What the Small City Can Do

Like all dissident geniuses Ezra Pound was an eccentric and a crank. He was also an anti-Semite. The apologies of Hugh Kenner and Pound’s literary admirers on this point fail in the face of his published correspondence. I turn at random to a page of the letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti to find a letter of September 1, 1954 full of ranting about “the dirty jew book” and phrases like “a userer is a spiritual kike whatever his blood count.” This is not the mild-mannered anti-Jewish prejudice of Eliot. It’s harsh, ugly stuff. There’s no wishing it away, and his confession to Michael Reck in 1967—“The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism”—while salutary, is not wholly satisfactory because it is an understatement. “A usurer is a spiritual kike whatever his blood count” is not the expression of a “suburban prejudice.”

Nor can we separate Pound’s political, racial, economic ideas from his poetry and criticism. Pound makes no such distinction. It’s all one project for him, even if New Directions has politely let a lot of his political prose go out of print. In the same letter to Agresti he writes, “It is NOT the arsenic in the bottle and labeled, but the arsenic in the DEElicious soup that is dangerous.” A warning to be heeded for his own work.

And yet! And yet! We’ve a lot to learn from Pound. He is the central figure of modern literature and responsible for much of the best writing in the Evil Century, both his own and that of others. His love and loyalty to his friends and to literature came before all else. Despite all that was tawdry and terrible and mean in him, his loyalty was heroic. Giorgio Agamben dares to say, “Pound is the poet who placed himself most rigorously and with almost ‘complete impudence’ in front of the catastrophe of Western culture.”

Take the letter to Harriet Monroe (September 30, 1914) after Pound reads Eliot’s “Prufrock”: “I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.” And then all the subsequent letters to Monroe in which he cajoles, argues, and harasses her to publish “Prufrock” as written. See the long letter of November 9th: “No, most emphatically I will not ask Eliot to write down to any audience whatsoever. I dare say my instinct was sound enough when I volunteered to quit the magazine quietly about a year ago. Neither will I send you Eliot’s address in order that he may be insulted.” Pound was unflagging in his promotion and defense of the writing of others. The correspondence testifies to this, even as it testifies to his hatreds. If it seems a contradiction that Pound could extol the work of Jewish writers like Louis Zukovsky while at the same time befriending John Kasper and writing the sorts of things I quoted above, there was no contradiction to him because his loyalty to friends and love for good poetry came before any of his other ideas.

Loyalty is a precondition for justice and truth and the rest of the beloved abstract nouns.

Loyalty is a precondition for justice and truth and the rest of the beloved abstract nouns. Beauty, justice, goodness, truth, et cetera reveal themselves through fidelity, which must come first. Loyalty is a precondition for those things but is not sufficient for them. Pound’s fidelity to his friends and to poetry made beauty and truth possible, even if he often spoiled that clearing by persistently picking injustice.

And what about the poems? When they are good, they are very good. Some contend, in stretches, with Virgil and Dante. Pound wrote with the rhythms of old Europe. Listen to recordings of his reading from The Cantos and listen to recordings of the poems and songs from European peasants before the Thirty Years’ War (1914-1945) wiped old Europe away forever. He knew the old ways intimately. (The “it” in Pound’s “Make it new” refers to the past, to the tradition. The phrase is not a Vorticist slogan but his translation of a phrase printed on the bowl of the first king of the Shang Dynasty.) The final stanzas of “Canto LXXXI” are Pound at his best:

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”
      Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
                   How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
                   Pull down thy vanity,
                   I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing
                   this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
                   To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

But what has Pound to offer to the citizens of the Front Porch Republic?

Yesterday, on the shelves of the nearby university library that lets locals like me without university affiliation check out books with our public library cards, I found in a collection of Pound’s prose published by Henry Regnery in 1960 the short essay “Possibilities of Civilization: What the Small Town Can Do.”

The essay describes “what a man can do outside a big city and without any pretensions to upsetting the history either of his age or of letters” in order that “it might set a small town group thinking.” He offers as an example the Italian city of Cesena (population in 1936, when the essay was written: 61,000) and one of its residents, M.T. Dazzi. Pound found his way to Cesena while researching the life of Sigismundo Malatesta. On his first evening there he walked from the library to a concert organized by the librarian, where a local lawyer turned amateur pianist outplayed the professionals from out of town.

Pound’s description of a library and art gallery is worth quoting at length:

The library is open in the evening; it opens in the afternoon a bit before the other libraries shut. No student is cramped for paper. Naturally most students use note books or bring their own paper, but the Querini foundation has provided for those who forget to bring paper and for whom even that expense might have caused trouble.

When I first saw the picture gallery it was a mess, it might have been a secondhand junk shop. Enter Dazzi. The Querini has a few first rate pictures. They are where you can see them. It had a little good furniture which is now so placed as to give an air of life to part of the gallery, but the creative act of the curator has been directed to the second rate painting. Perhaps Longhi is not a second rate painter, though no one has quite tried to place him among the world’s greatest. The Querini now has its Longhis all together in two or three rooms. That offers one an unique experience…

And all this has been done without ostentation and on the basis of recognizing what the Querini is, and what it could be, and not trying to do the impossible.

He notices the important details of what makes a local culture alive and how a small institution can feed that life. The library stays open in the evenings. It is excellent but not snobbish (providing free paper). The art gallery doesn’t attempt to compete with big city galleries but displays its modest collection well. Excellence is pursued within local limits.

My neighbors fill in occasionally for the Bellingham Symphony Orchestra and gave me tickets to the BSO performance of Mahler’s 1st. A fine piece of music but beyond the capabilities of the players. Most of the aged audience didn’t seem to notice the struggles of the French horns, but discerning listeners noticed and winced. The lesson from a middling performance of Mahler by the local symphony is not: Drive to Seattle to hear a better orchestra or hire more out-of-town musicians. The lesson is Pound’s lesson: “Figure out what you can do with the local plant:—local printing press, local musicians. Find out something that is not being done in New York or London. Find out what the big commercial people can’t do, or won’t do.”

The point is not to reconstitute “high culture” but on a small scale. (Pound again: “It’s not that I don’t know where to ‘draw the line,’ it is that the whole state of mind which leads to line drawing is irrelevant to the kind of culture I am trying to write about.”) High culture was invented by critics in the nineteenth century. It failed, and it failed to understand that the best Western art and literature has always been high, low, and in-between. The best has always been popular: Shakespeare, Dickens, et cetera.

The task demands modest means and ends, and there is nothing, truly nothing, in the way of our beginning immediately.

The task of local culture is to create places and situations where neighbors can gather for good literature, music, and art with no mind to changing or challenging the Age and without any reference to national or international politics whatsoever. The task demands modest means and ends, and there is nothing, truly nothing, in the way of our beginning immediately. A small effort of mine: next week I host an event with a local poet at the bookstore up the street. We will discuss the many translations of Homer. (I’m a Herbert Jordan man, myself. My interlocutor is a fan of the recent Emily Wilson efforts). How many people will show up? Will we be graced by the ghost of Andreas Divus? Can we live up to the example of M.T. Dazzi?

The contradiction of Pound: He is, especially in his private writing, a racist of the worst sort, but he is also, to borrow his description of the founder of the Querini Stampadia, “a monument of taste, and what is rarer, a monument to great common sense and thoughtfulness for humanity.” If we set aside the racism, Pound may be the Virgil to guide us from the inferno of the Evil Century in which we’re still trapped, whatever the calendar might say. He’ll lead us on a path to a small town library, open late with good books and free paper, to a modest gallery well arranged, and a local amateur playing fine piano; a clearing where we might build a house of good stone, each block cut smooth and well fitting.

Image Credit: Egon Schiele, “Krumau on the Moldova” (between 1913 and 1914) via Wikimedia.