). 14. The following account of Pound’s energeticism is indebted to Miriam Hansen’s survey of this topic (Hansen 1979: 194–9). 15. Writing in 1971, Frampton characterised the cinema as ‘the last art that will reach the mind through the senses’ (Frampton 2009: 131–40). 16. The same lesson might have also been drawn from Cubist collage where, for example. Pablo Picasso used the same linear pattern of printed text to signify, within the same collage, both the woodgrain visible upon the surface of a violin and the dark tone of a shadow cast by that same musical instrument (Krauss 1999: 25–33). 17. For a thorough examination of Frampton’s concept of metahistory and its roots in T. S. Eliot’s understanding of the poetic canon, see Zryd (2004: 119–42). 18. I am grateful to Michael Kindellan for sharing his etymologically nuanced reading of this passage from Frampton’s 1978 interview with Adele Freeman (Frampton 2009: 183).

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Notes on Contributors

Stephen Adams, Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, coeditor of The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (2005) with Demetres Tryphonopoulos, published his first article on Pound in 1975. His book The Patriot Poets, on American poets and the state of the union from Philip Freneau to Allen Ginsberg, appeared in 2018. He has also written a study of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1983), and Poetic Designs (1997), a handbook on metres, forms and free verse. Mark Antliff, Mary Grace Wilson Professor of Art History at Duke University, is the author, co-author and editor of the following books: Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993); Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (1997); Cubism & Culture (2001); Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France (2007); A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism (2008); The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York (2010); and Vorticism: New Perspectives (2013). He is currently completing a book titled Sculpture Against the State: Anarchism and the Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde. His most recent research focuses on the subject of radical pacifism and aesthetics during World War II and its aftermath. Massimo Bacigalupo teaches American Literature at the University of Genoa. He is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (1980) and AngloLiguria: Da Byron a Hemingway (2017), co-author of In Venice and in the Veneto with Ezra Pound (2008), and editor of Pound’s Posthumous Cantos (2015). His contributions appear in Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic (2008), Ezra Pound in Context (2010), T. S. Eliot in Context (2011) and Will the Modernist: Shakespeare and the European Historical Avant-Gardes (2014). In 2001 he received Italy’s National Translation Prize for his editions and translations of Wordsworth, Melville, Dickinson, Stevens, Pound, H.D., Eliot, Heaney and others. Jack Baker received a PhD from Durham University on the impersonal modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. He has published essays on Pound, Stevens, Marilynne Robinson and Geoffrey Hill, and is working on a book about aesthetics and consolation in modernist poetry.

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Jo Brantley Berryman, California Institute of the Arts, retired after thirty years teaching modern and contemporary literature in the School of Critical Studies as well as serving in various administrative positions, including Associate Dean and Director of the Poetry Today Series. She is the author of Circe’s Craft: Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ and numerous articles on Ezra Pound and modernist poetry as well as contributions to collections of essays published from the Ezra Pound International Conferences in London, Dublin and Brunnenburg. She is currently working on Ezra Pound’s Aesthetics and the Origins of Modernism, ‘Writers and Their Contexts’. Mark Byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. His current project, Modernism and the Early Middle Ages, has thus far produced the monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (2014) and a dossier on ‘Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages’ co-edited with Stefano Rosignoli in the Journal of Beckett Studies (2016). He is the current president of the Ezra Pound Society. Heriberto Cruz Cornejo is a Mexican pianist interested in the performance of and research into the music of Gerhart Münch. He is currently doing a Master of Music in Musicology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Galateia Demetriou earned her PhD in English from the University of Birmingham with a thesis on Ezra Pound and the Greek poet George Seferis. Her research interests venture into all areas of modernist and contemporary writing and art, and, along with teaching literature, she works as an instructor of academic writing and foreign languages. She has presented her work at a variety of venues, including the Ezra Pound International Conference, and her original poetry, translations and book reviews have appeared in a number of Greek publications. Sara Dunton received her PhD in 2016 from the University of New Brunswick; her doctoral dissertation is entitled H.D.’s Ways of Seeing: Encountering Artworks and Practising Ekphrasis in Pursuit of the ‘Art-Dimension’. She has presented papers on H.D., Mina Loy and Ezra Pound at several international conferences (including the 2017 MLA Convention), published articles in Paideuma (2013) and H.D. and Modernity (2014), and contributed a chapter to the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose (2018). Her projects include co-editing a scholarly edition of H.D.’s Palimpsest (forthcoming). Paul Edwards is the author of Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (2000). He has curated exhibitions of Lewis’s visual art and is the General Editor of the forthcoming collected edition of his writings. R. Bruce Elder is a filmmaker, media historian and teacher. His films and videos have been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Millennium Film Workshop in Manhattan, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Atlanta’s High Museum, the Film Forum in Los Angeles, the Stadtfilmmuseum München and Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis. Elder’s publications include Image & Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989), The Body in Film (1989), A Body of Vision (1997), The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American

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Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson (1998) and DADA, Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect (2013). His book Harmony & Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Prize. Elder’s most recent book, Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect (2018), includes the most thorough commentary on Ballet mécanique since Standish Lawder’s The Cubist Cinema (1975). His personal website is rbruceelder.com. Giuliana Ferreccio is former Professor of English Literature at the University of Turin, head of the Centro Studi Arti della Modernità and co-editor of its online journal Cosmo: Comparative Studies in Modernism. She is the author of Jane Austen: La passione dell’ironia (1990), William Wordsworth: Paesaggi della coscienza (2006), and has written extensively on comparative literature and literary theory. She has recently translated Wordsworth’s Prelude and Shakespeare’s Henry IV (second part) into Italian. Some of her recent contributions appear in Roma/Amor: Ezra Pound, Rome and Love (2013) and Ezra Pound and Modernism: The Irish Factor (2017). Margaret Fisher, PhD, independent artist-scholar, is author of Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (2002) and series editor with Robert Hughes of the Complete Music of Ezra Pound (2003–12). She has written on Italian Futurist radio and is artistic director of MAFISHCO, a performance and production company based in Emeryville, California. Daniel Hackbarth is a historian of art and media based in southern California. His research focuses on the role of montage, materiality and energy in the visual production of early twentieth-century Europe. His current projects include a re-evaluation of the German Expressionist woodblock print and a book-length study of the Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann. Evelyn Haller is Professor of English at Doane College near Lincoln, Nebraska. She has published essays on Virginia Woolf (2010, 2014), Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather, Flaubert and Yeats. Her lifelong work on Pound was published in Paideuma (2010) and various collections such as The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (2005) and Ezra Pound in London (2015). She was a Contributing Editor to The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990). Justin Kishbaugh is the Assistant Director of Academic Success and a Professor of Writing for Roger Williams University School of Law. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and a PhD in English Literature from Duquesne University. He has authored several articles on Imagist poetics and has co-edited and appeared in two anthologies of “Poets in the Pound Tradition” published under the Ezra Pound Center for Literature imprint at Clemson University Press. He is currently working on an article focusing on Pound and Binyon’s interactions regarding the latter’s Dante translations. Scott W. Klein is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (1994); the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the

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1928 edition of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (2010); with Mark Antliff, the editor of the essay collection Vorticism: New Perspectives (2013); and with Michael Valdez Moses the editor of the forthcoming essay collection A Modernist Cinema. He has published essays in such journals as ELH, Modernist Cultures, Twentieth Century Literature, The James Joyce Quarterly and The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, and is the Artistic Director of the Secrest Artists Series, the performing arts series at Wake Forest University. Sean Mark received his BA in Italian from the University of Milan and an MA in English from University College London. He completed a PhD in comparative literature at the universities of Tübingen, Bergamo and Brown, on a fellowship from the European Commission. He has published on Pound, Pasolini and Italian Futurism, and his first book, Pound and Pasolini: The Poetics of Crisis, is forthcoming. His poems have appeared in A Packet of Poems for Ezra Pound (2017), and he has edited and translated two books by contemporary Italian poets, for which he received the Sonia Raiziss Giop Foundation Grant in Translating. His translations have also appeared in the Italian Poetry Review. He has taught English at Sorbonne University, and currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the British School in Rome. Alec Marsh is Professor of American Literature at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The Spirit of Jefferson (1998), which won the first Ezra Pound Society Prize in 1998. His most recent publications are Ezra Pound (2011) and Ezra Pound and John Kasper (2015). Gemma Moss is Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at Birmingham City University. She completed her BA, MA in Postcolonial Literature, and AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Manchester. She specialises in music in modernist literature, and has published on E. M. Forster in English Literature in Transition, Ford Madox Ford in Modernist Cultures, and D. H. Lawrence. She has chapters forthcoming in Literature and Sound, ed. Anna Snaith, and Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, ed. Tsung-Han Tsai and Emma Sutton. Her monograph Music in Literary Modernism: James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. In 2018, she co-organised the conference on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism with Howard J. Booth, and she is co-organiser of the conference on Re-Orientating E. M. Forster to be held in 2020, marking fifty years since Forster’s death. Charles Mundye is Deputy Head and Head of Academic Development in the Department of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University, a Fellow of the English Association, and President of the Robert Graves Society. He produced and directed the second British staging of Pound’s first opera, Le Testament, for the York Festival in 1992, part of which was subsequently released on a CD of Pound’s music, Ego Scriptor Cantilaenae. He has written extensively on British and American poetry and the interrelationships between music and literature. His edition of Robert Graves’s War Poems was published in 2016. Ira Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1999) and Ezra Pound

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in Context (2010). He has also edited the letters of Ezra Pound and Alice Corbin Henderson, and is associate editor of Poetry. In addition, he has published biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. His critical books include Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (1986) and Modernism’s Second Act (2013). He is currently completing a critical life of Philip Roth. Mauro Piccinini is a Switzerland-based freelance researcher, expert in the avant-garde of the 1920s and currently writing a biography of the American composer George Antheil. He contributed the entries on Leo Ornstein and George Antheil to the German encyclopedia Komponisten der Gegenwart (1992–) and has written articles on Frederick Delius, Arnold Schönberg, Frederick Kiesler and Fernand Léger. Roxana Preda is Associate Lecturer of American literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of (Post)modern Ezra Pound (2001) and editor of Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1945 (2007). Her most recent book is Ezra Pound and the Career of Modernist Criticism. Professional Attention, in collaboration with Michael Coyle (2018). Her digital work includes Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contribution to Periodicals and The Ezra Pound English Language Bibliography (with Archie Henderson) for the Ezra Pound Society. She is the author of the digital research environment The Cantos Project (in progress), currently funded by Leverhulme. Stephen Romer is a poet, translator, editor and scholar of Franco-British modernism. Among his writings are essays on the literature of Decadence, Pound, Eliot and contemporary French and British poets. He has lived for many years in the Loire Valley where he is Maître de Conférences at the University of Tours. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011, and is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. Leslee Smucker is an active performer, writer and artist. Her interest in the combination of medium and scholarship spurred her programme Personae, based on the unknown music of Ezra Pound, and many other inter-media projects. Her subsequent album, also entitled Personae, was released in 2017. Smucker’s fascination with turnof-the-century French music also brought co-authorship of an essay in Cambridge University Press’ Fauré Studies series, with Carlo Caballero. She is artistic director of the ensemble Green Room Artists, a collaborative and innovative chamber group that performs and presents new music. Smucker completed her PhD and the University of Colorado, Boulder and served as Visiting Faculty at the University of South Florida. Charles Timbrell, pianist and musicologist, received his degrees from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland. He has given recitals throughout the US and Europe, recorded for Dante CD (Paris) and made two DVDs of French piano music for IMC (Tokyo). He has lectured at leading music schools, including the Royal College of Music (London), École Normale de Musique (Paris), the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna) and San Francisco Conservatory. His publications include French Pianism (1999), Prince of Virtuosos: A Life of Walter Rummel, American Pianist (2005), a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (2003), performing editions of piano works by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann, and articles in The

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New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Music and Letters, Journal of the American Liszt Society, Cahiers Debussy, Revue Belge de Musicologie and Cahiers Maurice Ravel. Timbrell is Professor Emeritus of Music at Howard University in Washington, DC. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos is Dean of Arts at Brandon University, Canada. He teaches and researches in twentieth-century American Literature, with a focus on difficult modernist texts (especially long poems), often approaching them through the lenses of poetics, translation theory and practice, prosody and rhetoric, editorial theory and textual criticism. As author, co-author, editor or co-editor, he has contributed to fifteen volumes, including The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s ‘The Cantos’ (1992), ‘I Cease Not to Yowl’: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti (1998), The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (2005) and H.D.’s Majic Ring (2009). Approaches to Teaching Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose is forthcoming.

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Bibliography

Archival Collections Archives of American Art Michael Lekakis Papers, 1940–1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Reels 3090–1.

Beinecke Library Ezra Pound Papers YCAL 43. The Olga Rudge Papers YCAL 53. The Agnes Bedford Papers YCAL 174. William Bird Papers YCAL 178. The Sheri Martinelli Papers YCAL 868.

Heriberto Cruz personal archive Interview of Eduardo Montes y Arroyo by Heriberto Cruz, December 2016.

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Archives Murphy, Dudley [1966?], Murphy by Murphy, unpublished memoir, Murphy Family Collection.

Library of Congress George and Böske Antheil Papers, Library of Congress.

Lilly Library Bloomington, IN Ezra and Dorothy Pound Collection. D. G. Bridson Collection. George Antheil Mss.

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Münch–Medina Archive – Franz Liszt 230, La Loma. Apdo. Postal 324 58290, Morelia. Michoacán, México Münch, Gerhart. Dedication of Ricercare to Henry Miller (1950). Music reviews of Münch’s performances 1937–1943. Music reviews of Münch´s performance 1951–1952.

Princeton University Sylvia Beach Papers. Ezra Pound (1915), The Dance of the Birth of the Dragon: A CHOREOGRAPH.

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Little Review, ‘Léger, Fernand’ (1924), Box 8, Folder 3. Little Review Records, MSS 001, Box 10, Folder 27.

UCLA: Charles E. Young Research Library Henry Miller papers, 1896–1984: 1930–1980. Lawrence Clark Powell papers, Box 100, Folder 8.

Selected Works by Ezra Pound Articles [1905] (1972), ‘Letters to Viola Baxter Jordan’, ed. with a commentary by Donald Gallup, Paideuma I:1 (Spring/Summer), pp. 107–11. (1911a), ‘Concerts-Chaigneau’, Monthly Musical Record XLI:484 (1 April), p. 87. (1911b), ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris I: The Seafarer’, The New Age 10:5, p. 107. (1912), ‘Patria Mia VIII’, The New Age 11:26 (24 October) , pp. 611–12. (1913a), ‘Xenia’, Poetry 3:2, pp. 58–60. (1913b), ‘The Approach to Paris V’, The New Age 13:23 (2 October), pp. 662–4. [1913] (1968), ‘A Retrospect’, in T. S. Eliot (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions, pp. 3–14. (1914a), ‘Allen Upward Serious’, The New Age (23 April), pp. 779–80. (1914b), ‘The Caressability of the Greeks’, The Egoist (16 March), p. 117. (1914c), ‘Edward Wadsworth: Vorticist’, The Egoist (15 August), pp. 306–7. (1914d), ‘Exhibition at the Goupil Gallery’, The Egoist (16 March), p. 109. (1914e), ‘Homage to W. S. Blunt’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (March), pp. 220–3. (1914f), ‘The New Sculpture’, The Egoist (16 February), pp. 67–8. (1914g), ‘Salutation the Third’, BLAST 1 (20 June), p. 45. (1914h), ‘Wyndham Lewis’, The Egoist (15 June), pp. 233–4. (1914i), ‘Vortex: Pound’, BLAST 1 (20 June), pp. 153–4. (1914j), ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review (1 September), pp. 461–71. [1914] (1968), ‘The Renaissance’, in LE 214–26.

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(1915a), ‘Affirmations: Vorticism’, The New Age 16:11 (14 January), pp. 277–8. (1915b), ‘Affirmations: Analysis of the Decade’, The New Age 16:15 (11 February), pp. 409–11. In G-B 111–17. (1915c) ‘The Renaissance II’, Poetry 5:6 (March), pp. 283–7. (1915d), ‘Chronicles’, BLAST 2 (July), pp. 85–6. (1917), ‘Editor’s Note’, The Little Review 4:5 (September), p. 3. (1918a), ‘Art Notes’, The New Age 23:22 (26 September), p. 352. In EPVA 78–81. (1918b), ‘The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry’, Poetry 11:5, pp. 264–71. (1918c)‚ ‘E.P. Files Exceptions’, in Ezra Pound, Pavannes and Divisions, NewYork: Knopf, pp. 245–50. [1918] (1968), ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’, in LE 431–6. (1919a), ‘At the Ballet’, The New Age (16 October), p. 412. In P&P III: 340. (1919b), ‘Art Notes’, The New Age (23 October), p. 428. In P&P III: 343–4. (1919c), ‘Death of Vorticism’, Little Review V:10–11 (February–March), pp. 45, 48. In P&P III: 279–80. (1920), ‘Pavlova’, Athenaeum XCIV:4695 (23 April), p. 553. In P&P IV: 50. (1924a), ‘George Antheil’, The Criterion 2:7, pp. 321–31. (1924b), ‘Treatise on Harmony’, transatlantic review I:3 (March), pp. 77–81. In P&P IV: 318–21. (1927), ‘Workshop Orchestration’, New Masses II:5, pp. 137–41. [1927] (1968), ‘How to Read’, in LE 15–40. (1928a), ‘Data’, The Exile 4 (Autumn), pp. 104–17. (1928b), ‘Ezra Pound und Seine Wiener Pläne: Ein Gespräch mit Amerikas modernstem Lyriker’ [Interview with Hans Sachs], Neues Wiener Journal (5 June), pp. 6–7. (1931–2), ‘Machines: Introductory Letter’, The New Review (Winter), pp. 91–2. (1934), ‘Un magnifico libro de P. M. Bardi’, Il Mare XXVII:1302 (24 February), p. 2. In P&P VI: 133. [1934] (1968), ‘Date Line’, in LE 74–87. [1936] (1977), ‘Mediaeval Music and Yves Tinayre’, in EPM 394–7.

(1953), ‘On Wyndham Lewis’, Shenandoah IV:2–3, p. 17. [1939] (2001), ‘Ezra Pound’s “European Paideuma”’, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Paideuma 30:1–2, pp. 225–45. Von Helmholtz, Bastien (pseudonym of Pound) (1914a), ‘John Synge and the Habits of Criticism’, The Egoist (2 February), pp. 53–4. In P&P II: 220. Von Helmholtz, Bastien (pseudonym of Pound) (1914b), ‘The Bourgeois’, The Egoist (2 February), p. 53. In P&P II: 220–1. Von Helmholtz, Bastien (pseudonym of Pound) (1914c), ‘Revolutionary Maxims’, The Egoist (1 June), pp. 217–18. In P&P II: 250. Von Helmholtz, Bastien (pseudonym of Pound) (1914d), ‘Suffragettes’, The Egoist (1 July), p. 254. In P&P II: 261–2.

Volumes and collections (1905–7), ‘Hilda’s Book’, in Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1979), End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H.D., ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King, New York: New Directions, pp. 67–84. (1912), Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, London: Stephen Swift.

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(1991a), Poetry & Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and J. Longenbach, 11 vols, New York: Garland. (1991b), Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn 1915–1924. Ed. Timothy Materer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (1992), A Walking Tour in Southern France, ed. Richard Sieburth, New York: New Directions. (1994a), Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. David M. Gordon, New York: Norton. (1994b), Pound, Thayer, Watson, and the Dial: A Story in Letters, ed. Walter Sutton, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. (1996a), Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (1998a), The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New York: New Directions. (1998b), ‘I Cease Not to Yowl’: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. (1999), Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, New York: Oxford University Press. (2003a), Poems & Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, New York: Library of America. (2003b), Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth, New York: New Directions. [1910] (2005a), The Spirit of Romance, ed. Richard Sieburth, New York: New Directions. (2005b), Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound 1923–1933, ed. Robert Hughes, intro. Margaret Fisher, Emeryville: Second Evening. (2005c), Carte Italiane 1930–1944: Letteratura e Arte, ed. Luca Cesari, Milan: Archinto. (2005d), Early Writings: Poetry and Prose, ed. Ira Nadel, London: Penguin. (2010), Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2015), Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo, Manchester: Carcanet. and George Antheil (2011), Le Testament: An Opera by Ezra Pound. 1923 Facsimile Edition, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes, Emeryville: Second Evening. and E. E. Cummings (1996), Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings, ed. B. Ahearn, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. and Ernest Fenollosa (1959), The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, New York: New Directions. and Walter Morse Rummel (1911), Three Songs of Ezra Pound, London: Augener.

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Index

Admonitions scroll, 63–77, 187 Aestheticism, 10, 141–56, 167, 214, 220–4, 292 Alberti, Leon Batista, 25, 33, 35, 43, 48, 49, 53 Aldington, Richard, 65, 155n12, 156n18, 179, 193, 198, 200, 212n13, 249, 325 Alighieri, Dante, 12, 33, 66, 68, 95, 96, 126, 127, 128, 148, 150, 156n16, 165, 166, 190–2, 216, 264, 226, 276, 293, 390–4, 399, 431, 435, 436, 442n3, 467, 472, 476n40 anarchism, 3, 193–213 Angelico, Fra, 11, 32, 171 Antheil, George, 48, 84, 88, 119, 134nn11,12, 274–6, 278, 279, 305–30, 334, 336–9, 341, 343–5, 347–58, 360–3, 365–7, 370, 372, 374, 375n21, 378, 390, 399, 445, 446 architecture, 10, 38–60 Aristotle, 263, 294, 472 Arles, 32, 33, 39, 40–1, 57, 402 St Trophime, 32, 39–41, 402 Atheling, William, 81, 82, 83, 88, 273, 275, 307, 349, 353, 445

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Bacon, Francis, 231, 241, 244, 245 Balla, Giacomo, 223, 248, 401 Ballet mécanique, 119–20, 123, 134–5n12, 135n16, 136n17, 137n27, 242, 308–9, 315–19, 321, 323, 330, 332n39, 343, 354, 360–75 Bardi, Pier Maria, 52, 402, 405–6, 407 Barthes, Roland, 498 Bartók, Béla, 85, 276, 329, 340, 341, 342, 399, 445, 447, 448 Beach, Sylvia, 307, 309, 316 Beardsley, Aubrey, 141–2, 154, 171, 175, 411 Bedford, Agnes, 78, 80–1, 84, 180, 273–80, 305, 309, 312, 313, 318, 319, 323–4, 336, 341, 344, 349, 356, 360 Bell, Clive, 108–9, 129, 133n4, 135n17, 241 Bellini, Giovanni, 31, 33, 35, 402, 410, 411 Bergson, Henri, 195, 209, 212n9, 213nn25,26, 229n7, 236 Binyon, Laurence, 5, 17, 21, 33, 61–3, 65–6, 68, 70–2, 76n2, 77n3, 183–92 Bird, William, 276, 309, 314, 316, 322, 366

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540

index

BLAST, 100, 113, 135n17, 189–90, 198–9, 201, 215–16, 220, 221, 231, 234, 236, 240, 241, 249, 251, 258n1, 283, 286, 287, 335 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 419, 423, 443nn5,10 Boccioni, Umberto, 236, 248, 250, 252, 401 Botticelli, Sandro, 10, 16, 17, 20, 21–2, 23, 26, 33–4, 142–3, 187, 190–1, 398, 402, 412, 471 Bragaglia, Anton, 235–6, 245n7 Brakhage, Stan, 132, 408, 484 Brancusi, Constantin, 5, 43, 48–9, 54, 56, 257, 283–304, 406, 407, 477, 479, 482 Braque, Georges, 54, 231, 238, 292, 304n16 British Museum, 17, 33, 61–8, 70, 72, 75, 76n2, 77n3, 183–4, 186, 187, 189, 207, 209–10, 213n27, 402 Britten, Benjamin, 278, 343 Brooke Smith, Robert, 11, 167–8 Browning, Robert, 14, 96, 125, 145, 155n2, 163, 170, 398 Bukowski, Charles, 464, 465, 467–8, 469, 470, 474n2 Bullough, Edward, 109–10, 115, 124, 135 Bunting, Basil, 131, 325, 411 Buonarotti, Michelangelo, 20, 265, 295 Burckhardt, Jacob, 9, 15, 16, 22, 24 Burne-Jones, Edward, 142, 155n9, 159, 165, 166 Byzantine art, 15, 20, 25, 33–6

Casella, Alfredo, 276, 316 Castiglione, Baldassare, 13, 14, 32n2, 291 Cavalcanti, Guido, 11, 347, 415–44 Cendrars, Blaise, 114 Cerio, Ferruccio, 408, 414n18 Chilesotti, Oscar, 446–7, 450, 453 Chute, Desmond, 398 cinema, 106–38, 360–75, 407–9, 483–502 Circe, 266, 272, 409, 481 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 115–16, 120, 134n11, 137n29, 231–45, 362 Cocteau, Jean, 307, 328, 337, 342, 399 Collier, John, 202–3, 206 Collignon, Raymonde, 82, 275, 278, 279n1 conceptual art, 156–76 Confucius and Confucianism, 61, 64, 67–70, 72–6, 96, 154, 169, 187, 262, 267, 413n13, 473, 476n42 Copland, Aaron, 309, 323 Corbusier, Le, 38, 43, 50, 59, 122 Cowell, Henry, 359, 365, 374n10, 375n12 Cravens, Margaret, 179, 181n4 Criterion, The, 275, 307, 310, 312, 347, 353 Crosby, Caresse, 92 Cubism, 24, 54, 56, 59n3, 113, 121–2, 131, 134n12, 136n17, 138n33, 213n25, 217, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 244, 250, 252, 260, 261, 290, 293, 497, 502n16 Cummings, Edward Estlin, 411, 478

Cage, John, 343, 344 Campion, Thomas, 319, 334, 374n9, 417–18 Carpaccio, Vittore, 10, 23, 31 Carra, Carlo, 248, 278, 316, 324, 402–3, 406

Da Romano, Cunizza, 409, 419, 434–6, 441, 443n14 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 31, 151–2, 381 Daniel, Arnaut, 15, 41, 79, 80, 171, 248, 348, 373, 376–7, 386, 446

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index D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 254, 256, 323 Debussy, Claude, 85, 88, 177, 178, 179–80, 335, 336, 341, 346n1, 348, 354–5, 356, 445, 446 della Francesca, Piero, 20, 21, 31, 52, 402, 410 Delluc, Louis, 112–13, 115, 117 Dial, The, 38, 52, 91, 114, 115, 288, 289, 291, 417 Dismorr, Jessica, 231 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 78, 83–5, 180, 273, 274, 276, 278, 326, 336, 349, 358n4, 373, 384, 409, 417, 445, 446 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 236–7 Duccio, Agostino di, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25–8, 35, 53–6, 59, 402, 410 Duchamp, Marcel, 48, 167, 288, 289, 309, 413n14, 450 Dudek, Louis, 478, 479 Egoist, The, 162, 166, 193–4, 194–8, 200–1, 202–3, 206, 209, 210, 211nn2,4, 212nn10,20, 214, 215, 216, 250, 285, 358n4 Eisenstein, Sergei, 131–2, 137n28 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 41, 90, 125, 131, 136n19, 163, 223, 225, 227, 228, 230n16, 234, 241, 250, 257, 268, 278, 289, 302n1, 310, 317, 399 Epstein, Jacob, 20, 35, 43, 46, 48, 54, 166, 193, 197, 200–1, 203–5, 207, 211nn5,6, 212, 218, 284, 285, 287, 289–90, 301, 303nn2,3 Ernst, Max, 401–2, 407, 413nn6,8 Excideuil, 40–2, 57 Farr, Florence, 349 Fascist Italy, 5, 43, 47, 51–2, 58, 86, 247, 253–8, 330, 401–3, 405–9, 413n9, 414n18

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 541

541

Fauré, Gabriel, 348, 356 Fenollosa, Ernest, 21, 61, 62, 63, 75, 88, 95, 101–2, 126–7, 137n24, 158, 168, 175n1, 188, 236–7, 240, 263, 269, 491, 492–3, 499 Chinese Written Character, see Pound, Ezra, Editions. Fenollosa, Mary, 62 Ford, Madox Ford, 89, 91, 221, 225, 307, 309, 311, 314, 323, 336, 345, 349 Frampton, Hollis, 483–502 Magellan, 485, 498–9 Zorns Lemma, 486–9, 501n4 Francisci, Pietro, 408 Freer, Charles Lang, 67, 158 Freud, Lucian, 231, 244–5 Frobenius, Ferdinand Georg, 324, 468, 484 Futurism, 42, 136n17, 201, 234, 235–6, 247–59, 322, 399–401, 402 Gance, Abel, 114, 133n9 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 14, 16, 46, 49, 88, 97–100, 166, 193, 200, 205, 207–10, 211nn5,6, 212nn13,18,24, 216, 236, 260, 283, 285–7, 289, 290, 291, 301, 303nn2,3,4,7, 337 Hieratic Head, 207–9 The Red Stone Dancer, 98–9, 291 Gautier, Théophile, 162, 347, 354–7 Gill, Eric, 46, 398, 399, 401 Giotto, 471, 475n35 Gosse, Edmund, 193, 200, 206–7, 210, 212nn19,20,21.22 Gourmont, Remy de, 347, 348, 354–7, 407 great bass, 360–75 Grosseteste, Robert, 401, 488–9, 493, 502n11

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542 H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], 89, 145–51, 155n18, 178, 180, 473–4 harmony [music], 350–2 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 136n18 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 197, 199–200, 364–5 Hemingway, Ernest, 91, 307, 349 Henghes, Heinz, 403–4 Heyman, Katherine Ruth, 78–9, 177, 273, 349, 352, 445 Hiler, Hilaire, 401, 412n6 Hitler, Adolf, 225 Hokusai, 169, 174–5 Holden, Charles, 46 Homer, 66, 91, 174, 266, 300 Hoppé, Emil Otto, 232, 241 Huddleston, Sisley, 89, 91, 102 Hudson Review, The, 480 Hulme, Thomas Ernest, 35, 194, 211n6, 284–5, 287 Hungarian Quartet, 85, 445, 447 Hynes, Gladys, 398, 399 Il Mare, 43, 254, 401, 403, 408, 412n6, 413n9 Janácek, Leoš, 340–1 Joyce, James, 123, 130, 131, 136n19, 137n26, 220, 221, 222, 224, 228, 250, 252, 257, 289, 303n7, 307, 309, 312, 314, 315, 332n45, 336, 342, 345, 349, 373, 412n3 Kandinsky, Wassily, 135n17, 252, 260–72, 502n13 Kasper, John, 464, 465, 468, 474n3, 475n5, 479, 480, 482 Kracauer, Siegfried, 112, 136n19 Kuanon, 76, 95–7, 187–8, 191, 468 Laughlin, James, 279, 405, 413n8, 471, 477

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 542

index Lawes, William, 409, 417, 418 Léger, Fernand, 50, 119–23, 128, 134nn11,12, 134n14, 137n27, 241, 308–9, 316, 360–5, 368–9, 372–4, 375n21, 399, 413n8 Leighton, Frederic, 199, 206 Lekakis, Michael, 477–82 Leslie, George Dunlop, 199, 212n12 Leucothea, 463, 464, 467, 468, 473 Lewis, Wyndham, 43, 89, 133n5, 135n17, 186, 192, 1198, 202, 203, 205, 211nn5,6, 214–30, 231, 249, 258n7, 277, 278, 283, 287, 289, 303n2, 337, 398, 401, 412nn3,4 BLAST see separate entry Blasting and Bombardeering, 225 Caliph’s Design, 222–3 ‘Doppelgänger’, 227–8 Enemy of the Stars, 221–2 ‘Revolutionary Simpleton’, 223–5 Tarr, 214, 221–2, 228, 229n13 Time and Western Man, 214, 225, 228–9, 278, 398 Timon of Athens, 203, 212n16, 214, 215–20, 222, 228, 229nn3,7 L’Herbier, Marcel, 132n1, 307, 365 Little Review, The, 119, 214, 288, 299, 365, 370, 375n19 Lombardo, Pietro and Tullio, 17, 19, 20, 32, 50, 56, 59, 402, 410 McAlmon, Robert, 307, 413n10 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 10, 15, 22, 24, 25, 31, 35, 36n3, 44, 265, 267, 296, 410 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 163, 355 Mantegna, Andrea, 215 Marinetti, Filippo, Tomasso, 3, 43, 193, 224, 247–59, 322, 353, 401, 412n4 Marsden, Dora, 193–4, 196, 201, 209, 211n2, 212n10, 213n26

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index Martinelli, Sheri, 463–76 Matisse, Henri, 223, 233, 237 Meliès, George, 106–7 Miller, Henry, 450–1, 453, 457, 457n3, 458n23 Monti, Rolando, 403, 413n11 Morris, William, 145, 155n12, 398, 399, 401 Münch, Gerhart, 85, 329, 330, 349, 445–59 Murphy, Gerald, 119, 134nn1,12, 135nn13,15, 242, 308–9, 331n5, 360–75, 375n21 Mussolini, Benito, 43, 44, 52, 225, 255, 256, 322, 408 Neoplatonism, 26, 110, 125, 135n17, 219, 228, 441, 489, 494, 502n10 New Age, The, 82–3, 115, 338 New Freewoman see The Egoist Nietzsche, Friedrich, 229n7, 355 Noh, 15, 61, 63, 87, 88, 94, 95, 96, 101–2, 104, 189, 343, 439 Ozenfant, Amédée, 121 occult, 180 Odysseus, 154, 225, 265–7, 269, 272 Odyssey, 300, 463, 471, 481, 483, 501 Pasti, Matteo de, 53–4 Pater, Walter, 145–56, 155n12, 156n20, 167, 355 photo-Secessionists, 232–3, 242 photography, 115–17, 118–19, 129 Picabia, Francis, 48, 175, 238, 303n9, 307, 309, 401, 407 Picasso, Pablo, 21, 54, 91, 190, 191, 215, 223, 228, 231, 234, 238, 260, 290, 292–3, 303n9, 304nn16,17, 337, 401, 406, 502n16 Pisanello, 410–11 Polignac, Princess de, 328, 447

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 543

543

Pound, Dorothy, 12, 17, 33, 65, 85, 87, 92, 94, 97, 100–1, 179, 180, 274, 275, 278, 279, 307, 312, 314, 321, 323, 330, 362, 399, 450, 452, 455, 464, 472, 479, 482 Pound, Ezra Dance Dance of the Birth of the Dragon, 94–7 Editions Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, The, 126–7, 137n24, 236, 240, 269, 491, 499 La Martinelli, 228 Music Cavalcanti, 84, 277, 278, 415–44 Collis o Heliconii, 278 Le Testament de François Villon, 84, 102, 274–7, 279, 305, 309, 310, 313–14, 317, 318–19, 324, 328, 334–46, 349, 360, 362, 366–8, 372, 375n15, 378, 415, 418, 421, 439 violin music, 312–13, 329, 378–94, 420 Poetry: THE CANTOS The Cantos, 124, 127, 131–2, 133n7, 136n19, 136nn21,22, 137n26, 167, 184, 214, 222, 225–6, 260, 265–7, 294–5, 300, 301–2, 484, 485, 496–8 1917: ‘Three Cantos’ [Ur-Cantos], 13–14, 21–2, 96–7, 190–1, 215–18, 237, 287 1925: A Draft of XVI Cantos, 128, 292, 299, 301, 397, 391: I, 266, 300; II, 219; III, 96; IV, 217–19, 222; VII, 94, 96, 227, 229n6, 287, 301; VIII–XI [Malatesta], 22, 24, 52, 54, 57, 293, 300, 301; XIV–XV [Hell], 15, 128–9, 135n17, 219, 222; XVI, 128–9, 131, 135n17, 362, 374, 375n24

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544 Pound, Ezra (cont.) 1928: A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, 398, 391: XVII, 26, 35, 57, 58–9, 224, 398; XIX, 224, 300, 399–400; XX, 17, 26, 33, 81, 300, 480–1 1930: A Draft of XXX Cantos, 96, 296, 398–9: XXIX, 41, 57; XXX, 398 1933: Eleven New Cantos: XXXV, 405; XXXVI, 137n25, 430–4, 489 1937: Fifth Decad of Cantos, The: XLV, 10, 11, 16, 17, 22, 32–3, 40, 402, 423; XLVI, 51, 57; XLIX, 61, 62, 68–70, 74–6, 186–7, 192, 402 1944: ‘Cantos LXXII–LXXIII’, 256–7, 259n13 1948: Pisan Cantos, The, 17, 31, 33, 35, 41, 57, 70, 71, 74, 101–2, 144, 156n21, 157, 168, 169, 188, 214, 278, 348, 409–12, 414n17, 416, 428, 450: LXXIV, 16, 35, 57, 58, 70, 71, 101, 102, 187, 188, 191, 267, 408–11, 441–4, 443n14; LXXV, 397, 409, 450, 457, 458n10; LXXX, 32, 33, 42, 61, 84, 102, 141–4, 150, 153, 154, 156n21, 171–4, 176n5, 180–1, 183–4, 186, 409, 411; LXXXI, 71, 84, 229n2, 348, 402, 409, 412, 417 1955: Section : Rock Drill de los Cantares, 85, 264, 287, 464, 467, 484: XC–XCV, 406, 463, 464, 468, 469, 470, 472; XCIII, 36, 432, 463, 465, 467–8, 471, 472 1959: Thrones de los Cantares, 35, 36, 61, 68, 70, 76, 264, 299, 463, 464, 471, 484: XCVII, 435, 441, 464 1969: Drafts and Fragments, 36, 57, 70, 76, 227–9, 264, 269, 299, 302, 409, 471, 472

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 544

index Poetry: Other works A Lume Spento, 147, 155n14 BLAST poems, 89, 100, 198, 219–20, 240–1, 335 Cathay, 71, 220, 225, 337 Hilda’s Book, 144–51 Homage to Sextus Propertius, 220, 223, 229n8, 252, 266, 291, 373, 380–1, 382–5, 386 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 10, 22, 32, 33, 107, 113, 115, 123, 163, 221, 229nn9,12,13,14, 237, 287, 291, 360, 367, 415, 416 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 262–4, 491 ‘Night Litany’, 248, 251 ‘Seafarer, The’, 225, 348–9 ‘To Whistler, American’, 157, 170 Prose ABC of Reading, 37n4, 126–7, 377–8, 381, 485, 493, 498 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 84, 305, 307, 312, 314, 337, 347–58, 360, 366 ‘Cavalcanti’, 398 ‘Date Line’, 378–9 ‘Gathering the Limbs of Osiris’, 11, 14, 15, 125, 143, 144, 171, 174, 337, 349 Gaudier Brzeska. A Memoir, 20, 32, 98–100, 113, 129, 130, 135n17, 137n29, 163, 166, 262–3, 303n4, 237, 240, 241, 252, 260, 355, 403 Guide to Kulchur, 11, 20, 33, 40, 47, 54, 57, 175, 256, 263, 264, 297, 303nn4,5, 305, 342, 349–50, 359, 365, 399, 418, 489 ‘How to Read’, 487–8, 493 ‘Patria mia’, 133n6, 170, 248 Spirit of Romance, 13, 125–6, 152–4, 165–6, 268, 335, 416–17

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index ‘The New Sculpture’, 197, 206–7, 283, 211n1 ‘The Serious Artist’, 103, 142, 143, 144, 152–3 Pre-Raphaelite, 39, 141–56, 170, 398, 475n34 primitivism, 21, 207–11 rappel à l’ordre, 256, 399, 412 Ray, Man, 119, 134n12, 241, 309, 360, 362, 364, 375n23, 401, 413n14 Rembrandt, 11, 32, 142, 154, 162, 170, 171, 411 Renaissance, 3, 9, 10–37, 44, 49, 52–7, 85, 142, 151–4, 155n5, 158, 167, 170, 191, 215, 222, 255, 330, 335–7, 342–3, 377, 380, 383, 402, 412, 417, 447, 453, 486 Respighi, Ottorino, 317, 322 Reverdy, Pierre, 131 Rexroth, Kenneth, 131, 132, 138n33 Rhymers’ Club, 141, 155n2 Rimini, 52–6 Rodker, John, 123, 130, 131, 136n19, 398, 400 Rome, 4, 14, 36, 51, 86, 92, 220, 254, 255, 256, 314, 316, 322, 401, 402, 403, 408, 413n11, 451 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 142–54, 155n13, 156nn15,16, 415 Rudge, Mary, 276 Rudge, Olga, 84–6, 92–3, 273, 276, 305–30, 349, 362, 407, 445, 447–8, 474n2 Rummel, Walter, 79–81, 177–82, 273, 274, 335, 336, 349, 445, 446 Ruskin, John, 49, 159, 162, 184, 398 Ruttman, Walter, 124, 128, 129, 130–1, 136n19 Sage, Kay, 403–4 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 43, 47, 51, 250, 255, 257, 401, 402–3, 407

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 545

545

Sanzio, Raphael, 13, 14, 37n4, 291 Sargent, John Singer, 202 Satie, Erik, 85, 276, 317, 334, 337, 341, 445 Schifanoia Palace, 22, 25, 29–31, 35, 412 Schönberg, Arnold, 271, 324, 334, 337, 341, 343, 393, 454–5 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 355 Scriabin, Alexander, 78, 83, 85, 445, 446, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457n2 sculpture, 17–20, 26, 42–3, 283–304, 477–82 Seferis, George, 479 Serly, Tibor, 329, 448 Shakespear, Olivia, 97, 98, 179, 225, 312, 330 Shakespeare, William, 81, 202–3, 215–22, 399, 439, 441 Simmel, Georg, 107 Sirmione, 11–12, 13, 14, 175n3, 176n5 Sitwell, Osbert, 91–2 Sordello, 13, 14, 125, 418, 434, 436, 443n13 Sorel, Georges, 193–6, 209, 211n6, 212nn8,9, 213n25 Spann, Marcella, 473, 475n32 Stein, Gertrude, 91, 131, 349 Stieglitz, Alfred, 134n11, 233, 237, 238, 242 Stirner, Max, 193–6, 211n4, 212n8 Stokes, Adrian, 20, 25–6, 37n7, 52–8 Strand, Paul, 231, 232, 233, 242–4, 245 Stravinsky, Igor, 84, 85, 102, 103, 119, 241, 278, 306, 312, 315, 318, 329, 336, 337, 341, 343, 347, 352, 354, 378, 393, 445, 447, 448, 453, 483 Surrealism, 23–4, 324, 399–403, 408 Swinburne, Algernon, 145, 155n2, 251, 336

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546 Symbolism, 93, 136n19, 213n25, 216, 267, 292, 355, 445 Symons, Arthur, 142, 155n3 Synge, John, 197, 199, 212n20 Tempio Malatestiano, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24–8, 33, 35, 43, 48, 52–6, 57, 59, 410 Thomson, Virgil, 317, 319, 330, 334, 341 Thornycroft, William Hamo, 206–7, 212nn21,22 Times, The, 89, 159, 198–200, 202, 205, 206, 212n20, 219–20, 313 Times Literary Supplement, The, 132n1, 162, 199–200, 205 Tinayre, Yves, 82, 83, 275, 278, 279n1, 313, 314, 318, 319, 376 Tiresias, 265, 271, 272 Titian, 10, 23, 31 transatlantic review, the, 4, 311, 314, 331n10, 347, 365 troubadour music, 78–81 ukiyo-e, 64, 65, 76, 168, 174–5 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 405 Upward, Alan, 197, 211n2, 212nn10,11 usura, 11, 15, 16, 22, 32–3, 36, 39, 57, 60n5, 399, 402, 423, 446, 496 Velázquez, Diego, 142, 154, 155, 171, 411 Venice, 9, 10, 11, 17–19, 23, 26, 31, 33, 35, 36n3, 39, 40, 43, 56, 57–9, 76, 78, 92–3, 161, 168, 248, 258n3, 276, 278, 308, 314, 323, 325, 326, 328, 399, 445, 447, 451 Biennale, 253, 255, 401, 405–7, 448

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 546

index Santa Maria dei Miracoli, 17–20, 56–7, 399, 410 Verona, 11–14, 15, 23, 33, 38, 39–40, 49–50 San Zeno, 12–13, 15, 16, 19, 32, 39, 49–50, 56–7 Villon, François, 84, 102, 224, 274–7, 279, 305, 313, 334–46, 360, 415, 418 Vitalism, 127–8 Vivaldi, Antonio, 85–6, 181, 278, 330, 398, 448, 458n6 Vorticism, 47, 110–11, 114–16, 119, 121–2, 131, 135n17, 193–213, 222–4, 228, 230n20, 234–46, 247, 249–53, 258n6, 284–8, 289–91, 334, 337, 360, 361, 401, 491, 493 Vortography, 115–20, 129, 231–46 vortoscope, 233–4, 362, 363 Waddell, Laurence Austine, 468 Wadsworth, Edward, 43, 47, 89, 135n17, 136n19, 197, 200–1, 202, 205, 223, 234, 245, 401 Wagner, Richard, 273, 308, 336, 348, 355, 445 Weber, Max, 236, 237, 238, 242 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 157–76, 261, 411 Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate, 158, 162, 170, 171–4, 176n5 Nocturne in Black and Gold, 157, 159, 162, 164–5, 167, 169, 170 trial of, 159–61, 164 White, Hayden, 497–8 Wilde, Oscar, 143, 221, 303n3 Williams, William Carlos, 13, 16, 62, 78, 89, 91, 97, 131, 138n32, 163, 168, 293–4, 303n2, 307, 412n3, 474nn2,10

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index

547

Woolf, Virginia, 132n1, 143, 155n7 Worringer, Wilhelm, 54, 284–5

233, 237, 249, 269, 294, 326, 349, 398, 399 Ysaÿe, Eugène, 173–4

Yeats, William Butler, 29, 62, 65, 87, 88, 91, 95, 101, 102, 141, 142, 144, 152, 154, 156, 180, 183, 189,

Zayas, Marius de, 238–40, 242, 332n43 Zukofsky, Louis, 86, 130–1, 138nn30,31,33

5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 547

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5961_Preda_Part-05.indd 548

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