A cautionary tale for those who so willingly proclaim the latest discoveries of the literary promoters to be masterpieces.
In Humphrey Carpenter’s 900-page biography of Ezra Pound, A Serious Character: the life of Ezra Pound, the man is nearly as annoying a century later as he must have been in real life. Half-literate, sloppy, hyperactive, supremely egoistical (even when promoting other artists); a young man whose eccentricities, confined to the harmless realm of literature, turned toxic in middle age when he left letters for politics. A narcissist incapable of admitting error. A flinger of insults when criticized, or just to claim superiority, but also a kind and generous friend. A man who, aspiring to be regarded as an intellectual, lacked the discipline to become truly learned about anything. In short, an American snake-oil salesman purveying poetry and invented poetic movements with all the boastful ignorance of a circus promoter. And the exact model of millions of obsessives today who embrace crackpot theories and bigotries and spread them enthusiastically on social media.
Immediately after his meeting with Mussolini he began a period of frenetic activity, in which he set himself up as a prophet of salvation through right economics, an interpreter of history who could save the world from its errors, a scourge of government who could unmask international conspiracies. . . .
It might be supposed from this that he had lost his sense of proportion; yet he was only behaving in character. The fervour he now devoted to questions of economics and government was the same with which he had pushed himself into the London literary world in 1909, had set up Imagism, promoted Vorticism, and championed Gaudier-Brzeska, Joyce, and Eliot.
Pound’s internet was, of course, the radio, and his infamous wartime broadcasts from Italy got him arrested, charged with treason on dubious grounds, and confined to a mental hospital on dubious grounds for more than twelve years. Within five years he was receiving regular visits from a fan club of flaky young groupies: proto-hipster would-be poets, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites.
And yet this jackass did somehow produce a few lines of memorable poetry, was credited by William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams as having a fine ear for rhythm, and by T. S. Eliot for editing “The Waste Land” into what came to be regarded as the poster-poem of Modernism. Having said that . . . if one were inclined to skepticism about Modernism, a closer acquaintance with its leading lights is unlikely to change that inclination. Even Eliot, whose public persona was downright priggish, turns up here writing silly letters to Pound and exchanging ridiculous nicknames with him (Possum for Eliot, Brer Rabbit for Pound). These are men in their 30s, not schoolboys. Modernism’s rebellion against traditions and conventions may have aired out literary salons that had grown staid and stuffy; but it also opened the doors to a boatload of half-baked nonsense pretending to be art, supported by equally half-baked claims that artistic judgment itself is nonsense, that whoever proclaims himself an artist is one, and that whatever claims to be art is immune from critical appraisal.
All the attempts of later avant-garde enthusiasts to find profundity in his work are rebuked by Pound himself. At 81, asked to explain the structure of his Cantos, he answers, “It’s a botch. . . . I knew too little about so many things. I’ve read too little and I read very slowly. . . . 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.” His defenders have claimed alternately that a) he said no such thing, or that b) the poet’s judgment of his own work has no value. To which I say, well, o-o-okay! A year or two later he tells Allen Ginsberg, “At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron.” When Ginsberg praises Pound’s poetry, Pound says, “A mess. . . . Stupid and ignorant all the way through. Stupid and ignorant.” He also renounced the anti-Jewish calumnies in which he had indulged.
Thus in his dotage Ezra Pound seems to have arrived, finally, at a kind of wisdom and self-knowledge, à la King Lear—reminding me of that time-tested definition of tragedy: wisdom comes, but too late.