£ian economics, & where not to learn about them

Like most people who've read & worked on Ezra Pound, I've always found the economic side of his writings pretty tough going. Sure, I can understand and sympathize with his outrage at how capitalism was working itself out in the first part of the century. And needless to say, I've always found the "Jewish-banker-&-financier-conspiracy" place he arrived at in his later thought to be just plain obscene. But in between Ruskinian outrage and anti-Semitic madness, there's Social Credit, the economic scheme hatched by Major Clifford H. Douglas in the early part of the century, passed on to Pound by AR Orage, and ominipresent in Pound's thought and correspondence form the mid-30s on; and I've always found Social Credit a hard business to understand, even in the relatively lucid exposition Hugh Kenner offers in The Pound Era.

So I was mightily pleased when I discovered, a year or so back, that Meghnad Desai, former LSE professor of economics & the author of Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso 2002) had written a book on Pound's economics. Desai (that's Baron Desai to you commoners) is, in the words of one reviewer, a "mild sort of heretic himself who has written sympathetically about Karl Marx, but who, whether he admits it or not, is now a mainstream economist." That's certainly my impression of Marx's Revenge; not at all a Marxist text (despite coming from Verso), but one of the most lucid and impressive histories of economic analysis I've encountered. I had high hopes that the Baron would be able to untangle and usefully contextualize Social Credit, Silvio Gesell, and all those other economic "heresies" that figure so largely in the mature Pound's thought.

The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound (Faber 2006) is not an easy book to come by, and I finally got my hands on a copy, thanks to the magic of internet shopping, early last week. It proves to be quite the disappointment. I don't mind that Desai doesn't really address the poetry; it's not his bailiwick, after all. And I suppose I don't really mind that he doesn't even attempt to tackle the mountain of Pound secondary literature. I do mind, however, that the secondary material he tackles feels like what happened to be on his shelves at the moment: we get The Pound Era, we get Paul Morrison's and Peter Nicholls's books on Pound's politics. But for biographical reference, we get Noel Stock's ancient (1970) biography (he's "Nigel" stock on the first page of the Preface, a clue to how well copy-edited this book is) and John Tytell's 1987 rehash of Stock (not to mention E. Fuller Torrey's psychological slash-job The Roots of Treason). Where, pray tell, is Humphrey Carpenter's huge and (for better or worse) state-of-the-art 1988 A Serious Character?

And why, if Desai's proposing to write on Pound's political economy, hasn't he dipped into some of the more recent excellent studies: Alec Marsh's prize-winning Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The Spirit of Jefferson (University of Alabama Press 1998), or Tim Redman's Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge 1991), or Leon Surette's Pound in Purgatory (Indiana 2003)? Desai doesn't even cite Earle Davis's Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics (Kansas 1968), which flawed as it is is far more careful and thoughtful than The Route of All Evil.

The problems of Desai's book go beyond the copy-editing blips of misremembered names, dropped commas, and multiple outright repetitions. Events are given as taking place at one date on one page, a different date on the next. Paragraphs veer off course into name-dropping digressions. Sentences metastasize into ungainly, well-nigh ungrammatical blobs. Explications of abstruse economic theory take us out to the deep end of the terminological pool (and this in a book explicitly pitched for the general reader) then, just as they seem to be nearing climax, abruptly break off into biographical notes.

This is in short one of the most ill-edited, ill-written books I've encountered in ages. It's not merely a work "of the left hand," as Milton famously called his own prose tracts, but it seems to have been written in snatches, dashed off in airport lounges between flights, or scribbled at in the twenty minutes before lights-out that we call "story-time" around here. Desai claims that his book will elucidate the roots of Pound's economic theory, situate it within the context of other "money cranks," and show that Pound's ideas have relevance to the age of globalism. Score: #1, C-; #2, D; #3, F (I count maybe three sentences in the book that assert – not demonstrate – the relevance of EP's economics to the contemporary).

What does The Route of All Evil offer the Pound scholar? nothing. What does it offer the general reader? nothing she or he can't get more lucidly, and more elegantly, from a half-hour's nosing around in The Pound Era. So why, for the love of Pete, did Faber of all people publish this thing? There's a clue in the Preface, where Baron Desai recalls an evening in "House of Lords in the Peers' Guest Room (the only bar where peers can entertain guests," and a conversation with his friends (Baron) Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's biographer, and Matthew Evans, Baron Evans of Temple Guiting, in which the topic of Pound's politics came up. Yes, that Matthew Evans – managing director of Faber, who of course encouraged Desai to put up a proposal & write the book. And they say small press publishing is an insider's game.

reading notes: pound, hulme

I have just now finished Richard Sieburth's newish (2010) edition of Pound's New Selected Poems and Translations (New Directions), &, like Elohim thru that first stretch of Genesis, I pronounce it good. Very good indeed. From a pedagogical point of view, this is now the standard Pound text: all of the significant shorter poems, great lashings of Cantos, & excellent explanatory notes. Sieburth includes a fascinating appendix detailing the history of earlier Pound selections, including the crunky old Selected Poems (New Directions 1949, & reprinted zillions of times afterward).

There are two further appendices: TS Eliot's original introduction to the 1928 Faber Selected Poems, and John Berryman's rejected introduction to the New Directions 1949 volume (later published in Partisan Review). It's the Berryman that's the real surprise for me here. I confess to not knowing Berryman's criticism at all except by reputation – and we all know how reliable reputation can be. But this piece is chock-full of nutty goodness, critical insights falling like dew. Here's my favorite: In discussing the "distance" with which Pound treats his subject, Berryman singles out among its causes Pound's

unfailing, encyclopedic mastery of tone – a mastery that compensates for a comparative weakness of syntax. (By instinct, I parenthesize, Pound has always minimized the importance of syntax, and this instict perhaps accounts for his inveterate dislike of Milton, a dislike that has had broad consequences for three decades of the twentieth century; not only did Milton seem to him, perhaps, anti-romantic and anti-realistic, undetailed, and anti-conversational, but Milton is the supreme English master of syntax.)

Could this be phrased any better?
***
On a lighter note, I've just finished Alun R. Jones's The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme (Victor Gollanz/Beacon, 1960), a book which proves that even fifty years ago an English academic (U of Hull) could publish, with a well-regarded pair of publishing houses, a perfectly ill-written book. But there's this grand titbit, part of a chapter enticingly titled "Hulme and Women":

Hulme, sitting at a table in the Café Royal talking to his friends, suddenly looked at his watch and strode from the building with the remark, "I've a pressing engagement in five minutes' time." In twenty minutes, he had returned wiping his brow and complaining that the steel staircase of the emergency exit at the Piccadilly Circus Tube Station was the most uncomfortable place in which he had ever copulated.

Pound, re-selected

In my department mailbox today two new New Directions Ezra Pound volumes, New Selected Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth, and ABC of Reading. It's nice to see that Pound is finally getting edited. I grew up on the crunky old black-&-white ND volumes, with their sometimes erratic typefaces & generally awful cover designs. No notes, often no indices, sometimes eccentric tables of contents. But God bless James Laughlin for putting & keeping the stuff in print!

But it is good, as I say, to see that Pound's work is finally getting presented in a from that doesn't make one blush when assigning the book to class. I guess the first big step in the right direction was the 1990 reissue of Personae (ed. A. Walton Litz & Lea Bachler), which cleaned up the texts somewhat & added the 3 "ur-Cantos." Then New Directions issued, in 2003, a single-volume paperback of the Pisan Cantos; the poems themselves are simply offset from the big collected Cantos volume, but they have copious back-of-the-book annotations by Sieburth, who the same year published his massive Library of America version of Pound's Poems and Translations, which has become the industry standard for well-edited Pound.

I suspect New Directions' flurry of publishing activity this year might have something to do with the passing out of copyright of much of EP's early work, which opens the door to such projects as Ira Nadel's Penguin Early Writings, and even the Dover "Thrift Edition" of his Early Poems. At any rate, I haven't spent much time with the New Selected Poems and Translations, except to note that in replacing the dear old Selected Poems he's weeded out a number of the lame early poems & added a number of later Cantos; appendices include the original introduction by TS Eliot and a scrapped intro by John Berryman; and there are lashings of notes at the end, no doubt a welcome addition for Pound newbies and college students alike.

The new ABC of Reading, alas, is barely new at all. There are three additions: a well-turned introduction by Michael Dirda, an index of proper names (THANK YOU, NEW DIRECTIONS!), and an eye-popping magenta hue to the cover, replacing the dour old black. The text itself is still in the same gritty, spectacularly ugly typeface, with the ample margins indicating that this was a mass-market sized paperback blown up to trade size. And there's one loss: on page 9 of the old edition, there was a paragraph entitled simply "ABC"; that's been lost, replaced with a perfectly useless title page. For those who're coming to the ABC for the first time, here's what you've missed:

A B C
Or gradus ad Parnassum, for those who
might like to learn. The book is not
addressed to those who have arrived at full
knowledge of the subject without knowing
the facts.

A paragraph I realize that I know by heart, & whose implications I've tried to take to heart.

timid

Reading – mostly re-reading – Ezra Pound's early criticism, most of it from before the First World War, in Ira B. Nadel's Penguin Early Writings: Poems and Prose. An odd freshness to the reading, out of the aged New Directions typefaces and into the "canonical" Penguin fonts – and perhaps simply the lapse of a couple of years since revisiting the texts.

Pound was 28 when the Great War broke out; me, I'm – well – rather older than that now. When I was 28, I was living in Northern Virginia, finishing my dissertation. It would be another three years or so before I landed my first (and still only) academic position. Where I am now Full Professor, aged, grey-bearded, balding, making up for the sclerosis of my thinking with a kind of awkward Pythonesque classroom showmanship.

The cusp of 30 is a good age, a vigorous age: I read Pound's always energetic prose, his boundless ambitions, & envy:

I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost by translation, and – scarcely less important what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated. ("How I Began")

There is no waffle, no "on the other hand" or "but" or "one might concede." Positions are staked militarily, with no concessions, no "I am staking out a position" – the poet-critic speaks, & presents what he says as self-evident truth:

Ibycus and Liu Ch'e presented the "Image." Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag because of his lack of it. ("Vorticism")

No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, and not from life... ("A Retrospect")

This is the writing of youth – or the writing of sublime self-assurance – or the writing, some would cavil, of monstrous arrogance. I wish I could write like this. I wonder, is my constant weighing of alternatives a mark of my fundamentalist upbringing, my deeply-ingrained diffidence (a Uriah Heepish humility – my mother always pronounced "humble" without the aitch)? or has a quarter-century in the academy so socialized me in the discourse of the "yes, but" that I'm unable, without considerable strain & self-analytical unease, to say what I think?

Note to self: a course in arrogance, in the sublime self-assurance that makes Milton (fuck you, Ezra Pound) just as great a poet as Dante, and just as scrappy.

all criticism should be professedly personal criticism. In the end the critic can only say 'I like it', or 'I am moved', or something of that sort. When he has shown us himself we are able to understand him. ("The Serious Artist")

All that the critic can do for the reader or audience or spectator is to focus his gaze or audition. ("A Retrospect")

Pound, selected

When Ezra Pound died in 1972, I was – well, I was alive, but I wasn't old enough to be reading him. I grew up on Pound in those tatty New Directions paperbacks, some of them handsome, some of them – like the Selected Poems that came out in 1948, & kept getting reissued, year after year – you know the one, with the profile snap surrounded by black space – among the ugliest books in my library. I read the selections – the Selected Poems, and then the Selected Cantos – and then turned to the full monty: Personae, the Collected Earlier Poems ("stale cream-puffs," he called them in an author's note), The Cantos (in a thick, brick-like rust-jacketed hardcover).

I was turning over a small pile of recent issues of Paideuma (used to be the Pound journal, now a more generally modernist poetry-oriented thing) and came across a review of Pound's Early Writings: Poetry and Prose, edited by Ira B. Nadel, published five years ago by Penguin. I picked up a copy of the book earlier this year at the ALA in San Francisco; it's been off & on lunchtime reading – mostly just to kind of remind me of how good Pound can be, since it's been a couple of years since I've read him intensely.

There's some problems with the collection. Yes indeed, as Paideuma's reviewer notes, the introduction could have used some serious copy editing: the editor actually uses the Rastafarianism "prophesized" at one point (something I spend at least 15 minutes banning from my students' vocabularies when I teach Bible). And there's the delicious typo (?) where he describes Pound's "logopoeia" (you know, "the dance of the intellect among words") as "the dance of the intellect upon words."

And the notes, while perfectly copious & for the most part very useful, have some odd lacunae. It's good to know that "And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi / Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion, / Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things..." is quoting Purgatorio VI & Inferno IV, but it would be even nicer for a student reader to know that Pound's describing Henry James as he knew him in London before the Great War.

But overall it's a very solid collection, which manages to get in practically everything, prose & poetry, that the ordinary reader would want to tackle of Pound's productions up thru 1922. But I'm still not used to seeing Pound in that banded, combination matte/gloss standard issue Penguin cover. It's even more unsettling than seeing him in the Library of America (as welcome as that was). What the Penguin edition means (as did the Dover Thrift Edition a few years back) is that Pound is chunk by chunk going out of copyright, and his works are being thrown open to every promotional hand that speculates a buck can be made – and of course, every editorial hand who feels s/he can do a better job of presenting the work than's been done earlier.

The more the merrier, my readerly/scholarly side sez. But there's part of me – death-bound subjectivity, as I explained to my Milton class yesterday – that's regretting the editions of yesteryear (les neiges d'antan), Pound in those black & white paperbacks sporting their "New Directions Paperbook" numbers and the number of their printing, Wallace Stevens in that powder blue Knopf dust jacket, Beckett behind those horrid Grove Press cover designs. "They used to call it An-tig-you-ah," snarled the elderly Robert Frost when Guy Davenport mentioned that Archibald MacLeish was in Antigua; "they've changed everything."

vectors

Bob Archambeau embarrasses me again. Not so much with his fashion choices – that goes without saying – as with his blog, where he posts these big, meaty literary-historical meditations, while I’m bitching about the weather or department meetings or putting up Marx Brothers clips or other such silliness. Maybe – come to think of it – I’m just plain shallow, or sailing into shallowness even as I plunge deeper into decrepitude.

Anyway, I’m still thinking about Ruskin, & trying to fit him into my sense of how modernism emerges from Victorian culture. I’m hamstrung, of course, by having to learn Victorian culture more or less from scratch. Okay, I took a couple of Victorian classes as an undergrad, and was a reader for a Victorian novel course as a grad student, & even audited a Victorian poetry seminar along the way. So I’ve read a lot of the stuff, even if I still can’t get excited about Trollope the way J. does (there’s always a Trollope novel in some stage of multiple rereading on the nightstand).

(She has, by the way, converted me to Kipling’s Stalky & Co.; finally, a public school novel in which the boys are without exception dire & reprehensible – if immensely funny & sympathetic – shits. Finally, a bit of realism about life between 13 & 17.)

I think the key here is to pursue the Pound-Ruskin nexus, which even on its face doesn’t seem at all unlikely. Here’s the thing: Pound almost never mentions Ruskin; there’s a reference in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and a couple of scattered things in the prose (calls him a “goose” at one point), but I think it can be coherently argued that Pound is absolutely saturated, probably without even knowing it, in a Ruskinian cultural discourse. And Michael Coyle’s already made that argument in EP, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture.

That is, the connection between aesthetic production and the state of the larger polity within which they're produced emerges in the early 19th century (according to Kenneth Clark, as quoted somewhere in Raymond Williams's Culture & Society); it's Ruskin who pushes that connection into an exploration of the social conditions upon which the artist ultimately depends, in the "Nature of Gothic" and then in The Political Economy of Art & the later works passim. So what Ruskin & Pound share is a sense of “culture” as an “organic” totality in which aesthetic productions reflect social relations, in which the general health of a society can be gauged by a close analysis of its artworks, and in which the health of the arts depends upon the health of the society as a whole.

What intervenes between the two figures is Aestheticism, with its doctrine of art's autonomy, of "art for art's sake." And EP, as Moody shows in his biography, is an aesthete thru & thru in the early work. When he turns "political" or "social" (Kenner, Davenport, & other date it to the post-Great War moment), he does so with little sense of how Ruskinian his ultimate stance will be. It's perhaps an impoverished Ruskinianism, for when Ruskin excoriates society, he always does so on a moral basis (at first Evangelical, later a more ill-defined "Christian"); Pound, on the other hand, has always seemed to me less concerned with the actual well-being of individual human beings under capitalism than on the wastage of potential artwork.

Now to work out the relationship of Ruskin to Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Mina Loy. Then there's a book.
***
But then there's Fors. (One of the Stalky boys – Beetle? M’Turk? – is a dedicated reader of Fors Clavigera, which seems less a mark of his social concerns than of his general bookishness.) Guy Davenport advanced a long time ago (in his "The House that Jack Built" essay) the notion that Ruskin, & Fors in general, is kind of a generative protomodernist ur-text, a "Victorian Cantos in prose." I'm of course fascinated by Fors; like those who read Tristram Shandy as proto-postmodernism, I want to see all of the digressiveness & parataxis & random trouvées of high modernism in the book. But it's not the same thing to say that Fors is willy-nilly protomodernist and to say that Fors is an actual model for modernist literary structure.

The problem is one of what EP Thompson, in his Witness Against the Beast, calls "vectors": if one's got a sense that there's something important shared between the 17th-century Muggletonians (Ludowick Muggleton's portrait, by the way, adorns Sussex University's ultra-modern chapel, which otherwise looks like a concrete & brick beehive) & William Blake, one must establish plausible, even probable "vectors" by which Blake would have been exposed in the late 18th century to Muggletonian ideas. (& Thompson does, at least to my satisfaction.)

The temporal stretch between JR & EP is much shorter, & the works & ideas were more widespread – Pound was 14 when Ruskin died, & cheapo editions of Fors & the rest of his works were all over the United States by the time of Pound's birth. But I'm still searching for that hard & fast accounts of Pound's – & the other modernists'* – reading of Ruskin, & what use they made of him.

*Joyce is a gimme; Stanislaus reports in his memoir that his brother absolutely doted on Ruskin, & even wrote a pastiche homage when he learned of JR's death in 1900.

Pound in the marketplace; Susan Stewart: Columbarium

When we first got into the city, I headed down to Union Square & the Strand to pick up a stack of Ruskin books I’d bought online. I didn’t really spend a lot of time there that evening; there were a lot of things I wanted to read thru on hand already, & I didn’t want to disperse my always tenuous attention. Anyway, t'other night I finally made the big pilgrimage & did some serious shopping, filling a bag (mostly) with slim volumes of contemporary poetry.

Do I need to say that decent poetry bookshops in South Florida are pretty much nonexistent? Well, there aren’t many anywhere, for that matter. I don’t know the midwest or the west coast, but on the east coast & south the only good new poetry bookshops I know are Bridge Street in DC, Talking Leaves in Buffalo, & St. Mark’s in NYC. And places that have consistently interesting used stock are even rarer – Rust Belt in Buffalo is the only one that springs to mind. But the Strand’s poetry section is so damned large, & I get up here so rarely, that there’re always at least a dozen things I end up buying. Indeed, semiannual trips to the city & the Strand seem to be the primary way recent works of poetry enter the house anymore. (But yes, I bought your book new, straight from the publisher.)

One of the few non-poetry books I picked up, however, was Gregory Barnhisel’s James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (U Massachusetts P, 2005). A very solid piece of scholarship. It’s weird to think of our distance from the modernists, which these days is approximately that of the modernists themselves from the late romantics. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to get histories of modernist writing that aren’t in the “heroic” mode of Hugh Kenner et al. What they called the “new historicism” in early modern studies when it hit modernism became the “new modernist studies,” & it’s not so much a “new” historicism as the first round of a real live critical history-writing.

At any rate, Barnhisel’s is one of those books whose thesis is so simple & unified & compelling that you wonder why the hell this book wasn’t written decades ago. After a very interesting examination of Pound’s publication history thru the 1930s, veering between trade publishers & small press coterie editions, Barnhisel traces how James Laughlin & ND published & promoted him in the postwar years – when Pound was a political pariah; Pound wanted to be Ruskin, the commentator on culture & society: ND promoted him as Pater, a mostly apolitical aesthete. Or rather, they promoted his poetry & his literary essays & downplayed precisely the public persona he most valued, that of political & economic gadfly.

In the process they implicitly supported & underwrote New Critical apoliticism, & a notion of aesthetic autonomy that went far beyond Pound’s own; for Pound, the poet was both the technician of a purified language and the prophet of corrected social structure: that latter role disappears in his public face, as presented in ND books, between 1946 & 1973 (the year of the Cookson-edited Selected Prose, which finally made many of his economic writings available).

I wish Barnhisel’s prose were a trifle more elegant, & I’d like to see a bit more Bourdieu brought to bear on these issues, but on the whole this is a very useful book indeed. (Not least, he confirms that at least one other reader has conceived the 1930s American publishing scene in much the same way I did in Poem of a Life.)
***
Columbarium, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2003)

A book of “first things” – between the bookends of four longish poems on the 4 Empedoclean elements – air, fire, water, earth – a series of shorter poems on various themes, arranged from A to Z. The elements of which we are made & among which we live, & the 26 glyphs by which we comprehend & express them. A curious blending of the pre-Sokratic & the high classical (Virgil’s Georgics one touchstone). As always in Stewart’s work, an almost obsessive, loving regard for the evidence of the senses. An impressive range of forms in the alphabetic section, most of them ad hoc & gracefully realized.

[76/100]

Moody's Pound

So we're about 65% unpacked; I'm still waiting for a couple of cartons of books to arrive from New York – acquisitions from The Strand & Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), but there's plenty to keep me busy right now, including a copy of A. David Moody's new Pound biography. The thing's got one of those titles that makes you unclear as to where to colonize & where to hyphenate: near as I can tell, the full moniker is Ezra Pound: Poet – A Portrait of the Man and His Work – Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 (pause for breath).

Back in November, I responded rather snarkily to Andrew Motion's Guardian review of the book – mostly to Motion's inane review, mind you, not to Moody's book, which I hadn't seen at the time. I do regret, however, a sidenote in which I doubted – based on Moody's Eliot scholarship, which was all I'd read of his work – how good a Pound biographer he'd prove. Boy, how wrong could I be!

Anyway, back then I'd noted that Pound had already received more than a little biographical treatment:

There's no shortage of Pound biographies out there: full-length treatments include Charles Norman's (1960), Noel Stock's (1970), Humphrey Carpenter's (1988) and JJ Wilhelm's (in three volumes, 1985, 1990, 1994); shorter & more specialized books include Ackroyd's illustrated Ezra Pound and His World (1980), Jacob Korg's book on EP & HD (2003), C David Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile (1976), Anne Conover's book on EP & Olga Rudge (2001), John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987), Ira Nadel's recent volume for Palgrave's Literary Lives series, & probably a few others shelved in my office at work right now, where I can't lay hands on them.

All of these books have shortcomings, some of them more dire than others. Norman's book is a breezy celebrity bio, notable mostly (to me at least) for his use of Zukofsky as a resource. Stock's is the life as told by a somewhat repentant former disciple. Wilhelm simply can't write, & has no sense of discrimination among his materials.

Humphrey Carpenter's big (1000+ pp.) work, then, is probably the biography of record, unfortunately: while he conveys an admirable density of facts & dates, his work is hampered by the fact that he's utterly unsympathetic to, & mostly uncomprehending of, Pound's mature poetic project. (What possessed the author of lives of Auden & JRR Tolkien to devote this much energy to Pound of all people? Aesthetically, it's rather like me polishing off the LZ biography & setting out to write the life of Billy Collins.) I'll consult Carpenter for a date; but for a sense of Pound's poetry or for a clear idea of what his political or economic thought at any particular stage, I look elsewhere.

And now I know where that elsewhere is: Moody's first volume (out of a projected two, which even if vol. 2 is the same length as this hefty volume 1, will still be a bit shorter than Carpenter) is absolutely luminous. I'm tempted to say that this, folks, is biography as it ought to be written – if you've gotta read one biography of a major modernist (who isn't Joyce or Zukofsky, of course), then Moody's Pound is the ticket.

I'm particularly impressed, beyond Moody's limpid and sometimes elegant (but never show-offy, like Carpenter's) prose, with how the biographer keeps Pound's poetic project in his sights, and shows convincingly that even the "stale cream-puffs" of A Lume Spento are logical steps in the development of a quintessentially modernist poetics. He's very good on the poetry; he's even better on Pound's cultural thought, how even in his earliest stages he was seeing poetry as inextricable from the larger life of the polis (in volume 2, we'll see how this leads him down the path to Italian fascism). And he's very good indeed at depicted Pound in the context of the London literary scene of the 'teens – just how much of an outlander, a kangaroo Pound was even to those who sensed his formidable drive and intelligence.

The only fault I would find with Moody is his discounting of WC Williams's testimony about Pound's early years. (By the way, on the evidentiary issues that I find so fascinating in biography, Moody is about as scrupulous as they come; his notes at the end of the book make fascinating reading when he tangles with earlier biographers & editors.) All of WCW's testimony about the pomposity & basic silliness of the young Pound, it seems, is vitiated by the distance from which Wms was writing, & by his tangled relationship with EP in the intervening years. The biographer in me approves of Moody's handling here; I think he's well justified. The biography-reader, on the other hand – the one who's cherished those snapshots of a silly young Ez – is disappointed with a rather puerile disappointment.

Go read this one; you won't regret it.

ad interim: saucy swinburne

So I finished my latest trawl thru The Cantos the other day – from soup to nuts over six months, Odysseus in Hades to all those lyrical, fragmentary regrets. A grand read, tho a trifle tiring in the final stretches. And then I pulled down Richard Sieburth's Library of America edition of Pound's Poems and Translations, wondering if I would see more in the early stretches than I had before.

Well, this time around I saw – or rather, heard – quite a lot of Celtic Twilight-era Yeats. Certain verbal tics, like Pound's repeated use of the adjective "dim" to describe the hair of whatever beloved his persona happens to be addressing. But I also heard a good deal of Swinburne, which sent me back to the Swinburne I'd been reading last spring (in, of all places, Orlando), a nice fat Carcanet Selected Poems that I seem to have bought in Florence for 5000 lire some years ago.

Now like everybody else I'd heard lots about Swinburne's S&M propensities, but I'd only seen flashes of them in the poetry. Not so this time around. I won't even start on "Dolores," a 440-line hymn to "Our Lady of Pain," a phantasmagoric tour thru a sensual underworld that makes Eyes Wide Shut seem rather tame (no, wait, Eyes Wide Shut was rather tame...). Instead, I'll fasten on a single unforgettable stanza from a little love ditty entitled "A Match." It begins tamely, innocently:

If love were what the rose is,
And I were like a leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.

The poem gets progressively weirder from there, contrasting "life" & "death," "sorrow" & "joy," but settling down in the penultimate stanza to a chaste "If you were April's lady, / And I were lord in May..." But then there's the final stanza, which plunges it all into a scene that ought to be illustrated by Félicien Rops, or acted out by Bettie Page:

If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We'd hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.

Am I the only one who finds this irresistably kinky?

laureates in space

Who'd've thought it – an English Poet Laureate entirely out of it? I'm shocked, shocked. (Until, that is, I consider John Betjeman & John Masefield, & a whole parade of mummified relics who've occupied the office: the list is of course considerably shorter than the American one only because the English post is a lifetime one.) But then I read current PL Andrew Motion's review in the Guardian of the first volume of A. David Moody's biography of Pound, Ezra Pound: Poet. Vol 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920.

Motion begins by lamenting "the blur near the centre of 20th-century literary biography: lives of the two greatest modernists are missing." Of course, he means modernist poets – heaven knows there are lives of Joyce, arguably greater than either Eliot or Pound, the "two greatest" he's referring to. Motion continues:

Peter Ackroyd and others have done their best to get round the prohibitions of the Eliot estate, but we still lack a properly detailed, intimate account. Problems of a different kind have delayed a full and scholarly biography of Pound, despite the best efforts of Humphrey Carpenter and others. Pound's life is so vast in its energies, so richly international in its reach and so bedevilled by controversies that it has taken more than 30 years - since Pound's death in 1972 - for A David Moody's book to arrive on the scene. The first volume of this grand opus is a significant event.

I'm flummoxed by this paragraph. In the first place, while the Eliot estate did indeed make problems for Ackroyd in his writing TS Eliot: A Life, it's still a pretty damned good biography, and Lyndall Gordon's TS Eliot: An Imperfect Life is even better. I can imagine more detailed, more revelatory biographies – & heaven knows we'll get them in 15 years' time, when crucial caches of TSE's letters are unsealed – but I have no idea what Motion wants in a "properly detailed, intimate account": details of Eliot's cock size, as we get in Lew Ellingham & Kevin Killian's life of Jack Spicer?

And this notion that we lack a "full and scholarly biography of Pound" has me rather puzzled. There's no shortage of Pound biographies out there: full-length treatments include Charles Norman's (1960), Noel Stock's (1970), Humphrey Carpenter's (1988) and JJ Wilhelm's (in three volumes, 1985, 1990, 1994); shorter & more specialized books include Ackroyd's illustrated Ezra Pound and His World (1980), Jacob Korg's book on EP & HD (2003), C David Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, A Political Profile (1976), Anne Conover's book on EP & Olga Rudge (2001), John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987), Ira Nadel's recent volume for Palgrave's Literary Lives series, & probably a few others shelved in my office at work right now, where I can't lay hands on them.

All of these books have shortcomings, some of them more dire than others. Norman's book is a breezy celebrity bio, notable mostly (to me at least) for his use of Zukofsky as a resource. Stock's is the life as told by a somewhat repentant former disciple. Wilhelm simply can't write, & has no sense of discrimination among his materials.

Humphrey Carpenter's big (1000+ pp.) work, then, is probably the biography of record, unfortunately: while he conveys an admirable density of facts & dates, his work is hampered by the fact that he's utterly unsympathetic to, & mostly uncomprehending of, Pound's mature poetic project. (What possessed the author of lives of Auden & JRR Tolkien to devote this much energy to Pound of all people? Aesthetically, it's rather like me polishing off the LZ biography & setting out to write the life of Billy Collins.) I'll consult Carpenter for a date; but for a sense of Pound's poetry or for a clear idea of what his political or economic thought at any particular stage, I look elsewhere.

For all of Motion's boosterism on behalf of Moody's new biography (or at least its 1st volume – which, let's be frank, covers Pound the young man and Pound the impresario, & doesn't quite get to the Pound of the Cantos, which is where the real interest lies), he doesn't really say anything to persuade me that this book's any better than its predecessors: according to Motion, Moody's

prose is more obviously driven by the need to get the facts straight and to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of the poems, than by curiosity about psychological motives and personal characteristics. It means the book has an air of slightly detached efficiency - which is no bad thing, except that it makes Pound himself seem a touch remote. We see the blaze of his firebrand energy; we marvel at his generosity to writers of whom he approves; we admire his astonishing powers of self-driving; but we rarely feel these things on our pulses.

And that's all he has to say about the book itself; the rest of the review is, as the manner of anglo-reviewers on biography, a summary of the biographee's career (as if readers of the Guardian had never heard of EP).

Which leads me to a tentative conclusion: A David Moody's is not merely the best Pound biography Andrew Motion's ever read, but it's the first. And what makes it better than all the rest (which he seems not to have dipped into) is the mere fact that it's been published by Oxford University Press – a grand step towards making Pound safe for British palates.

[Final note: I'll read Moody's book, of course, & its sequel, tho there's nothing about Moody's criticism – mostly on Eliot – that persuades me he'll have much perceptive to say about Pound's poetry. The Pound biography I'm waiting for, of course, is the one in progress by Tim Redman, author of the excellent Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism.]