Katherine Anne Porter (84 page)

No, this was not the point. Ezra Pound detested the “private life,” denied that he ever had one, and despised those who were weak enough to need one. He was a warrior who lived on the battlefield, a place of contention and confusion, where a man shows all sides of himself without taking much thought for appearances. His own individual being is all the time tucked safely away within him, guiding his thoughts and feelings, as well as, at a long remove, his acts and words.

How right he was in so many things. The ferocious urge of his energy, his belief in himself with all his fears, his longing to be part of the world and his time, his curious lack of judgment of things outside his real interest now appear in these letters, and it is the truest document I have seen of that falling world between 1850 and 1950. We have been falling for a century or more, and Ezra Pound came along just at the right time to see what was happening.

He was a man concerned with public questions: specifically at first the question of the arts, the place of the artist in society, and he had a fanatical desire to force entire populations to respect art even if they could not understand it. (Indeed, he demanded reverence without understanding, for he sincerely did not believe that art was for the multitude. Whatever was too much praised he distrusted—even to the works of Sophocles. This is the inconsistency of his attitude all the way through: the attempt to force poetry upon people whom he believed not fitted to understand it.)

He believed himself to be the most patient soul alive, but he was not patient, he was tenacious, quite another thing. He was blowing up in wrath regularly from the very start, but he did not give up. He did not give up because he was incapable of abandoning a faith so furious it had the quality of religious fanaticism.

Witness his running fight, beginning in 1912, with Harriet Monroe, who controlled
Poetry
;
Poetry
was Pound’s one hope in this country for a good number of years, so, some of the time, and at great cost to his nervous system, he controlled Miss Monroe. His exasperation with that innocent, unteachable, hard-trying woman came to the point where he was all the same as beating her over the head with a baseball bat. I should
like to see the other side of this correspondence: her patience, or whatever it was, and her ability to absorb punishment, were equal to her inability to change her ways.

When Miss Monroe got really frightened at some of the things he sent her, he wrote: “Don’t print anything of mine you think will kill the review, but. . . the public can go to the devil. It is the public’s function to prevent the artist’s expression by hook or by crook. . . . Given my head I’d stop any periodical in a week, only we are bound to run five years anyhow, we’re in such a beautiful position to save the public’s soul by punching its face that it seems a crime not to do so.”

So it went for twenty-four long years, one of the most sustained literary wars on record, and yet it is hard to see what they would have done without each other. Harriet Monroe was his one instrument in this country, and continually she broke in his hands. She had some very genteel notions about language, and a schoolgirl taste for pretty verses that rhymed nicely and expressed delicate feelings, preferably about nature. (“No, most emphatically I will not ask Eliot to write down to any audience whatever,” Pound wrote her in 1914. “I daresay my instinct was sound enough when I volunteered to quit the magazine a year ago. Neither will I send you Eliot’s address in order that he may be insulted.”) Bloody, Harriet’s head undoubtedly was, but she would not let him go, and he would have been outraged if she had.

When after long years and in her old age, she tried at last to give up
Poetry
, to escape into private life with her family, he wrote: “The intelligence of the nation more important than the comfort or life of any one individual or the bodily life of a whole generation.” That is truly the public spirit, the Roman senator speaking. Why did he take the trouble? For he adds, in contempt: “It is difficult enough to give the god damn amoeba a nervous system.” Still, she had done her bit and could go, but she had no right to allow
Poetry
to die “merely because you have a sister in Cheefoo. . . .”

Pound was one of the most opinionated and unselfish men who ever lived, and he made friends and enemies everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic American constitutional right of free speech. His speech was free to outrageous license.
He was completely reckless about making enemies. His so-called anti-Semitism was, hardly anyone has noted, only equaled by his anti-Christianism. It is true he hated most in the Catholic faith the elements of Judaism. It comes down squarely to anti-monotheism, which I have always believed was the real root of the difficulty between Judaism and the West. Pound felt himself to be in the direct line of Mediterranean civilization, rooted in Greece. Monotheism is simply not natural to the thought of such people and there are more of them than one might think without having looked into the question a little. Pound believed, rightly or wrongly, that Christianity was a debased cult composed of too many irreconcilable elements, and as the central power of this cult, he hated Catholicism worse than he did Judaism, and for many more reasons.

He was not a historian, and apparently did not know that religion flows from a single source, and that all are by now mingled and interrelated. Yet he did quote some things from ancient Chinese thought that are purely Christian in the sense that Christianity teaches the same ethics and morality, and so do the Jews, no matter from what earlier religion either of them derived it. So he was reckless and bitter and badly informed, but said what he thought, and in religious matters, in this period perhaps the most irreligious the world has ever known, it is still dangerous enough to be frank on that subject. “Anti-Semite” is a stupid, reprehensible word in that it does not mean what it says, for not only Semitic peoples have taught the doctrine of the One God, and Anti-Semite is used now largely for purposes of moral blackmail by irresponsible people.

Pound’s lapses, his mistakes—and this would include his politics—occur when he deals with things outside his real interest, which was always art, literature, poetry. He was a lover of the sublime, and a seeker after perfection, a true poet, of the kind born in a hair shirt—a God-sent disturber of the peace in the arts, the one department of human life where peace is fatal. There was no peace in that urgent, overstimulated mind, where everything was jumbled together at once, a storehouse of treasure too rich ever to be sorted out by one man in one lifetime. And it was treasure.

It held exasperation, too; and related to the exasperation, but going deeper, are the cursing, and the backwoods spelling,
and the deliberate illiteracy—at first humorous, high animal spirits, youthfully charming. They become obsessional, exaggerated, the tone of near-panic, the voice of Pound’s deep fears. His fears were well founded; he was hard beset in a world of real and powerful enemies. I heard a stowaway on a boat once, cursing and shouting threats in that same monotonous, strained, desperate voice; in the end his captors only put him in the brig for the voyage. The artist Pound knew had become a kind of stowaway in society.

With the same kind of energy and obsessional faith Pound collided with the Douglas theory of social credit. He himself appears to have a basic principle of thought about economics: “Debt is slavery.” Ernestine Evans said she heard it on a gramophone record that got stuck, and Pound’s voice repeated steadily at least fifty times: “Debt is slavery.” She said the more often she heard it the more sense it made. This technique of repetition, in this case accidental, is known to the spreaders of lies. Maybe, though, it would be useful to repeat now and again a simple basic fact like that. “Debt is slavery.” But for Pound even the Douglas plan was immediately drawn into the service of the arts.

Often in these letters there is in Pound a kind of socks-down, shirttail-out gracelessness which many will take delightedly for his true Americanism. In these moments he was a lout, and that is international. But he wore his loutishness with a difference. It is in his judgments, and his earlier judgments were much better than his later: though his pronouncements even on those he most admires run up and down like a panicky stock market. It is always praise or dispraise precisely according to what they have done in that present moment, and he is indignant when they do not always sit down quietly under it. He thundered not with just the voice of Jove, he
was
Jove. His judgments were indeed fallible, but his faith in them was not. “It isn’t as if I were set in a groove. I read any number of masters, and recognize any number of kinds of excellence. But I’m sick to loathing of people who don’t care for the masterwork, who set out as artists with no intention of producing it, who make no effort toward the best, who are content with publicity and the praise of reviewers.” He loathed rightly in this case, if ever a man did, yet so often simply in arrogant temper.
His perfect assurance that he knew a work of art when he saw one, and his bent toward all kinds of excellence, led him into some lamentable errors which time little by little may correct.

As critic he was at his very best in the teacher-pupil relationship, when he had a manuscript under his eye to pull apart and put together again, or in simply stating the deep changeless principles of the highest art, relating them to each other and to their time and society. As one of the great poets of his time, his advice was unfathomably good and right in these things, and they are not outdated, and they cannot be unless the standard is simply thrown out.

Pound understood the nature of greatness: not that it voluntarily separates itself from the mass but that by its very being it is separate because it is higher. Greatness in art is like any other greatness: in religious experience, in love, it is great because it is beyond the reach of the ordinary, and cannot be judged by the ordinary, nor be accountable to it. The instant it is diluted, popularized, and misunderstood by the fashionable mind, it is no longer greatness, but window dressing, interior decorating, another way of cutting a sleeve. . . . Ezra Pound understood this simple law of natural being perfectly, and it is what redeems every fault and mitigates every failure and softens to the outraged ear of the mind and heart all that shouting and bullying and senseless obscenity—makes one respect all those wild hopeful choices of hopeless talents.

There is a doctrine that we should be patient in times of darkness and decline: but darkness and decline are the very things to fight, they are man-made, and can be unmade by man also. I am glad Pound was not patient in that sense, but obstinate and tenacious and obsessed and enraged. When you read these letters you will see what good sound reasons he had to be, if he was to make any headway against the obsessed tenacious inertia of his particular time. Most of the things and the kind of people he fought are still sitting about running things, fat and smug. That is true. And a great many of the talents he tried to foster came to nothing. Fighting the dark is a very unfashionable occupation now; but it is not altogether dead, and will survive and live again largely because of his life and example.

F
RIENDS
of us both first brought Eudora Welty to visit me two and a half years ago in Louisiana. It was hot midsummer, they had driven over from Mississippi, her home state, and we spent a pleasant evening together talking in the cool old house with all the windows open. Miss Welty sat listening, as she must have done a great deal of listening on many such occasions. She was and is a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl, and unlike the young Englishman of the story, she has something to be modest about, as
A Curtain of Green
proves.

She considers her personal history as hardly worth mentioning, a fact in itself surprising enough, since a vivid personal career of fabulous ups and downs, hardships and strokes of luck, travels in far countries, spiritual and intellectual exile, defensive flight, homesick return with a determined groping for native roots, and a confusion of contradictory jobs have long been the mere conventions of an American author’s life. Miss Welty was born and brought up in Jackson, Mississippi, where her father, now dead, was president of a Southern insurance company. Family life was cheerful and thriving; she seems to have got on excellently with both her parents and her two brothers. Education, in the Southern manner with daughters, was continuous, indulgent, and precisely as serious as she chose to make it. She went from school in Mississippi to the University of Wisconsin, thence to Columbia, New York, and so home again where she lives with her mother, among her lifelong friends and acquaintances, quite simply and amiably. She tried a job or two because that seemed the next thing, and did some publicity and newspaper work; but as she had no real need of a job, she gave up the notion and settled down to writing.

She loves music, listens to a great deal of it, all kinds; grows flowers very successfully, and remarks that she is “underfoot locally,” meaning that she has a normal amount of social life.
Normal social life in a medium-sized Southern town can become a pretty absorbing occupation, and the only comment her friends make when a new story appears is, “Why, Eudora, when did you write that?” Not how, or even why, just when. They see her about so much, what time has she for writing? Yet she spends an immense amount of time at it. “I haven’t a literary life at all,” she wrote once, “not much of a confession, maybe. But I do feel that the people and things I love are of a true and human world, and there is no clutter about them. . . . I would not understand a literary life.”

We can do no less than dismiss that topic as casually as she does. Being the child of her place and time, profiting perhaps without being aware of it by the cluttered experiences, foreign travels, and disorders of the generation immediately preceding her, she will never have to go away and live among the Eskimos, or Mexican Indians; she need not follow a war and smell death to feel herself alive: she knows about death already. She shall not need even to live in New York in order to feel that she is having the kind of experience, the sense of “life” proper to a serious author. She gets her right nourishment from the source natural to her—her experience so far has been quite enough for her and of precisely the right kind. She began writing spontaneously when she was a child, being a born writer; she continued without any plan for a profession, without any particular encouragement, and, as it proved, not needing any. For a good number of years she believed she was going to be a painter, and painted quite earnestly while she wrote without much effort.