Katherine Anne Porter (83 page)

Intellectuals, she said, always wanted to change things because they had an unhappy childhood. “Well, I never had an unhappy childhood, what is the use of having an unhappy anything?” Léon Blum, then Premier of France, had had an unhappy childhood, and she inclined to the theory that the political uneasiness of France could be traced to this fact.

There was not, of course, going to be another war (this was in 1937!), but if there was, there
would
be, naturally; and she
never tired of repeating that dancing and war are the same thing “because both are forward and back,” while revolution, on the contrary, is up and down, which is why it gets nowhere. Sovietism was even then going rapidly out of fashion in her circles, because they had discovered that it is very conservative, even if the Communists do not think so. Anarchists, being rarities, did not go out of fashion so easily. The most interesting thing that ever happened to America was the Civil War; but General Lee was severely to be blamed for leading his country into that war, just the same, because he must have known they could not win; and to her, it was absurd that anyone should join battle in defense of a principle in face of certain defeat. For practical purposes, honor was not even a word. Still it was an exciting war and gave an interest to America which that country would never have had without it. “If you win you do not lose and if you lose you do not win.” Even as she was writing these winged words, the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans against the Franco-Fascists, kept obtruding itself. And why? “Not because it is a revolution, but because I know so well the places they are mentioning and the things there they are destroying.” When she was little in Oakland, California, she loved the big, nice American fires that had “so many horses and firemen to attend them,” and when she was older, she found that floods, for one thing, always read worse in the papers than they really are; besides how can you care much about what is going on if you don’t see it or know the people? For this reason she had Santa Teresa being indifferent to faraway Chinese while she was founding convents in Spain. William Seabrook came to see her to find out if she was as interesting as her books. She told him she was, and he discovered black magic in the paintings of Sir Francis Rose. And when she asked Dashiell Hammett why so many young men authors were writing novels about tender young male heroines instead of the traditional female ones, he explained that it was because as women grew more and more self-confident, men lost confidence in themselves, and turned to each other, or became their own subjects for fiction. This, or something else, reminded her several times that she could not write a novel, therefore no one could any more, and no one should waste time trying.

Somehow by such roundabouts we arrive at the important,
the critical event in all this eventful history. Success. Success in this world, here and now, was what Miss Stein wanted. She knew just what it was, how it should look and feel, how much it should weigh and what it was worth over the counter. It was not enough to be a genius if you had to go on supporting your art on a private income. To be the center of a recondite literary cult, to be surrounded by listeners and imitators and seekers, to be mentioned in the same breath with James Joyce, and to have turned out bales of titles by merely writing a half-hour each day: she had all that, and what did it amount to? There was a great deal more and she must have it. As to her history of the human race, she confessed: “I have always been bothered. . . but mostly. . . because after all I do as simply as it can, as commonplacely as it can say, what everybody can and does do; I never know what they can do, I really do not know what they are, I do not think that any one can think because if they do, then who is who?”

It was high time for a change, and yet it occurred at hazard. If there had not been a beautiful season in October and part of November, 1932, permitting Miss Stein to spend that season quietly in her country house, the
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
might never have been written. But it was written, and Miss Stein became a best-seller in America; she made real money. With Miss Toklas, she had a thrilling tour of the United States and found crowds of people eager to see her and listen to her. And at last she got what she had really wanted all along: to be published in the
Atlantic Monthly
and the
Saturday Evening Post
.

Now she had everything, or nearly. For a while she was afraid to write any more, for fear her latest efforts would not please her public. She had never learned who she was, and yet suddenly she had become somebody else. “You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay you, and when your public knows you and does want to pay you, you are not the same you.”

This would be of course the proper moment to take leave, as our heroine adds at last a golden flick of light to her self-portrait. “Anyway, I was a celebrity.” The practical result was that she could no longer live on her income. But she and Alice B. Toklas moved into an apartment once occupied by Queen
Christina of Sweden, and they began going out more, and seeing even more people, and talking, and Miss Stein settled every question as it came up, more and more. But who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story.

She and Alice B. Toklas enjoyed both the wars. The first one especially being a lark with almost no one getting killed where you could see, and it ended so nicely too, without changing anything. The second was rather more serious. She lived safely enough in Bilignin throughout the German occupation, and there is a pretty story that the whole village conspired to keep her presence secret. She had been a citizen of the world in the best European tradition; for though America was her native land, she had to live in Europe because she felt at home there. In the old days people paid little attention to wars, fought as they were out of sight by professional soldiers. She had always liked the notion, too, of the gradual Orientalization of the West, the peaceful penetration of the East into European culture. It had been going on a great while, and all Western geniuses worth mentioning were Orientals: look at Picasso, look at Einstein. Russians are Tartars, Spaniards are Saracens—had not all great twentieth-century painting been Spanish? And her cheerful conclusion was, that “Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century also, with the Oriental mixing with the European.” She added, as a casual afterthought, “Perhaps Europe is finished.”

That was in 1938, and she could not be expected to know that war was near. They had only been sounding practice
alertes
in Paris against expected German bombers since 1935. She spoke out of her natural frivolity and did not mean it. She liked to prophesy, but warned her hearers that her prophecies never came out right, usually the very opposite, and no matter what happened, she was always surprised. She was surprised again: as the nations of Europe fell, and the Germans came again over the frontiers of France for the third time in three generations, the earth shook under her own feet, and not somebody else’s. It made an astonishing difference. Something mysterious touched her in her old age. She got a fright, and this time
not for ancient vanished civilizations, but for this civilization, this moment; and she was quite thrilled with relief and gay when the American army finally came in, and the Germans were gone. She did not in the least know why the Germans had come, but they were gone, and so far as she could see, the American army had chased them out. She remembered with positive spread-eagle patriotism that America was her native land. At last America itself belonged to Miss Stein, and she claimed it, in a formal published address to other Americans. Anxiously she urged them to stay rich, to be powerful and learn how to use power, not to waste themselves; for the first time she used the word “spiritual.” Ours was a spiritual as well as a material fight; Lincoln’s great lucid words about government of the people by the people for the people suddenly sounded like a trumpet through her stammering confession of faith, she wanted nothing now to stand between her and her newly discovered country. By great good luck she was born on the winning side and she was going to stay there. And we were not to forget about money as the source of power; “Remember the depression, don’t be afraid to look it in the face and find out the reason why, if you don’t find out the reason why you’ll go poor and my God, how I would hate to have my native land go poor.”

The mind so long shapeless and undisciplined could not now express any knowledge out of its long willful ignorance. But the heart spoke its crude urgent language. She had liked the doughboys in the other war well enough, but this time she fell in love with the whole American army below the rank of lieutenant. She “breathed, ate, drank, lived GI’s,” she told them, and inscribed numberless photographs for them, and asked them all to come back again. After her flight over Germany in an American bomber, she wrote about how, so often, she would stand staring into the sky watching American war planes going over, longing to be up there again with her new loves, in the safe, solid air. She murmured, “bless them, bless them.” She had been impatient with many of them who had still been naïve enough to believe they were fighting against an evil idea that threatened everybody; some of them actually were simple enough to say they had been—or believed they had been—fighting for democratic government. “What difference
does it make what kind of government you have?” she would ask. “All governments are alike. Just remember you won the war.” But still, at the end, she warned them to have courage and not be just yes or no men. And she said, “Bless them, bless them.”

It was the strangest thing, as if the wooden umbrella feeling the rain had tried to forsake its substance and take on the nature of its form; and was struggling slowly, slowly, much too late, to unfold.

1947

E
.
P
.:
CANTO
XIII
(Kung)

I
N
Mexico, many years ago, Hart Crane and I were reading again
Pavannes and Divisions
, and at some dogmatic statement in the text Crane suddenly burst out: “I’m tired of Ezra Pound!” And I asked him: “Well, who else is there?” He thought a few seconds and said: “It’s true there’s nobody like him, nobody to take his place.” This was the truth for us then, and it is still the truth for many of us who came up, were educated, you might say, in contemporary literature, not at schools at all but by five writers: Henry James, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. The beginning artist is educated by whoever helps him to learn how to work his own vein, who helps him to fix his standards, and who gives him courage. I believe I can speak for a whole generation of writers who acknowledge that these five men were in just this way, the great educators of their time.

The temptation in writing about
The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941
is to get down to individual letters, to quote endlessly, to lapse into gossip, to go into long dissertations on the state of society; the strange confusions of the human mind; music, sculpture, painting, war, economics; the menace of the American university; the weakness of having a private life; and finally the hell on earth it is to be at once a poet and a man of perfect judgment in all matters relating to art in a world of the deaf, dumb, and blind, of nitwits, numbskulls, and outright villains. One might go on for hours and pages citing instances, comparing letters, tracing change and development from year to year, noting enthusiasms turning into abhorrence, admirations into contempt, splendid altruistic plans to foster the arts falling into ruin because almost nobody would help, and following the frantic pattern of the poet’s relations with his assortment of friends, for such I suppose they must be called.
Friendship with Pound seems to have been a very uncertain state.

It would all be false, and misleading from the main road. These letters are the most revealing documents I have read since those of Boswell or Jane Carlyle, but how differently revealing. For where nearly all letters we know are attempts to express personal feeling, to give private news, to entertain; or set-pieces on a subject, but still meant for one reader; these letters as published contain hardly one paragraph which does not relate in one way or another to one sole theme—the arts. Almost nothing about the weather, or how the writer is feeling that day; and a magnificent disregard for how the reader is feeling, except now and then: to William Carlos Williams, 1909, “I hope to God you have no feelings. If you have, burn this
before
reading.” He then launches into a scarifying analysis of his dear friend’s latest poetry.

There are very few landscapes; very little about health. The poet is married, a marriage that now has lasted nearly thirty-five years, so there must have been some sort of family life, but the reader would hardly guess it. Now and then he remarks on the difficulty of paying rent, but you understand at once that the difficulties of paying rent and being an artist are closely connected. He mentions once or twice that he is aging a trifle, or feels tired, but he is tired of fighting people who fight art, or he feels too old to take on a certain job of work. Once he mentions kittens in a letter to William Carlos Williams, but I feel sure he meant something else; it must have been a code.
*
To his father he writes literary gossip, and remarks that he is playing tennis that afternoon. To his mother he mentions the marriage of Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington, and later writes to her, “I am profoundly pained to hear that you prefer Marie Corelli to Stendhal, but I cannot help it.” He remembers Yeats’s father on an elephant at Coney Island; but that was Jack Yeats, after all, a painter—otherwise one knows he might have sat on an elephant all day without a glance from Pound.