In 1938 let us say, a bloke with small means wants the best of Europe. Once he cd. have done a great deal on foot. I dare say he still can. In 1911 there was an international currency (20 franc pieces) twenty such in jug-purse and no god-damned passports. (Hell rot Wilson AND the emperor, I think it was Decius.) If a man can’t afford to go by automobile, and if he is content with eating and architecture, the world’s best (as I have known it) is afoot from Poitiers, from Brives, from Périgord or Limoges. In every town a romanesque church or château. No place to stay for any time, but food every ten miles or fifteen or twenty. When I say food, I mean food. So, at any rate, was it. With fit track to walk on.
I do not say walk in Italy. The sane man will want his Italy by car. Even if it is public omnibus. The roads go over the Appenines, they go over the Bracca. They go over, where trains bore through. It is not a country to walk in because food is a FRENCH possession, when on foot one wants it. […] The dust on Italian roads, the geographic or geological formation of the peninsula all say go by car. Don’t try to walk it. You have enough foot work when you get to the towns. You have a concentration of treasures that will need all your calf muscles, all your ankle resistence.
– Ezra Pound,
Guide to Kulchur p. 111f.
Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand (55).1
Reading Pound’s Guide to Kulcher, I was perplexed; partially because it is an odd book, aimed at those who don’t mind attending the university of the brain of Ezra Pound (which is a strange place, of many prejudices). Mostly, though, I just wasn’t (and ain’t) sure what to make of it, how to reconcile those parts I can (reservedly) agree with and those which strike me as outcroppings of the fashion of the times or mere idiosyncrasies.2 It jumps here and there, following a logic which I don’t quite see (and am too lazy to look for),3 and digresses on subjects with a force not quite necessary to the task of guide – as though Virgil cracked wise at every opportunity, and made opportunities to do so where none were before.
When I can agree with him, though, I find that generally agree pretty whole-heartedly. Some notes:
I suspect that the error in educational systems has been the cutting off of learning from appetite […] Real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits. A scrap here, a scrap there; always pertinent, linked to safety, nutrition or pleasure (98f).
Then there is education as apart from learning. By learning I assume in some measure that he means learning how to think about things, rather than being educated into a brittle edifice of apparent understanding. It’s impossible to force-feed knowledge; one gets prescient indigestion.
About thirty years ago, seated on one of the very hard, very slippery, thoroughly uncomfortable chairs of the British Museum main reading room, with a pile of large books at my right hand and a pile of somewhat smaller ones at my left hand, I lifted my eyes to the tiers of volumes and false doors covered with imitation bookbacks which surround that focus of learning. Calculating the eye-strain and the number of pages per day that a man could read, with deduction for say at least 5% of one man’s time for reflection, I decided against it. There must be some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage (53f.).
Also how ideas of things become mixed up with the things themselves. There is the vast cultural heritage as an idea and then there is the representation of it, locked behind imitation bookbacks. There is the thing that is and the thing that seems and, though it seems that one can grasp it by a diligence of buttocks, that is the idea of an ass.
If the affable reader (or a delegate to an international economic conference from the U.S. of A.) cannot distinguish between his armchair and a bailiff’s order, permitting the bailiff to sequester that armchair, life will offer him two alternatives: to be exploited or to be the more or less pampered pimp of exploiters until it becomes his turn to be bled. ¶ The bailiff’s order may be openly such, or it may be a bailiff’s order heavily camouflaged, but homo not completely sap-head will smell, divine or see clearly the difference between his roof and a mortgage (244).
***
The supreme evil committable by a critic is to turn men away from the bright and the living. The ignominious failure of ANY critic (however low) is to fail to find something to arouse the appetite of his audience, to read, to see, to experience (161).
It happens when I’m not paying attention. Or not careful enough attention. The other day, for instance: I was reading around in Personae because someone twanged my nerves by observing that I don’t read poetry (which is true, but not something I like to admit to) and read the following, which I rather liked:1
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman –
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is the time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.
Then it happens: the question both beside and to the point – irrelevant to daily living, unanswerable in literary history, and ungovernable in a tangled brain. ‘A grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father’: the grown child is presumably Ezra (ca. 191-), but who’s the father? Two options:
 |
 |
| Mr. Whitman | Mr. Pound |
I’m of the opinion that when you are making a pact with someone, it is not a very nice thing (or indeed a very useful thing if you wish that someone to take the pact seriously) to call them pig-headed. Of course Mr. Pound, although renowned for ferreting out, supporting, and lauding to the heavens whatever talent he found among his contemporaries (providing, of course, that you, my dear, would not properly understand it, unless you too had met Gaudier-Brzeska), was not known for being ‘nice’. Setting that for the moment aside – an alternative: Pound sees Pound as pig-headed. I spoke about this to someone who has read more Pound (and poetry) than I have, and he seemed to think this improbable.
I sputter, I stutter, I disagree. Privately, of course. Partly because I think Pound is pig-headed. It takes a certain pig-headedness to yowl about big ideas when people only care whether the trains run on time. But that is not why I disagree, really.
I disagree because I would like to think (vain dream!) that self-knowledge is possible. That’s not what I mean to say. Rather – I would like to think that a man as clever as Pound undoubtedly was would be clever enough to sense his porcinities – would have moral as well as intellectual sense. This hope reaches out of the poem, takes me by the hand and leads me towards my meaning of the poem’s sense.
But surely Pound here accepts the vast similitude, acknowledges Whitman as an influence, a forbear, a poetic father. Perhaps. An echo and my own inclinations tell me otherwise. The child is father to the man.2 I am too tired and lazy to untangle it.
* * *
I was going to write a response clever obscure & convoluted to this poem, but I lost heart after looking at just one article on JSTOR (David Simpson. ‘Pound’s Wordsworth; or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’. ELH, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 660-686) which seemed to say that at first Mr. Pound did not like Wordsworth, and then he did, via Hegel.3 That was too much for me – I have lost my faith in such things.
So I’ll stick to my prejudicials and leave poor enough alone.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Which makes me think of two things:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
– and –
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
If you want the bibliographicals, well, you know where the library is. [↩]
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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