Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism

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Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism

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EZRA POUND, WYNDHAM LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM

VINCENT SHERRY

New York

Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and radical modernism / Vincent Sherry. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-507693-1 1. Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Lewis, Wyndham, 1882-1957 —Criticism and interpretation. 3. Radicalism in literature. 4. Fascism and literature. 5. Modernism (Literature) PS3531.082Z8348 1992 810.9'358'0904-dc20 92-17258

135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For my mother and father


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For intellectual debts, first of all: to John Matthias for early exposures and lasting enthusiasms; to Donald Hall for stern counsels still called for; to Christopher Ricks, Thomas Whitaker, Marjorie Perloff, Daniel Hoffman, Calvin Bedient, and James Gindin for first encouragements; to Alan Filreis, Thomas Jackson, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Stephen Tapscott, James Chandler, Ronald Bush, and Reed Way Dasenbrock for their exact and varying scrutinies; to A. Walton Litz, most of all, for the openness and intelligence too rarely combined nowadays. I wish to acknowledge and thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 1989-90 fellowship, and Villanova University—in particular Rev. Lawrence Gallen and Rev. Kail Ellis —for release time and research grants. My admiration and gratitude to Henry Krawitz and T. Susan Chang, at Oxford University Press, for their friendly diligence, and to Elizabeth Maguire, senior editor, for the skill and wit of her office. I am grateful to Mary de Rachewiltz for hospitality and grace under pressure; to Omar Pound for kindnesses little and large; to my wife, Hiroko, and my daughter, Sophia, for the blessing of the days; and to my parents, finally, for things long unacknowledged, with thanks at last expressed. Acknowledgment for use of unpublished materials of Ezra Pound is made to the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, with special gratitude to Patricia Willis, curator of American literature; and to the Lilly Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, with thanks to Saundra Taylor, curator. Unpublished materials of Wyndham Lewis are used by courtesy, the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library, with thanks especially to Mark Dimunation, curator. Grateful acknowledgment is given to New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works of Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading (all rights reserved); The Cantos (copyright © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound); Pound/Joyce (copyright © 1967 by Ezra Pound); Pound/Lewis (copyright © 1985 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Literary Property Trust); Ezra Pound and Music (copyright © 1977 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust); Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (copyright © 1926, 1935, 1950, 1962, 1970, 1971, and 1980 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust); Guide to Kulchur (copyright © 1970 by Ezra Pound); Jefferson and/or Mussolini (copyright © 1935, 1936 by Ezra Pound, renewed 1963 by Ezra Pound; used by permission of Liveright Publishing Company); Literary Essays (copyright © 1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound); Personae (copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound); The Rome Broadcasts: "Ezra Pound Speaking" (copyright © 1978 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust); Selected Letters, 19071941 (copyright © 1950 by Ezra Pound); Selected Prose, 1909-1965 (copyright © 1960, 1962 by Ezra Pound; copyright © 1973 by the Estate of Ezra Pound); Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals (copyright © 1991 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust [published by Garland]). Previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound copyright © 1993 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents. For published and unpublished writings of Wyndham Lewis, I wish to acknowledge and thank the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust, a British Charitable Trust, copyright © 1993 Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust; for illustrations, the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis, used by permission.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS, Prologue,

Xi

3

1 From the Continent to England, 1889-1925, Musical Empathy, 11 Political Aesthetics, 16 European Vortex, 24 This Hulme Business, 34

9

2 Ezra Pound, 1908-1920, 43 Negotiations, 49 Early Cantos: Auditing the Tradition, 66 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 82 3 Wyndham Lewis: L'Entre Deux Guerres, 91 Untuning the Word, 99 The Failure of Art, 113 The Art of Failure, 127 4 Ezra Pound, 1921-1939, 141 Resuming the Cantos: Eliot, Dada, Major Form, 143 Making Friends with the Enemy, 163 States of Excess, 173 Epilogue,

187

NOTES,

197

INDEX,

223


ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Umberto Boccioni, The Street Enters the House (La strada entra nella casa), 14 2. Ezra Pound, 26 3. Wyndham Lewis, 27 4. Wyndham Lewis, Composition, 28 5. Wyndham Lewis, The Crowd, 29 6. Wyndham Lewis, Plan of War, 95 7. Wyndham Lewis, Slow Attack, 96 8. Wyndham Lewis, Design for "Red Duet," 97 9. Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 116 10. Wyndham Lewis, The Pole Jump, 117 11. Frontispiece to Hitler, 120 12. Nuremberg Party Rally, 125 13. First page for Canto VIII in A Draft of XVI. Cantos, 148 14. Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss (Le Baiser), 177


Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism


PROLOGUE

In The Struggle of the Modern, Stephen Spender writes: In Pound and Lewis one feels that a fallacy is embodied in their somehow violent preference for the past over the present, their hatred of modern civilization, their contemptuous view of most of their contemporaries, their willingness to support causes which use modern technology in order to re-establish forms of living to which they attribute the achievements of the enviable past.

The "fallacy" Spender attributes to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis turns on the paradox he finds in these "revolutionary traditionalists."1 How does a state-of-the-art technique, Spender is asking, lend its timely energy to the art of an antique State? Archly experimental, the artistic temperament of the modernists promised to be progressive, forward-looking, liberal in a conventional sense, but this aesthetic intelligence colluded with social attitudes manifestly backward, reactionary, indeed atavistic. How can the radical inventions of Pound and Lewis, those ultramodernists, locate the root of their attraction to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy—societies they praised explicitly for recovering an ancient hierarchy? Avant-garde and retro-grade: the disparity between the aesthetics and the sociology of the modernists continues to define a riddle central to their problematic achievement. That Spender left it unsolved testifies to its scope, its comprehensive depth. Concepts of modern social history alone will not explain the authoritarian politics of the modernists, nor will descriptions of modern art (qua art) encompass their aesthetic initiatives. For their political pronouncements did not originate in the grammar of standard ideologies; their creeds emerged more obliquely, idiosyncratically — as possibilities projected from the intimately known practice of their own craft. Their actual aesthetic material — painted image, spoken (or printed) word —spelled the language of a new political discourse, one in which the forces of social reaction and artistic liberation found a single vocabulary. In this book I set out to recover that language; to reconnect it to the traditions that informed it and that still render it comprehensible; to reveal its sometimes compelling logic; to identify the often perilous nature of the project; and, when fitting, to appreciate the tragedy of its failure. 3

4

POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM

"The totalitarian synthesis": Pound's catchphrase, including Lewis's work with his own, implies both an authoritarian demeanor and the melding of art and the State.2 The myths informing this enterprise reach back to ideas of universal harmony, where the macrocosmic music of the spheres might resonate in the microcosm of the civil state. This hierarchical concept could be renewed through novel conceits — for example, through medieval polyphony and its figures of simultaneous or "vertical" harmony. These orderly echelons of sound echoed the ancient scheme of cosmic correspondences, providing an image of musical scales for stratified classes,3 offering Pound and Lewis a set of tropes well suited to their own political project. Attempts to attune the new State to old models of consonance, however, are problematic. These difficulties reflect a major change in cultural, intellectual, and political history. For music had altered its image utterly by the time of the Enlightenment. Empirical, protoscientific authors stressed the sheerly physical effect sound plays upon the variable — and volatile — fiber of the sensuous creature. "Sometimes inflaming" the auditor, warns Georges Sandys in 1632, music stirs "the Spirits which agitate in the heart," which "receave a warbling and dauncing aire into the bosome, and are made one with the same where with they have an affinity" — "the sence of hearing," he concludes, "stricking the Spirits more immediately, then the rest of the sences."4 Mechanistic, behavioristic, this nascent scientism augurs the fate that awaits the old myth of harmonic hierarchies. That antique imitation of a higher order is winding down into the antic mimicry of an affective art. To what political uses could this new, physiological understanding of sound lend itself? Well before the twentieth century, music had gone over to the enemies of the authoritarian state. In the 1780s, in France, it entered into easy alliance with the protorevolutionary doctrine of mesmerism, or animal magnetism.5 Heard to penetrate to the sensory quick, music drew the auditor into physical union, first with the acoustic stimulus, then with other listeners; such feelings of group empathy prefigured the demotic solidarity that would topple the ancien regime in 1789. Revolutionaries as well as traditionalists, the Anglo-Americans will also rebel against the old aesthetic framework of universal harmony. But how, in doing so, might they preserve —and renew — its artistic writ of political authority? This apparently contrary project was already engaging the energies of French critics, a half generation before the English modernists who read them. Julien Benda and Remy de Gourmont expanded their analyses of style into disquisitions on the social function of art. Attending to the political meaning of aesthetic experience, they heard an internal, essential connection between musical sensation and populist collectivism. Music reaches the vitalist core of the listener, they proposed, and joins all members of the audience in a spurious but formidable unity. The fellow feeling induced in this way represents a form of mob bonding. The excitable mass emerges as the political image —the direct result —of this provocative melding through sound.

PROLOGUE

5

Silencing the old myth of cosmic consonances, Benda and Gourmont relocated its idea of authority in a new sensory register. Whereas the democratic ear merges, the aristocratic eye divides. Separating the viewer from the object of sight, the eye also achieves the distinctions on which clear conceptual intelligence relies; it thus provides the emblem and instrument of a ruling intellectual elite. Retuning the musical myth of social hierarchy to the more severe measures of the eye, Benda and Gourmont represent a significant, intentionally scientific, characteristically modern attempt to reconstitute the aesthetic basis of political dominance. It is commonly acknowledged that Pound learned much from Gourmont, as did Lewis from Benda; the two lines of descent have been studied in varying degrees of complexity.6 Yet the single colloquy the French writers comprise on the matter of political aesthetics has not been noted—let alone recreated —as the integral, formative influence Pound and Lewis assimilated. The neglect of this French perspective remains perplexing, since Benda and Gourmont, far from operating in isolation, served as focal points in a wideranging, pan-European exchange. This discussion included Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, and Gustave LeBon in France, Wilhelm Worringer and Theodor Lipps in Germany, the Futurists in Italy, and Jose Ortega y Gasset in Spain. While these commentators did not always agree, they were engaged in a single, consistent enterprise. Their inquiry into aesthetics verged ever on social statement. In describing the sensory experience of art, they were finding evidence for principles of civil government. The physiology of ear and eye offered them a pseudoscientific language, one in which they could advance arguments for the political ideas of servitude and mastery, emphasizing in turn the mass mergings of aural empathy and the ascendancy of visual discrimination. This two-part model is modified by some of those writers, who see individual images as the unintellectual (nonverbal) language of intense sensation and, as such, the one company of the (unthinking) Crowd mind. Such variations remind us that these writers are all offering an imaginative hermeneutic of the senses, not the findings of hard science. Yet a single paradigm guides their multinational exchange, and this European colloquy represents a significant part of the awareness shared by the AngloAmericans. The best known point of interaction between Pound and Lewis lies in the Great London Vortex of 1914—thanks in part to fine scholarship by Reed Dasenbrock, Timothy Materer, and Marjorie Perloff.7 Yet the Vorticists' own program —it foresaw a literature written to the more demanding standards of the visual arts — explains their attraction to the European physiology of the senses, above all the superiority of the eye. That critics have not recognized the import (or existence) of this contemporary continental tradition is an omission that reveals more than the difficulty of foreign-language sources. For this European sensibility challenges the critical belief that modernism devoted its prosodic energies to the musicalization of language, a

6


material to be intoned as well as spoken. It defies the long-prevailing faith that modernism, despite the antidemocratic politics of its major figures, affirms a poetics of colloquial music, celebrating the very sounds of common speech. This critical belief is held with an intensity that is a measure of its congeniality. Yet the questions it leaves unanswered range from accuracy to judgment: What sensory preferences actually inform the literature they write? What is the political meaning of the art they do produce? The vocal premise appears most notably in the critical legacy of Pound. His "great discovery of the principle of 'living language,' that oral basis of man's behavior"8 — the categorical eloquence is Herbert Schneidau's — stands as a virtual rule of attitude in modernist studies. It has become a preconception, one suspects, when it is used to describe the muse of Wyndham Lewis, whose writing (like some of Yeats's) relies on creative hatreds, above all for the musical vocalese: "And Wyndham Lewis, than whose ear for speech there was no more voracious, listened in his times of poverty, hour by hour, to the talk in pubs." The claim made here by Hugh Kenner—than whose gift to other critics none greater, than whose attitude no more influential — shows its political drift in its own context (in The Pound Era). Here all modernist writing springs from an oral culture, to which it returns —in happy complicity with the speech and characters of Demos: For the norm is now Speech, which binds men, which flows through minds and cultures. . . . So writing is largely quotation, quotation newly energized, as a cyclotron augments the energies of common particles circulating. . . . "Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book," said Joyce of Finnegans Wake. "It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table." And "I am less alarmed," wrote Eliot, "about the decay of English when I read a murder story in the appropriate paper, than when I read the first leader in 'The Times.'" And "Poetry" — Pound — "must be as well- written as prose. Its language . . . departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity). . . ." And Wyndham Lewis . . . "The speech of Polish mothers," said Dr. Williams of his poetic idiom. . . .9

These several inflections of the common tongue — overheard in Joyce's cafe; on the pages of those working-class papers Eliot slyly delighted in; in the unbookishly learned idiolect of Pound; in the proletarian music filling Lewis's open-minded ears; in an American parole renewed for Williams by the rich otherness of immigrant speech —draw to a single critical point: the writing of all Kenner's modernists finds one root in the commonality of talk, which determines its radically democratic character. The themes of social elitism that Pound and Lewis came to espouse, Kenner's account can be extended to say, will seem largely irrelevant to their literary achievements, which he may thus continue to esteem. Yes, the same

PROLOGUE

7

argument will concede, these artists of the vulgate may have entered the ranks of fascism in its early, populist phase, but the severe mien of fascist imperium has nothing to do with their aesthetic accomplishment. Yet the continental background I am recovering will show the Anglo-Americans' most inventive techniques in league with the more atavistic strains in their social sensibility. In short, the physiology of the eye accounts both for a new literary language —a vocabulary of ultravisual immediacy — and the faculty (as they saw it) of dictatorial command. Might we not proclaim their artistic achievement, however, by separating it —more than half a century later — from the political meaning bound into it by the circumstances of their own age? A nearly contemporary assertion Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well

already frames the question. Will time pardon Pound and Lewis, like (Auden's) Yeats and Paul Claudel, for writing well? The affirmative answer Auden declared in his early version of the Yeats elegy was to be suppressed, of course, when he struck out these contentious quatrains.10 Doing so more than twenty-five years later, moreover, the poet proves his own point: he checks the insidious tendency of time to soften the connection between aesthetic beauty and political ugliness — as the music of The Faerie Queene leaves Spenser's own role in a hateful Irish policy an ever more neutral, merely abstract part of the allegory. At our own moment, however, excesses in the opposite direction seem more likely and more dangerous. We now read modernist literature on the high ground of historical hindsight, and this vantage offers a somewhat perilous advantage in judgment. To charge that Pound "promulgated, in his poetry and prose, an ideology that led to the murder of millions"11 is certainly tenable as historical description, but it is tendentious and false as a formulation of Pound's intent (as its author intends). It may be tempting to impute the achieved record of fascist atrocity to the prior motives of the modernists, but this is to read history backward. We do better to follow the development of literary ideology sequentially, for this progressive consideration may lead to a more reasonable framing of the final question. How much of the artistic achievement may we admire? The modernists' new standard of visual immediacy in words led them to esteem (what they saw as) a superior directness in the political cultures of Nazism and fascism. What happens to this aesthetic of visual privilege, in the actual fabric of their art, when those political regimes approach the apocalypse—and revelation—of 1939? Since the events surrounding World War II complicate the artists' own values and practices as well as our critical outlook, my study ends substan-

8


tially with the work they produced by 1939. An opening exposition of the continental tradition leads to separate chapters on Pound and Lewis, who grow into that European sensibility in their individual ways; at different paces. Whereas Lewis assumes the European outlook naturally, as a kind of birthright, Pound accommodates it more gradually, tentatively, problematically, for the censure it places on the musical experience challenges his own native faith in the Whitmanesque poetics of colloquial song. Thus the first decade of the poet's career requires its own extended treatment (chapter 2). The next chapter traces the evolution of Lewis's mature writing in the years of 1'entre deux guerres, and shows his distinctly English articulation of the continental intelligence. His influence opens new, wider areas of awareness in my reading of the later Pound (chapter 4), who moves into fully conscious alignment with his former colleague, not at the point of the English Vortex, but in the later twenties and thirties. Their political aesthetic develops in response to the watershed event of their generation (my chapters are organized loosely around it): the Great War. The horrors of mass conflict accelerate the development of their antipopulist position, even while its aesthetic precedents have been taking shape — reaching different stages — in the preceding years. To place this artistic preamble before their social testaments is not to frame an apology for their fascism but to recover the first condition of their political intelligence, its primary and necessary medium. For their drift to the right cannot be understood in terms of the narrowly partisan alignments later generations may find as targets for recrimination. Their initiatives were nurtured in an older, more formidably rooted notion of "ideology." Here the elementary language of art — aesthetic experience at its most direct and sensuous — affords a basic vocabulary for the articulation of political values. This intellectual culture owns a special place in the French tradition the Anglo-Americans were extending, where our consideration begins.

CHAPTER 1

From the Continent to England, 1889-1925

As the Terror subsided in postrevolutionary Paris, liberal intellectuals — Marie Jean Condorcet, Emmanuel ("Abbe") Sieyes, Antoine Destutt de Tracy—found themselves allied in a well-founded skepticism about the practical validity of the new political ideals. Liberty and equality and fraternity, urgent but nonetheless abstract notions, had manifestly failed to guide civil behavior in the desired direction. And so this loose confederacy of thinkers, members of the Class of Moral and Political Sciences at the newly formed Institute of France, sought to return social thinking to an older Enlightenment tradition. Empirical inquiry into human physiology, in particular the faculties of perception and cognition, and not the reiteration of preconceived ideas, must provide the concepts to guide self-government. On this exercise they conferred a name that locates a prime irony of intellectual history: ideologie. For the usual modern sense of this term —a body of political beliefs enjoying the unquestioned allegiance of a fideist — defies the first intent of ideo-logy, as expressed in the Greek roots of the word: most precisely, a study of images (eidos, "image"); more broadly, an objective analysis of the social meaning of sense impressions. Following John Locke and Abbe Condillac, and regarding ideas merely as the transformed stuff of sensation, the first ideologues took the fabric of sentient and perceptual life as the sole locus from which political and philosophical concepts could be adduced. An abstract hypothesis must be founded on an objective basis. The right to property discovered a rationale that fairly samples their method. The human sensibility, inundated with a welter of sense impressions, recognizes itself as a distinct, sentient entity. "As soon as this individual knows accurately itself," Tracy observes, "it sees clearly that this self is the exclusive proprietor of the body which it animates"; the perceiver's own sense of self—"an inevitable and inalienable property, that of its individual9

10


ity" — ratifies the notion of ownership.' By accepting the primacy of empirical analysis like this in the establishment of values, the ideologues sought to write a medical textbook for the ailing body politic — a manual of achievable goals in the ideal civitas. Tracy confidently claimed that his method was establishing a science "for the success of which all others must cooperate, that of regulating society in such a way that man finds there the most help and the least possible annoyance from his own kind."2 News of the French movement reached England by 1797, when the Monthly Magazine carried notice of Tracy's explanation of ideologic.3 Yet its main tradition remained on the continent, where Anglo-Americans of European leanings, T. E. Hulme as well as Pound and Lewis, could find the Enlightenment legacy, which was rekindled at the turn of the next century. Sociologists were once again addressing the material basis of human sensibility, as were aestheticians like Gourmont and Benda. The tradition they were extending, however, had complicated itself during the preceding century. While the original ideologues belonged to a progressive intelligentsia, eager to consolidate revolutionary gains by proving egalitarian ideas empirically, their scientific approach played into the reactionary hands of Henri SaintSimon and Auguste Comte in the mid-nineteenth century. The earlier emphasis on common physiology was shifting to stress a variable human nature; to describe an ideally hierarchical, organic social order: a natural elite.4 Heirs to this double tradition, the modern critics of literature and painting aligned their sensations with various social creeds, opposite political testaments. As such, the Europeans demonstrate not only the flexibility of a living tradition but the free, open-ended, essentially inductive character of their method: their civics varied according to the different laws they saw evidenced in the human senses. Most attempts to return social precepts to the ways of the soma, Terry Eagleton argues forcefully in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, represent an enterprise designed to ratify the concepts of the existing political order. The prevailing rules are thereby rooted more securely in the "minutiae of subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed. To dissolve the law to custom, to sheer unthinking habit, is to identify it with the human subject's own pleasurable well-being, so that to transgress that law would signify a deep self-violation." While Eagleton concedes that aesthetic sensation can dismay the ideology of convention, not merely echo the status quo, it is curious that he sees this rhythm of rebellion working ever —and only—in the service of progressive, liberal causes. "[T]here is surely no doubt that to affirm the claims of affective experience" against the abstract rationales of the established society "is in principle progressive" and, as such, "marks . . . a potentially liberating or Utopian trend of thought."5 Eagleton's understanding of aesthetic sensation as a catalyst for the Marxist millennium cannot come to terms with the phenomenon I address centrally here: a conservative reaction, launched

FROM THE CONTINENT TO ENGLAND, 1889-1925

11

through a study of art in its most immediate and affective state, against the mainstream culture of liberal, democratic, "progressive" Europe, as typified by la belle epoque in France. It is in the language of direct aesthetic sensation that the charter of revolution from the radical right is written. That the claims of the political reactionaries originate in aesthetic values is a theme reflected in the organization of this chapter, which begins with the art criticism of Wilhelm Worringer and ends with the social formulations of his English student, Hulme. In the intervening pages I recreate the continental culture that mediates their exchange: the ideologiecritique that analyzes the activities of ear and eye and endows this sensory experience with political significance. This European sensibility provides a context at once historical and heuristic: an established part of the awareness Hulme shares with Pound and Lewis, it also affords a language for interpreting the political significance of modernist art. This gnosis will not need to travel to Pound and Lewis through Hulme. He stands instead as an advance example of the Anglo-American response to it —a forward register of its intellectual powers, its political promises, its sometimes delusive appeals. MUSICAL EMPATHY

In romantic and postromantic poetics no experience figures more largely than the act of empathy. From the landskip conventions of the late eighteenth century through the dramatic monologues of the Victorians, a primary motive and goal for poet and reader is to achieve union with the aesthetic object.6 Modern commentators tend to present this feeling of identification as a strictly physiological moment —in a kind of descriptive mechanics. "To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself," Worringer argues in Abstraction and Empathy, "to empathise myself into it." The mainspring of his projection lies in his inner vitalist core. This energy—called "life . . . inner working, striving" by his forerunner, Theodor Lipps —wells up, and its surge carries its possessor into a feeling of contact with nature or objects close by. Thus the percipient may "flow uninhibitedly with his inner feeling of vitality, with his inner need for activity," into "the cognate organic."7 Empathy finds its likeliest opportunity in the response to music. The movements of sound are heard to correspond to the motions of the vital spirit; the auditor becomes one with the living current of acoustic sensation. This notion of physical sympathy with sound is so powerful that Worringer, even when responding to Greek architecture, uses acoustic figures to develop his point, connecting to the colder stones of these buildings through tropes of lambent sound. "The Ionic temple . . . rises up serene and pleasant, replete with self-confident life and striving, which, tempered by a marvelous harmony, appeals with gentle force to our sense of life." More expansively:

12


"The criterion of the organic is always the harmonious, the balanced, the inwardly calm, into whose movement and rhythm we can without difficulty flow with the vital sensations of our own organisms."8 These emphases need to be added because Worringer's understanding of music is an awareness lodged in the secondary term of metaphor — an awareness invoked but not claimed with the kind of conceptual clarity that he establishes for empathy per se.9 These tropes, gathering their detail and meaning from contemporary intellectual culture, reflect an attention to sound that is equally broadly based and closely focused. The formative ideas are laid out by Henri Bergson, first of all, in his Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (1889). Here he explains the affective power of music as an echoing connection between its movements and those of the human quick. "[T]he expressive or rather suggestive power of music" operates, he explains, as "we repeat to ourselves the sounds heard, so as to carry ourselves back into the psychic state out of which they emerged"; this "original state" consists of "the very motion and attitudes which the sound imparts to our body."10 Sound stirs the restive fibers of the biological soul; then it raises an elementary physical sympathy between the respondent and the figure associated with the rhythmic sensation—be it Worringer's Ionic temple or, more naturally, Bergson's dancer and speaker: "The regularity of the rhythm establishes a kind of communication between [the dancer] and us. ... Indeed, if he stops for an instant, our hand in its impatience cannot refrain from making a movement, as though to push it, as though to replace it in the midst of this movement." "Some neuropaths cannot be present at a conversation without moving their lips; this is only an exaggeration of what takes place in the case of every one of us."11 For Bergson, the laws of musical empathy also ruled the process of cognitive intuition. The proper object of such intuition, he claims in a 1911 lecture, is the experience of time in its proper form, namely, the interpenetration of past and present in a temporal duree. He likens this duration to a "melody," "one identical change which keeps ever lengthening,"12 but music provides more than metaphorical accompaniment here. Intuition achieves a union between the percipient and the flow of time, and music offers the chief vehicle for this identification. In a parable written later in his life, Bergson directs the philosopher to follow the simple wisdom of the child, who chants the words of his lesson in order to penetrate to the author's unique moment of inspiration, his creative duree. Likewise, the thinker can enter the grand duration of creative evolution by sounding it out in a correspondent music. In order to "appropriate" the "inspiration of the author," the child "must fall into step with him by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection." For there is "a certain analogy," he maintains, "between the act of reading as I have just described it and the intuition I recommend to the


13

philosopher. On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and rhythm of the compositor, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in physical sympathy."13 Between this initial visceral experience and its abstract elaboration, Bergson explained, a secondary stage occurs. Here the intuition has moved into the form of a concrete image—the typical content of poetry. But the poet must orchestrate the image, Bergson insists, and thus retune the intuitive "feelings" it represents to the musical, sensual, and temporal conditions of their origin. When the "images pass before our eyes," he concedes, "we in turn experience the feeling," but "we should never realize these images so strongly without the regular movement of the rhythm by which one is lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet."14 This orchestration leads the reader back to the intuitive origins of poetry in much the same way that the philosopher in the preceding passage — a name for the poet at an earlier stage—sounds his way into intuitive union with nature. Musical empathy informs this process from its inception by the philosopher-poet to its reception by the reader-auditor. As Bergson's own writing indicates, the notion of musical empathy worked sufficiently widely to bridge the disciplines of philosophy and poetry. His principle of acoustic intuition guided the performance poetry of Italian Futurists, too. Fillipo Marinetti opened his 1914 piece "Abstract Onomatopoeia and the Numeric Sensibility" by proclaiming that "Our increasing love towards matter, and the will to penetrate it, and to knows [sic] its vibrations, and the physical sympathy that binds us to engines, incite us to use onomatopoeia."15 Following the laws of onomatopoeia, the material body of the word mimics the essence of its referent, but Marinetti goes to a further, Bergsonian stage: he hears the sound draw the auditor into visceral union with the phoneme and, indeed, with the object or feeling presented under the form of word. Like most extreme formulations of a creed, the Futurist's goes to the center of the original faith. Thus he returns the Bergsonian belief in sympathy through sound to the musical mesmerism—the ectoplasmic attraction — of a century earlier. Here the power of an acoustic art —to bind the sentient listener to the material field of language voiced aloud — is heard as the "lyrical continuation and transfiguration of our animal magnetism."16 The power of these attitudes may be measured, not only by their diverse appearances, but by the sophistication with which they were elaborated. The Futurists could refine the laws of musical empathy, for example, to operate in a pictorial frame. In his 1911 catalogue notes for The Street Enters the House (La strada entra nella casa) (figure 1), Umberto Boccioni suggests that the viewer might regard his painting as a graph of sound effects: "the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and reality of the objects outside."17 Here a female figure stands with her back to the viewer, while a galaxy of disparate things — construction poles, a set of stairs,

14


FIGURE 1. Umberto Boccioni, The Street Enters the House (La strada entra nella casa) (1911). Oil on canvas. Sprengel Museum, Hannover.

a horse —swirls into her physical awareness, into her body. But earshot has replaced viewpoint as her angle of relation to the scene. The artist has torn the objects from the eyes' linear distance and placed them in the ears' circumambient plane, letting them move into and through the woman as though they were acoustic sensations, whose effects are more immediate, invasive, and physically dense than those of eyesight. (The intensity of specifically aural impression led a later commentator to retitle the painting "The Noise of the Street Penetrates the House."'18) It is probably a function of the technology of preservation that the visual work of the Futurists - from poster art to typographic poetry - survives as their defining legacy. Their contemporary impact, however, registered more strongly on the ear. The English critic Henry Newbolt recorded this in his essay, "Futurism and Form in Poetry" (1914). Here he singles out the vocal


15

priority in Futurist poetics and attacks, obliquely but consistently, the underlying methods and aims of musical empathy: But whereas [Marinetti] mimics and declaims, the [proper] poet does something quite different. The poet changes the water of experience into the wine of emotion, not by the tones of his voice, but by the magic of ordered language. He does not give you the elements of matter and nervous excitement for you to make of them what you can; he gives you his own intuition already made, his own world already created, and so created as to exist eternally, when the vibrations of the voice have long since passed into silence. The power of the Futurist . . . is gramophonic, and it has the limitations of the gramophone.19

Marinetti's piece on onomatopoeia had been published in the English weekly the New Age several weeks before, and Newbolt, bristling at vocal "mimicry," rejects the Futurist's use of imitative sound and the physical sympathy—"nervous excitement" — it induces in the auditor. But the English critic is really shooting through the Futurist at the Bergsonian poet-sage, who sounds his way into vital contact with nature, who reproduces the music of the duree in his own voice, who moves into union with creative evolution and thus achieves his ongoing "intuition." Denying the artistic validity of sympathetic experience through sound, Newbolt rejects the consequently fluid and musical and timeful nature of Marinetti's "intuition," requiring that it come "already made." For Ezra Pound, artists function as the antennae of the race, picking up signals from the future; the Futurists served more often as lightning rods for the past, absorbing the anxiety and frustration discharged from older conventions. Newbolt delivered an old charge, and yet he was not appealing to a narrowly traditional kind of verse architecture. His sense of poetic form was more organic than mechanical: "new feelings," he proclaims, "must have new forms of expression." Even as he resists the empathy the Futurists sought to induce through experimental sounds, he guarantees a legacy of "creative freedom" for poetry; its true "tradition [is] not so much of the laws and ceremonies" of verse as of "independent workers," who "in this sense . . . have all been Futurists."20 Under these standards his attack demonstrates how a modern sensibility can react against the currents of aural empathy without appealing to a retrogressive, traditional definition of form. This (moderate) conservative is indeed a (mild) progressive. But a revolutionary traditionalist, like Spender's modernists? Pound respected Newbolt,21 who was blessed as well in Lewis's Blast. The older English critic's resistance to musical empathy anticipates the response of the Anglo-Americans, who combine a still more experimental aptitude in the arts with reactionary social attitudes. For it is a political signal that triggers Newbolt's blast at acoustic sympathy. And this social message is already being clarified and amplified by a number of continental writers, chief among them Julien Benda, whose

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rejection of musical empathy finds its context and point in a more identifiably political discourse.

POLITICAL AESTHETICS La Trahison des clercs (1928), Benda's most widely known book, has wrongly eclipsed the visibility of his earlier work, most notably Belphegor (1918), which enjoyed a selective but well-informed readership. The Treason of the Intellectuals indicts artists for involving themselves in politics, yet this reproach is a piece of silent self-criticism on Benda's part, for Belphegor developed a distinctly aesthetic understanding of social phenomena. Writing on the topic of empathy, which he identified almost entirely as a musical and aural experience, he examined its pathology, both physiologically and psychologically; exposed its deficiencies as an aesthetic principle; and identified its alarming social ramifications. His range of interests reflects the scope of the European commentary to which he is responding and contributing, and this broader community serves to clarify the import of his perceptions. He stands most prominently among a group of ideologues who, in the original sense of Tracy's word, develop their political ideas through a systematic, (quasi-)scientific analysis of the human senses, particularly hearing and sight. For this Enlightenment tradition finds its modern fate most strikingly in Benda. He follows its first methods but expands its original aims: he uses the tools of physiological inquiry to locate human weaknesses as well as to find special strengths; he identifies errant social concepts, based on physical infirmities, just as he uses his favored sensations to renew the warrant of a political elite. Here he appears first among the "reactionary" ideologues, who will be surveyed in relation to his formidable example. Much Music Marreth Men's Manners Building an aesthetic critique of mass society from the bottom up, Benda begins with the physiology of hearing. Like Bergson and the Futurists, he hears the vitalist soul stirring in elementary sympathy to the movements of sound: "The sensations of hearing . . . cause vibration in a nervous system connected with a vital organism which lies deeper than that affected by sensations of sight."22 Just as Marinetti found this vibration of sound carrying the "ego" into physical communion with vast expanses ("spread [ing] itself in universal vibration"23), Benda finds that sounds seem to "come from inside" and, "increasing the scope of his being[,] make him aware of the infinitude of his ego" (B, 143). Yet the wonders those other writers praised in this sympathetic expansion through sound strike Benda as dangerous political delusions. The aural empathy that binds listeners to music —and to other listeners —leads to feelings of demotic gigantism, a sense of common-man fellowship that is equally phantasmal and volatile. Thus the art of lyric is


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heard to work ever in the service of collective, populist themes. These are anthems to the very togetherness that song stimulates as a function of its physical effect: "Note, too, how amazingly this field of lyricism has been extended: how they have managed to add to the mysteries that sufficed for our forefathers (of love, of woman, of children) others no less moving, of race, of crowds, of animal life, etc." (B, 90; emphases added). By the same rule of musical effect, lyric must descend from the lofty philosophical subjects it purports to address and, true to the physical sympathy it induces, provoke sensations of indiscriminate comradeship. As in the "work of Barres," which "begins by taking as its centers of vibration certain truly philosophical states of mind, such as pantheism, a loftily skeptical intellectualism, and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial passion and national feeling."24 A weakness for such populist passions appears to Benda as the meager birthright of the lower social orders. Their servility and lack of sophistication open them to the emotions that music so insidiously plays upon. Conversely, these blandishments seem not to reach the shrewder, more opportunistic minds of the native aristocrat, who is praised here on pages that seem to be taken from a Renaissance manual for princes. "National passions," Benda notes in Trahison, "are now exerted by plebeian minds," where they "assume the character of mysticism, of a religious adoration almost unknown . . . in the practical minds of the great nobles."25 But the lower classes hold no monopoly on such aural credulity. "Who will write the aesthetic of the middle-classes?" queries Felix, unhappy protagonist in Benda's novel The Yoke of Pity.26 The answer surrounds him in that text, which documents the need for physical communion in the art and life of the bourgeoisie, and presents these needs as a function of all people's "patheticism, their outpouring of emotion, their 'musicality.'"27 In everyone there lies the gullibility that music preys on to orchestrate group feeling. Through all levels of society there runs a need to adhere: variously, to categories of race, class, nation. The lowest common denominator of society is indeed the sense of commonality achieved on that lowest level of acoustic sensation. Demos is a mental susceptibility, then, a state of mind rather than a condition of social class. Thus the Foreword to Belphegor expresses agreement with the sardonic sociology of the eighteenth-century anecdote: "I mean by 'the people' all those who think basely and vulgarly: the court is full of them" (B, n.p.). And so Benda's political deliberations seem to turn on a sense of ideology exactly congruent with that of his Gallic forerunners. Following Tracy's own attempts to understand and describe a variety of civil rights and behaviors as functions of different sensory activities, the modern ideologue puts himself forward as no flag-bearer for Cause or State; no sociologist of the Abstract; no apologist for an existing metaphysics or a traditional politics. Or so he would profess. Yes, echelons of mind rather than birth or social class tend to be held high as standards in the modern ideological culture

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Benda represents here. But echelons they are: the preferred and unpreferred modes of sensation are not only rank-ordered, they acquire the meaning and value of the metaphors that align them consistently with class rankings in older hierarchical societies. Thus Benda speaks alternately of "plebeian minds" and an "aristocracy of mind."28 The new ideological discourse—initially or intentionally a nonpartisan analysis of human sensation and its social implications — follows the development, across the nineteenth century, of the first ideologie: the identification of superior and inferior faculties becomes an argument for natural ladders of authority. And Benda's metaphors can be heard as parts of speech in the broader, pan-European grammar of political reaction. The opposing tropes of an elite intellectual caste and a servile, dispensable mass of common minds are indeed tokens that can be cashed in for hard political currency. These are counters that can be redeemed, at any moment, for hierarchy as actual social fact. This process is visible in a single passage from the writings of Benda's younger contemporary, Jose Ortega y Gasset. In "The Dehumanization of Art" Ortega begins by appealing to artists of superior gifts to identify themselves in the welter of modern egalitarian society. By the end, he has slyly revived the very political structures that contribute these metaphors of preference, invoking the stratified society of prerevolutionary Europe as an ideal no less desirable for being foregone: From a sociological point of view the characteristic feature of the new art is, in my judgment, that it divides the public into the two classes of those who understand it and those who do not. . . . The new art obviously addresses itself . . . to a specially gifted minority. Hence the indignation it arouses in the masses. . . . For a century and a half the masses have claimed to be the whole of society. Stravinsky's music or Pirandello's drama have the sociological effect of compelling the people to recognize itself for what it is: a component among others in the social structure, inert matter of the historical process, a secondary factor in the cosmos of spiritual life. On the other hand, the new art helps the elite to recognize themselves and one another in the drab mass of society and to learn their mission which consists in being few and holding their own against the many. A time must come in which society, from politics to art, reorganizes itself into two orders or ranks: the illustrious and the vulgar. That chaotic, shapeless, and undifferentiated state without discipline and social structure in which Europe has lived these hundred and fifty years cannot go on. Behind all contemporary life lurks the provoking and profound injustice of the assumption that men are actually equal.29

Ortega studied in Germany in the same years that saw the emergence of Worringer. He understood the rationale of the "new art" of visual abstraction as well as the compulsions of physical empathy. In "The Dehumanization of Art," he clearly favors the austere outlines of geometric design over the obscure involvements of sympathy. And he extends this artistic prefer-


19

ence in a (now) predictable political direction. In a patronizing analysis of human empathy, he attributes its operations to the common mind of Demos in no loosely allusive or metaphorical way. For the actual material circumstances of working life, he believes, make such "sentimental intervention" the only available response. Since these are people who "have never practiced any other attitude but the practical one in which a man's feelings are aroused and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental intervention leaves them without a clue" (DA, 9). The solidarity of the demotic "masses," based on "their willingness to sympathize with [their] neighbor's joys and worries," is the socialization of that ingrained trait of "sentimental intervention"; an art that invites this empathic response is thus the one "made for the masses" (DA, 11) — enchanted masses, we should say, for music provides the primary medium for this sympathetic identification. Discriminations Assigning empathy to the lowest social class, Ortega lays the groundwork for his political state, which he conceives as a scheme of aesthetic senses, of bodily humors arranged in rank order of preference. Whereas sympathy is the debased habit of the common folk, members of a body swayed to music, detachment is the rank and privilege of an aristocratic class, holding the high ground of the eye. Like aural empathy, this visual distance provided a subject for wide European analysis: its advantage relies on a quasi-physiological examination, one that adduces evidence for the superiority of the eye to the ear. In these terms critics of the visual and literary arts rewrite the social contract of liberal democratic Europe, basing their arguments for a hierarchical society on this two-tiered model of aesthetic sensations. Ortega's remarks on the visual arts underscore the virtual immunity of the cultivated eye to the disease of empathy, somatic involvement. "The painter," this critic believes, remains "completely unconcerned" with the object of sight, indeed "a hundred miles removed from it"; he "does nothing but keep his eyes open." This ideal artist exists in a "purely perceptive attitude . . . [H]is attention . . . is directed exclusively toward the visual part —color values, lights, and shadows. In the painter we find a maximum of distance and a minimum of feeling intervention" (DA, 16). This visual preference evolves fully in Ortega's analysis of Wagnerian opera. While music appeals to aural empathy, drawing the correspondent motions of the vitalist soul into union with the living current of sound, the eye thrives at a linear distance from its object of attention. Ortega praises its diffident strengths in pointed contrast to the pathology of the sympathetic ear: Wagner poured into Tristan und Isolde his adultery with Mathilde Wesendonck, and if we want to enjoy this work we must, for a few hours, turn vaguely adulterous ourselves. That darkly stirring music makes us weep and tremble and melt away voluptuously. . . .

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Art must not proceed by psychic contagion, for psychic contagion is an unconscious phenomenon, and art ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect. . . . Aesthetic pleasure must be a seeing pleasure. . . . Any phenomenon that aspires to being mental and not mechanical [reflex] must bear this luminous character of intelligibility. . . . Seeing requires distance. Each art operates a magic lantern that removes and transfigures its objects. On its screen they stand aloof, inmates of an inaccessible world, in an absolute distance. (DA, 24-26)

The same echelon of aesthetic senses appears in Benda's writings. He values the natural intelligence of the eye in systematic opposition to the mental deficiencies of the ear. The eye enjoys "sensations mixed with an intellectual condition," he emphasizes, "(the latter sometimes usurping almost all the field); they come under the heading of clear sensibility." However, "sensations of hearing constitute pure sensation, exempt, insofar as any conscious state can be, from any intellectual element; these come under the heading of clouded sensibility" (B, 143). For the first condition of intellectual activity is visual distance: "Sensations of sight impose upon the subject the idea of something outside of himself" (B, 143; first emphasis added). Thus "sensations of sight are naturally inseparable from the idea of the object which arouses them" (B, 142-43). While the eye relies on separation to form a picture of the object, and thus attains the conceptual clarity that is its privilege, separation works equally strategically between the objects in view. Benda exalts these acts of visual distancing and intellectual definition in direct contrast to the effects of musical empathy, which "reject[s] all intellectuality" and gravitates to the lower sensual order of the ear and tongue, creating a "sensation vaguely troubling and peculiarly flattering to the palate'" (emphasis added). The ear serves the demand "that art shall avoid any attempt to distinguish between things, all clean-cut separations and definite outlines, and shall present them in their indistinctness, in their inter-penetration, in their mobility, in their fluidity" (B, 18-19). The severing thrust of the eye describes a specifically literary strength for Remy de Gourmont. In Le Probleme du style (1902), Gourmont argues vigorously that a developed visual sense provides the necessary basis for a fine writing style. He embeds the reasons in this analysis of ocular dynamics: "The visual man [le visuel] will keep the memory of a scene under the form of an image more or less distinct, more or less intricate."30 The eye can perceive things "nette" and "compliquee," both distinct and intricate, because it clarifies fine details by separating, and the stylist draws upon this visual faculty of severance because such discrimination is the essential action in good writing. Thus Gourmont repeatedly compares the stylist and the painter. The good writer thinks of words in discrete units, indeed one at a time, like the colors selected for combination by the visual artist:


21

M. Jules Claretie has noted, a propos of Ziem, that almost all painters write well; it is inevitable; they relate that which they see and search for the words, one at a time, which translate their vision, just as they do with colors, before painting. (PS, 34-35) Visual persons tend, even with subconscious phrases, to translate their vision exactly like a painter, searching for words and combinations of words as a painter does colors and combinations of colors. (PS, 37-38)

Gourmont contrasts his stylists of the eye with "mechanical beings," to whom "words and phrases come without a break, fluently, all the work of the journey between reality and the idea and the idea and reality having been made in advance for them by former writers" (PS, 38). These unvisual automatons miss not only the discrimination essential to a fine literary aesthetic, but the intellectual action, "tout le travail de passage du reel a 1'idee et de 1'idee au reel," that is the special ocular power. While the eye lends itself to stylistic fineness of feature, Gourmont also credits it with an intellectual advantage over the ear. Repeatedly he contrasts the intellectual potency of eyesight with the mental ineptitude of hearing. He notes that the ear is incapable of acting intelligently on the content it has received. It learns by rote memory, which is no learning at all, and thus falls prey to the susceptibilities of the "emotional" soul. In current French pedagogy, he complains, the principle is to cultivate verbal memory at the expense of visual memory. One is encouraged, not to look, but to listen. . . . The ear is the foundation they stress; the Holy Spirit enters always through the ear, but under the form of words and phrases that inscribe themselves on the brain exactly as they are pronounced . . . and one day out they come, identical in sound, and perhaps meaning nothing. That which enters through the eye, however, can leave through the lips only after original work of transposition; to relate what one has seen, that is, to analyze an image, is an operation complex and laborious; to tell what one has heard, however, is to repeat sounds, perhaps like a wall.31

Here the child-genius of Bergson's philosopher-poet, repeating the words of the lesson to partake of its inspired wisdom, shows the mental capacity of a ventriloquist's dummy. True intelligence follows the physics of the eye, which actively analyzes, exercises its severing function in breaking down a complex image, and thus arrives at a properly intellectual understanding. In line with the new ideologiecritique, Gourmont politicizes these perceptions. Aural debility characterizes the mental processes of the demotic masses. Popular poetry, he claims in his 1905 essay "Le Vers populaire," is musical in the worst sense. The plebian mind, a veritable sensorium of acoustic impressions, errs in ways that define the ear's intellectual inferiority to

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the eye. The music of public poetry typically commits "la synerese," drawing together in one sound two vowels normally kept separate; it obliterates specifically the distinctions proper to the visual intelligence. "La synerese" stands indeed as the "fundamental" action of the popular musical sensibility, providing the characteristic example of its many acoustic excesses and malformations—most obviously, the "deformities demanded by assonance, as in songs based on a single rhyme" (ELF, 288). Correspondingly, the popular poet, who is "ignorant of Ovid, Musset, and all that is written," and who "find[s] his powers in a tradition that is strictly oral" can produce only "an unknown rhapsody" (ELF, 279-80). This oral performer shows intellectual deficiencies, and these mental weaknesses derive directly—the emphasis is Gourmont's — from the dominance of sound; from a lack of the (visualintellectual) skill needed to read the tale. The musical priority and visual deficiency of popular poetry combine, in the final assessment, to deny it the status of true aesthetic experience. Excluding Demos categorically from art in "L'Art et le peuple," Gourmont argues that proper artistic enjoyment relies on "desinteressement" (PS, 193), the detachment that is a function of the visual distance so emphatically lacking among the musical masses. Minds gifted with a superior intelligence should claim the rank of a preferred social class: Gourmont makes this suggestion insistently, but obliquely. It is the constant inference of his own binary system of thought. He has not only opposed the visual and aural senses; he has explicitly identified the mental shortcomings of the ear with those of a lower, common culture, and he leaves the redemptive hegemony of the eye as the logical next step in the social critique. Julien Benda takes that step. Writing less than a decade after Gourmont, he joins the ideas of optical privilege and political superiority in a single word. Severite, in an unusually literal but not untrue sense, means "severance" or "separation," and as such describes the twofold condition of visual perception: distance from the objects of sight and discrimination among them. Construed also as "aloofness" or "austerity," moreover, severite describes the virtu of an aristocracy at once inherited and earned—its traditional privileges the reward for percipients gifted with this superior visual faculty. Two appearances of severite in Belphegor make up its double sense. In line with the physiological basis of the new Ideologie, Benda uses it first to describe a condition of perception. "[S]ensations of sight impose upon the subject the idea of distinction between himself and the object of his vision (intellectual state, principle of severity)" (B, 143-44). The distance on which intellectual discrimination depends then provides a rationale for a similar privilege in the social system — a principle adduced in a now familiar pattern of opposites. Here Benda contrasts the vulgar appetites of the new "musical" society with the visual or "plastic" sensibility of an antique aristocracy, "a Mazarin, a Fouquet, or a Seignelay," who bore this principle of visual sever-


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ity as their emblem and crest: "[W]e might characterize the luxury of those days as plastic, that of our contemporaries as musical. . . . The material and colour of the [modern] hangings, the carpet, the cushions, the ornaments, the shape of the furniture, the lighting system [are] arranged with a view to flattering the senses, and avoiding any impression of severity" (B, 122). Severite suggests a kind of aristocratic diffidence, its signature the sort of spare and flinty elegance Yeats praised among his Anglo-Irish patricians. Benda locates that disposition in his own ascendancy class, but the trait shows a distinctly aesthetic genealogy. The visual distance essential to a perception of the "plastic" arts has become the aloofness of a social elite. Separation between objects of sight sustains the most striking example of visual ideologie. The primary act of optical distinction—the detachment of the frontal image from the background or surrounding plane — is engaged at length by Ortega. He calls it "proximate vision," contrasts it with "distant vision," and, in the language of physiological analysis, rationalizes a political ideal. To look with proximate sight means "to focus both ocular rays on a point which, thanks to this, becomes favored, optically privileged. In distant vision we do not fix the gaze on any point, but rather attempt to embrace the whole field, including its boundaries. For this reason, we avoid focusing the eyes as much as possible" (DA, 103-4). The metaphors describing the effects of proximate sight—its image is "favored," "privileged" — point up a civics of preference that needs little decoding. Visual discrimination and political distinction stand like example and precept, specific proof and general rule, for the modern ideologue. While Ortega extends the tendencies already evident in the work of Benda and Gourmont, he links this act of optical severance with the idea of natural hierarchy in ways more literal, radical, and historically specific than his French colleagues. The separations fundamental to a graded society, a feudal monarchy, are exercised and validated by proximate vision, which "organizes the whole field of vision, imposing upon it an optical hierarchy: a privileged central nucleus articulating itself against the surrounding area. The central object is a luminous hero, a protagonist standing out against a 'mass,' a visual plebs" (DA, 101); "Proximate vision dissociates, analyzes, distinguishes — it is feudal" (DA, 112). By contrast, distant vision (forsaking the eye's best powers) repeats the homogenizing effects of modern democratic culture: "Let the eye, passive but free, prolong its line of vision to the limit of the visual field. . . . The structure of our hierarchialized elements disappears. The ocular field is homogeneous; we do not see one thing clearly and the rest confusedly, for all is submerged in an optical democracy" (DA, 101-2); "Distant vision synthesizes, combines, throws together —it is democratic" (DA, 112). Unlike Benda and Gourmont, Ortega develops this systematic opposition wholly within the visual register. Yet distant sight essentially reproduces the deficiencies of aural empathy (the merging characteristic of mass culture), which are identified as such and castigated in his earlier analysis of Wagner.

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EUROPEAN VORTEX

Internally coherent and consistent as this group of European aesthetes may appear, the importance of their colloquy lies in the way it weaves together influences larger than any one of their own idiosyncratic threads. To place their opinions on the visual sense in a more broadly drawn framework of intellectual history will allow us to see how the forces operating through them also reach Lewis and Pound —at a moment before either one of the Anglo-Americans has really assimilated the recent European literature (all of it not yet written in 1913-14). To return this discourse to its historical moment also allows us to recover other contributors to it. These writers, rarely cited in the backgrounds to modernism, address issues similar to those engaged by the signal figures already named. Their sensibilities show the intellectual, psychological, and political drama that attends the development of this modern ideologie. Pound/Lewis: A Vorzeit That Ortega sees social attitudes mirrored so clearly in the optical field may strike us now as an intellectual feat both extravagant and simplistic. At his own moment, however, the spatial plane mirrored developments in intellectual and political history. Progress in the science of space matched the direction of social thought, and the visual field provided a staging area for a conservative political reaction like Ortega's. "The traditional view that space was an inert void in which objects existed gave way to a new view of it as active and full," Stephen Kern notes in the admirably apt summary of The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. "[T]his new conception of 'positive negative space' . . . implies that the background itself is a positive element, of equal importance with all the others." Ignoring the separation between the plenum of matter and the vacuum of space, intellectuals were collapsing the distance, formerly absolute, "between subject and background in painting, between figure and ground in perception, between the sacred and profane spaces of religion."32 The study of space was breaking down those distinctions on which traditional hierarchies rely. Ortega's appeal to the vertical structures of medieval painting, to the aesthetics of the frontal plane and the politics of visual privilege, represented more than nostalgia. It was a timely and pointed reaction to intellectual and social forces in their most likely field of convergence: space. The timeliness of Ortega's reaction was matched by an expediency in social recommendation. While he linked the art of optical severance to an ancient aristocracy, like Benda, he did not spend his polemical energies, at least overtly, in attempts to revive that antique state. The old patrician class found its descendants in the new elite of the visual intellect, the antidemocratic painters and writers he extols. Their aristocratic character functioned as no idle or decorative analogy, of course. A reading of his commentary has


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already suggested that he introduces such class affinities with the covert hope of realization; his artists retain the memory as well as the metaphor of class privilege. Nonetheless, the authority expressed in the pictorial frame of medieval art could be nominally detached from its founding social context. Along the same lines, command could be transferred to the act of perception itself. To chisel an image out of a mass of background detail is to exercise a superior virtu, like that enshrined in the sequestered frontal space of medieval iconography. The devices of proximate vision, then, could be revived free of the curial, recherche spirit of much twentieth-century neomedievalism. For the technical attitudes of proximate vision run essentially in line with a mainstream tradition in modern literary history: the Romantic Image, the evolving discipline and creed that Frank Kermode has reviewed. Presenting the Image as icon, purging it of discourse, trusting it as the irreducible "what" of aesthetic experience, writers as diverse as Keats and Pater embraced it as the occasion of a supernal, exquisite, nearly ineffable mental event—its percipients the members of an artistic clerisy.33 Within this continuing tradition, the sensibilities of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis develop (figures 2 and 3). Already, at their first moment of collaboration, they share an awareness for the potentials of proximate vision — a device binding the richly diverse continental legacy into one salient technique. Lewis's 1913 pencil, pen, and ink watercolor Composition (figure 4) found its most suggestive assessment in Pound's own 1914 review of the portfolio of illustrations ("Timon of Athens") in which it appeared, and of which it is representative: "If you ask me what his Timon' means, I can reply by asking you what the old play means. For me his designs are a creation on the same motif. That motif is the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity."34 The design described here matches the strategic layout in Ortega's model of proximate vision, but Lewis's centralized and privileged intelligence, unlike the authority of the medieval king, is neither accepted as a convention of power nor represented as a received fact. This modern hero acts out a drama of perception that serves both to test and confirm his hegemony. The viewer participates in this perceptual agon, attempting to center the schematic swirl and find that point of designing control that corresponds to the intelligent protagonist Pound has evoked, and to the heroic luminary Ortega has extolled. The double wedge shape near the center anchors the dynamic pattern: the bottom apex of the "M" continues into the lower-right corner; the wedges hoist the upper-right and upper-left sectors of the canvas, while the shape of this centering point repeats itself in a series of self-similarities, a sort of visual echo, across the canvas.35 (This kind of submerged but evident center is the optical conceit for many of the "Timon" drawings.) To perceive the obscured focal point of these systems is to exercise the visual faculty of discrimination and thus, in line with the modernized version of Ortega's scheme, to earn a distinction

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FIGURE 2. Photograph of Ezra Pound by E. O. Hoppe (1918). Mansell Collection, London.

like that revered in the foreground - the preferred space —of the medieval frame. The social meaning implicit in Composition becomes explicit in its contemporary companion piece of 1913-15, The Crowd (figure 5). Despite its grounding in the current Futurist convention of political riot as pictorial subject, this painting displays a geometrical and social content more clearly in line with the medieval scheme of proximate vision. The tiny red stick-men consigned to the upper background merge into an indistinct, aggregate mass; here is the "visual plebs" that Ortega saw in the optical hinterlands of the older canvases. Far more finely detailed, the shapes in the lower-left corner clearly occupy the former place of favor in the medieval scheme. These


27

black-capped leaders are privileged with a sequestered place, designated as such by lettering that forms most of the French word ENCLO[S]: enclosure. In that visual sign, however, lies a potent verbal riddle: Lewis uncloses the word for enclosure, breaks it off; symbolically, orthographically, he violates the separate, integral space of the principals. The sanctuary of an intelligent ruling class is thrown into jeopardy by the residual anarchy of mass society. Thus the painting contains the outlines of a social agon no less dramatic than the internal conflict Pound traced in his precis on Composition. In sequence the two paintings show Lewis moving from a struggle for

FIGURE 3. Photograph of Wyndham Lewis by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1916). Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

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FIGURE 4.

POUND,

LEWIS, AND RADICAL

MODERNISM

Wyndham Lewis, Composition (1913). Pencil, pen, and ink watercolor The Tate

Gallery, London.

perceptual dominance to an equally embattled assertion of political supremacy. The proof of sensory hegemony leads this artist to ideas of social hierarchy. This process recalls the development of the original ideologie (its tragic fate, one may say), but it is obviously affected by current circumstances. Behind the Futurist crowd lie the masses mobilized (by 1915) for the Great War, and this apocalypse of modern mass society both aggravates and inflates the political conclusions Lewis drew onto this canvas. The political temper of this modern ideologue is force-ripened by historical events, and forced into older, readily available models of authoritarian governance. Yet the adaptability of proximate vision to modern conditions-variously psychological, historical, social-also testifies to its modern prepotency.


29

"In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it."36 Pound's praise for the architecture of light and shade in the Tempio Malatestiano hails no romantic gloaming like that in which Thomas Hardy wandered. He is recalling specifically the contrast pattern of proximate vision. Its spatial — social — hierarchy appears here as a conceit of this modern percipient. For the comma Pound inserts after that first phrase sets apart the undistinguished dark and the point of luminous value, reenacting and celebrating the discrimination essential to the medieval scheme. The confident ease in that gesture may measure the security of Pound's faith in the aesthetic and political principles of the old vision. For the adaptability of the medieval technique extends as well to the literary art of the modernists.

FIGURE 5. Wyndham Lewis, The Crowd (1913-15). Oil on canvas. The Tate Gallery, London.

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To transform the printed page into a quasi-pictorial frame entails a creative conceit that Pound and Lewis develop in different ways (their stratagems are analyzed later). But the attitudes and practices of proximate vision can be seen to enter their writing in one of its shared traits: local difficulty. Densely constructed, an equal compact of sharp visual imagery and elusive significance, the individual verse line in some of the best cantos, like the centripetal and vortexlike sentences of Tarr or The Childermass or The Apes of God, magnetizes our attention to a very narrowly drawn window of vision. This effort tends to reduce the global environment of those focused words to a vague and opaque background or, to adjust Ortega's phrase, a textual plebs. The literary technique serves to display and confirm an authority like that exercised in the "Timon" design and esteemed in the frontal spaces of the medieval frame. Foregrounding the verbal image, the reader works it with a degree of concentration and skill equal, it seems, to that which produced such passionate artifice, and may thus join the writer as aesthetic hero of the moment. To exercise this luminary virtu is to share in a sense of authorial power that verges ever—in the rhetoric and pride of the writers' own craft — on authoritarian mastery. Right to Left: Le Cercle The same aesthetic and sensory events that Benda and Ortega and Gourmont parley into political significance were turned toward social meanings utterly contrary to those formulated by these reactionaries. The very literary and visual techniques that appealed to a conservative political sensibility also proved compatible with the rhetoric and agenda of social revolutionaries — ideologues like their foes only in the root sense of that word: analysts who use human sensations to adduce political truths. To consider this alternate tradition may serve not only to put the main figures of this chapter into historical perspective, but to reiterate the fact that perceptual experience holds no absolute value. The social meaning of sense activity and artistic techniques is a function of the commentator's own heuristic skill and interpretive will. To see these as hermeneutic acts will be to underscore the importance of the intellectual choices made by the Anglo-American participants in this discourse, first among them T. E. Hulme (discussed later), the English translator of Georges Sorel. Sorel attacks democratic humanism from the extreme left, Benda and Gourmont from the radical right, but the socialist revolutionary hates it for the same aesthetic and sensory reasons as his reactionary compatriots. He dwells obsessively on its musical and oral culture, the crown and emblem of which is the French Parliament. Here demagoguery exploits the aural gullibility of the masses, the same credulity that other writers found in the ears of Demos. The people's representatives substitute pleasant acoustic counters for referents of hard fact or clear concept. Gourmont heard it this way:


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All those words that certain political philosophies abuse—justice, truth, equality, democracy, liberty, and a hundred others —have nothing but a sentimental value, which their users merely invest in them. Not only does the tenor of the word become a sentiment for those who use it, but its very material form, and the atmosphere which surrounds it. (PS, 39) All the locutions of "sphere" evoke not a single image. . . . [T]he word . . . seems indeed to have no significance, most of the time, beyond that of oratorical redundancy; to correspond to nothing. It is one of those . . . words so stripped of visual meaning that, in these cherished locutions of parliamentarism, they are almost interchangeable with one another. (ELF, 331)

Sorel indicts parliamentary socialism in similar figures of ingratiating but senseless sound. "In the mouths of these self-styled representatives of the proletariat," he charges, "all socialistic formulas lose their real sense." For "Parliamentary socialists can only obtain great influence," he protests, "if they can manage, by the use of a very confused language, to impose themselves on ... working men constituents simple enough . . . to be duped by high-sounding phrases." Thus he summons the fellow travelers: "Against this noisy, garrulous, and lying Socialism . . . revolutionary Syndicalism takes its stand."37 Sorel took his stand on the same perceptual grounds as Benda and Gourmont, offering an antidote to parliamentary humbug in terms strikingly like those of his reactionary adversaries. Drawing upon a lexicon of visual tropes as well stocked as theirs, he locates a clarifying force in the optical intelligence. Thus he calls for "methods of expression which throw a full light on things, which put them exactly in the place assigned to them by their nature, and which bring out the whole value of the forces in play. Oppositions, instead of being glozed over, must be thrown into sharp relief." He concludes: "My view . . . is that the best way of understanding any group of ideas in the history of thought is to bring all the contradictions into sharp relief."38 Visual distinctions like this make clear communication possible; the eye dissolves the vocal opacity of parliamentary democracy and socialism. This faculty of sight finds its supreme form in the "intuitive image," which Sorel presents as the stimulant of proletarian revolt, an event that will "not be produced in any very certain manner by the use of ordinary language; use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society."39 Sorel detaches the image not only from the verbal sound of his hated orators but from language itself. Not the picture scored to the sympathetic music of the Bergsonian duree, this intuitive image shares deep affinities with the visual monads of Benda, Gourmont, and Ortega. No instrument of intellectual elitism or conservative political reaction, however, it serves as a weapon in class

32


revolt. The General Strike and the Syndicalist War share an aesthetic and sensory standard with their conservative targets. An equally anarchic twist is put into the effects of visual severance by the French sociologist Gustave LeBon. Discrete, discontinuous images form the basis of mass perception, he argues repeatedly in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895): "A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first"; "Crowds think in images, and these images succeed each other without any connecting link."40 This method of visual separation plays not to the superior intellect but to Demos at its lowest, most common and unintelligent denominator. Freed from the logic of language and discursive continuity, these individual images work on the suggestible masses with raw primary force. "[T]he ideas suggested to crowds," he maintains, "present themselves then in the guise of images and are only accessible to the masses under this form. These image-like ideas are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other's place like the slides of a magic lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other. This explains how it is that the most contradictory ideas may be seen to be simultaneously current in crowds."41 The adaptability of visual severance to values both demotic and aristocratic, anarchic and hierarchical, is demonstrated by an instructive parallel in contemporary French history. Here the forces of Sorelian revolt were being co-opted, legitimated, and made to work for the purposes of wellestablished authority. In 1911, in the so-called Cercle Proudhon (appropriately named after a Marxist rival of Marx), antidemocratic intellectuals from the extreme left — Sorel's syndicalists — closed ranks with those of the radical right — members of Charles Maurras's Action francaise, an ultraconservative league preaching the return of the monarchy and prerevolutionary echelons of title and class. Provisionally, but no less surprisingly, the socialist international joined its voice with hymns sung "pour la patrie." This synthesis of socialism and nationalism augurs the compound of forces that will make up Nazism and fascism, Zeev Sternhell points out.42 More than a marriage of convenience, this merger met needs equally theoretical and practical on both sides. It tells us something about double political identities — on one hand in Maurrasian royalism, on the other in Sorelian anarchism, and, ultimately, in the affective language these ostensibly rival social interests share: the foregrounded image. Intellectually, Sorel worked firmly against the grain of traditional Marxism — still too deeply rooted for him in the mechanistic scheme of the eighteenth century and its subsequent Hegelian idealization of progressive history. LeBon's own vision of human nature as essentially irrational, responding more readily to arbitrary sensual stimuli than to a reasoned discourse of


33

ideas, helped Sorel in his revisionist scheme. The affective basis of political behavior was moved more deeply by feelings of nation and race, he realized, than by the concept of class.43 As Henri de Man noted only a decade later, describing the change wrought on his own youthful Marxist orthodoxy by the Great War: the proletariat exerts no revolutionary leverage of its own, nor is socialism a concept to alter world history by itself, for these are not ideas, like the nation or fatherland, for which people are eager to die.44 The un-self-conscious, undirected energies of the underclass require a cause outside their own in order to consolidate an effective pressure. The rampant nationalism of Action francaise — its spiritual tie to the ancien regime obscured by Sorel's own need to find a rallying point for the elementary energies he represented—thus provided the standard behind which the unruly masses might march toward their millennium. But into medium aevum? What this alliance reveals about the slide of new socialism toward antique authority is matched by the message it conveys about the needs of old social elites—in the modern age —for a popular, mass-based legitimacy (Maurras's lieutenants undertook the Sorelian merger with the hope of making sizable gains among a working-class constituency). If fascism is indeed a dictatorship that relies (at least initially) on a populist mandate, the Cercle Proudhon locates the exact intellectual center of this modern political phenomenon. And the poetic language used on both flanks of the movement—the affective image—is poised ever between those opposite political possibilities of demotic anarchy and antidemocratic authority. Does the pictorial integer slide, like Sorel's disconnected image, to the left, or, like Maurras's royal intaglio, to the right? This question focuses one local but very telling instance of the paradox that works so widely in the culture of literary modernism: a technical program that is conventiondismaying and revolutionary in effect can coexist with political attitudes that incline toward traditional authority and conservative, indeed atavistic, order. This paradox presents itself most vividly in the careers of the radical modernists Lewis and Pound, as Spender noted with perplexed dismay. The combination is no accident, I suggest, for the faculty of visual severance that exerts so strong an influence in their writing also contains this contradiction among its primary possibilities: optical separation may serve equally the antidiscursive, randomly picture-receptive mentality of Sorel's mob or the acts of precise definition that support an elite class, variously intellectual and social. In the Anglo-Americans' reading of the European discourse and their own consequent practice, a reactionary intent prevails over an anarchic or libertarian one (although this reaction remains infatuated with its opposite). I said earlier that a look at the broader scope of contemporary intellectual history might recover the psychological drama of modernist ideologie. Given the range of options that attend their technique of visual severite, the conservative, authoritarian response may indeed represent a defensive reflex —

34


against the very revolutionary potential of the same techniques. And these motives are common enough to be glimpsed in an earlier writer, a kind of precursor. In his little-known piece for the Dome, "Ballet, Pantomime, and Poetic Drama" (1898), Arthur Symons arrives at a model of aesthetic perception remarkably congruent with the one outlined by continental ideologues like Benda and Ortega. The silence of pantomime, he suggests, creates an environment in which the eye exaggerates its characteristic actions of severing and defining, marking off bounds and outlining. Silence edges every gesture: "Something like that sense of suspense seems to hang over the silent actors in pantomime. . . . The silence becomes an atmosphere, and with a very curious power of giving distinction to form and motion." Symons also draws the familiar association between the acts of the eye and the operation of the intellect, suggesting that the separation of a distinct visual form from a contingent mass of nature is the true feat of optical intelligence: "Pantomime, in its limited way, is again no mere imitation of nature: it is a transposition, as an etching transposes a picture. It observes nature in order that it may create a new form for itself, a form which, in its enigmatic silence, appeals straight to the intellect for its comprehension and, like ballet, to the intellect through the eyes."45 His crediting the eye with superior intellectual potential, however, follows upon a disclosure of fears about the optical language of mime. Its wordless imagery seems to make it a universal medium and, by explicit corollary, one that is all "too democratically" available, like the visual vocabulary of LeBon's crowd: "It begins and ends before words have found themselves, in a deeper consciousness than that of speech. And it addresses itself, by the artful limitations of its craft, to universal human experience. . . . And it appeals, perhaps a little too democratically, to people of all nations."46 Thus the later claim for the eye's intellectual superiority appears all too like an agitated response, a nervous defense against its populist prepotency. Spatial severance and visual dominion, the cultural and political lordship of the intelligent eye, appear here as a reactionary aesthetic — in a startlingly accurate, literal sense of that charged, valorized word. At times Lewis and Pound seem likewise to be reacting against similar fears, to be regulating the very unruly force of the eye by imposing a no less visual discipline on that energy: a regimen that stands the images at intellectual and aesthetic attention, one by one. But the reversals, the emotional logic and subplot of this little essay, point up the dynamic, first of all, in Hulme's brief but complex career. THIS HULME BUSINESS

Hulme subdued the music of his imagist poetry, but he crafted its acoustic surface with exacting attention to rhythmical period and stress. T. S. Eliot


35

was indeed correct when he noted that "the poems of T. E. Hulme only needed to be read aloud to have immediate effect."47 It is thus understandable that Hulme's decision to quit writing verse, late in 1911, should coincide with a decided reaction against musie. His aversion mingles aesthetic displeasure with political recognition — and reaction—in an intensive manifold of awareness. The moment occurs in a little-known (pseudonymous and uncollected) essay of April 1912, "A Tory Philosophy": I will quote a couple of sentences which seem to me to give the whole secret of the psychology of romanticism: "The spirit of man will go on its way with songs, and the burden of its most triumphant song will always be, 'My soul is escaped like a bird out of the net of the fowler. The snare is broken, and we are delivered.'" That's what the romantic is, somebody who is always just about to escape from something. Always "escaping," that is it! The important thing, for the purposes of getting at the exact emotion excited by romanticism, is to recognise that it isn't that it wants to escape from anything in particular, but just that it shall escape.48

"Escape" labels the liberal romantic's aim of liberation, but it also invokes his release into song, the pull of acoustic vitalism, for song, the quotation stresses, provides the means of his desired delivery from self. More broadly, the self-diffusion achieved through musical empathy leads this romantic to a collective identity—to the egalitarian politics celebrated in the songs of this poet's fellow travelers (joined against the conservative hierarchy invoked by Hulme's title). This point of political identification emerges, moreover, with an apparently genuine excitement of discovery. The words of the unacknowledged quotation read like an anonymous messenger's miraculous truth, and Hulme uses the magic of italics to emblazon the key word. His situation here recalls the moment in Symons's essay, where a technical attitude and practice, formerly admired, suddenly reveals its disturbing social implications. Whereas Symons altered the meaning of the sensory experience, converting the potential mass appeal of the wordless language of mime into the vocabulary of an elite, cerebral understanding, the ex-poet Hulme rejects the acoustic medium of his earlier enthusiasm. In another section from "A Tory Philosophy" (a five-part series), Hulme attempts to answer the deficiencies of musical democracy with an aesthetically correct politics. He raises a "classical" standard against that romantic program: The classical point of view I take to be this. Man is by his very nature essentially limited and incapable of anything extraordinary. He is incapable of attaining any kind of perfection, because, either by nature, as the result of original sin, or the result of evolution, he encloses within him certain antinomies. There is a war of instincts inside him. . . . The best results can only be got out of man as the result of a certain discipline which introduces order into this internal anarchy. That is

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM what Aristotle meant by saying that only a god or a beast could live outside the State. Nothing is bad in itself except disorder; all that is put in order in a hierarchy 49 is good.49

Imputing the unlikely awarenesses of "evolution" and "original sin" to classicism, Hulme appears to be deeply confused. His remarks do not penetrate to the basic elements of artistic experience, classical or otherwise; the analysis pays no heed to the kind of sensory activity he represents at the core of musical democracy. His appeal to absolute authority lacks, in short, an absolute rationale. Hierarchical order arises here only to defy that which is antipathetic to it —disorder. It displays a merely abstract, nominal, oppositional logic. It is "reactionary" in the shallowest sense. These two passages witness the difference between political science and political religion: between ideologie and ideology. They also locate Hulme near the midpoint of the journey he will complete by 1915. Ultimately, his political conservatism bases its claim not simply on the follies of musical populism, but on the evidence for authority afforded by the superior sense of the eye. The partial awareness of 1912 testifies to the tentative process and empirical spirit of ideologiecritique. He evolves his political consciousness by scrutinizing his own sensory experience, gradually clarifying its physiology and amplifying its social import. Not that he confined this process of inquiry to his private sensorium. Hulme's international awareness will comprise most of the discursive territory surveyed in this chapter: he knew the work of Gourmont as well as that of Worringer; he translated both Sorel's Reflections on Violence and Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics. This wide acquaintance served not only to interest him in the aesthetic and physiological subjects of the continental ideologues, but to give him a full variety of options to exercise in his interpretation of sensory experiences: Gourmont's views lay to one hand, Sorel's to the other. The social hermeneutic Hulme finally settles on thus stands (as much as any can) as a matter of individual choice. He provides an advance example of the intellectual contacts and interpretive decisions of Lewis and Pound. To see Hulme moving critically and selectively through these European influences is to challenge the prevailing view of his sensibility—as a passive mirror of his passing exposures on the continent: Bergson first, Worringer later. The best of these accounts, Michael Levenson's, convincingly dates the three major phases of the European acquaintance and accurately weighs the intellectual debt in each: an impressionist, ultra-Bergsonian subjectivity in 1908-11; the classical aesthetic and royalist politics of Ferdinand Lasserre and Charles Maurras in late 1911; the transcendent, antihumanist premise of 1913, borrowed from his study with Worringer.50 Yet Hulme's mature temperament is more than a screen onto which these varying messages have been projected, each successive image shedding the memory of what went


37

before. While his early writing shows a heavy influence from Bergson, it also reveals an individual resistance, a personal intelligence he articulates in the special language of ideologiecritique. To find that point of challenge to his mentor will serve to identify the locus of Hulme's own growth as a distinctive thinker and, ultimately, to return to the career a degree of internal consistency wrongly lost by emphasis on his borrowings. It is among the modern ideologues that he finds true — and equal — company. Disenchanting the Pupil Hulme's engagements with Bergson between 1908 and 1911 show him absorbing the concept of acoustic vitalism and realizing the full range of its cognitive possibilities and political implications. Intuition—the radical contact between the rhythms of one's inner vitality and the temporal duree of nature—is achieved through musical empathy. "[A]n art like music proceeds from the inside, as it were," Hulme emphasizes in "Bergson's Theory of Art" (early 1911),51 and its force returns the auditor to "the stream of impulse which constitutes life" (S, 213). For musicians "get at ... certain rhythms of life at the centre of our minds." By "setting free and emphasising this music," moreover, they "compel us willy-nilly to fall in with it like passers-by who join in a dance" (S, 156). (The Bergsonian character of this appreciation is revealed by its source in a passage from Bergson's own essay Laughter (1900): "[Artists] grasp . . . certain rhythms of life and breath that are closer to man than his inmost feelings. . . . By setting free and emphasizing this music, they force it upon our attention; they compel us, willy-nilly, to fall in with it, like passers-by who join in a dance."52) The picture of dancers swayed in union provides an image not only of acoustic communion, but of enchanted masses—the street dance of demotic politics. Collectivism and populism already appear as the social meaning of acoustic sensation. Hulme formulates his insights thus in "Music" (under the subheading "Crowds") in "Notes on Language and Style" (a gathering of fragmentary pensees, transcribed between 1909 and 1914): "Music in its power of seeming to hold an audience or crowd together into an organism. When plays low in park the atmosphere seems to fall to pieces and crowd becomes units again. Cf. Band and Bard."53 The channels through which Hulme first pursues intuitive empathy with this vital stream are usually Bergson's: aural, categorically unvisual. "Imagine now that you are turned into a cross-section of this flowing stream of life," he proposes in the Bergsonian essay "Intensive Manifolds"; "that you have no sense of sight" and "no clear picture or representation of the stream at all": then "you will in spite of that have a complete knowledge of it" (S, 188; emphases added). Already in 1911, however, the student also puts his eye into contact with this desired vitality—the object of his intuitive empathy and content of his ideal artifact. Here he magnifies the role of the visual image in intuitive empathy, which he calls (in "Bergson's Theory of Art")

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"instinctive feeling": "imagery . . . hands you over the sensation as directly as possible, attempts to get it over bodily with all the qualities it possessed for you when you experienced it. The feeling conveyed over to one is almost a kind of instinctive feeling. You get continually from good writing this conviction that the poet is constantly in presence of a vividly felt physical and visual scene" (S, 164). No misguided pirate of his French original, Hulme concedes that he is (at least in terms of Bergson's own scheme) inflating the value of optical content: "I exaggerate the place of imagery simply because I want to use it as an illustration." Nonetheless, he proceeds immediately to adduce the truest and finest poetic experience as one that displays such a visual priority: [Imagery] is not the only kind of effect produced on one by verse but it is ... the one essentially aesthetic emotion [verse] produces on us. Readers of poetry may attach more importance to the other things, but this is the quality the poets recognise among each other. If one wants to fix it down then one can describe it as a "kind of instinctive feeling which is conveyed over to one, that the poet is describing something that is actually present to him, which he realises visually at first hand." (S, 167)

Hulme seems to have forgotten that, for Bergson, the image itself is not the intuition or "instinctive feeling" but a simulacrum, a fading coal that needs ever to be breathed back to life, a picture that retains contact with its temporal sensory source only to the degree that it remains grounded in verbal music. Hulme's image has become the intuition itself. Hulme develops this challenge to Bergson with understandable obliqueness: the student outflanks his mentor, avoiding direct confrontation. Yet his early insistence on the primacy of sight locates the main line of continuity with his later writing, when he will disenchant the eye, making it immune to the musical empathy his former teacher has described so eloquently. The difference between 1909 and 1914 consists of the recognition that the power of the eye relies on separation from the object of attention; it must resist those forces of empathy with which Hulme has earlier sought to align it; in doing so, it also checks the democratic tendency implicit in this sympathy. Hulme's subsequent reading of Gourmont54 obviously helped to account for this change. Yet the consistency of his visual preference suggests an inward continuity for his final position, a greater degree of personal authenticity than is commonly acknowledged. The difference between Hulme's early and late phases is told chiefly in terms of those opposite aesthetic philosophies of empathy and severance. That war is joined on the pages of "A Lecture on Modern Poetry." First written in 1908, revised for delivery in 1914, the "Lecture" is a palimpsestuous debate. Here Hulme corrects his first proclivity to empathy by asserting


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the virtual immunity of the eye to the (now) perfidious, urging rhythms of musical sympathy. A document still dated variously by scholars (some fail to acknowledge the later version),55 its citation of Worringer's own patented notion of "space-shyness" — a dread of the universal flux that leads the primitive mind to seek refuge in the rigid stability of geometrical forms — dates the text after Hulme's exposure to the art historian in 1913. He also employs Worringer's chief example of this attitude—Egyptian monumental art.56 Yet the best evidence for the lecture's moment of composition is its rhetorical complexity: Hulme is returning upon himself, righting the errant sensibility of his earlier years by aligning it with the more demanding standards of visual severite. This ideology has triumphed through great struggle, however, and this accounts for the peculiar vehemence with which he makes his now contrary claim. He draws an uncompromising dualism here between the sensory empathy of musical verse and the acts of detached, intellectual attention exercised by the silent reader: [W]hat are the principal features of verse at the present time? It is this: that it is read and not chanted. We may set aside all theories that we read verse internally as mere verbal quibbles. We have thus two distinct arts. The one intended to be chanted, and the other intended to be read in the study. . . . The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic state, during which suggestions of grief or ecstasy are easily and powerfully effective, just as when we are drunk all jokes seem funny. This is for the art of chanting, but the procedure of the new visual art is just the contrary. It depends for its effect not on a kind of half sleep produced, but on arresting the attention, so much so that the succession of visual images should exhaust one. (FS, 73)

Earlier, in 1911, Hulme reveled in the state of hypnosis and the magnification of sensibility that musical empathy could bring about: "the rhythm and measure" of music "caus[e] our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points and so take hold of us with such force that even the faintest imitation of sadness produces a great effect upon us" (S, 157). In 1914 he rewrites himself in rhetorical negatives. Rhythmical sound induces the mere sleep of the soma, while the inward vitalism that music speaks to appears as nothing but a drunken lout. The eye claims its new cognitive purity, enjoying its distance from the page as the condition of an intellectual superiority securely symbolized by its domain in the "study." These contrary values emerge more boldly in one of the contemporary pieces from "Notes on Language and Style" (the aversion to sound dates the remarks), where he attacks the facility of physical acoustics, the sensuous flow of music, with a passion for visual severance and definition that matches Gourmont's own. Thus the true reader resists the illusion of a speaking presence in print and combats

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM this passage from the Eye to the Voice. From the wealth of nature to that thin shadow of words, that gramophone. The readers are the people who see things and want them expressed. The author is the Voice, or the conjurer who does tricks with that curious rope of letters, which is quite different from real passion and sight. (FS, 86) Rising disgust and impatience with the talking books. . . . Rather choose those in old leather, which are solid. Here the man did not talk but saw solid, definite things and described them. Solidity a pleasure. It is seeing the real clay, that men in an agony worked with, that gives pleasure. To read a book which is real clay moulded by fingers. . . . No flowing on of words, but tightly clutched tense fingers leaving marks in the clay. These are the only books that matter. . . . (FS, 80)

If the date for the "Lecture" were still open to debate, one extrinsic factor might support the earlier year. An exactly contemporary work offers an obvious target for Hulme's vociferations on poetry's musical voice: Florence Farr's Music of Speech (1909),57 which argued that the living voice must draw its own latent music, Orpheus-like, to the surface of verse. In 1909, though, Farr stood as an unlikely enemy to Hulme. When he resigned from the Poet's Club in that year, he took Farr with him as one of the favored few in the new "secessionist school" (with Florence Tancred, F. S. Flint, and Edward Storer, among others).58 And Farr was not alone in exercising this critical attitude: Hulme's own verse, tuning its pictorial content to the cadences and cross-cadences of a fluent conversational idiom, flourished in the same general convention. Not even a writer with Hulme's apparent capacity for paradox could simultaneously nurture a group of poets sympathetic to Farr's practice, write verse of equally vocal timbre, and deliver a virulent rebuke of the same practice. No, the "Lecture" and "Notes" are acts of backwards revision by an older Hulme, pieces of reaction against his earlier musical art. This return upon the self witnesses not the inconsistency of the inveterate borrower, I hope to have shown, but the rectification of his primary, individual, visual preference. It also shows the skeptical, dialectical, self-correcting temperament natural to a scientist of the senses, an ideologue who drew his observations toward political conclusions. Authority Hulme's argument for the divisions of a traditional social hierarchy begins with his deepened commitment to visual discrimination. In the later "Notes" he already matches Gourmont's passion for optical delineation and definition. He claims the virtual hegemony of the eye in matters of literary "style" (this Gourmontian term provides the title of the subheading here): "A man cannot write without seeing at the same time a visual signification before his eyes. It is this image which precedes the writing and makes it firm" (FS, 79).


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Like Gourmont's ideal painter-writer, Hulme's sculptor-stylist exercises the severance special to the eye, treats his units of composition one at a time, and cuts away the connections or "bridges" between them: "With perfect style, the solid leather for reading, each sentence should be a lump, a piece of clay, a vision seen; rather, a wall touched with soft fingers. Never should one feel light vaporous bridges between one solid sense and another. No bridges—all solid: then never exasperated" (FS, 79; emphases added). Another passage in "Notes" presents the act of selection essential to proper literary art in similar visual metaphors: "Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches of life. The art of abstraction. . . . The gaps—hence chess" (FS, 99). The idea of visual severance here originates in the Latin etymon of "abstraction" (ab-trahere, "to draw away from") and culminates in the superior intellectual apprehension signified by that word. Similarly, Hulme's emphasis on "gaps" locates optical severance as the condition of the intellectual's traditional game: "chess." Hulme scores this principle of visual division most boldly into the thought of his final phase. The doctrine of discontinuity precedes and provides for the ultimate structure of his philosophic thought: the segmented, three-tiered hierarchy of inorganic materials, organic life, and ethical or religious values. Its rule of separation, asserted with a vehemence special to himself, relies on acts of visual severance for its guide, its basis, its rationale. For Hulme describes the tri-level scheme in the same figures he used to praise a specifically optical discrimination. As in "Humanism and the Religious Attitude": "There must be an absolute division between each of the three regions, a kind of chasm. There must be no continuity, no bridge leading from one to the others" (S, 6; last emphasis added). These lines of ocular separation engage him more closely, it seems, than the actual content of each level: "Our principal concern then at the present moment should be the reestablishment of the temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering" (S, 4; last emphasis added). The defense of discontinuity is tireless: "most of the errors in certain subjects," he emphasizes again, "spring from an almost instinctive attempt on our part to gloze over and disguise a particular discontinuity in the nature of reality" (S, 4). That Hulme uses the same metaphors to describe the severing acts of sight and the divisions of his triple-tiered system makes the point of ideologie: the idea of intellectual (and political) hierarchy finds proof and warrant in the discriminating temper of the higher optical intelligence. Having established this sensory basis for his concepts, Hulme posits the echelons of his final phase with a lucidity and security absent in the essay "A Tory Philosophy" (1912). The hard bounding lines of Egyptian and Byzantine art (to which Worringer opened his eyes in 1913) provide the sign, not only of a purely geometrical and lofty spiritual reality, but of the eye's own superior power to etch these discrete shapes. Thus Hulme does not confine

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the theme of authority to an inhuman absolute, to some postulate deep within space. He extends it (in the second of these excerpts) to human "institutions" — their authority underwritten by the same visual "discipline": When the intensity of the religious attitude finds proper expression in art, . . . [this] expression springs not from a delight in life but from a feeling of certain absolute values, which are entirely independent of vital things. The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a monumental stability and permanence, a perfection and rigidity, which vital things can never have, leads to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical (Cf. Byzantine, Egyptian and early Greek art). (5, 9) In the light of these absolute values, man himself is judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He is endowed with Original Sin. While he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he can never himself be perfect. Certain secondary results in regard to ordinary human action in society follow from this. A man is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of value by discipline — ethical and political. Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and liberating. Institutions are necessary. (S, 47)

Certainly the doctrine of Original Sin fits into the value system of transcendent philosophy better than it does into classicism, but human infirmity alone does not account for Hulme's political solution. Nor does the curative order depend, in the last analysis, on the extrinsic authority of religion: Hulme was not a religious man. That graded hierarchy relies on the intrinsic authority of the author's own perceptual life and values. Acts of visual discrimination create the three-tiered system as emblem and charter of political dominion. Here lies the proof of an intellectual mastery (his antihumanism notwithstanding) akin to that which it espouses in the social realm. It is adduced with a finality that belies the changing record of Hulme's own views on the powers of the senses. That response, evolving over a brief four-year career, provides a pattern for the progress of two major modernists — over four decades.

CHAPTER 2

Ezra Pound, 1908-1920

A Lume Spento, the volume of poems Ezra Pound produced as a firstling in Venice in 1908, includes a homage to Robert Browning. "Mesmerism" configures the relation of older and younger poets, not in terms of their shared admiration for Latin culture, but in the most precise sense of its title: a hypnotic trance believed to involve animal magnetism. What holds the apprentice in fanciful thrall is the imagined voice of his master, also master of the modern dramatic monologue, whose speaking brio Pound amplifies to equal degrees of reverence and risibility: Aye you're a man that! ye old mesmerizer Tyin' your meanin' in seventy swadelin's, One must of needs be a hang'd early riser To catch you at worm turning. Holy Odd's bodykins! "Cat's i' the water butt!" Thought's in your verse-barrel, Tell us this thing rather, then we'll believe you, You, Master Bob Browning, spite your apparel Jump to your sense and give praise as we'd lief do. You wheeze as a head-cold long-tonsilled Calliope, But God! what a sight you ha' got o' our in'ards, Mad as a hatter but surely no Myope, Broad as all ocean and leanin' man-kin'ards. Heart that was big as the bowels of Vesuvius, Words that were wing'd as her sparks in eruption, Eagled and thundered as Jupiter Pluvius, Sound in your wind past all signs o' corruption. Here's to you, Old Hippety-Hop o' the accents, True to the Truth's sake and crafty dissector,

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM You grabbed at the gold sure; had no need to pack cents Into your versicles. Clear sight's elector!1

The "long tonsilled Calliope" recalls the inspirational muse of epic poetry on one hand but, on the other, the elongated American steam whistle. This instrument of piercing breath signals all too clearly the unmodulated blare of the poem's own acoustic surface. If the youthful poet must shout to feign the vocal presence the Victorian contrived (usually) more subtly in print, his overheated language still reveals an imaginative grasp of the powers —and implications — of poetry written for the living voice. For this paean inscribes not only a debt to Browning but a way of listening to him. It records an audition equally intuitive and finely tuned to the whole range of possibilities —aesthetic, physiological, political — that attends the sense of hearing in the contemporary continental analysis. "Mesmerism," that theme-word of prerevolutionary France, was being revived by French sociologists at the turn of the next century.2 It represents the principle of mob bonding as a law of sheerly physical attraction between bodies, as a sympathy induced in a semihypnotic state. This insight was appropriated by aesthetes like Benda and Gourmont, who found the primary channel for such vitalist empathy to be the sense of hearing, which links the auditor to the producer of the sound and, in turn, to other listeners. Thus the poet of the dramatic monologue, forcing a tap into his listeners' "in'ards," engages that quick and, "leanin' man-kin-ards," draws himself and his audience together in an economy of sensual empathy. The sense of social kinship emerges, in that archaic formulation, with a stress equally elementary and radical. Allowing for the difference between the negative view of the French writers and Pound's own mood of enthusiastic approval and participation, the poem presents the main points of a commentary still in the process of formation.3 This includes the double character he accords to the eye: "What a sight you ha' got o' our in'ards." Pound's viewer is both a magisterial seer and a sympathetic respondent, a superior perceiver and a sensibility pulled into union with the vital subject of sight. In the continental understanding, after all, the eye serves the interests of an elite, detached discrimination or a collectivized, engaged sensation. Whereas for Benda and Gourmont eyesight defies the happy sympathy between sound and auditor, for Sorel and LeBon it opens into the most direct sort of sensual excitement and so provides the language of mob bonding and crowd excitement. Anticipating this division of views, Pound already seems to have surmounted it. Not given to a single opinion on the nature of sight, he stands instead as a cultural site, one at which various —and contrary—currents of intellectual history may cross. They will continue to do so, six years later, on the pages of a journal in which he will frequently appear: the Egoist (1914-19), formerly the New

EZRA POUND, 1908-1920

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Freewoman (1913). The magazine of English Imagisme, it allowed writing by Gourmont to lie restively next to editorials launched from the vantage of Sorel. Either one of those authors might have staked his political claim on the variable doctrine of the Image emerging here. For the Image was defining its values as a negative strength: it found its several powers as correctives to one complex infirmity, on the diagnosis of which Gourmont and Sorel agreed—with the founding editor of the journal. Dora Marsden, libertarian and radical individualist, aimed her attacks most obviously at the machinations of language, which she analyzed from a nominalist standpoint. The Word substitutes its generic abstraction for a concrete specific, she complains, and as such enacts the same kind of antiindividualist generalization that is the work of every government, above all democracy, whose egalitarian fallacy appears indeed as a function of language itself.4 Her antistatism stands as a reaction —at its own moment — against the conventional liberal faith in the power of social institutions to right the wrongs of history; it fits into that demise of conventionally progressive liberal ideology that George Dangerfield maps in The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914.5 Yet Marsden was above all an ideologue, like Gourmont and Sorel, in the original French sense. She drew political conclusions from a professedly nonpartisan study of human sensation. Whereas Gourmont had criticized democracy from the right, Sorel from the left, they concurred on the sensory basis of the democratic fallacy—the gullibility of hearing. This perception fueled Marsden's own attack on the contemporary social establishment. The insidious, disempowering processes of government and language occur only and always, Marsden insists, through the weakness of the ear, which allows the material body of the Word to make real the substantive Idea. Sound induces the illusion of abstract presence and so constitutes the spuriously "magic concept" —the machismo authority, social governance, no matter whether democratic or royalist. The link between aural credulity and phantom substantiality, the craven needs of the ear and the shadowy menace of the State, is no decorative metaphor but an essential theme. Once the material body of the Word has deluded one into accepting the reality of its concept, Marsden argues, the very magic of this transaction holds the auditor in thrall, in subjection. She traces this economy of vocal authority with elliptical precision: "Voice of God, Authority at its height, begets duty— Poetic Duty. . . . Duty shall be what Wordsworth called her: 'Stern daughter of the Voice of —the Authorities."6 And so her jeremiad identifies her "only task" in "a Verbal Age like this": it is "to break the hypnotic spell, to blast the stupefactions of—the Word"; specifically, to blast away "the deceptive element in sound, which is the basis of civilisation and culture." For "the alluring and deceptive functions of living sounds are more fundamental than their expository. Song is older than speech."7 To avoid the illusions that attend the musical token, she turns to the visual

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Image. Fresh, unacculturated, ungeneralized, it provides the language of direct, ultrasubjective sensation. As such, it forms the basis of individual perception, valid action. "Out of befoozling sound not even the finest brain can spin anything save folly," she continues to complain, but now counters that "the human brain can work to fruitful purpose only when it is set to ply about images which have sprung into vivid form in the human consciousness: it is at home only in that aura of images which is thrown off from the living 'I' and to which men have given the title The World.'"8 If Marsden seeks to avoid delusive acoustics by positing the absolute value of visual images, like Gourmont and Sorel, does her optical language acquire the political valence of the conservative reactionary or the extreme anarchist? And which of these social inclinations will the proto-Imagist line of Pound's 1908 poem show? One answer emerges in recent commentary on the politics of Imagism and the genealogy of modernist literary doctrine. Reacting understandably to Donald Davie's assertion that the line of continuity between poetic Imagism and authoritarian fascism is "unbroken" (an association largely intuitive in nature and uncomplicated by history), Robert von Hallberg has joined Michael Levenson to return the Image to its early moment. These critics have reconnected it, correctly and helpfully, to the convention-dismaying energies of the New Freewoman. In this context the Image stands as a highly subjective, impressionistic, proto-anarchist, antistatist impulse; as such, it defies an attempt, like Davie's, to place it as cornerstone in those monolithic, totalitarian dictatorships that various modernists supported— variously—later. 9 Informative as their research is, von Hallberg and Levenson, like most readers, are reading the text of English radicalism from left to right—as an ultraliberal defiance of conservative authority. Yet an understanding of this moment in cultural history is properly grounded when we see the radical Image standing poised — against the continental background impinging on Marsden—between opposite possibilities; between a turn to the left and a slide to the right. For the radical particularity of the Image underwrites the autonomy of the Self, a kind of heroic individuality. Antistatist and libertarian as this sign may be, it may serve the designs of the tyrannical, selfauthorizing ego. Of this possibility Marsden herself is fully aware. In an editorial of 1 December 1915 she concedes that the extreme individual is at least potentially an elitist: "The temper native to rebellion is the aristocratic temper." This autodidact enjoys and indulges the power of self-assertion that he or she displays in "spectacle," that is, in a colossal Image. Here the Image, the very symbol of the rebel's individuality and freedom, becomes the tool of the tyrant's vainglory and authority: "The people can derive a sense of exhilaration from the spectacle of the One pitting himself against the World — let it be Athanasius, Alexander, Cromwell, or Napoleon —always provided he stands a chance of succeeding. They adore such a display of supreme power. . . . [T]he people's proneness to apotheosis [shows] that it can, of its own


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impetus, rise to heights of adoration and revel in displaying admiration's complementary emotion of submission."10 The individualist Image may be turned to the purposes of totalitarian authority, just as the libertarian energies of Sorel merged into the conservative schemes of Charles Maurras in the Cercle Proudhon. These French developments were noted in the New Freewoman. The commentator (Benjamin Tucker, arch-individualist and original publisher of the journal) attempted to annul that marriage of left and right as a conceptual impossibility, for he remained committed to a conventional opposition between superliberals and ultrareactionaries. But Marsden's riposte recovers the fundamental affinity between the two sides by returning them to their common ground in ideologiecritique. Here their nominal sponsor, the unorthodox Marxist Proudhon, shows his main strength as a sensory power, one which Sorel shares with Maurras and in which their apparently opposite political philosophies find mutual support and proof. "When [Proudhon] is looking at things as they exist," Marsden asserts, "he is a strong searchlight." It is not a body of doctrine that joins Sorel and Maurras but a means of perception. Their joint enterprise is one of "egoistic investigation,"11 where the eye of each operates as a radically particularized "I." Thus the Image searched out by this light of individual intelligence may warrant the positions of rebel or king, Sorel the anarchist or Maurras the royalist. These two political alternatives reveal the double potential of that protoImagist line in Pound's 1908 poem to Browning. The rival possibilities appear as a pair six years later, on 16 February 1914, in a single issue of the Egoist— but not from Pound's hand alone. Here a recent show of sculpture by Jacob Epstein comes under review, first by Huntley Carter, then by Pound. Both critics rehearse Marsden's individualist critique of language; both subscribe to her faith in the beneficent immediacy of the visual Image; yet each develops this discourse to one—and only one —of its two political possibilities. In "The New Sculpture," Pound derides the deficiencies of linguistic thought in opposition to the incandescent sight of an Epstein or GaudierBrzeska, whose "[a]rt is to be admired rather than explained." Feeling "sick of the psycho-intellectual novel—the analytical method of pretending that all hateful things are interesting and worthy of being analysed and recorded," Pound turns from the chicanery of verbal chic to the absolute Image, the unmediated presence and stark clarity of sculptural forms. Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska "work in an unchanging world. Their work permits no argument. They do not strive after plausibility. I think we are sick to death of plausibilities, of smooth answers."12 These "smooth answers" echo Marsden's own critique of language, particularly as spoken, where the material body of the Word gives substance to spectral thought and allows the speaker to move those empty counters along the lines of specious reason, using the delusive continuity and fluent pleasance of verbal music to pretend a discursive consistency, to obscure the elementary truth of separate facts. More curtly, more

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formulaically, Huntley Carter observes that this sculpture defies the verbal work of "logical analysis."13 Against the pernicious tricks of verbal reasoning the sculpted Image extends its single promise of perceptual immediacy—to the separate political uses of the two commentators. In the vivid solidity of its images Carter senses the language of the primary soma—"those very elemental things which express the universal flow" —and, in line with Sorel and LeBon, he celebrates his merging through the sensuous eye to a collective identity. This radically democratized cosmos relies on now familiar metaphors of musical empathy to claim its constituency. As if listening to "Epstein's work," Carter rejoices in the way it "sets ["the human soul"] expanding in harmony with the rhythm of the universe. . . . [It] carries us into the universal flow by its power, simplicity, and intensity of feeling. . . . It is full of mass-rhythm, or massmusic."14 As Pound's artist struggles free of language, however, his intelligence sheds it as the very debility of democracy—the generalization of identity—that Marsden has also located. "The artist has been at peace with his oppressors for long enough," Pound declares, and specifies: "He has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly." Heroic self, Pound's artist will produce an equally particularized image, but he develops this individualist value in the same political direction Marsden warns of: the authority of le moi superieur, the single figure of the dictator. The polis chartered by Pound's "new" visual artist is a state-of-the-art civilization that is anarchic or libertarian at root, but radically hierarchical as a protopolitical fact —in line with Pound's own emphasis on artistic individuals' heroic superiority: "We turn back, we artists, to the powers of the air, to the djinns who were our allies aforetime, to the spirits of our ancestors. It is by them that we have ruled and shall rule, and by their connivance that we shall mount again into our hierarchy. The aristocracy of entail and of title has decayed, the aristocracy of commerce is decaying, the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service."15 Countering the mass-man that Carter sees as the social muse of this visual art, Pound's artistic elite stands as the one political personality of his Imagisme. The change Pound underwent to move from his "early" aesthetic posture to his "later" political position should not be reckoned, then, as a shift from a pristine Imagism to an unrelated, latter-day authoritarianism. We must account instead for his movement away from his first vocal affinity—its democratic hymn sung in the 1908 poem to Browning —to the authority of visual Imagism (the one side of Imagism he claims). The line of critical inquiry that opens this development lies in Pound's evolving response to Remy de Gourmont. For Gourmont challenges the populist music, the native genius sounding through Pound's "Mesmerism," from an aesthetic vantage that endows the eye with sensory and political privilege. In Richard Sieburth's helpful study of this literary relationship, Gourmont appears correctly as a "libertarian." Yet Sieburth leaves the political faiths


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that vie for ownership of that term — anarchist and aristocrat —unmentioned, the opposition unpointed and unresolved. In either one of those unconventional political identities, after all, the mentor asks much of his disciple. And so Pound's debt appears in Sieburth's account less troubled than it was.16 If Pound ultimately accepts Gourmont as aristocrat, he will also need to endorse the aesthetic premises of that ascendancy position —a visual elitism that defies the democratic letter and vocal spirit of his own first poetic instincts. This process defines a continuing crisis in Pound's first decade as a writer. It leads him from the gauche enthusiasms of "Mesmerism" to the more adroit plays for place in literary tradition—to the epic ambitions of the first cantos (early 1915 to late 1919). This process is not wholly motivated or contained by his evolving response to Gourmont, but this personal apprenticeship, which intersects as well with the public mayhem of the Great War, provides the most vivid, telling register of his development, and I will use it to focus the complexity of Pound's maturing temper. To move, then, in medias res, near the crisis point of his first period, to France.

NEGOTIATIONS

From Gourmont to Benda Pound first mentioned Gourmont in a letter of early February 1912,17 but he had probably read Le Problems du style by the end of the preceding year. For his essay "On Virtue" (4 January 1912) presents Gourmont's idea of Every Man in His Humor, repeating and expanding the scheme of different sensory types. Unlike Gourmont, however, he seems unwilling to prefer a visual intelligence to the musical-affective sensibility. Each artist, he argues, must find the sensory metier proper to himself. While "certain people think with words," he proposes, others realise nothing until they have pictured it; others progress by diagrams like those of the geometricians; some think, or construct, in rhythm, or by rhythms and sound; others, the unfortunate, move by words disconnected from the objects to which they might correspond, or more unfortunate still in blocks and cliches of words; some, favoured by Apollo, in words that hover above and cling close to the things they mean. And all these different sorts of people have most appalling difficulty understanding each other. It is the artist's business to find his own virtu.18

Denying the primacy that Gourmont accorded to the eye, Pound remains committed to the values of aurality, as expressed in the Browning poem of four years earlier. Pound's need to maintain an oral muse under the critical pressure of Gourmont found an opening in the assault of the enemy-mentor: Gour-

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mont's own work as a poet put into practice the very musical sensibility he had anatomized with such embittered precision in his prose. Quickly Pound found the use of treating Gourmont's prose and verse as though they were two separate enterprises. Following the first acquaintance of late 1911 to early 1912, he assimilated the Frenchman's analytical insights into his own critical tenets: visual immediacy in images, the breaking up of cliche, an arctic clarity in names —these values entered early English Imagism largely as a function of Pound's borrowings from Gourmont, as Sieburth has demonstrated.19 But Pound's first appreciation of Gourmont's verse holds it exempt from the same critical standards. In his 1913 series of essays on French poets, the very article that treats the contemporary tradition of Gourmontian versifiers—they practice the prose virtues of brevity and visual succinctness — notes no absence of those values in Gourmont's verse. Pound praises it instead by comparing it to the music of the Provencal master Arnaut Daniel, and his estimate includes laudations no self-respecting Imagist could confer: "And so it runs with ever more sweeping cadence with ever more delicate accords, and if you are not too drunk with the sheer naming over of beauty you will wake at the end of reading and know that the procession of all women that ever were has passed before you."20 Silently, strategically, Pound accepts the disparity in Gourmont's work, for it allows him to reconcile the new, powerfully optical acumen that Gourmont gave to his critical intelligence with more familiar, comfortable standards — the taste for rich poetic acoustic that had already led him to the lush soundscapes of Provence. Pound admits the division in Gourmont's oeuvre only gradually. He approaches this recognition obliquely, following his own extreme need to hold together the apparently contradictory standards of musical feeling and visual intelligence. Hinting at the inconsistency near the end of his essay on Pierre Vildrac (25 September 1913), he presents the difference between the critical values and poetic practice of Gourmont as a polarity of attitudes in the larger literary culture of France: "Those who are interested in ritual and in the history of invocation may have been interested in M. De Gourmont's litanies, those who are interested in a certain purging of the poetic idiom may be interested in the work of such men as Vildrac and P. J. Jouve" (SP, 340). The spareness of those prosier versifiers follows the advice which Gourmont dispensed in his criticism but to which his own verse —with its curial "invocation" and heightened cadences —is still held unaccountable. Compelled less and less to defend the musical poetic that Gourmont's own optical intelligence has discredited, Pound leaves a record of his development in a gradually more open admission of this disparity. (This process, once followed through to its conclusion, may be understood in relation to contemporary history.) In his 1915 elegy on the recently deceased writer, he concedes the essential irrelevance of the poetry to the literary and cultural criticism. Here he contrasts the import of the densely musical verse with that of the work as a whole: "The significance of Remy de Gourmont and the signifi-


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cance of his poetry are two things apart. . . . Suffice it to say that the litanies are a marvel of rhythm, that they have not been followed or repeated, that de Gourmont was not of 'the young French school.' If he is 'grouped' anywhere he must be grouped, as poet, among les symbolistes. The litanies are evocation, not statement."21 The discrepancy Pound points up between the acoustic indulgence of Gourmont's poetry and the visual stringencies of his criticism now presents his mentor, in the former role, in a specially charged designation: "symbolisme" a muse of murmurous suggestion and musical "evocation." Symbolisme cultivates multiple meanings through the acoustic dimension — de la musique avant toute chose—with its capacity for soundalike, a potential Pound had indulged and trumpeted in a single line of his 1908 poem to Browning, which proclaims its resonating resistance to single sense (the conspicuous consumerism of single meaning): "You had no need to pack cents into your versicles." Does this musical enthusiasm resonate in Pound's use of the symboliste title in 1915? Or is he seeking to silence Gourmont—and his still more youthful enthusiasm for Swinburnean incantation — under a label as lethal as it is gentle? In 1916, in his reading copy of Le Probleme du style, Pound marks Gourmont's customary distinction—"There are indeed two kinds of style; these correspond to the two large categories of persons, the visuals and the emotionals" (33) —and pencils in the margin: "+ auditifs." To this he adds a marginal reference, "p. 41." On this page Gourmont makes a somewhat uncharacteristic concession to the perceptual powers of the ear, as he admits that hearing "possesses the means to receive a representation of the exterior world in the form of signs." Sieburth, commenting on Pound's jotting, argues that the cross-reference gives equal status to the eye and ear, the sense of hearing also opposing itself to the weaknesses of I'emotif.22 Yet it is essential to see that Pound's markings do not enclose the passage in which Gourmont concedes the occasional virtu of hearing. Pound brackets only this sentence: "Style is a specialization of sensibility" (41), which lies fully eight lines above the remarks on the ear. While the connection between this axiom and the earlier constellation of le visuel and I'emotif and I'auditif must remain conjectural, we may see Pound adding I'auditif to I'emotif in order to complete one side of Gourmont's usual dichotomy of the senses. L'emotif shares an intellectual passivity—a gullibility, a suggestibility—with the ear. The gate through which the vital feelings are reached and manipulated, hearing provides a guide for the wrong kind of writing style. And it is this connection that emerges only two pages later, in a passage Pound marks heavily, where Gourmont resumes his attack on the ear and associates its passivity —a great liability for the stylist —with rote echoing merely: "As for the pure auditif who gets mixed up in writing, he will be a mere parrot" (43). This auditif pur carries the whole case of la poesie pure de la musique; on his head Gourmont the critic punishes his own prodigality in symboliste acoustics. The contradiction between his critical precepts and verse practice

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continues to complicate and enrich Pound's development of sensory preference for his own style. This process leads him to the position taken two years later, in "French Poets." A history in miniature of Pound's interest in Gourmont, the essay records his changing attitudes in its rhetorical indecision, but he moves this ambivalence toward resolution. He sees Gourmont as the poet who "recreated the 'litanies.' It was one of the great gifts of 'symbolisme,' of the doctrine that one should 'suggest' not 'present'; it is, in his hand, an effective indirectness. The procession of all beautiful women moves before one in the Litanies de la Rose; and the rhythm is incomparable. It is not a poem to lie on the page, it must come to life in audition, or in the finer audition which one may have in imagining sound."23 Gourmont's heavily rhythmical verse is correctly aligned here with the tradition of symbolisme. Yet Pound no sooner expresses his old fondness for its musical suggestiveness than he checks it, restricting its validity and effectiveness: "in his hand," and evidently no one else's, may it succeed. He tightens this qualification as he puts the actual music of those majestic cadences under quarantine, accepting it only as he reduces it to the silence of the printed page: to "the finer audition one may have in imagining sound." Pound's restriction reveals its idiosyncratic character and individual force more clearly once it is held against a passage in Gourmont's writing that makes a related claim. Here Gourmont defends musical poetry —in effect, his own —against the onslaughts of "vers libre," which is written, as he sees it, for the page alone. He asserts the need to keep "the memory of speech" fully alive against the silencing eyes of the reader. No inaudible souvenir, no imagined sound, such speech resonates with intense "musical feelings." He warns how "Verse will soon cease to be sung and even to be recited; since [the invention of] printing, poetry is composed for the eyes"; he counters that "one does not read only through the eyes; one reads through the ears, one reads with the memory of speech those verses from which one demands musical feelings and at the same time sentimental impressions" (ELF, 24546; emphases added). In the half decade following his first exposure to Gourmont, then, Pound's understanding of the verse has swung between opposite extremes. His early need to preserve its musical quality led him to diminish the critic's own standards of visual intelligence and clarity; his developed sensibility has compelled him — on the evidence of the difference between Gourmont's values in "Vers libre" and his own finer audition of purely imagined sound — to impose those visual values on a verse intoned in manifest defiance of them. Of course Gourmont's own inconsistency provided a pattern for Pound's double focus on the work, but the point to mark is that the younger poet did not maintain this divided attitude all at once: he replaced one emphasis with another as a function of his own evolving priority. His preference for the social critic over the master of la poesie pure, the apologist for visual intelligence over the orchestrator of symbolists music, reflects developments intrin-


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sic to the poetic career, as we shall see, but it also registers the pressure of extrinsic forces, which help as well to reveal the political direction in this process of growth. The doubts attending Pound's first exposure to Gourmont in 1912 begin to reach solution in the harsh solvent of political history. It is the total war of 1914-18—that climacteric, in Pound's (and Lewis's) view, of modern mass culture—that helps him to accept the antidemocratic rebuke of musical sensation and, conversely, to extend the values of optical vantage, for deserving clercs, to social advantage. If this later position has already been staked out in early 1914, in "The New Sculpture," it is a testament to Pound's own residual affinity with the music of Gourmont symboliste that he needs the stark light of contemporary events to clarify the dire warnings of his mentor — as critic of the ear. Yet the Great War did not simply accelerate Pound's change of attitude to the acoustic character and value of Gourmont's verse. Mass conflict revealed its lesson to him in terms of an understanding offered by the prose ideologue—an analytical and judgmental scheme of rival sensations which, once confirmed by history, will determine which of the two Gourmonts he must prefer. That the ear locates the intellectual weak point in the body politic—the soft spot through which the people can be collectivized, manipulated for the purposes of total war —is a phobia of Gourmont (as critic) that Pound articulates with angry conviction in his antiwar diatribe of July 1916: "The Constant Preaching to the Mob." The title confirms the specifically oral culture of total conflict. He extends this Gourmontian apercu through a strategy as unpredictably unique as the personal understanding it expresses: "Time and again the old lie ... [I]t is the demagogue's business to bolster up his position and to show that God's noblest work is the demagogue. Therefore we read again for the one-thousand-one-hundred-and-eleventh time that poetry is made to entertain. As follows: The beginnings of English poetry . . . made by a rude war-faring people for the entertainment of menat-arms, or for men at monks' tables.'"24 Linking the demagoguery of mass war with the performance poetry of Anglo-Saxon, Pound resolves the oddity of that comparison in terms of his own literary biography. For the medium of living voice, to which he was originally committed for the sensuous and expressive content of verse, is changed now that it has been conscripted in the effort of total war —changed utterly from the days of his first delight in it, as in his translation of The Seafarer (1911). History has visited pollution on his old vocal metier —a lesson grimly witnessed by his next move. Here he praises not the musical speech of his poet-character, but his inner silence: "The beginnings — for entertainment" — has the writer of this sentence read The Seafarer in Anglo-Saxon? Will the author tell us for whose benefit these lines, . . . for whose entertainment were they made? They were made for no man's

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM entertainment, but because a man believing in silence found himself unable to withhold himself from speaking. . . . — [He must offer] an apology for speaking at all, and speech only pardoned because his captain and all the sea-faring men and companions are dead. . . . Such poems are not made for after-dinner speakers, nor was the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Still it flatters the mob to tell them that their importance is so great that the solace of lonely men, and the lordliest of the arts, was created for their amusement. (LE, 64-65)

Here Pound elevates his preferred poet into the same sphere of private silence that he will regard in 1918 as the desirable register for verse —above all, for the poetry of Gourmont, who has figured most largely in this same development. When Pound sets the figure of Gourmont against the public, oratorical culture of total war in his prose elegy of 1915, then, it is not surprising to find him insisting on the difference between the musical poetry of the symboliste and the visual intelligence of the critic. He lays preponderant stress on the intellectual strengths Gourmont reserved for the eye: directness of perception and exactness of presentation. In keeping with this development is Pound's adherence to undemocratic sentiments — his belief that such capacities mark a superior caste in society, an intellectual elite: "Yet the phrase is so plain and simple: 'to permit those who are worth it to write frankly what they think.' That is the destruction of all rhetoric and all journalism. I mean that when a nation, or a group of men, or an editor, arrives at the state of mind where he really understands that phrase, rhetoric and journalism are done with. The true aristocracy is founded, permanent and indestructible."25 This elegy to Gourmont reverses both the political sympathies and aesthetic preferences of the 1908 poem to Browning, replacing the ambiguity of that democratically mingled artist of voice with the aloof frankness of this clearsighted French aristocrat. It seems that the student of Gourmont has now caught up with the author of "The New Sculpture." But it was Gourmont who chartered the authority Pound accords to Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska (and himself); who first staked Pound on the high ground of visual immediacy; who could not be cited as ideologue of the eye, however, until the spell of his own symboliste chants had been broken across the wreckage of the Great War. The lofty presence of Yeats at Stone Cottage in the winters of 1913-14 and 1914-15 has surely reinforced Pound's faith in a superior society of artists.26 Still, the difference between the attitudes of 1908 and 1915 is not explicable solely in terms of Pound's changing a Victorian mentor for a modern Celtic one. While Yeats offered crucial support for Pound's growing confidence in the superiority of poets to the mayhem of social history, it is the contemporary continental tradition in which Gourmont was such a seminal and active contributor that helps Pound to determine the kind of artist


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he preferred. This colloquy provides a rationale and, in its detailed analysis of the visual sense, a quasi-empirical proof for the superbia to which the artist lays claim. As an ideologie, that is, Pound's clerisy of privileged artists relies on that specifically French science of human faculties and perception. His 1915 and 1918 writings on these issues frame his first intensive work on the Cantos. This period of activity may be focused best after we have noted how Gourmont's formative influence is extended through Pound's ongoing response to that European discourse—in his subsequent writings on its younger member. Arriving in Paris in June 1920, Pound writes emphatically to John Quinn: "Julien Benda, best mind here." Now beginning his brief stint as Paris editor of the Dial, Pound is already angling for "trans, rights on 'Belphegor'"—the translation will be serialized through 1920—and is seeking to enlist Benda as "reg. contrib. after that."27 The appeal of Belphegor exceeded that of the approval it offered to Gourmont's own social critique. One of its attractions might lie in the history of its making, which Benda evokes pointedly in his Foreword. "These essays were, for the most part, written before 1914," he opens by claiming. This analyst of mass musical compulsions thus gestures suggestively but powerfully to the machinations of the mass war to come (mentioned several times in the Foreword, which is provocatively dated "November 1918"). Benda stands forth as a prophet whose warnings have been confirmed by history. How attractive a figure for Pound. His own understanding of musical politics has also moved from a prewar augury, announced in the urgent but coded and still ambivalent language of an intuition reinforced by Gourmont (and Marsden), to the elemental clarity of postwar awarenesses. He possessed Benda's book with the urgency of an intellectual autobiography, but one that has gone unnoticed by critics (it is written in the oblique case). Pound accords Benda prominent place in the first installment of his "Island of Paris" series, an account of the French literary scene that ran between September and November, 1920. His praise is exact, and fitting: the genius of Benda represents "not the rich loam in which a new literature may germinate" but a "fine disinfectant," a dour and skeptical intelligence that has created "this clearing of common sense, this place open to wind and light" in "the midst of a rather depressing jungle." It is Benda's diagnostic gift that Pound esteems above all. Thus he penetrates to the analyst's crucial insight, embedding it in this interlingual crux: "one is very glad of Benda's analysis of the symptoms of 'coryphees.'"28 Coryphees—leaders of a ballet or chorus — stand as resonant emblems for the ethic and practice of mass musical culture, the political system that Benda sought so assiduously to expose. The French word that Pound uses to convey the gist of Belphegor more than hints at his acquaintance with the original text. Indeed, three months before the book began to appear in its first English translation (the September issue of the Dial), Pound had published a pseudonymously initialled

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review in the Athenaeum (his travel through France in the spring and summer of 1919 probably exposed him first to the work). The July report is not only an unconditionally enthusiastic judgment, opening with an elevation of Benda to a position of absolute prominence in contemporary French letters; this piece develops the implications of Bendan themes in greater detail than the September essay. Extending the diagnosis of the musical basis of demotic society, Pound enlarges on the deficiencies of the democratic system, which he presents as the very condition of the decay of meaning in the language. Here he develops Marsden's analysis of the democratic trap in the musical Word, that acoustic illusion. The musical sensation interposes itself between Word and referent, thus allowing for that hugely indefinite middle in which any and all possibilities of meaning may be entertained (the vaguest and most attractive of these, Wyndham Lewis will later agree with LeBon, is the notion of mass democracy itself, a function of the empathy induced by verbal sound). Such semantic pluralism may have defined the virtu of that loquaciously democratic poet Robert Browning a decade earlier, but it is now condemned and countered by higher standards of verbal precision: "The belief that any wheeze that works is God's verity offers a great solace to democracy and a great convenience to democratic governments as we know them. . . . Nothing is more symptomatic of the era than a distaste for 'mediaeval' precision, i.e., precise definition by words; or the corresponding desire to lump incompatibles and obscure border lines" (emphases added).29 The acts of optical severance on which such definition relies appear clearly in the illustration of the surgical operation that follows. Here, in keeping with Benda's own sensual ideologie, Pound identifies the superiority of visual discrimination in the surgeon's blade and delights in the politics of privilege that it validates: "M. Benda has a beautiful instrument, beautiful in neatness as a surgeon's instrument may be beautiful — utilitarian possibly—and it is very pleasant to watch him cut. . . . [I]t is no less pleasant to watch M. Benda operating on Bergson at just the point where Bergson is being most journalistically democratic."30 When the "surgeon's instrument" of 1920 comes to the hand of the "crafty dissector" of the 1908 poem to Browning, that "clear sight's elector" has broken his early alliance with the democratic voice and changed his political stripe, utterly. Thereby hangs the tale of a continental discourse that has instructed this poet ideologically: on the varying uses and social meanings of the different senses. Pound's development of a visual poetic and his subscription to the politics of privilege provides one of the stories to be told about the beginnings of his cantos, from early 1915 through late 1919. This process (examined in detail later) draws its complexity from questions that extend the issue of sensory strengths into debates on the powers and problems of language. May Pound push his ideology of the eye into verse diction and rhythm? How can he impose its contentious claims on the fabric of poetic


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words? These concerns are developing concurrently in his prose, to which we may turn first. Sign Language Dora Marsden was not a verbal artist. She attacked the perfidies of language in the implicit faith that perception and cognition could proceed along a path free of linguistic clutter. The raw, ungeneralized material of visual perception could not only be understood, she believed, it provided the sole means of stimulating new, curative action in society. Her standards describe Pound's own attraction to the visual arts a la lettre, but the problem she poses for the literary artist is considerable. It creates, in effect, two consciousnesses: one responsive to an ideally primary set of visual signs, the other struggling with the wayward distractions of words—verbal counters mired in an ever secondary and usually duplicitous scheme of reference. Pound seeks to heal the breach between the verbal medium of his craft and the visual meridian of his desire, but his efforts include a definition and exaggeration of their rival claims —a distinction that seems to grow increasingly acute. Writing on Epstein in early 1914, in "The New Sculpture," he offered a Marsden-like critique of language—as a "what if world of words, where any or all propositions, indeed "hateful" ones, could enter on grounds no firmer than the sounded token—that is mild in comparison with the frontal assault he launches in the "Art Notes" of March 1920. Here he takes stock of Epstein's more recent sculpture. Claiming that its shapely angles and sharply edged spaces belong to a universal language of form, he proceeds to suggest that it appeals to a visual sensibility both indifferent and superior to the machination of words: "Epstein's 'Christ' . . . would convey the full blast of its sculptural and emotional content, were it found in the desert by tribes who had never heard of the Christian religion. . . . There is not the faintest trace of dogmatism in his work. One cannot restate it in language" (EPVA, 140-41; emphases added). Between 1914 and 1920 the standard of visual immediacy has not only deepened its grip on Pound's technical imagination, it has widened the rift between those rival media of words and images. Pound's continued attempt to resolve this dichotomy is a project attended and complicated by the political question addressed in 1914, still fully alive in 1920: "There is not the faintest trace of dogmatism in [Epstein's] work." In 1920, as in 1914, "dogma" may charter either the repressive State or the beneficent institutions believed in by liberals as the chief means of egalitarian progress. To its generalized truth the resistance of Epstein's sculpted images stems from the same root of radical individuality that Marsden nurtured in the New Freewoman and the Egoist. Yet that optical language still opens into two distinct political possibilities. Is the particularized Image the imprint of an individualist as anarchist or the egoist as suprematist? The cult of the

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Self issues into a language of poetic images, but these may inscribe the charter of socialist revolt or authorize the rights of heroic tyranny. Pound's articulation of political preference is complicated in 1920, now that the once-latent problem of visual immediacy in words has become dominant; now that he has struggled for six years to instil optical standards into a linguistic medium. What happened when the thrust toward visual transparency collided with the resistant opacity of language? Little of consequence, answers Michael Levenson, who proposes that visual-pictorial values touch upon Pound's poetic from outside language; from extrinsic movements in the visual arts, where the current (1913-14) tendency to ape the extravagant mannerisms of Marinetti accounts for the radical political cast of "The New Sculpture." Seeing no connection between literary Imagism and painterly Vorticism (only one of the available examples), Levenson admits no commerce between an art of verbal evocation and one of visual directness, and he concludes that "modernist poetry could not continue to develop by emulating the methods of painting and sculpture."31 The eccentric political character of those European artistes-tyrannoi will thus remain ever foreign to the pure center of English Imagism, whose doctrine of verbal directness relies entirely (for Levenson) on milder criteria, the lenient and genial presence of Ford Madox Ford. Yet the most powerful proponent of visual directness in words, for Pound, was the author of Le Probleme du style, who gave the writer's eye both the task and the opportunity to write like a painter. Of course this pictorial emphasis conflicts with the limits of language, but this hardly prevents Pound from testing and extending the claims Gourmont encouraged him to make. Now that we have recovered this influence, we can see Pound's struggle to attain visual immediacy in words as no passing fancy but a constant, if troubled, ambition. The critical questions can thus be rephrased. Does the density of words force this radical Imagist to adjust his political claim and moderate his prepotency in the State — in view of his own diminished ability to make the verbal Image ring true to the desired object of sight? Must he leave the Republic he dreams of, flickering like the shadow of an impossible Ideal, on the rear wall of the writer's cave? Or does the very threat to the powers of the eye lead him to emphasize the authoritarian strain in his visual ideologie and, in doing so, to exaggerate its political claims — heightened as well by the events of contemporary history between early 1914 and 1920? When Pound returns to the topos of "The New Sculpture" a year and a half later, in his July 1915 "Affirmations" of Epstein, he develops the distinction between visual and verbal thinking with a complexity that measures an increase both in self-awareness and the extrinsic pressures of history. On one hand the political value and attraction of visual immediacy have strengthened in the face of mass war. In view of that burgeoning anarchy, the visual artist's


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ability to contrive an absolute, irreducible design gains in value. Where image and meaning coalesce, a rightful authority stirs, and it deserves now to be endowed with a civic function, indeed a political ministry, whereby a correspondingly clear, unfettered sense of order and purpose might be realized in society. "[N]either America nor England," he complains, "cares enough to elevate great men to control; because there is no office for the propagation of form; because there is no power to set Epstein, for example, where he should be, to wit, in some place where his work would be so prominent that people, and even British architects, would be forced to think about form. . ." (EPVA, 15). Yet the conferring of such extravisual, political meaning on the shapely sprites of the designing mind is just one more "plausibility"—an exercise in the discursive, ultraverbal speculation that Pound characterized in 1914 as a traitor to the visual immediacy he seeks. It is the mere trick of a "literary" sensibility blind to his own primary desire — visual fact, as he admits now in 1915. "All this is very secondary and literary and sociological," he concedes. "There could be no such harangue among artists. One sees the work; one knows; or, even, one feels" (EPVA, 15). Thus the solution he has just adduced is but a symptom of the conjectural wrong he seeks to right. Having already conceded that his explanations are "only phrases and approximations and rhetoric," are indeed "the sort of phrases that arise in the literary mind in the presence of Epstein's sculpture" (EPVA, 13), he reaffirms the dichotomy between verbal and visual thinking. By dint of repetition as well as the emphases added here, he identifies the equally desirable and impossible ideal of verbal presence, of visual immediacy in words. That wish represents a possibility sufficiently strong to carry Pound across the warning line of his own articulate skepticism. At a moment poised midway between "The New Sculpture" and "Affirmations," in "Vorticism" (1 September 1914), he claims that verbal images, if conceived and executed correctly, might attain the kind of enlightened directness he otherwise reserves for sculptural visions like Gaudier-Brzeska's or Epstein's. Words, properly mounted in the mind's eye (of Imagisme), might surmount the referential doubleness of language, a liability he features here as the special debility of symbolism(e) alone: Imagisme is not Symbolism. The symbolists dealt in 'association,' that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a world. They made it a form of metonymy. . . . Moreover, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique. . . . The Image is the poet's pigment. . . . [I]n writing poems, the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics. An image, in our sense, is real because we know it directly. (EPVA, 201, 202-3)

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The image that the poet imprints on the "primary pigment" of his linguistic art attains an immediacy of meaning and directness of impression comparable to that of an optical picture. In view of his own incredulity about visual presence in words, Pound's assertion appears to be blatant wishfulness. Indeed, he seems to rely on the very ethic of "plausibility" that he has already condemned as the worst susceptibility of verbal thought. But the passage offers more than an unwitting testament to the very delusive powers of language that he claims to be trying to stem. For the issue of verbal presence is being framed in terms of an aesthetic debate special to Pound, already rehearsed — and now being resolved —in his developing opinions on Gourmont. Pound forms the dichotomy between an ideally primary and regrettably secondary intensity in verbal art as the difference between the sensory registers in which language may do its work: between sight and sound. Thus he exiles the normally referential quality of linguistic meaning to the French hinterlands, specifically to symbolisme, a desert in which its mode of acoustic suggestion may play the idle pipe of la poesie pure. The law of "association" that operates in conventional verbal designation is at work in the symbolistes' tokens, but even more prodigally, and thus acquires the status and character of musical evocation at its indefinitive worst (the "mushy technique" is the musical mode): one recalls those "seventy swadelin's" of multiple rhymes, the hurdy-gurdy music and rigmarole rhythm, in which Browning was heard, Swinburne-like, to chant away single sense (cents). To the semantic muddle of the musical word Pound now contrasts Dante's "Paradiso," a masterwork of the creative "image," which he describes and praises as a radiant display of divine presence in the Word.32 Against this preferred method stands the example of Browning's "Sordello" in particular, a dramatic monologue Pound labels a "mask" (EPVA, 203), which suggests that Browning's art of live voice is attended by the same occlusion of meaning that the Word as pure image seeks to dispel. Thus Pound overrides his well-founded doubts about the powers of language. His claim for original visual intensity in words —based on the seer-like powers of the eye —is staked in a personal anecdote. Recalling his brinkmanship in sitting a final examination in second-year geometry, he vaunts this special optical virtu, boasting how quickly he "saw where the line had to go, as clearly as I ever saw an image, or felt caelestem intus vigorem" (EPVA, 207). A heavenly strength within: the infusion of supernal power into this visually gifted youth is a blessing compatible with the one conferred on the poet of Paradiso, who presents his own theophany in a language inspired and arranged by the same optical acumen. Like the incarnational Logos of Dante, Pound's word and image may coalesce. Superior powers of sight allow him to see the meaning indivisible from its lexical sign. The primacy of the eye leads Pound, in the same essay, to the high ground of ideologie. Having established the physiological superiority of that orb (his


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own experience the empiricist's field), he proceeds to endorse the idea of a life ruled by artists similarly gifted. This once astute geometrician now uses his visual skill, not only to profess the eye's domain through universal and immutable laws, but to assert the capacity of imaginative art — especially an optically sharp sensibility like his—to regulate (social) life. Following the intuition he displayed in seeing where that "line had to go," then, the adept of the eye can "learn that the equation (x — a)2 + (y — b)2 = r2 governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. . . . It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject-matter only" (EPVA, 207). Pound's nascent faith in his right to poetic rule is expressed, it is essential to recognize, as an overt challenge to the conventional limitations of language. His political hubris appears as a defiance of linguistic prudence first of all —an assertion of visual immediacy in the lexical counter. That idea of absolute, infrangible relation between verbal sign and meaning has of course receded deep into the precincts of myth: the incarnational Word, the sign isomorphic with its referent, had been systematically dismantled by Saussure, who, in this regard, was simply formalizing mainstream developments in nineteenth-century linguistics.33 When Pound endows words with the real presence of images, he is not only overreaching the now customary restraints of language. He is transgressing the ethic of a democratic society built —in his own view, as expressed in "The New Sculpture"—on the infirmity of verbal terms or, more positively, on tolerance for the possibility of multiple meanings in any one word. He has allowed his prize faculty of the eye the kind of power that brings him to a place already recognizable as a position of political extremism, already identifiable as a point on the far right. In line with the several possibilities evolving on the pages of the New Freewoman and the Egoist, his visual monad might be claimed either by Sorel or Gourmont, but the tendency in Pound's response to these options is already clear. If he moves to the old right rather than the new left in projecting the social potential of visual directness, where does he turn to find a technique for his optical poetics and politics? To the ancient East, first of all. The fact that Pound's visual Word sets him so strongly at odds with the conventions of contemporary verbal and political culture helps to explain this crucial turn in his career. At the moment these attitudes are forming, he turns away from the constraints of his AngloSaxon tongue for models to describe his preferred action in language. In early 1914 (at the exact moment he writes "The New Sculpture") he is deeply immersed in the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, enthusiastically appropriating that linguist's sense of the mechanics and values of the Chinese ideogram.34 In that commentator's exclusively pictographic explanation, Pound could find the Word standing as one with the optical image of its referent,

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tied to its meaning by a kind of visual rhyme. He readily accepted the highly simplified notion that isomorphism ruled the construction of the words through their constituent "radicals." As Hugh Kenner has demonstrated, Pound followed Fenollosa in willfully ignoring the phonetic dimension in these characters. He could not hear this unfamiliar language, Kenner is correct to point out.35 A linguist as competent as Pound, however, might have received tuition. Did he wish to hear it? The sound markers, altering the referent without changing the basic pictographic image in a way that showed the difference, introduced arbitrariness into the visual sign. Thus Pound sought to protect this pristine, essentialist, Adamic script from the indeterminacy that frets the acoustic dimension of his own English words. His personal extension and refinement of the ideogrammic conception of language is marked by an attempt to redress the semantic prodigality of phonetic English. He wishes to shift his own poetic language into alignment with those Chinese paradigms of verbal—visual —presence. "The ideogrammic method": Pound used Fenollosa's words to define this practice. It is a "process of compounding" in which "two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. For example, the ideograph for a 'messmate' is a man and a fire" (emphases added).36 The date at which Pound formed his most ambitious understanding of this method—juxtaposing particulars in the service of "general statements"—is rightly debated, yet it seems clear that the rudiments of ideogrammic form are present already in 1915.37 This early date becomes impossible to ignore when the ideogrammic method is seen, not simply as a way of handling blocks of material, but as a response to the issues rehearsed in this chapter. It provides Pound a means of engaging a specifically linguistic problem; it allows him both to acknowledge the faults of his English language and to correct them. How may these juxtapositions achieve the visual immediacy of Chinese signs in the phonetic textures of Pound's English? In his 1916 book on Gaudier-Brzeska he describes an interaction between two radicals — armor and a pine in the mist. An equation of sculptural beauty, the relation between the two radicals may be preserved by the writer who, "working in words only," will juxtapose the two phrases in the same way the sculptor arranges his two "planes in relation." Emphasizing the poet's inability to show the actual image in his (English) word — "he works not with planes or with colours but with the names of objects and of properties" — Pound admits the necessarily coded, secondary quality of verbal meaning. But he proceeds to suggest that the yoking of the two phrases may create an image of a different order from the mental pictures normally generated by a single word: "a more vivid, a more precise image."38 This image focuses the very "relation between the two," and it becomes visible to the mind's eye in a kind of intuitive supersight. Since it cannot predate his creation, it is not open to the vagaries of representation. The poet presents it directly because he forges it out of its


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constituents, those parts into which, however, it cannot be reduced. Pound has not given up the Gourmontian value of visual separation, for no ideogrammic unit can be seen without a firm grasp of its concrete particulars. Yet this perceptual action is being swept up within a higher function, one that is entirely consistent with the political values that inform the visual privilege celebrated by Gourmont. That the ideogram resists reductive analysis —it is holistic, intuitive, creative rather than referential or duplicative — suggests the correspondence between its cluster of radicals and the Gestalt phenomenon described in 1933 by Karl Mannheim, who also points up the political drift underlying Pound's process of linguistic inquiry, right from the start. "Conservative thought is 'morphological,'" Mannheim asserts; it perceives "the world in terms of unanalysed and unanalysable given wholes in their unique Gestalt." Numinous, irreducible, the ideogrammic unit transmits the same kind of unquestioned power that Mannheim describes here; that Pound finds as the desirable property of signs. It is as a Mannheimian Gestalt, indeed, that Pound presents the constant attractions of Epstein's images —in 1920, in 1915, and already in 1914, when the emblems of artistic aristocracy appeared as "djinns," as icons instinct with a primitive's own sense of real presence and absolute power—an authority as unquestioned as the most radical conservative's tradition. On the other hand, Mannheim asserts, "liberal and progressive thought" is "analytical," for it "decomposes the seemingly monolithic entities of the traditional world view into functional elements."39 Already in "The New Sculpture" Pound associated such analysis with the normal machinations of language, presenting these as the usual defect of contemporary "democratic," liberal, progressive civilization. The authority of the ideogrammic method will not be fully established in Pound's own verse until he is well into the project of drafting the first cantos, in mid-1919. Its development shows all the disruptions that signal the experimental nature of the procedure. Yet his mastery deepens and strengthens in the course of composing these poems, between 1915 and 1919. For the method resolves the linguistic debate that has engaged him most profoundly in the preceding years. He will have also generated a nearly perfect intimation of the ideogrammic ideal. "The Coming of War: Actaeon," written in early 1915, shows the original energy of Pound's discovery of Fenollosa and couples it with a rarely surpassed level of practical sagacity, technical expertise. It reads like an intuitive blueprint for the juxtapositional strategies of the mature cantos. A multiplex cluster of visual radicals; a discontinuous syntax, measuring the lines to units of optical perception, like the cut-and-fit prosody of the later work; a gathering of these etched images into a Gestalt whose lure and irreducibility are augmented by the elusive, overshadowing figure of the mythic character in the title; the poem is exemplar as well as example of the new technique:

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM An image of Lethe, and the fields Full of faint light but golden, Gray cliffs, and beneath them A sea Harsher than granite, unstill, never ceasing; High forms with the movement of gods, Perilous aspect; And one said: "This is Actaeon." Actaeon of golden greaves! Over fair meadows, Over the cool face of that field, Unstill, ever moving Hosts of an ancient people, The silent cortege. (P, 109-10)

No one reading the poem seventy-five years after its composition can ignore the influence of its apparent progeny. The short plastic line has been taken over most successfully by American projectivist poets, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson chief among them, who use it as a unit of breath, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of the speaker and providing a basis for the talkiest of muses. Theirs is a vibrantly vocal poetic.40 But is Pound's text really played best by the voice? The visual orientation set up in the first line and the stroke of closural silence made in the last seem to frame a moment of chiefly optical imagination. Indeed, the radical fragmentation of syntax would leave the outer ear of most readers of 1915 without a clue to follow in voicing the poem aloud (a fluent vocalese provided the point of popular praise in Florence Farr's Music of Speech41). Added to this are those fine torsions worked into the material sound: the dental consonants dominating the terminal position of the verses tend to click the lines shut, closing off vocal momentum. Sounds that separate rather than meld an acoustic continuum exert a continuing attraction for this poet, as Kenner has observed.42 Indeed, in 1935, Pound directs Mary Barnard to seek "sounds that stop the flow," citing his own practice since Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) as a demonstration of the principle.43 Operating at least several years before that, the technique helps to lift words out of the sphere of the speakable and into that "finer audition" of "imagined sound": of words quite exclusively read. The visual channel thus activated opens the reader of this poem to the full range and effect of its visionary Gestalt, which recovers some of its political significance in the context of its originating moment.


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Pound's frustrated attempts to write verse on the occasion of the war have been recovered recently by James Longenbach. As yet unable to legitimate the national experience in personal terms in 1915, Pound lapsed into the manufactured intensity of public oratory. He needed the distance of epic perspective, and found success only in a mythic treatment of the subject.44 To Longenbach's useful conclusions we may add that such detachment entails more than a mythic vantage: it is also a feature of technique. The discontinuous syntax and agglutinative prosody allow Pound to array the subject rather than engage or discourse upon it. Freed from the need to produce opinions about the topic, he eschews the whole ethic of verbal exchange, the standards of an inclusive discourse. Thus he shuts down the open forum of commentary and open-ended verbal speculation that he has already identified as the medium of democratic culture, that state of intellectual free fall. The loftiness of the "no comment" approach is shown in the clean edge of aristocratic diffidence that lines the parts of poetic diction here. Unnegotiable, not reducible into the grammar of prose statement, the images and allusions shaped by this sculptural prosody already claim for themselves the political ascendancy of Pound's visual ideologie. This social attitude, more than implicit in Pound's sensibility before the outbreak of war, has been aggravated by the conflict, which has inflated its claims. The war brings the powers of artistic supersight — perhaps too quickly —into political position. In line with Lewis's development between Composition (1913) and The Crowd (1915), Pound's early struggle for aesthetic and perceptual authority plays onto the bloodier ground of history; mass war batters his sensory superbia into radically reactionary shape. It is only in relation to that conflict, after all, that we discern the social attitudes of this poem. These circumstances contain no apologia. Yet this political stance is one that Pound does not yet possess with the full authority of personal —artistic —conviction. The visionary high ground he holds with Actaeon, after all, is tenuous: High forms with the movement of gods, Perilous aspect . . .

Actaeon's own outlook was certainly "perilous": glimpsing Diana naked, he was punished for such vision and turned into a stag, to be hunted and killed; the figure of the sacrificial victim plays suggestively against the local context of war. But this motif applies more clearly to the poem's own imaginative angle of sight. Actaeon's endangered view reflects Pound's own lack of confidence in his optical prosody. For a moment, one feels, the imperial orb has no clothes. This odd combination — Actaeon's vulnerability and the authority of the visual Gestalt —will reappear even in 1919, at the end of the process of

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drafting the first suite of cantos. Insecurity attends the daring required to unwrite the tradition of the long poem—by writing his own under the aegis of his visual linguistic. The "no questions" outlook of the ideogrammic aura is approached with a questing uncertainty. Such oppositions are at work from the start of the cantos' composition. EARLY CANTOS: AUDITING THE TRADITION

The struggle recorded in the first published cantos seems predictable. The fluency Pound had acquired in dramatic monologue made Browning the likely muse for his modern epic, one that expresses above all the poet's individual sensibility (dwelling only incidentally on the history and legend that provided the traditional content of epic). Converting the vocal characters of Browning's monologues into a more personal, lyric "I," Pound finds his instrument — and his undoing. In propria persona, he engages in the selfstimulating, self-responding colloquy of the monologue, lapsing into the worst loquacities of his mentor. The garrulousness chokes rather than discloses the sensibility he seeks to reveal. Yet his problem seeks solution, Ronald Bush has suggested cogently, within the Browning legacy. Pound's contrary needs — to relieve the verbal surface of the poem from his intrusive presence, yet preserve a texture that reflects his individual sensibility—show him moving toward the older poet's paratactic manner. Its loose, discontinuous, cumulative progression of phrases and lines allows him to build up the impression of the varying contents and character of his sensibility without imposing on these materials a falsely, rhetorically unified personality. Should this poetic rhythm be heard— as an extension of the oral-formulaic tradition in which it originated? Bush's own analysis is dominated by vocal metaphors,45 which suggest a fundamental continuity between the monologue Pound rejects and the parataxis he adopts — a single emphasis on poetic voice. Yet the cut-and-fit prosody of his agglutinative method matches exactly with the act of visual severance that engages Pound increasingly over these years. As unpublished drafts of these first cantos (unavailable to Bush in the mid-1970s) reveal, the opposite possibilities of vocal and visual prosodies appear as an elementary tension in these opening poems. "Give up th'intaglio method,"46 Pound counseled himself in the last line of the first verse paragraph in his first published canto (the three "Ur" cantos were serialized in the summer 1917 issues of Poetry). The method of intaglio (in-tagliere, "to cut in," a pattern incised in metal or stone) reflects the measure Pound has been developing — to first perfection in "The Coming of War: Actaeon" —for entering visual precision into verbal textures. The first published canto shows Pound setting aside this technical challenge for the easier cadence of Browning's Sordello-like speech. Yet various manuscripts identify that choice as the sheerest expediency — "that's the way you go on,"


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he concedes, for he is meeting the demands of the long poem merely by going along with the headlong energy of speech — and a shameful abandonment of his own finer technical incentives: "Give up carving each stone of my edifice as if it were an intaglio."47 Similarly, the lines emphasized here were deleted from the opening verse paragraph of the published version: But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks, Cast off restrictions, go back on my own full-formed method, Let in your quirks and tweeks, slap-on-the-back, punch-in-the-belly, Familiarity. Let's say the thing's an art form, your 'Sordello,' Not merely a freak, a by-path.48

These are the necessary but easy tricks of Pound's acquired fluency in monologue: its entertainment-performance factor ("slap on the back, punch in the belly"); the ingratiating ease of a method that promotes "familiarity," both as a characteristic of its own conventionality and as a function of the empathy between speaker and listener. The failure of nerve he displays is matched again by an admission of self-betrayal. He is going "back on [his] own [not quite] full-formed method" — that is, "th'intaglio method" which offers its own arduous prosody as the rule of a more stringent excellence. Progress and personal adventure lie instead in the direction of greater "restrictions"— a paradox explained in terms of the aesthetic alternatives at issue here: the easy expansiveness, the blowzy facility of monologue speech, needs to be curtailed by the exact, exacting configuration of the stone carver's design. It is in just these terms that Pound spells out the options in another unpublished passage. Here he reduces the Browningesque style of speech to a specious ease, a mere rumble and clatter of voice, and includes in this resonant cartoon of resonance the loftiest strains of antique song. The consideration then shifts to the promise and challenge of a visual poetic, and its demanding aura is enhanced by the form its manifesto takes here — an elegy for the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, newly dead: What do I mean by all this clattering rumble? Bewildered reader, what is the poet's business? To fill up chaos, populate solitudes, multiply images Or streak the barren way to paradise. [(Here was the renaissance)] To band out fine colours, fill up the void of the stars And make each star a nest of noble voices. Let undines hear me, and in cool streams Redeck the muses' gardens, green herbs and cress And water-drinking flowers . . . . Rumble again? 'What are the muses' gardens?' Oh, take a heaven you know, and make the starry wood Sound like a grove well filled with nightingales, . . .

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM The soul starts with itself, builds out perfection, Confucius, Dante. Or the best man killed in France, Struck by a Prussian bullet at St Vaast With just enough cut stone left here behind him To show a new way to the kindred arts Laying a method, quite outside his art, Vortex, dispersal, throw it at history. ([crossed out in mss]; emphases added)49

Gaudier's genius reaches beyond his own sculpture to a synthetic art; the designs he has cut into stone provide a model for Pound's own verse—the intaglio (and ideogrammic) method. Not that the "restrictions" it imposes on the voluble facility of voice represent any artistic modesty. "Throw it at history," Pound dares himself. He expresses the same hubris that compels the development of a visual aesthetic in a verbal medium, as vaunted in the essays of 1914 and 1915. Now in the midst of the mass war that took the exemplar of his method, and his friend, he shows the radicalizing force of that historical moment. This is the same political daring he has already shown in the ideogrammic intaglios of "The Coming of War: Actaeon": the authority and elitism so provocatively manifest in the social hermeneutic of that poem. Dangerous as this optical prosody (and philosophy) proves to be, the evidence of its development lies buried in predictable attempts at concealment (in the manuscripts), but it possesses the kind of inevitability that makes it impossible to disguise. For the published version of the first canto returns at the end to Pound's initial motive — considering an epic written "to paint, and not to music": Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about us: Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis. If for a year man write to paint, and not to music — O Casella! (I, P, 234)

Casella—musician, seducer, for Virgil the prime type of the lyric poet — receives a plaintive apostrophe here as an expression of the regret this poet feels in losing the acoustic register, once the sensuous content of his verse. Not a choice between prosodic meters and colloquial measures, Pound's new (visual) metier entails a forsaking of "sounds" altogether — as another, earlier manuscript draft of these lines makes clear: '"O Casella mia'," he begins, and asks: "where once men wrote to sounds / We write to painting? (for a year) 1915."50 When Pound's September 1917 affirmation of the new optical prosody is returned to its roots, it reveals not only the tentativeness requisite to a new poetic, but its most radical point of departure from his own sense of epos: this new epic muse aspires to the condition of silence.


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Do the actions and values of visual severance replace the harp as the poet's muse and guide? Where men once wrote to sounds, can he write to painting and sculpture? These questions compel the main line of technical experiment and discovery between 1917 and 1919—we shall see at length—to political extremes. Canto IV: Perilous Aspect Canto IV underwent a nearly two-year process of deliberation and composition (1917 to 1919). Here Pound struggles to attain the compression, the new intensity of hyperelliptical presentation, which this canto manifests so strikingly. (A last return to the acquired proficiency of dramatic monologue appears in the sure-handed caprice of Homage to Sextus Propertius, under the special conditions of a creative, talky translation of Sextus's individual oeuvre.) The new values have borne down on him with the heavy pressure of Ulysses, the manuscript drafts of which he has been reading since late 1917: the dramatic immediacy achieved by speakers like Bloom and Stephen impressed him powerfully.51 Yet Joyce can offer him little practical instruction on how to achieve such intensities, for the novelist has extended and refined the methods of monologue, variously dramatic and internal, which have already outlived their usefulness for Pound's own poetic purposes in the Cantos. He seeks a standard of presence and directness comparable to Joyce's, but not by digging deeper into the psyche of his character-in-voice. The compression he desires lies instead as the fruit of his visual prosody, the sculptural poetic he has pondered — more than practiced—through the first three cantos. The completion of Canto IV in early spring 1919 will show the poet clearly oriented in this direction. He marks the progress of his sensory values in an essay he writes in the interim: a review of Browning's translation of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. That this piece appeared first in the Egoist (JanuaryFebruary 1919) provides history and memory for his Marsden-like critique of the musical Word, of its usual trick —the material body of sound leads us into accepting the reality of the abstract concept. Browning, Pound charges, falls into this aural fallacy, for he attempts to impose an ongoing, unifying meaning —"ideas"—upon the separate "facts" in the dramatic legend. These discursive speculations are a function of the poet's own musical voice —a link Pound makes explicit by quoting a remark (from Browning's preface) about the '"abundant musicality'" in '"the ideas of the poet'": "I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poems the ideas of the poet." . . . His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas." —"Thought" as Browning understood it —"ideas" as the

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term is current, are poor two-dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow." An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact. The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the objective sight of the poet. (LE, 267; emphases added) Against the stupefying sonority of Browning's lyrical discourse Pound's ideal poet is wide awake, specifically wide-eyed, grasping directly the discrete facts of the case through acts of visual severance: the singularity of each separate "atom of matter" is linked internally and causally to each "atom of force" in the "objective sight of the poet." Thus Pound moves toward an appreciation of the technique that puts visual discrimination into literary practice, and he esteems it here as the vehicle for the desired directness of presentation. This is the cut-and-fit or "agglutinative" method. Naming it in this essay for the first time, Pound sets it categorically at odds with the discursive continuity of Browning's normally expository syntax and appreciates it as the device for sticking to those facts; for handing over the events whole, one at a time: "One might almost say that Aeschylus' Greek is agglutinative, that his general drive, especially in choruses, is merely to remind the audience of the events of the Trojan war; that syntax is subordinate, and duly subordinated, left out" (LE, 273). A discontinuous prosody will thus allow Pound to define the primitive monad and regain its intensity in verse. This reading of powers and presences in classic Greek poetry comes to Pound from Gourmont, who also helps to account for the visual priority in Pound's own poetics and practice. In Le Probleme du style, Homer's poetic genius appears in his aptitude for making comparisons, but Gourmont's conception of metaphor, reflecting his own special sense of visual severance, differs strikingly from normal models. In a passage Pound marks in his reading copy, Gourmont calls Homeric comparison "the elementary form of visual imagination" (PS, 87), and he proceeds to describe it as an act of dividing rather than merging the two terms of the likeness.52 Responding perhaps to the stylistic structure of the epic simile, where tenor and vehicle become nearly independent units ("as the wave . . . so the soldiers"), Gourmont sees the Homeric trope as a way of presenting a series of discrete "facts" (a theme word in Pound's essay on Aeschylus), "analogous" but separate. The Greek poet's various perceptions, "wellbalanced and sharp," appear "directly, without encroaching on each other" (PS, 88-89), and thus achieve the directness of presentation that Pound esteems in this verse: "The sensations are sequential, so the language is sequential. Homer reveals a fact, then compares it to another analogous fact: the two images always remain distinct, though they can be seen roughly simultaneously. . . . Homer is exact because of his inability to lie. He cannot lie: impressions strike him one by one; he describes them one by one, without confusion" (PS, 89). Taking Marsden's own insistence on visual immediacy into the more


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opaque precincts of language, Pound relies for guidance from his first mentor on the literary, stylistic value of the eye. And Gourmont's tutelage helps us to understand which of the two available political identities — anarchist or aristocrat — will appear as the social meaning of his radically individualized verbal Image. For the optical discrimination Pound extols is placed by Gourmont at the top of a hierarchy of sensory merit, the lower reaches of which are marked by the ear's openness to fluid, continuous sound (la synerese) — emblem and medium of the undistinguished, undistinguishing masses. Similar social configurations emerge in Pound's 1918 essay, where his Gourmontian emphases anticipate the dichotomies, drawn by Karl Mannheim, between authoritarian and liberal representations. The open-ended, expository, ultraverbal method of democratic political culture belongs to the discursively musical voice of Browning (we recall "Mesmerism"), and as such is forcibly rejected by Pound. By contrast, the definition of images equally numinous and irreducible—veritable pictures, which capture and present each "atom of matter" in each atom of "objective sight"—builds up Pound's ideogrammic clusters; his own version of the Gestalt. These are insignia of presence and authority not open to question. Social privilege emerges as an "ideology" in the original French (Greek) sense: a politically useful truth that is valid insofar as it conforms to the way the human creature receives images and sensations. In this 1918 essay, after all, Pound rejects the later, corrupted sense of "ideology" as he drains the word "idea"—as abstract concept (a political fideism merely received) —of any merit. To the same point a strongly marked passage in his copy of Le Probleme du style: "an idea is nothing but a sensation dimmed, an image effaced" (69). For Pound, as for the ideologues, truth and value lie in the primary register of the human faculties, visual perception ("objective sight") above all. This sensory and aesthetic experience — on which valid concepts rely—is the language of a new political gnosis; of Pound's modern epic. The priority of the eye in his political aesthetic reveals its individual force more clearly when one recognizes that the agglutinative prosody, which serves as the instrument of optical vision, belongs primarily—Gourmont's perception notwithstanding—to the tradition of oral verse. The performing poet used this measure to accommodate his oral formulaic materials, which he has received for the most part in discontinuous, half-line units. As Michael Bernstein shows in The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, this formulaic prosody lends itself readily to the juxtaposition of radicals in the ideogrammic method.53 While Bernstein connects Pound's practice first of all to the circumstances and ethic of aural culture, he also raises issues that define the productive difficulty of Pound's modern enterprise. The "voices" that seem to enter Pound's text—the material of many prior texts, talked up to an apparently high pitch of Poundian loquacity— gather together and, at critical mass, cancel the very fiction of dramatic voice. We cannot hear a single speaker, the integral and authoring subject

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needed to articulate Pound's moral, aesthetic, and political values. The loss of the individual voice, Bernstein aptly suggests, reinforces or even accounts for Pound's definition of an authoritarian position.54 Further, I propose: Pound attains a provisional solution to this problem—his many-voiced anonyme—by emphasizing the visual accent in ideogrammic juxtaposition over the oral element of formulaic combination, which conspires to shout down its author. In the rhetorical fiction of these poems Pound may ask to be heard, but this request, seen in the extreme light of his perceptual drama, reads as an elegy to the object of its desire. For Pound reauthorizes himself as a writer, inhabiting the very absence of his own voice, silently juxtaposing the contents of his individual sensibility — the radicals of his ideogram — and etching these images with an intelligence as individual as their ordaining subject's. (Marsden would approve all but the authority Pound twists into his ideogrammic gists —though he does this with a nervousness, as we shall see, that measures the true daring of the enterprise.) So that, in Canto IV: Palace in smoky light, Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary-stones, ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows! The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare, Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light; Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving. Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple trees, Choros nympharum, goat-foot with the pale foot alternate. . . .55

Using the mythological account of the building of Thebes as a pattern for Troy, Pound recalls the walls of that city rising to the sound of the lyre of Amphion (Anaxiforminges: master of the lyre). His oral presence ("Hear me") and aural awareness derive from that mythic fiction; the visual and auditory modes seem to be easily compatible here. Yet his own developing preferences show in his handling of this topos. The discontinuous prosody of the first two lines matches the acts of separation and definition he has attributed to the eye in the Browning essay, and its radiant prospect is the signature of that visual metier. It is clearly a realization of the poetic esteemed in his remarks on the Agamemnon. Conversely, the absence of a discursive, expository, contextualizing voice (applied wrongly by Browning—Pound has judged—to the facts and separate events of Greek myth) allows the poet to present his detail directly, numinously, hieratically. Not troubling to explain what the references mean (as he often did in Three Cantos), his finished Gestalt signs its own authority into law—through the acts of superior perception he reproduces in this visual prosody. Pound also extends the visual principle of the ideogram into episodic


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arrangement. He relies increasingly on the juxtaposition of separate dramatic radicals, rather than continuous discourse, as the means of organizing the constituent parts. Already Canto IV proceeds as a series of paratactically arranged episodes from myth. The Amphion prospect shifts to scenes from the Philomel and Isis story, which changes in turn to a long but fragmentary account of the Actaeon legend and, following an interleaving of Japanese material, to the story of Danae's imprisonment in the tower. The application of this method in episodic arrangement is complemented on the smaller scale by consistent use of the cut-and-fit technique as a principle of prosody. His congeries of mythic events avoids the sort of authorial commentary it is designed to elude, but this visual principle of organization—both prosodic and architectonic — emerges as the single protagonist in these varied events. The myth of Procne and Philomel (Poems, 73-74), to begin with, depicts not only the loss of the power of speech but the invention of an alternate, exclusively visual means of communication — in effect, the negotiation made in the overture to IV. Philomel, having been tricked and violated by King Tereus, had her tongue cut out so that she could not tell the tale. She learns the craft of weaving and depicts the several events for Theseus' wife, Procne, in a series of emblems. Philomel's loom and its design of serial scenes reflects the paratactic sequence of visual images in this new canto, while the dangers of this novel method are reflected in her own vulnerable state. Pound's uncertainty about his optical prosody will extend through the completion of the seventh canto, when the new method, broken down, will occasion the fictional autobiography of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley — that account of failed poetic careers (discussed later). The anxiety underlying this technical incentive appears at first obliquely, allusively, but unmistakably. It provides a measure of the daring implicit in the new project (and a sign of the misgiving which, once overcome, in Cantos V-VII, will lead Pound to indulge the method all too freely). His uneasiness appears again in Canto IV in the figure of Actaeon, who stands, as in "The Coming of War: Actaeon," as prototype of the voyeur, hero manque of Pound's visionary capacity, victim of the poet's own desire to see—through the visual measures he exercises in these incandescent lines: Actaeon. . . . And a valley, The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees, The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top, Like a fish-scale roof, Like the church-roof in Poictiers If it were gold. Beneath it, beneath it Not a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disk of sunlight Flaking the black, soft water;

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POUND, LEWIS, AND RADICAL MODERNISM Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana, Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air, Shaking, air alight with the goddess fanning their hair in the dark, Lifting, lifting and waffing: . . . The dogs leap on Actaeon, 'Hither, hither, Actaeon,' Spotted stag of the wood; Gold, gold, a sheaf of hair, Thick like a wheat swath, Blaze, blaze in the sun, The dogs leap on Actaeon. (Poems, 74-75)

While Actaeon's suffering still points up Pound's fears about the risk of his optical prosody (the echoing repetitions clearly belong to the oral muse), the poet seeks to compensate for that uncertainty by indulging the method at its greatest length to date. Note how the use of stipulative or negative definition serves to separate the image from what it is not; extending the act of visual separation into the rhetorical texture of the verse, Pound reaches a stunningly high level of variety and particularity in what is seen. A self-doubting self-assertion — each rhythm lifting and reinforcing the other — describes the development of this technique. Pound's anxiety reveals itself at the climactic moment of the Actaeon episode. For the phrase describing the method of ideogrammic juxtaposition here —"ply over ply" (Poems, 75) —originates in Browning's "Sordello"; in a passage which features crime and punishment as its chief motifs: 'Thus much being firm based, 'The other was a scaffold. See him stand 'Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand 'Of the huge brainmask welded ply o'er ply 'As in a forge . . .56

The verve of his new visual prosody carries more than a faint memory of its own punishable hubris. Along the same lines, an imperiled heroine of sight takes the leading role in the last of this canto's dramatic radicals—the story of Danae. Pound in fact alters his source in order to link the punishment motif in the legend with the visionary capacity that is his sensitive concern. In the legend Danae was placed in a sunken tower (a ground level window let in air) by her father Acretus, who was attempting to elude a prophecy that she would bear a son who would kill him. Pound not only lifts her prison into a high aerial vantage, he also relocates it above the mythic city of Ecbatan (Poems, 76),


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which, according to Herodotus, was mapped out to correspond in every detail with the plan of the universe.57 This tower is Pound's idealized perspective: the opening of Canto V in the 1921 edition (subsequently dropped in 1925) places the poet there in the first person: "I looked," Pound writes, on the "city of patterned streets" of "Ecbatan" (Poems, 78). As adjusted, the myth serves the understandably double feelings of ambition and insecurity. The sublimely patterned city of Ecbatan configures the high dream of the epic as a quasi-spatial architecture, a cluster of dramatic radicals organized (like this canto) by design rather than continuous dramatic discourse. Yet the convention-dismaying energy of this same project threatens its agent with failure and rebuke, a punishment visited on the two heroic prisoners — Danae and Pound-of that towering sight. Cantos V and VII: Songs Behind Glass "Topaz, I manage," the poet of Canto V boasts of his new optical prosody, and three sorts of blue; but on the barb of time. The fire? always, and the vision always, Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting And fading at will. Weaving with points of gold, Gold-yellow, saffron . . . (Poems, 78)

"The barb of time" points up the struggle between temporal consecutiveness and spatial simultaneity—Pound's rival muses of headlong speech and the intaglio moment. Yet this bewitching figure also resolves the problem it frames —in an appropriately hermetic configuration. The recondite allusion gestures, Carroll Terrell notes, "to Giordano Bruno's motto vincit instans ('the instant triumphs'), of which Bruno says that the creative instant or inspiration is a barb of light which pierces the mind to give one a totally new perception beyond all mere logic chopping. This lines up with Pound's notions regarding 'the luminous detail.'"58 Bruno's triumphant instant describes a moment of superior perception and, in Pound's rephrasing, a device for controlling time. For the principle of visual severance provides a shaping cadence as well as a type of heightened sight. Through discrete lines of verse the poet follows the linear movement of verbal time but turns it into a series of triumphant instants—the momentary but shapely stasis of his optical prosody. "The clock ticks," he has just conceded—but only to vaunt: "and fades out" (Poems, 78). The figure of time's prong does not denote a poetic impediment, then, but a means of catching the vision —like the "points of gold" with which these integral lines are starred. This point is clinched in the words emphasized here from an earlier, unpublished draft of the passage:

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Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue, Sight to my reach and will, and no invention, Caught on the barb on the time, 'That no long poem . . ,'59

The poetic of the engraved instant still stands in opposition to the poem of epic length, but only in theory, for Pound has reduced the conventional critical objection here to an inconclusive fragment of quotation—"'That no long poem . . .'" — as a measure of his own mounting confidence in his new technique. Once the anxiety underlying this practice has been worked out (Canto IV is an unburdening), Pound goes on to exercise the measure more securely in the new cantos. What concerns him most urgently here is the current status of epos, the oral muse that has dominated epic tradition. Gourmont's notion that Homer's was a primarily visual imagination is of course a biased eccentricity—yet one that will have helped Pound to recenter his own epic ambition in the eye. Seeking to establish the epic legitimacy (and political prepotency) of his new optical prosody, Pound argues that poetic song can no longer generate or sustain the long poem — a negotiation that drives both the discursive thrust and the artistic invention in these new cantos. "The ear [grows] dull, perhaps, with the vision," Pound admits—without excess rue. And he presents the diminished place of the aural muse several lines later, as he responds to the dramatic voices of a wedding celebration ("Give nuts" recalls an old fertility charm): And come shuffling feet, and cries 'Da Nuces! 'Nuces' praise and Hymenaeus 'brings the girl to her man,' Titter of sound about me, always and from Hesperus . . . Hush of the older song: 'Fades light . . ." (Poems, 78)

Denigrating the hubbub in the street to a "titter of sound about me, always," Pound contrasts the nuisance value of such noise, through verbal repetition, to the absolute value of the eye: "the vision, always." From such high visionary ground, sound appears, like the temporal medium in which it occurs, merely as an aggravating necessity. Like that ticking clock, it is useful mainly in inspiring an art antipathetic to it. Thus he reclaims a poetic of live voice under the restrictive, indeed oppositional, conditions he puts forward in his contemporary commentary on Gourmont. He suppresses actual dramatic noise in favor of an imagined or remembered music. "Hush of the older song" places this muse behind glass, displaying it in the silent museum of literary history. Through these reaches the imagination of Canto VII travels, attempting to justify the poetic of the hush —amidst the dying echoes of the old aural


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tradition, which Pound's own literary history presents as increasingly tenuous and problematic. (Canto VI prepares the case with a catalogue of motifs and characters from the Provencal tradition of poetic song.) Reference to Homer and the onomatopoeic "crash of the wave on the beach, and the scutter of receding pebbles" leads to the verse of Ovid, where the naturalistic elan of old song has become the drier, more sophisticated table talk of an urban courtier. Thence the medieval legacy —the chansons de geste and the sung poetry of Provence—gives way to a later French tradition, specifically the prose practice of Flaubert; and thus, ultimately, to Henry James ("the great domed head"), who is linked to the antique tradition of epos here through Dante's epithets for Homer. James's "old voice" also echoes the "old men's voices" from the Homeric passage at the beginning of this canto (Poems, 87) —but with a critical perspective that makes all the difference: The old men's voices — beneath the columns of false marble . . . Not present, but suggested, for the leasehold is Touched with an imprecision . . . . . . and the art A shade off action, paintings a shade too thick. 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, And the old voice lifts itself weaving an endless sentence. (Poems, 87)

The critical signals in these lines may be clarified once we understand how the "endless sentence" — James's literary signature — represents his extension of Homeric song. The connection emerges when Pound returns to this Homeric topos in 1922. After nearly two and a half years, he depicts the prosody of epos, in keeping with James's lengthy sentences, as "long song." (These revealing lines were left out when the poem, written as Canto VIII, was revised for publication, in 1925, as Canto II.) Here the measure of the continuous, fluid line of epos (the billowy hexameters of Homer) is based upon the natural ideal of expansive breath — merging the spirit of song with the wind bellying the canvas and the deep breathing of the oarsmen: The weeping Muse Mourns Homer, Mourns the days of long song, Mourns for the breath of the singers, Winds stretching out, seas pulling to eastward, Heaving breath of the oarsmen, triremes under Cyprus.60

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Yet the continuity between the "long song" of epos and the "endless sentence" voiced by James is a correspondence that hints at the deficiency of the latecomer, and this judgment is amplified in Pound's contemporary commentary on James. In his August 1918 essay he checks his evident fondness for the novelist when he dismisses "the endless sentence" as a symptomatic failure. James's lack of aptitude in plot and direct presentation accounts for his "opacity" (reflected in the "imprecision" of the Jamesian scenes in Canto VII). This "thickening . . . chiaroscuro" finds its sure vehicle in "the long sentence" (LE, 304). A sustained musical period, that is, substitutes its own intrinsic harmony and momentum for extrinsic visual reference. To the same point Pound notes James's astonishing lack of optical sensibility—revealed in his utter lack of taste and discrimination in the pictorial arts (LE, 307). And so the cautionary tale in the literary history of Canto VII tells that the oral muse of Homer reverts in modern practice to a—now unacceptably—blind music. Example of this precept is scored into the 1922 version of Canto VIII in a recondite pattern. Here the alternative values of sound and sight emerge in a poet's paysage moralise—two differing versions of the one passage, repeated within a few lines of one another (the extreme selfconsciousness of this scheme probably accounts for its being dropped from the final version, as II, in 1925). The first is a sentence strung continuously, ultramusically, across two lines; the second a paratactic cluster of phrasal radicals, of language torn into visible fragments: Tyro to shoreward lies lithe with Neptunus And the glass-clear wave arches over them . . . And by the beach-run, Tyro, Twisted arms of the sea-god, Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold, And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them, Glare azure of water, Cord-welter, close cover. Quiet sun-tawny sand-stretch . . .61

The first excerpt follows closely on the lines eulogizing the "long song" of Homeric epos, and it conforms to the standards of that foregone prosody: it orchestrates the assonance of strong "i" vowels into a fluent, almost Swinburnean current of sound. Under such acoustic pressure, it achieves the near "opacity" that Pound associates with the same values in James's version of "long song." Its fluent music breaks down in the second excerpt, where a marvelous variety and particularity of visual detail are cut and fit into the discontinuous prosody. Here the abundance of hyphenated compounds — each its own ideogram of juxtaposed particulars — shows the deep reach of this optical sensibility. The two passages enact Pound's negotiation with epic tradition: the oral muse of epos gives way to the new syntax of the eye.


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It is of course Gourmont who empowers this challenge to the oral tradition, and Pound recounts this influence — allusively, parabolically but urgently—in this account of the vicissitudes of speech: And all that day, another day: Thin husks I had known as men, Dry casques of departed locusts speaking a shell of speech . . . Propped between chairs and table . . . Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being, A dryness calling for death. (Poems, 89)

These lines rework a conceit by Gourmont—handled first in Pound's (June 1914) essay-review of Ford's Collected Poems: "Remy de Gourmont, when he says that most men think only husks and shells of the thoughts that have already been lived over by others, [has] shown [his] very just appreciation of the system of echoes, of the general vacuity of public opinion" (LE, 371; emphases added). Rote repetition and vocal mimicry, Gourmont had pointed out, describe the limits of strictly aural apprehension—a symptom characteristic of the popular mind. In Pound's terms, the listening "public" is a mere "system of echoes," the intellectual content of which is "vacuity." In Canto VII, the empty shell of the spoken word draws an image of its material body, while the husk's vacant center — rhyming with the "general vacuity" of five years earlier — configures the auditor's failure of autonomous thought. As an acoustic object the word has no "inner being," no subsistent Logos, and its physical sound, following the laws of Gourmont in a more livid and particular demonstration, leads the listener to mindless echoes only; a rattling of the pods. The pressure this ideologie exerts on the aural tradition of epos is critical, Pound reveals, as he surrounds the "shell of speech" figure with epic references: But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears For dead Sicheus. Life to make mock of motion: For the husks, before me, move, The words rattle: shells given out by shells. (Poems, 90)

Pound alludes—through Dido's mourning for her dead husband Sicheus—to her second, more renowned grief: the fated departure of Aeneas in his epic task of founding Rome. A sense of epic mission clearly attends the poet's own passage through these shells of speech —the old tradition of the livevoice poetic —toward the new visual prosody. He too will weep for the old

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measure of epos —as in his elegy to Homeric song in the 1922 version of Canto VIII —but there is no doubt about the direction or value of the career that leaves it behind. The previous instance of the leave-taking scene in VII makes this point still more clearly. Here Pound clusters the image of the outmoded shell of speech with Dido's mourning for Sicheus (Aeneas), featuring the motifs of epic progress as he repeats Dante's call — o you in the little boat astern there —to follow him to new lengths in his own voyage: Only the husk of talk. O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight . . . (Poems, 89-90)

Addressing himself to the chosen few among his readers who have persevered with him and will now be able to follow him to new heights (Paradiso, II, i),62 Dante speaks powerfully for Pound at this juncture in his own quest: weighed down with the burden of weeping for the foregone tradition of vocal poetry but ambitious to proceed in his new adventure. The vantage from which Pound delivers his Gourmontian pronouncements in 1919 was maintained with considerably less confidence in the 1914 review. There his insight into the "system of echoes" that composes "the general vacuity of public opinion" actually serves (in full context) not to validate the artist's superiority to the benighted auditors of Demos, but to place the poets in league with the general mindlessness and to undercut the very political and cultural hegemony they assume: "Shelley, Yeats, Swinburne, with their 'unacknowledged legislators,' with 'Nothing affects these people except our conversation,' with The rest live under us'; Remy de Gourmont, when he says that most men think only husks and shells of the thoughts that have already been lived over by others, have shown their very just appreciation of the system of echoes, of the general vacuity of public opinion" (LE, 371). The irony is searching: artists seek mastery by exploiting the very creaturely stupidity—a public dumbly echoing the conversation of their betters—that they should contemn and, were they noble, seek to alleviate. In early 1914, Pound can still be ambivalent about the artist's proper role in actual political life. He will need to move his ambition for aesthetic mastery out of that problematic medium of sound, of mere aural gullibility. From early 1914 to late 1919, from the moment of "The New Sculpture" to that of Canto VII, he has labored to attain Gourmont's standard of visual immediacy in words. Through the intaglio and ideogrammic methods, he has attempted to base his theme of political dominion in a language of exclusively visual control. A record of his progress — followed over the course of this chapter —occurs at the end of Canto VII. This canto returns to the scene of the murder by Lorenzo de' Medici (first


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seen in V) of Alessandro Medici, an event that Pound frames with the Gourmontian "shell of speech" imagery: . . . and the big locust-casques Bend to the tawdry table, Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets, And make sounds like the sound of voices. Lorenzaccio Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices. Ma si morisse! Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse. And the tall indifference moves, a more living shell, Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact, O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher, Eternal watcher of things, Of things, of men, of passions. Eyes floating in dry, dark air; E biondo, with glass-gray iris, with an even side-fall of hair The stiff, still features. (Poems, 90)

To present Alessandro as a noble figure Pound has considerable precedent to overturn. A victim of abulia, near paralysis of the will to decide and function, Alessandro was unable to act on the many warnings that he was to be killed by Lorenzo, who was not acting without reason: Alessandro is memorialized by the historian Varchi as one of the most ruthless tyrants of his time.63 Yet it is Lorenzo who receives Pound's rebuke: his name is reduced to the insult of the cackling 'Lorenzcccio'— the suffix means "bad" or "nasty." Indeed, Pound's own regard for Alessandro leads him to transform his abulia into a high aristocratic diffidence: "and the tall indifference moves." Just as Pound uses the pejorative image of the shell of speech to intensify the dislikability of Lorenzaccio, he casts Alessandro ("a more living shell") in an exclusively visual register, and he decorates that curiously noble mien —neatly geometrical, the features appear in a conventional mask of authority—with heroic triplets. He also establishes a close focus on that visage, pushing it forward in a way that exactly matches the aesthetic and political scheme of proximate vision — to Ortega the most visible outline of authority in the spatial hierarchy it designs. Technique is the test of a man's sincerity, and a measure of Pound's infatuation with the tyrant he has foregrounded is his own mastery in the complementary art of visual severance: the cut-and-fit measure of the optical prosody in these concluding lines. It is fair to say that the struggle to attain this visual severity in words — to define the verbal image as intaglio — reaches conclusion in this scene of politi-

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cal mastery. Its social hermeneutic emerges cleanly, as though inevitably, in the final moment of a now five-year-long process (no more cantos will be written for two years). Yet hermeneutic it is. How securely does the idea of political authority reside in the following lines?— also from Canto VII, and likewise shaped by the discontinuous, paratactic cadence: 'Beer-bottle on the statue's pediment! 'That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past, 'Contemporary.' And the passion endures. Against their action, aromas; rooms, against chronicles. Smaragdos, chrysolitos, De Gama wore striped pants in Africa And 'Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops,' (Poems, 88)

If the juxtaposition of radicals in Pound's ideograms often follows the high line of visual supersight, thus supporting the idea of political elitism, it also conforms here to the rhythms detected by LeBon and Sorel, who see a series of disconnected images like these as random sensation—the content and stimulus of the suggestible Crowd mind (striped pants, beer bottles, and phantasmal waves of soldiers are its one company). That Pound's aesthetic of visual privilege flirts with the urgings of populist excitement is an awareness that may help to account —as in Symons's essay on pantomime—for the intensity of contrary assertion at the end of this canto. Yet this evidence indicates once again that artistic sensation holds no absolute political valence—as those two reviews of Epstein in the one issue (16 February 1914) of the Egoist continue to remind us. While Pound's sympathies clearly draw him toward the tyrant valorized in the finale, the instability of Alessandro's charter —the political meanings of sense impressions are variable—provides the ultimate point. To underscore Pound's uncertainties about the main instrument of his authoritarian Gestalt—the "no questions" poetic of the ideogrammic method —is to return that hubris to the questing spirit of its origins; to the self-questioning, empirical, scientific culture of ideologie. For this sensibility allows Pound to record his failure of method in the Cantos with the bleak mastery of his next best poem.

HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY

"Have done Cantos 5, 6, and 7," the poet wrote to his father on 13 December 1919, "each more incomprehensible than the one preceding it; don't know whats to be done about it."64 The same day he confided to John Quinn that his cantos were becoming "too too too abstruse and obscure for human consumption."65 After eight months of intense activity, the project suddenly


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stopped; no further progress on cantos is reported until 1922 (when Pound also revises and renumbers the cantos written through 1919). It was in the early days of this hiatus —in December 1919 and January 1920, as unpublished correspondence reveals66 — that Pound composed the poems of his twopart sequence, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Featuring the disappearance of the two poets, E.P. and Mauberley, its fiction holds a mirror up to Pound's worst fears about his own emergent lifework: the increasing obscurity of the cantos will merit him an oblivion similar to theirs. The link between their demise and his apparent failure in the new cantos accounts as well for the sequence of Poems 1918-21. Here the fiction of artistic collapse in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley immediately precedes its dramatic fact (as Pound perceived it in 1919): the text of Cantos IV-VII. The source of his anxiety lay in the dangers of the poetic invention he first perfected in Canto IV, then extended in V-VII: the juxtaposition of radicals in the ideogrammic method. Risks aside, the nascent strengths of this method seemed so great that, immediately on completing Canto IV, Pound hailed his new measure thus (in the unlikely pages of a travel essay): "Any historical concept and any sociological deduction from history must assemble a great number of such violently contrasted facts, if it is to be valid"; "Snippets of this kind build up our concept of wrong, of right, of history"; "I put down the pellets in this manner," he ends by announcing vatically, "because the burnt-in detail is tied by no more visible cords to the next detail."67 His juxtaposed bits, that is, forge hidden linkages, magical interactions. His modern epic has found its technical elixir. Or so he wished. It is fair to say that the energy of discovery in Canto IV is already running down in V, VI, and VII; that method is becoming mechanism. After all, one quotes from Canto IV to show luminous detail, "Palace in smoky light, / Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary-stones" (Poems, 73), but not, say, from VII: "Le vieux commode en acajou: / beer bottles of various strata. / But is she dead as Tyro? In seven years?" (Poems, 88). Paradoxically, the technique designed to generate the incandescent image has borne the fruit of obscurity, as Pound's December 1919 remarks clearly attest. Laying image against image, ply against ply, Pound's initiative has reverted to its aesthetic and political opposite. Attempting to bring these discrete pieces of information into a Gestalt equally luminous and elusive, at once the language and test of a superior sensibility, he provides merely a disjointed series of images, addressing the wayward, randomly picturereceptive mind of Demos. We may add the observation that this transit from initial success to incipient defeat has proved swift indeed, nearly instantaneous. While the fiction of vanishing poets in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley reflects Pound's current fear of his own fate, the tale also catches the special reversal of his experience: a technical virtu grasped and dropped —a career plummeting from its early meridian. "He passed from men's memory in I'an trentiesme / De son eage" (Poems, 53). The French words intoned over the

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bones of E.P. did not originate as funeral music but, in the opening of Villon's Grand testament, as a clarion assertion of self.68 Heroic boast manque, self-declaration as epitaph, Pound's lines graph an apex attained and lost in an instant of brief excellence. That is the moment of Mauberley. An elliptical but continuous fiction, like The Waste Land, Mauberley tells the tale of an integral difficulty in the work of il miglior fabbro: the ambitions and failure of his ideogrammic method. To read the sequence in this way is to surmount the long-argued critical questions — does Pound identify with the literary activist E.P. or the reclusive aesthete Mauberley; whose "voice" does he assume? 69 —and recover the one story he obliquely relates. In its single fable Pound relives the major phases of his early career (as traced in this chapter) in consecutive personae: in E.P. he develops and sets aside the old poetics of song; in Mauberley he crafts the new, more arduous prosody of his optical measure; and he brings this last initiative to an impasse as abrupt as the one he suffered in December 1919. Each part of the sequence rises to a finale that is also a climacteric — a poem critics usually attribute to the protagonist of that section and regard as the crowning image of the fictional career. E.P.'s achievement is "Envoi"; a gathering of flowers from the legacy of English lyric poetry, it appears here as the end and measure of Pound's own early apprenticeship in the poetry of living song. Mauberley's poetic is consummated in "Medallion"; its hard sculptural prosody shows the aim and imprint of Pound's own ideogrammic method — sharply etched radicals juxtaposed for composite effect. Whether these two pieces stand as triumphs of their respective metiers or as mockeries of their opposite impulses is a question answered by Jo Brantley Berryman, in the most detailed study of the sequence, without being asked. Berryman sees the two poems as equally positive manifestations of their separate aesthetic principles, which she regards as complementary rather than antithetical. Positing a single source for the two poems in the performances of the singer Raymonde Collignon, Berryman argues that Pound's reviews of Collignon's music combine the essential motifs of "Envoi" and "Medallion" — a revival of the lyric tradition and a presentation of the frozen moment in art. For Berryman, Pound's twofold appreciation extends the double enthusiasm of his 1914 essay "The Later Yeats," where he describes two approaches to verse: "firstly, the sort of poetry which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech, and secondly, that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words" (LE, 380). These two muses, Berryman concludes in a way that summarizes a prevalent critical attitude, achieve the separate but equal distinctions of "Envoi" and "Medallion."70 That Pound wrote his essay on Yeats before he began sustained work on the Cantos is a telling fact. His affirmation of musical speech will of course lead him to push the lyric monologue as first compositional principle for the


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long poem, while his testament to a sculptural poetic shows the energy resulting later in a verse line modeled like linguistic plastic—the verbal ideograms of Cantos IV-VII. To transfer the ideals of 1914 unaltered to 1920, however, is to ignore the trial by fire to which Pound has subjected these principles in the interim: lyric speech and sculptural prosody have failed, each in its turn, to guide the cantos to initial success. Can "Envoi" and "Medallion" really be read as triumphant celebrations of ideals Pound articulated a half-decade — and a failed epic—earlier? To do so is to miss that most local, immediate, indeed formative context for Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Pound's abandoned work in progress on the cantos. The logic of poetic autobiography is complex, but the psychology of failure points on one hand toward the disguises of fictional autobiography, on the other to a self-protective method in admitting defeat: the jouissance of self-parody; send-ups for the let-downs of his own double career. "Medallion" engraves its intaglios far too finely, sinking its wreath into verbal granite, while the bouquet of poesies in "Envoi" offers a leaden laurel, an intentionally limp imitation, in which Pound distances himself gently but unmistakably from his own first singing school. The poem preceding "Envoi" brings E.P. through the higher and lower circles of London literary culture, ultimately "To Fleet St." (Poems, 61). Site and symbol of popular letters, the newspaper district of London opposes its commercial values to the cultivation of traditional lyric beauties—the roses of Pieria associated with Sappho and the early tradition of poetic song: Beside this thoroughfare The sale of half-hose has Long since superseded the cultivation Of Pierian roses. (Poems, 61)

The comically syncopated double rhyme of "-hose has" and "roses" shifts an Attic grace into the accelerated grimace of modernity. Clearly Pound's lingua franca does not lend itself to lyric excellence in the old sense. The ambition to compose such verse leads to the sequestered sensibility, to the cloistral postures and gestures, of a lost tradition; to "Envoi." "Go lovely Rose," opens Edmund Waller's lyric, which provides the source of poetic song in "Envoi" and (as set to music by William Lawes) a standard for the modern poet's own singability: Go lovely Rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knowes When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be.71

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Go, dumb-born book, Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes; Hadst thou but song As thou hast subjects known, Then were there cause in thee that should condone Even my faults that heavy upon me lie, And build her glories their longevity. (Poems, 62)

To assert that "the voice of 'Envoi' is rich with the overtones of the English lyric tradition of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Waller," like Hugh Witemeyer, or to claim, like John Espey, that it presents living "echoes of the long line of English poets from Chaucer down,"72 seems wishful. For this response denies both the manifest sense of these lines and the grim brilliance of the prosody here. Pound's book is born dumb; the song once sung is described now, in rhetorical negatives, as a foregone possibility. And Pound realizes this theme—makes it real —as a function of his own inverse mastery of poetic sound. The hard and clear front vowels of Waller are muffled, pushed to the rear of the mouth, swallowed between consonants. Waller accommodates his periodic syntax in integral units of line and sense, thus presenting a series of discrete musical phrases, whereas Pound lets his syntax sag into a distended, prosier, more discursively linear style, and so shifts our register from the ear to the page. That Pound's antique muse has lost her voice is a point reiterated in its last verse paragraph: Tell her that goes With song upon her lips But sings not out the song (Poems, 62)

A mute tune; a mouth shaping music and proclaiming no song: the aural content of "Envoi" is only the visual echo of a lost sound —its words are read (here lip-read), not heard. This poet may complain about the book as the basis of modern information — "Hadst thou but song / As thou hast subjects known" — but this protest belongs to the rhetorical fiction of "Envoi." For Pound's own ideogrammic method is designed, in 1919, as a vehicle for information; to present "facts" and build up "concepts." Print determines the sensibility of the modern poet, and Pound's response to these conditions—the specifically optical prosody of his ideogrammic technique —gains the force of historical necessity. And the inward necessity of personal history. For his technical incentive, advanced by Mauberley in the second part of the sequence, emerges at the end —and as a consequence —of E.P.'s troubled lyric career.


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Consecutiveness is the lesson of the chronology Pound attaches to "Envoi" and the first poem of the Mauberley section: E.P.'s farewell occurs in 1919, Mauberley's debut in 1920. This point has been obscured in later editions of the sequence, when Pound shifts the 1920 date to a parenthesized subtitle, whereas, in Poems 1918-21, it was temporal succession that provided the main theme-"1920 (Mauberley)": Turned from the 'eau-forte Par Jaquemart' To the strait head Of Messalina: 'His true Penelope Was Flaubert,' And his tool The engraver's. Firmness, Not the full smile, His art, but an art In profile; Colourless Pier Francesca, Pisanello lacking the skill To forge Achaia. (Poems, 63)

Pound fractures syntactic continuity here in favor of the agglutinative, cutand-fit measure special to the eye —a sensory preference fully referenced in the several arts of etching, medallions, sculpture, and painting. Yet Mauberley can only "turn from" a position once maintained, indeed held in common with E.P., whose "'sculpture' of rhyme" (Poems, 54) finds its image in an etching by Jaquemart—it provided cover-design for Emaux et Camees, an 1884 volume of verse by Theophile Gautier, whose engraved quatrains stood as model for E.P.'s own. To see the ultrasculptural prosody of Mauberley as the terminus ad quem of E.P.'s technical adventuring, then, is to grasp the full volume of Pound's despair and the whole story of the two-part sequence. "For three years, out of key with his time," Pound boasts of E.P., "He strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry" (Poems, 53). Defying the status quo, E.P.'s literary heroics lead to the technical experiments of Mauberley—a link Pound makes specific in the recondite echo of "Mauberley II": For three years, diabolus in the scale, He drank ambrosia, All passes . . . (Poems, 64)

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"A devil in the scale" —the term in medieval musicology for an augmented fourth, a calculated dissonance — suggests an obvious correspondence between this artist and another "out of key with his time." Yet the phrase encloses a more precise formulation of Mauberley's own conventiondismaying art. Diabolus in musica, a note or interval placed wrongly between two perfect intervals, splits the octave in half; it operates as a tool of separation, disrupting musical continuity and creating the impression of counterposed opposites — thus accounting for the jingle: "Mi contra fa / Diabolus in musica."73 All in all, the figure evokes the prosody of severance, the cut-andfit measure of ideogrammic juxtaposition, that has evolved through the first cantos. "All passes," Pound writes ominously of that experiment in verse. Its failure already lived out, late in 1919, Pound redeems it, if only provisionally, as the ironically mastered finale of his autobiographical sequence. For his self-portrait as the artist Mauberley is self-parody, enacted with grim completeness in "'The Age Demanded.'" Here an aesthetic of glimpses — Mauberley's cultivation of "selected perceptions" (Poems, 67) —lifts his verse out of the range of the audible, leaving him delighted with the imaginary Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge. (Poems, 67)

Recalling the "finer audition" of "imagined sound" Pound cited in Gourmont as basis for his own optical prosody, he now goes on to burlesque its poetic product. The standard of silence underlining its visual rhythms leaves this poet Incapable of the least utterance or composition, Emendation, conservation of the 'better tradition' Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities, August attraction or concentration. (Poems, 67)

The agglutinative, abrupted method of Cantos IV-VII appears here at its most costive, at its worst. A stylistic silencer, the strategy of radical juxtaposition has strangled Mauberley's verse. Corpse, hardly corpus, his poetic achievement is interred in "Medallion" with a sardonic epitaph — his unlithe language woven as though "From metal, or intractable amber" (Poems, 69). Thus Pound conducts the rites of his own downfall, deftly parodying the prosody he had paraded, six months earlier, as the measure ensuring his place in epic tradition. This farce both conceals and reveals his severest fears about the new technique. It will be nearly two years before he returns to the cantos, and seven years before he turns wholeheartedly to recuperate the ideogrammic method. The recovery negotiates the chopped seas of postwar


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Europe, leading him through France to Italy and the emergent culture of modern fascism. The same years witness the appearance of Wyndham Lewis as major artist and thinker —a sensibility responsive to the wide range of continental writing outlined earlier. This is an influence Pound will assimilate as a major component of his own poetic renaissance; Lewis's work of 1'entre deux guerres points up the aesthetic depth and political content of Pound's (chapter 4). Their relationship does not develop in personal exchange, but as a roughly simultaneous movement toward similar positions, which, once recognized by Pound, will be consolidated and enriched. While postwar circumstances obviously account for their attraction to political authority, its aesthetic and sensory bases lie deep in their shared background, in the tradition of the new European ideologie. To turn next, then, to Wyndham Lewis —to the continental sources of his severe English achievement.


CHAPTER 3

Wyndham Lewis: L'Entre Deux Guerres

To purge "the bad effects of English education," Wyndham Lewis set out in 1902, at the age of nineteen, to finish his schooling on continental ground. For six years he followed his instincts along the Franco-German axis we traced in the first chapter. In Munich (1902), he briefly entered a sphere already shaping the debates between the proponents of empathy and abstraction, Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer most prominently.1 He would return to the city for six months in 1906, two years before the publication of Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfuhlung. Yet the richest intellectual environment would prove to be Paris, where he arrived in 1903 and lived for most of the next five years. A singular, fiercely solitary figure, he moved on the distant fringes of Gertrude Stein's circles. He attended the lectures of Henri Bergson at the College de France, including the sequence on comedy. Passing through the meetings of the ultraconservative Action Francaise, where he met Charles Maurras, he became "familiar," his biographer Jeffrey Meyers avers, "with the work of contemporary French thinkers: Georges Sorel, Julien Benda, Charles Peguy, and Remy de Gourmont."2 The names of Benda, Gourmont, and Sorel enter Lewis's vocabulary at a later, more predictable moment: he begins to cite these thinkers in the years after the Great War, when his prose has taken a turn toward a more discursive, speculative character. No detailed documentation of his intellectual interests survives from his first Parisian period. One may reasonably contend that a young artist like Lewis, driven by youthful curiosity and gifted with sensitive antennae, might follow the available leads to the work of Gourmont and Sorel, authors who had defined the values of the visual sense so provocatively. They had produced most of their major writings by 1908. Yet Lewis's recreation of his Paris years in the novel Tarr (1918) shows his counterpart, the English protagonist Frederick Tarr, moving almost exclusively through a 91

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community of expatriates —German, English, Russian, Italian; he makes no significant contact with local French culture, let alone with the signal figures named by Meyers. Of course one need not hinge the claim of Lewis's relationship to the French intellectuals on direct acquaintance. What is certain about his early exposures — Lipps in Germany, Bergson in France —is enough to have focused his mind on one side of the European discourse recounted earlier. Reacting against the idea of musical empathy, he moved intuitively into line with Gourmont and, later, Benda. Already in 1909 and 1910, in his first attempts at short fiction (based on a year of travel through Brittany and Spain in 1908), he expresses an understanding, like Gourmont's, of the susceptibilities of human hearing, and he moves these insights toward antidemocratic conclusions similar to those drawn by Benda a full decade later, in 1918, in Belphegor. By the time Lewis turns to revise this early fiction for collection in The Wild Body (1927), he will have absorbed not only the writing of Gourmont and Benda, but most of the continental literature that provides the full, expository ground for these French authors, whose political aesthetic he will ratify and extend. This wider, seasoned awareness provides the broad focus of the present chapter. Yet Lewis's mature sensibility returns us to its origins to understand its core, its depth. We may compare two versions of one story—written as "Le Pere Francois" in 1909, revised as "Franciscan Adventures" in 1927—to follow the intellectual biography, as it were, of this radical ideologue, who moves his original, empirical observations of human sensations toward an increasingly abstract formulation of political principle. Picaresque farceur, the narrative persona of Lewis's early fiction journeys through the backwaters of Brittany and Spain to find comic incidents that also represent elementary laws of behavior. Here the human creature sounds his credulity and stupidity again and again through that circuit of aural and oral compulsion so severely mapped by Gourmont and —later—by Benda. In "Le Pere Francois," the narrator fiddles thus with his victim's voice: After having been shown his throat, and having vainly attempted to seize between my thumb and forefinger an imaginary vessel that he insisted, with considerable violence, that I should find, our relations nearly came to an abrupt termination on my failing, and having, indeed, pursued song athwart his anatomy to its darkest and most lugubrious sources, I said irrelevantly that his hair was very long. He slowed down abruptly in his speech, but some sentences still followed. Then, after a silence, taking suddenly the most profoundly serious expression, he said, with a conviction of tone that admitted of no argument and paralysed all doubt, "I will tell you! It's too long! My hair is too long!"3

The mystery organ in the depths of this "florid aperture" is the source and site of the feelings of musical vitalism currently being identified and analyzed by continental thinkers. Having had the vitalist innards of his throat tickled

WYNDHAM LEWIS: L'ENTRE DEUX GUERRES

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and stimulated, Francis responds to the speech of the narrator in a way that conforms to Gourmont's own analysis of the effects of such vocal energy. In a rote, determinate reaction, the Franciscan merely repeats the ("irrelevant") phrases imprinted into him. The paces of aural habit through which this vibrant songbird has been put now lead the narrator to ponder the political implication of this sensory debility. "Music was his theme," Lewis writes of this caricature-in-voice; "to look at him," he continues, one would have said that the only emotion he had ever experienced was that provoked by the topical and sentimental songs of his country. He had become a very disreputable embodiment of them. His was the face of a man who had wedded, and been mastered by, the vague and neurasthenic heroine of the popular lyrical fancy; from constant intercourse with this shade he had grown as nearly as he could make himself her ideal. . . . [H]e turned in my direction, stretching out the hand with the umbrellas, and began singing a patriotic song in a lusty voice. (WB, 277)

Lewis's political consideration does not emerge in the vocabulary of sociological treatise. He is thinking in terms of the mechanical comedy to which Francis's mouthy elan typically runs — in the language of physiology that is special to the new ideologie. Francis's fanciful marriage with the heroine of the song, following his "constant intercourse with this shade," consummates the laws of physical sympathy fundamental to acoustic experience. Presenting that response as the femme fatale's "popular" draw, moreover, Lewis shows such empathy through sound as the populist way of feeling. Music binds the members of Demos into an acoustic amalgam and generates collective feeling, like the national hymns heard by Benda, as a function of its own sensory effect. Thus the songster Francis, exuding the same "lusty" mood that compels his imaginative marriage with the ballad bride, rides his "patriotic song" into elementary union with his conationals. Reversing this current of empathic projection but preserving its social meaning, he elsewhere invites the same populist aggregate to abide at his acoustic quick: he has "become a giant. . . . [N]ow that he is isolated everything has come to inhabit him, and he feels constantly in his spirit the throbbing of multitudes" (WB, 280). The modern political phenomenon of demotic gigantism thus whirls around his empty center. The vacant interior space of the individual craves such bogus relationships and expansions as musical empathy makes all too easy and available. "Le Pere Francois" forms a nearly complete basis for the political pronouncements Lewis writes into the 1927 revision. His initial observations about the mechanism of sensory life simply shift now into a more overtly discursive rhythm and diction, moving his early notions into a more abstract, taxonomic vocabulary: "What emotions had this automaton experienced be-

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fore he accepted outcast life? In the rounded personality, known as Father Francis, the answer was neatly engraved. The emotions provoked by the bad, late, topical sentimental songs of Republican France" (WB, 121). Lewis's own emphases on Republican doxology throw the sentence into high allusive relief, reaching into the background sound for words like "fraternite" and "egalite." Here he links the egalitarian and collectivist values of early Republican France to the group feelings induced by music, a sensory experience already dramatized by Francis in the 1909 manuscript and aligned now with its particular Cause and State. He repeats this point of political definition in the new image of Francis "standing in the middle of the road, the moonlight converting him into a sickly figure of early republican romance " where "he sang to me as I walked away" (WB, 129; emphases added). Here Lewis adds only the "republican" label to the romance topos of 1909. Where Francis's original wedding with the "popular" bride of lyric fancy consummated the union of musical empathy and conformed to that newly discovered law of demotic solidarity, the same mode of feeling finds its theme song, its political motto and specific creed, in the mass equality of postrevolutionary France. This was of course the political and intellectual culture in which ideologie discovered its first uses, and its ethic and method are followed in the trajectory Lewis describes between 1909 and 1927: the sensory evidence adduced in the first story leads to the abstract idea named in the second. (The peculiar temper that earned Lewis his sobriquet as the Enemy is also manifest in this exercise: his is a reactionary ideology, like Benda's —an empirical analysis designed to expose the bogus character of a political concept based on human infirmity.) Lewis undertook his 1927 rewriting at a considerable distance from the original story. He had passed through the eye of the Great London Vortex into the surge of the Great War; returned to London and secluded himself in the British Library; researched the philosophical and literary material for his prodigious output of speculative and creative work in the twenties and thirties. To assign his revisions to the circumstances of this later phase, however, is to poke the fire from the top: the developmental continuity should not be missed. It is equally important not to minimize the impact of the Great War. The popular sanction required for mass conflict — one fought, putatively, to make the world safe for democracy —reinforced Lewis's antipopulism, and the second of the two issues of Blast (July 1915, War Number) bristles with the resentment4 no less rebarbatively than his 1927 revision. This historical experience also served to strengthen Lewis's aversion to the acoustic empathy he had already identified as the basis of demotic fellow feeling. In Blast 2, the sound of "the Crowd cheering everywhere" is like the "perpetual voice of a shell. If you put W before it, it always makes War!"5 The impact of war on Lewis's developing ideology of the eye is more abrupt and disturbing. In his 1913 Composition, as already seen, the triumphant struggle for a purely perceptual dominance becomes politically radical-


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ized, by 1915, in The Crowd. Here the artist shifts his vocabulary of optical dominance into an exact version of the medieval scheme of proximate vision, where the eye's own ability to foreground and isolate the object of attention in high focus is complemented by a similar institution of social authority. These observations point up the political meaning of a similar process, visible in a comparison of designs in Blast 1 (June 1914) and Blast 2 (July 1915). The titles of the two prewar pieces, Plan of War and Slow Attack (figures 6 and 7) suggest that the charge of Mars can be bridled — planned or slowed-by the acts of visual severance that segment and organize their dynamic lines. Here the eye exerts the sort of physical superiority we found as the challenge and victory of Composition. For the black-and-white chock-

FIGURE 6. Wyndham Lewis, Plan of War (1913-14). Oil on canvas (as reproduced in Blast 1). Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

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FIGURE 7. Wyndham Lewis, Slow Attack (1913-14). Oil on canvas (as reproduced in Blast 1). Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

ablock avoids the chromatic progression in the Futurists' dynamic sweeps; its optical disruptions seem to direct the currents of aggression onto the restraining grid of its own designs. Yet Lewis has woven most of these juxtaposed shapes so closely together that they seem to build rather than retard the momentum. Masses of compacted energy, they inscribe lines of staggered force; graphs of exertions more tremendous, finally, than the resistance being applied. Though undeclared, this alliance between dynamist content and visual form will appear unholy once signed into history on 3 August: once national elans batter each other into the quasi-aesthetic shape of the Western Front, that framed space of death. (Like Gertrude Stein, Lewis must also see the design of the European trench system as a gruesome parody of artistic-


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cubist or Vorticist-form. 6 ) Accordingly, an equally abstract representation of 1915 decidedly reorients the eye's earlier compact with vitalist forces. Design for "Red Duet" (figure 8) loosens the close juxtapositions of black and white in the 1913-14 work, unraveling those graphs of densely compacted energy. Ampler, more frequent, his white spaces now fit like multiple margins of silence, voids against which the vectors of energy arrest or deflect themselves. Similarly, Lewis enhances the control exerted by the rectilinear frame as he repeats that containing shape several times within the design. Thus he already turns optical severance in a Bendan direction, into a pictorial language of severe mastery.

FIGURE 8. Wyndham Lewis, Design for "Red Duet." Drawing (as reproduced in Blast 2). Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. A painting titled Red Duet is dated 1914 and is similar in design to Plan of War and Slow Attack.

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In this way Lewis develops his ideology of ear and eye from 1908 to 1915, thence to 1927. This sensibility provides the structuring, unifying force for his magnum opus of the postwar years. The six volumes he published between 1926 and 19307-two novels (The Childermass, 1928; The Apes of God, 1930) and four discursive tracts (The Art of Being Ruled, 1926; The Lion and the Fox, 1927; Time and Western Man, 1927; Paleface, The Philosophy of the Melting Pot, 1929)— were all conceived and written originally as a single oeuvre, The Man of the World. This witnesses his attempt at the kind of major syntheses promised by the new ideologie. Adducing truths of human physiology as a basis for political concepts in the discursive books, Lewis extends these principles into the alternate world of the fiction —that sphere of virtual (aesthetic) sensations — to seek proof for his elementary axioms about physiology. In the first part of this chapter I will formulate Lewis's ideology of the senses and proceed to read the novels as test —but not testimony—of its success. For this painterly sensibility failed to generate a valid verbal art —an awareness Lewis himself disclosed, but initially only in the provisional framework of the fiction. Benda condemned his early tendency to prescribe social solutions in aesthetic terms in La Trahison des clercs (1928), but Lewis will react to his own failure to consummate his artistic ideology in the fiction by extending it directly into history. Having failed (by 1930) to impose a pictorial ideal on the lexical experience, he turns to the Third Reich, and in Hitler (1931) he sees the Fuhrer as hero in his own artistic scheme of proximate vision. This will be the second of his disappointments, and the rise and fall of that optical illusion will be traced in the second part of this chapter. How he assimilates this defeat into the fiction written through the mid- and late thirties provides the subject of the third part. Yes, Lewis shares the sensory preferences of Benda, as his frequent references to "the excellent Belphegor"8 attest. Yet the English writer's ambition will appear, in the end, equally more hubristic and self-limiting. At once over-reaching and self-chastening (Benda never confesses his own earlier treason), Lewis returns upon himself, generating a thought and art out of his intellectual and aesthetic failures. There are two Lewises, then, in the years of 1'entre deux guerres. If they contend with one another, they will also vie for the attention of his old friend, Ezra Pound, who discovers Lewis anew, we shall see, in the late twenties, and builds his understanding of their affinity through the thirties. That Pound responds to the Enemy mask of defiant hubris rather than the Lewis of individual reticence (who has slipped critical attention as well) is a choice freighted with a significance similar to that which frets his decision, made on the pages of the Egoist of 16 February 1914, to read Epstein's sculpture as a writ of elite authority and not a rite of populist collectivism. Not that Lewis presents the viewer of 1930 with two neatly defined options on the State of his art. His admission of aesthetic failure (and his abrogation of the artist's political project) is made obliquely, at first deflected into a


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self-parody that seems at times to triumph in the very political aesthetic he enjoys sending up. It is a performance curiously similar to Pound's in Mauberley (the resemblance will make the poet's inattention to the second of the two Lewises all the more telling): an ironic undermining of his aesthetic ideals, which have failed to attain literary success; which have driven him toward social conclusions equally high-minded and terrifying, and ultimately impossible to sustain. Lewis's process of defining his artistic values, exaggerating their political prepotency, and admitting his fallacy is one that I will follow here without continual reference to Pound's own evolving views (their local contacts and specific similarities will be noted). His later influence on Pound represents a hermeneutic choice on the poet's part, a selection of one ally from the two available Enemies. The import of his decision may be best assessed (in chapter 4) by allowing Lewis's career to generate the full complexity of its double identity—a monument of twisted brilliance; a turning back on his own deluded, fiercely intelligent hubris, which averts its ultimate tragedy by recognizing its mistake: a misguided but compelling extension of the current tradition of European ideologie.

UNTUNING THE WORD

In Time and Western Man, Lewis writes: It is in a thick, monotonous prose-song that Miss Stein characteristically expresses her fatigue, her energy, and the bitter fatalism of her nature. . . . [I]t is the tongue—only the poor, worried, hard-worked tongue—inside the reader's head, or his laryngeal apparatus, that responds to the prose-song of Miss Stein. (61)

The points of attack in Lewis's essay repeat the themes of Benda's aural physiology. Physical union with the acoustic stimulus is cartooned in this reader's sensual echoing of Stein's text. Merging with the material body of language, one mouths its sounds with a mindlessness equal to its originator's. The involuntary nature of acoustic sympathy and the listener's reflex imitations also recall the major point of Gourmont's analysis. Such rote repetition is the only response available to a listener who has followed the susceptibilities of the ear and entered into physical union with the sound 9 —with the "soggy lengths of primitive mass life" that Lewis finds in her fluent chant. To his ear, Stein recites to consumers attuned to the merely aural provocations of mass, vulgar culture: her sausage-links prose song is "undoubtedly intended as an epic contribution to the present mass-democracy" (TWM, 62). She appears in his democratic Dunciad as fellow traveler with Ernest Hemingway (and Aldous Huxley10); they have supplanted the well-born artifice of written prose for the bastard artistry of a plebian vocalese. This

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fictional language "is not written" at all; "it is lifted out of Nature and very artfully and adroitly tumbled out upon the page: it is the brute material of every-day proletarian speech and feeling" (MWA, 35). The differences between oral and written models of language provide Lewis with a framework for a broadly based analysis of modern culture. While voice infects the printed literature of a democratic state, an aristocratic society tends to reverse this tendency: to influence and improve the material of speech by imposing a page-based standard of usage upon it. The leverage required for this effect depends on circumstances, he concedes, that have passed into history: on a restriction of the literate public to an upper class capable of supporting good writing. Predictably, Lewis's comments on the topic revert to cultural elegy, expressing a nostalgic wish for "the artless high spirits so important in a patron" willing "to pay a person to speak as Shakespeare did, or Dryden or [incongruously] Nash." At other times, he directs such reverie into a focused, detailed apologia for those foregone conditions: While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste, its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. . . . [T]here is no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British "Banker's Olympus," to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech. Americanization — which is also for England, at least, proletarianization—is far too advanced to require underlining.

Arguing that precision of verbal meaning escalates in relation to the level of literacy, Lewis is extending a long tradition of linguistic analysis. Unlike Jacques Derrida, who regards the printed word as locus and invitation for uncontrolled semantic play, an older convention of linguistic commentary, aptly surveyed by Walter Ong, sees selectivity and exactness of reference as priorities in a book-based experience of language: the separation of words into razor-sharp units on the page fosters the need for a correspondingly integral, single significance. (Hugh Kenner has speculated cogently on the relation between writing and the very conception of the word as an atomic unit of meaning.)11 Yet a legacy no less relevant to Lewis's thought appears in the recent commentary of Benda and Gourmont, ideologues who have invested visual severance with a political value identical to the one Lewis invokes here: while the democratic ear merges, the aristocratic eye divides, achieving the separations on which clear conceptual understanding relies and, in their hermeneutic, proving the natural truth of a political elite. While optical separation stands as the emblem of an aristocratic class for the French critics, Lewis gives this political aesthetic a fresh impress on the page —in the lexical experience itself. Conversely, the separation between word and referential sense appears


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widest to Lewis in sounds made by and for the Crowd, in the discourse of populist politics. Here the physical thrill of the word may not only substitute for the reality of the referent; it allows the auditor to wish into existence unreal or untenable social concepts. Calling this susceptibility the als ob— "as if"—principle of democratic culture, he asks "If, again, we cannot all be 'free' in the Roman sense, or be 'persons' as were all Roman Citizens, then should we use their words?" and answers, describing the delusion of that democratic password in terms of its acoustic charge: "The word 'free' is merely, as it were, a magical counter with which to enslave us, it is full of an electrical property that has been most maleficent where the European or American is concerned. . . . It is the 'democratic' conceit that is at fault, is it not?" 12 How these electric vocables stimulate the political fiction of democracy—universal freedom and equal citizenship are the specific associations — is a question that Gustave LeBon answers at greater length, in a passage that stands as a probable source for Lewis's own: Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty etc., whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not fit it precisely. . . . [A] truly magical power is attached to those short syllables. . . . They are uttered with solemnity in the presence of crowds, and . . . all heads are bowed. . . . [The] very vagueness that wraps them in obscurity augments their mysterious power. . . . Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.13

Responding to the same electric signals Lewis hears in these words, the members of LeBon's crowd nod in blind unison to the vocal tokens proclaiming their collective equality. This feeling of empathy with the sound and with other auditors, both writers suggest, provides the true basis of democratic fellow feeling. Lewis's objections to the acoustic delusion in language belong to the analytical, diagnostic, descriptive rhythm of his ideologie. They form the basis for his prophetic, curative, prescriptive measures. Here he uses the deficiencies of musical democracy to argue for the stark political alternative of fascism: And yet for anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would probably be best. . . . In short to get some peace to enable us to work, we should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised. . . . Complete political standardization, with the suppression of the last vestiges of the party system, will rescue masses of energy otherwise wasted in politics for more productive ends. All the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufactured, will henceforth be spared this happy people. There will not be an extremely efficient ruling caste, pretending to possess a "liberal" section, or soft place in its heart for the struggling people, on

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the traditional english model, but the opposite to that. There will be instead an organization that proclaims its intention to rule without interminable palaver, without a "talking house" to humbug its servants in, sweating them but enabling them to call themselves "free". . . . (ABR, 320-22)

As words go over into music in demotic culture, and thus lose meaning, the judgmental, idiomatic sense of "humbug" picks up its original, mimetic idea: nonsense sound. Along the same lines, "palaver" returns its acquired association of vocal drivel to its cognate etymology— para-bolar, "to throw to the side" — in order to depict the essential deflection of meaning in words voiced aloud, in a democratic "talking house" (parliament). Here the acoustic charge of language short-circuits its significance and substitutes its sensory thrill — the melding effect conatural to the experience of sound — for the conceptual validity of collectivist, egalitarian passwords. Such manipulation of audience and electorate belies the high ideal of suffrage and conscious choice and thus, in Lewis's view, describes the supreme delusion of democracy. This system operates with a different but no less coercive authority than fascism itself. Thus the newest, most startling inference of Lewis's argument is the idea that fascism differs from current democratic method mainly or only on the matter of linguistic directness. Fascists at least say what they do, and that, Lewis claims, is the least we can hope for: "All I wish to emphasize [in fascism] is a new factor, a political openness and directness, the initiative in which democracy cannot claim" (ABR, 75). What decides Lewis's preference for fascism over democracy is not the putative difference between the values of oppression and liberality; it is an aesthetic standard defined primarily in visual terms —for him the clarity and directness available (mainly) to the eye. His choice represents a distinction between better and worse states of perception, not between States founded on creeds either admired or disapproved. It is made by the radical ideologue, not the conventional modern ideologue. It is in terms of this latter-day identity that Lewis is seen — often astutely— by Fredric Jameson. As a Marxist, however, Jameson reduces Lewis's political options to the binary dialectical model: the specter of communism has generated the single, predictable antithesis of fascism, which the Enemy must seize as the only available alternative.14 Yet Lewis's resistance to such conventional partisan divisions locates the essence of his political identity. Authority is his one value, and if it is properly (optically) established, it matters not one whit to him which partisan stripe it wears. In the passage above, in fact, he is describing the ideal regimen of a fascist or socialist state: "All marxian doctrine, all etatisme or collectivism, conforms very nearly in practice to the fascist ideal" of a "rigidly centralised" hierarchy, "working from top to bottom with the regularity and smoothness of a machine" (ABR, 321-22). And


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so Lewis taunts ideological faithfuls —in the early thirties —by placing his authoritarian squarely in the no-party's-land of ideologie: "politically I take my stand midway between the Bolshevist and the Fascist—the gentleman on the left I shake with my left hand, the gentleman on the right with my right hand. If there were only one (as I wish there were) I'd shake him with both hands."15 This indifference to party allegiance helps to explain Lewis's lack of overt commitment to British fascism. In this home-grown species he could see close-up the actual machinations of party politics, even those of the authority he heroicized: its leader relied on a mass-based legitimacy, on demagogic oratory (a recognition he will need a full decade to make in Germany, whose distance from England affords him the vantage on which his ideals rely).16 Here is one soft point in the satirist's armored shell, the extraordinary naivete of the Man of the World: an aesthetic conception of politics that subjects all parties to the same artistic criticism and that blinds him to the real difference between partisan values. What joins dictatorial fascism to the right kind of socialism is, for Lewis, a specifically verbal directness: its Word shows what it means. This is his own literary hubris, one that he is asserting on the pages of his contemporary fiction. Overreaching the nonpainterly medium of language, he attempts to substitute (his) optical rules for normal lexical laws. The frustrations attending this project variously challenge and reinforce his desire to find his artistic ideal fulfilled in the political realm. To explore his troubles in the twenties with the theory and practice of visual linguistics is to locate a tension generating his more overt application of aesthetics to politics in the early thirties. Visual Lingo While Lewis sometimes admits the conflict between visual directness and verbal representation, he defies these differences just as often. In "Credentials of the Painter" (1922), to begin, he restricts vivid immediacy to the pictorial image alone, setting it categorically at odds with the elusive music of the verbal counter: The fundamental claim of the painter or sculptor, his fundamental and trump credential, is evidently this: that he alone gives you the visual fact of our existence. . . . His art is in a sense the directest and is certainly the most "intellectual," when it is an art at all. The word-picture of the writer is a hybrid of the ear and eye. He appeals to both senses. In his imagery he leaves you the emotional latitude almost of the musician. He says "the dog bayed," and as you read it a ghost of a deep sound causes a faint vibration in your throat (you "bay"), and a vague hound appears with bloodshot eyes and distended neck in the murk of your consciousness. The painter paints you a dog baying; it is a new and direct experience. (WLA,218)

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Lewis's faith in the directness of pictorial presentation leads him to claim that a specifically acoustic effect may attain greater accuracy in paint than in language, even when the word is sounded out to mimic the aural referent. The exaggerations he makes in favoring the painter over the writer only add to the demands on language when, at other moments, he proposes a union between his pictorial vision and his literary efforts: I am an artist, and through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. "The architectural simplicity"—whether of a platonic idea or a greek temple —I far prefer to no idea at all, or, no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE —even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome — that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. (ABR, 338)

Here Lewis joins the French faculty of severance to the eye of his English prose: optical separation ("hard exact outline") combines intellectual definition ("conceptual quality") with the unfettered directness ("simplicity") of the integral verbal image. Claiming a directly presentational intelligence in language, this 1926 tract counters the cautionary words of 1922 and as such outlines the ambitious trajectory of this painterly writer. Yet the force of the earlier passage enters as fool to Lewis's Lear, subverting the visual hubris in ways equally subtle and conspicuous. The "tropical" zones and structures he seeks to elude provide a verbal reminder—the word shares its etymon with trope, "turning (away)"— of the essentially metaphorical, secondary character of linguistic figures. Despite the overt protest, Lewis's formulations reveal their deeper allegiance to Dora Marsden and the nominalist arguments of the New Freewoman and the Egoist (which had serialized Tarr). The "structures" of discourse are all too "tropical" and "complicated," and the strain required to align the deflections of language with the arrow-straight compass of Lewis's idealized eye is evident in the special pleading he reverts to here. The strain is already evident in 1922, in his "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art," where he takes Schopenhauer's dictates on visual severance as an absolute rule of all art: "[Art] therefore pauses at this particular thing, the course of time stops: the relations vanish for it: only the essential, the idea, is its object." That might be a splendid description of what the great work of plastic art achieves. It "pauses at this particular thing," whether that thing be an olive-tree that Van Gogh saw; a burgher of Rembrandt or Miss Stein. "The course of Time stops." A sort of immortality descends upon these objects. . . . Those words are, however, part of a passage in The World as Will and Idea. . . .


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"[A]rt . . . is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world's course, and has it isolated before it." We might contrast this with a Bergsonian impressionism, which would urge you to leave the object in its vital milieu. . . . The impressionist doctrine, with its interpenetrations, its tragic literalness, its wavy contours, its fashionable fuss, points always to one end: the state in which life itself supercedes art. . . . (WLA, 208-9)

While Schopenhauer restates the now familiar connection between visual separation ("it plucks the object of its contemplation out of ... the world's course") and conceptual definition ("only the essential, the idea, is its object"), Lewis goes on to discredit any mode of intellectual, aesthetic, or sensory perception other than this exclusively visual one. Isolation of the individual verbal figure from the lexical continuum must deprive it of the contextual, relational basis of modern linguistic understanding. The necessary play between figure and ground emerges here, in Lewis's judgment, as an operation of vitalist empathy and interpenetration at its Bergsonian worst. To this protodemocratic milieu Lewis responds, in 1922, with the nascent force of his own developing vision of aesthetics and politics. The separation of figure from ground in the scheme of proximate vision achieves a spatial hierarchy, and this imaginative paradigm of authoritarian politics seeks a local habitation in the art of names as well as in pictorial images—though the strenuousness of its verbal realization will be apparent throughout Lewis's efforts. His attempt to elevate literature to that highly specialized method and standard of painting produces a body of fiction remarkable for the very ambitious terms on which it struggles and, in the end, makes an art of its own failure. Lingual Visages The emblem and instrument of Lewis's struggle as a pictorial stylist is the jagged, highly idiosyncratic character of his prose syntax. Working against the cursiveness of conventional English grammar (meaning is built on word order, not inflection), he seeks to replace its principle of continuity, which relates one word to the next in linear sequence, with a model of correspondence, where the individual word, separated from the normal syntactic flow, may recover an equally integral referent. Consider the contortions required to delineate the images for this cameo in Apes of God—a representative example from that largely plotless gallery of satirical portraits of Bloomsbury: The impressive displacement (on the pattern of the heavy uprising from the pondfoam of the skull of a seal, with Old-Bill moustache, leaden with water, as exhibited at the Zoo) released the pinch of neck-flesh which had been wedged between

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the stud and shirt-band. . . . Head lazily rolled to one side he considered it —with staring swimming eyes and moist pink muzzle, pulpily extended — plum locked in plum. (AG, 59)

Disrupting the drift of the long sentence, Lewis checks the linear movement of subject-verb with a lengthy parenthesis. Thrusting against the momentum that undermines the visual specificity of single words, he fills the breach with a series of closely focused, separate images. The second long sentence proceeds from noun clause to main clause when, like the first, it frustrates its expected progression, refusing to produce the sort of flourish that normally attends the completion of the periodic structure: the movement from minor to major. Unmusical to a fault, the fragmentation of these noun phrases is assisted by the dashes. Syntax and punctuation conspire to produce a pagebased illusion of resemblance between discrete verbal units and the images of individual things. It is an art of more than usual illusion: the very vividness of its images relies on the exaggeration of extreme metaphors. Such similes play a crucial role in Lewis's practical poetics — as in the likenesses aped by the cat in the opening of his 1930 novel: "A cat like a beadle goose-stepped with eerie convulsions out of the night cast by a cluster of statuary, from the recesses of the entrance hall. A maid with matchless decorum left a door silently, she removed a massive copper candlestick. She reintegrated the gloom that the cat had left" (AG, 7). "Nothing is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision," Robbe-Grillet remarks:17 "A cat like a beadle goose-stepped" — a virtual bestiary of fabulous comparisons. The very quest for vivid particularity in verbal reference has led Lewis to fetch his metaphors from so far away; the less striking the likeness, after all, the dimmer the image in print. Stuck to phantoms, unstuck from things, words seem "matchless" indeed—in the several senses of that aptly charged adjective, including "incomparable," in a passage that relies on such extravagant comparisons to denote other quiddities. Such figurative, nonessential words are doomed to the duplicity of meanings that this one centers so ostensibly: a matchless candle-bearer, who is beyond compare, or is without lighting devices. Thus "matchless" integrates the true gloom of Lewis's passage—the darkness cast over the phenomenal world by the shape-changing shadows of words like that. Like Pound's ideogrammic method, Lewis's art of extreme metaphor concedes the referential doubleness of English words, but only in an attempt to surmount it—to enforce the one meaning he projects through his aggressively visual tropes. An art of excess, it runs the risk of committing opposite mistakes. Stretching the credibility of the metaphors too far, he may also compensate by relaxing into the readily acceptable, conventional figure. In either case, the Enemy will have gone over to the side of his linguistic foe. Pushing the vividly imagined terms of his similes to an untenable distance from their originals, he releases a flow of sensuous particulars as gratuitous and unat-


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tached as the self-propelled current of the Stein-stutter: a blind, mindlessly winding alley of purely verbal sensationalism. Understandably, he may resort to the established trope, and these dim but easily credible figures not only fail his own experiments; they confirm the adequacy of the same conventional usage his literary project exists to discredit. Going too far and not far enough and, on both counts, consorting with his enemies, Lewis's selfbetrayal is evident in the technical practices as well as the fictions of these two novels. The danger of figurative excess escalates when the technique of extreme metaphor repeats in series. The simile of extravagant visual abuse is the basic gesture of Enemy satire, and when Lewis widens its scope, filling out the satirical scene with multiple figures, the quick, sharp, glancing blows of those individual tropes seem to miss their targets. The verbal images often seem to spring less from their victims than from each other — one fantastical figure pulling the next in its wake. Consider the difference between the vividness of a single image and the smear of a serial crowd: Stationary butterflies, his eyes fluttered bashfully as the three visitors came into the hall. (AG, 310) Dense centripetal knots or vortices of people collect marginally, beneath the wall or beyond the path, but a march is kept up where the ground is even by an active inquisitive crowd of promenaders passing each other back and forth like the chain of a funicular. The vortices forming beneath the wall are watched from above in the manner of the Eton wall-game by disputatious idlers who interrupt from their vantages with peremptory vetoes, or launch red-herrings into the centre of the scent.18

When Etonian debates are staged as popular entertainment, "red-herrings" may well be thrown, not only (in the idiomatic sense) as rhetorical distractions, but as stinking fish from the stands. Preposterous metaphor, "red herrings" links its literal and figurative terms, achieving the same kind of tensioned correspondence that Lewis's other, equally radical comparisons need to succeed. And while this usage embodies just the sort of verbal brio that Northrop Frye regards as the driving spirit of satire,19 it serves only to highlight the excess of excess, when the vehicle of a metaphor drives away from its tenor into the intense inane. Not only does the overheated verbal imagination blur the visibility of the prospect here; its symptoms are streaked across the grammar as well. The flurry of alternative conjunctions —"Dense centripetal knots or vortices," "beneath the wall or beyond the path," "who interrupt . . . or launch"—reads as the sign of a focus refusing to settle, of an author being carried along by the autonomous force of language itself. Less interesting as referential image than word, "funicular" (rope, cord) shows that whirligig of linguistic energy sweeping the writer into its own eyeless vortex. While the desire to wring visual immediacy from verbal ab-

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straction compels the technique of extreme metaphor, its elaboration manufactures an opacity greater than that which it seeks to overcome. Lewis compensates with a complementary mistake: a usage excessively safe. In this excerpt from The Childermass (a massacre of the Utopian myth of childhood), the radical thinginess of the unusual trope has been supplanted by a language of generic blandness: "Satters lisps, throwing a baby ravishment into his gaze. . . . Satters stickily lisps. 'You're a perfect darling Pulley!' in a florid whisper, on a hot and baby-scented breath. . . . Satters revives to pour out, in rich whining sibillation, leaning heavily on Pullman's arm . . ." (Ch, 46-47). As an adjective, "baby" loses the solidity of the nominative for the vagueness of a general condition. Similarly, stickiness and floridity describe states of feeling, and show no concrete specifics of sensation (thus the need to repeat, for emphasis, "hot"). To turn the adjectival "whining" into a creature is a dog of a task —but its product would at least be visible. Little better his ornithology at the start of this passage from Apes: "Lord Osmund is above six foot and is columbiform. His breast development allies him also to that species of birds whose males are said to share the task of sitting feeding the young with their mates. The poulter-inflation seems also to give him a certain lightness —which suspends him like a balloon, while he sweeps majestically forward. His carefully-contained obesity may be the reason for his martial erectness" (AG, 350). "Columbiform" and "poulter"like offer "species" as the terms of imaginative comparison here. A language of taxonomic, Latinate generality has replaced the observed particular as the substance of Lewis's verbal art, and thus allowed the writing to lapse into a semidiscursive fluency — a manner utterly at odds with the sharp, darting, imagistic jabs of the literary satyr. What rescues this passage is that patch of unexpected visibility near the end: the image of the balloon swept majestically forward is unlikely (in the context of animal comparisons), sudden; like other shocking tropes, it relies for its visibility on an unpredictable rip in the discursive fabric —it comes just after the gratuitously inserted " —" (Lewis's visual imagination tends to penetrate language between dashes). And yet this anomalous, hypersyntactic metaphor depends on the abstract and normalizing language that precedes it, for that commentary provides a class category as frame for the unusual detail and, rhetorically, a kind of logical ballast to drag its airy extravagance to ground. As in farce, the humor turns on the sense of an impossibility becoming strangely reasonable, normal, indeed inevitable. This compromise between the eccentric detail and the normative voice is struck again and again in both novels, but to make it Lewis is going against his own strength as pictorial stylist. Since the painter betrays his first principle of visual directness in his transactions with language, it is easy to see how Lewis's Enemy persona reflects an internal division. That mask portrays the artist's own split aesthetic identity. Verbal evocation and pictorial immediacy make their rival claims on this writer, but he has projected the personal conflict outward into a fixed, typi-


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cal, political opposition: the musical indirection of democratic culture, the optical clarity of the fascist ideal. This separation, polemically maintained, suggests a need to hold apart forces that are, in fact, more complicitous — at least in Lewis's own literary practice. These opposites stand together in the locus of origins: in the fiction, most clearly in its dramatic personae, where characters of verbal (and vocal) obliquity merge into those typifying the directness intended by the painter. These personages focus a wide-ranging system of contradictions, which reveal the compromised nature of the linguistic medium in which they appear. Such contradictions make up the figure and title of "The Split-Man" in Apes of God, Julius Ratner, who subsumes the vocal-musical character of James Joyce within the visual-presentational values of Lewis himself. Shaping Ratner's face to the austere outlines of Egyptian bas-relief—"The Arabs call him Split-Man"—Lewis shows him in angular profile; his highly defined features convey the impression (under the guise of the artistic convention that it is) of crisp, integral image, direct presentation. Yet this sternly abstract visage merely rests as facade over the vitalist innards of Ratner's Joycean voice. When Zagreus observes, '"Exteriorly I always think of you in profile —like a bas-relief, you know. You always seem to me to be looking at me sideways—like a bird,'" he responds: '"Really! You read a great deal into me Horace that is not there I fear —I never knew I was so interesting,' Ratner croaked —his assumed worldliness breaking and cracking, the primitive gutturals ['a bitter velvety bass'] getting the upper hand" (AG, 331). Jimmy Julius is speaking here to Horace Zagreus, whose two names include an opposition similar to his respondent's. The Roman stylist's terse epigrams provide the written equivalent of the succinct, well-defined outline of the Ratner profile; yet the fertility god Dionysus stirs in his second, Greek name. This antithetical title is an ample thematic resource, generating the extraordinary, indeed visionary, complexity of these sentences, where the first and last names collide as a multiple, ramifying paradox: "The entire Split-person, with a wolfish rush, came together, the dead half and the quick —it shook itself, it burst into action. The repressed instinct to strike, in the snake-like suspense of the faculties, in the rattish winter of his discontent beneath the horatian city, armed Ratner's tongue" (AG, 412). Just as musical elan undermines the nonvital geometry of Ratner's Egyptian profile, the Dionysian quick of his tongue violates the composure of a classical Horatian civitas. This city is the social extension of the visual values configured in the well defined bas-relief: optical discrimination creates an artistic-political elite, who preside over a city founded on the values of pictorial definition. As such, however, it is resented by a musical underclass —aggrieved, yes, but animated by an acoustic vitality like Ratner's, roiling "in the rattish winter of [their] discontent beneath the horatian city." While the apocalyptic division between these two camps appears familiar from Lewis's discursive opinions on political aesthetics, their inclusion in a

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single position—the single figure of Ratner—is not. The rigidity of their opposition in the polemical writing signals an attempt on Lewis's part to standardize and hold apart forces that run more compulsively ("wolfishly") together in his literary practice, where he is more likely to concede the point: the pictorial directness he seeks in language is deflected into the acoustic density of words. The bitterness of this admission understandably casts the confession on an oblique angle (the focus of contradiction is James Joyce), but the grimness of his conviction lends the imaginative intricacy of these two passages a studied consistency. Horace Zagreus takes his place in a chain of fictional personages, a sequence of characters who outline the essential direction and difficulty of Lewis's literary mission: the transmission of visual ideals into language. He is the emissary of Pierpoint. Never glimpsed in the novel, this potent but enigmatic figure is most clearly identified with the absent author: Pierpoint recalls, not only Percy Wyndham Lewis, but the name he nicked into his early letters —"Pierce-eye"—as ominous token of his later, aggressively pointed optical philosophy. A "painter turned philosopher" (AG, 129), like Lewis in the twenties, Pierpoint writes an encyclical, which Zagreus bears into the fictional milieu like a sacred scroll, in the ark of Lewis's new aesthetic Covenant: the extract summarizes the major points from the Man of the World's script. Extending the mystical wisdom of that encyclical into literary—and social — practice, however, entails a difficulty equal to the intricate network of its delivery. It moves from Lewis to Pierpoint, from Pierpoint to Horace Zagreus (already compromised by the rival claims of his double name), and thus to Zagreus's literary protege, Dan Boleyn. Following in the fateful footsteps of Ann Boleyn, Dan is a tool in the dynastic ambitions of Pierpoint's aesthetics. His failure to give birth to the desired product—to pierce the fabric of language with an original visual intensity —will lead him to be discarded as easily as his namesake. There is many a slip between Pierpoint's cup and Boleyn's lip, and Dan indeed gives some lip to the aesthetic of optical severity that has been passed to him: he allows the hard gaze of the pictorial artist to degenerate into vocal drivel, right from the start. Arriving at the party in the image of a "tall young man" with "great severity" (AG, 202), he scrutinizes the antics with "severe eyes" (204)—his visage the very image of visual severance, featuring high definition, intellectual discrimination, social elitism; he is the typecharacter of Lewis's visual ideologie. As soon as this optical intelligence enters language, however, it collapses into incantation, the wishful indecision of words in the mouth. The high aim of the eye is failed by language, uttered here both in internal monologue and aloud: "The tall boy swayed giddily, his expression all radiant with new-born hope and the sacred fire of the genius that one living creature at least believed in.—His own father had never said —it has been left to a total stranger to discover! 'Melanie!' in


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ponderous lisping rapture he articulated her name to call her attention. . . . 'Can you teach me to paint pictures in oils oh do please say yes!'" (AG, 126). Free indirect speech suits Lewis's purposes, he maintains in Satire and Fiction, mainly as satiric display.20 Accordingly, Dan's appearance in the novel reverts continually from a record of his severe visual aspect to a chanting in mock unison with his vocalized thoughts. This constant modulation from his idealized visage to the dismal matter-of-spoken-fact thus adds the certitude of burlesque to the failure it repeatedly enacts: the optical linguistic being tested in Dan is going down in a verbal —vocal —farce, in comic rue. Zagreus's letter, dismissing the experimental subject, puts his deficiencies in these terms: '"You may not be so fitted for these severe exercises of the intellect as I had at first believed. . . . I have felt myself in the midst of some sentimental 'bottom-dog' Revolt, or that I had taken to my bosom a barbarian, instead of one (as I had fondly believed) who had the makings of a disciplined and rational person — destined to be a fine Frontkampfer of the new idea'" (AG, 608). While Dan's "severe eyes" should have suited him for "these severe exercises of the intellect," he has belied Benda's (and Gourmont's)21 promise of visual discrimination and conceptual definition. Barbar-ian (a word used ever searchingly by Lewis) lends the sense of its acoustic etymon—a babbler—to its judgmental meaning, and thus characterizes the forces undermining the ocular project: nonsense sound hangs on, even in printed words, as a presence, residual but real as the root meaning of that word. This errant music deflects the high, civilizing aim of optical definition. Lewis's failure to align his pictorial principles with the lexical medium leads him to the complementary admission: aesthetic ideals neither describe nor prescribe the facts of political life—not even the acts of his preferred parties. The representatives of fascism thus emerge as split men of their own. Divided between aesthetic antitheses as sharply drawn as Ratner's, these figures own no single artistic principle to extend into social formations. In Childermass, the Fuhrer-like Hyperides finds his prime disciple (the chain of command resembles the network emanating from Pierpoint) in Alectryon. He combines the superior powers of the defining eye—visual severance creates his sharply lined visage and vaunts its prestige in his severely elitist mien —with an unregenerate stutter, consonant with the musical indecision of democratic culture and the nonsense sound of its literary spokesperson, Gertrude Stein: He is the handsomest of all the Hyperideans with a large and languishing russet petasus tied beneath his chin. A black-cloak falls straight to his heels fastened with a Bangkok swastika temple design imposed upon a rough brooch and he carries a black leather portfolio of continental cut. His face has no feminine imperfections but is cast on the severest lines of an eager and wolfish symmetry. . . . (Ch, 293-94)

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"I speak; and if I speak well it is through [Hyperides'] influence, though this task of mine, I humbly conceive, be by no means above my parts, which in their turn derive to me from the hardy conjunction of an armorial duke with a Big-Steel Jewess (albeit such descent in certain quarters smacks of attainder) the last devisee of the historic blood of him who brought back the blocks of the decalogue out of the cloud from which archetypal puppet I inherit the slight stammer you m-m-may have rem-m-marked." Bailiff. "No. Did Moses stammer?" Alectryon. "He, Sir, was named the Stammerer in consequence of his stammer. Aaron did all the s-s-s-s-s-s-speaking." (Ch, 300)

Likewise, in Apes of God the figure of Blackshirt defiles the ceremonies of visual innocence, the pristine scheme of optical directness, that provides the standard and value of fascist mastery for Lewis. Blackshirt makes vulgar appeals to Demos, showing an unexpected affinity with popular musical culture: "Blackshirt began expounding. It reminded Dan of a 'broadcast.' . . . 'These Finnian Shaws' said Blackshirt — and Dan thought he detected a certain vulgarity in the accents of his voice" (AG, 482). "The Blackshirt whistled softly Auld Lang Syne and Dan looked up in some astonishment. This display of musical ability in such an unbending realist was unexpected to say the least" (AG, 502-3). This deconstruction of the ideal extends to the motives and method of Lewis's distinctive literary style. The gestural directness that he values in the political grammar of fascism and seeks to replicate in his own fictional prose — dislocating normal syntactic progression, forcing the musical flow into abrupt, quasi-pictorial signals, thus showing verbal images as distinct and integral things —goes over to its political and aesthetic enemies in this next passage. Appropriately, the Split Man beholds this duplicity, but Lewis encloses the contradiction in a pattern of verbal echoing too subtle for Ratner, who regards a crowd strutting in a dance, to a music of drums, with contralto and counter-bass saxophones—period The Present. The studied mass-energy of the music, hurrying over precipices, swooping in switchbacks, rejoicing in gross proletarian nigger-bumps, and swanee-squeals shot through with caustic cat-calls from the instrumentalists, depressed him. It was as if he had written it himself! But still more did the vibrations of the voice of Horace Zagreus depress him — that it would be impossible to attribute to Ratner's handiwork, with the autocratic dominant strut of its sentences, but doubly stupid it was in Ratner's estimate, twice as tiresome as the idiot mass-sound of the marxistic music. (AG, 442-43)

The "autocratic dominant strut" of Horace Zagreus's sentences depicts the boldly gestural motive and effect that Lewis seeks to produce in the visual explicitness of his own prose —and finds in the direct, directing Word of fascist authority. This political aesthetic might earn full endorsement from


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its speaker's Latin namesake. In line with his identity as Dionysian Greek, however, the anarchic vitalism of the demotic street dance is swayed to the same strut, here called to that tune of the "idiot mass-sound of the marxistic music." For the Horatian Lewis's elitist precision is all of a piece with the fertile confusion of the common tongue. The usual duplicity of word and referent survives even in his highly refined style, and especially in its extravagant metaphors, where the vivid particularity of the comparison only widens the chasm between word and referent. Representing his failure to synthesize painting and writing in passages as bleakly remarkable, as bitterly original as these, Lewis might have resolved their ambivalent triumphs into one certain truth: subjecting politics to an aesthetic analysis is to commit the reciprocal fallacy. Lewis concedes this theme, but only—for now —in his fiction, where the elementary conflict between his literary medium and his pictorial goals simply forces him to admit the misalignment. The incompatibilities may indeed appear merely as subjects to be exploited in the novels; to feed the very machine of literature that Lewis's painterly ideal cannot drive.22 Yet the inclusive vision of the political state as a work of art continues to exert its fascination for the Man of the World. In face of his literary failure, indeed, the political possibilities of his aesthetic seem to exert an even greater attraction in the early thirties, when he writes a tract in support of Hitler, a figure whom he conceives and represents in terms of his own artistic schemes. This visual ideologie is rooted in the early days of Lewis's career, and it establishes itself firmly at the beginning of the Man of the World project: its rise (and fall) may be traced from the first postwar years.

THE FAILURE OF ART

The changes wrought by the Great War on Lewis's visual sensibility are summarized in his 1950 memoir Rude Assignment: The war was a sleep, deep and animal, in which I was visited by images of an order very new to me. Upon waking I found an altered world: and I had changed too, very much. The geometries which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. . . . War, and especially those miles of hideous desert known as "the Line" in Flanders and France, presented me with a subject-matter so consonant with the austerity of that "abstract" vision I had developed, that it was an easy transition. . . . And before I knew what I was doing I was drawing with loving care a signaller corporal to plant upon the lip of the shell-crater.23

This new claim on painterly realism certainly comports with the values of pictorial directness that Lewis sought to instill in literature in the twenties.

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His need to witness the war experience might have propelled him in this direction, but his shift toward realism, at least in the immediately postwar period, seems to be exaggerated in retrospect —perhaps to assert the truth of the horror that occasioned the change. His remembrance is qualified by the contemporary record, by Ezra Pound, who, reviewing the same work Lewis is referring to, but in 1920, remarks: "A few devotees will regret that Mr. Lewis shows none of his more abstract compositions, yet his control over the elements of abstraction was hardly ever greater than in some of these present drawings, and his independence of the actual never more complete than in his present subjugation of it to his own inner sense" (EPVA, 134). Pound is describing the aesthetic conscience of Lewis's war painting in line with the values he will extol, nearly twenty years later, as that "Form-sense 1910 to 1914" (GK, 134). Yet he is also correct to see a new kind of realism on these canvases (sampled later), geometric in emphasis. For the new painting retains the primacy of abstract design over naturalistic content —with a struggle that makes all the difference. The agonistic attitude that Pound could see as the generative force of its achievement — that "subjugation" of "the actual" to the "abstract" schemes of his "inner sense" —thus emerges as an active awareness in the painter's own practice, as Lewis's own recollection continues: "I can never feel any respect for a picture that cannot be reduced, at will, to a fine formal abstraction. But I now busied myself for some years acquiring a maximum of skill in work from nature —still of course subject to the disciplines I had acquired and which controlled my approach to everything."24 The language here is alive to the complexities of the original situation. Far from happy complicity with an easy naturalistic line, the Enemy's attempt to hold "nature . . . subject to the disciplines" of a "fine formal abstraction" reflects the struggle traced by Pound (whose review is echoed here as the truer record of Lewis's attitudes in the first postwar years). This tension between formalism and realism plays onto broader political ground. For the architectural element in the war painting showed Pound, in February 1919, a distinctly social motive and goal. "These ["well composed, well constructed"] works are signally free from the violence which characterized Mr. Lewis's prewar productions," he writes in "Wyndham Lewis at the Goupil": "The artist is the antidote for the multitude. At least, there is antidotal art, whether one approve of it or no" (EPVA, 100). In other words, the painter could impose the formal order of his art onto the historical reality he enclosed in these designs. This model organization and authority both rearranged and corrected the chaotic actuality of mass society, as evidenced in the mass war that was Lewis's subject. Imposing design on representative content, the artist could be seen maneuvering for political vantage. Mastery is indeed the theme under which the painter's geometric schemes meet the random, variable, matter-of-recent-fact. (His analysis of Lewis's rage for


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order situates his own quest for poetic authority — particularly in Cantos IVVII —in its postwar moment.) Thus the form-making Vorticist acknowledges himself as legislator of the world in The Caliph's Design, a discursive fantasy written shortly after Pound's review. As though acting on that reviewer's "approval," Lewis demands a social embodiment of his aesthetic vision. Hailing the "revolutionary epoch" that his own painting is part of, he tells artists to abandon their dated doctrine of art for art's sake; to model their work on the social conscience and public scale of the architects (the pamphlet is subtitled "Architects! Where is your Vortex?"); and to fashion this civil art in line with the most strenuous standards — the "hard and smart" lines of ultra-abstract artists. Theirs is a priestly tyranny of aesthetic legislators, a privilege embodied in Lewis's rhetorical persona. This caliph orders not just a city but a whole civil order to be built in accord with "a little vorticist bagatelle that I threw off while I was dressing."25 More than caprice, his demand extends the privileges accruing rightly, Lewis believes, to an artistic clerisy. Again in 1919, he affirms a small "public d'elite" as a center of correct — and correcting — aesthetic awareness,26 and singles them out most of all for their capacity to see geometrically, abstractly. Hailing the diagrammatic aspect of art in "Prevalent Design" (1919), he suggests forcibly that such designs might prevail by force in the political sphere. His higher caste's "tyrannous talent for design" (WLA, 120) claims the same imperial means for levering aesthetic schemes onto the social realm as the Caliph's own. The privileges of Lewis's clercs hinge on the form-making powers of their visual intelligence, and he exercises this authority through its signature pattern—proximate vision, as named and described by Ortega. To foreground the focal image is to discriminate; the consequent hierarchy of planes—in the sensory language of the new ideologic—endorses the idea of class echelons in society. Thus Lewis's 1919 painting A Battery Shelled (figure 9) puts his officer class securely in the frontal position. The authority he thereby sanctions is matched by a high aerial vantage of his own: he detaches the eye from the scene with the same kind of insouciant power that he depicts in their relaxed, apparently confident command. The naturalistic lines he weaves into the vestments of preeminence stand in equally sharp relief to the stick-men figures massed in the rear. This contrast may serve the perception that the members of the higher class might alone attain the kind of individuality he has contoured into these living, untypical shapes. But it is also possible to see the disparity as a formal and thematic irony, whereby the authority revered in the very scheme of this painting has reverted to the work of war — an aberration of the civilizing function Lewis accords these privileged individuals and reflects in their own sophisticated mien. This reading also helps to explain the differences between the war painting and the design of The Pole Jump (1919-1929; figure 10), where the rightful

FIGURE 9. Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919). Oil on canvas. The Imperial War Museum, London.


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FIGURE 10. Wyndham Lewis, The Pole Jump (1919-29). Pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache. Private collection.

authority finds no errant preoccupation, where no such complication attends the configuration of power. Dominating its frontal plane, these juridical figures extend their authority over the plebian mass in the background by a rather extraordinary trompe-1'oeil. Inclining their hats in one direction, Lewis describes a single line of force that rises, in dramatic effect, to halt the vaulted body suspended in midair. The difference between A Battery Shelled and The Pole Jump goes to their controlling perspectives. The lifted vantage and distancing effect in the war painting ensure that one is looking at a representation of authority, and this viewpoint allows for a rueful, distanced, even elegiac consideration of its subject. The angle of sight in The Pole Jump shifts into that of the frontal figures. Looking through the eyes of privilege, the viewer has moved into the dramatic economy of power, and the surging gaze transmits the feel of dominion intensely. While the convention of proximate vision obtains equally in the two paintings, the detached symbolic representation in the first has given way to an actualizing involvement in the second. The difference witnesses a movement from the virtual world of aesthetic shapes to the sphere of real political experience. Not content with using the schemes of proximate vision to depict a hierarchy in society, he seeks indeed to live

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inside its configuration of absolute power. This desire is so deep it can only be sharpened by deferral. When the pictorial stylist confesses the necessary failure of his scheme in Apes of God, in 1930, he will seek to realize it in Hitler's emergent State. This development witnesses Lewis's own habitus, the inward bent of his character, and not simply a strategy of compensation. The same movement we see in the two paintings above can be followed again in a set of passages from The Lion and the Fox. In each he deploys the pattern of proximate vision with its familiar political content, contrasting the single figure of the privileged king with the subservient Many, but he shifts its angle of view, subtly, tellingly; a representation of this scheme in the first excerpt yields in the second to a participation in the political dynamic it depicts: So the King in these early societies played the game of the One and the Many with a small chosen team, in a small chosen world. And the many on their side were not so many, not so many as ever to be "the crowd" or the many-headed multitude: but enough to reproduce the general contrast of numbers to singularity. . . . The feudal european king was essentially not a patriarch, but a stranger and an enemy. The king and his nobles were usually of another race to the subject, their mastery beginning in physical conquest. . . . These russian or anglo-saxon serfs had their individual stranger (a small personal god) quartered on them, giving a personal form to all the anonymous outer power of the universe, against which it was impossible to fight, but against which . . . he agreed to protect them. He was their enemy, a representative of the outer hostile world, between whom and themselves the terms of propitiation and sacrifice had been systematized.27

The first passage sets out the class hierarchy that is preserved in the pictorial convention of proximate vision, and Lewis uses that design in a reasonably neutral, give-and-take, dialectical consideration of the political reality it reflects. In the sequel, he enters that diagrammatic scheme. Instead of looking at the ruler from the perspective of one gazing at the picture, where the privileged king is wreathed by the plebs, Lewis has taken up the vantage of the subject, through whose eyes "all the anonymous outer power of the universe" can be felt as the lord's resource of authority. And the poetry to which Lewis rises in portraying the dark, anarchic empowerment of antique rule measures the degree to which that aesthetic scheme — convenience for explanation in the first excerpt —is heated here with a lived intensity. On one hand, he knew better. Already in 1934, in "Power-feeling and Machine-age Art," he will assert that political force must move at crosspurposes with aesthetic form; the necessary dynamics of the State are at odds with the true order of art.28 By this time he will have started to see (as we will see) how far Nazi society diverges, in actuality, from his own artistic charter. On the other hand, the artificial schemes of painting abide as his


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primary model for personal and political life, and this pressure — the sedulous pleasure of conceiving and dealing with history in terms of artistic paradigms—will be countered only gradually, momentarily, tentatively, through the later thirties. To live in the aesthetic scheme is Lewis's deepest wish, a hubris whispered to this unpublished fragment (192?) from "Notes Toward [a] Theory of Painting": "The life I am indicating (and which I regard as the most developed and which interests me most) is the mind that wishes to live wholly in NOTHING: to live eternally in some arbitrary (of man the point of view of experience, UNREAL) state or condition, where everything is represented, and where the opposites merge in an ordered repose."29 The ordered repose of The Pole Jump, where the power thrust of the privileged gaze meets its object in a lively but contained stasis, follows the aesthetic form under which Lewis will experience Nazi Germany, thus idealizing and resolving its brute mastery. His vision of ordered repose in the dictator's plans— "the Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity"30—testifies already, in 1931, to the delusive powers of this aesthetic view. Now, the imminent Reich had not yet revealed its matter of sordid fact to everyone. But already, in The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis has agreed that postwar circumstances may require a violent, dictatorial oppression. On this political reality Lewis imposes his aesthetic screen, and its effect can be measured by the number of sheerly personal antipathies he had to overcome in order to admire Hitler. "Neither [Hitler's] obscure origins, personal appearance, artistic taste, intellectual attitude, youth cult, emotional rhetoric, racial theories, military spectacles nor rabid nationalism appealed to him," Jeffrey Meyers cogently remarks, and such traits were clearly evident to Lewis during his two-month visit to Germany in 1930.31 These points of difference add up to measure the strain under which he must labor to sustain the authority of the Fuhrer in the cleaner, nobler lines of the artistic paradigm. Proximate vision indeed exerts a formative force, showing its influence already in the frontispiece to Hitler (1931): a lurid close-up of the leader's face (figure 11, full page in the first edition) preserves that model design of privileged command. Lewis describes the attitudes behind this angle of view a decade later, when his analysis of his conceptual mistake — his misguided (German) nationalism—retains the outline of the older, more potent, sensory-aesthetic scheme of proximate vision: I believed, say, twelve years ago, that the doctrine of national sovereignty was an indispensable guarantee of freedom. At present I believe the opposite. I regard that as archaic thinking. . . . Freedom of the kind I formerly advocated is not possible, then, because scientific techniques have so diminished distance, and telescoped time, that the earth, which was once for man an immense, mysterious, and seemingly limitless universe, is no longer that, but a relatively diminutive ball.32

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FIGURE 11. Photograph (unattributed) of Adolf Hitler. Frontispiece to Lewis's Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931).

The worldview in which the national sovereign functions depends on an angle of sight exactly congruent to the one Lewis drew in The Lion and the Fox, where he mapped the scheme of proximate vision into the dynamics of total political control - where the equally "archaic" prerogative of absolute royal force was seen to rely on the same dark, anarchic background that Lewis projects as the source of the national dictator's authority here. Of course this modern tyrant drew his power from his public: the fascist is a dictator with a mass-based legitimacy. Master demagogue in practice, Hitler consolidated his political audience by orchestrating their voices into his own, that medley of dialects equally guttural and sweet. While his national character-in-voice projected a single political will as its effective fiction, the social body he created thereby was magnetized to his own in a supreme, massive example of musical empathy. Indeed, Hitler flourished by


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the very methods the Enemy had spent two decades analyzing and excoriating. That the social critic deafens himself to the lesson of his own twenty-year jeremiad is an obverse testament to the force of a single aesthetic preconception. (Ideologie creates as effective a screen as ideology.) Viewing the Leader as luminous hero in the scheme of proximate vision, as protagonist in that atavistic drama of total control, he simply refuses to hear, in Hitler's rhetoric of the Reich, the truth of his own sardonic critiques. The sage analyst of musical democracy and the politics of acoustic sympathy has in fact become its unwitting victim, a naive respondent all too ready to endorse its chief effects. Since musical empathy fosters the illusion that the speaker is part of the audience, Lewis welcomes Hitler again and again as a man of the people. No sinister enemy-other, this friendly familiar stands free from the machinations of elitist cabals: "Maurras, a great 'intellectual,' aristocratic in temper, is untypical: whereas Hitler is a sort of inspired and eloquent Everyman" (H, 33; emphases added). Later he adds: "Hitler's words in the above passage are worth noting — not in secret conventicles—in the Camorra of a militant minority, in fact —but in open, hundred-thousand-strong, visible masses of the citizenry, are nationalsocialist ends to be achieved" (60-61). Once again Lewis repeats that self-betraying appreciation of Hitler as the vocal hero of Demos: "Hitler is a very new type of Nationalist in Germany. The people who follow him know that the Junker-spirit plays no part in his eloquent workman's evangile" (10). The aural incredulity that Lewis must give up in order to attend so raptly upon this musical demagoguery is recovered from time to time. It is as though the artist needed to cleanse his aesthetic conscience thereby. Yet he never subjects the Fuhrer to such a critical auditing. He allows other examples of mass acoustic sympathy to operate like lightning rods for his inveterate rebuke: all the more evident, then, his willed inattention to Hitler's political orchestrations. Here the old Enemy launches a characteristic blast, blaming the demagogue for manipulating the emotional excitement generated by songs, but the salvo flies toward a site fetched from afar —the Celtic hinterlands: "[all that] Mr. De Valera has to do is come and strike some sad sobbing notes out of the Irish harp, and to howl in a melodious, carefullycultivated brogue, about 'Ould Ireland' —and the trick is done! These bloodbrothers are at each other's throats . . . a few bold, shrewdly-aimed blows upon the Welsh Harp, with a wild wail or two—that would have just the same effect!" (H, 142). The closer Lewis approaches to Germany—to Hitler—the more oblique the critique. The complaint about Goebbels's vocal affect in the following passage is sufficiently strong to make its absence felt in the Fuhrer's case: In this gigantic assembly of twenty thousand people there was something like the physical pressure of one immense, indignant thought. . . . Goebbels . . . was a tiny, nervous figure, whose voice rose constantly to a scream, as he denounced

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the present misrule— the tribute politics, Erfuhlungspolitik—the Terroristic methods—the stream of taxation, the credit monopolies of the Social-democratic, and now the Centre coalition, ruling dictatorially by Presidential decree —of Bruning and of Severing, and their Erfuhlungskabinett. (H, 10-11)

Attempting to meld his audience to his coercive call, the minister finds his answer in the mimic rant of Lewis's own text: fusing itself with the orator, it offers both parody and symptom of the togetherness inspired by such vocal performances, This kind of musical mock-up is spared Hitler on account of the optical ideal under which Lewis perceives the leader. He displays that whole process of wishful seeing and willed nonhearing in this representation of a typical meeting of the Hitlerjugend: "[I]f you want to see 'Youth' at work and in its element—with all its characteristic passion and 'idealism'—you cannot do better than go to the meetings of the Hitlerists. There Youth-at-the-Helm is not a phrase, but a fact, and Youth with its eyes wide open!—But that is not at all what is expected of 'Youth' by the golden-tongued, insinuating Youth-fans" (H, 98-99). While the devotees' "wide-open eyes" reflect Lewis's own visual infatuation with Hitler, the political reality of mastery and dependence is being cast into the ideal optical model of proximate vision. The scene recalls the prospect in that seminal passage from The Lion and the Fox where the plebian viewers, like the youth here, are protected from the dark backward and abysm of space by the strong, strongly foregrounded hero in the aesthetic scheme: Hitler steadies the eyes and hands of the youth, ready to steer them out into the void behind him, for Lebensraum. To substantiate his pictorial paradigm in political fact, however, Lewis must rebuke the demagogic music of the actual proceedings. Like the other attacks in this book, it is indirect: he lambastes the "golden-tongued" youth cult—but of his own Anglo-American acquaintance: the baby babble of Gertrude Stein, that anthem to the comfortable nonsense sounds of democratic culture. The Enemy thus seeks to regain the high critical ground he has in fact given up. What Lewis resists seeing here is the full truth of the recognition he made in the passage cited earlier from The Art of Being Ruled: both fascism and democracy rely on a domination of their publics. Those emphases might now just as easily be reversed. Should he not admit that the authority he seeks in fascism relies on a mass-based approval and, as such, consorts rather than contrasts with the musical follies of democratic — demagogic — politics? To make this recognition is to unmake the political vision of The Man of the World. This awareness develops through the thirties, understandably, in a kind of cryptoglyph, although it already underlines the characterization in Apes of God, written in the late twenties. By the time Lewis writes The Hitler Cult (1939), he will have opened his ears fully to the musical demagoguery of the Fuhrer. For he spends the latter part of this decade confronting the difference between the practical reality


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of fascism and the optical aesthetic under which he once apprehended and sanctioned it. The advance of history leaves the schemes of avant-garde art further and further behind. The pamphlets he publishes in 1936 and 1937Left Wings Over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing and Count Your Dead: They are Alive! or A New War in the Making 33 — offer more stolidly pragmatic rationales for the political system the artist had regarded earlier as the supreme artifact. Along these lines, his 1937 condemnation of Pound includes a decree of absolute divorce between the perfection the poet desires equally, and wrongly, in politics and aesthetics: "he demands perfection in action, as well as in art. He even appears to expect perfection, or what he understands as such, in the world of politics."34 Lewis's critique may be true, but it misses the fact that Pound's hubris will have been fueled by the Enemy's own example —at least by his earlier insistence on a State built upon the best aesthetic principles. In 1938, in fact, Pound still praises Lewis for his early "discovery" of Hitler, attributing this insight (like his own find, Mussolini) to the superior powers of the painter's — the Vorticist's-designing eye: "Form-sense 1910 to 1914" (GK, 134). In Italy now for over a decade, Pound is presenting a memory of Lewis, whose true development over this decade witnesses another meaning entirely : a gradual unmaking of the aesthetic premise of politics and a revamping of the political conclusion to which it drew him. For his juridical statements of 1937 reach further back in the decade for their inner conviction. Historical reality has been growing apart from the aesthete's dream of society at least since 1933. He expresses his artistic disaffection from the new German state in "Berlin Revisited" (1933-34) —an admission too bitter, evidently, to publish. In these scattered manuscripts he notes the heightened level of material prosperity in Nazi Germany, but he is noticeably disappointed by the failure of the revolution to raise literary awareness to a comparable degree: they are reading Galsworthy (not Lewis!). The separation of economic from intellectual well-being gives the lie to the Man of the World's synthetic vision, and (in the dramatic aside of this suppressed text) he concedes his defeat equally in spirit and in detail. Thus the German consciousness, unimproved by the optical intelligence (of writing like his), has reverted to the old musical ways of gentile democracy. Like their English familiars, les hommes moyens sensuels of Hitler's Reich use the pleasant but sedulous acoustics of words for political self-hypnosis. They substantiate the vacuous ideology of middle-class respectability with comfortable sounds, thus wishing that empty ideal into material existence: We have in England a disease called "refaynement"—something that causes the poor fellow afflicted with it to say "nayce" instead of nice. But the German can be just as "refayned" if not more so. Do not run away with the idea that any German gives utterance to a trenchant "nein!" when desiring to express negation. No, there are just as many Germans who say "Nayn" or

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"fayn" for "nein" or "fein" as there are Englishmen who say "nayce" for "nice." . . . I must confess to having experienced a certain shock upon realizing the incredible "nayceness" of the modern German mind.35

As a lost possibility, his vanished hope still abides in his rhetoric: that desirably "trenchant 'nein!'" would enclose in its harsh and abrupted note the exact sense of its French etymon —trencher, "to cut"—and thus shape its speech to the pattern of visual severance and definitional directness that Lewis had nurtured as his inner vision of the Reich. To that painterly plan of the polis the Germans have delivered their long musical "nayn." The travel diary foretells the changing model of Lewis's political perceptions in the thirties. With increasing clarity and acuteness, he hears the music of mass empathy shouting down the pristine ideal of a visual elite. He tells this story of personal disillusion in grim detail, most pointedly in his 1939 record of the Nuremberg rallies. To catch the exact curve of his despair here, one needs to see that political theater through Lewis's eyes: a visible emblem of his former, aesthetic ideal of State. It preserved the contrast pattern central to the design of proximate vision, and it animated that scheme in a dramatic architecture of light and shade. The obscured, moving mass of soldiers set the lifted figure of the Fuhrer into bold relief, while the illumination trained on him offered him as the favored, truly luminous hero of the painterly design. That scheme was enhanced by Albert Speer's additional light effects. On the perimeter of the field 130 upturned searchlights sent powerful and well-defined beams as far as twenty thousand feet into the air, creating the look of a "cathedral of light," Speer proudly writes, a "vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls"36 as cosmic boundary for the rally (figure 12). In such surrounds the leader could play his part in that archaic drama of total control that Lewis had scripted in the spatial diagram in The Lion and the Fox; the tyrant both impersonates the terrible background — the Fuhrer shares its spectral glow —and terrifies his people with it. In Lewis's 1939 account, the terrible beauty of this social sublime looks back to the artistic paradigm that nurtured it, but as a foregone ideal. Lewis longs wanly for "the well-ordered repose" of a political artifact. In the "Goethean calm" of the old aesthetic outline, the true "aristocratic" character, which is "exclusive," could be sanctioned in the foreground of proximate sight. Now that Hitler's source of power stands revealed (the idealized populism of 1931 no longer operates), Lewis's disillusionment shows itself in the following sequence in The Hitler Cult. He moves in a serial reenactment of his own changing views. An elegiac recollection of true (classicalNietzschean) aristocracy —equated with an aesthetic state —slides into a cartoon of mass musical empathy and demotic solidarity more lurid than any drawn before:


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FIGURE 12. Photograph of Nuremberg Party Rally, 1938. Munchen, Suddeutscher Verlag.

How Nietzsche, the theoretical "aristocrat," came to mistrust the Prussian Imperialist technique, is made plain by Nuremberg. . . . The mass methods of standardized "Germanism," as Nietzsche saw it, were heading in the opposite direction to the Olympian exclusiveness of Goethean calm. They were headed towards . . . a really demoniacal Demos. . . . A second image suggests . . . a more intimate and spontaneous exhibition of the same demoniac Demos. . . . [During] a visit I paid to a night club, . . . the orchestra —accordions, drums, and saxophones — broke into popular airs; and chains of people, thirty or forty men and women, sitting at one of the massive tables, swung from side to side, their hands joined across their bodies, shouting the refrain of the song. This swaying chain became intoxicated with the beautiful animal sound of peasant jubilation. . . . One of the schoolroom forms on which they were sitting tipped over, and one end of the human chain crashed to the floor. But they all still went on swaying from side to side, chanting their peasant dirge of joy.37 Just as the Nuremberg report reenacts Lewis's own shifting perspectives on Reich aesthetics, his biographical account of the Fuhrer presents the career of this political artisan in stages that match his own developing view of it. Here Hitler fails his first, higher calling as painter and architect, then

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lapses into the facile channels of musical politics, in the same way that Lewis had to give up his optical model of ideal authority in order to hear the sounds of that mass-orchestrating demagogue. Hitler had tried to enter the schools of painting, and the schools of architecture, and engage in that laborious apprenticeship that . . . leads (sometimes) to fame. Now he found —after thirty years —that all the time the solution lay right inside his mouth. No training, to speak of, was necessary. The jaw-muscles would soon get used to delivering verbal broadside and discharging torrents of pent-up sentiment. It was sufficient to open his mouth and out would pour a whirlwind of platitude which simply swept everybody off their feet. (HC, 88)

Lewis's account of the Fuhrer's betrayal of the painterly ideal tells a tale of personal disillusionment as obliquely and compellingly as the Nuremberg story. Lewis admits the visual mistake of Hitler frequently in The Hitler Cult, but obliquely, self-defensively. Stabbing jokingly at the Fuhrer's visual aspect, ranging from his eyes to the effect of his image on others, Lewis is in fact lashing out against his own optical infatuation — one recalls the frontispiece to Hitler all too clearly here: "[T]o see Hitler face to face is I suppose a bit of a sensation. (Many people seem to find it so, to judge by the numbers that repaired to Nuremberg every year, in the hope of getting a sort of electric shock from a handshake with a 'world-conqueror,' and by gazing into his 'magnetic' eyes)" (HC, 4). Elsewhere he notes: "It was not on account of Herr Hitler's beautiful eyes . . . that I adopted 'neutrality'" (vii). The very grimace in these grins displays the strenuous effort needed to conceal the memory of Lewis's early visual fascination. His forced humor about the sight of Hitler shows itself as camouflage and distraction as soon as one confronts some discarded, unpublished passages from a draft of Rude Assignment. Here, as he concedes his severe misreading of the Fuhrer's look, he goes on to label his mistake a failure of pictorial perception above all. "Why has nature provided us with no psychical insight so that when we encounter a mass murderer we are apprised of the fact by an instantaneous repulsion?" he asks himself, and confesses: "As a portraitist I feel I should have detected the awful symptoms, even if I was wanting in the visionary power to see this little figure, only a few years later, popping into his gas ovens. . . ."38 If this admission reads like the final chapter of Lewis's intellectual autobiography in the thirties, it might be said that he wrote what came before in invisible ink. It is perhaps unfair to ask Pound to have seen the reversal of opinion occurring, as it does, just below the surface of the work published before 1939. Of Lewis's books, however, the poet most admired Apes of God (his praise will be detailed later), which fully anticipates the later decon-


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struction of the political aesthetic. He might have looked as well at the fiction Lewis produced through this decade.

THE ART OF FAILURE

The three novels Lewis wrote in the thirties extend the awarenesses he reached in drafting the two of the twenties. His increasingly self-conscious failure to attain visual directness in words affords him, paradoxically, an ever greater inspiration. With growing ingenuity and humor, he dramatizes his own demise as a painterly hero in words. For he cannot halt the temporal momentum of language; cannot carve his pictorial integer onto the page. The attention he pays to the impossibility of painterly writing complements the concern he shows for its parallel fallacy: the aesthetic perception of politics. The failed state of his art now makes an art of the State impossible. The fallacy he had fallen into formerly will become starkly clear to him by the end of the decade, yet he rejects his inclusive vision in his nonfiction prose only gradually, usually obliquely, or in terms of careers other than his own. Thus the novels of the thirties seem to thrive on the kind of selfknowledge he denies or deflects in his discursive writing. This inconsistency runs true to the pattern established in the twenties: the Man of the World's argumentative tracts espoused the sort of major syntheses that the novelist was busy undoing. Having now abandoned his ambitions for a composite art, the older novelist still uses the incompatibility of paint and words as his imaginative theme, thus generating the literature that the pictorial stylist could not. The sheer need to produce, however, does not limit the quality and significance of these later novels. The painterly writer turns the illustration of his necessary defeat, we shall see at length, into a searching critique of the political conditions and aesthetic conventions of English literary culture in the thirties. While Childermass and Apes of God froze linear plot in favor of the pictorial moment, all three novels of the thirties show the interest of fast-moving intrigues. They are basically thrillers. Snooty Baronet (1932) tells of a literary agent's attempt to arrange a fake kidnapping as publicity stunt for an author he represents, and Lewis advances the stratagem with an eye to narrative excitement above all.39 Equally well-paced but more richly textured, the plot of The Revenge for Love (1937) weaves romances into a scheme to run guns across the Spanish border; the plot includes an international cast, who lend political interest to the developing intrigue (though the novel was finished before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War).40 Disguise motifs and the threat of detection supply the narrative incentive in The Vulgar Streak (1941): a working-class man poses as an aristocrat, and this counterfeit character makes his living by passing counterfeit money. Here various subplots

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enrich the main story line through counterpoint. The impostor's developing romance, for example, provides motive for the maintenance of cover. Throughout the novel a kind of future memory operates to give the events the momentum of history that has already happened: a series of allusions to the Czech crisis of 1938 mirrors the protagonist's deception and expands its significance.41 By the end of the decade, the suspense plot essential to all three novels has reached a masterful elaboration. Yet the heightening of the time line and the feeling of momentous sequence here witness the very temporal sensationalism that Lewis will have spent two decades identifying and condemning. Triumph manque, his great success in these conventional efforts turns on the defeat of his own aesthetic philosophy, and Lewis masters that failure with somber gusto. The opening moment of a novel (or a chapter) holds the potential of standing as a time out of time —as an instant not yet swept up in the militant continuum of plot. The pictorial stylist struck his static pose most strikingly in the first paragraphs of Childermass and Apes of God. He brings the same ambition to the same place in the later works. Inserting clear reminders of the plastic ideal toward which his writing has aspired, moreover, he engineers the evident irony of its now elaborate travesty at the start of The Vulgar Streak: At the end of the Venetian street were the waters of the Grand Canal, graved with the denilunar wavelets of Venetian art. They were passing small shop-fronts as they talked. It was the morning and the September sun was hot. The taller of the two men was athletic, handsome and elegant; his companion on the other hand was a tweed-clad Briton with a Peterson pipe— of that "tweed and waterproof class," as registered by the eye of Concord. "Venice g-g-grows on me," said the pipe-sucker, who cultivated a mild stammer. (VS, 9)

Presenting the waterscape of this initial prospect as a radiant engraving, Lewis proceeds to undermine the possibility of a complementary verbal frieze, releasing the fluid content of language in an appalling but now familiar vocal cartoon. Speech displays the temporal dimension of language more dramatically than print —spoken words come and go, unlike those fastened to the page —and Lewis enhances the standing of the enemy Time in the stammerer's character-in-voice. Like Gertrude Stein's, the stutter repeats meaningless serial sounds as a virtual anthem to the temporal sensationalism language may lapse into. This is an antiphon already sounding the loud defiance of words to the verbal artist's attempts at engraved stasis and fixity of significance. The proof of Lewis's motive in this intricate artistry lies in the recurrence of the pattern, and the opening moment of chapter 6 (part I) both repeats the design and enlarges discursively upon it. Here the painterly vision of the


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first paragraph stands in manifest defiance of time. Once the account has swung into the second paragraph, and thus clearly initiated the sequence of narrative, Lewis dwells with bitter eloquence on the demise of his ideal of timelessness: The gondola, that snail-like craft, in defiance of Time only pretended to move. Its glistening trail was only painted no more, upon the dark green waters. To April it seemed that they had been painted too. Vincent and she, as neither moved, their faces going dark like the faces in old pictures. The red mist of the defunct sunset impended above the ivy-green of the red-tipped waves. . . . They had spent the latter part of the day upon a dilapidated island. Time had stood still there too. Time, rather, had pretended to stand still. Indeed Time had been stupidly pretending to stand still all day. But how absurd that was of Time, for as anyone could see, Time moved with a violent speed that took one's breath away. It was the modern age of course. It hadn't always. That was why one felt so old, although one was quite young. (VS, 48)

Here the propulsions of Time have moved from his own text to the driven behavior of the modern world, but Lewis does not lose sight of his primary linguistic theme. Language abides in time, and speech beats out a temporal imperative most perversely and urgently. Thus the time-minded paragraph shifts its register into the free, indirect speech of April, whose voice records an obsession with temporal sequence equal to its own immersion in Time. "This was Monday," her oblique oration begins, "and she had met Vincent for the first time last, last . . . when was it, Tuesday? And now they called each other by their first names and she felt she had known him the whole of her life. Just now when she had been talking about her childhood in Wiltshire she felt surprised suddenly . . ." (VS, 48; emphases added). While Lewis's failure to realize his ideal of plastic composition in words has generated an art of masterful despair, his defeats do not always disport themselves with the capricious ease of The Vulgar Streak. The overture to Revenge for Love expresses the demise of a composite art in a cryptic but bitter fable, featuring romantic betrayal as its chief motif. The scene is a Spanish prison: Claro," said the warder. "Claro, Hombre!" . . . he repeated, tight-lipped, with the controlled passion of the great logician. "We are never free to chose- because we are only free once in our lives." "And when is that?" inquired the prisoner. "That is when at last we gaze into the bottom of the heart of our beloved and find that it is false —like everything else in the world!" (RL, 13)

In an opening moment like this the word engraver has enjoyed a provisional reprieve from the closing prison house of narrative time. Accordingly, Lewis's spokesman here confines the possibility of liberty to one moment —

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like the opening instant of a novel, this time out of time. As the theme of freedom winds down into a sardonic joke about deception and unreal ideals, the reader may see an old lesson enacted anew. The progression from first to second and third paragraphs once again typifies the continuity on which narrative relies, and the ideal of an art free from time is broken like a promise across the rueful sequence of that ruse. The rhythm of expectation and reversal carries the rise and fall of Lewis's own geste, cancelling his hope to write the static intaglio and correct the wrongs of linguistic time. The pictorial writer's struggle against Time is nurtured as well on the romantic myth of passing inspiration. While Lewis usually directs his animus at the temporality of discourse, he also outlines this crisis on the Coleridgean and Shelleyan model of revelation's fading coal. Unique, unduplicatable, the superior vision disappears here into the temporizing hands of its recipient, Victor Stamp, the Australian painter in Revenge for Love, who "had seen, even as a student, well enough what was what —so long as the brushes were not in his hand. Or he had been visited by intelligent vision in a flash, that had faded out the moment he had started. . . . Even, when he had started, he had known what he had to do. But he had reckoned without his hand. For his hand had proceeded to do something entirely different from what his eye had told it . . . " (RL, 82). As rare as the single instant of its occurrence, Stamp's vision is lost to processes of craft no less time-driven than language itself. Since the original vision must vanish in the timeful channels of its execution, the one masterpiece Stamp can produce is a masterful imitation — of the cubist painter Georges Braque. The cubist's multiple perspectives may be read as the sequence and signature of the time-mind, and thus celebrate the very temporality that annuls Stamp's attempt at holding his own moment of authentic sight. In line with Lewis's embittered fiction of his failure as pictorial stylist, and in keeping with his tendency to turn such defeat into thematic material and technical incentives, Revenge for Love culminates in a highly ironic triomphe du temps. An elliptical but insistent narrative has driven the momentum of expectation up to this end point, where Victor Stamp attempts to run his (Margot's) car around a Spanish blockade at the French border. Lewis expands the breakthrough moment as an apotheosis of linear time, characterizing it as such right at the start: "'Stop!' as a hollow report her voice summoned Victor. 'Stop!' It was her duty, too, to halt him. But it was quite unavailing to shout at events—at events three seconds off. As well talk to Time and tell it where to stand!" (RL, 320). From here a two-page slowdown to a millisecond-by-millisecond presentation of the event provides the verbal equivalent of "A Nude Descending the Staircase." Like the Futurists, Lewis creates the sensation of dynamic time by crafting a series of discrete instants. The smaller the interval in the sequence of events, the more frequently piqued is the expectation of what comes next. The disequilibrium between a lagging narrative and a quickening anticipation witnesses a shift


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of attention from time as objective fact to the momentous inner tide of subjective time. The Enemy has spent twenty years analyzing and condemning this fallacy in Gertrude Stein, but he now subjects the reader to the same experience of time as merely serial (and passive) sensation—through the senses (mainly the ears) of Margot: She saw the two Guards get bigger and get bigger. It was as if in a series of blinks, or similar to the jumps of the hands of a large public clock, where the hands were the size of scythes. . . . She saw one of [the Guard's] eyes close up, the lid went neatly down over it; and there was the other at the root of the barrel of the carbine. And as they bore down upon this puppet with its painfully deliberate mechanism, the frantic clamour of their klaxon filled her head to bursting point, in spasm after spasm of menacing sound. She closed both her own eyes as she saw the steel-shutter go down over the Guard's: then she released a long chuckling scream, clawing at her mouth to hold in this offensive outburst. (RL, 321)

Lewis's follow-up to the slow-motion episode suggestively links its rampant temporality to the machinations of language itself. Placing a newspaper leader's fragmentary account of the event at the center of the page, he juxtaposes the discontinuous phrases of its headline style to the more fluent verbal interpolations of its reader, Percy Hardcaster: TWO OF THE GANG. CONTRABANDISTAS. DEAD. A POSTMAN. PRECIPICE. . . .

In the three seconds— no more —he allowed himself, Hardcaster saw that the bodies of one Victor Stamp and of a woman known as Margot had been found. They were at the foot of a precipice. A French postman found them — proceeding to a mountain village. Assumption: the pair had walked over the edge of the precipice. Probably in a storm. There had been a storm. . . . (RL, 335)

Since Lewis insists that Percy could not absorb the whole story (Percy is wrong, for example, about the pair walking over the precipice), it is clear that the cause-and-effect account is no comprehensive record of the actual event. Percy has shifted the separate and integral facts of the leader onto a temporal axis that anchors itself nowhere. The discrete facts have been swept up into a serial fiction that reflects nothing but the temporal imperative of language; the progression of words determines the continuous story. It takes Percy "three seconds" to do his sight-reading; this was also the time elapsed between Margot's intimation of the event and its completion—"three seconds off": thus the principle driving that distortion of narrative sequence, the inner tide of subjective time, operates as a function of linguistic apprehension primarily. Percy's narrative moves upon the waters of language. But his words ape a diabolical god's. He is riding the same wave of gratuitous, subjective, momentous energy that Lewis released in his narrative of the event and presents, in the end, as a symptom and function of verbal time.

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The failure of words to achieve visual definition and exact presentation provides a formative pattern for the novels of the thirties, where the falseness to which language is prone displays familiar political uses as well. Verbal perfidy works most subversively when language is voiced, Lewis has pointed out elsewhere, since the sensuality of the acoustic token easily supplants the reality of its referent. Accordingly, his tales of disguise and deception tend to feature impostors-in-voice, where an assumed accent or artful inflection stands in place of its true character. In Revenge for Love, for example, the Irish agent Sean O'Hara simulates the speaking manner of the English working class and thus insinuates his way into the party of Demos, a political body Lewis usually cartoons as a gullible ear. In line with his inveterate critiques, he steers Vincent Penhale's confession of his bogus tongue into an indictment of acoustic illusion in demagogic politics, where the sounds arbitrarily associated with leadership take the place of the fact: '"An Englishman just follows you around, if you've got an Oxford Accent. You don't have to do any leading. All you have to do, is to open your mouth, and allow a few words to escape, with that magical inflection, hall-marked Cam or Isis, and it's all right. You are his Leader by virtue of your accent. (Hence the bankruptcy, of leadership)'" (VS, 219). These narratives of vocal disguise illustrate aesthetic and political themes well known from the polemical tracts of the previous decade, but Lewis now adds a further dimension to the old cultural expose. His artistry has argued that verbal representation cannot capture the writer's original visual inspiration; thus the whole concept and value of literary originality seems invalid. This bitter admission yields a dividend to the satirist. It affords him a chance to represent, analyze, and parody the political faith that raises nonoriginality into an ethical and aesthetic standard — a simplistic Marxism (a twist unnoted by Frederic Jameson). It is an opportunity grasped by Lewis, grimly and masterfully, in the novel that recreates the artistic culture of the Marxist thirties. The industry of forging pictures that sustains Victor Stamp and his colleagues in Revenge for Love is the workshop of a Marxist program. Idealizing it as such, the communist Tristy offers a demotically garbled version of the rationale being advanced roughly simultaneously by Walter Benjamin in "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."42 Like Benjamin, Tristy welcomes the flourishing existence of copies —first, to destroy the element of private property in art, in order to make it available to the people; ultimately, to renounce the figure of the privileged subject, the originating artist, who disappears into the serial reproduction. Equating private property and originality, Tristy delights in the particular hypothesis that Vincent van Gogh, like Victor, worked as forger (RL, 235). While Victor Stamp's family name obviously fits his current occupation as copier, his first name shares a Latin root with Vincent van Gogh's, and this correspondence also serves-under


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the form of an etymological conceit —to annul the idea of unique subjects as originators of art. The Marxist campaign against the individualist premise in literature finds its chief spokesman in Mr. Mateu, a career communist and sometime man of letters. His literary project takes literacy itself as its target. He "snarled as he thought of the printed word. There had only been fifteen years of communism, but more than twice that number of centuries of fascist authorship. Even when the earth had all turned to Marx, there would still be this ominous shadow of the earth—that is, its time set up against its space — fascist to the marrow, controlled by Athenian and Roman aristocrats. The super-earth, of this dark immortality of books! A book was a blackshirted enemy" (RL, 302). While this tirade follows a party-line ethic, predictably equating individual authorship with a privileged authority over the means of production, it includes an emphasis peculiar to Lewis's own aesthetic. The spatial dimension of books disturbs this Marxist, but his rhetorical negative on this issue simply presents Lewis's own literary value in reverse echo. A page-based language lends itself to the operation of the visual intelligence, thereby providing a field for optical discriminations. In this way Lewis has sought to free words from their common ground in the parole—to sever the flow of the vocalese and shape the pictorial integer out of its fluid material. While this individual reformation of language stands as the boast of the Enemy, it provides the animus of the standardizing Marxist, and the rhetorical fabric of this novel collapses (strategically) under the assault of the populist challenge, thus mocking the old ideals of Lewis's political aesthetic in a bitterly original comedy. Entering his narrative language as an Everyman-in-voice, Lewis puts on the motley of the anti-individualist word, allowing the highly stylized signature of his own distinctive prose to dissolve into the free, indirect speech of a typical Englishman: Jack Cruze. The Marxist meaning of this literary discourse is spelled out clearly when Jack plays novelist to the character of Gillian Phipps. He echoes this English communist's words in the same way that Lewis submerges Jack's quotations into his own narrative text: He heard all about the backbite direct as you might call it, or mental communism were Gillian's words. No thoughts hidden away from your brother-biped but all laid naked to inspection, share and share alike: so that no one could say that anyone was keeping anything away from anyone else, or claiming they had a self, as she put it. Properly considered, she said, aren't we all just one Big Self? So nothing must be kept back and locked up, like a private possession which is all that self is, she said. (RL, 179)

Repeating the slogans that Gillian herself has repeated from the orthodox script, Jack parrots her attack on the dangers of the private self and affirms

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the values of such standardization, rejecting in principle the privilege of singularity in utterance. Lewis repeats this political theme as he allows his own shapely writing style to be swallowed by the fluid ease of Jack's demotic vocalese. Orchestrating a collective hubbub into Jack's voice, Lewis uses this speaker to represent the clamorous multiplicity of a wide populist average. At the upward end of his vocal reach lie the tones of shabby gentility that Lewis heard in Joyce's lower-middle-class Dublin accent. He scores these notes into Jack's English inflection, which he reproduces through the words of narrator and character: "In Jack's line of business they see all sorts and the great Mr. Tristram Phipps came into his office one day, on the off-chance of finding him in, sent by young Hailes, about his income tax" (RL, 94). '"Well, Mr. Phipps, sir,' says Jack, taking him by the hand and shaking it, very cordial indeed to be sure" (RL, 116). Despite this affectation of commercial propriety, the Jackish discourse drags the narrative language into its subsistence idiom — demotic vulgarity—with a force as constant as gravity: "She'd jump out of his arms just as he was getting busy, after a spell of all-in and no-quarter, and left him panting there with his tongue out like a dog in a drought" (RL, 179). Jack's demographic inclusiveness functions dramatically as well as symbolically; he breathes his way into the fictional language with a force equal to his own mass identity. When Gillian sees Jack as a colossal populist figure, and reproduces (in oratio obliqud) Lewis's own antipathies to this figure, her own free indirect speech is invaded by "well!", a Jackism dubbed in with the very indomitable ease that she presents as the trait of this majority character: "She watched Jack's jaunty back as he breasted the swing door, nodding a cheery good night to the porter. The working-class man again! The dregs —the majority! The backboneless, mindless mob. Well!" (RL, 203). The Jackish manner exerts its momentous effect on the global scale as well, moving into ever greater possession of the narrative language in part III. At first darting in and out of those gypsy rhythms, Lewis seems to display this clown of the vulgate, not to identify with him. By the end of the third part, the practice of modulation between author and character has given way to long passages of sustained single voice, where Jack appears, not as an intermittent or subtextual sound, but as the steady state of narrative speech. Compare the first paragraph of part III with an extended excerpt from its final vignette: Jack Cruze was known as "Jack" to everybody, much as Falstaff is in Shakespeare's pages; and "Jack" he was to himself as well. Or it would be better to say that because he had always thought of himself as "Jack," others did the same. The fact that "the Garbo" is the accepted way of describing the Swedish Queen of Hollywood must just mean that she saw herself as that, rather than as "Greta." That sort of impersonal style she must have carried about with her —shutting out the


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familiar, the diminutive, or the fond. But old Jack Cruze was the opposite of that. No one could be above a half-hour with him without dropping the "Mr. Cruze." He was a natural "Jack"! (RL, 93) They threw themselves back after this and there was a long silence. I need not say perhaps that Jack was not in too sweet a temper by this time—after having listened to these people discussing his business principles, but agreeing that he was too stupid anyhow to be held responsible for the crimes he committed in the name of business. For some time Jack'd had an itching in his throat, and he'd wanted to cough like billyoh. But he'd had to stop himself because he wasn't supposed to be there. They both started when he cleared his throat and spoke at last. It was like as if Jack had got into the room on tiptoe and they had not known he was there till he opened his mouth. "Well, ladies and gentlemen," said he with the nastiest grin he could command to put round the words coming out of his mouth, for Jack could be nasty at times, and letting them have it in the voice he uses in his office, when he feels a little under the weather and anyone tries to teach him his business or question his honesty: "Well, ladies and gentlemen. . . ." (RL, 120-21)

The breath only faintly traceable to Jack at the outset—the demotic fillip of "old Jack Cruze," the rakish inversion of "'Jack' he was to himself as well" — has expanded by the end to lay its stain across the whole verbal fabric. In a controlled display of uncontrol, Lewis plays at being enslaved by the same linguistic forces that he has in fact mastered as the material of this symptomatic, diagnostic art. The insistent, progressive loss of his authorial autonomy to Jack's populist rabble emerges as his well-commanded strategy in part III, as he suggests forcibly through a single episode in the narrative. Here Percy Hardcaster, nominal double of the writer Percy Wyndham Lewis, is placed on this peculiar set of speaking terms with the Jackish manner: "Percy had a feeling that something was wrong, not for the first time, and looked up quickly. But he could not guess that he was taking part (at times) in a Jackish dialogue! And so he remained with his sensation that all was not quite as he would have expected it to be . . . " (RL, 187). Percy's unwitting, subvocal dialogue with Jack exactly matches the designed effect of Lewis's rhetorical fiction in part III, where the narrative language is overcome by the pressure of Everyman's voice, effective but only dimly recognized. Representing the technical drama of this section so clearly, Lewis shows how surely he has directed his own demise as individual author and distinctive stylist. Just as the final episode in Revenge for Love provides a kind of summa temporis, ironically consummating the philosophy of time that drives its suspense stratagem, so too that long, last flourish of the Jackish trumpet sounds its own triumph manque. The Enemy revels sardonically in the rival aesthetic of vocal populism. No less cynical in motive than sinister in practice, Lewis's left-handed play with language moves to a purpose as rightist

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and single-minded, moreover, as the political animus that generates the experiment. Injecting the Jackish infection into the narrative, tracing the tumescence of a mass verbal consciousness, and thus demonstrating the ephemeral nature of the author's single identity, Lewis uses his own role as victim of a Marxist campaign against individuality to claim the victory of a cartooning expose. Yet the wheel of satirical parody goes a turn further: Lewis enlarges the ground of his critique from literary Marxism to the elementary operations of language. Through the example of Sean O'Hara, Lewis shows the Marxist principle of standardization operating as a rule of verbal imitation in language, where mindless mimicry seems to govern all linguistic apprehension. This Irish member of the Third International infiltrates the party of the English working class by copying its generic accent; he conforms in spirit as well as in vocal letter to its mass standard. And the narrative language around Sean demonstrates a reliance on laws of imitation equally grim, indeed more subtle and insidious. Thus Sean's wife Eileen is said to own Irish ancestry, a notion that influences the style of speech entering slyly, freely but indirectly, into the narrative: But Eileen, his wife, was Eileen because her good old Surrey and Surbiton father had always had a weakness for the Colleen Bawn, and when he heard The Wearing of the Green played by a good trombone at the street-corner he would hum to himself: "They're shooting lads and lasses for the Wearing of the Green," and would get quite moist-eyed about these beautiful shootings, or rather about the fact that they should have been so romantically provoked —by the wearing of such a lovely and patriotic color as green. And when he had to christen his offspring he gave her an Irish name and would not have been averse to her being mistaken perhaps one day for a product of the Lakes of Killarney, or (had he known about it) of the Lake of Innisfree; and sure his old mater once said she had had an "Irish ancestor" (so hot-blooded!) which accounted for the violet tint of her eyes. . . . (RL, 128)

The mere presence of the Irish name sets the narrative language into evident mimicry: the loosely strung whimsy and sentimentality of the Irish parole at its stagiest ("beautiful shootings"; "such a lovely and patriotic color"; "and sure his old mater"). A passage ostensibly concerned with genealogy and parentage thus outlines a bleakly causal and determinist rationale for linguistic usage. While the Paddy inflection stands as a kind of national lampoon-in-voice, it belongs in dramatic context to Eileen's mostly English father, who may stand thus as a pattern for the book's full, international variorum of dramatic speakers. These characters obtrude their prescribed texts into Lewis's own prose and, from those half-submerged quotations, generate its narrative language. Driven to mimic the mannerisms of the character on whose verbal ground he finds himself, chameleon-like, Lewis's narrator seems little more

WYNDHAM LEWIS: L'ENTRE DEUX 6UERRES

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(or less) than the rainbow of vocal colorings he has put on to correspond with those speaking determinants. Submitting to this apparently random medley of speakers, the narrative blends a splendidly various symphony of echoed talk. The practice resounds not as aesthetic achievement, however, but as evidence for Lewis's most severe gravamens on the mimetic nature of linguistic usage. This dispiriting precept emerges most acutely in one of its most humorous examples. As the speaking character of Agnes Irons blithely recites her upper-class lexicon of party mots, Lewis interrupts the oblique oration to indict her verbal helplessness and, adroitly, to indicate his own: There was an interval during which Agnes expatiated upon the topping character of her uncle, whose jolly old Rolls was always looming up at the psychological moment, and rolling the jolly laughing person of his sporting niece away in this direction or that. And then other persons, who were beastly rich, also would keep breaking into the narrative. "Rolls Royces — butlers and footmen —pots of money!" was a wistful incantation never for long off her chuckling lips. The major words were drawled out in a tone of comic commiseration at the absurdity of the "pots of money" these same sahibs had and which, of course, one could not help noticing. . . . (RL, 219-20)

"Other persons" have indeed "been breaking into" Lewis's "narrative" no less coercively than the manual of high-tone phrases being dictated into Agnes's papery voice here. Accordingly, the narrator submits to the same parole — the archly emphasized "would," the typically mannered "beastly rich"— that he identifies as the risibly determined content of her talk. A quotation mocking a quotation, Lewis's onionlike verbal comedy unpeels to an empty center somewhat less terrifying for the laughter he generates out of that space. The aping clown that Julian Benda and Remy de Gourmont depicted as the character of aural apprehension emerges, then, as the mimic figure of verbal understanding and usage in Revenge for Love. The failure of originality that Lewis enacts so inventively here also admits the painterly writer's failure to realize his initial, visual inspiration in language: the unique, authentic image gives way to class concept, a word that simply reiterates a type; the creative hero of optical perception becomes a duplicating fool in the lexical-vocal medium. Exaggerating the inadequacy of his foe, the Enemy uses satirical parody as a potent strategy, but its humor should not obscure a fact as disquieting as the animus that drives this linguistic farce. As the artist withdraws from the lower verbal dimensions into a higher visual intelligence, he gives language its obstreperous head, releasing and accelerating its momentous energies. "Going over to the opposition" appears as motif in Lewis's later autobiographical novel, Self-Condemned (1954),43 which offers a telling retrospect on the developments we have seen in the work of the thirties.

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Like Wyndham Lewis, Rene Harding has left England in disgrace in early September 1939 and sought a bleak refuge in the "sanctimonious icebox" of Toronto, Canada. In a twelve-by-twenty foot room he finds his version of Lear's heath. Self-recognition relies on the assistance of another: Professor MacKenzie, a character obviously modeled on Marshall McLuhan. In conversation MacKenzie points the historian toward a developing irony in his life, as mirrored in the professor's own account of modern intellectual history. MacKenzie sees the nineteenth-century philosophy of material progress taking a puritanical, elitist turn in the twentieth. Here supermen of geometric vision in the plastic arts are matched by the priestly tyranny of Bolshevism in the political sphere (SC, 314-21). This vision of cultural history provides the terms of searching introspection on Harding's part — "All his lifework (so long neglected) . . . had been burst open, as it were, and scrutinized, by a stranger of intelligence. A shaft of hard light had been cast upon [its] intellectual structure" (SC, 324). For MacKenzie's outline explains the dramatic paradox of Lewis's own intellectual, literary, and political careers. A mind that has aggressively resisted the delusions of automatic evolutionary progress has advanced technical programs founded on meliorist, perfectibilist claims of their own: "One might . . . find in his adoption of the superman position a weakening; the acceptance of a solution which formerly he would have refused." Like "his life," moreover, human life, as a function of this progressive vision, "was being mechanized upon a lower level" (SC, 356) — the exact opposite of his original aim. In terms of Lewis's own career, a literary project that sought visual purity and sculptural mastery in words produces novels that mark the triumph of indirect musical discourse, the time mind, and the autonomy of language. The defeat that Lewis redeems in his fiction with the elaborate travesty of his enemies thus appears with an unchecked bitterness in his truer counterpart, Rene Harding. The same defeat, suffered nearly thirty-five years earlier by Ezra Pound, was assimilated into the dramatic fiction of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. For Mauberley's aesthetic ambitions — similar to Lewis's earlier high ideals — have led him to the obverse triumph of "Medallion," his final poem (like the "Envoi" ironically crowning E.P.'s career). The demanding standard of a sculptural prosody here reverts to its opposite. His appeal to an elite readership is undermined with the cryptic and cynical concision of the allusions: Luini in porcelain! The grand piano Utters a profane Protest with her clear soprano. The sleek head emerges From the gold-yellow frock


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As Anadyomene in the opening Pages of Reinach. (Poems, 69)

The reference to Salomon Reinach's Apollo (1904) directs one to his comments on the work of Bernadino Luini, whose project is described as being "carried out not altogether without vulgarity, for his elegance is superficial, his drawing uncertain, and his power of invention limited. His most characteristic trait is a certain honeyed softness that delights the multitude."44 How does Mauberley's cultivation of the most exacting aesthetic sense decline into the vulgar indulgence of Luini? This reversal receives its most accurate and provocative gloss from Lewis, who would live it out in his own (Mauberley-like) career. For this painter realized that the pure form on which his early, ultra-abstract manner relied was indeed the triumph of its enemy: these shapes promoted, not the hypercerebral activity of a visionary art, but a vulgar holiday for the eye. Freed from the duty of perceiving realistic content, it creates the "visual music" of mere optical sensationalism.45 Correspondingly, the cut-and-fit measure of Mauberley's own optical prosody serves to detach blocks of language from the meaning supplied by continuous discourse, putatively to build new "concepts" out of those radical particulars, but in fact to produce only the accumulation of sensuous phrase upon sensuous phrase. Thus the "grand piano" that "Utters its profane / Protest" to the sacral sculpture of Mauberley's words introduces no dissonance. The root meaning of "pro-test" is not to object but, through that intensive prefix, "to witness strongly." The pianola and gramophone lend their low pleasures of acoustic sensation in perfect consonance with Mauberley's art. The reversal Lewis perceived in his career as an abstractionist had of course been repeated in history. The cerebral elitism of the visual sense: this pictorial dream led Lewis to Hitler, who succeeded indeed as its manifest antithesis —a demagogic giant, a triumph of the mass musical empathy on which totalitarian dictatorships rely. The reversal Pound experienced in 1919 was of course absorbed into a different moment of political and cultural history. His aesthetic ideal, not yet invested in a particular Cause or State, remains innocently at odds with history — not yet betrayed by the developments of Fentre deux guerres. Its social values still stood as immanent possibilities. How Pound negotiates its first failures, ultimately recovering his visual ideologie with the help of Lewis's own work of the twenties, may engage us next.


CHAPTER 4

Ezra Pound, 1921-1939

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley tells Pound's story of personal failure against the backdrop of contemporary history. Forces larger than private aesthetic programs determine the fates of his poetic characters. The literary economy has broadened its public base— the lowering of standards crushes the individual artistic excellences to which E.P. and Mauberley variously aspire. The antagonism between popular and elite readerships was of course well established by 1920; London, capital of articulate philistia, is well known to Pound. Yet a personal urgency attends his attempts to demonstrate this mass demand on literature — and to reveal its consequences. For these forces exert a pressure on the literary language available to Pound's counterparts and, in the rhetorical fiction of the poem, to himself. Its verbal textures have assimilated the phrases of the common tongue. These idioms and cliches do not serve expressive purposes, however, nor do they show the scholarly brio of Propertius; as punctuated and framed, they stand on display: Unaffected by 'the march of events,' He passed from men's memory. . . The 'age demanded' chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time . . . (Poems, 53, 54)

Demonstrating rather than using the colloquial, Pound's art of the cliche has been assessed most acutely by the contemporary English poet Geoffrey Hill, who notes how the quotation marks "are a way of bringing pressure to bear and are also a form of 'ironic and bitter' intonation acknowledging that pressure is being brought. They have a satiric function, can be used as tweez-

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ers lifting a commonplace term out of its format of habitual connection."1 To Hill's insights one may add that "the march of events" and "the age demanded" reflect the ideas of historical inevitability and contemporary necessity that attend the notion of mass civilization. While Pound's speaker may invoke a force of determinism behind his cultural politics, his verbal sensibility has been determined no less forcibly, indeed more insidiously, by phrases and attitudes that are preformed and, as the punctuation warns, autonomously powerful. To display verbal pressure like this in a poem remembered most often for its dirge on the Great War is to recall the cultural economy of that conflict: the use of the parole to coerce populations into the efforts of total war. The determinism that runs in Pound's art of the cliche sounds its theme across the fields of language and political history, in a bleak key. "The march of events" indeed led the masses to France—to the automatic slaughter of technological warfare — along the rails of a conditioned response to idioms like this. To exhibit a public sign-system and thus to disrupt its political compulsions: this method and motive bring the elegant verbal finish of Mauberley into the otherwise unlikely company of European Dadaism, whose artists had likewise attempted to show up the whole network of icons — variously linguistic and visual—that had allowed the Great War to occur. The Dadaist spirit provides a substantial (though previously unnoticed) line of connection between Mauberley and Pound's renewed work on the Cantos, early in 1922, in Paris, where he— and a number of Dadaists — had relocated. Critics who have substantiated his engagement with Parisian Dada have pointed out how its strategies of quotation, fragmentation, and collage provided him a means of managing the diversity of sources on which his poem increasingly relied. "His realization that he could now include both prose and verse, both narrative and non-narrative, both literary and nonliterary materials into the open texture of his work," goes Richard Sieburth's precis, "constitutes . . . perhaps the major breakthrough in the poem. . . . Pound discovered a method of ideogrammic citation which allowed him to deploy language not mainly as the means but rather as the very object of representation, thus collapsing the traditional Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history."2 We should add that the materials Pound recycles into the newly variegated textures of the cantos compose a medley tuned to a mainly vocal register, an expansive and often bilious talkiness, whose accents range from the Uncle Remus and "Gabby" Hayes idioms of Pound's American Demos to the (mock-)ceremonial tones of the Holy Roman Empire in his adopted Europe; whose impetuous energy serves both to facilitate composition (there have been no new cantos for two years) and, in line with the original Dadaist initiative in Mauberley, to call attention to itself. Yet the drive behind Pound's display of the parole in these new cantos, like the Dadaists' own motives, will have lost much of its original context


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and originating point — the public culture of the Great War— by 1922 or 1923 (when Dadaists were becoming Surrealists). Once the political speech they had sought to expose was no longer edged by the daily crisis of war, Dada's negativism became increasingly unfocused. Robert von Hallberg reasonably contends that "Dada was for [Pound] not a movement capable of producing serious art,"3 but this assertion must be qualified by a historical explanation: the true seriousness of Dada was hard to sustain after the war. We must turn to sources beyond Dada, then, to explain the very Dada-like surfaces of the new cantos. Is there another influence, one that comprises the sport of language that Pound found in Dada and yet assimilates this apparent anarchy to the ethic and method of constructive — or "serious" —art; and one that helps to account for the specifically vocal spin that Pound puts upon his grave verbal play? "He Do the Police in Different Voices": the manuscript of The Waste Land entered Pound's ken late in 1921, and his close involvement with it helped to stimulate first the research, then the writing, of five new cantos (including the four-poem suite on Sigismundo Malatesta), whose first draft he announced in a letter of July 1922.4 An expanded sense of speaking decorum, Ronald Bush has observed, is one of the practical lessons Pound learns from Eliot's poem.5 Yet its working title also points up the impulses it shares — no more (or less) oddly than Mauberley—with Dadaism. To "do" the polis—to impersonate the speech of the city—is to play its characters-invoice in evident display; not to speak the parole expressively or sincerely but to demonstrate it—in figures of speech equally risible and didactic. Eliot seeks that combination of revelry and instruction that is peculiarly Dadaist. Yet the moral in this seriocomic show of the parole was not confined to the local, immediate context of the recent war. From what vantage did he deploy this hubbub of talk? And what advantage does this perspective provide Pound — as he attempts to organize the language of history into forms requisite to the "serious" art of epic? These lines of inquiry will lead us to see how the provocations of Dada and Eliot — recognized by critics as influences on Pound at this moment, but only separately—conspire in late 1921 to generate the major achievement of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930). That his synthesis of these forces leads him to the intellectual and political company of Wyndham Lewis (the severer Enemy), who produced the various volumes of The Man of the World through the end of the decade, provides my ultimate, ramifying point.

RESUMING THE CANTOS: ELIOT, DADA, MAJOR FORM

Just a piece of rhythmical grumbling: Eliot's famed (but late) disclaimer about the import and coherence of The Waste Land is easily challenged. Most of us read the sequence as an integral work rather than a hodgepodge

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of fragments, assuming that its "different voices" inscribe a design. This may be a progressive unity, traced in the protagonist's—Eliot's — quest for the transcendental wisdom of its last part. Calvin Bedient has proposed, for example, that the sustained, liturgical manner of "What the Thunder Said" evolves — gradually but inevitably — out of the circuslike babble that proliferates in the first three parts. Far from sending those voices out expressively, Bedient argues, the protagonist displays these shifting personages as emblems and symptoms of the mutability he wishes to transcend.6 Rotating his speakers as easily as one turns the knob on a radio set, Eliot satirizes the variable, ephemeral personality and its staging device, the voice. This critical perspective merges with the antivocal attitudes in the new European ideologie, the contemporary culture that provides ground and reference for Pound's own aesthetic development. While Bedient does not focus on the part Pound played in articulating the final product, we may note a striking likeness between the major point in this critical reading and the qualities il miglior fabbro observed and praised in the edited manuscript. Completing the textual transactions in a Christmas Eve (1921) letter to Eliot, offering his summary observations, he notes the poet's vocal phobia: "(It also, to your horror probably, reads aloud very well. Mouthing out his OOOOOOze" [Letters, 169].) A puritan squeamishness about (acoustic) pleasures may lead the speaker, Pound enjoys pointing out, to revel in the very sensuous medium Eliot sought to reveal as a lower corporeal order. The editor hears the splendid speakability of these verses in terms of the negation that generates them. And he knows that the via negativa is the pilgrim's path. After all, he resisted Eliot's attempt to add a sequel of miscellaneous passages, insisting that "the POEM ends with the 'Shantih, Shantih, Shantih'" (169); those mystic syllables consummated the religious quest that unified the poem. That spiritual adventure probably appealed to Pound only on practical grounds. A provisional fiction, it allowed Eliot to combine the interests of a loosely strung narrative with an opportunity for closure. This kind of comprehensive scheme reveals its most powerful point of attraction for Pound, moreover, when he observes the absence of a shaping outline for his own sequence. His December letter concludes by combining a friendly expression of envy for Eliot's achievement with a complaint about the undesigned waywardness of his own abandoned work: "Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies, and cogitating an excuse for always exuding my deformative secretions in my own stuff, and never getting an outline" (Letters, 169; emphases added). Large-scale design appears as the true Penelope of his quest in a letter written-like a progress report — six months later, when the Malatesta cantos have been drafted: "The first 11 cantos are preparation of the palette. I have to get down all the colours or elements I want for the poem. Some perhaps too enigmatically and abbreviatedly. I hope, heaven help me, to bring them into some sort of design and


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architecture later" (Letters, 180). The desire for a working "outline" that he expressed a half-year earlier has extended its reach, solidified its aim. He seeks not merely a provisional sketch but an achieved "design," a fully realized "architecture." Eliot's guidance in the development of these standards is suggested in that later letter (to Felix Schelling in July 1922), where Pound first raises the standard of major form to major value. Preoccupied here with the inadequacies of poetry written in a musical vocalese, he confesses the failure of his — or anyone's — attempts to reproduce the densely acoustic verse of Provence: sensuous sounds in verse belong to an unrecoverable past.7 Subduing the physical body of language to the form-making faculty of epic design, Pound articulates a scale of priorities that reflects — in a rough-and-ready but suggestive, timely way—the new influence of The Waste Land. I am proposing that his strengthening commitment to architectural values affords him a vantage from which, like Eliot, he tends to deploy his characters-in-voice, not expressively but symptomatically. This is not the Pound of critical convention, who sounds his vernacular poetic, his melodious yawp, across the rooftops of the Europe he wished to wake up. It is the Pound who drew difficult counsel from the contemporary continental tradition of ideologiecritique, which opened his ears to the dangers, equally aesthetic and political, of musical speech. Its warnings have been reinforced recently, locally, urgently, by Eliot's own themes and practice. Thus the vocal presences, so variously and strenuously felt in the textures of the new cantos, stem from an impulse to exhibit rather than use, let alone proclaim, such talkiness. Speech sounds out a pathology of disquiets that range from the oddities of personal temperament to the roils of history but, taken together, display a force antipathetic to the new imperative of major form, a value likewise heightened by Eliot's example. The Dadaist impulse toward anarchic display is thus subjoined to a motive and image of art at its most seriously formal, its most traditionally serious. History on Parole A Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925)8 includes poems written in three separate spurts over the course of a decade (1915-17; 1917-19; 1922-24), but this gathering witnesses a decided effort on Pound's part to project a comprehensive design; in effect, to organize the first movement as a unity, a microcosm of the cantos to follow. Shifting the poems out of the chronological order in which they were written and originally numbered, he now opens with the invocation of (Divus's) Homer (Canto III in 1917) and ends in XVI by presenting historical events appropriate to a contemporary heroic epic: variously, the struggles of the Russian Revolution and the Great War. Returning in a way to its beginning, the suite closes a circle, but on the spiral axis of forward historical time. The matching coordinates of past and present constitute a shape-in-time. It is indeed through the thick and dinglich me-

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dium of history that Pound seeks to articulate the visionary scheme of his poem (this formative principle will be called "the repeat in history" in a 1927 letter to his father [Letters, 210]). This scheme assimilates the processes of historical time to a formal structure reminiscent of the gyre design in Yeats's A Vision (also 1925). It is a species of "spatial form," not in Joseph Frank's critical description — a repetition of phrasal units that results in a sense of temporal arrest —but an imaginative vision close to Yeats's own: a model of historical recurrence in which time stands fast.9 The struggle between this suprahistorical form and the changeable matterof-timely-fact describes a generative tension in the new cantos, one which Pound hints at in an early draft of Canto VIII: [Chien de metier,] [hopelessness of writing an epic,] chien de metier, [hopelessness of building] a temple, in Romagna, in a land teeming with cattle thieves, Galeaz.10 [deletions]

In the midst of provincial political anarchy, Malatesta raises his Tempio as an image of order, and its merit seems proportionate to the forces arrayed against it. Similarly, Pound's task is to subdue the local, various, apparently random facts of history to a plan of spatial order and architectural proportion for his "epic." "A poem containing history," in his own emergent definition of the genre, the epic also witnesses a commitment to comprehensive structure. This double demand of historical truth and epic design—"a dog of a task" ("chien de metier") — emerges as the burden of his revived project in the opening lines of the new cantos. Here he invokes the muses of Clio and Calliope, historical truth and epic structure, setting their rival claims in the form of a farcical shouting match: These fragments you have shelved (shored). 'Slut!' 'Bitch!' Truth and Calliope Slanging each other sous les lauriers (C, 28)

Echoing the penultimate line of The Waste Land, then proceeding to do these muses in a different voice, Pound reveals an affinity not only with Eliot's technique of vocal collage, but with the attitudes already seen to attend his reception of the poem. The image of a poet shoring fragments into a bulwark against chaos — tentative, inconclusive ("shelved") as its struc-


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ture may be—points up the value of overarching form that Pound records in his contemporary correspondence (he will need to write eight more cantos before he cuts the gyrelike shape into time). The immanent design of the poem, already present as value and intention in the opening words, reveals its purpose and effect in the imminent lines: it overlooks the sport of anarchic voice that follows. Here a low demotic lingo bounces off the laureate diction of the final phrase, a high epic reference pumped up further by the tony French. Yet Pound do this Dadaist show of different voices from an aerial vantage, the formalist standard he invokes in the first line, where he aligns it equally with Eliot's influence and the model of the Tempio. These formalist values are strikingly visible when the poem appears in A Draft of XVI. Cantos (figure 13), where the inscriptional head-lettering mimics the architectural motifs of the Tempio and presides forcefully over the vocal sport erupting on the page beneath. (That Pound intended this contrast seems clear, for the young painter he selected as his designer, Henry Strater, showed him but a single visual signature: his taut line, the static solidity of his classicizing forms, are worked perfectly into this monumental calligraphy.11) From this formalist high ground Pound sees history for the rigmarole it is and, in key with Eliot, deploys it in the turbulent speech, the slangy vitriol, of his own age, which gives words to his muse of history. Etymologically, after all, Clio means "to tell." Contemporary speech is itself timeful, heavy with its own moment of history, and it provides the language, a whole dramatic medium, for his Clio. Thus the historical dimension of the poem comprises but exceeds the recorded deeds of past and present; it includes the language of Now — in the mouth — overheard with the same kind of creative antipathy (Slut! Bitch!) that he has found in Eliot's poem. Pound reaffirms his Clio's connection with modern idiom in her next appearance. She barges into the text of Canto XIX as Cleo, barking contemporary slang in accents as demotically garbled as the voice of Eliot's polis — heard at the window, through the door, all over the phone: And the slick guy looked out of the window, And in came the street 'Lemme-at-'em' like a bull-dog in a mackintosh. O my Clio! Then the telephone didn't work for a week. (C, 85)

Tied to this dog of an idiom, Pound has indeed taken on "a dog of a task." He has sought to realize an orderly scheme for an epic including the random irregularities of history, which include first of all the language history has given him —the vulgate sounding its doggy yawp across these lines.

FIGURE 13. First page for Canto VIII of A Draft of XVI. Cantos (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925), 27. Henry Strater, artist, and William Bird, publisher. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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The cartoons to which Pound reduces the vernacular poetic suggest forcibly that his use of the parole represents no simple, good-faith expression of timely words. His is not simply the old tale of the tribe newly told. It is tempting to draw an oral-formulaic analogy for his major initiatives: his talky incorporation of documentary texts recalls the reciting and recycling of formulas by the bards of epos.12 Yet this critical notion, too close to the uncritical view of Pound as the bard of untroubled speech, simply fails to comprise the complexity of his project, the dilemma of his own moment in literary and political history, and the negative incentive that modern speech provides him. For the voice and episteme of the contemporary have been discredited. Faith in historical progress has been belied: the lesson is shaped, mutely but vividly, in the structure of the first sixteen cantos, where the ancient epos of Canto I returns as the bogus epic of XVI; where the heightened speech of Homeric adventure is retuned as the demotic, deformed idiom of contemporary misadventures—the Great War and the Russian Revolution (C, 70-75). A present-tense speaker is more likely to be problematic than expressive, and his presence is both subservient and antipathetic to the epic poet's form-making faculty, to which Pound gives pride of place in the first line of his revived project. When the manuscript draft of the passage on Malatesta's Tempio reaches published form in Canto VIII, Pound's early anxiety about random historical fact is resolved into the language he has now found as its timely equivalent: the current parole. These words may dance the tune of their own time, but only under the masterful shadow of the Tempio, reminding us of the higher design toward which the whole enterprise aspires. Thus he colloquializes the Italian chronicle that provides his source for the varied doings of the historical Malatesta, Who stole Pesaro in October (as Broglio says 'bestialmente'), Who stood with the Venetians in November, With the Milanese in December, Sold Milan in November, stole Milan in December Or something of that sort, Commanded the Milanese in the spring, The Venetians at midsummer, The Milanese in the autumn, And was Naples' ally in October, He, Sigismundo, templum aedificavit In Romagna, teeming with cattle thieves, with the game lost in mid-channel, And never quite lost till '50, and never quite lost till the end, in Romagna, So that Galeaz sold Pesaro 'to get pay for his cattle.' (C, 32)

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The formative tension here is pointed up in a letter of August 1922 to John Quinn: "If I find [Malatesta] was TOO bloody quiet and orderly," Pound reveals, "it will ruin the canto. Which needs a certain boisterousness and disorder to contrast with his constructive work." 13 In practice: out of the idiom that provides the subsistence language of this passage the Tempio is lifted into the numinous otherness of those Latin italics. This image of spatial form stands powerfully at odds with the caprice, the breeziness of Pound's own contemporary tongue — words as unstable as Malatesta himself, his career an embodiment of the vagaries of history. While this contrast reflects the rivalry of epic design and historic truth, its resolution in the passage achieves the synthesis made possible by Dada Eliot, who allows Pound to do the talk show of the parole from higher formalist values, which make the low sport of vocal history both conceptually possible and intellectually respectable. Pound's serious art can allow for the new virulence of voice, but only by compensating for it. Not only does he reduce idiom to a symptom, using it to display the fluid instability of history; he also absorbs the sounds of speech into a myth, a fictional narrative (the proximate model is The Waste Land) that leads him through the lower orders of noise toward his prime object of imaginative longing. The quester seeks an empyrean silence, a high outlook from which well-defined spatial forms provide the objects of desirous sight. This legend offers a new thematic pattern and an emergent dramatic structure in the Cantos. It will be repeated frequently through the next major gathering (A Draft of Cantos XVII-XXVII [1928]) after its first appearance in the last poem of the 1925 sequence, where it marks the consummation of developments started in this phase. Passing out of the clamorous hell of Cantos XIV and XV, where wartime London is presented as a pandemonium of voices, the poet-protagonist moves onto a purgatorial plain in XVI, filling out his own vision of the earthly paradise from its original in Purgatorio. The point to mark in this prospect is the stress Pound lays on silence — an emphasis more striking in view of the changes he had to make on his source in Dante. He has grafted his own scene of visionary, architectural quiet onto the aural sensorium of Purgatorio 29-31, a soundscape replete with the music of the spheres — alternately plangent, consoling, encouraging.14 When his imagination breaks clear of the infernal reaches in XVI, he tunes the acoustic splendors of his model utterly out of his account, showing all the more acutely his zeal for high optical definition and razor-sharp spatial form: Then light air, under saplings, the blue banded lake under aether, an oasis, the stones, the calm field, the grass quiet, and passing the tree of the bough


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The grey stone posts, and the stair of gray stone, the passage clean-squared in granite: descending, and I through this, and into the earth, patet terra, entered the quiet air the new sky, the light as after a sun-set, and by their fountains, the heroes, Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello, and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities. (C, 69; emphases added)

The aural dimension arrayed so resplendently in Dante's topos is taken over next, in Pound's imaginative rewriting, by the vocal characters of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, a reportage-in-talk: army slang and a thick, ethnically inflected English parole supplant the music of the spheres, retuning the poetic imagination to the realms of infernal history we have learned to hear in such speech (C, 70-75). Having removed acoustics from his theophany and reduced the sounds of speech to a demotic carnival, Pound asserts one salient aesthetic value in this ultimate landscape: spatial form. The allusion to Malatesta recalls the Tempio, its incandescent frame a memory to be gazed upon (with the other structures) in this aerial prospect. Invisibly, irresistibly, the Tempio crowns and focuses Pound's own accomplishment here: the containing shape of the first sixteen cantos (the design-intime identified earlier) is achieved in this final poem. The paradise limned at the heights of XVI represents more than a lofty Parnassian standard for art. Sigismundo Malatesta takes his place among the "founders" of "cities." As typified by the Tempio, this is an aesthetic civilization, a polis Pound has reached by doing the police on the different voices of his own youthful enthusiasm for poetic music. It is a city of art that offers an abode for the anti-art Dadaists no more unlikely than the company they have kept with Eliot — at least in Pound's own gradus ad Parnassum. His personal progress — and its political mythology—may engage us now.

The New Man In Canto XX, Pound humorously relates his 1908 meeting with Professor Levy, the renowned scholar of Provencal language and literature—that most formative influence on his early poetry. And so the comic scenes dilate into a tale of the growth of the poet's mind —a quest, an ascent, where the movement of Pound's senses to the top of this hillside prospect follows stages in his own poetic development:

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Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered, By the clear edge of the rocks The water runs, and the wind scented with pine And with hay-fields under sun-swath. Agostino, Jacopo, and Boccata. Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard. Sandro, and Boccata, and Jacopo Sellaio, The ranunculae, and almond, Boughs set in espalier, Duccio, Agostino; e I'olors— Hay new cut on hill slope, And the water there in the cut Between the two lower meadows; sound, The sound, as I have said, a nightingale Too far off to be heard. And the light falls, remir, From her breast to thighs.

(C, 90)

On the summit Pound keeps imaginative company with painters and sculptors: Duccio (Malatesta's artist), Jacopo, Boccato, Sandro. These men of plastic craft stand as obvious sponsors for Pound's own optical prosody, the new measure of visual discrimination (his old inventions, the intaglio and ideogrammic methods, are being renewed). Retelling his own development in terms of the medieval (Provencal) allegory of love, he moves to a virtual theophany in the flesh — the subject of an exclusively visual perception: "I gaze" (remir), he raptly affirms, asserting twice that "sound," the "sound, as I have said," is "too far off to be heard." The song of that nightingale summons the full splendor of Provencal poetry and, silent as it is, the whole problematic of Pound's relation to it now. Already in 1922 (in the letter to Schelling) he recognized that the musical licence of its convention—typified in its rhyming mimicry of bird song and indulged in his own early practices — could no longer be honored (see n. 7). Professor Levy has appeared indeed as the anchorite of an outdated muse. Here the story of Pound's personal development intersects with antique myth, one that presents bird song as a radical language of poetry, prime type of Edenic speech. This legend tells how Adam conversed with birds in words, like music, that had not fallen apart into sound and referent, a meaning attached merely arbitrarily. As an expressive (not denotative) vocabulary, bird song enjoyed an absolute identity of sense and sensation. This is the birds' "most learned original," in the depiction of Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House, where it is heard to utter the words of "Natures mystick


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Book."15 So appealing is this prospect of paradisal speech, it seems, that its silencing must account for the emotional twilight of Canto XX. Yet Pound expresses more here than a wan longing for prelapsarian song. Sounds that can only be "imagined" or "remembered" recall the critical dicta of his 1918 essay on Gourmont, where he assigns the acoustics of words to this secondary level of intensity. Renewing these values in the mythic frame of the 1927 canto, Pound repeats his challenge to the critical myth that presents him as the triumphant poet of vocal music. For if the loss represented by "Adam's Curse" makes Yeats labor to sound beautiful, it shows Pound, in line with the developments followed earlier, struggling against the very sensuous potential of language, its acoustic flesh. It is no accident that his first climb to empyrean silence (XVI) occurs on the plains of Purgatorio, where it stands indeed as a quasi-religious struggle, a nearly gnostic purging of the soma. "The New Man": in 1917 the German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck aligned the figure of his title with a quest that parallels Pound's own purgatorial climb. "We have heard too much of the dialogues of the dead," Huelsenbeck protests; "our ear has received too much that is artificial, and we run now the risk of losing our inner self. . . . [S]ilence must rise, the ear must ready itself for the orphic of most sacred nights. . . . The new man stretches wide the wings of his soul, he orients his inner ear toward things to come."16 Pound knew little of Berlin Dada, critics seem to agree, but the spring 1924 issue of Little Review—still bearing Pound's name on the masthead — carries work by Huelsenbeck and Arp (and Tzara). And the ascent mythologized in "Der Neue Mensch" is a fiction shared — in Pound's own perception—across the international front of the movement. Writing about the Parisian Francis Picabia, whom he cites as "the dynamic of Dada," Pound hails this painter's primary strength as one of "nettoyage" (cleansing, emptying). These purgative powers rhyme with Huelsenbeck's, with the ascetic drive in the climb of his new man. This askesis matches the plot of the Divine Comedy, Pound points out in his essay on Picabia, where he also suggests its relevance to the process and goal of his own quest. For the objects of sight he describes at the height of the Dadaist's Dante-like ascent match those he will envision at the summits of Cantos XVI and XX—the finer forms of geometrical abstraction, lined with the silence of an ultrashapely, incandescent, visionary sculpture: "In his beautiful and clear pictures . . . [t]here is a very clear exteriorization of Picabia's mental activity; of a mental sensitivity of a kind, let us say, which distinguished Dante's discrimination of the qualities of brightness in the Paradiso from the thicker emotional qualities of the Inferno; the kind of sensibility which has led idiots to complain of Dante's romance with an 'isosceles triangle.' I am not in the least comparing Picabia and Dante as literature, or perhaps I am. . . ."17 Equipped with remarkably strong "intellectual lungs," Pound's Picabia has moved "amid the unfurnished altitudes of negation,"18 plying the high road of the via negativa to arrive at the finer heights of aesthetic perfection, a visual-intellectual pleroma.

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What Huelsenbeck's narrative adds to the tale Pound tells in the cantos and the homage to Picabia is the suggestion — and problem — raised by its last words: "The New Man . . . orients his inner ear toward things to come." A public apocalypse seems to follow on the private (adamantly silent) revelation. Berlin Dada professed inclinations more explicitly political than those declared in its other capitals, neutral Zurich most notably, yet the stress it laid on social consequences rivals its more strident emphasis on radical individuality and, as corollary, the kind of private aesthetic experience into which Huelsenbeck and Pound ascend. These apparently opposite goals attended Dada as an original ambivalence, a productive difficulty. Clearly the avant-garde forms one flank of social reform, an advance guard that left normal partisan interests toiling far behind. Rising up in response to the provocations of the Great War, its attempt to blast the verbal icons of the old order owned a millennial energy as well. Yet this claim remained ostensibly at odds with the values of subjective mental experience, which were redoubled by Huelsenbeck and Picabia, whose "mental activity" and "mental sensitivity" appealed most to Pound. The issues framed by Dadaism reveal the complexity of Pound's political aesthetic and, ultimately, the values into which these problems are resolved. Pound's preference for the private "sensibility" goes unrealized in his most identifiably Dadaist artifact—the prankish "Kongo Roux" (Kangaroo, Red Congo), which he composed for the July 1921 issue of 391.19 Here he proclaims a Utopian city in language that indulges the linguistic license of Dada at its most characteristic and intense. The piece does suggest how the energies of verbal deconstruction could flow into civil reconstruction; the interlingual punning catches up the theme of Kongo Roux as international city. Yet the connection between this new political order and the private aesthetic ordo of Pound's new man is not established. Just as Joyce assigned the multitongued resources of his own work in progress to the authorship of "you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table,"20 so Pound merges his own perspective into the corporate mind. The play with language qua language — our collective possession—extends the antipsychologist strain in Dadaism and shifts its making — and our response to it —away from the finer kind of private aesthetic delectation that Pound esteems as Picabia's achievement and claims at the height of his own ascent and quest. This absence presents a genuine problem in Pound's political negotiations. For his contemporary remarks insist that the root of regeneration in postwar Europe lies not in a corporate inheritance already possessed (la langue), but in words wrought more finely by the individual artist. "If not enough good will to release ONE proved writer," he emphasizes in his 1922 scheme (Belle Esprit) to support deserving clercs, then "how do they expect to regenerate Europe?"21 This new civil State emanates from the capital of the single artistic sensibility — a point Pound will not leave to uppercase typography alone. In his July 1922 letter to Schelling he rewrites Shelley: "All values ultimately


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come from our judicial sentences. (This arrogance is not mine but Shelley's, and it is absolutely true. Humanity is malleable mud, and the arts set the moulds it is later cast into . . .)" (Letters, 181). "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World," asserted Shelley, whose bards receive their muse and transmit its beneficent effects in ways unknown even to themselves.22 Pound's writer, however, prescribes ideal social formations and behavior as a function of conscious craft; as the extension of a heavily deliberated—"judicial"—will to verbal order. The difference between the romantic's inspirational muse and the modernist's technical conscience corresponds to the distinction between an impersonal, corporate experience of art —"unacknowledged" also means "anonymous" — and a highly privatized one. It shows Pound's greater emphasis on personal control and artistic individuality, in effect, on the exercise of the special aesthetic sensibility he has labored to attain. The problem is clear: how may this new man of privately heightened awareness — the hero of Pound's quest for a purer, superior perception of art — participate in the Utopian motives of Dada? The climb in Canto XX may lead Pound back into political history, I will suggest, but only in terms of the paradox Huelsenbeck frames (and resolves): the new man's point of social engagement is the superior sensibility into which he ascends. Other directions were available: the Zurich Dadaist Tzara responded in the early twenties to the Parisian Surrealists Eluard and Aragon and adopted their communist philosophy, merging the energies of the (universal) unconsciousness in a collectivist project. Yet the author of "Der Neue Mensch" shows how the radical emphasis (in early Dadaism) on individual sensibility resists involvement with a populist aesthetic. Endorsing the antidemocratic argument in Ortega's Revolt of the Masses,23 Huelsenbeck affirms the rights of the artist-subject in a way that strongly recalls the claims Ortega made for an aesthetic elite in The Dehwnanization of Art. "For me," the Dadaist apologia for individuality goes, "existence and the right of the personality were identical, and for this reason alone, I could never have become a Communist. The notion of the common people, much as I supported it, often took on the menacing physiognomy of the masses. In a word: I regarded existence as the survival of the creative individual in an age of bleak levelling."24 These individualist values emerge strikingly in Pound's own proclamation of the New Man motif—on a page of unpublished manuscript, where he is outlining major themes in Cantos XVII-XXX: "Formando di disio nuova persona" (Making out of desire the new person). The echoing allusion to Cavalcanti picks up the exact sense of the German Dadaist's Neue Mensch, for Pound asserts his heroic individuality against the leveling claims of the collective — on the same page: just under the Italian words he inscribes (an otherwise gnomic, impenetrable glyph) "one vs. city."25 The Italian phrasing looks beyond Cavalcanti to the actual promulgation of the theme in contemporary Italy (the manuscript dates from some time

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after 1925, when Pound settled in Rapallo). An ambivalence like the Dadaist's generic individual appears as well in the fascist ideology of the New Man, who is at once a corporate identity and a single, superior hero. "Fascism's rejection of the 'individualistic' or 'atomistic' conception of man central to the world view of classical liberalism," Zeev Sternhell observes, promotes "a view of man as an integral part of an organic whole"; yet this "unity finds its most perfect expression in the quasi-sacred figure of the leader."26 The collective identity yearns after a superior individual as embodiment of its own merit and prestige. In this way fascism enacts (and resolves) its own intellectual paradox—a philosophy of political elitism with a massbased legitimacy. Individual suprematism and corporate totality were inverse themes in the rhetorical culture of fascism, each one capable of being read backwards into the other. This doubleness is reflected most clearly in Pound's economics. His ideas reach back to his early involvement with Guild Socialism, as Tim Redman has convincingly shown, and thus sound populist, collectivist themes;27 yet his program maintains the usual fascist balance between socialist ends and dictatorial means, finding its thrust and intelligence in the ordaining leader. The major strain in Pound's own early apprehension of fascism is the appeal of the superior hero —II Duce. (The writing on Mussolini will be examined later.) This emphasis on heroic authority points back to several sources, the most obvious of which is L'uomo nuovo (The New Man). This early (1923) promotional biography of Mussolini was written by Antonio Beltramelli, a scholar who had examined the Malatesta dynasty and already helped to shape Pound's interest in Sigismundo. L'uomo nuovo influenced Pound, as Lawrence Rainey helpfully demonstrates, at a crucial moment in his development — during the composition of the Malatesta cantos. For Beltramelli identified Mussolini's true counterpart and forerunner as the early Renaissance condottiere. Just as the culture of the individual Renaissance city hinged on the will and benefice of its one patron and defender, so, in Beltramelli's — and Pound's—view, the new cultural and political order of fascism was inseparable from the force of Mussolini's own personality.28 Yet this stress on individual suprematism can be followed still further back — to attitudes Pound shares with the original myth of the New Man, as recited and interpreted by Huelsenbeck. Those individualist, elitist values inform and account for Pound's tale of himself as new man — his immersion in his own poetic development: his movement from the Edenic music of youth to the harder prosody of visual discrimination. This story is repeated frequently in A Draft of Cantos XVII-XXVII (1928).29 To follow its varied articulations in the new sequence is to watch Pound move toward a position of political privilege and to measure the intensity of personal energy leading him there, beginning in the first poem of the new sequence.


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Canto XVII repeats the movement from a musical demi-Eden to the shapely silence of formal vision three times. It begins amid a natural abundance of sound, a fertility rite of "Zagreus! Io Zagreus" And the bees weighted with pollen Move heavily in the vine-shoots: chirr-chirr-chir-rikk — a purring sound (C, 76)

but lifts gradually to a purely visual prospect, where the separation between the perceiver and the plane of sight coincides with a high degree of discrimination within the scene. The focus settles on the cave of Nerea, where the repeated imagery of the seashell serves not only to frame an archetypal figure of the artifact but, in view of its obvious association with the sound of the sea, to make more striking the emphases here on the absolute silence of this artwork: Cave of Nerea, she like a great shell curved, And the boat drawn without sound, Without odour of ship-work, Nor bird-cry, nor any noise of wave moving, Nor splash of porpoise, nor any noise of wave moving, Within her cave, Nerea, she like a great shell curved (C, 76; emphases added)

Certainly an incantatory quality attends the repetition of these formulaic constructions, yet the audibility of these verses is muffled by the silence Pound writes into the atmospheric fiction. The pressure of quiet here bears the weight of Pound's myth of his own poetic development, as recorded in Canto XX: an ascent from a sensory paradise specializing in music to the more strenuous perfection of the eye. Correspondingly, the final sequence of XVII opens in the ideally integrated sensorium of a natural paradise — the grey eyed goddess Athena enjoys her dancers moving to "The sistrum, shaken, shaken" (C, 78) —yet shifts to another type of the purely visual artifact, which assimilates the order of silence imposed on the mirror image of Nerea's seashell: "And the white forest of marble, bent bough over bough, / The pleached arbour of stone" (C, 79). These organic metaphors reach back to an image of trees with "marble trunks" (C, 76) in the opening of the canto. Yet the formal order depicted here is no function of sound-heavy nature. It is the product of stratagems devised by a maker like Pound, who, to this precise point, works a verbal scheme into the scene. While "pleached" recalls

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"bleached," and as such invokes the possibility of a sun-whitened and waveshaped arbor of stone, it means, specifically and precisely, twisted, intertwined, interlaced. A common figure for artistic craft, it recalls the specific technique of poetic interlace, Pound's own practice of laying phrase against phrase in the cumulative, discontinuous prosody of optical cut-and-fit. These several emphases appear clearly in the canto's middle fiction. The poet leaves a natural paradise, the acoustic pleasance and fertility dance of "Zagreus, feeding his panthers, / . . . with them, choros nympharum" (C, 77), for a starker marble perfection. No look-alike arbor of natural rock, this is an artifact of stone, steel, and silver. Here "bough over bough" reverts to "ply over ply" and the poet, plying this well-known formula for the cutand-fit method of his own visual poetic, signals and celebrates its work in the concluding prospect. Having sought a transparency in words, he takes his place among "i vitrei" (the glassmakers), the "men of craft": ' There, in the forest of marble, ' the stone trees — out of water — ' the arbours of stone — ' marble leaf, over leaf, ' silver, steel over steel, ' silver beaks rising and crossing, ' prow set against prow, ' stone, ply over ply, ' the gilt beams flare of an evening' Borso, Carmagnola, the men of craft, i vitrei, Thither . . . (C, 78)

May the man of Pound's new visual craft stand also as the New Man of the Dadaist millennium? In order to enter history at the level of superior sight, Pound must first disengage himself from the tumult and the shouting of the times. Thus the tale of personal poetic development he tells in Canto XX merges its fiction with the basic motive of Huelsenbeck's myth, for the ascent angles Pound above and away from the pandemonium of history — from the precipitous speech of his own Clio. Here the records of the Este family, talked up to a pitch of loquacity no less mad and haphazard than the acts of these historical characters, generate a "jungle." The rites of musical fertility have merged into these vital sounds of history, Clio's timeful and talky register, which Pound, following the inner logic of his questing ascent, must transcend. Accordingly, the poem opens out from this noisy milieu onto a scene of superior, serenely stable Euclidean shapes — a "body eternal" that represents the "renewal" wrung out of such mad talk, out of the mouth of history's muse (the full sweep of this creative double measure requires an extended quotation):


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And came here, condit Atesten . . . 'Peace! Keep the peace, Borso.' And he said: Some bitch has sold us (that was Ganelon) 'They won't get another such ivory.' And he lay there on the round hill under the cedar A little to the left of the cut (Este speaking) By the side of the summit, and he said: 'I have broken the horn, bigod, I have Broke the best ivory, l'olofans.' And he said: 'Tan mare fustes!' pulling himself over the gravel, 'Bigod! that buggar is done for, 'They wont get another such ivory.' And they were there before the wall, Toro, las almenas, (Este, Nic Este speaking) Under the battlement (Epi purgo) peur de la hasle, And the King said: 'God what a woman! My God what a woman' said the King telo rigido. 'Sister!' says Ancures, "s your sister!' Alf left that town to Elvira, and Sancho wanted It from her, Toro and Zamora. 'Bloody Spaniard! Neestho, le'er go back . . . in the autumn.' 'Este, go' damn you.' between the walls, arras, Painted to look like arras. Jungle: Glaze green and red feathers, jungle, Basis of renewal, renewals; Rising over the soul, green virid, of the jungle, Lozenge of the pavement, clear shapes, Broken, disrupted, body eternal, Wilderness of renewals, confusion, Basis of renewals . . . (C, 91-92; Pound's ellipses)

Pound's individual privilege over history is reasserted as the passage continues, as he travels the path of his familiar personal ascent above the noisy roil of vitalist history. Here the acoustic surcharge of fertility rites to "Zoe, Marozea, Zothar" — sounding their curial cry "loud over the banners" (C, 92) —fades into the higher silence of sharply defined visual shapes. These stand as image and reward for the climb of the protagonist and narrator, the first-person subject of the Italian verb in Pound's opening allusion to Dante:

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cosi Elena vedi, In the sunlight, gate cut by the shadow; And then the faceted air: Floating. Below, sea churning shingle. (C, 92)

Helen's figure has been lifted a significant distance to occupy the place of honor in Pound's paean. In Dante's Inferno she sits in a black pandemonium, a place "mute of all light" and replete with the shrieks of the damned. (Pound's awareness that he has altered his source is revealed in a letter of April 1927 to his father [Letters, 210].) Her elevation into the diamondlike, pristine silence of the defining eye follows Pound's fiction of his own poetic development — from the superabundance of sound to the supernal quiet of intaglio design—yet the drastic nature of the change made on Dante weighs out the heavy burden of Pound's own tale of the self. Such individualist intensity helps to account for the theme of political elitism in Huelsenbeck's fabrication of the New Man myth, and Pound's version will also bring him to a place of advantage — a vantage conceived and exercised in terms of the current ideologie of the eye. Optical discrimination is a technical concept, which Pound variously exercises and addresses: discontinuity, a measure in prosody and a means of perception, is also an essential thematic principle. This theme has received the fervent attentions of Hulme, whose writing about necessary disjunctions in philosophical thought, most notably between the biological and historical and spiritual levels of existence, has been collected and published recently (1924) in Speculations.30 His scheme of hierarchical separations, based on the faculty of visual distinction, is repeated in the semidiscursive fiction of Canto XXI; in the escalating stages of the quest. Leaving "the voices of the procession" in a local Dionysian rite "below us" and "faint now," the imagination trades the musical milieu of earthbound life for a higher habitation — among the names of deities normally linked with the supernal powers of the eye, Phoebus Apollo and Pallas Athena. The "discontinuous gods" Pound appeals to here are the "brilliant discontinuous gods" in an earlier manuscript draft of the passage.31 Thus he returns the Hulmean motif of philosophical discontinuity—a discretely tiered echelon of realities and values—to the luminous divisions of the eye, which lines this prospect with finely drawn forms: Phoibos, turns eburnea, ivory against cobalt, And the boughs cut on the air, The leaves cut on the air, The hounds on the green slope by the hill, water still black in the shadow.


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In the crisp air,

the discontinuous gods; Pallas, young owl in the cup of her hand, And, by night, the stag runs, and the leopard, Owl-eye amid pine boughs. (C, 99)

In "the crisp air" of these arctic altitudes, individual entities assume a radical clarity, a definition as exact as that owlet's tiny eye. Severance like this, Gourmont and Benda and Pound agree with Hulme, is the elite function of human sight. Thus the panopticon Pound crafts into this passage — cutting the forward movement of syntax and filling out a phrasal array of discretely visible figures; repeating the word "cut" like a directive; featuring a high degree of definition in the objects depicted — stands as evidence of his own capacity for godlike sights in verse. This suprematism extends its political claim in a final example of the quest, in Canto XX, which moves to conclusion by climbing out of an infernal pandemonium (this canto has already twice traveled the path of ascent). The sounds of a waterfall at the bottom —"hah hah ahah thmm, thunb, ah / woh won araha thumm, bhaaa" —blend with the words intoned, "Voce profondo" (C, 93), by the lotus-eaters. The background sound of the cataract lends its echo to characterize their speech, suggesting its densely sensuous medium and indicating as well the incipient nonsense of their tasted and savored vocables. Their indolence reveals its aural proclivity clearly when, protesting the rigors of the Odyssean quest, they complain most bitterly about that mariner's depriving his men the joys of music (stuffing their ears against the sirens' song). Following the Odyssean likeness for the quest of the Cantos, Pound heads for his local destination, at the end of XX, by tamping the ears of his muse. Escalating to a scene of silence equally selfconscious and visionary, he presents the figures of Malatesta's son and mistress in epic perspective. He situates them as conquerors in a Roman triumphus that approaches the reader silently, "without creak" of chariot—the prospect a kind of pantomime on massive scale, its details impending vividly in each of these integral, thirty-nine lines: And from the plain whence the water-shoot, Across, back, to the right, the roads, a way in the grass, The Khan's hunting leopard, the young Salustio And Ixotta; the suave turf Ac ferae familiares, and the cars slowly, And the panthers, soft-footed. Plain, as the plain of Somnus, the heavy cars, as a triumph, Gilded, heavy on wheel, and the panthers chained to the cars,

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Over suave turf, the form wrapped, Rose, crimson, deep crimson, And, in the blue dusk, a colour as of rust in the sunlight, Out of white cloud, moving over the plain, Head in arm's curve, reclining; The road, back and away, till cut along the face of the rock, And the cliff folds in like a curtain, The road cut in under the rock Square groove in the cliffs face, as chiostri, The columns crystal, with peacocks cut in the capitals, The soft pad of beasts dragging the cars; Cars, slow, without creak, And at windows in inner roadside: le donne e i cavalieri smooth face under hennin, The sleeves embroidered with flowers, Great thistle of gold, or an amaranth, Acorns of gold, or of scarlet, Cramoisi and diaspre slashed white into velvet; Crystal columns, acanthus, sirens in the pillar heads; And at last, between gilded barocco, Two columns coiled and fluted, Vanoka, leaning half naked, waste hall there behind her. 'Peace! Borso . . . , Borso!' (C, 94-95)

The crescent, huddled shape in the car of Pound's triumphus looks back to the figure placed at the head of the procession in Shelley's "Triumph of Life"— the shell of the new moon crouching beneath a hood and double cape. Around that character "fierce song and maniac dance"32 recall the tumult clustering around the Roman event, but such sounds are notably absent in Pound's poem, which reduces those voices to a comic memory, the peripeteia of the surprise yelp in the antic finale. The grip of imperial quiet in these imagined environs registers the pressure of a visual aesthetic, and the eye enjoys a prominence as solitary as the conquerors it features. This modern ideologue celebrates the authority of the eye, in particular its discriminating function, in the lively design of an aesthetic scheme that signals its power: proximate vision, as analyzed by Ortega. Here the detachment of the frontal object from the background plane establishes a visual hierarchy and endorses not only the perceptual supremacy of the eye, but an analogously graded social structure: as in medieval iconography, where the foregrounded figure of the king asserts his primacy against the undistinguished dark, the visual plebs. Adapting this format to his own literary


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medium, Pound heightens the forward presence of his triumphal figures as he shifts the backdrop into dark recess: "the plain of Somnus," the backward abysm of sleep, serves to define, in high relief, the featured, frontal, premier figures of Pound's own dream time. Similar acts of optical separation are worked into the imagery and prosody. Lacking a single verb, these thirtynine verses dispense with the normal means of establishing linear movement and thus allow each line to enjoy its own shapely, vivid stasis. A tour de force, the passage professes the ideology of visual discrimination and the code of civil privilege with a commitment — technique is the test of a man's sincerity—that should have pleased Wyndham Lewis.

MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE ENEMY

In Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis turns the short chapter on Pound into a sustained commentary on the technical philosophy that has defined the main line of development in the first twenty-seven cantos: the principle of discontinuity, employed variously on the prosodic level—through the agglutinative method — and, on a larger scale of organization, in the juxtaposition of episodic radicals. Lewis focuses on its prosody, but this gives him no cause for praise: Now a kind of mock-bitter, sententious terseness characterizes most of Pound's semi-original verse. . . . The other, more fundamental "terseness" of Pound . . . gives [his verse] all a rather stupid ring. It is not, of course, the nature of metre chosen to which I am referring, but the melodramatic, chopped, "bitter" tone suggested by the abrupt clipping and stopping to which he is addicted. ... In his verse he is always "breaking off." And he "breaks off," indeed, as a rule, twice in every line. Cave of Nerea She like a great shell curved. And the boat drawn without sound Without odour of ship-work, Nor bird-cry, nor any noise of wave moving, Nor splash of porpoise, nor any noise of wave moving, Within her cave, Nerea, She like a great shell curved. This actually seems to belong to the repetitive hypnotic method of Miss Stein and Miss Loos. "She like a great shell curved," and the "any noise of wave moving," both repeated, are in any case swinburnian stage-properties. The whole passage with its abrupt sententious pauses is unpleasantly reminiscent of the second-rate actor. (TWM, 72-73)

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"Breaking off"—the principle of radical severance — operates widely and finely in Lewis's own prose art: the imagery of satiric caricature has its edges sharpened by an abruptly discontinuous syntax. He is in fact commenting here on lines that inscribe his own salient value of imaginative silence. Whereas Pound has attempted to subdue the incantatory quality of his verses with the quiet he writes into the atmosphere, thus maximizing the effects of his own visual prosody, Lewis refuses to note the designed effect, choosing to emphasize the dominance of the very trait Pound labors to make recessive. If Lewis misses — or refuses to admit — the affinity between his own stylistic signature and Pound's, the Enemy's pride of craft in his own art may simply blind him to its variant applications. Far from revealing an opposition between his practice and Pound's, the passage may offer the kind of misreading that attends too close a connection, an implicit yet willed insistence on the primacy of the originator. Always a meaner spirit when it came to literary relationships, Lewis seems imbued with the anxiety of having influence, while Pound not only recognizes the link, as we shall see, but exploits it. Documenting this connection will serve to alter the conventional understanding of their continuing relationship. Critics who see their commerce extending past the collapse of the 1914 Vortex usually describe it as a fading echo of that fabled moment and an elegy to its one day of fated exuberance. Timothy Materer and Reed Dasenbrock are both correct to note the diminishing strength of strict Vorticist principles,33 yet the artists interact on ground deeper and more extensive than that spot of time in English cultural history. The European background that accounts for their shared emphasis on visual severite and their mutual resistance to acoustic empathy provides for their continued exchange in the twenties and thirties. Pound's work of 1928 and 1929-Cantos XXVIII-XXX were written to round off the first comprehensive collection (A Draft of XXX Cantos [1930]) —ends his decade with a coda to which the Enemy offers the key. Cantos XXIX and XXX In view of the attack published on Pound in 1927, it is remarkable indeed that the poet could write soon afterward a panegyric that lifted Lewis's painting — out of the work of their generation — to signal prominence. The fact that he left such praise for his detractor wwpublished may represent the second thought of pride, but this diminishes neither the magnanimity nor the import of the initial gesture. The first motive of the piece is to reverse the decline into which Lewis's artistic career has fallen — a mistake of public judgment that Pound insists he was never in danger of committing: I observe with unspeakable disgust and a matured contempt for continental "criticism" or for the Parisian sense of responsibility that none of their series of brochures on modern painters contains a book on Lewis. . . . Any time from 1914 to '20 I was ready to do a book on Lewis and never found a publisher. My book on


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Gaudier was due to a series of calamities but its existence does not and did not indicate that I thought Lewis' work of less interest. ... I can say "Idiot!" to the people who missed the chance of getting Lewis' earlier work for next to nothing. The Red Duet and the second Timon series are now out of the market. Whatever England's best known art expert says publically, he has Lewis' work on the walls of the room he lives in. ... Lewis ranks with the best men of the time, not perhaps as a master[?] of paint, but as an inventor of form combinations.34

Pound proceeds to detail Lewis's continuing importance for him. The need to affirm a connection between his poetry and Lewis's painting drives the language of another passage through the usual obstacles — the customary opposition between static and temporal arts — into a terminology that accurately reflects his own reconciliation of these rival modes. The appreciation is no less discriminating than a poet's assimilation of a painterly way into words; it records derivation, with a difference: If I prefer Lewis' most abstract work to any other phase of his, it is possibly because I am not primarily interested in the arts of space. Working in time, by time, by the designing and combination of durations sometimes combined with the conventionalized sound combinations of language there are of necessity periods in which I am comparatively unaware of current developments in the spatial arts. (EPVA, 305)

Pound is not "primarily interested in the arts of space," but the "most abstract work" of Lewis — unlike the more recent, realistic portraiture — does indeed provide a formative analogue for his verse. Pound's own principle of abstract design, the "designing and combination of durations," outlines a method of unit-by-unit composition, which conforms to the principle of geometric construction in the earlier paintings of Lewis, who is esteemed chiefly as an "inventor of form combinations." Insisting that his poems work "in time, by time," Pound not only angles his deliberations in relation to the concerns of Time and Western Man; he also suggests the affinities his verse has earned with the philosophy of the Enemy. "The clock ticks and fades out," the poet of Canto V has boasted, describing his own way of accommodating and surmounting temporal sequence: the cut-and-fit prosody—here "the designing and combination of durations"—redresses the forward movement of verbal time in the contained moment, the local duree, of the integral line. These spatial principles diminish the import of musical temporality and sound effects, and this effort is signaled suggestively when Pound reduces his consideration of sound to a "conventionalized," indeed merely a "sometimes," element in the effort. These comments are written virtually concurrently with Cantos XXIX and XXX, and the poems enlarge upon the characteristic themes of Lewis in a semidiscursive way. The rhetorical fiction here features the metaphysics of

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love, the high ideals and weaknesses of desire, but the unifying concern of the two poems — and the summary vision he fits on these first thirty cantos — emerges in the imagery of a familiar Enemy topos. Pound features a critique of music as an affective art, one that promotes the much detested response of empathy; it fosters a demipolitical condition—the togetherness of egalitarian democracy, seen here in cartoons of its ritual, suburban intimacies: O-hon dit que-ke fois au vi'-a-ge . . . Past the house of the three retired clergymen Who were too cultured to keep their jobs. Languor has cried unto languor about the marshmallow-roast (Let us speak of the osmosis of persons) The wail of the phonograph has penetrated their marrow (Let us ... The wail of the pornograph. . . .) The cicadas continue uninterrupted. (C, 143; Pound's ellipses)

Just as music facilitates empathy—the wail of the phonograph penetrates the marrow, engaging the listeners' quick through the vital current of sound—so it generates a medium of fluid interchange between people: "the osmosis of persons." And the phonograph that serves as emblem and instrument of democratic togetherness through music rhymes, appropriately, with "pornograph": vulgarity marks the acoustic culture of the modern vulgus. The same quality attends the French vulgate at the opening of the passage, where the demotically garbled pronunciation presents a livid caricature of the oral culture of Demos: "it is sometimes said in the village." Pound confirms the central presence of Lewis in this canto, as he turns to his professed concern with amour, by reducing the appeal of love to an Enemy caricature. Here the woman appears as a medium of fluid sensation, a "submarine . . . biological process" (C, 145), and as such conducts the diffusions of physical sympathy. "Let us consider the osmosis of persons" (C, 145), Pound wryly observes on the attractions of love. "This is the voice of the ooze," he writes of these appeals in an unpublished draft of this canto, where the merely somatic sounds drag down "the light of the eye and the mind."35 Lewis-like, he is resisting the merger with the vocal mud —the "OOOOOze" of Eliot's voices abides as a resonant cartoon—with a heavily sublimated, highly idealized vision of male sexuality, depicted in XXIX in line with the higher function of visual severance and exact definition: The tower, ivory, the clear sky Ivory rigid in sunlight And the pale clear of the heaven Phoibos of narrow thighs,


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The cut cool of the air, Blossom cut on the wind, by Helios Lord of the Light's edge . . . (C, 145)

Lewis's influence pervades Canto XXX. Here Pound takes up the subject rhyme for physical sympathy — a lover's pity—and turns it against the spirit of his evident literary source, Chaucer's "Compleynt unto Pity." There the poet, rejected by his lady, makes a heavily allegorical plea for the pity that lies buried in her heart.36 The modern poet, disgusted by the machinations of empathy, reverses that request into a true complaint (uttered by Artemis). "Pity causeth the forests to fail," it opens, introducing the syntax and sentiment she repeats formulaically through the poem: Pity slayeth my nymphs, Pity spareth so many an evil thing. Pity befouleth April, All things are made foul in this season, This is the reason, none may seek purity Having for foulnesse pity And things growne awry (C, 147)

Having thus reversed Chaucer, Pound shows his true mentor here in the concluding allusion to Time and Western Man: Time is the evil. Evil. A day, and a day Walked the young Pedro baffled, a day and a day . . . (C, 147)

The experience of time as sheer sequence —"a day, and a day"—reduces it to a merely serial flow, and so to mindless sensation, which promotes those exchanges of physical sympathy—"the osmosis of persons"—that Pound, like Lewis, now complains about.37 He finds here the same disease the Enemy heard in the continuous, never-ending, sausage-links prose songs of Gertrude Stein, that anthem of democratic fellow feeling. Yet the formulaic measure of Pound's verse witnesses its typical affinity with the sung phrases of epos, a connection strengthened here by the patterning of internal, cross- and off-rhymes. The Enemy influence flows against Pound's native grain, and the friction generates the extraordinary double measure of this final poem — a musical verse that chastises the empathy it induces and thus chastens its

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somatic effect (the same kind of guarded, piquant sensuality is achieved in the Cave of Nerea passage). Out of contradiction great art. Yet Lewis's heckling of musical beauty represents a provocation sufficiently strong that Pound must address and accommodate it in his prose. Choosing Lewis In the essays and letters of l'entre deux guerres, Pound leaves a record of opinions on Lewis like the trace of a spoor planted early—as far back as Tarr. The history of these judgments shows the mounting prominence of that literary achievement and its growing influence on Pound. These affinities deepen, indeed, the further they move away from their Vorticist Vorzeit; the more securely Pound possesses Lewis's own (continental) ideologie. By 1928 (Childermass) Lewis already will have begun to question the premises of this aesthetic ideology; in 1930, in Apes of God, he presents these ideals chiefly in travesty. His literary failure leads him to impose his aesthetic principles more directly onto history, however, preceding and providing for his mistaken perception of Hitler —as he came to realize in the thirties. Of the two Lewises, Pound will choose the defiant ideologue over the chastened realist, thus defining the trajectory of his own enterprise over these years. In his 1918 essay on Tarr, Pound praises its eponymous hero in terms clearly reminiscent of the laudation he gave to the Vorticist paintings of 1913-14 ("a fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity"): "Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stupidities of the half-cultured latin quarter." Yet the Enemy's baleful mastery in prose still seems too dauntingly unconventional for Pound. While he extols Lewis's ability "to come to the hard definition" of word and visual surface, and admires "the handling, the vigour, even the violence, of the handling" of language, he also demurs: "Lewis ... is, in the actual writing, faulty. His expression is as bad as that of Meredith's floppy sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we have something active and 'disagreeable.'"38 The abrasive discontinuity of Tarr poses a stylistic problem for the poet who, in 1919, is still turning "the intaglio method" to use with more than a residual fear of its hubris. Far more jagged in character, the verbal surfaces of Apes of God draw far higher praise from Pound twelve years later —a mark of his strengthening affinity with the stylistic practices and technical ideology of the novelist. In January 1931 he not only accepts a language ripped into visible shreds —the twisted diction and contorted visages of Apes; he asserts the permanence of the achievement: "The colossal masks will remain with the fixed grins of colossi." Nothing here of the Enemy's own tendency to laugh at his own colossal failures; his achievement appears unqualified in Pound's eyes. Thus "THE APES" stands, for Pound, as "the only major manifestation we have had from north of the bleating channel for now nearly a decade." Moreover: "I prefer THE APES OF GOD to anything Mr. Joyce has


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written since Molly finished her Mollylogue with her ultimate affirmation."39 The implicit contest here between Lewis and Joyce reaches back into the troubled history of Pound's evolving response to Ulysses—a record of opinion complicated by Lewis's own growing influence on him. In Time and Western Man, the Enemy heard Joyce sounding out the same habits and faults he found in Gertrude Stein's monologues, those anthems of vocal sensation and democratic togetherness. While Lewis's views did not appear until some time after the novel was published in 1922, the Enemy position was already advancing, in the same year, on the pages of The Waste Land, where Pound could hear an equally sardonic analysis of voice. That annus mirabilis of literary modernism has of course encouraged subsequent legend to stress a single energy of artistic invention among its major figures, yet the difference between Joyce and Eliot on the point of dramatic voice cannot be gainsaid. For the Irishman do the polis, the American the police, in significantly different voices: the generosity of Joyce's complicity (even in satire) with his civitas of speakers contrasts markedly with the pinched, puritan severity of Eliot's sardonic patrol of the parole. Their difference represents the distance Pound himself has traveled between older and newer vocal dispensations. The history of his commentary on Ulysses testifies best to that transit, where, in effect, he follows the advance example of Eliot's practice into explicit agreement with Lewis's later critique—but with a struggle that marks the importance of this development. In his May 1922 review of Ulysses Pound notes approvingly that "Joyce speaks if not with the tongue of angels, at least with a many-tongued and multiple language, of small boys, of street preachers, of genteel and ungenteel, of bowsers and undertakers, of Gertie McDowell and Mr. Deasey" (P/J, 196). Measuring the continued appeal of practices valued at the start of his career, above all the free and direct speech of Browning, the vocal poetic that Pound proclaims here also echoes a collectivist politics familiar from long ago —first heard in the 1908 poem to Browning. To express this social philosophy now, he has taken a page from the book Mikhail Bakhtin will write in the thirties (to the letter if not the spirit of Revenge for Love). Thus Pound's description of the creative milieu of Ulysses—that Bakhtinian hubbub—leads him to feature the same social meaning Bakhtin will attach to such a pluralist, polycentric rabble: its democratic meaning is summed up in Leopold Bloom, who sums up the varied speakers of the novel, as a kind of everyman-in-voice: "Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the man in the street, the next man, the public, not our public but Mr. Wells' public ... he is I'homme moyen sensuel" (P/J, 194).40 While Pound sometimes celebrates the wild heteroglossia of common speech in Ulysses, he is clearly uneasy with the unqualified freedom of a speaking muse. The strategy of managing talk from a high formalist perspective—the Eliot-like plan of the new cantos of 1922 — is thus imputed to Joyce,41 as Pound insists that the art of the vernacular in Ulysses is curative,

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indeed redemptive. Pound's novelist addresses and improves the materials of speech through a Flaubertian conciseness, correcting the inaccuracy of the lingua franca by subduing it to the higher functions of "literature" — a word (litera, "letter") and activity whose values escalate in proportion to the distance Pound's sculptural, inscriptional, and intaglio metaphors place between it and speech. Thus "the public utility of accurate language," Pound claims, "can be attained only from literature,'" and the novelist's "mot juste is of public utility. . . . We are governed by words, the laws are graven words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate. The specimen of fungus given in my February letter shows what happens to language when it gets into the hands of illiterate specialists" (P/J, 200; emphases added).42 Joyce's novel underwrites the ideal of a higher clerisy of literati, wordsmiths who purify the dialect through a specifically written language. Yet the verbal asceticism Pound ascribes to Ulysses comports oddly indeed — Stephen's scholasticism notwithstanding—with its Rabelaisian excesses of spoken language. In effect, Pound has attributed an Eliot-like abstemiousness of speech, an imagination's Latin, to the vocal jocundissima of Ulysses. In doing so he posits the values that drive his own poetic development through the twenties —first, as already seen, in the poetic practice of this decade; ultimately, in the critical awareness he shares with the Enemy in the thirties. A piece Pound writes in early 1933 advances Lewis's critical judgments on Ulysses—at first tentatively, obliquely. Opening with the strategic concession, exhibiting the rhetorical gesture of the changing viewpoint, the author of formerly favorable opinions responds to Lewis by asking that Joyce's experimental artistry be judged less on its own merit than in the perspective of literary history, in view of the later art it makes possible: "Mr. Wyndham Lewis' specific criticism of Ulysses can now be published. It was made in 1922 or '23. 'Ungh!' he grunted, 'He [Joyce] don't seem to have any very new point of view about anything.' Such things are a matter of degree. There is a time for a man to experiment with his medium. When he has a mastery of it; or when he has developed it, and extended it, he or a successor can apply it" (P/J, 251). Pound's later remarks on Ulysses (below) will turn this appeal to literary history against Joyce, representing the work not as a fresh start but a dead end, and the very same essay—the next paragraph—sheds the delicately hypothetical character of objection and moves into closer agreement with Lewis's own condemnation of the book: "Ulysses is a summary of pre-war Europe, the blackness and mess and muddle of a 'civilization' led by disguised forces and a bought press, the general sloppiness, the plight of the individual intelligence in that mess! Bloom very much is the mess" (P/J, 251). Twelve years earlier (April 1921), Pound had labeled the voice-over artistry in the "Circe" episode "megaloscrumptious" (Letters, 166), but this emblem and instrument of vocal sensuality is now the object of most virulent rebuke: Bloom stands as a resonant center of a vast cultural malaise. Both


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the focus and the judgment reflect Lewis's: Bloom is the Enemy's bete noire, and his murmuring, mouth-filling monologue presents l'homme moyen sensuel at his democratic worst. It seems to have required the extravagantly orchestrated vocality of Joyce's work in progress to open Pound's ears fully to the worst susceptibilities of the oral artistry he had praised in Ulysses. On examination, however, the 1922 review has shown the poet imposing a more austere ideal on the language of the novel than it invited—thus marking the influence of Eliot's own asceticism of speech in The Waste Land. The aural skepticism has been reinforced in the interim by the critique of Joyce in Time and Western Man. In work in progress, then, Pound can hear Joyce increasingly, Lewis-wise, as a kind of Irish Stein specializing in the lower order of musical time. In a 1934 article he asserts that "Joyce's mind has been deprived of Joyce's eyesight for too long. ... He has sat within the grove of his thought, he has mumbled things to himself, he has heard his voice on the phonograph and thought of sound, sound, mumble, murmur" (P/J, 256). The repetition of "sound, sound" chimes with the twin vocables of "mur-mur"; the two nonsense morphemes provide the word's root meaning: double nothing. Thus the densely acoustic medium that is Bloom's own is associated with "the plight of the individual intelligence," the "mess" of himself echoing through contemporary civilization—in sharp contrast to the visual intelligence of the Vorticist hero Tarr, baffled and shut in by (yet valiantly at odds with) circumjacent stupidities. This Enemy perspective is expanded and directed backwards into Joyce's earlier work in a letter to Lewis of two years later. Here Pound aims his critique of musical flow not just at the river of verbal music that work in progress has become, and that he calls elsewhere "that diarrhoea of consciousness,"43 but on its technical precedents. The stream of consciousness and its vehicle, the internal monologue, are reduced, as in Time and Western Man, to the indeterminate flow of the Stein-stutter: "This flow of conSquishousness Gertie/Jimmie stuff has about FLOWED long enuff." 44 Aligning Stein and Joyce in a letter of January 1936 to James Laughlin, Pound puts them on a piece of common ground staked out by Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. The oddity of that company resolves itself when one recognizes that the shared susceptibility of these several artists (it is the later, liturgical Eliot) is the sensuous voice, cartooned here in the jokingly retitled "Murder in the Cafedrawl": "Waal, I heerd Murder in the Cafedrawl on the radio lass' night. Oh them cawkney woices, My Krissz, them cawkney woices. Mzzr Shakzpeer still retains his posishun. I stuck it fer a while, wot wiff the weepin and wailin. And Mr. Joyce the greatest forcemeat since Gertie. And wot iz bekum of Wyndham!" (Letters, 277). Repeating Lewis's own "sausagelinks" image in this "forcemeat" figure for Stein's endlessly reiterated incantations, Pound signals — with the open invocation at the end of the passage — that the Enemy's critical intelligence provides the perspective here.

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Pound's subsequent commentary raises Apes of God into signal prominence (with the oddly acclaimed Eimi of Cummings) among the novels written in the decades following Ulysses. The issue on which he temporizes, reversing and revealing himself interestingly, concerns the formative role of Joyce's work in literary history. In a 1941 radio eulogy for the recently deceased writer, he follows the decorum of the occasion; he can claim the nurturing function of Joyce's novel, however, only as a concession: "Even Ulysses can be considered the first trilogy of live books, that is the series Ulysses, cummings' EIMI, and Lewis' Apes of God. This is a healthier way of reading Ulysses than that of considering it the END of double decked stories, however much it be truly the tomb and muniment of a rotten era portrayed with the pen of a master."45 In the unbound occasion of nearly contemporary remarks, however, he circumscribes the achievement of Ulysses more severely, asserting that Mr. Lewis made the BOUNDARY line, DEFINED the limit of Mr. J's Ulysses. (I said HUSH, at the time) I said wait till they see it. After the tree has grown you can begin prunin the branches. Well old Wyndham grumped: as follows, he said about J's Ulysses: 'Don't seem (meaning Mr. Joyce doesn't seem) to have a very NEW point of view about anything . . .' That was Ulysses LIMIT, it painted a dying world, whereof some parts are eternal.46

The sense of an ending that Pound feels in Ulysses is double and, as such, allows for considerable ambivalence in judgment: does the novel present the end of a historical society, or does it represent the dead end of its own technical and imaginative methods? On one hand Ulysses portrays a corrupt and dying world, and it strikes Pound at times as an immortal feat for doing so. It seems equally clear, on the other hand, that the techniques Joyce uses — internal and dramatic monologue preeminently — are so intimate with this decadence that the whole oeuvre must represent a splendidly decorated cul-de-sac. That Wyndham Lewis defined its limit is also the mark of the new beginning his own hypervisual work entailed, a distinction supported suggestively by remarks penned to him by Pound ten years later: "Shd/ think Joyce's mind was formed in Dublin / unlikely to hv/ been influenced by Dung [Carl Jung] when so far thru Ulyss / Did J/ ever read any Whitehead/? Did yu evr hear him mention anyone but Dujardins, Vico, Svevo and Mr. Dooley? not that it matters a dam / Book had to be PUT over, fer practical reason / but cert / I sd / it was an END not a start / P. S. U. After that FINISH // period of rot, p. t. c."47 (emphases added). Here Pound represents Joyce as an artist too intellectually impoverished to start anything, let alone to stimulate creative work by Lewis, who, as a critic, had already defined the limitations of his would-be master.


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It is certainly possible to hear in Lewis's attack on Ulysses a defensive denial of Joyce's influence on his own fiction. In the second halves of Childermass and Apes of God, after all, the failure of his visual aesthetic coincides with a mimicking of Joyce's voices (the fantastical descriptions in these novels resemble, in particular, the scene settings in the "Circe" chapter). Half parody, half appropriation, the Enemy's characters-in-voice sound increasingly like desperate attempts—they lack both the control and the humor of Joyce's—to infuse his own failing novels with the vocal energy of Ulysses. His critiques of Joyce's work may well evidence a strategy of compensation, one that Pound all the more tellingly fails to detect. When his 1950 remark is fit into the thirty-year record of commentary of which it is part, we may affirm what his work on the cantos of the twenties has already shown: it is not Joyce but the defiant Lewis, extending the attitudes of Eliot's The Waste Land, who has provided the main artistic and philosophical company in the poet's own P(ost) S(criptum) U(lysses) career. Pound marks that abiding presence, finally and decisively, in a series of five letters (mostly unpublished) he wrote to Lewis in the early fifties on The Hitler Cult, which he received only after the war and proceeded to annotate with a seriatim, page-by-page commentary. This correspondence offers an apologia for Italian fascism, Mussolini above all, at the expense of Hitler's nazism, a phenomenon in which Pound had never found much interest or value (beyond the fact that Hitler, in Pound's eyes, had been "discovered" by Lewis). Predictably, he takes grim delight in the Enemy's critique of a historical force that Pound sees now as the cause of Il Duce's undoing. At the same time, Lewis's analyses in The Hitler Cult represented the Enemy's critical intelligence at its best, in his severe expose of the musical fallacy in modern mass society — heard most disturbingly at Nuremberg. Accordingly, Pound isolates this aspect of Lewis's sensibility for praise, framing the Nuremberg episode as the logical consummation, the proper termination, of a "Damn good bk/ but you cd/ cut the last three items, from p. 229 [the Nuremberg material ends on p. 228]/ 2 chapters and conclusion."48 The enthusiasm for Lewis's report runs true to the main line of Enemy influence we have marked so far in Pound's work of l'entre deux guerres—that is, as a mainly negative strength, a sardonic auditing of the musical follies in demotic politics. How the poet will have continued to idealize fascist authority, maintaining Mussolini in the bright outlines of the visual ideologie Lewis has had to recant, may be studied next. STATES OF EXCESS

By the late twenties Pound was settled in Rapallo, and he turned to discursive writing on an ambitious scale. Ranging between economic and literary polemic, including political and musical commentary, the intellectual scope of

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these works equals the reach of Lewis's own Man of the World, the separate volumes of which began to appear in 1926. The several lines of inquiry that Pound pursues also appear as well coordinated as the varied strands in the Enemy's oeuvre. His poetic values help to develop and support economic points. The writing on music draws its critical vocabulary from the visual arts, which serve in turn to reveal the social meanings of the acoustic experience. Accordingly, the political significance of Mussolini emerges in images and tropes that express a fundamentally aesthetic perception of the figure. The resemblance to Lewis extends through the interdisciplinary character of the work to the specific artistic values that inform its controlling consciousness. These are the aesthetic preferences to which A Draft of XXX Cantos has already been seen to attain — a technical philosophy that affirms the Enemy's own (French) ideology. Yet the primacy of the eye in literary and political values also presents the problem of its own hypertrophy. This sensual ideologie reveals itself most tellingly in the excesses it displays —and, as in Lewis's case, in the author's way of negotiating these extremes. Reading Binding several threads in Pound's discursive writing is an intellectual discipline which, single in principle, finds manifold applications: exact definition. This exercise offers a standard for literary usage, a model for stable economic valuation, and a means of controlling the verbal concepts that may circulate in the public discourse. Understandably, this nexus has drawn considerable critical attention, in particular the interests of deconstructionists like Andrew Parker, who skillfully extends Derridean axioms, arguing that Pound's quest for le mot juste (and the just price) begins as a campaign against textuality. Here the separation between the printed word and its speaker —its original intent —opens a zone of semantic free play, a fissure in which multiple meanings proliferate (like a usurious hypervaluation of money), whereas the Word spoken creates the feeling of indivisible verbal presence.49 Intricate, internally consistent as this critical model may be, it ignores the relevance of Lewis in the development of Pound's aesthetic. Pound extends an Enemy premise in How to Read (1928), recovering the page as the correct center of verbal attention. He returns the perception of precise meaning to original ocular skills — teaching us how to read. He diminishes the problem of optical immediacy in lexical counters (an issue that Lewis also forcefully resolved) by asserting the absolute presence of the poetic image (the product of phanopoeia): "In Rimbaud the image stands clean, unencumbered by non-functioning words; to get anything like this directness of presentation one must go back to Catullus . . .";50 "Rimbaud brought back to phanopoeia its clarity and directness" (HR, 41); "In phanopoeia we find the greatest drive toward utter precision of word; this art exists almost exclusively by it" (HR, 27). Moving further in this direction, he disqualifies the acoustic word from the privilege ascribed to it by Derrideans.


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The exact, integral sense of the word is occluded —he is thinking exactly like Lewis —by the phonetic sensation: "In melopoeia we find a contrary current, a force tending often to lull, or to distract the reader from the exact sense of the language" (HR, 28). The point is repeated with categorical venom in an unpublished letter of 1933 to F. R. Leavis: "Melopoeia 'inseparable' BALLS / Swinburne and Hopkins full of melopoeia that has nowt to do wiff meaning."51 Extending his affinity with Lewis, Pound affirms the priority of writing over speech in his 1937 essay, "Immediate Need of Confucius": "Dante for a reason wrote De Vulgari Eloquio — On The Common Tongue — and in each age there is need to write De Vulgari Eloquio; that is, to insist on seeing the words daily in use and knowing the why of their usage" (SP, 89). Pound's emphases here suggest that seeing words on the page helps one to become conscious of the parole, ultimately to control and purify the tribal dialect. This claim fits Lewis's own vision of high verbal culture in the Renaissance, where a social elite paid writers for improving the language spoken. One reason for insisting on this difference between the Gourmont-BendaLewis influence on Pound's poetic and its deconstructionist description has to do with the reality of modern political discourse and, relative to that, the position in which each of these linguistic attitudes places the poet. The Word spoken, Derrideans routinely maintain, affects an impression of meaning consubstantial with its sound, and accordingly serves as emblem and instrument of authority. For this perception there is of course a prima facie, anecdotal truth, as the twentieth-century retinue of demagogic dictators all too amply attests. Pound's own project of repossessing complete meaning on the page thus reveals its marginal relation to the dynamic of modern totalitarian authority, which relies, in practice, on a mass-based, in large part orally established legitimacy. Not only does the poet appear to trade the vocal gold of real power for printed notes —in effect, play money; uneasily aware of this shortfall, he compensates by exaggerating the powers of lexical (visual) discrimination in the State. When he writes to Carlo Izzi in January 1938, he repeats the French scheme of aesthetic elitism a la lettre. He hails the faculty of "demarcation"; grounds this perception firmly in the visual "field"; links this act of optical definition to the stable valuation of money by "bankers"; and makes the standard association between visual discrimination and a graduated scale of merit and ability—a "hierarchy of values." "'Demarcation' is intellectual. It is also boundary of field if you like, but demarcation is universal. The bastid Cromwell and --- Anglican bishops and bankers obscure every hierarchy of values" (Letters, 304). Yet this claim for the "universal" reach of visual discrimination is pressed with a vehemence that gives away the very tentative validity in history of this private, esoteric strength. The sequestering direction of Pound's aesthetic sensibility does conflict with his concern for stable meaning in public words. His awareness of the

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problem generates the rhetorical complexity of this passage in How to Read, where he attempts to reconcile the discrepancy between his private standard of visual precision in literary texts and the general civil benefit — by wishing away the difference: It does not matter whether the author desire the good of the race or act merely from personal vanity. The thing is mechanical in action. In proportion as his work is exact, i.e., true to human consciousness and to the nature of man, as it is exact in formulation of desire, so is it durable and so is it "useful"; I mean it maintains the precision and clarity of thought, not merely for the benefit of a few dilettantes and "lovers of literature," but maintains the health of thought outside literary circles and in non-literary existence, in general individual and communal life. (HR, 18-19; emphases added)

The pointless preciosity of such verbal precision among the literati is an anxiety revealed more honestly in an unpublished manuscript of the same period —in a critique of other elites: "Civilizations decay from the top. The only way you can assure the duration of a culture is to drive it down and through the whole people. The more it is confi[n]ed to a group of specialists the frailer it is[,] the more prey to fads and self interest."52 Such misgivings motivate the several works designed for general public instruction in these years, the "ABC" and "How to" books. Yet the same ambivalence about the uses of an elite augments his attraction to Mussolini. Not only does Il Duce become a hero to drive culture "down and through the whole people"; in doing so, we shall see, he turns Pound's own rarefied poetic to public action. Pound will extend a visual aesthetic into political discourse with an intensity commensurate to its opposite, privatizing tendency. The tension between its mandarin character and its public mandate will generate its most revealing postures. Speaking In the preface to Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound describes Il Duce's style of public speech in the image of a now familiar poetic method: "On Oct. 6th of the year current (anno XII) between 4 p.m. and 4-30 Mussolini speaking very clearly four or five words at a time, with a pause, quite a long pause, between phrases, to let it sink in."53 Following a rhythm of shaped durations, separating language into integral phrasal units or distinct radicals, Mussolini speaks in accord with the discontinuous, agglutinative prosody Pound has evolved (and mimics in the syntax here) for his own ideogrammic juxtapositions. This philosophy of composition has been rehabilitated since 1927,54 in principle as well as in the practice of the cantos written in the late twenties, where he emphasizes equally the defining clarity of its component parts and the overarching, ramifying meaning of the construction. Sculptural prosody, its abrupt combinations resemble the monumental rock interfaces of Bran-


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cusi's The Kiss (Le Baiser) (figure 14): "The more one examines the Milan speech the more one is reminded of Brancusi, the stone blocks from which no error emerges, from whatever angle one look at them" (J/M, ix). The allusion Pound uses to decorate the work of his own prosody in the public discourse belongs to a history of opinion that shows its fundamental opposition to that popular claim. In his "Paris Letter" (for the Dial) of December 1921, he praised Brancusi for forging a "cielo, a Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms ... a refuge from the noise of motor traffic

FIGURE 14. Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss (Le Baiser) (1908). Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris. © 1993 ARS, N.Y. ADAGP, Paris. Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y.

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and the current advertisements" (EPVA, 172). Against the sound of automobiles and the noisome mutability of modern fashion—the timely noise a demagogue like Mussolini must traffic in— The Kiss offers the silent, formal finality of its juxtaposed stones. The disparity between those opinions of 1921 and 1935 reveals a single paradox—one forcibly resolved by Mussolini, who turns the poet's fugitive, highly idiosyncratic poetic back toward public utility. If Lewis pressed his own optical aesthetic into political service at the moment (1930) he had admitted its irrelevance to language, similar misgivings may attend the extension of Pound's own idiosyncratic measure into public words. From whatever angle one looks at them, indeed, those Brancusi blocks could not be more unlike language. If, following Saussure, a word finds meaning by virtue of its difference from others in the verbal system, Brancusi's stones resemble uniform monosyllables, uttering the one Word of the totalitarian gnosis by admitting no others into the system. A failure to control the waywardness of words from within language — according to linguistic principles rather than by sculptural and pictorial analogues — may be a ramifying fault. Does the authoritarian mien of Mussolini's speaking style —the method of poetic ideogram dressed here in the new emperor's clothes — reflect the poet's defiance of the normal working of words? Is dictatorial power one image and consequence of Pound's own inability to dictate the speech of his people into an order that is aesthetically superior? Empty triumphalism, Mussolini's Poundian manner may present the negative triumph of a deeply reactionary poetic—the extension of his artistic tendency and its most severe political definition. Its resistance to the usual slippage of words accounts for its aesthetic—visual —bearing and its social—antidemocratic—slide. The tolerance of "no error" in Mussolini's speech — Pound's oblique boast about the "no questions" aura of his own ideogrammic Gestalt, built up likewise by a juxtaposition of visible radicals — sets the method at odds with the free, trial-and-error play between word and language, individual figures and verbal ground. Such a process is characteristic equally of modern linguistic understanding and the skeptical, potentialist basis of truth in modern democratic culture. Thus Mussolini's — Pound's — manner serves as a means of restricting the vagaries of linguistic license and, in the phrases leading into the Brancusi allusion, of "plugging the leak left in all democratic pronouncements" (J/M, ix). Here Pound cartoons the tendency of liberals — Mannheim's — to talk away the core of an authority — Pound's—that must be established outside language. It is as a nonverbal artifex that Mussolini must be praised, for his authority vanishes into the inconclusiveness of words, the inevitable contradictions of a verbal hermeneutic: "Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Treat him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions" (J/M, 34). The opposition between normal linguistic consciousness and extreme po-


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litical authority—a dichotomy operative in Pound's thought since 1914 — appears with increasing virulence through the thirties. In his 1930 essay "Epstein, Belgion, and Meaning," he brings the notion of continuous verbal discourse under the pejorative heading of "monolinear logic." Repeating his resistance to normal discursive thought, he jabs at "the defect of monolinear sentence structure" (EPVA, 166), scorning "monolinear syllogistic arrangement" elsewhere as "that old form of trickery" (J/M, 28). To the liberal, implicitly progressive, apparently rational character of open-ended inquiry in words — a process in which meaning has already been seen to "leak away" —he prefers a model of language organized into nonlinear, discontinuous units, which match the paratactic structure of his own verse. Its quasispatial design stands, in Pound's conceit, as the isomorphic imprint of its thought. This absolute identity of meaning and sign shuts out all processes of linguistic analysis, inquiry, debate: "We no longer think or need to think in terms of monolinear logic, the sentence structure, subject, predicate, object, etc. We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hypergeometric amalgams" (EPVA, 166). This ideal of single, infrangible, ultimately nonverbal significance shows its authoritarian attitude explicitly in its most visible corollary—the wordless visage of the totalitarian leader, as Pound esteems it: "Mussolini a great man, demonstrably in his effects on event, unadvertisedly so in the swiftness of mind, in the speed with which his real emotion is shown in his face, so that only a crooked man cd. misinterpret his meaning and his basic intention" (GK, 105). Assuming a final, inviolable identity between look and meaning, Il Duce's face appears as the supreme example of the aesthetic of visual immediacy; it annuls the operations of verbal hermeneutic with the same kind of preemptive power that Pound reveres in his mien. Dictatorial signs extend their unquestioned, indivisible significance into this poet's aesthetic regimen, then, as a resistance to language itself. After all, the numinous aura of the authoritarian Gestalt is a quality preserved only in the most antique schemes of verbal meaning, like the medieval (Edenic) notion of the Logos incarnate in the material body of the Word. Out of key with the linguistic concepts of his time, Pound must shift the basis of his claim for absolute significance from verbal to non- or para-linguistic formulations, ranging from the pictographic model of the ideogram to the geometrical, mathematical descriptions above. (His indifference to linguistic process will show its most obvious consequences in the cantos written in the later thirties, when the attention paid to visual principles of organization, above all ideogrammic juxtaposition, allows the verbal surface of the poems to erode noticeably.) That literary modernism develops its major technical incentives against the grain of language — "We must dislocate the language into meaning" — is a truism endorsed by Pound's expressed views. The usual response of critics

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observing this antilinguistic bent is to align modernist compositions with those of music.55 Here the problem of verbal indeterminacy resolves itself as the continuity of normal discourse dissolves into multiple repetitions — across the span of a work — of figures, phrases, motifs (the well-known patterns of "subject rhyme" in the Cantos). Yet "musical technique" is a particularly loose term (virtually interchangeable with Joseph Frank's "spatial form"), for the strategies it denotes are hardly special to music alone, which owns a specially vexed place in the European ideologie I have attempted to establish as one root of radical modernism. Pound's own criticism of music may serve, in conclusion, to secure his own troubled place in this continental tradition of political aesthetics. Listening "Pound's intellectual knowledge about music far surpassed his practical knowledge,"56 Ned Rorem cogently remarks. This disparity between technical know-how and intellectual intelligence opened a zone of freewheeling speculation and polemic in Pound's reviews. While his nonprofessional curiosity allows him to adduce new issues, this amateur also relies on terms and concepts that are sometimes wildly nonmusical. The visual arts supply him with his basic critical vocabulary and standards. From this perspective he tends to describe his sensory experience of music in line with the values of formal, primarily visual, aesthetics. Such constructions rhyme in spirit and in detail with the artifice of authoritarian display (in Mussolini's speech) and totalitarian power (over verbal meaning), and thus allow the poet to realize his need for quasi-spatial control — expressed as a defiance of normal linguistic waywardness — in this more tractable medium: sounds free of semantic freight and fret. From the start, however, Pound appears to be uneasily aware that he is importing the figures of one art to comprehend another.57 His vision of musical structure thus exhibits an odd but understandable combination of tentativeness and self-compensating certainty; of self-doubt and a will as steely and fabricated as that of the fascist state he will find, idealized, in the mirror of major musical form. In a single gesture, equally grandiose and self-contradictory, the author of Antheil and the Theory of Harmony categorically dismisses the relevance of architecture or the plastic arts to music and proceeds to describe music in just such terms — in line with the Vorticist painters' (and Brancusi's) combinations of forms: And it is a very good sign that Antheil is annoyed with the term "architecture" when this term is applied to music. . . . He has, in his written statements about music, insisted that music exists in time-space; and is therefore different from any kind of plastic art which exists all at once. Just as Picasso, and Lewis, and Brancusi have made us increasingly aware of


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form, of form combination, or the precise limits and demarcations of flat forms and of volumes, so Antheil is making his hearers increasingly aware of time-space, the divisions of time-space. (ATH, 41-42)

As this passage proceeds, Pound resolves his inconsistency in favor of the spatial-pictorial influence and, in doing so, reveals the most telling effect of his uncertainty. As though to eliminate his doubt about the relevance of the pictorial imagination to the musical experience, he exaggerates its claim. He now conceives this art exclusively in visual terms — the audience becomes "the spectator" — and adduces for music the pictorial, preemptively sculptural values of "lucidity" and "definition of form." Here musical "rhythms" resolve themselves into a juxtaposition of "defined planes" or "masses." Favoring Antheil's constructivist music over Wagner's mere "hurly burly," he legitimates his choice through the exclusive warrant of visual artists. This "other aesthetic has been approved by Brancusi, Lewis, the vorticist manifestos; it aims at focusing the mind on a given definition of form, or rhythm, so intensely that it becomes not only more aware of that given form, but more sensitive to all other forms, rhythms, defined planes, or masses" (ATH, 44). An equally visual idiosyncracy appears in Pound's theory of harmony. Since the amateur needs to spatialize music in order to understand it, he discards the conventional model of harmony—as simultaneous consonance—for a linear, diachronic one, where it shapes as an interesting relation between sounds separated on the time line. In classical musicology, in fact, harmony was closer to the linear element of melody. Not a simultaneous structure of vertical "scales," which medieval polyphony introduced, classical harmony entailed a sense of relative "proportion" in the ratios of consecutive quantities to each other. Yet it remained diatonic and, as such, relied on consonance and resolution. These values are as far from the music on which Pound bases his harmonic theory—Antheil's cacophonous Ballet mecanique—as his own schemes are from classical references. He seems convinced that his theory is new: "The element most grossly omitted from treatises on harmony up to the present is the element of TIME. The question of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation, has been avoided" (ATH, 9).58 Here Pound diminishes the import of acoustic content in a way that reveals the nonmusical, specifically visual value in his conception. Harmony is sensed as a duration in which the interval of silence (pace John Cage) —"the time interval that must elapse between one sound and another"—provides its shaping agent. Repeating his esteem for the defining function of silence again and again, he shapes this quiet hiatus as a painterly space, which centers the attention of this (re)viewer of music. It appears equally clear that Pound conceives of musical sound as the material medium in which the shape-tracing powers of the eye may operate. This emphasis emerges later, in one of his best-known metaphors for the

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experience of listening to "pattern music." The rose pattern driven into the pile of iron filings by the electric force of the magnet depicts the perception of "dynamic form" in music, here the intervals of harmony in Jannequin's music; but Pound stresses adamantly that this "forma, the immortal concetto" does not belong to the acoustic stuff per se, for it takes shape "not by material contact with the magnet itself" (GK, 152). He puts it this way in Canto XXV, where he stresses the distance between the sound and its percipient as a function of the sculptural analogy he draws — a comparison that favors "the mind" over the sensuous fiber of the respondent: 'as the sculptor sees the form in the air ... 'as glass seen under water, 'King Otreus, my father . . . and saw the waves taking form as crystal, notes as facets of air, and the mind there, before them, moving, so that notes needed not move. (C, 119)

The form-making sensibility belongs to a nonmusical, specifically visual and sculptural-pictorial intelligence, one that engages the sensation of music in terms alien to its own sensuous flow. This was Antheil's own suspicion about Pound's musical understanding, as revealed in an unpublished letter to the poet. Here he defends the primacy of fluid, sensational time from Pound's more intellectual, spatial reconstruction of it. He turns those pictorial metaphors back on their originator in order to recoup the intensely acoustic feeling — "SOUND" — that he feels to be diminished by Pound's alien, visual, literary conception: "In music there is nothing else, except TIME and SOUND, and the physical and psychic CONCEPT of these vibrating the human organism. Anything else is literary."59 At one time Antheil ratified Pound's pictorial metaphors for music —in the responses the poet inserts here (in a 1918 essay printed in Antheil and the Theory of Harmony): A concert in a concert-hall is a performance, a presentation, not an appeal to the sympathies of the audience. (YES. G. A.) It is, or should be, as definitely a presentation or exhibition as if the performer were to bring out a painted picture and hang it before the audience (Yes, yes, why not? G. A.) The music must have as much a separate existence as the painting. It is a malversion of art for the performer to beseech the audience (via the instrument) to sympathise with his or her temperament, however delicate or plaintive or distinguished. (ATH, 77)

The young composer accepts the visual metaphors as images of his own intent, namely, that music must be an art of direct presentation and not an exercise in acoustic allusion or programmatic reference. Yet he will develop


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this principle in the direction signaled by his later, unpublished letter, which insists on the temporal-sensory conditions of music and rejects any explanation of sound that is made in terms of some intellectual program or visualplastic analogy. Pound's elaboration of the same value will lead him to emphasize just those visual and literary proclivities that Antheil will object to later and that he already seems to be wary about ("Why not?"). Direct presentation belongs primarily to the optical sense for Pound, and this preference leads him already to devalue the acoustic sensation. He seeks to distance his musicians and the physical sound they produce from contact with his ideal percipient, who relates to the music—in the exact sense of these pictorial tropes —as spectator rather than auditor; as neutral viewer rather than as intensely engaged sensuous consciousness. Where Antheil's later letter associates SOUND with CONCEPT, he is treating sensations as the only source of ideas, and as such reveals his own fundamental alignment with the original tradition of ideologie. So does Pound's 1918 essay, which lays the sensory basis for political ideas articulated fully later —indeed two decades later, a measure of his early and lasting affinity with the continental tradition. Whereas the 1918 essay contrasted aural sympathy with visual distance, the same dichotomy appears more starkly as this passage reappears, rewritten, in Guide to Kulchur (1938). Here he denigrates the experience of psychophysical empathy between auditor and music in images of "pleasing . . . [and] wooing the audience"—antidemocratic figures no less livid than those crafted in Benda's own cartoons of group rhythms. Against these Pound outlines the values of visual separation in terms of the full, twofold function it exercises for the various European commentators. The eye provides the vantage for perceiving the spatial-pictorial "design" of the music, and its characteristic act of severance works within the musical composition itself as a principle of division, the shaper of durations. "The really fine musician," Pound argues, "has this sense of time-division and/or duration." By contrast, the "theory of pleasing the audience, of wooing the audience, the theory that the audience really hears the performer not the composer, and that there can be no absolute rendering of the composer's design, ultimately destroys all composition, it undermines all values, all hierarchy of values" (GK, 197-98). The "hierarchy of values" proclaimed here looks over to Pound's own contemporary letter (January 1938), where he links it to the exercise of "demarcation," that is, to the visual act of defining "field." And as such it recalls the schemes of Benda and Gourmont, where the eye exercises its superior power in making such distinctions; where the act of dividing the material of sensory experience on a horizontal plane accounts for its high standing on a vertical scale, and thus supports a complementary ideology of political privilege. Yet a fallacy runs like a fault line through the very sensibility that grounds this political commentary. Radical ideologie allows one to impose the figures

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of one discipline — physiology—onto another—politics. Civics, no less than science, owns a tradition of inquiry founded on its own customs and usages, and indifference to these precedents points up the lack of historical and political depth in ideologie (as Edmund Burke knew). Pound's own lack of musical depth allows — forces — him to conceive of acoustics in terms of visible schemes. If the ideologue's inattention to civil tradition opens a dangerous freedom for his recommendation, unmoderated by an awareness of social history, the language of geometry and architecture in Pound's own music reviews acquires an equally extreme political valence. A quasi-empirical fantasy, his ideologie of the authoritarian State stands revealed in the music criticism as the inverse triumph of that intellectual tradition. The very freedom of its inductive method relies on Pound's own indifference to musical discipline. A weakness inherent in ideologie, it opens in the text of Pound's musical criticism like a tragic flaw. His visual hubris reveals itself in his very attempt to conceal it; and it skews the deliberations to social conclusions as strained as its own methods are insecure. The quality of excess in Pound's social recommendation may reveal its nature and sources more clearly by contrast to the arguments for authority being advanced nearly simultaneously by Eliot. Harking back to feudal paradigms, favoring monarchy and birthright aristocracy, the Anglo-Catholic bases his political claims in a distinctly English national history. His vision may be no less insupportable than the fascism of Pound (or Lewis), but at least he developed his arguments in terms of an actual political tradition, one that served to moderate expectations in view of historical reality and thus to gradualize the desired change (if change were really considered possible). That heavy sense of national history is the most glaring absence in the Italian (and German) fascism that attracted Pound (and Lewis). Recently confederated nations had not evolved viable, ongoing traditions of political discourse and procedure. Thus history offered little resistance to political tyrants on one side, artistic tyrannoi on the other. Freed equally from the constraints of civil custom and the disciplines of music criticism, Pound's reviews of the music of the "fascist era" advance social recommendations no less severe than they are facile. In 1933, Pound offers the work of Bach —ever esteemed as the exemplar of "major form" —as the characteristic art of the fascist era. Rejecting a romantic transcription of the composition, he dismisses any attempt to soften the severe elegance of the baroque construction: A handful of courageous people braved the storm and were compensated with the stark beauty of Bach's Italian Concerto and the prelude and fugue for harpsichord. . . . Mr. Atheling maintains, and even complains, that Liszt was an ass of elephantine proportions and that he massacred Bach, turning him into a piano orgy. . . . It is my belief that the taste, at least the official taste in Rapallo, is for the


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moment pure (100%). We prefer Bach unadulterated, we do not ask for concessions from the ideas of the pre-fascist era. (EPM, 351)

The perception of major form in music defines the civil as well as artistic elite in fascist culture, Pound insists, using other phrases, later in the same year, to chime with "pre-fascist." "Pre-eugenic" and "anti-malthusian" suggest forcibly that only the selective breeding inspired by the Malthusian specter of mass populations can produce the correct audience for the music of the fascist era. An immodest proposal, it uses Swift's own persona of the concerned humanitarian, covering its extravagance with a glass shield: "I have no doubt, speaking at a human level, that many 'composers' of the pre-eugenic and anti-malthusian era have the right to live. But this has nothing to do with MUSIC" (EPM, 353). Similar social preferences are maintained on the same aesthetic ground in his 1937 review of a performance of Jannequin's Chanson des oiseaux. Here the critical point is "intervals": the shaped durations that witness Pound's own reconstruction of harmony as the relation between sounds separated and arranged on the time line. An awareness of this visually conceived value distinguishes the musical cognoscenti from the incompetent dabbler. The elite of the fascist era thus separate themselves from the lumpenproletariat of a democratic, pre-eugenic, anti-Malthusian state. "Having heard the original Jannequin sung badly," he complains, "I reassert this distinction between . . . music for who can play it and . . . music made for the least [lowest] common, and most vulgar, denominator of the herd in the largest possible hall" (EPM, 399). To vaunt his membership in this superior audience—the few who are fit to enjoy the arduous pleasures of Bach's major form or Jannequin's intervals — Pound conceals his own insecurity as a music critic, which has led him to overemphasize those very qualities of spatial structure. These qualities have assumed the security offascismo. Reaching from personal uncertainty to claims of elitism and political authority, Pound's full musical hermeneutic stands out clearly in his commentary on Paul Hindemith. The fascist character of this music (Hitler once admired it) is elaborated in terms of aesthetic schemes that are spatial in nature: its "totalitarian ideal" exhibits a "highly organised system" with a clearly defined "hierarchy."60 But these tropes belong to a spatial understanding that Pound insists is categorically alien to music. "You have bales of writing about music wherein every page contains some allusion to construction," he protests. "For [Hindemith's] 'Schwanendreher' this terminology is inept" (EPM, 405), and so his appreciation promises "no literary admixture, no vague suggestion of pictorial art, nothing derived from non-musical plastic" (EPM, 416). But he ignores his own scorn for nonmusical notation and, at the same moment (October 1936 and January 1937), deploys vivid, highly detailed metaphors, indeed metaphysical conceits, to compare Hindemith's music to natural process. Here is "[m]usic," he begins by claiming, "that is

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nothing but music or at least that exists independent of any concurrent arts; that draws the auditor's mind not out of itself toward some further objective, but keeps it concentrated on the actual sound being presented to it!" Yet Pound is soon drawn out of the sound into his own visual schemata: "From the viola lead grow all the sounds of the orchestra. My emphasis is on the verb grow. . . . Conscious or unconscious, the composer is impregnated with the sense of growth, cellular, as in the natural kingdoms" (EPM, 405). He expatiates: "Anyone who hasn't heard Hindemith play his own Schwanendreher has something to learn. . . . [N]ot being in any way an imitation of any past work, but having its own, 1935, organization, as perfect as the organization of wood fibers is in a tree trunk" (EPM, 411). The natural rightness Pound finds in this art recalls the naturalistic argument in much fascist ideology, particularly in the case made for the corporate state, which he finds mirrored in this music. Yet the poet's own argument advances a rhetoric — its visual figures — against the grain of the sensual, specifically aural content of the experience. A familiar contradiction—to Pound himself, ever protesting too much, always compensating for the weakness that requires him to rely on spatial schemes like these. This ideologue crafts the terrible beauty of the totalitarian sublime out of his very limitations as a music critic.

EPILOGUE

That modernism proclaims a poetics of colloquial music is a persistent critical myth. Like the old doctrine of cosmic harmonies, which abided restively among skeptical scientists in the Renaissance, the aural fallacy in modernist criticism speaks to needs as urgent as they are uneasy. The belief that Lewis and Pound address us through the familiar sounds of idiom, thus redressing the material of common speech to a higher artistic order, allows us to soften the outline of the starker, elitist societies they ended up supporting. The distance these writers place between their art and the noise made by language is the area of awareness I have attempted to establish as essential in the study of their work. For their reaction against the postromantic standard of a vernacular poetic locates both a political disposition and a technical incentive—all in all, the awful grandeur in their achievement. Socially atavistic and artistically progressive, these artists sign an antique state into law through literary practices extraordinarily advanced—their verbal surfaces uprooted from the language we speak and grafted onto a new, pictorialgraphic canvas. Visual immediacy in words does not always or only mean fascist authority, however: the political significance of such craft is a function of individual will and heuristic skill (as the diverse views of European aestheticians have shown). May one admire the artistic achievement of Lewis and Pound, then, by detaching it from the social value it discovers so stubbornly in their work? The question remains urgent but unanswerable, for it summons our full, understandably mixed response to the work of these major modernists—to its sometimes appalling greatness. One may argue that the aesthetic of authority immanent in the work of the Anglo-Americans develops, through the twenties, into the imminent apocalypse of dictatorial fascism. Early in his career, after all, Pound hailed artists as the antennae of the race: these gifted percipients will have received the signal of that dire future and, in the poet's own boast, will have already transmitted it in aesthetic code. Yet the presumption of continuity between literary authority and totalitarian history entails a simplification as drastic as —if less tragic than—the one into which these modernists fell. Like the original ideologues, Lewis and Pound were formulating political principles in the laboratory of human physiology. Their preference for one aesthetic sense over another led them to convictions about 187

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natural hierarchy, but a critic who sees this same elitist theme duplicated in later history must testify that the events of international politics actually develop under laboratory conditions. Here is the creed of automatic progress at its sheerest — a nineteenth-century myth diabolically reversed in the twentieth. Moved variously to condemn and excuse the modernists' complicity in history, we enact the full ambiguity of their legacy. What happens to their aesthetic of visual privilege, it is better to ask, when the political regimes it originally led them to endorse approach the awful climacteric of 1939? Does this artistic program continue to guide their attraction to fascism through the final decade? Lewis's growing exposure to the realities of German and European politics in the thirties, we recall, caused him to dispense with the artistic conditions of his social preferences. Ultimately, he withdrew those prescriptions. Pound's retraction of his fascist loyalties remained more tenuous. Nor did he ever really exorcise the demon of anti-Semitism. Yet his development through the decade witnesses a growing separation between literary values and political action, a rift that leaves his earlier art of optical superbia increasingly far from the fascist suprematism he came to attest. Granted, he merges aesthetics and politics in a number of visionary moments in the prose he wrote in this decade (examined in the last chapter). These passages seem retrospective, however. Here Pound is expanding the awarenesses he has already attained in drafting the first thirty cantos, and he moves these ideas about human sensation toward political conclusion. This artistic sensibility does not strengthen his intellectual grip on fascism in the thirties, when, as Redman shows, he argues his commitment increasingly in the technical terms of economic philosophy.1 Nor does the artistic vision significantly inform the expression of his social creed in the verse he composed through this decade. The unmaking of this aesthete's political conceit might be surveyed, then, as a basis for final remarks on the fate of the enterprise it shares with Lewis's. While Pound took fifteen years to write the first thirty cantos, he composed subsequent poems far more quickly. Eleven New Cantos (XXXI-XLI), which appeared in 1934, was followed in 1937 by the Fifth Decad of Cantos (XLII-LI); the twenty poems of two linked suites—the Chinese and John Adams tracts (LII-LXXI) —were completed within fourteen months, from late 1937 to early 1939. Steadily larger appropriations of material from prior texts — variously quoted, translated, loosely paraphrased — accelerated the pace of production. But extratextual pressures also hastened the writing. The growing sense of international crisis in the Europe of the late thirties gave a sense of urgency to the drafting of cantos expressly concerned with themes of social governance and economic policy—to the publication of opinions that Pound felt to be both relevant and salutary. In this crucible Pound's political sensibility was transmuted. The same kind of hard-headed pragmatism that emerged in Lewis's response to the

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crisis of the middle and late years of the decade is visible as well in these cantos. Pound's civil recommendations seem to be separated increasingly from aesthetic and sensory premises. It is not ideologie—using an empirical analysis of sensations in art to adduce truths relevant to human governance — that engages him, but ideology—the ready-made political faiths of received systems of state. Whereas the poet of the early cantos concerned himself most urgently with the ruler's duty to generate art, thus to revamp and improve the sensibility of society, this inclination declines progressively in the middle cantos. "Cantos 31-3 are far more concerned with Jefferson governing than with Jefferson calling art into being," Reed Dasenbrock notes. While the youthful Pound was bent on "praising statesmen for their relation to art," in the middle cantos "what they do as statesmen begins to occupy him."2 "Litterae nihil sanantes" (literature curing nothing): John Adams's exile of the poets from his Republic is quoted by Pound in XXXIII without defiance or demur (C, 161). This shift of emphasis leaves its mark on the stylistic fabric of the cantos. Conceiving his Prince increasingly as a man of timely action, Pound occupies ever larger portions of the poem's verbal surface with the record of factual deeds merely transcribed. Aesthetic embellishment of these texts appears almost irrelevant. He is still selecting and juxtaposing his documentary materials under the nominal guidance of his ideogrammic method. But this artistic principle has become mechanical in practice by 1938. Its special technical incentive once enabled the poet to cut massive blocks of material down to significant gists and to shape these into telling combinations, but his interest has moved now from the intricacies of such poetic technique to the material itself. He believes in the evident truth of these prior texts. The energy attending artistic process has thus given way to a kind of fundamentalist, literalist, indeed evangelical fervor for the wisdom of the primary scripts—useful mirrors in the past for correct action in the present. Paradoxically, the same enthusiasm that leads the political fideist to see the immediate, indeed radiant, truth in Adams's writing allows him to disregard the care needed to rekindle the light for his reader. With blinding speed he cuts between his diverse sources, generating a dust storm of piths and glyphs. These developments can be mapped usefully onto the chronological scheme Guy Davenport has designed to describe the progressive stages of the poem's composition. The epic writer's initial sense of discovery shows the periplus or voyage as the dominant motif in the first thirty cantos, Davenport proposes, whereas the next forty poems (written during the thirties) follow upon his landfall. These points of contact and practical action are characterized in a familiar image of focused, directed energy—the point of the vortex. Far above lies the apex of Mount Segur, vantage for the transcendent meditation of the last years.3 These phases overlap of course at any moment of the epic history, but the critical metaphors do open a special perspective on the subject of my study. For the aesthetic configuration of political ideas appears

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to be most sharply and consistently made in the journey phase of the poem. This is so, I suggest, because the poet's apprehension of the civitas as a work of art entails a virtual likeness: it is a vision approached rather than dwelt in. The attraction of this intuitive possibility lies in the way it ever verges on realization — not in its attainment. Thus the sensory and aesthetic bases of his political ideology inscribe themselves as a preamble to actual history, a field in which these same tenets seem to lose urgency. When Pound inhabits his ideal city, whether it be the perfect state described by John Adams or the fulfillment of the American's principles (in his view) by Mussolini, the artistic and sensory premises of his first political interests dissolve, in large part, leaving the acts of statesmen and the institution of state to be evaluated on mainly practical grounds. This shift of emphasis reveals itself not only on the broad scale of a decade's worth of verse, but in local series as well: most instructively, in the juxtaposition of Cantos XLV and XLVI. Taken together, these two poems illustrate Pound's failure to hold the random and sordid matter-of-historicalfact in the bright outline of his aesthetic scheme. His medium of historical truth, after all, is the living speech of his own contemporary idiom. His Clio, we recall, talks in the jazzy syncope of his day—her parole spoken with no loss of time. The specifically visual linguistic of his ideal state puts it increasingly outside the realities of political discourse, of history itself. Pound presents the aesthetic conception underlying his ideal economic state with an unrivaled beauty in the famed Usury canto (XLV), a poem which challenges summarily the assumption that this poet speaks as our untroubled bard of musical talk. All the more defiantly will the commentator exercise the received critical notion, reinforcing it with the positions of the contemporary deconstructionist school. Following Derrida in her reading of Canto XLV, Maud Ellmann presents the poet's insistence on exact verbal meaning (his antidote to usurious indeterminacy) as an exclusive function of the Word spoken, which encourages the impression of verbal presence; the spatial framing of language on the page, however, opens words to multiple semantic possibilities (a usurious inflation of meaning).4 Reasonable as this reading appears to be, it defies the manifest sense of the poem. For usury corrupts the instruments and edifices of spatial design in particular: With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face, with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall harpes et luz or where virgin receiveth message and halo projects from incision . . . with usura the line grows thick with usura is no clear demarcation

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and no man can find site for his dwelling. Stonecutter is kept from his stone . . . Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit. Not by usura St Trophime Not by usura Saint Hilaire, Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman (C, 229-30)

Just as the single allusion to musical sound in this canto makes use of italics, thus conceding the subordination of acoustics in the spatial frame of the page, the two subsequent lines shift the oral event of the Annunciation into a picture of visible form, engraved and inscribed. Here the sequence and imagery dramatize Pound's own sense of the active relation between sound and sight in the linguistic economy of poetry, that formative analogue for the economy of money. The material of live speech is unmade and remade in the process of writing poetry: the sounding of the word gives way to the incisions of the pen or typewriter, tools to be hung with the chisel and rock axe. The stylus acts in accord with the faculty of separation that is special to its guiding eye, allowing the written Word to attain its intended verbal sense—the Logos to assume its one incarnational reality— and thus to stem the kind of hypervaluation of meaning that rhymes with and fosters the inflation of usury. Not that the poem fails to suggest a speaking presence: echoes of the performing orator fill that structural device of anaphoric repetition. But the spoken materials of the poem, shaped by the strongly end-stopped line, shift their affective register from ear to eye, which specializes in severances like these. What remains for the ear is that dimension of imagined or remembered sound—the archaic character of the diction will be noted in a moment—that Pound first learned to appreciate through Gourmont as the finer audition.5 This rarefied language shows all the strengths — and susceptibilities — of the Edenic Word. ADAMINUS DESCO GEORGIO ME FECIT was inscribed on the column of the church of San Zeno in Verona 6 —wording Pound simplifies to summon the myth that frames his own ambition here: Adamo me fecit. Just as Adam is reputed to have found names isomorphic with their referents, no incongruity seems to arise between Pound's verbal counters and his meanings. The words click into place under the pressure of intense conviction; thematic urgency makes each line seem exactly right to its gathered thought. Prelapsarian as such usage may be, Pound allows the verbal disposition of the poem to drift, manifestly, in the same direction: the archaisms move the words behind museum glass—more on show than for use. A moment of visionary possibility in linguistic terms, it belongs to a time far away, deeply recessed in literary history. Similarly, in political terms, it provides verbal

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currency for a state foregone—for a realm that can only be invoked by rhetorical negatives: "with usura hath no man a house of good stone. . . ." The marginal, provisional character of this poetic language is an awareness Pound approaches, understandably, obliquely: And if you will say that this tale teaches . . . a lesson, or that the Reverend Eliot has found a more natural language . . . you who think you will get through hell in a hurry . . . (C, 231)

Opening this next canto (XLVI) by attacking the language of Eliot's most recent (homiletic-liturgical) verse, Pound seems to be defending against fears of his own inadequacy. For he also aspired to a "natural language" in Canto XLV: the immediate fit of meaning and word in his ideal linguistic and economic scheme. His particular point of uncertainty about its value, the one doubt that drives him to this self-protective attack on Eliot, is the suspicion that his own poetic lexicon is practically useless and useless practically; that it is unable to "teach a lesson." For the economic value and political meaning of exact definition appear to be lost in the recherche, antiquated idiom in which he consummates that ideal. This admission signals the gradual shifting of the basis of Pound's political economy from verbal measures to practical means —the whole process outlined earlier in this section. The moments of agreement between linguistic discipline and economic control are becoming as rare in number as they are rarefied in character. Accordingly, the text of the cantos exhibits an increasingly rabid loquacity. This feature appears, moreover, as the opposite but necessary effect of Pound's practice of ideogrammic juxtaposition. Since this method adheres almost exclusively to a measure of visual perception (as Pound's early indifference to Chinese phonetics demonstrated), it does not comport easily with the energy and rhythms of the language he learned as the common tongue. The peripheral character of its relation to spoken language leads the poetic Word toward a nonspeakerly lexicon, like the curial diction of the Usury Canto (XLV); yet its detachment from the parole also deprives speech of controls intrinsic to language and allows Pound to career in ever wilder professions of talk elsewhere (the radio performances will be heard shortly). This understanding helps to account for the contradiction between Pound's Adamic Word, manifestly fine and exquisitely chiseled as it is, and the otherwise wildly demotic quality of the idiom into which he lapses. This fall from the paradise of an aesthetic polis into the parlous inferno of political history occurs already in Canto XLVI. Here the poet's obsession with time and the intransigent matter-of-historical-fact reverts to the heavy timefulness of his own contemporary speech. He recalls the wars of several

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centuries — and his own attempt to understand the financial basis of these events (beginning with his introduction to Major Douglas and the principles of Social Credit) — in a single idiom: Seventeen years on this case, nineteen years, ninety years on this case An' the fuzzy bloke sez (legs no pants ever wd. fit) 'IF that is so, any government worth a damn can pay dividends?' The major chewed a bit and sez: 'Y — es, eh ... You mean instead of collectin' taxes?' 'Instead of collecting taxes.' That office? nineteen Years on this case, CRIME Ov two CENturies, 5 millions bein' killed off to 1919, and before that Debts of the south to New York, that is to the banks of the City, two hundred million, war, I don't think (or have it your own way . . .) about slavery? Five million being killed off . . . (C, 231-32)

The unbound colloquy into which this canto expands suits the young student's questioning attitude. Free speech allows him to translate the finer points of economic science into familiar, generic terms, and thus to develop a rough-and-ready comprehension of somewhat esoteric themes. (Note the unusually high incidence — for Pound —of run-on lines, which contribute to the open-ended, improvisational feel and searching reach of the words.) The very indeterminacy of the parole — all too evident in the elliptical rifts he has scored into the opening lines of this canto—make it a kind of intellectual free zone. It is a usage sufficiently loose to allow his nonspecialist mind room to move: it leads him toward the financial subject easily, generically, in a sort of trial-and-error way of testing, disproving, and adjusting cliches as forms of understanding. This is recognizable as the idiolect of Pound's economic meditations. Like the modern talk he puts into the mouth of his Clio, this vocal artistry follows a negative incentive—to avoid the language of intellectual control. This aesthete delivers his vision of the ideal financial state, then, in a vocabulary purer than the words of any tribe (XLV), but his approach to economic science relies at times on the dialect of the idiot's guide (XLVI). Fool to Pound's Lear, the parole recalls the poet persistently to the inane indeterminacies of history —that raucous sphere in relation to which all an-

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swers appear peripheral, contingent, provisional. The solution is scripted in another language. A similar contradiction appears in the discrepancy between the next two major suites of cantos. His celebration in Cantos LIILXI of ancient Chinese dynasties—their verbal culture committed to the visual precision of ideogram and a visionary control of money—winds down into a time and speech close to the American poet's own. Here the documentary records of John Adams (Cantos LXII-LXXI) are talked up to a pitch of density and impenetrability equivalent to history itself. This is the muse of Pound's broadcasts on Rome Radio. A discourse steeped in the idiom of his native land, and aimed at his conationals, it speaks with the voice of Canto XLVI —the only canto he chose to read on the air7 — and not XLV. He talks in the interrogative mood of an idiom heavy with its own historical moment, not in the optimal subjunctive of a silent, visionary ideal. His economic considerations are always thickened with historical incident, not simplified and composed as demonstrations of preconceived theses. This inclination is a function, I suggest, of the medium in which he pitches it all —a vernacular as contemporary, timeful, and erratic as history. Note how the parole leads this account, not to clear conclusion, but to ever more historical details, ever more talk; to an endless series of anecdotal incidents — one damn thing after another: Well, as Lord Rothermere said: they are unteachable. I don't know how much more they reckon to drop before they get ready for physic. I have said on this radio before now that along about 1695 or 94 the Bank of England was put together, and in 1750 they shut down on the Pennsylvania colony money, and the system of lending paper money out to the farmers. And in 1776 the natural consequences of that dirty London policy of starvin' and cheatin' became, as they say, more apparent. And a year or two later Johnnie Adams said to the British commander: They were havin' a parley, sez John Adams. "I don't care what capacity I am received in, receive me in any capacity you like except that of a British subject." So the first large scale effect of the London cheatin', and money monopoly was the loss of the American colonies. The Chinese have a method of countin' cycles of 80 years. I don't know that there is much in it, but it seems to work sometimes. Eighty years, from the bank to the American Revolution. About 80 years from startin' the American government to the great betrayal of 1863. Think it over. And from 63 to the present. OUR rise as a state, thru three or four major, but POSITIVE convulsions, like Jefferson's revolt against Hamilton's dirtiness, the Jackson-VanBuren war for the liberation of the American Treasury. Lincoln's sayin', 'give to this people the greatest blessin' they ever had, their own paper to pay their own debt. And then the assassination of Lincoln.8

The ease with which Pound takes to speech is clearly matched with an unease about the license it affords. Using it to mimic the waywardness of history, wheeling it freely through the complex intricacies of economic science, he talks away the very definitiveness he values as the first virtu of

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intellectual life and the one thing needful for stable financial valuation. Disquiet about his own noisiness leads him to ever more compulsive talk. For the severe ideals of his economic aesthetic resist the blandishments of aural diffuseness with an intensity both original and radical, revealed as such at the moment he receives his first radio. He writes in March 1940 to Ronald Duncan: "Blasted friends left a goddam radio here yester. Gift. God damn destructive and dispersive devil of an invention." Conceding that the radio has "got to be faced," he seems to find its use only in its strengthening of an antithetical temperament: "Possibly the loathing of it may stop diffuse writing." But even this acceptance is guarded: "Anybody who can survive may strengthen inner life, but mass of apes and worms will be still further rejuiced to passivity" (Letters, 342). The hypnosis of a fluent vocalese—the stupefying "juice" of Joyce —and its reduction of the human creature to the passive impressionability of animals — "apes" first of all —recalls Wyndham Lewis's analysis of the Joycean politics of "mass" musical societies and points up the mounting influence of this critique in Pound's own developing values. If the poet takes up the Enemy's position on these issues in March, he will take up residence in the enemy country by the next January. Involving himself increasingly in the aural traffic of politics, he moves more and more in tune with the vulgus. An aesthetic ideal conceived far from the language we speak is left further and further behind. And this separation between art and politics—the fate shared by the specifically visual linguistic the former colleagues of Blast share — shows them, in the end, going their separate ways. In the fiction written through the thirties, Lewis moved his visual linguistic ever further away from his literary usage. In Revenge for Love, he freed plebeian speech in revenge for the aristocracy of the eye (his own first love). Conceding the marginal relation of his visual aesthetic to the temporal-aural dynamics of language, he also allowed the vocal culture of modern populist politics to undermine the phantom supremacy of the imperial eye. In that defeat the Enemy gained at least a prudential victory, one that his discursive prose would later consolidate. That Lewis controlled the demise of his earlier ideals marks his main point of difference from Pound, one which reveals its full import in terms of their historical moment. By the middle to late thirties, it was clear that history was not responding to artistic prescriptions written in the twenties. The elitist dream of the earlier decade was being supplanted by the burgeoning anarchy of fascist populism. The same demotic hubbub that sounds across the surfaces of Lewis's novels spreads through the fabric of the middle cantos, but in these poems it goes unchecked by the finer, diagnostic irony the Enemy features in his work. Lewis displays the conquest of aesthetic values by history, whereas Pound has now ceased to exhibit the parole symptomatically. He suffers the beating down of his own higher standards, like Yeats's great art beaten down. "I lost my center fighting the world" (C, 802) is a poet's confession of his failure to understand society in the best way possible

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for him — in aesthetic terms. Thus the increasingly manic character of his political screeds in the thirties and forties witnesses not the nightmare triumph of this aesthete's dream of state, but the waning influence of the single force that gave at least an impression of stability to his social sensibility: the aesthetic. These jeremiads are, in a full sense of the word, artless. That history will betray clercs who intrude into politics is a truth Lewis grasped with masterful despair in the thirties — its recognition perhaps the best influence the Enemy could have exerted on his old friend.

NOTES

Prologue 1. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 221-22. 2. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1952), 95 (hereafter GK): the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis joins his own to comprise, first "the sorting out, the rappel a I'ordre," then "the new synthesis, the totalitarian." 3. See, for example, Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernor (1531); rpt. ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft, vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), 42-43: "The perfecte understanding of musike" is "necessary" for "the better attaynynge the knowlege of a publike weale: which ... is made of an ordre of astates and degrees, and, by reason therof, containeth in it a perfect harmony." 4. Georges Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis [sic] Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures (1632); rpt. ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 477. Sandys is commenting on the locus classicus of Western musical mythology, in the Ars Poetica (11. 391-401), where Horace joins the stories of Orpheus and Amphion to tell the several powers and possibilities of music, variously psychological and social. The developments I am following here belong to the intellectual history whose impact on the theory of music is set out in John Hollander's wide-ranging survey The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 15001700 (1961; rpt. New York: Norton, 1970), which shows how the old musical cosmology gradually declines during these years into a decorative rather than essential theme. 5. This movement and its place in French political history are recounted in an excellent study by Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1970). While Darnton does not focus on the connections between the affective doctrine of mesmerism and acoustics, the instrumental role of music appears clear. Mesmerist sessions were usually conducted to musical accompaniment; a contemporary advertisement calls attention to the joint effects of magnetic attraction and the sound of tunes emanating from the antechamber (reproduced by Darnton, 6). "Soft music, played on wind instruments, a pianoforte, or the glass 'harmonica' that Mesmer helped to introduce in France," Darnton summarizes, 8, "sent reinforced waves of fluid deep into [the listener-patient's] soul." An antimesmerist cartoon, "Les Effets du magnetisme animal," 56-57, depicts those engulfed in the ecstatic trance as dogs, responding to the blandishments of horn and fiddle. 6. The most relevant critical work-Richard Sieburth on Pound and Gourmont, Geoffrey Wagner on Lewis and Benda—will be cited and discussed in later chapters.

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7. Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Timothy Materer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). The work done on Vorticism generally supports the case I make later for these writers' development of a visual poetic. Yet the continental writers who will influence their optical sensibility — Gourmont and Benda—do not figure into the European sources of Vorticism, as outlined by Alan Robinson, Symbol to Vortex: Poetry, Painting, and Ideas, 1885-1914 (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), which leaves Benda unmentioned, and features Gourmont only as a secondary influence in Hulme's movement toward Imagism, 60. The relation of Vorticism to Futurism is described helpfully by Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 171-73, 183, 186. Perloff recreates the prewar period in "Profond aujourd'hui," The Futurist Moment, 3-43. Also important are W. C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), and Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 8. Herbert Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and The Real (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 192; see also 137-39. Schneidau sees the Image as the synthesis of several sensory registers, the visual and oral primarily. 9. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 126-27. 10. These lines are still retained six years later in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), 50; they are excised in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (London: Faber, 1966). 11. Robert Casillo, "Damage Control in the Pound Industry: Response to Dasenbrock, "American Literary History, 1 (1989), 240. Casillo is reacting to "Pound's Demonology," Reed Way Dasenbrock's review of Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons: AntiSemitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), in ALH 1, 231-39.

Chapter 1 1. [Antoine] Destutt [de] Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy: to which is prefixed A Supplement to a Preceding Work on the Understanding, or Elements of Ideology, trans. Thomas Jefferson (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan, 1817), 39-47; 47. 2. As translated by Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of "Ideology" (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 47; a useful overview of the historical situation and the backgrounds to the ideologues is provided by Kennedy, 38-74. 3. Monthly Magazine, 3 April 1797, 285-86. 4. The best summary of these developments is by Keith Michael Baker, "Closing the French Revolution: Saint-Simon and Comte," in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 1789-1848, ed. Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), 325-31, esp. 330-31. 5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 20, 60.

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Eagleton appeals eloquently for a redemption through the senses from the inherited norms of reason and society in "The Marxist Sublime," 196ff. 6. A good overview of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments is provided by Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963), 9-37, esp. 25ff. Langbaum rightly identifies Pound's first work in the dramatic monologue with the poetics of empathy, 77-81; more suggestively, he aligns the methods and ethic of Pound's "creative translations" with the same tradition, 94-95. These initiatives do not locate Pound's growing points as a poet, however, as I will later suggest. 7. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style [1908], 3rd ed., trans. Michael Bullock (1953; rpt. New York: International Universities Press, 1967), 5, 33. 8. Ibid., 80, 114. 9. By dint of repetition, these figures present an understanding as insistent as the vitalist urges he hears echoed in the music. As in his discussions of classical architecture and Renaissance art: "[The] inner life [of the Ionic temple], its expression, its harmony, fall within the regularity of the organic . . . all the sensations of life flow uninhibitedly in, and the joyfulness of these stones irradiated with life becomes our own joy"; "[the] aim [of Renaissance art] was to project the lines and forms of the organically vital, the euphony of its rhythm and its whole inward being, outward in ideal independence and perfection, in order, as it were, to furnish in every creation a theatre of the free, unimpeded activation of one's own sense of life" (Abstraction and Empathy), 80, 28; emphases added. 10. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (1910; rpt. London: Allen & Unwin, 1950), 44. 11. Ibid., 12, 44. 12. Bergson, "Philosophical Intuition," The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 150. 13. Bergson, "Introduction," The Creative Mind, 102-3. 14. Bergson, Essay, 15. 15. F. T. Marinetti, "Abstract Onomatopoeia and Numeric Sensibility (Further Considerations Concerning Words at Liberty)," trans. Arundel del Re, New Age, 16 July 1914, 255. 16. Marinetti, "Geometric and Mechanical Splendour in Words at Liberty. Futurist Manifesto," trans. Arundel del Re, New Age, 7 May 1914, 17. 17. As quoted by Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 43. 18. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 198; for Kern's valuable survey of scientific culture in these years, see the material cited in n. 32. 19. Newbolt, "Futurism and Form in Poetry," Fortnightly Review, DLXIX (1914), 812. 20. Ibid., 806, 810, 807. 21. "Of Newbolt and his associates, Pound has argued that they 'at any rate WROTE something now and again, and however much one disagreed with 'em, one was at least disagreeing with something.'" The Pound quotation is left unreferenced by Stanley K. Coffman, Jr., Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 14.

200

NOTES

22. Julien Benda, Belphegor [1918; Belphegor: Essai sur l'esthetique de la presente societe fran false], trans. S. J. I. Lawson (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), 144; hereafter cited in text as B. 23. "Geometric Splendour," 16. 24. Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: Morrow, 1928), 69. 25. Ibid., 22; see 3-22, esp. 14, 17. 26. Julien Benda, The Yoke of Pity [L'Ordination, serialized 1912-13], trans. Gilbert Cannan (New York: Holt, 1913), 75. 27. Ibid., 137. 28. Treason, 22.

29. Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art," in "The Dehumanization of Art" and Other Writings on Art and Culture, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 6-7. La Deshumanizacion del Arte was first published in Madrid in 1925; the essays, written between 1911 and 1925, will be cited parenthetically as DA. 30. Remy de Gourmont, Le Probleme du style (1902; rpt. Paris: Mercure de France, 1916), 33. The essays collected here will be cited parenthetically as PS. All translations of Gourmont are my own. 31. Remy de Gourmont, Esthetique de la langue francaise (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), 315-16. My translation of the essays collected here will be cited parenthetically as ELF. 32. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, 152-53.

33. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1964), 1-29, esp. 2, 5, 21. 34. Ezra Pound, "Vorticism" (1 September 1914), in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New Directions, 1980), 208. The writings collected here will be dated in the text or in a note and cited parenthetically as EPVA. 35. The principle of fractal geometry, or self-similarity on varying scales, is developed as a model structure for the Cantos by Hugh Kenner, "Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos," ELH, 55 (1988), 721-30. 36. From Canto XI, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1986), 51; see chapter 4, n. 8. 37. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme (1915; rpt. New York: Peter Smith, 1941), 128, 127, 130. 38. Ibid., 130, 270. 39. Ibid., 130-31. 40. Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, no trans. (1960; rpt. New York: Viking, 1967), 41, 60. The first English translation appeared in 1896. 41. Ibid., 61-62. 42. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 14: "It was in France, finally, that one saw ... a phenomenon that one must take into account if one wishes to understand fascism: the shift to the right of elements that were socially advanced but fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy"; see also 7, 26. In this book Sternhell convincingly demonstrates the reciprocal needs of the socialist left —for leadership—and the aristocratic right—for mass-based legitimacy; see esp. 8-11, 55-56, 100, where he details the activities of the Cercle Proudhon. Sternhell's idea of a synthetic energy is countered by Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933 (New Haven:

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Yale University Press, 1986), which follows fascism as a force emanating almost exclusively from the traditional elite of the radical right; see esp. 12-15, 62, 120; he thus dismisses the import of the Cercle Proudhon, presenting it as a brief, inconsequential flirtation between incompatibilities (156ff.). Soucy presents Sorel as an idealistic Marxist, incapable of compromise. Sorel's unorthodox Marxism is argued for more cogently by Sternhell, in the material cited in n. 43. 43. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, 36-37, 80. 44. Henri de Man, La Lecon de la guerre (Brussels: La Librairie du Peuple, 1920); esp. 8-9. This volume is a compressed version of his original 1919 text, written in English as The Remaking of a Mind. De Man's later, revised Marxism is discussed helpfully by Sternhell, 122-23. 45. Arthur Symons, "Ballet, Pantomime, and Poetic Drama," Dome, n.v. (1898), 68. 46. Ibid., 67. 47. Eliot, "The Function of Criticism" (1923), in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (1951; rpt. London: Faber, 1972), 32. See also Wallace Martin, The New Age under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 158-59: "The range of rhythmic exploration in Hulme's poems is impressive, considering how few he wrote. ... A comparison of the final version of 'Sunset (II)' with the earlier version, which bears accentual marks, reveals the painstaking care he exercised in rhythmic revision." 48. T. E. Hulme ("Thomas Grattan"), "A Tory Philosophy. I.-The Two Temperaments," Commentator, 10 April 1912, 310. 49. Hulme, "A Tory Philosophy," Commentator, 3 April 1912, 294, 295. 50. Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37-47, 80-102, esp. 97. For the importance of chronology in unraveling the apparent contradictions of Hulme, see the less precise temporal scheme of Wallace Martin, The New Age under Orage, 172: "There are three Hulmes — a pre-1907 empiricist, a 1907-12 Bergsonian, and a post-1912 reactionary—who are not usually distinguished from one another and hence unjustly accused of self-contradiction." Unless otherwise noted, my dating of Hulme's writings follows Levenson's three-phase chronology. 51. T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art [1924], 2d ed., ed. Herbert Read (1936; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 156; the writings collected here will be cited parenthetically as S. 52. Laughter, no trans., in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (1956; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 161-62. The resemblance between Hulme's appropriation and this unsigned translation is striking. 53. T. E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. Samuel Hynes (1955; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 96; the writings collected here will be cited parenthetically as FS. Unlike Levenson, who regards "Notes" as an early text entirely, I follow Hynes's suggestion, FS, xii, for the serial character of these notes — written on loose sheets of paper and only partially organized into folders. See the description by Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme (1938; rpt. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1982), 271. Hynes's roughly chronological sequencing also places "Notes" (as a finished collection) after 1912 (with the final text of "A Lecture on Modern Poetry"). 54. For Hulme's debt to Gourmont's Le Probleme du style, see Roberts, T. E. Hulme, 117. Hulme's similarities to the French writer are adduced—the question of direct influence is left open —by Coffman, Imagism, 82-83.

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55. Levenson, Genealogy, 42-44, focuses on the values of impressionism and subjectivity in "Lecture"; while he concedes, 44, that this is "one movement in the lecture," he does not discuss the other, later, in fact dominant line of thought, which represents a reaction against the same premises. In this text Hulme seems to have tied himself back into the paradoxical knot Levenson unravels so capably elsewhere (by correct dating) — as one may do here by recognizing that the text of the lecture belongs to two separate phases. For the circumstances surrounding Hulme's later rewriting of the lecture, see Michael Roberts, T. E. Hulme, 21; see also Hynes, ed., FS, xii. 56. FS, 70-71: "The ancients were perfectly aware of the fluidity of the world and of its impermanence. . . . But while they recognised it, they feared it and endeavoured to evade it, to construct things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them. . . . We see it in a thousand different forms. Materially, in the pyramids. . . . Living in a dynamic world they wished to create a static fixity where their souls might rest." 57. Florence Farr [Emery], The Music of Speech, Containing the Words of Some Poets, Thinkers and Music Makers Regarding the Practice of the Bardic Art Together With Fragments of Verse Set to Its OWN Melody (London: Elkin Matthews, 1909). 58. An account of this moment is given by Hynes, FS, xvi-xvii.

Chapter 2 1. Ezra Pound, "Mesmerism," in Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (1926); rev. ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 13-14. The poems collected here will be dated and cited parenthetically as P. For the relation between this poem and Browning's own "Mesmerism," see George Bornstein, "Pound's Parleyings with Browning," in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 106-26, esp. 114-15, 123; this piece contains valuable documentation of Browning's early influence on Pound. 2. The centrality of mesmerism in the contemporary French social science of the crowd has been demonstrated by Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 114-36, esp. 119, 122, 128-29. The various social scientists cited by Barrows discuss the element of hypnotic trance in mob bonding but do not locate these activities in any one of the senses. 3. Pound's affinity with the principles and methods of radical ideologie is suggested by a cluster of remarks made later in his career, where he agrees that social ideology is synonymous with the sciences of physical affect, emotion, and perception. In the last of the cantos on John Adams (1939), most obviously, he alludes to Destutt de Tracy's Political Economy. It was Thomas Jefferson's translation of that volume (see chapter 1, n. 1) that evidently led Pound to the work. This book carried a lengthy Abstract of his original Elements of Ideology, yet Pound's focus seems to be exclusively economic— "Gold, silver, are but commodities / Pity, says Tracy, they were ever stamped save by weight"-in Canto LXXI, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1986), 420; (the use of this collection for cantos published after 1925 is explained in chapter 4, n. 8). Yet he will have just observed, in Guide to Kulchur (1938), that social "ideology" has its roots in the etymology of that word—the knowledge of images, appetites, emotions; all in all, the perceptual and sensory mechanism of the

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human creature: "From sheer force, physical prowess, craft, jaw-house, money-pull, press to radio, government has undergone revolutions of modus and instrument. Ideologies float over this process. Emotions, appetites, are focussed into political forces" (GK, 259). The connection between Pound's political sensibility and the first ideologues' is thus correctly affirmed by Jean-Michel Rabate, in Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound's "Cantos" (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 83ff. My later analysis will extend this premise to the visual sense, differing from Rabate. He grounds the poet's search for social control in a sensual affect, but he hears political dominance being established through a specifically vocal empowerment, where the significance of words is defined and controlled through poetic voice. 4. See, for example, Marsden's "Views and Comments," New Free-woman, 15 June 1913, 4: "An intellectual concept is not, strictly speaking, a concept at all: it represents the giving of a local habitation and a name to a 'Nothing.' It is a verbal trick, put through for many different and mainly sub-conscious motives." She includes the women's movement itself among these airy insubstantialities, its reality manufactured by language: in the Egoist, 1 October 1914, 361, she notes how the war has disrupted the energy of the movement, the validity of which obviously relied on the mere words it had conferred upon itself: "The confusion has arisen out of an assumption that ultimate authority lies in words"; like the male institutions it challenges, it "starts out on its reasonings from the base that 'In the beginning was the Word.'" Already on 1 July 1913, 25, she had resisted all political groupings as machinations of the generalizing Words she strategically capitalizes here, professing that her journal "has no cause. The nearest approach to a Cause it desires to attain is to destroy Causes. . . . The New Freewoman is not for the advancement of Woman, but for the empowering of individuals—men and women." All political groupings achieve what she objects to especially in "Democracy," New Freewoman, 15 July 1913, 42: a "strangling by request, the bludgeoning of the individual by the alliance, by majorities." 5. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 (1935; rpt. New York: Putnam, 1980), sees the liberal-humanist assumptions of the Edwardian age collapsing from three sides: in "The Tory Rebellion," "The Women's Rebellion," and "The Workers' Rebellion," 71-330. The extremism Dangerfield sees on the political right and left matches the array of social forces I see on the pages of the New Freewoman and the Egoist. 6. Marsden, "Authority: Conscience and the Offences," Egoist, 1 August 1914, 283. Here, 281, the acoustic plush of the Word —"'God's tremendous voice'" — holds the difference between the true bankruptcy of language and its effective power: "Gods and other authorities are soft cushions of words placed near the vague rim where power fringes off into limitation." 7. Marsden, "Men, Machines, and Progress," Egoist, 2 February 1914, 41; "I Am," Egoist, 1 January 1915, 1. 8. Marsden, "I Am," 2. She traces the relation between the radical particularity of the individual perceiver and the Image perceived in the same essay, punning (her aversion to sound notwithstanding) on the "eye" of "I," 3: "Thus the T is the comprehensive expression of existence as viewed by the only unit competent to view it: the one who exists. It comprehends the whole gallery of images which it can throw out from itself: 'the stream of life,' and all the images which glow in the stream. . . . The 'I' creates its own world." 9. Davie's claim is made in Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952; New York:

204

NOTES

Schocken, 1967), 99. Von Hallberg's counter comes in "Notes on Imagism and Politics," the draft of a chapter (from work in progress) that he presented as a paper at the 1990 MLA convention in Chicago; I am grateful to the panel chairperson, Tim Redman, for a copy. In his conclusion von Hallberg dissociates Pound's "earlier" Imagism categorically from his "later" politics: "it is clear that Pound in 1913-14 was vehemently antistatist, and anti-socialist. It is hard to imagine how an anti-statist politics would lead to the politics of state totalitarianism. In Pound's case it is difficult even to use the term 'development' to cover these two positions. His political development seems to have brought a direct contradiction of his earlier anarchist Individualism." These views are in fundamental agreement with the conclusion Levenson reaches in "Egoists and Imagists," A Genealogy, 79: "I have been trying ... to point out that modernism was individualist before it was anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional, inclined to anarchism before it was inclined to authoritarianism." 10. Marsden, "Views and Comments,"Egoist, 1 December 1915, 182, 183. 11. Benjamin R. Tucker, "Lego et Penso: Proudhon and Royalism," New Freewoman, 1 October 1913, 156-57, esp. 157: "If ... it should be decided that Proudhon is [the] property [of Maurrasian royalists], we might well say, without doing violence to current terminology as Proudhon did when he said it: La Propriete, c'est le vol. With it in hand, the Anarchists answer to Charles Maurras and all his followers: No, the author of Idee Generate de la Revolution au Dix-neuvieme Siecle is not your great Proudhon, he is ours." Marsden's rejoinder comes in "Views and Comments," 15 November 1913, 204-5, where she also chides Tucker for the kind of partisanship that runs counter to Anarchism. 12. Pound, "The New Sculpture," Egoist, 16 February 1914, 68. Pound's affinities with Marsden end with the more densely abstract language she begins to exercise (against her own nominalist skepticism) in mid-1915, when she begins to engage such topics as "the origin of mind" and "the philosophy of the real." Pound expresses his distaste on 8 April 1916, writing to John Quinn about their plans for the Egoist: "Miss Marsden is some sort of fool, I haven't found out precisely which sort. The blob of her stuff on the front pages would always prevent the paper from being really satisfactory"; in The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915-1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 71. Marsden's antiauthoritarian stance, as expressed in the material cited above in n. 10, may also account in part for the blast. 13. Huntley Carter, "Schonberg, Epstein, Chesterton, and Mass-Rhythm," Egoist, 16 February 1914, 75. 14. Ibid., 75-76. 15. Pound, "The New Sculpture," 68. This essay is left unmentioned by von Hallberg in "Notes on Imagism and Politics"; for Levenson's reading of it, see the material cited below, n. 31. 16. Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. 68-69, 72. 17. From an unpublished letter to his mother of 21 February 1912, as quoted by Cyrena N. Pondron, The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry, 19001920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 19. Pondron's overview of the French influence in England in these years, 1-49, is well documented and illuminating. 18. Pound, "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris ... VI. On Virtue" (4 January 1912); rpt. in Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed, William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), 28-29. The writings collected here will be dated and cited parenthetically under SP.

NOTES

205

19. Sieburth, Instigations, 5, 12, and 173, n. 26, argues convincingly that Pound and H.D. were reading Le Probleme du style in 1912. Sieburth provides an important commentary on this formative influence; he is alert to the sensory priorities of Gourmont's literary criticism; but he does not focus on the contradictions in Gourmont's thought or in Pound's own response to that problem. 20. Pound, "The Approach to Paris . . . II," New Age, 11 September 1913, 578. The musical element in Gourmont's appeal is underscored again, 577: "I suppose that M. DeGourmont knows more about verse-rhythm than any man now living." The impact of Gourmont's musical art on Pound's verse may be measured in a poem written early in 1912, "The Alchemist," which recites the names of women as magical talismans (P, 7072). Such acoustic indulgence, which defied the lesson of Gourmont's criticism, may have led Pound to exclude the poem from his 1912 collection, Ripostes. 21. The first installment of Pound's two-part elegy, "Remy de Gourmont," appeared in Fortnightly Review (1 December 1915); the quotation is from the second, published in Poetry (January 1916), rpt. SP, 392. Pound's ongoing engagement with the powers and problems of symbolisme provides the subject of a recent book by Scott Hamilton, Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), which focuses that legacy chiefly in the figure of Theophile Gautier and describes Pound's difficulties in terms of the rival claims of Parnassianism and realism. 22. Despite Pound's early exposure to Le Probleme du style, it is his 1916 edition that is preserved by Mary de Rachewiltz at Brunnenberg, Merano, Italy. Sieburth's reading of the marginalia is given in Instigations, 61. 23. Pound, "French Poets" (February 1918); rpt. in Pound, Make It New (London: Faber, 1934), 187-88. 24. Pound, "The Constant Preaching to the Mob" (July 1916), rpt. in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 64. Writings collected here will be dated and cited parenthetically under LE. 25. This occurs in the second of the two pieces referenced above, n. 21; rpt. SP, 39.1. 26. See the good account by James Longenbach, "The Bourgeois State of Mind," Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56-77, esp. 73-77. 27. Letters of Pound to Quinn, 191. 28. Pound, "The Island of Paris: A Letter (September, 1920)," Dial, October 1920, 410-11. 29. Pound ["B. L."], "Julien Benda," Athenaeum, 9 July 1920, 62; Benda's book provides the sole subject for review, which begins, 62: "One shrinks from the abruptness and exclusiveness of such a phrase as : 'M. Benda is the only exponent of common sense in the French of our moment'; yet amid the vast clutter of pastries which the French literary cuisine presents to the inquiring stranger it might seem unnecessarily difficult to find any other solid joint, or indeed any other piece-de-resistance, if one may be pardoned so ticklish a metaphor." Pound's authorship is confirmed by Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 263. 30. Pound, "Julien Benda," 62. 31. Levenson, Genealogy, 131; for his reasoning, see 120-31. He also treats the images of the verbal Egoist and the designs of the abstract painter as impulses that run to the opposite aesthetic and political conclusions of individual libertarianism and totalitarian control, 132-33. In "The New Sculpture," however, Pound treats those ab-

206

NOTES

stract designs of Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein as great examples of artistic immediacy, of Marsden's—the Imagiste's—wish for absolute simultaneity between visual image and meaning. 32. EPVA, 203: "The form of sphere above sphere, the varying reaches of light, the minutiae of pearls upon foreheads, all these are parts of [Dante's] Image. The image is the poet's pigment. . . . " 33. The older, incarnational tradition is the subject of an excellent book by Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, 2d ed., rev. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). The lectures of many years by Ferdinand de Saussure were collected as Cows de linguistique generate [1916], 3d ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965). Saussure's relation to literary history is discussed helpfully by Gerald L. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), esp. 56, where Bruns places Saussure in line with English romantic thought. Also helpful is Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), esp. 4-13, where Jameson concentrates on Saussure's reaction against attempts by some of his contemporaries — himself earlier—to historicize verbal meaning, thus to assume the primary validity of an early meaning (rather than regarding the sense of the word as a function of its difference from others in the linguistic system). For Saussure's extension of major tendencies in linguistic thought, see Jameson, passim, e.g., 11-12, 16. 34. See Longenbach, 41, 142, and Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 22-23, 265-72. 35. Kenner, The Pound Era, 226-29, esp. 228. 36. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Pound, first published in four installments in Little Review (September-December 1919); rpt. Instigations of Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 364. A survey of Fenollosa's ideas and their long-range effects is given by Laszlo Gefin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 37. Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's "Cantos" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 9-14, rightly notes Pound's reservations, as expressed between 1915 and 1927, about the validity of ideogrammic composition in nonsinological languages. A reasonable account of the early importance of the ideogrammic spirit in his own verse—juxtaposing particulars in the service of a composite effect—is made by Michael Andre Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 68-69. 38. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1970), 120-21. 39. Karl Mannheim, "The Democratization of Culture," trans. Paul Kecskemeti, in Mannheim's Essays on the Sociology of Culture, ed. Ernest Manheim (1956; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 214. 40. Thus the formulas in the 1950 essay by Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in his Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 51: "Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings"; throughout the essay the breath is conceived as the vehicle of the projective imagination. 41. The full title of Farr's volume, The Music of Speech, Containing the Words of

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Some Poets, Thinkers and Music Makers Regarding the Practice of the Bardic Art Together With Fragments of Verse Set to Its OWN Melody, hints at the broad scope of its resources. The book originated in a series of live performances in which Farr and other poets chanted the words of chosen poetic texts to the music of a zitherlike instrument, designed for her by Arnold Dolmetsch. She also supplemented her own opinions with an extensive series of critical reviews, mainly from the daily press. She was appealing to the standards of the common audience to support an implicit but important critical point: the common tongue, the normal speaking voice, bore an innate grace that the musical instrument merely drew to the surface. The tropes in these reviews insistently push the "lilt" of the natural speaking voice into the image of a fluent stream. One praises the effect of a poetic voice, 3, "buoyed up, as it were, on a smooth-flowing stream of melody, which simply lent perfect grace to its natural movement." Farr's own penchant for this kind of acoustic fluidity prescribed a heavy dose of Swinburne in the concerts. His double rhymes, multiple internal and near rhymes, homophonic repetitions and long syntactic parallels create the feeling of acoustic sequence, cursive units rather than single sounds edged by stress. A review of one performance thus concentrates on the part taken by Yeats, still attuned to a Swinburnean influence. Here a fluid acoustic consistency is set above visual severance; the journalist prefers a continuous, barely modulated monotone to sharp optical contrasts, 5: "The result might be described as a subtly modulated monotone—the monotone which in the hands of a great artist can often thrill us with more potent magic than all the bright play of contrasts—the monotone of Rembrandt's shadows, of twilight, of the tolling bell." It was in a popular literary culture such as this, after all, that Pound —and Hulme—were hammered into resistant shape. 42. Kenner, The Pound Era, 86-88. 43. Letter of 23 February 1934 to Mary Barnard, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 190741, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 254: "There aren't any rules. Thing is to cut a shape in time. Sounds that stop the flow, and durations either of syllables, or implied between them, 'forced onto the voice' of the reader by nature of the 'verse' (E.g., my Mauberley)." The correspondence collected by Paige will be dated and cited parenthetically as Letters. 44. Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 113-25. Another side of the same process is Pound's creative translation of the war poetry of Li Po, in Cathay. 45. Bush, Genesis, 75-86, 142-61; 198. 46. Pound, "Three Cantos I," Poetry, July 1917, 113. The subsequent two cantos were published in the July and August issues. These first published cantos have been handily gathered into the new Personae, ed. Baechler and Litz, and will be numbered and cited parenthetically under P. 47. Corrected tss. of Cantos I-III (f. 2397), Beinecke Library, Yale University. Since the manuscript material for any canto may be voluminous, and as such sorted into multiple files, I give the Beinecke file number in the citation. 48. Pound, tss. fragment of Three Cantos I (f. 2398), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 49. Pound, unpublished Ur Cantos (f. 2393), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 50. Corrected tss. of Cantos I-III (f. 2397), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 51. The gestation of Canto IV is understood in line with related developments between 1917 and 1919 by Bush, Genesis, 175-76, 198. Carpenter, Life, 345-47, confines its composition to the spring of 1919. In Bush's reading, a major influence comes from

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the emerging manuscript of Ulysses—but as an example to Pound, Bush suggests, of compression through dramatic voice, 202; yet Bush concedes, 201, that it is far harder now to identify (thus to hear?) an individual speaker in IV. 52. Gourmont's thoughts on Greek metaphor are relayed as well by Sieburth, Instigations, 104-5, although he connects these points neither to Pound's essay on Aeschylus nor to the prosody of the contemporary cantos. 53. Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe, 38-39, 47. 54. Bernstein, "Identification and its Vicissitudes," ibid., 162ff., esp. 169-72, 17677, 179-80. This problem of multiple voices is assimilated interestingly by Bernstein to a pattern of three recurring identities, any one of whom Pound may assume at any moment, but not all of whom are audible, 175-76, and who serve in the end only to underline the major problem. Pound simply cannot authorize himself as poetic voice, as Bernstein indicates forcefully, 176: "At the poem's core, the presence of Pound's personal voice, his ability to speak in propria persona (and the conventional Latin expression is, in this context, singularly revealing) remains an unresolved dilemma." 55. Pound, "The Fourth Canto," in Poems 1918-21 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 73. Cantos IV-VH were collected in this volume, which included as well Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. The link between these cantos and Mauberley, discussed later in this chapter, accounts for my use of this edition of these cantos, hereafter cited parenthetically as Poems. 56. Robert Browning, "Sordello," in Poetical Works, 1833-64, ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 265. 57. The details of the original, separate myths of Danae and Ecbatan are spelled out by Carroll Terrell, A Companion to "The Cantos" of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 14. 58. Ibid., 18. 59. Tss., Canto V (f. 2419), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 60. Pound, "The Eighth Canto," Dial, May 1922, 505. 61. Ibid., 505-6. The piling up of phrases through the agglutinative method here bears out Pound's remark in "Aeschylus," 273, that the absence of completed grammatical periods results often in verbosity. 62. The Dantean source and theme are discussed by Terrell, Companion, 34, though without reference to Pound's own technical odyssey. 63. Reference to this murder occurs first in Canto V (Poems, 80), which refers to the account of the chronicler Varchi. Terrell, 20, shows that the visage of Alessandro is compounded with the blond head ("E biondo") of Obizzo d'Este, a maniacal tyrant whom Pound nonetheless esteems for his "passionate depths," 35. 64. Unpublished letter, quoted by Carpenter, Life, 354. 65. Letters of Pound to Quinn, 181. 66. In a letter of 7 June 1920 to Schofield Thayer, preserved in the Dial archive at University of Chicago, Pound writes of "'H.S. Mauberley'": "He was done in Dec. & Jan." I am indebted to Ronald Bush for a transcription of this letter. 67. "Pastiche. The Regional. VIII," New Age, 21 August 1919, 284. This important piece, which has not been reprinted, was written as one in a series of travel articles Pound composed in France for the New Age in the summer and fall of 1919. 68. Francois Villon, "The [Greater] Testament," in Complete Poems of Francois Villon, trans. Beram Saklatvala (London: Dent, 1968), 15: "In my thirtieth year of age, / When of shame I'd drunk my proper share, / Neither all fool, nor yet all sage, / In spite of the bitter woes and care . . ."

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69. For the dominance of E.P., see John Espey, Ezra Pound's "Mauberley": A Study in Composition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), passim, esp. 14-16, 21, 98-102; Espey's views are shared by Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 16095, esp. 163. This view is countered by Thomas Connolly, "Further Notes on Mauberley," Accent, 16 (1956), 59-67, esp. 59-60; Connolly's ideas about Mauberley's dominance are developed by William F. Spanos, "The Modulating Voice of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6 (1965), 73-96, esp. 7576. The premise of Connolly and Spanos is extended painstakingly by Jo Brantley Berryman, Circe's Craft: Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983). 70. Berryman, Circe's Craft, 141-44. Pound's relevant remarks on Collignon occur in his omnibus reviews, "Music," New Age, 16 May 1918, 44-45, and 15 April 1920, 387-88. This singer may indeed provide a common model for "Envoi" and "Medallion," but it is unwise to transfer the enthusiasm of Pound's reviews to his views in the poems themselves, where the figure is swept up in the ironic design of the whole sequence. Berryman weakens her interesting material by allowing her argument to become trapped by the pseudo-problem of "who's speaking where". She proposes that the sequence is dominated by the voice of Mauberley, whom she hears, quite implausibly I think, as the speaker of the first eleven poems—including the war elegies (1-135). Yet she frees E.P. from Mauberley's control and allows him to speak "Envoi"; no more persuasively, she separates Pound from Mauberley and presents "Medallion" as Pound's own triumphant work in "'Medallion': Pound's Poem," 137-60. 71. Edmund Waller, "Go Lovely Rose," The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G. Thorn Drury (London: Routledge, 1893), vol. 1, 128. 72. Emphases added to Witemeyer, 163, and Espey, 98. 73. For explanation of the medieval practice, I am indebted to Professor Dennis Wilde, O.S.A. Chapter 3 1. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A narrative of my career up-to-date (1950; rpt. London: Hutchinson, 1951), 113. The trip to Germany and the Munich milieu are described well by Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as Enemy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 6-7. 2. Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 15-16. For Lewis's attendance at Bergson's lectures on comedy, see Wagner, 215; for several details in Lewis's French experience between 1903 and 1908 I am indebted to Victor Cassidy, author of a biography which, though unfinished, has followed the few available leads in recreating Lewis's Parisian years. 3. Lewis, "Le Pere Francois (A Full-length Portrait of a Tramp)," The Tramp: an Open Air Magazine (September 1910); rpt. in Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard La Fourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1982), 278. This gathering of first versions and the later revisions (in The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and other stories [1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928]) will be cited parenthetically as WB. 4. See Blast, 2, July 1915, War Number, ed. Wyndham Lewis; facsimile rpt. (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1981), for example, "The God of Sport and Blood," 10: "The

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directors of the German Empire have shown their vulgarity and democratization as clearly in their propaganda of ferocity, as in their management of medievalism and historic consciousness. . . . From this supposedly 'aristocratic' Junkerish country has come the intensest exhibition of democratic feeling imaginable." The contrary draw to a traditionally conceived elite is expressed in "A Review of Contemporary Art," 42: "The leisure of an ancient Prince, the practical dignity required by an aristocratic function ... are all things very seldom experienced to-day, but that it might be desirable to revive." He responds to that possibility: "Should we not revive them at once?". 5. Blast, 2, 97. 6. Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1938), rpt. in Gertrude Stein on Picasso, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Liveright, 1970), 18-19: "Really the composition of this war, 19141918, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the centre surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism." Despite her emphasis on lack of central focus, this description might fit the serial arrangement of abstract shapes on many Vorticist canvases. 7. Lewis alludes to his seclusion through these years in his early autobiography, Blasting & Bombardiering (1937; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 45, 231, 339. See also Meyers, The Enemy, 102-5, for an account of this period. 8. The phrase occurs in Time and Western Man (1927; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1957), 283; hereafter cited parenthetically as TWM. Lewis focuses on the aesthetic and political—specifically "democratic"—doctrine of empathy (183-84), here invoking Benda as he does so. Elsewhere he concentrates on an equally essential point of Belphegor. "as Benda also immediately noticed," the contemporary "world of Europe" represents "a musical society" (TWM, 31-32). Thus he invokes Benda again as he sets the culture of musical populism at odds with the aristocratic intellect (TWM, 292). He repeats this praise for Benda's analysis of empathy in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1989), 232; hereafter cited parenthetically as ABR. Rather than organizing this chapter around a documentation of Benda's single influence on Lewis, I wish to show the operation of the more wide-ranging, panEuropean colloquy in which the Frenchman figured so prominently. A helpful introductory survey of Lewis's political ideas (qua political ideas) is by D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London: Cassell, 1972). Bridson presents Benda's influence on Lewis, not in terms of the musical politics of democracy, but chiefly as a means of reinforcing Lewis's aversion to Bergson, 62-63. The aesthetic basis of Lewis's antidemocratic stance emerges indirectly in the comments on "group rhythm" by Wagner, A Portrait, 44-59, although the notion of musical empathy acquires no real conceptual focus or analysis here. Wagner does provide a more extensively historicized discussion than Bridson on the French backgrounds to Benda, 8-13; the appeal of authority in contemporary French culture is traced, 12, to the needs of a nation recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian war. 9. Also in line with Gourmont and Benda is the formulaic distinction Lewis draws between musical empathy and visual separation, as in "The Credentials of the Painter" (1922); rpt. in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913-1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), 219: "No one has ever wept at the sight of a painting in the way they sometimes weep when they listen to music. You could not by showing people a picture of a battle cause their hearts to beat and their

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limbs to move, eyes to water, as it is fairly easy to do by beating on a drum, and blowing into a fife. . . . The coldest musician . . . cannot help interfering with your body and cannot leave you so cold as a great painter can. . . . [L]ooking at Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus' would cause you as little disturbance of that sort as looking at a kettle or the Bank of England." The writings collected here will be dated and cited under WLA. 10. In "The Taxi-Cab Driver Test for Fiction," in Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934; hereafter MWA), Lewis uses the obsessive concern with sound in this unidentified passage (from Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point) to make his own point of literary politics: "You won't be late?" There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice, there was something like entreaty. "No, I won't be late," said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice annoyed him. It drawled a little, it was too refined— . . . [S]he could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous. The words broke out in spite of her principles. This single tell-tale page appears to me to be terribly decisive: for no book opening upon this tone of vulgar complicity with the dreariest of suburban library readers could . . . become anything but a dull and vulgar book. "'You won't be late?' There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice." That is surely so much the very accent of the newspaper serial (even down to the cosy sound of the name of the heroine) . . . this is the very voice of 'Fiction'. (301-2; emphases added after quotation)

Huxley's saturation of his passage with acoustic images serves to shift the language from the optical frame of the page to the register of the inner ear, where a "cosy name" like Marjorie Carling's can unfold its delectable sounds. Here parataxis (used three times in this short excerpt) also recovers its original oral force —magnet and channel for easy reading, Lewis might have argued, by a plebian public. 11. Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 6; MWA, 32. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 42-47; Hugh Kenner, "Reflections on the Gabler Era," James Joyce Quarterly, 26 (1988), 11-12. See Jacques Derrida, for example, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in his Writing and Difference, ed. and trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), esp. 196-99; the dichotomy is pressed less strenuously by Derrida than by Derrideans. 12. Lewis, The Apes of God (1930; rpt. New York: Robert McBride, 1932), 610, hereafter cited parenthetically as AG. Paleface, The Philosophy of the Melting, Pot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 72-73. 13. LeBon, The Crowd, 102-3. 14. Thus the ideology of the prevailing Eye is discarded in favor of the standard political opposition of fascism and Marxism by Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. 17-18, where Jameson challenges Lewis's "attempts to justify his immense and wide-ranging cultural critiques in terms of the defense of the rights of the visual and the painter's practice. The untenable squaring of the circle allows him to repress the structural center of his work, which lies not in the position of the observing subject, but rather in his implacable lifelong opposition to Marxism itself." For application of the communism-fascism polarity, see also Jameson's Appendix, "Hitler as Victim," 179-85, esp. 184, where he aligns the formalized dichotomies of the Cold War with that "struc-

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tural center" of Lewis's work in the earlier decades. Jameson's view of history as a series of competing ideologies — (proto)fascism and Marxism above all—is set out interestingly, 15-16, and it provides a complex model for narrative time in Lewis's novels, 16ff. 15. Answer to Questionnaire circulated to writers and printed by New Verse, October 1934, 7-8. See also ABR, 70, "Fascism ... is a faction of the extreme and militant Left who have burst round and through to the Right, as it were," and 71: "Fascismo ... is Leninism adapted to an ancient and intelligent population." Lewis's indifference to the complexities of history—in favor of the cleaner, simpler lines of an aesthetic construction of the State-is attested in a letter excerpted in the Introduction to The Essential Wyndham Lewis, ed. Julian Symons (London: Deutsch, 1989), 2-3: "My mind is ahistoric, I would welcome the clean sweep. ... I could build something better, I am sure of that, than has been left by our fathers." 16. In The Old Gang and The New Gang (1933; rpt. New York: Haskell, 1972), Lewis opens by discussing the fascist movements in Germany, Italy, and England in terms of the youth cult, 17, which he regards throughout his work as the most typical infatuation and obvious delusion of contemporary mass culture. He soon exempts Italy and Germany from this disreputable connection, 22-23. But not England: "Have we nothing but boy scouts and girl guides? Are we quite out of it? ... It's all plain-sailing in Germany—in Russia it's as plain as print. But old England has its 'New Gang.' . . . We are all of us far too ready to assume that, in contrast to those revolutionary states over on the mainland and to the North, we in Old England have no 'Youth' politics to speak of. That is a great mistake. In the political field it is not even disguised" (27-28). It is not disguised in England because it does not enjoy the distance on which his idealizing perspective—on Germany, Italy, Russia—relies. The membership of the British Union of Fascists defied his ideals. Largely transient and lower-working-class at the start (1933-35), those filling the ranks fell far short of the regimental paradigm Lewis admired in Germany. See the one demographic study, Stuart Rawnsley's 'The Membership of the British Union of Fascists," in British Fascism: Essays on The Radical Right in Inter-War Britain, ed. Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thurlow (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 150-65, esp. 154-57. The standard political history is by Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (1961; rpt. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), which focuses more on Oswald Mosley than on the English social context. For Mosley's reversion to the demagoguery of mass politics, see the discussion in Robert Skidelsky's "Reflections on Mosley and British Fascism," in British Fascism, ed. Lunn and Thurlow, esp. 95-96. 17. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 165. 18. Lewis, The Childermass (1928; rpt. London: John Calder, 1965), 239; hereafter cited as Ch. 19. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 236. 20. Lewis, Satire and Fiction (London: The Arthur Press, 1930), 47. 21. Lewis accepts the Gourmontian term and value of "le visuel" as the defining strength of his satire in Satire and Fiction, 46. 22. When Lewis attempts to separate his discursive ideology (variously political and aesthetic) from his literary practice, in fact, he seems only to reveal his underlying attraction to major syntheses. He writes thus to Pound in 1925, detailing the individual works in the emergent Man of the World series and asserting their interrelation, in Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 144-45 (hereafter P/L):

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After one attempt only I saw how difficult it would be to find a publisher who would give me what I wanted for my five hundred thousand word book, The Man of the World— (longer than War & Peace, Ulysses, & so on). Luckily its form enabled me, without very much additional work, to cut it up into a series of volumes. In each part of the original book I had repeated the initial argument, associating it with the new evidence provided by the particular material of each part. . . . There is a hundred thousand word volume, called The Lion & the Fox about Shakespeare, principally. There is one called Sub Persona Infantis [The Art of Being Ruled] which deals with a particular phase—you know the one —of the contemporary sensibility. The Shaman [part of The Art of Being Ruled] about exoliti & sex-transformation. The Politics of the Personality (100 thousand) [Time and Western Man] principally evidence of philosophy, one (100 thousand) called The Politics of Philistia [in The Art of Being Ruled] & one called The Strategy of Defeat (40 thousand) [in Time and Western Man and The Art of Being Ruled]. Then there are 2 volumes < (not of course part of The Man of the World) > of The Apes of God (fiction) the first of which is nearly done. Joint (sketched & partly done) [a separate narrative in the style of The Childermass] Archie (complete, thirty or forty thousand) [beginning mss. of The Apes of God] — The Great Fish Jesus Christ [not written?] (45 thousand).

(Materer supplies helpful identifications of these provisional fragments.) The words placed in angle brackets were added to the typescript by Lewis, and the palimpsest tells the story of an aborted fusion. He detaches the novels from the polemical work, but only as a second thought. His initial script reflects his first impulse: to write the fiction as integral part of a single, inclusive oeuvre. 23. Rude Assignment, 129, 128. 24. Ibid., 129. 25. Lewis, The Caliph's Design (1919); rpt. WLA, 129, 130, 145, 133. Since "The life of the crowd, or the Plain Man, is external [and] he can live only through others and outside himself," he "in a sense is the houses, the railings, the statues, the churches, the roadhouse," 138; thus Lewis calls on architects "to work for formal beauty, for more intelligent significance in the ordering of our lives," 136. In this essay the word "Demos" now recurs like a sardonic refrain. It also contains the first reference to Remy de Gourmont, whose views on contemporary architecture are shared by Lewis, who also wishes for the demise of a naturalistic standard (146-47). 26. Lewis, "What Art Now" (1919); rpt. WLA, 115: "It is on the possibilities of rendering this smaller public d'elite more supple, more interested, and much more learned in the matter of pictorial art ["the 'new art,'" 114], that the healthy flourishing of painting in this country for the next twenty years depends." 27. Lewis, The Lion and The Fox (London: Grant Richards, 1927), 122, 124-25. In "The Figure of the King" (121-29), Lewis focuses repeatedly on mystique of royal isolation; see also 92. Hereafter cited parenthetically as LF. For the same theme of royal isolation, see ABR, 93. 28. Lewis, "Power-feeling and Machine-age Art" (October 1934); rpt. in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society, 1914-1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1989), 236-40. 29. Lewis, "Notes Toward [a] Theory of Painting," Cornell University Library. 30. Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 184. Hereafter cited parenthetically as H. 31. Meyers, The Enemy, 187; for a good account of Lewis's visit and the Germany he found, see Meyers, 187-89. 32. Lewis, Rude Assignment, 92. 33. Lewis, Left Wings over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing (Lon-

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don: Cape, 1936); Count Your Dead: They are Alive! or A New War in the Making (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937). 34. Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering, 279. 35. Lewis, "Berlin Revisited," Cornell University Library. 36. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 59. 37. Lewis, The Hitler Cult (1939; rpt. New York: Gordon Press, 1972), 226-27. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HC. 38. Lewis, mss. Rude Assignment, Cornell University Library. 39. Lewis, Snooty Baronet (London: Cassell, 1932). 40. Lewis, The Revenge for Love (1937), ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1991). Hereafter cited parenthetically as RL. 41. Lewis, The Vulgar Streak (1941; rpt. New York: Jubilee, 1973). Hereafter cited parenthetically as VS. 42. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 219-53. The contemporary culture of English literary Marxism emerges lucidly in Valentine Cunningham's British Writers of the Thirties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 296-340; see esp. 316-17, where Cunningham surveys the cultivation of the common tongue in the literature and journalism of the thirties. 43. Lewis, Self-Condemned (1954; rpt. London: Methuen, 1955). Hereafter cited parenthetically as SC. 44. Salomon Reinach, Apollo, trans. F. Simmonds (1904; New York: Scribner's, 1924), 191. 45. See Lewis's rejections of his early abstract manner in "After Abstract Art" (July 1940) and "The 1956 Retrospective at the Tate Gallery" (July-August 1956): Vorticism, its predecessors and descendants, merely "build up a visual language as abstract as music" (WLA, 452); "All that our abstract experiment of twenty years ago did for painting, it seems, was to substitute sensationalism for the cultivation of the senses" (WLA, 359). Chapter 4 1. Geoffrey Hill, "Our Word is Our Bond," The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Deutsch, 1984), 143. 2. Richard Sieburth, "Dada Pound," South Atlantic Quarterly, 93 (Winter 1984), 66-67; Sieburth provides a good survey of Dadaist attitudes and practices, stressing "Dada's overall attempt to deconstruct or disrupt the semantic function of the ideological sign system that had made World War I possible" (56). Also valuable is Sieburth's "Ezra Pound," in American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, ed. Karen Rood (Detroit: Gale Research, 1980), 315-33. A good account of Pound's acquaintance with Parisian Dadaists is Andrew Clearfield's "Pound, Paris, and Dada,"Paideuma, 1 (Spring-Fall 1978), 113-40. Pound's interest in Dada extends his general allegiance to the international avant-garde in Marjorie Perloff s lucid argument, "Ezra Pound and the Prose Tradition in Verse," The Futurist Moment, 163ff., which emphasizes the point that his attempt to display language on the page changes the writer's medium to the canvas; Perloff traces these incentives back to Pound's first exposure to Futurism; see esp. 171-75, 183, 190-91.

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3. Robert von Hallberg, "Ezra Pound in Paris," in On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie, ed. Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988), 64. Von Hallberg's reticence stems from a general resistance to Perloffs argument for the continuing importance of the European avant-garde — not only for Pound but for American poetry in the Pound tradition; see 55-56, 60, 64. Perloff extends her commentary on the modern tradition of the avant-garde in "AvantGarde or Endgame?," Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1-28. 4. First came the writing of "The Eighth Canto," Dial, May 1922, revised and renumbered as II in 1925. Its challenge to the tradition of musical epos, discussed in chapter 2, may be assimilated to the influence of The Waste Land, as discussed later here. The letter, written to Felix Schelling, 8 July 1922 (Letters, 180), refers to "the first 11 cantos." 5. Bush, Genesis, 239-42. 6. Calvin Bedient, He Do the Police in Different Voices: "The Waste Land" and its Protagonist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. ix-xi, 59, 73, 219-21. 7. Letters, 179: "I have proved that the Provencal rhyme schemes are not impossible in English. They are probably inadvisable. The troubadour was not worried by our sense of style, our 'literary values,' he could shovel in words in any order he liked. . . . [H]e got certain musical effects because he cd. concentrate on music without bothering about literary values. He had a kind of freedom which we no longer have." 8. I will be alluding to the separate collections of cantos, as published between 1925 and 1940, but, for the sake of convenience, using The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1986), hereafter cited parenthetically as C; no major disparities exist between the earlier and later editions for the passages quoted. 9. The absence of this historical dimension in Frank's understanding accounts for his persistent failure to admit the political implications of his own antitemporal scheme — the point of most heated debate in his recent exchange with Frank Kermode. This critic's uneasiness with the term and concept of "spatial form" is traced correctly by Frank to "the long-established association in [Kermode's] mind between 'the abolition of time' and 'the practical effects of irrationalism,"' chief among these an aversion to "democracy and all the 'Bergsonian' attitudes to time and human psychology." "Invariably," Frank points out, Kermode equates "the critical fiction of spatial form" with "the myth of fascist totalitarianism." Despite Frank's attempts to rescue his critical model from the political meanings with which it is loaded, Kermode's reactions are accurate, for he perceives not merely the technique of repeating phrases and images across the span of a work, but those residual myths of time—in this instance the new myths of atemporality— that inform at least some of the manifestations of this technical sensibility. As Frank himself later conceded, he had not read Lewis's Time and Western Man at the time of writing his essay on spatial form. Politically, at least, he knew not whereof he spoke; subsequently, indeed, he has remained impervious to the same political hermeneutic. While Joyce provides the signal exception to this rule, it is obvious that spatialization of Time, when it occurs, tends to give the lie to Progress —and to the liberal social philosophies that are its fellow travelers. The analogy Pound draws between the dream-time of Greek epos in Canto I and the dire phantasmagoria of modern epic events in XVI thus witnesses a pervading historical pessimism. No less than in A Vision, an antiprogressive, reactionary attitude shows in the shape given to history (despite Yeats's failure to discern a schematic plan anywhere in the first twenty-seven cantos, as he admitted in 1928, in "A Packet for Ezra Pound," in A Vision rev. ed. [1956; rpt. New York: Macmillan,

216

NOTES

1970], 4: "I have often found there brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits should not be dealt out in some quite different order.") For a repetition of this scheme in the next suite of cantos, see the summary below, n. 29. Frank sets out his theory first in "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 10-13. He addresses the political issues in "Spatial Form: Thirty Years After," in Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 223-24. See Kermode's comments on Pound and Lewis in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), esp. 109-10, where he connects their antidemocratic, reactionary attitudes to antitemporality. See also Kermode's "A Reply to Joseph Frank," Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978), 579-88, esp. 585-86. 10. Corrected tss., Canto VIII (f. 2436), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 11. The earlier work of Strater and the circumstances surrounding this first edition are recreated helpfully by Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 198-201. 12. This analogy is drawn in The Tale of the Tribe, 9-10, by Michael Bernstein, who goes on to show how Pound's many-voiced product stands at odds with his own desire for a single, authoritative view. See the discussion referenced in chapter 2, n. 53 and n. 54. 13. Selected Letters of Pound to Quinn, 217. 14. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Eliot Norton (1891; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 220-42, esp. 220, 221, 224, 230, 233-34, 241-42. 15. The old myth is conveyed with a note of mock nostalgia by Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), vol. 1, 76-77 (11. 570, 584). 16. "Der Neue Mensch" was first published on 23 May 1917, in Neue Jugend, in Berlin. An English translation appears in Hans Kleinschmidt's introduction to Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking, 1974), xxx-xxxi. 17. Pound, "Parisian Literature," Literary Review, [New York] Evening Post, 13 August 1921, 7; "Paris Letter," Dial, October 1921, 457. 18. Pound, "Parisian Literature," 7. The qualities Pound esteemed in Picabia are strikingly similar to those he extolled in Benda in the first of his "Letters" from Paris for the Dial (chapter 2), where he praised Benda as a "fine disenfectant," who has cleared out "this place open to wind and light." In the later "Paris Letter," 457, he also admires Picabia for his "hyper-socratic destructivity." 19. Kongo Roux, 391, Le Pilhaou-Thibaou, 10 July 1921, 10. This piece is reprinted by Clearfield, "Pound, Paris, and Dada," Appendix II, 135. The site of the millennial city is the demilitarized banks of the Rhine. 20. Joyce's remarks to Eugene Jolas, in Jolas's "My Friend James Joyce," in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. S. Givens (New York: Vanguard, 1948), 13. 21. Enclosed in a letter of 18 March 1922 to William Carlos Williams (Letters, 172); the first beneficiary was to be Eliot. 22. "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire;

NOTES

217

the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World." "A Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 508. 23. Huelsenbeck, Memoirs, 52: "Dada, as I see it now after so many years, was a revolt of the personality that was threatened on so many sides. It was a revolt against imminent levelling, stupidity, destruction. It was the distress cry of creative people against banality, such as Ortega y Gasset subsequently described in his famous book The Revolt of the Masses." 24. Huelsenbeck, 53. 25. Plans and Notes, Cantos XVII-XXX (f. 2528), Beinecke Library, Yale University. In the same gathering another page of handwritten notes twice suggests the Huelsenbeck-like connection—in Pound's words—between "Tyranny" and "Demos"; the "arts" are seen on the other hand as a superior independence, in connection with "freedom" and "experiment." 26. Zeev Sternhell, "Fascist Ideology," in Fascism: A Reader's Guide; Analysis, Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laquer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 337-49, esp. 344, 347. 27. Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), passim, esp. 49, 129, 150, 199, 266-67. 28. Rainey, Pound and the Monument of Culture, 27-49, esp. 46-49; this useful discussion does not refer to the New Man myth in contemporary Dadaism. 29. A Draft of Cantos XVII-XXVII also comprises a mythic figure of history analogous to the one traced in the spanning pattern of the preceding sequence. Just as Pound's invocation of an original heroic epos in Canto I found its grisly diminuendo in XVI, in the demotic tales of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, now an original natural paradise, envisioned at the opening of the new suite (XVII), is mirrored in the finale, but mockingly, in the bogus Utopia of the communist millennium (XXVII): here Marxist egalitarianism appears in a damning parable of the 1917 uprising. As earlier, this diagram of historical decline expresses the antiprogressive temperament that so often attends the will to arrest temporality in constructs like these. 30. While it was Hulme's poetry that engaged Pound early on, the philosophical work attracts his attention later, as witnessed in his commemoration of "T.E.H.," among the casualties of war, in Canto XVI, written in the same year (1924) that the first Speculations appeared: "And ole T.E.H. he went to it, / With a lot of books from the library, / London Library, and a shell buried 'em in a dugout, / And the Library expressed its annoyance. / And a bullet hit him on the elbow / . . . gone through the fellow in front of him, / And he read Kant in the Hospital, in Wimbledon, / in the original, / And the hospital staff didn't like it" (C, 71). 31. Tss. draft, Canto XXI, (f. 2486), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 32. Shelley, "The Triumph of Life," Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 457-58. 33. Materer, in Vortex, 58-59, points out that, even at Pisa, Pound still thinks of the Vortex as a "pattern of hope," yet the element of nostalgia at this moment of crisis is also evident. Dasenbrock, in Literary Vorticism, 202-5, describes a number of possible analogues for Vorticism in Pound's later practice. The ideogram, for example, which juxtaposes particulars to create general statements, seems to adapt the force of centripetal attraction in the vortex; but Dasenbrock correctly notes that these later techniques represent faint echoes of the original Vorticist conceits.

218

NOTES

34. "Collected Prose" (1929), in Beinecke Library, Yale University; excerpted in EPVA, 304. In a letter of 27 March 1926, P/L, 166, Lewis responds to a (now lost) letter from Pound announcing receipt of The Art of Being Ruled (published 11 March 1926). Pound's letter of 30 March, P/L, 166-67, expresses preference for the fiction over the discursive prose, but concludes, 167: "I dare say yr. book is a good move politically, to git you your place in the sun etc. Wish it luck to that end. Publik oviduct in proper condition, le's hope." This initial reticence about Lewis's overt political writing has been fully reversed by October 1936, P/L, 185-86, when Pound censures Benda's own censure of treasonous clercs and enlists his former colleague on Blast in this attempt at an artists' reformation of society: "time for concerted action IS. Manifesto against TREASON OF THE CLERKS. Damn and blast generation that left our generation the bloody mess it did leave us. ... Kill John Bull [with art]." In keeping with the attitudes mapped in chapter 3, Lewis expresses skepticism about such proposals; see the letters of 1 December 1936, P/L, 187, and 26 December 1937, P/L, 199. 35. Miscellaneous unpublished passages of Cantos XXI-XXX (f. 2530), Beinecke Library, Yale University; emphasis added. 36. Thus Pound reverses the direction of Chaucer's poem, as he associates pity—not its absence —with death. Cf. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977), 690: "Thus am I slayn, sith that Pite is dede. / Alias that day that hit shulde falle!" 37. Daniel Pearlman, in The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Pound's "Cantos" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 115-31, esp. 123-24, also sees the evil of sequence as the substance of Pound's objection but, in line with the general tendency in his book, too simplistically, for he fails to note Pound's creative antipathy with historical sequence and its speech, the parole. Pearlman also fails to see the relevance of Lewis's Time and Western Man (uncited in The Barb of Time) and thus misses an essential dimension of Pound's poetic intelligence. 38. Pound, "TARR" (March 1918); rpt. Instigations, 216, 224, 221, 217. 39. Pound, "After Election," New Review (January-February 1931); rpt. Pound/ Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1967), 241, 240. The writings collected here will be dated and cited parenthetically as P/J. 40. See Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422, esp. 262-63, 324-26, 400-402. An interestingly slanted notion of Bakhtin's is that poetry tends by its nature to exclude the heteroglossia in favor of a single, uniform, privileged, hieratic language (287). While this idea is obviously premodernist (and perhaps predominantly Russian) in its references, it may nonetheless help to identify a difference between the democratic practices of fiction (if not Lewis's), where a varied speakership is given equal rights of access to language, and the more elite inclination of the Cantos. 41. Although Pound diminishes the import of the Homeric structure in Joyce's novel as a mere "scaffolding," P/J, 197. 42. The "specimen of fungus" is Middleton Murry's "Gustave Flaubert." 43. Unpublished letter of 10 March 1937 to Hilaire Miller; quoted in P/J, 257. 44. Letter of 5 December 1936 to Lewis, in P/L, 189. 45. It was in the month of Joyce's death (January 1941) that Pound began speaking on Rome Radio. The most extensive commentary on Joyce occurs in talks given near

NOTES

219

the beginning of this period. These talks are reprinted from written scripts in P/J, 26673, where they are presented in series but not precisely dated; this quotation is from the second, 272. Echoes and allusions to these themes appear also in the talks of 26 April 1942, 11 May 1942, and 21 May 1942, as collected in "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), 107-9, 127-29, 141-44. (Since systematic recording of Pound's broadcasts did not begin until the United States was nearing war, in October 1941, the first ten months are spottily documented.) 46. From the first of the Joyce talks, P/J, 268. 47. Undated letter to Lewis (1951), in Blast 3 [a compendium of unpublished materials and tributes], ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1984), 165. 48. These letters are held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University, under the titles "WL/Ap/51" and "W.L. cult/2nd/install." Pound's recommendation that Lewis's book end with the Nuremberg scene occurs in "W.L. iv," 6 (only the first three pages of this letter are published in Blast 3, which includes the full text of the second letter, with annotations, 163-82). Pound's annotations extend to sixteen manuscript pages. 49. Andrew Parker, "Ezra Pound and the 'Economy' of Anti-Semitism," in Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 70-90. 50. Pound, How to Read (London: Harmsworth, 1931), 41; emphases added. Hereafter cited as HR. 51. Letter of 12 February 1933 to F. R. Leavis, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 52. Tss. notes for Cantos XXXI-XXXIII (f. 2542), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 53. Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley Nott, 1935), vii; hereafter cited as J/M. 54. Bush, Genesis, 11: "It seems that by 1927 Pound had picked up the word 'ideogram' to redefine once again his intuitive affinity for description by particulars." See the first issue of his own journal, Exile 1 (Spring 1927), esp. 88; see also HR (composed in 1929), 49-50: "The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good. ... He must begin by stating that such and such particular works seem to him 'good,' 'bad'. . . ." The method of juxtaposing particulars is thus cited in ABC of Economics (London: Faber, 1933), 37, as "heaping together the necessary components of thought"; the juxtaposition of specific imagistic radicals in the Chinese ideogram is described also in ABC of Reading (1934; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1960), 21-23, where it is adduced as a superior mode of perception, evidenced as such in GaudierBrzeska's intuitively ideogrammic perception and thus hailed as "the RIGHT WAY to study poetry, literature or painting" (23). 55. This tradition, which follows a line of development from Poe to Baudelaire and Mallarme, turns upon a rejection of referential content for poetic language. It has been revived to explain the "lyric structure" of long modern poems by M. L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), passim, esp. 9-15. I discuss these issues in "Current Critical Models of the Long Poem and David Jones's The Anathemata," ELH, 52 (1985), 239-55. 56. In Rorem's Introduction to Pound's Antheil and the Theory of Harmony (1924; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 3; hereafter cited parenthetically asATH. 57. Early on, Pound admitted his uncertain footing on this new acoustic ground.

220

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After taking up the pseudonym of William Atheling as music critic for the New Age, he wrote to his father in late 1917: "Am doing art and music critiques under pseudonyms, paying the rent, rather entertaining work. NOT to be mentioned. It may be I have at last found a moderately easy way to earn my daily. Bloody queer what a man will do for money. MUSIC!!!!" (quoted by Carpenter, Life, 314). About his competence as a critic of the visual arts no uncertainty arises here. 58. An interestingly intricate argument for the musical validity of Pound's theory of harmony is made by Hugh Kenner, "Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos," 725-28. See also R. Murray Schafer, ed., Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1977), 293-96 (the writings collected here will be dated and cited parenthetically as EPM). Both critics concede that Pound's is at least a highly unconventional theory of harmonic sound. The development of harmonic theory is set out helpfully by Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, 26-28. 59. Undated (1923-24) letter from George Antheil to Pound, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 60. The "totalitarian ideal" is described thus by Pound, "American Notes," New English Weekly, 4 April 1935, 509; he applies it to Hindemith's music in a January 1937 review, "Ligurian View of a Venetian Festival," rpt. EPM, 415.

Epilogue 1. Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism , 93-152. 2. Reed Way Dasenbrock, "Jefferson And/Or Adams: A Shifting Mirror for Mussolini in the Middle Cantos," ELH, 55 (1988), 517, 509. 3. Davenport offers this comprehensive model as a means of organizing the cantos he does not cover in detail in his Cities on Hills: A Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound's "Cantos"(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 90-100. 4. Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1987), 180-82, where she applies the deconstructionist axioms she has declared earlier, passim, esp. 14-15: "Writing, space, and personality connive with heresy to stifle the value that [Eliot and Pound] stimulate, divesting speech, tradition and community of all authority. The theory of personality is one of the main strategies these poets use to preach a 'revolution' which would turn the world full circle back to speech and time. . . . [They] commit themselves with growing urgency to a return of speech. Both champion an oral culture, in order to restore hegemony and to dispel the difference [between printed word and integral meaning] that they call 'personality.'" These issues are discussed in my review of Ellmann's book (with others on Eliot), "Canon Fodder," Times Literary Supplement, 19-25 August 1988, 914. 5. That the inflation or distortion of verbal sense is a function of acoustic sensation is a judgment expressed with increasing ferocity by Pound. A definitive example occurs in unpublished manuscript passages of another Usury canto (LI), where he summons the ghost of Robert Browning, returns to the site of his own first instruction for a poetry of living voice, and chastises that poetic in view of the sensibility expressed in XLV. Here Pound cartoons the Browning of "Bishop Bloughram's Apology," and links his vocal practices specifically—"Old Bob . . . with the voice" —first to the temporal medium of speech, then to the fluid imprecision of come-and-go words:

NOTES

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over the glaze, a light Time like a bed bug cimex, Time a centipede, scuttles under the door illusion? matter illusion? time rather! and speaking of righteousness lacking the concrete example Old Bob at the seance with the voice, say Gigadibs Bloughram, Robert redivivus Browning, ectoplasmic R.B. like suds over a beer stein (f. 2612, Beinecke Library)

Words voiced aloud, like the spume that plays upon the paradigm, make for a flow of vocal sensation only; spilling over the lip of the beer stein, it obscures the sort of well-cut form depicted in Canto XLV as the shaping agent of exact sense. Here "ectoplasm," the substance believed to emanate from a spiritualistic medium, recalls the magical "mesmerism" or hypnotic power that Pound attributed to his Victorian mentor in 1908 — describing in particular the effect of the speaking voice on the listening reader. The spirit matter of Browning's speech has now become old Bob's beery voice. 6. See Kenner, The Pound Era, 323-26, for an account of this luminous detail. 7. Broadcast of 12 February 1942, in "Ezra Pound Speaking, "34-38. 8. Broadcast of 3 February 1942, in "Ezra Pound Speaking, "29.


INDEX

Anarchism, 30-33, 45-47, 48-49, 204nn.9, 11 Antheil, George, 180-83; on Pound, 182 Auden, W. H., 7, 198n.l0 Baker, Keith Michael, 198n.4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 169, 218n.40 Barrows, Susanna, 202n.2 Bedient, Calvin, 144 Beltramelli, Antonio, 156 Benda, Julien, 4-5, 91, 100; and ideologie, 16, 17-18; on musical empathy, 16-17; political aesthetic of, 4-5, 16-18, 22-23; on visual discrimination as political aesthetic, 22-23; on visual vs. aural sensibilities, 20, 22-23. See also Lewis, Wyndham: on Benda; Pound, Ezra: on Benda WORKS: Belphegor, 16-18, 20, 22-23, 55; The Treason of the Intellectuals, 16, 17, 18, 98; The Yoke of Pity, 17 Benjamin, Walter, 132 Bergson, Henri, 5, 12-13, 36, 91; on intuition (through musical empathy), 12-13, 15; and musical vitalism, 12. See also Hulme, T. E.: influenced by Bergson Bernstein, Michael Andre, 71-72, 206n.37, 208n.54, 216n.12 Berryman, Jo Brantley, 84, 209nn.69, 70 Boccioni, Umberto (The Street Enters the House), 13-14 Bornstein, George, 202n.l Brancusi, Constantin (The Kiss), 176-78 Braque, Georges, 130 Bridson, D. G., 210n.8 Bruno, Giordano, 75 Bruns, Gerald, 206n.33 Bush, Ronald, 66, 143, 206n.37, 207-8n.51, 219n.54 Carpenter, Humphrey, 207n.51 Carter, Huntley, 47, 48 Casillo, Robert, 7, 198n.11

Cercle Proudhon, 32-33, 47, 200-ln.42 Clearfield, Andrew, 214n.2 Coffman, Stanley, 199n.21, 201n.54 Colish, Marcia, 206n.33 Comte, Auguste, 10 Connolly, Thomas, 209n.69 Cork, Richard, 198n.7 Creeley, Robert, 64 Cubism, 130 Cunningham, Valentine, 214n.42 Dadaism, 142-43, 153, 154; and the Great War, 143. See also Pound, Ezra: and Dadaism Dangerfield, George, 45, 203n.5 Darnton, Robert, 197n.5 Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 5, 164, 189, 198n.11, 217n.33 Davenport, Guy, 189, 220n.3 Davie, Donald, 46, 203-4n.9 Derrida, Jacques, 100, 190, 211n.11 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 9-10, 202n.3 Duncan, Ronald, 195 Eagleton, Terry, 10, 198-99n.5 Egoist, The, 44-45, 47, 61, 69, 104, 203n.5, 204n.l2. See also Marsden, Dora; New Freewoman, The Eliot, T. S., 6; on Hulme, 34-35; political sensibility of, 184; and voices of The Waste Land, 143-44, 169. See also Pound, Ezra: influenced by Eliot (The Waste Land) Ellmann, Maud, 190, 220n.4 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 197n.3 Espey, John, 86, 209n.69 Farr (Emery), Florence (The Music of Speech), 40, 64, 206-7n.41; and Hulme, T. E., 40 Fascism, 3, 7, 32-33, 184, 187, 195, 200ln.42. See also Nazism; New Man myth: in

223

224

INDEX

Fascism (continued) fascism; Pound, Ezra: on fascist aesthetic of music; Pound, Ezra: on Mussolini; Pound, Ezra: Works (prose books): Jefferson and/or Mussolini Fenollosa, Ernest, 61-62, 206n.36 Flint, F. S., 40 Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox, 58 Frank, Joseph, on spatial form, 146, 180, 215-16n.9 Frye, Northrop, 107 Futurism (Futurists), 5, 13-15, 26, 130, 198n.7 Gestalt, theory of, 63. See also Pound, Ezra: and Gestalt; Pound, Ezra: and Gestalt as means of authority; Pound, Ezra: and Gestalt through ideogrammic method Goebbels, Joseph, 121-22 Gourmont, Remy de, 4-5, 20-22, 36, 91, 100; on Homeric metaphor, 70; and ideologie, 21-22; political aesthetic of, 4-5; on popular (oral) poetry, 21-22; and Sorel, 30-31; on the visual style, 20-21, 70; on visual vs. aural sensibilities, 21, 22. See also Hulme, T. E.: influenced by Gourmont; Lewis, Wyndham: and Gourmont; Pound, Ezra: influenced by Gourmont; Pound, Ezra: readings of Gourmont WORKS: Esthetique de la languefrancaise, 21, 22, 31, 52; Le Problems du style, 2021, 22, 31, 70 von Hallberg, Robert, 46, 143, 204n.9, 215n.3 Hamilton, Scott, 205n.21 Hill, Geoffrey, 141-42 Hitler, Adolf. See Lewis, Wyndham: on Hitler; Lewis, Wyndham: Works (nonfiction books): Hitler and The Hitler Cult Hollander, John, 197n.4, 220n.58 Horace, 197n.4 Huelsenbeck, Richard ("The New Man"), 153, 154, 155, 156, 216n.l6; on communism, 155; on Ortega, 155, 217n.23 Hulme, T. E., 34-42, 160; adapts Bergson, 37-38; on classicism vs. romanticism, 3536; and ideologie, 36, 37, 41; and the Image, 37-38; influenced by Bergson, 36, 37; influenced by Gourmont, 36, 38, 39, 40-41, 201n.54; influenced by Worringer, 36, 39, 41, 202n.56; and musical empathy, 37; poems of, 34-35, 201n.47; and Sorel, 36;

on visual discrimination as model hierarchy, 40-42; on the visual style, 39-40, 41; on visual vs. aural poetics, 39-40 WORKS: "Bergson's Theory of Art," 37, 38, 39; "Humanism and the Religious Attitude," 41-42; "Intensive Manifolds," 37; "A Lecture on Modern Poetry," 38-39, 202nn.55, 56; "Notes on Language and Style," 37, 39-40, 40-41, 201n.53; "A Tory Philosophy," 35-36 Hynes, Samuel, 201n.53, 202n.58 Ideologie, 9-10. See also Benda, Julien: and ideologie; Gourmont, Remy de: and ideologie; Hulme, T. E.: and ideologie; Lewis, Wyndham: and ideologie; Marsden, Dora: and ideologie; Pound, Ezra: and ideologie Imagism, 45, 50; criticism of, 46, 203-4n.9; and individualism, 46, 203n.8; and Radicalism, 46-47, 203-4n.9 Izzi, Carlo, 175 Jameson, Fredric, 102, 206n.33, 211-12n.l4 Joyce, James, 6, 154. See also Lewis, Wyndham: on Joyce (Ulysses); Pound, Ezra: influenced by Joyce (Ulysses); Pound, Ezra: on Joyce; Pound, Ezra: on Joyce's Ulysses Kennedy, Emmet, 198n.2 Kenner, Hugh, 6, 62, 64, 100, 200n.35, 220n.58 Kermode, Frank, 25, 215-16n.9 Kern, Stephen, 24 Langbaum, Robert, 199n.6 Lasserre, Ferdinand, 36 LeBon, Gustave, 5, 32, 56, 82, 101; and the affective image, 32; and Sorel, 32-33 Levenson, Michael, 36, 46, 58, 201n.50, 202n.55, 204n.9, 205n.31 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham, 3-8, 15, 25-30, 33, 56, 91-139, 188, 195-96; in The Apes of God, 110; and artistic authority, 115, 11718, 118-19, 213n.25; on aural credulity, 9293, 99, 101, 102; on aural empathy and its political meanings, 93-94, 99, 210n.8; on aural vs. literary sensibilities, 99-100; on Benda, 98, 210n.8; and Blast, 94; and British fascism, 103, 212n.l6; early European travels of, 91-92, 209n.2; effect of Great War on, 28, 94-97, 113-14, 209-10n.4; as the Enemy, 94, 108-9; and extreme metaphor, 106-8; on fascism as Marxism, 102-

INDEX

3, 212n.l5; on fascism vs. democracy, 1012, 122; on Goebbels, 121-22; and Gourmont, 212n.21, 213n.25; on Hemingway, 99-100; on Hitler, 119-26; and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 138-39; on Huxley, 99100, 211n.lO; and ideologie, 27-28, 92, 94, 98, 99, 102, 115, 187-88; on Joyce (Ulysses), 169, 170, 173;and LeBon, 101; and linguistic mimicry, 136-37; and linguistic temporality, 105, 128-30, 130-31, 138; and The Man of the World, 98, 143, 212-13n.22; and Marxism, 211-12n.l4; and Marxist aesthetics parodied, 132-36; on nationalism, 119-20; on Nuremberg rallies, 124-25, 173; and pictorial literature, 105-13; and pictorial literature as self-contradiction, 108-9, 110-13, 127, 128-31; political aesthetic of, 99-103; and political aesthetic contradicted, 111-13, 120-21, 123-26, 138, 218n.34; on Pound, 123, 163-64; and proximate vision, 25-27, 30, 115-17, 118, 119; in The Revenge for Love, 135; revises early fiction, 92, 93-94; on Schopenhauer, 104-5; on Stein, 99; and visual discrimination, 9597, 104-6, 110, 111; and visual discrimination as political aesthetic, 100; on visual vs. aural sensibilities, 108-11, 210-11n.9; on visual vs. linguistic sensibilities, 103-13, 12729; on Vorticism, 139, 214n.45; war paintings of, 113-14, 115, 116. See also Pound, Ezra: influenced by Lewis; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis's Apes of God; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis's Art of Being Ruled; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis's critique of Ulysses; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis's Hitler Cult; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis's paintings; Pound, Ezra: on Lewis's Tarr; Pound, Ezra: readings of Lewis WORKS (essays and reviews): "After Abstract Art," 139, 214n.45; "Berlin Revisited" (unpublished), 123-24; "The Credentials of the Painter," 103-4, 210-11n.9; "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art," 104-5; "The God of Sport and Blood," 209-10n.4; "The 1956 Retrospective at the Tate Gallery," 139, 214n.45; "Notes Toward [a] Theory of Painting" (unpublished), 119; "Power-feeling and Machineage Art," 118; "Prevalent Design," 115; "A Review of Contemporary Art," 210n.4; "What Art Now?," 115.213n.26 WORKS (nonfiction books): The Art of Being Ruled, 101-2, 104, 119, 122, 210n.8,

225

212n,15, 213n.27; Blasting & Bombardiering, 123, 210n.7; The Caliph's Design, 115, 213n.25; Count Your Dead: They Are Alivet or A New War in the Making, 123; The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator, WO; Hitler, 119, 120-22; The Hitler Cult, 122, 124-26; Left Wings Over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing, 123; The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare, 118, 120, 213n.27; Men Without Art, 100, 211n.lO; The Old Gang and The New Gang, 212n.l6; Rude Assignment: A narrative of my career up-to-date, 91, 113, 119, 126; Satire and Fiction, 111, 212n.21; Time and Western Man, 99, 163-64, 167, 169, 210n.8, 215n.9, 218n.37 WORKS (fiction): The Apes of God, 101, 105-13, 173; The Childermass, 107, 10812, 173; "The Crowd Master," 94; "Franciscan Adventures," 93-94; "Le Pere Francois,"92-93; The Revenge for Love, 127, 129-37, 195; Self-Condemned, 137-38; Snooty Baronet, 127; Tarr, 91-92, 104; The Vulgar Streak, 127-28, 128-29; The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and other stories, 92 WORKS (drawings and paintings): A Battery Shelled, 115-17; Composition ("Timon of Athens"), 25-28, 94; The Crowd, 26-29, 94-95; Design for "Red Duet," 97; Plan of War, 95-96; The Pole Jump, 115-17, 119; Slow Attack, 95-96 Little Review, 153 Lipps, Theodor, 5, 11, 91 Locke, John, 9 Longenbach, James, 65, 205n.26 McLuhan, Marshall, in Self-Condemned, 138 Malatesta, Sigismundo, 146, 149, 150, 151; and Mussolini, 156. See also Pound, Ezra: Works (The Cantos): Cantos VIII-XI (Malatesta Cantos) de Man, Henri, 33, 201n.44 Mannheim, Karl, 63, 71 Marinetti, Fillipo, 13. See also Futurism Marsden, Dora, 45-47, 57, 104, 203nn.4, 6, 8, 204n.11; and anarchism, 45, 204n.11; on aural credulity, 45, 203nn.4, 6; and the Cercle Proudhon, 47, 204n.l 1; on the doctrine of the Image, 45-47, 203n.8; and ideologie, 45, 47; and nominalism, 45, 203n.4. See also Egoist, The; New Ereewoman, The

226

INDEX

Martin, Wallace, 201nn.47, 50 Marvell, Andrew, 152-53, 216n.l5 Materer, Timothy, 5, 164, 212-13n.22, 217n.33 Maurras, Charles: and Action Francaise, 32, 33, 36, 91; and the Cercle Proudhon, 3233, 204n.11 Mesmerism, 4, 13, 44, 197n.5, 202n.2 Meyers, Jeffrey, 91, 119, 210n.7, 213n.31 Modernism: criticism of, 5-6, 7, 179-80, 187, 219n.55; problematic achievement of, 3, 67, 187-88; as "revolutionary traditionalism," 3, 33; and vocal poetics, 5-6, 187, 220n.4 Music: as model for hierarchy, 4, 197n.3; physical effects of, 4; and sensory empathy, 11-16, 199n.9. See also Benda, Julien: on musical empathy; Bergson, Henri: on intuition as musical empathy; Bergson, Henri: and musical vitalism; Gourmont, Remy de: on popular (oral) poetry; Hulme, T. E.: and musical empathy; Hulme, T. E.: on visual vs. aural poetics; Lewis, Wyndham: on aural credulity; Lewis, Wyndham: on aural empathy and its political meanings; Ortega y Gasset, Jose: on visual vs. aural sensibilities; Pound, Ezra: and aural credulity; Pound, Ezra: and aural empathy; Pound, Ezra: on fascist aesthetic of music; Pound, Ezra: and harmonic theory; Pound, Ezra: on music; Pound, Ezra: and spatial vs. musical intelligence; Pound, Ezra: Works (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley): and loss of vocal music Mussolini, Benito, 156. See also Pound, Ezra: on Mussolini; Pound, Ezra: Works (prose books): Jefferson and/or Mussolini Nazism, 3, 7, 32-33, 184, 187, 200-ln.42. See also Fascism; Lewis, Wyndham: and British fascism; Lewis, Wyndham: on fascism; Lewis, Wyndham: on fascism as Marxism; Lewis, Wyndham: on fascism vs. democracy; Lewis, Wyndham: on Hitler; Lewis, Wyndham: Works (nonfiction books): Hitler and The Hitler Cult New Freewoman, The, 44-45, 46, 47, 61, 104, 203nn.4, 5, 204n. 11; and the Cercle Proudhon, 47, 204n.l 1; and the doctrine of the Image, 45-47, 203n.8; and Gourmont, 45; and Sorel, 45. See also Egoist, The; Marsden, Dora

New Man myth, 153-54; in fascism, 156. See also Pound, Ezra: and New Man myth Newbolt, Henry, 14-15 Olson, Charles, 64, 206n.40 Ong, Walter, 100 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 5, 18-19, 23, 81; and artistic authority, 18; and ideologie, 23; on mass empathy, 18-19; political aesthetic of, 19-20, 23-25; on proximate vision as political aesthetic, 23, 24-25; on visual vs. aural sensibilities, 19-20 Parker, Andrew, 174 Pearlman, Daniel, 218n.37 Perloff, Marjorie, 5, 198n.7, 214n.2, 215n.3 Picabia, Francis, 153 Pondron, Cyrena N., 204n.l7 Pound, Ezra, 3-8, 15, 25-30, 33, 43-89, 14186, 188-96; on Adams, 189, 190, 194; and the agglutinative method, 70, 71-72, 208n.61; on Alessandro de' Medici, 81, 82, 208n.63; on Antheil, 180-81; and artistic authority, 48, 54, 58-59, 60-61, 65, 68, 71, 72, 80, 114, 154-55, 178-79, 189-90; and artistic authority lost, 82, 176, 188-89, 19596; and aural credulity, 79, 80; and aural empathy, 44, 166-67, 182-83; and Belle Esprit, 154, 216n.21; on Benda, 55-56, 205n.29, 216n.l8, 218n.34; on Brancusi, 177-78; on Browning, 60, 69-70, 22021n,5; and Chaucer, 167, 218n.36; and Dadaism, 142-43, 153, 154, 155, 214n.2; and Dante, 60, 80, 150-51, 153, 159-60, 175, 206n.32; on Destutt de Tracy, 202n.3; and the Dial, 55; effects of Great War on, 5354, 65, 68, 142; on Eliot, 192; on Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, 171; on Eliot's Waste Land, 144; and exact definition, 174-76, 190, 191; and exact definition obscured, 192-95; on fascist aesthetic of music, 184-86; and Futurism, 214n.2; on Gaudier-Brzeska, 4, 47, 67-68, 197n.2, 219n.54; and Gestalt, 63-65, 83; and Gestalt as means of authority, 63, 65, 71, 82, 178; and Gestalt through ideogrammic method, 63, 71, 82, 178; and Guild Socialism, 156; and harmonic theory, 181, 185, 220n.58; on Henry James, 77-78; on Hindemith, 185-86; on Hitler, 173; and Hulme, 160, 217n.30; and the ideogrammic method, 62-64, 72, 83, 86, 176-78, 189,

INDEX

192, 206n.37, 219n.54; and ideologie, 6061, 71, 82, 145, 183-84, 187-88, 189, 2023n.3; and Imagism(e), 59; influenced by Browning, 43-44, 66-67, 74, 202n.l, 22021n.5; influenced by Eliot (The Waste Land), 143, 144-45, 146-47, 150, 169-70, 171, 173, 215n.4; influenced by Gourmont, 48, 50, 54, 58, 70-71, 79, 205n.2,0; influenced by Joyce (Ulysses), 69, 207-8n.51; influenced by Lewis, 165-68, 169, 170-71, 173, 174-75, 195; and the intaglio method, 66-68; on Jacob Epstein, 47, 57; and Jefferson, 189, 202n.3; on Joyce, 168-73, 195; on Joyce's Ulysses, 169-71, 172, 218n.41; on Joyce's work in progress, 171; on Lewis, 4, 123, 197n.2; on Lewis's Apes of God, 168, 172; on Lewis's Art of Being Ruled, 218n.34; on Lewis's critique of Ulysses, 172; on Lewis's Hitler Cult, 173, 219n.48; on Lewis's paintings, 25, 114, 164-65; on Lewis's Tarr, 168; on Lorenzo de' Medici, 80-81; on Maj. C. M. Douglas (Social Credit), 193; on Marsden, 204n.l2; and melopoeia, 175; on music, 180-86; on Mussolini, 173, 176-77, 178-79, 190; on Newbolt, 15, 199n.21; and New Man myth, 153-56, 158, 160; smdphanopoeia, 174; on Picabia, 153, 216n.l8; and Provencal poetry, 145, 151-52, 215n.7; and proximate vision, 25, 29-30, 81-82, 162-63; radio broadcasts of, 194-95, 218-19n.45; readings of Gourmont, 49-52, 54, 71, 205nn.l9, 20, 22; readings of Lewis, 98-99, 168, 172, 173; and Shelley, 154-55; and spatial vs. musical intelligence, 180-86, 21920n.57; on Stein, 171; and symbolisme, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60; and totalitarian synthesis, 4, 197n.2; on usury, 174, 190-92; and visual discrimination, 56, 70-71; and visual discrimination as danger, 73-75; and visual discrimination as model hierarchy, 81, 16061, 162-63, 175, 183; and visual discrimination as prosodic principle, 72, 73-74, 7576, 81, 82, 157-58, 162-63; and visual vs. aural sensibilities, 49-52, 53, 54, 68, 69-70, 71-72, 76, 78, 84-85, 191; and visual vs. linguistic sensibilities, 47, 57-63, 178-79, 192. See also Lewis, Wyndham: on Pound WORKS (essays and reviews): "Affirmations" (July 1915), 58-59; "After Election," 168-69; "American Notes," 185; "The Approach to Paris . . . II," 205n.20; "Art

227 Notes" (Jan. 1920), 114: "Art Notes" (March 1920), 57; "Civilization," 185; "Collected Prose," 164-65; "The Constant Preaching to the Mob," 53-54; "Epstein, Belgion, and Meaning," 179; "French Poets," 52; "Hellenist Series . . . Aeschylus," 69-70, 208n.61; "Immediate Need of Confucius," 175; "In Explanation," 78; "The Island of Paris: A Letter. September 1920," 55; "Julien Benda," 55-56, 205n.29; "The Later Yeats," 84; "Ligurian View of a Venetian Festival," 185; "Mostly Quartets," 18586; "Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse," 79, 80; "Music in Ca' Rezzonico," 186; "The New Sculpture," 47-48, 57, 63, 205-6n.31; "On Virtue," 49; "Paris Letter. December 1921," 177-78; "Past History," 170; "Pastiche. The Regional. VIII," 83, 208n.67; "Remy de Gourmont," 50-51, 54, 205n.21; "Splendid Success of the Second Concert," 184-85; "TARR," 168; "ULYSSES," 169-70; "Vorticism," 59-61, 206n.32; "Warm Reception in Genoa for the Tigullian Musicians," 185; "Wyndham Lewis at the Goupil," 114 WORKS (prose books): ABC of Economics, 219n.54; ABC of Reading, 219n.54; Antheil and the Theory of Harmony, 180-81, 182; Gaudier-Brzeska, 62; Guide to Kulchur, 3, 114, 123, 179, 182, 183, 197n.2, 202-3n.3; How to Read, 174-75, 176, 219n.54; Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 17677, 178-79 WORKS (poems and collections): "The Alchemist," 205n.20; "The Coming of War: Actaeon," 63-65, 68; Homage to Sextus Propertius, 69; "Kongo Roux," 154; "Mesmerism," 43-44, 48; Poems 1918-21, 83, 87, 208n.55; Ripostes, 205n.20 WORKS (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley): 64, 73, 82-88, 99, 138-39, 141-42, 207n.43, 209nn.69, 70; as autobiography, 83-85, 88; and Bernadino Luini, 138-39; and cliche, 141-42; dating of, 83, 208n.66; and loss of vocal music, 85-86; and Raymonde Collignon, 84, 209n.70; in relation to the Cantos, 82-85, 208n.55; and Salomon Reinach, 139; and Theophile Gautier, 87; and visual discrimination as prosodic principle, 87-88; and Waller, 85-86 "The Age Demanded,"' 88; "Envoi," 84, 85-86, 209n.70; "Mauberley II," 87-88;

228

INDEX

Pound, Ezra (continued) "Medallion," 84, 85, 88, 138-39, 209n.70; "1920 (Mauberley)," 87; "XII," 85 WORKS (The Cantos); 66-67, 142, 144-45, 215n.8; and Homer, 77-78; major form in, 144-45, 145-47, 150, 151, 200n.35, 217n.29; and poetic fiction of silence, 15052, 153, 157-62; and poetics of colloquial speech, 145, 147-50, 151, 158-59; and poetics of history, 145-50, 151, 158-59, 194; vocal vs. architectural values in, 145, 147-50, 151, 158-62 A Draft of XVI. Cantos, 145-51; A Draft of Cantos XVH-XXVII, 156-63, 217n.29; A Draft of XXX Cantos, 143, 164; Eleven New Cantos, 188; Fifth Decad of Cantos, 188; Cantos LII-LXXI, 188, 194 "Ur" Cantos (Three Cantos, 1917), 66-68, 207n.46; Canto III, 145; Canto IV, 69, 7275, 83, 207-8n.51; Canto V, 75-76, 165; Canto VI, 77; Canto VII, 76-77, 79-82, 83; Canto VIII (revised as II, 1925), 77-78, 215n.4; Cantos VIII-XI (Malatesta Cantos), 143, 144, 146-47, 148, 149-50; Canto VIII, 146-47, 148, 149-50; Canto XVI, 145, 149, 150-51, 153; Canto XVII, 15758; Canto XIX, 147; Canto XX, 151-53, 158-60, 161-63; Canto XXI, 160-61; Canto XXV, 182; Canto XXIX, 165-66; Canto XXX, 167-68; Canto XLV, 190-92; Canto XLVI, 192, 193 Proximate Vision, 23. See also Lewis, Wyndham: and proximate vision; Ortega y Gasset, Jose: on proximate vision as political aesthetic; Pound, Ezra: and proximate vision Quinn, John, 55, 82, 150, 204n.l2 Rabate, Jean-Michel, 203n.3 Radicalism: in aesthetics, 3, 5, 13-14, 25-29, 187, 203n.9, 214n.2; in politics, 3, 5, 28, 154, 187, 203n.9, 204n.ll; rival political expressions of, 30-33, 45-48, 57-58, 155-56, 200-ln.42, 203n.5, 212n.l5 Rainey, Lawrence, 156, 216n.11, 217n.28 Redman, Tim, 156, 188 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 106 Roberts, Michael, 201nn.53, 54, 202n.55

Robinson, Alan, 198n.7 Rorem, Ned, 180 Saint-Simon (Claude-Henri de Rouvroy), 10 Sandys, Georges, 4, 197n.4 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 61, 178, 206n.33 Schafer, R. Murray, 220n.58 Schelling, Felix, 145 Schneidau, Herbert, 6, 198n.8 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 80, 162, 216-17n.22 Sieburth, Richard, 48-49, 50, 51, 142, 205n.l9, 208n.52, 214n.2 Sieyes, Emmanuel, 9 Sorel, Georges, 5, 30-33, 36, 82, 91; and the Cercle Proudhon, 32-33; and Gourmont, 30-31; and the intuitive image, 31; and Marxism, 32-33, 200-ln.42 Soucy, Robert, 200-ln.42 Space, modern science of, 24 Spatial form, 146, 180, 215-16n.9 Spanos, William F., 209n.69 Speer, Albert, 124 Spender, Stephen, 3, 33 Stein, Gertrude, 91, 96-97, 210n.6; in Lewis's Childermass, 111-12 Sternhell, Zeev, 32, 156, 200-ln.42, 201n.44 Storer, Edward, 40 Strater, Henry, 147, 148, 216n.11 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 80, 207n.41 Symons, Arthur, 34, 35 Symons, Julian, 212n.l5 Tancred, Florence, 40 Terrell, Carroll, 75, 208nn.57, 62, 63 Thayer, Schofield, 208n.66 Tucker, Benjamin, 47, 204n.11 Villon, Francois, 84, 208n.68 Vorticism, 5, 123, 164, 198n.7, 217n.33 Wagner, Geoffrey, 209nn.l, 2, 210n.8 Wees, W. C., 198n.7 Williams, W. C., 6 Witemeyer, Hugh, 86, 209n.69 Worringer, Wilhelm, 5, 11-12, 36, 91, 199n.9. See also Hulme, T. E.: influenced by Worringer Yeats, W. B., 7, 54, 80, 146, 207n.41; on form in the Cantos, 215-16n.9

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