A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound
by Humphrey Carpenter,
Faber and Faber, 1989.

Ezra Pound has often stood as the quintessence of Modernism. Originating from Hailey, Idaho, in the American West, he presented himself as a cross between Dante and Uncle Remus, James McNeill Whistler and P. T. Barnum. Later, when the masks changed, or slipped altogether, the associations became sinister and unsavoury as his anti-Semitism ran riot and when, during World War II, he openly supported the methods and objectives of Benito Mussolini.

Pound is a challenge to any biographer. Earlier histories have been tentative. Neither Charles Norman nor Noel Stock’s biographies are searching or satisfactory but, with A Serious Character, Humphrey Carpenter has sifted and assembled a colossal amount of material in a thousand page volume that surpasses even his work on W.H.Auden.

Carpenter is fearless from the beginning:

” ‘Ezra Loomis Pound was born . .. in a pioneer shack’. He wasn’t, and it is typical of Ezra that one of his biographers should muddle fact with myth from the very beginning.· Sorting out sheer history, indeed, proves almost impossible with him from start to finish.

“Almost better, perhaps to swallow legend whole; for example Ford Madox Ford’s splendid spoof of Ezra’s entry into the world: ‘Born in the blizzard, his first meal consisted of kerosene. That . . . accounted . . . for·the glory of his hair.’ Amiable nonsense of this sort is not always very far from
the truth. “Nevertheless the facts must be disentangled.”

Disentangling the strands of Pound’s life and psyche requires patience and understatement. lt is surely hard for any writer not to be overwhelmed by the poet’s self promotion and alienated by his increasingly repulsive politics. Carpenter is scrupulous never to overstate his case, trusting his remarkable narrative to tell itself.

From his earliest days Pound, an only child, had an exaggerated self-importance which by the time he reached Penn State University in 1906 expressed itself in an indifference to formal study and a preference for bohemian clothing. Pound was a haphazard student who couldn’t spell for toffee but always had a magpie’s eye for a bauble.

As Carpenter notes: “His method might be summarized as, first, to have plenty of self-confidence; next, to lay out his work with a dash so that it looked plausible and last, to get the ‘feel’ of the subject picking up the jargon and the kind of questions that would interest real experts, thereby giving an impression of genuine knowledge.

“Occasionally he lifted the mask of erudition enough to reveal this technique, to make such remarks as ‘Really one DON’T need to know a language. One NEEDS, damn well needs to know the few hundred words in the few really good poems that any language has in it.’ His performance was backed by an excellent memory, so that he retained, almost involuntarily, anything that happened to catch his attention.”

This might be said to have sustained him throughout his career. When his poetry began to appear in the first two decades of this century he was openly ridiculed for the infelicities he carried over from Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, or any other of the Romance languages he pillaged. But individual poems, The Return and The Wayfarer, and collections like his Cathay poems nevertheless turned the heads of poets in Europe and America. Pound knew everybody- from Yeats, Ford, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence to H.D., Aldington and the other lmagists.

He also met the Woolf circle but dismissed them as ‘Bloomsbuggars’. To the literary monde he brought a zeal for promoting the works of others that is both touchingly loyal and unpleasantly manipulative. He hectored editors and harassed patrons to keep Joyce out of penury ·and was even more assiduous in raising Eliot to view.

At one stage, after’ circulating friends for a whip-round to liberate Eliot from his job at Lloyds Bank, Pound received a panicked reply from T.S.: “If this circular has not gone out, will you please delete Lloyds Bank, to the mention of which I strongly object. If it is stated positively that Lloyds Bank interferes with literature, Lloyds Bank would have a perfect right to infer that literature interfered with Lloyds Bank. Please see my position …”

Later Eliot was to dedicate The Waste Land to Pound who had cut down Eliot’s series of rambling fragments into a shorter, more interesting series of rambling fragments. ‘Il miglior fabbro’ Eliot called him : the better maker. But rather, Pound was a gifted fabricator whose taste for often pretentious allusion and cryptic private references has turned the excavation of his voluminous Cantos into a round-the-clock industry. It was no wonder William Carlos Williams saw Pound’s writing and The Waste Land as blows against the idea of a poetry free of literary self-consciousness and abstraction.

The Poundologists won’t be pleased with Carpenter’s work because it judiciously reveals Pound as a skilful huckster, who drained his doting parents of their spare cash, behaved unpleasantly to nearly ·everyone he met and produced a great deal of writing of dubious value.

He also emerges as kindly, fiercely loyal, paradoxically modest about his achievements and, in his younger days, almost unaccountably cheerfuL His devotion to his parents is both endearing and odd and suggests a bond which was never replaced, certainly not with his elusive and sexually subdued relations with women, with whom Pound was as ethereal as the Nineties themselves.

“Don’t knock Mussolini,” Pound wrote to a young admirer, “at least, not until you have weighed up the obstacles and necessities of the time.” Pound, Yankee pragmatist, racist, and essentially puritanical, was dazzled by ‘Mus’ even though he denied it. Pound also liked the trains to run on time. Living in Italy in the Thirties he was as oblivious to the day-to-day political realities as he was in London during the. First World War.

Besotted with ,the arcane economics of Douglas Social Credit, Pound was too idiosyncratic to, become a blackshirt. He made it a rule never to join anyone else’s party. With disturbing. precision. Carpenter describes Pound’s exile in Italy in the middle and late Thirties. Apart from one trip to England where he met with Oswald Moseley and pontificated about the Spanish Civil War, Pound spent his time writing Cantos riddled with bigotry and obscurantism and became as marginal to public letters ‘in Britain as Eliot became central to them.

Resisting William Carlos Williams’ persistent calls to return to the US, Pound remained in Rapallo at the outbreak of war. On January 21, 1941 he made the first of many radio broadcasts from Rome. They were often punctuated by his jokey cracker-barrel accent – “Dearly beeloved brevrem, this is ole Ezra speaking . . . ” The content was less cheery- digressive, daft, and obsessively anti-Semitic, tirades against ‘kikery’ and ‘judaocracy’. Carpenter’s account contains much new evidence of Pound’s arrest and trial for treason, his insanity plea and the subsequent incarceration at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, little of it reflecting well on Pound. This is followed by equally penetrating detail on the campaign led by Frost, Lowell and others to have him released and returned to Italy. In the 300-odd pages of this section, Carpenter reveals Pound as psychotically contradictory, but perhaps no madder than usual, and ever the opportunist. “To play the noble sufferer, the maligned but uncomplaining sage, the wise man in the madhouse, offered far more potential than that of the elderly and not very popular poet still exiled in a Europe that had seen the defeat of his ideas.”

A Serious Character is a major work, fascinating, definitive and scrupulously written. As a study of the 87 complex years of Ezra Pound’s life it is impressive, but its further effect will be to force a reconsideration of Pound’s work, particularly the Cantos, as part of an overdue dismantling of the Pantheon of Modernism which Pound ‘s own reputation-brokering did so much to establish.

“Pound Devalued”, The Adelaide Review, No.65, July 1989,pp.32-3.