Reading The Pisan Cantos

I've only just begun, a few days ago, to work through Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos LXXIV-LXXXIV, after having attempted and failed at this same task a decade or so ago. There is still quite a bit I simply don't understand, and to resort to the explanatory notes whenever they are strictly speaking needed would result in a very different sort of reading than what we have in mind when we say we're reading poetry. Linguistically, the only completely inaccessible parts of the text are the Chinese characters, but the reason for slipping into Old French or German or Italian or Latin or Greek at any particular moment are often obscure to me. Anyway the results of this incomprehensible collage of quotations are, generally, consistently beautiful.

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Often the Cantos read like what one imagines Glenn Beck's blackboards might yield if Beck had studied Homer and Dante and learned classical Chinese, instead of spending his early years hosting an FM-radio 'morning zoo' program. The same preoccupations are there --usury, the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the illegitimacy of elected officials-- but rendered in a way that places them in a direct lineage with the history of classical literature Pound had so wonderfully internalized, rather than being the outsider scrawling of a talk-show host.

But both Pound and Beck are  distinctly American in their worries about what goes on behind the scenes; and indeed Pound helps to give some kind of historical depth to what otherwise just sounds like incoherent chatter. It is false, and toxic, but it hasn't always just been promoted by subliterate boobies. In fact, Pound and Beck have only one degree of separation between them: a spot held by the rabid anti-Semite and classic American crank Eustace Mullins, who frequently visited the poet while he was convalescing in the post-war years at the St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in Washington DC, putting off his treason trial for as long as he could. In 2010 Beck would begin promoting Mullins's book, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, on his Fox Network program. 

That Pound was a Fascist does not in principle bother me-- and here I notice, without being prepared to offer a full defense of myself, a different standard for poets than for philosophers, even as I otherwise insist that the distance between them should not be exaggerated. Heidegger cannot be excused, because his continued vitality is wrapped up with 'using' him for this or that purpose, and so with using a system of thought that was in fact an apologia for National Socialism. I can't imagine any comparable expectation of usability of the Pisan Cantos, unless the deepening of the reader's engagement with language counts as 'use'.

In fact, in a certain respect I appreciate Pound the person, as he stands in relation to his art. I love to see the Soviets' nonplussed reaction that a confirmed psychotic and Fascist would win a prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1948; they were missing something --along with George Orwell, who insisted on the need for a conformity between aesthetic sensibility and common decency-- that the prize's jury understood about the nature of the project.

The open-air US military prison cage in which Pound scrawled out the Cantos' incipit, about Mussolini's lynching, look rather too much like Guantanamo, and the circumstances of Pound's creation rather too reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's mental regimen of daily verse composition while in the Gulag, not to wonder whether there is perhaps an entire variety of creation that is triggered by the unique combination of exposure and confinement characteristic of these instances of imprisonment. (I don't know whether any great new verses have been composed in the minds of the prisoners at Guantanamo, though I'm fairly confident in saying that old, familiar verses have been recited inwardly with greater concentration).

There has been some suggestion that the Pisan Cantos are a variety of 'schizopoetics' in the Deleuzian sense. I'm not really sure I've understood what that is, but I do not think that the firing of the poetic imagination as a result of the mental strain of imprisonment, accompanied by a diagnosis by WW II-era US military psychologists of incipient personality disorder, is quite enough to say that there is anything schizo about the poetry. Again, what jumps out to me, even through the crackpot stuff abut the Jews pulling the strings behind the scenes, is the intense, rigorous embeddedness in litaerary tradition. I think the art brut of Glenn Beck's chalkboards gets somewhat closer to the sort of free-associative, historically rooted yet totally un-self-aware, deeply obsessive theory-of-everything projects that tend to be of interest as examples of the schizopoetic. Pound is not like that. His mental illness seems largely to have been exaggerated in order to avoid trial for treason; and his treasonous sympathy for Fascism was not in itself schizoid, but only toxic.

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It's been noted that the proximity of African-American military prisoners in the camp at Pisa came to play an important role in the Cantos themselves; and was the only central theme of the work imported directly from the American experience (even if Pound's paranoia about global conspiraces itself has an American inflection). When I first began reading the Cantos, by mistake I had failed to turn off iTunes, and at some point the Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 album Enter the Wu-Tang came on. I managed to read and to listen together for about 10 minutes before I had to give up on the aural component of my aesthetic immersion. But one thing that struck me was that aesthetically the two works were not entirely from different universes; both were pastiches of junk and high ideas, thrown together at least in a way that yields up the impression of schizopoiesis (an impression that in Ol' Dirty Bastard's case would eventually be clinically confirmed); both involve invented mythologies pieced together from sundry cultural sources, including a peculiar Sinophilia in both cases; both involve bullshit theories of who's behind the scenes controlling what (in Wu-Tang's case, derivative and fringe spin-off doctrines of the Nation of Islam, already fringe enough on its own); both use the word 'nigger' a great deal, in a way that enhances the poetic force of each of the respective works while pushing them even further to the margins of (in Pound's case) canonizability, or (in Wu-Tang's case) establishment acclaim in places like Cleveland (the pop culture equivalent of high culture's canon).

It struck me during those ten minutes that Pound would have enjoyed Enter the Wu-Tang very much.  But that's just a stupid aside. Or kind of stupid: however condescending, Pound's attitude towards African-American folk culture is one of great admiration; and he even holds African-Americans responsible for the preservation of forms of diction in English that white Americans were, with their lack of concern for folk tradition, carelessly allowing to slip away. I therefore really would like to know what he would have thought about this album, which I consider explosively powerful, very much like the Cantos themselves.

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I keep thinking about There Will Be Blood, a film I only saw once when it came out three or four years ago, but which sits with me and grows within me like few other films I've seen. It's gradually come to seem to me as nothing less than an allegory of the foundation of America: the ruthless, pragmatic, unbelieving entrepreneur; versus the hypocritical monster who takes the shape of a media evangelist. The entrepreneur ends up beating the preacher to death, but there will always be another one to take his place. What this juxtaposition leaves out (and we can't exactly call it a Manichean juxtaposition, since neither of the figures is much of a light-bearer), is the frontier individualist, who doesn't believe the preacher's bullshit, but also does not clamor for wealth and power. He feels something on the boundary between extreme freedom and total alienation. If he is of mediocre intelligence and ambition, he will join a militia within his native Idaho, say. If he is Ezra Pound, born in Idaho in 1885, he will decamp for Europe, and denounce the entire US as an insane asylum. He'll believe weird things, and maybe write some great stuff.

In any case, even if we add this third type to the allegory of America, there's still not much in the way of light-bearing, or, to put it differently, Enlightenment. And it remains a crazy country (and one where I hope to live again permanently someday).

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One remarkable thing about Pound's life-course, which obviates the ridiculously high demand placed by Orwell, is that the poet himself understood, and more lucidly the older he grew, that his anti-Semitism was rooted in self-hatred. His end-of-life confession, that his bigotry resulted from the worst sort of 'suburban' and conventional laziness one can lapse into, to my mind allows us to say that Pound, in acknowledging his self-hating misery, can rest happy in death, in a way that stubborn Heidegger cannot.

Pound redeems himself, and distances himself from the crackpots because he is able to regret who he is. The greatest turn came late in life, when he became embarrassed by the the tremendous waste of time of his suburban dislike of Jews. But it's already there, in the Pisan Cantos, as I read them. At Canto 76. 246-49, for example:

                        J'ai eu pitié des autres

probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own convenience

        Le paradis, n'est pas artificiel,

                        L'enfer non plus.

And then again at 80.674-76, the remorse that comes with being broken by cruel imprisonment, the breaking down of the hard man that can't but redeem all the rest:

                Les larmes que j'ai créées m'inondent

Tard, très tard je t'ai connue, la Tristesse

I have been hard as youth sixty years.

Comments

[michael reidy]

Politically a simpleton, his taste for grand simple solutions was shared by Eliot, Yeats and Lawrence. The latter envisaged a lethal chamber as large as the Crystal Palace. Were they to be led in by brass bands? I forget. John Carey in his ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ has the details but I can’t lay my hand on it at present. Add in Gissing, Woolf and Wharton and the modernist anti-democratic tendency in literature is clear.

Was Social Credit a demented scheme? More than Credit Default Swaps? Buddy can you spare the time!

[Aliester Alemaine]

Wonderful read. Thank you.

[Bella]

Such a fresh view on Pound.. I really enjoyed reading it.