Cuts and Bruises by Frederic Raphael

Author:Frederic Raphael [Frederic Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847777454
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Noel Stock’s Ezra Pound. On the face of it, a responsible piece of academic seriousness: one hears the flip of cross-referenced index cards and the whirr of ticketed tapes. The early life is as interesting as most early lives and the early struggles as warming as early struggles often are. Yet one grows conscious of the thin matter on which the floor of the narrative rests; the joists reach only just to the centre of the structure on which, as riskily as a dancer in an old Venetian palazzo, Stock reposes his weight. The anecdotes which serve to humanise young Ez amount to an amiable portrait of the emergent spirit, but much of the evidence of his amiability comes from the subject’s own accounts. What sounds like reconstruction is a cross between hagiography and narcissism.

Almost all the serious turns in Pound’s life – those areas where one wants to go slowly – are briskly described, with the corners cut. His marriage, the rupture with England, the collapse of his coherence, his inability to correspond and yet his cacoethes scribendi epistolas, all these things are handled with cursory meticulousness (metus = fear). Stock flinches from any speculation which might explain P.’s petulant fall from promise into paranoid megalomania. His sexuality appears vigorous (his language boasts it) but why did he marry and then so quickly renege on marriage?

Stock treats P.’s ‘ideas’ with remarkable solemnity. Yet most of them (most of it, one might say) lack credibility or sense. What got into him? What got into pretty well all of them? How could they have ‘believed’ what they advocated, Lewis, Eliot, Pound, and the rest of them?

P.’s generosity seems his only agreeable quality, but it was financial rather than magnanimous. He lacked all reason, yet he wanted to argue. He believed in definitions (from which everything else followed) just as Christians believe in miracles, because they prove what cannot otherwise be true. What the hell was he playing at? One inclines to the banal: he was a silly old poet bearded for prophecy. Stock allows Pound’s view that ‘Hitler was a martyr’ to stand without the mildest of ironic demurrals.

P.’s value remains as a gadfly, an ideogram of the man of letters. A gadfly, however, is a good fly only when a herd needs to be piqued out of its complacency; there is no sense in, or use for, a swarm of gadflies. Why did P. oppose Roosevelt so furiously? Was he, as Stock says, ‘of Republican stock’ or did he truly imagine that FDR had harmed the republic which, on any commonplace measure, he rescued from despair? Not all P.’s poundings were without force; the rock-drill left durable marks. No one could have looked at the course of modern kulchur and education and said that all was well. Yet, nervously treacherous to the priority of aesthetics, I prefer muddle to mania.

Behind old Ez, and not far behind, one can smell roasting flesh, and in him an appetite for it. The man

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