SOURCE: Young, Kevin. “Visiting St. Elizabeths: Ezra Pound, Impersonation, and the Mask of the Modern Poet.” In Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, edited by Michael Coyle, pp. 185-204. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2001.

[In the following essay, Young relates Pound's transitional sense of both Modernism and the artistic ‘mask’ to that of the African American writing experience.]

Ezra Pound's poetic career—an oxymoron of a term which, before him, was somewhat unimaginable—can be characterized by the very titles of the various literary magazines he edited, hustled for and hawked. From simple Poetry to The Egoist to The Exile, Pound progressed and regressed, along the way founding more “isms” than a political party. Indeed, Pound is all too often read as a self-contained rally: one man whose many voices surround one sure cause, whether Modernism or fascism or some (im)potent combination of the two. Unrepentant genius, anti-Semite, innovator, lecturer, hypocrite lecteur, didact and autodidact, outsider, promoter, provacateur, prisoner, impersonator, Imagist, anti-Amygist, Vorticist, long-married, paranoid, adulterer, Brer Rabbit: Pound embodied as many roles as he wrote volumes—indeed I argue the two are linked—becoming, if for the briefest of moments, even a “race man.”

Certainly, Pound was himself aware of this conflicting chorus of voices, questioning himself toward the end of The Cantos:

                    But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
If love be not in the house there is nothing.

(116/795-96)

The notion of cohesion is a theme central to The Cantos and to our reading of them, indeed to Pound's very method throughout: he is attempting, through juxtaposition, fragment, collage, and “ideogram” to craft and graft a larger whole. Not a Frankenstein monster, nor a bonzai tree—rather a living yet larger than life thing that is itself full of thingness, concrete and shifting—a paradise.

That it does not cohere may be even more obvious than the fact that Pound is no demigod, as he rightly surmised. But what of the beauty? Is it tied to the madness? Does it result from the method? And does the failure to cohere excuse the poem's wrongheadedness, both in form and in invective? The Cantos' “progress” from Odysseus—the clues of a journey, an epic—may not seem progress at all, finishing or rather simply ending with wrecks and fragments. Is this Pound's fault or his form's?

In three related, and possibly progressing parts—through history, memory, and madness or, if you prefer, hell, purgatory, paradise—I want to investigate Pound's method and seeming madness. This should help us better understand both—and while considering his analogous stance as poet, egoist, and exile, we may even understand exactly what remains. “The rest is dross.”

POETRY; OR, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA

In America there is much for the healing of the nations, but woe unto him of the cultured palate who attempts the dose.

—“What I Feel about Walt Whitman”

Pound is certainly elusive, though this often gets read as exclusivity, or elitism. Perhaps the fault lies with us as readers, who expect cohesion and not the asymmetry that Pound favors. I am formulating here a notion that Pound's long poem or epic—though the two are not interchangeable—is purposefully fragmented and asymmetrical. “Imbalanced,” one is tempted to say, yet simple human frailty does not explain it: no one but Pound expects him to be a demigod; nor does the poem fail to cohere because his paradise (or ours) is missing a god altogether. These dissenting ideas of fragment as protest and fragment as faith are found more convincingly in Eliot's The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

But if Eliot brought to modern poetry the cult of impersonality, then Pound brought to it that of persona. This of course, is the title of his selected “shorter” poems—all but The Cantos—collected in the 1920s as Personae.¹ But add to this the contemporary/modern notion of the persona promoted by the New Critics, resulting from Pound and Eliot's insistence that the speaker is not necessarily the author. To assume otherwise, we now believe, would presume the worst kind of fallacy—persona is the necessary fiction, the mask that the self speaks through. (To contrast, we may think of the romantic notion of the author as wanderer, as the “I,” albeit lyrical.) But persona of course is far more—the force of character, of voice—not just mere plot or plodding.

This is important to modern poetics, from Pound's Cathay to Prufrock to less obvious examples such as Hughes's blues poems and Stein's experiments, whether Melanctha or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Arguably it is this force—not of the face, but of the face meeting the mask—that propels the modern moment. It certainly plays out even in the visual arts' characteristic starts, its modernist beginnings and usual suspects: Picasso's Desmoiselles D'Avignon. And even arguably, Duchamp's “explosion in a shingle factory”—as one critic famously described A Nude Descending a Staircase—or more relevant to my mind, his realization that the persona goes beyond the painting; that it is the artist who makes the art, not just at the time of creation, but the force which sustains it after; and that the mask of the artist (think of “R. Mutt,” the name Duchamp signed his readymade Fountain which was indeed a urinal) could say anything, even if it is silence.

This range of masks that characterizes Modernism is to my mind one of Pound's many legacies. The fact that much of this masking occurs along racial lines may now seem more obvious to us. Though “Black masks/White Modernism” has always been discussed in terms of Picasso, and even Stein (not to mention the “populist Modernism” of Lindsay and Sandburg), it has seemed less obvious in the “High Modernism” of Pound and Eliot. Michael North's insightful The Dialect of Modernism helps remedy this, observing racial masking not just in Stein and Picasso, but in Pound and Eliot. By reading their correspondence, which North calls “the private double of the Modernist poetry they were jointly creating and publishing” (78), North sees their linguistic ventriloquisms—their epistolary taking on of “black dialect” voices and nicknames such as “Old Possum” and “Brer Rabbit,” borrowed from Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus Tales, as a symbolic (and necessary) freedom for them.

On the one hand (or face, as it were), “Black dialect is a prototype of the literature that would break the hold of the iambic pentameter, an example of visceral freedom triumphing over dead convention” (18). But at the same time

the language Pound and Eliot assume as part of their attack on convention is itself a convention; the linguistic tool they use to mock the literary establishment is in fact part of that establishment. On close examination the dialect adopted by these early modernists proves to be of that peculiar kind that confirms the standard even in deviating from it. Indeed, this may be one of the advantages of this dialect for writers like Eliot and Pound, that it can contain and at least in part conceal their deeply mixed feelings about race, language, and the social authority that links them.

(North 79)

North also traces such linguistic freedom to Eliot's early drafts of The Waste Land, with its echoes from African American writer James Weldon Johnson's “Under the Bamboo Tree.” Taken alongside Charles Sanders's characterization of early drafts of The Waste Land as structurally a minstrel show (despite the fact that Sanders, writing in 1980, manages to avoid any racial implications!), North helps indicate the attraction of minstrelsy and the black mask—till recently more acknowledged in visual art and in the earlier, popular Modernism of Lindsay's “The Congo”—to the so-called “High Modernism” of Eliot and company. But whither Pound?

Needless to say, Ezra Pound belongs to that group of people—we call them Americans—drawn to the mask of blackness, whether for low tragedy or high comedy (and never the reverse), yet unwilling or unable to see behind the mask, to view the face behind the race. Understanding this is crucial to comprehending both Pound and America—and the place blacks occupy in either.

Place is crucial here too because Pound is a poet of place, or rather, exile—which he, as much as anyone, made part of the modern mode. Of course, this is not true exile but self-exile, the kind opted for rather than forced on one—even if writing requires the distance such distance provides. The expatriate is as American as they come: Pound and two of the writers Pound promoted, Eliot and James Joyce, embody this. We may compare them to Dante, whom all three men admired; unlike Dante, banished because of politics, the three modernists in exile became more like the things they sought to avoid, whether more Irish or more American. Further, the difference between the Romantic paradigm of the poet as wanderer, expressed in everything from the Ancient Mariner to Byron's very life, and the modern poet as exile, should not be lost.

Pound of course would be followed by many after The First World War, including the likes of African Americans from Richard Wright to James Baldwin to Chester Himes. But what of Pound and America? Was he running from the same America as Wright or Baldwin was? From the “whiteman's”? from Whitman's?

THE EXILE

Pound wrestled with Whitman more publicly than with any other literary predecessor, or, upon reflection, more than any of his contemporaries did. In this way he is more Whitman's inheritor than anyone else—this includes the likes of Lindsay and Sandburg—except perhaps Langston Hughes. Indeed, the poems Pound collected in Personae may be seen as a series of wrestlings with Whitman, who of course provided Pound the closest and thus most complicated view of American epic. Pound found Whitman vulgar, but also impressive enough to offer him “A Pact”:

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now it is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

(SP 27)

The strangeness of the voice, its detachment yet emotion, its admission of guilt (“as a grown child”) combined with accusation (“a pig-headed father”) provide the tension here, as well as a basis for many of Pound's personae—both poetic and public—to follow. (Think of “The River-Merchant's wife: A Letter,” one of the best poems of the twentieth century, with its combination of reproach and desire.) The last line of “A Pact,” originally called “A Truce” (Froula 47) stands quite far from the natural images in the first one—and the penultimate line's punning nature, both sexual (“root”) and smartass (acting a “sap”)—jars us with its coldness. “Commerce” is hardly love, just as economics are not quite poetry, as Pound was to find out the hard way—ironic because Pound himself, if we believe him, believes that money and its use, its “usury,” was the Moloch of his time and a different “root” of evil. (And though Pound claimed not to be against Jews but against war, his belief that usury was tied to war was also tied to and/or obscured his anti-Semitism.)

So even in his praise, or rather, his presumptive pact, we see Pound's anxieties. And it is not, to my mind, an anxiety of influence—rather, Pound's anxiety over Whitman is an anxiety over America, and over the black mask more specifically. Never is this clearer than in Pound's “parody” of Whitman, in which he puns on and turns Whitman's name into “watermelon,” degrading Whitman's rhapsodic standing with the slave into stereotype:

Lo, behold, I eat water-melons. When I eat water-melons the world eats water-melons through me.
When the world eats water-melons, I partake of the world's water-melons.
The bugs,
The worms,
The negroes, etc.,
Eat water-melons; All nature eats water-melons.
Those eidolons and particles of the Cosmos
Which do not now partake of water-melons
Will at some future time partake of water-melons.
Praised be Allah or Ramanathanath Krishna!(2)

Ignoring for a moment this last line's echo in the last lines of The Waste Land, we can see that for Pound Whitman not only evokes or revokes the lowercase “negroes, etc.”—one only half-wishes he would continue with that etcetera—but the whole of what for him is the other, from Muslims to Hindus. “The negroes” are of course, just above the worms (or below, depending).

This extreme attitude about Whitman at least is tempered by Pound's view in “What I feel about Walt Whitman,” oddly written in 1909, a year before his parody. This piece, interestingly not published till 1955, declared “Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt (although at times inimical to both). Personally I might be very glad to conceal my relationship to my spiritual father and brag about my more congenial ancestry—Dante, Shakespeare, Theocritus, Villon, but the descent is a bit difficult to establish. And, to be frank, Whitman is to my fatherland … what Dante is to Italy. …” By this, Pound means that “Like Dante he wrote in the ‘vulgar tongue,’ in a new metric. The first great man to write in the language of his people” (SP 146).

Ironically, Pound's ability to see Whitman as a “spiritual father” is only made possible by being on the other side of the ocean, by the expatriate's inevitable sense of homeland and wisdom: “From this side of the Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and—if it be permitted a man of my scant years—my world citizenship: I see him America's poet” (SP 146). Exile, after all, breeds acceptance. In this, he reminds me of James Baldwin, who wrote of his inability to eat watermelon or listen to Bessie Smith until he returned from overseas; before that, both were too evocative of the extremes allowed, by the likes of Pound, to the lowercase negro: happy darky (watermelon smiles) or tragic buck (gin and tears). “Beast or angel,” as Ellison put it.

For Pound, Whitman the father is not the benevolent “old graybeard” Ginsberg saw in a mythic California supermarket, but rather an obtuse but begrudgingly talented patriarch (a view Ginsberg may be said to have adopted of Pound in turn). Indeed, even in his admiration of Whitman, Pound oozes repulsion:

He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time. He does ‘chant the crucial stage’ and he is the ‘voice triumphant’. He is disgusting, he is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.

Entirely free from the renaissance humanist ideal of the complete man or from the Greek idealism, he is content to be what he is, and he is in his time and his people. He is a genius because he has vision of what he is and of his function. He knows that he is a beginning and not a classically finished work.

(SP 145)

Of course, Pound could be writing about himself here. This knowledge of Pound as a beginning may or may not be one he himself shared, but it is certainly a freedom Pound required, even as he despised it.

In this it resembles his relation to the black mask, which Pound courted and impersonated, posing as not just “Brer Rabbit” but Uncle Ez; Pound poses not just as the elusive trickster of Joel Chandler Harris's tales (“Brer Rabbit”) but as the beleaguered storyteller (“Uncle Remus”) himself, providing the framework for the modernist family but ever apart.

THE EGOIST

Indeed, we may think of Ezra Pound as a black poet. As we have seen, in his private correspondence, it was a persona he certainly adopted. Why not grant him that blackness he courted so heavily? It too, like the personal epic, is the logical extension of Whitman's “I”. But I am only half-joking about a “blackened” Pound—for not just as a writer, but as a poetic persona, Pound is as problematic as the Negro is and was.

Well-read but outside academia, monomaniacal, masterful, foolhardy, incarcerated for what he thought of as a political crime, Pound parallels the tone and treatment and trope of black folks in the 20th century. Some would wrongly add to this list his anti-Semitism, seeing this as solely a black trait (or one found frequently in black folks). But Christine Froula, in her intelligent Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, reminds us that like his expatriatism, Pound's anti-Semitism is as American as they come. “American as apple pie and lynching” as was said in another context altogether. “What makes Pound's poem [The Pisan Cantos] important, rather, is that its errors are not idiosyncratic and personal. They are the same errors which whole nations committed; they are the errors of twentieth-century history. And they are profoundly tied to the problematics of language in the modern world” (Froula 205).

Though inexcusable in any form, anti-Semitism in Pound might best be understood—if understand we must—in its American context, coming from a poet who may be mad (in both senses) and adrift, who believed in plenty of theories that ranged from dangerous to distracting. Take for instance, the tract Jefferson and/or Mussolini in which Pound compares Jefferson—slave owner and founding father, I might add—with Mussolini, indeed arguing that they are different sides of the same persona.

There is no question that Pound went wrong in placing his hopes for a paradiso terrestre in Mussolini and Italian Fascism, and there is no question that that fatal error issued from a faculty of judgment driven off course by an intensity of vision and desire. There are lines in the poem that we can understand only by remembering that Pound's views were formed largely on the basis of publications controlled by the Italian government, and there are others that we cannot even wish to forgive.

(Froula 204-205)

I hate Pound's anti-Semitism—“His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America”—but its blatant wrong-headedness, its very obviousness may make it easier to combat than Eliot's. Eliot seems to me to have a polite, class-based, English, fake blueblood anti-Semitism—almost an acquired, “sensible” taste. His is that combination of xenophobia and Anglophilia—something Pound detested, a purity he did not believe—only marginally different from Philip Larkin's. Larkin's xenophobia is clearly self-hating, however; in Philip Larkin: Writer, the author argues this is merely part of Larkin's persona. If we take Eliot's claims to “impersonality” seriously, then Eliot himself does not have this defense.³

What's more, Eliot apologized only slightly for his views of “Jews”; more telling, it infects even some of his work that ain't as obviously anti-Semitic, such as “Sweeney among the Nightingales.” The early poems reveal the heights of Eliot's problems with the Other: “apelike Sweeney” and his whores (one Spanish, it seems, one “Rachel née Rabinovitch”); and worse, the poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”; the whole early satires for which Eliot became for some reason famous. Though, as Melvin Wilk notes, Eliot saw these poems not as comic but as “intensely serious”: indeed, Wilk's study sees that “in all three poems with anti-Semitic content in Poems (1920), in ‘Gerontion,’ ‘Burbank’ and ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales,’ Jews are depicted as characterizing what for Eliot were the negative aspects of modern civilization” (Wilk 15).

In this, Pound's masquerade proves quite different from Eliot's ventriloquism. It is the difference between wearing the mask and playing at puppets—even if the “dummy” may turn out to be he who ventriloquizes, there is an implicit distance, an “impersonality” in which the self is not implied. Some see this as negative, as Eliot's failing, either related to or quite apart from his anti-Semitism; others, like Anthony Julius's recent study, would put Eliot's anti-Semitism front and center, indeed arguing that it is central to his form (and to what Julius calls the limits of dramatic monologue).⁴ Regardless, we must admit that Eliot's process, complex as it is, is one in which we do not experience personae, much less a person, so that it is indeed difficult to disagree with Hugh Kenner's sense that:

J. Alfred Prufrock is a name plus a Voice. He isn't a “character” cut out of the rest of the universe and equipped with a history and a little necessary context, like the speaker of a Browning monologue. … Nor is he an Everyman, surrounded by poetic effects. … What “Prufrock” is, is the name of a possible zone of consciousness where these materials can maintain a vague congruity; no more than that; certainly not a person.

(Invisible Poet 40)

This is quite different from early Pound, admirer of Browning, whose personae are not simply straw (or “hollow”) men to be knocked down; they are embodied, spoke from, lived.

My point with this slight digression is not to discuss whose “anti-Semitism” beats another's: such a game has no winners, only losers, most of all the offended parties, which includes we the readers. Rather, I want to make a simple point: that Pound's Modernism may be broader; that in his explicit insistence on letting history into the poem, Pound implicitly allows Modernism (and its postmodernist heirs) to craft a poem that includes the world and one's personal experiences. Remember, the “new carving” for Pound is not just epic, but personal epic, which may be the best way to read The Cantos. The phrase is as much an oxymoron as Pound.

In practical terms, Pound allows the writers who follow—such as Ginsberg, who visited Pound in St. Elizabeths hospital, and who said Pound apologized to him for his views—to write a poem that may critique the very views Pound espoused. Certainly this is what Charles Olson did, in his complex private (hence the lowercase) reaction to visiting him:

I hate this anti-semite! this revolutionary simpleton, as Yeats called him. Go further and wonder, as Yeats did, if his Cantos aren't all hodos chameliontos. But for christ's sake have the courage to admit that Pound faced up to the questions of our time.

(Olson 15)

Ironically, Pound's willingness to include (or inability to exclude) his personality in his epic allows us to write a poem that may run counter to his views. We, as Pound does with Whitman, may make a pact with Pound the father that allows us “commerce” as we carve our own mask out, no matter how wormed the wood.

PERSONA; OR, THE MASK OF THE MODERN ARTIST

I mean to formulate here a paradigm of the poet and influence that differs from Harold Bloom's anxieties over the father. Simply, we can view the “visit to St. Elizabeths” as a metaphor for the creative process—visiting the madhouse or the saint who names it—or for the complex process of literary ancestry itself. Certainly the number and type of visitors Pound had indicate his stature, but also indicate how one can disapprove of or even dislike one's influences, the “pig-headed father,” without abandoning them. To read Olson is to read this wrestling with tradition or at least convention, both poetic and racist.

Nevertheless, the notion of the father is important to Pound's early poetry. It is part and parcel of the racial masquerade—indeed, he is attempting through his racial masquerade to “found” a few fathers of a different lineage. His willingness to take his sources where he may—not just in Eliot's purist Britishness—expanded the horizons of what “kulchur” could be: an expansion evident even in his spelling of “kulchur.” Pound's vernacular, found in both his “private” letters and his “public” poetry—a rather false distinction, that Pound helped to erase—is taken from a polyglot of sources, some of them pidgin, some of them highfalutin'. This lack of distinction, of clear origins—seen by many, including Pound himself, as incoherence—can be seen as a freedom.

It is crucial to remember that freedom in Pound's case came not just from donning black masks, but Asian ones as well: could we not read Cathay and Pound, “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time”⁵ as utilizing another type of mask? This Kabuki style freedom, however, seems altogether more earned and honest and honoring than the black ones (or the easy “Orientalism” of other writers); such a mask certainly is far less personal (or far more “believable”) than his other “impersonations” described famously and frequently. Or perhaps this Asian mask is more personal for Pound, as opposed to his other frequent impersonations: Charles Olson thinks so, as he writes that

A long time ago (what, 25 years?) Pound took the role of Confucius, put on that mask, for good. I'm sure he would rest his claim not, as I have put it, on the past, but forward, as teacher of history to come, Culture-Bearer in the desert and shame of now. (I don't think it is possible to exaggerate the distance he goes with his notion of himself—at the end Gate of the last Canto Confucious [sic] is to be one of the huge figures standing there, looking on).

It is all tied up with what he calls a truism, London, 1913: are you or are you not, a serious character?

(101)

This notion of “serious character” is a personal one of course, but it aptly describes also Pound's adoption of personae. Of course Olson knows that the attraction to the mask is not always to highlight but to hide the face: “His attraction to Confucius must be the old thing, what we all do, confuse our opposite with ourselves” (71). It is this slippage between the personal and the personae that makes Pound interesting.

In describing one of his many visits to St. Elizabeths, Michael Reck writes, “Pound had a lusty love of telling jokes, and a good repertoire of them. When he told an Irish dialect story, he became for the moment an Irishman; when he told a Jewish story, he was a Jew.” Ironically, much as with blackface or black dialect, mastery of the “foreign” voice not only brings the impersonated closer to the impersonated, but also shows the power of the impersonator over those he imitates. Imitation is both flattery and nose-thumbing. However, it seems certain that Pound's skill in impersonating was a complex force of his personality as well as a factor in creating poetic personae—in the end the result was a series of believable historical voices, merging with his own.

In other words, the modernist method.

But there is a level of fakery here, also important to the notion of Modernism as mask. In Cathay Pound is faking it till he makes it. Much has been made since of Pound's distance from the Chinese original, but it is this transformation and not mere translation that makes Pound's versions beautiful today—unlike Amy Lowell's “accurate” versions, done in tandem with Florence Wheelock Ayscough.⁶ But this admission of, and relishing in the mask or even downright fakery, Laughlin recalls by an anecdote of watching Pound “sing” Chinese: “He had, in his way, mastered the tones—Chinese is spoken with four different voice tones—and he gave a good performance, an up-and-down singsong” (146).

Without making too much of this mastery of different “tones,” I think the indication of Pound's desire not just to “master” different languages, but to include them all, respectfully contradicts Laughlin's argument that The Cantos are a monologue. “If we stand back and look at The Cantos from a distance and ask ‘What is really going on here?’ we find that we are listening to a long monologue. Gertrude Stein said Pound was ‘a village explainer, excellent if you are a village, but if you are not, not” (Laughlin 112). Laughlin goes on to say that “the voice of The Cantos is explaining everything except science and technology”—if we think this, then we surely might “not” enjoy being explained to. But if we take Stein's comments seriously, we learn that we must be as various as a village—a bunch of voices—to hear the multivoiced Cantos properly.

This High Modernist method⁷ differs from (but certainly depends on) imagism, Pound's early insistence on the “economy” of poetry. In hindsight, the notion that a poem should not waste a word—or as F. S. Flint put it in his “Imagisme” manifesto, “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”⁸—may insist too neatly on the economics and fascism that Pound later would become infamous for. But certainly it is tied to notions of essence Pound admired in Asian poetry, more specifically the ideogram with its emphasis on simultaneity and visuality: “The Thrust of Pound's 1913 ‘A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste’ was for the poetic novice to pare his work down to its essence. He wrote in that essay that ‘It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works’ … and two years later, in the same vein, that ‘A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can't say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better keep quiet” (Bush 21).

There is, of course, more than just a small contradiction in Pound's subsequent embracing of the epic—is an imagist epic possible? Pound himself, Ronald Bush argues in his The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos, weighed this over, finally deciding to include “the image not as the end-all of a poem, but as the starting point, one unit out of which a structure might be built” (23). That this structure Pound built (or found) in The Cantos was neither “economic” nor what he himself called “symmetrical”⁹—despite its discussion of financial economies and its search for the symmetry in history—is pointed up by two black writers: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

In many ways, the very notion of economy gets undermined by Langston Hughes, Pound's rough contemporary and now we know, correspondent. One anecdote (possibly apocryphal) relates that Hughes began shortening the line and lengthening his poems when he realized magazines paid by the line! Note also how the blues repetition of a line, may, apart from the metaphoric and artistic possibilities, also play against Pound's notion of saying it once and well. And play into notions of plenty—not just by gaining an extra nickel per line or whatever the rate is (it, for one, has barely changed), but also by providing a necessary excess (one of form) to counter the (seemingly sad) content.

In other words, Hughes recognizes the tension between form and content, as well as a blues tension between personality and impersonality, between private pain and public performance. By doing so, Hughes participates in what I have come to call the counterfeit tradition: one in which the freedom of fiction, of forging one's own identity (much like the manufacture of money) allows the author a literal freedom. A good modern example may be Richard Wright's forging a rather racist note from a white co-worker in order to check out books from the library, detailed in “Growing Up under Jim Crow.” But even in an oppressive system like slavery—an economic system Pound seems unwilling to discuss in his many histories of money—blacks forged for themselves “free passes,” taking another “counterfeit” identity, either as a freedman or even forging the master's signature. It is through telling lies to get at a larger freedom (and truth), that the counterfeit is born.

To put it simply—and to distinguish it from mere fiction—counterfeit is a term I have “coined” to discuss ways in which black writers create their own authentication—their own, alternative system of literary currency and value, functioning both within and without the dominant, gold-standard system of American culture. Counterfeit I also see as literary counterpart to the long-standing tradition of the black trickster who operates not just outside of “white” morals, but outside of reductive “black” identity as well. Indeed, one crucial aspect of the counterfeit is—like the forged free passes which inspired it—a renegotiation of borders, a freedom from insular identity itself. Like runaway slaves, the black writer in the counterfeit tradition crosses then questions the bounds between “bound” and free, between fact and fiction, between “real” bills and fake ones. Indeed, in true trickster style, as the saying goes, you fake it till you make it.

With Pound's emphasis on the mask and on money, we may easily see his relation to the black counterfeit, even if his is a somewhat ambivalent (or should I say envious) relation. For despite his view of blackness as oppositional, too often Pound's world—which is our world, after all—leaves the black writer the passer of “marked” bills. Even if accepted as currency, this marked black script retains its dark weight; black writing is never green enough, despite the fact that like all writing, it seeks a larger cultural currency. Thus Pound both recognizes black contributions and steals from them in the same breath; Hughes, like Ginsberg and Olson after him, can see the value of Pound's perspective while also seeking to “counter” it. Such a countering is another aspect of the counterfeit—which, like counterfeit money, both circulates in and subverts the dominant system (which Pound himself thought he was countering, but as we've seen, participated in). Counterfeit is the way in which black folks forge—by this I mean both “create” and “fake”—black authority in a world not necessarily of their making.

Within this counterfeit tradition, we may reevaluate Hughes's version of blues identity. More specifically, Hughes's blues combine the distinct freedom of impersonality and persona to provide a personal (though public) art—one not limited by autobiography. This, surely, accounts for some of the appeal of the Chinese voices for Pound, not to mention the Black ones. But I am interested here in the mix of voices, of persona, the many masks that Pound donned—and how these soliloquies may violate the “script” of what should be said and by whom, as well as a stricter meaning of script as “paper money.”

With Hurston we can see clearly this notion of the voice as value and language as a form of money. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston directly links the history of language to that of value:

Let us make a parallel. Language is like money. In primitive communities actual goods, however bulky, are bartered for what one wants. This finally evolves into coin, the coin not being real wealth but a symbol of wealth. Still later even coin is abandoned for legal tender, and still later for cheques in certain usages. …

Now the people with highly developed languages have words for detached ideas. That is legal tender. “That-which-we-squat-on” has become “chair.” “Groan-causer” has evolved into “spear,” and so on. Some individuals even conceive of the equivalent of cheque words, like “ideation” and “pleonastic.” Perhaps we might say that Paradise Lost and Sartor Resartus are written in cheque words.

The primitive man exchanges descriptive words. His terms are all close fitting. Frequently the Negro, even with detached words in his vocabulary—not evolved in him but transplanted on his tongue by contact—must add action to it to make it do. So we have “chop-axe,” “sitting-chair,” “cook-pot” and the like because the speaker has in mind the picture of the object in use. Action. Everything illustrated. So we can say the white man thinks in a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics.

(Hurston 830)

This last sentence sounds incredibly like the notion Pound favored (even if slightly inaccurate) of the “ideogram” in Chinese culture—that in the ideogram we have a simultaneity of action and picture, being both a description of action and a picture or visual representation of that action. This is what Pound was going for in The Cantos, of course—and arguably the ideogrammatic epic fails. But I want to point out his appeal to African American poets, despite his use of “plantation dialect,” because of the ideogram and its specific relation to actual African American English.

Rather than the “close fitting” words of “the primitive man”—again a sense of the mask of language—we have the “counter fit” of the verbal-noun. Indeed, after giving us a list of verbal nouns such as “funeralize,” Hurston tells us why: “The stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident seem too bare for the voluptuous child of the sun, hence the adornment. It arises out of the same impulse as the wearing of jewelry and the making of sculpture—the urge to adorn” (832-33). Do I hear in this impulse another rejection of “economy,” both for literature and for life?

In further discussing African sculpture, Hurston champions the “asymmetry” that helps us read The Cantos. Pound himself recognized asymmetry as part of form, writing “That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms” (Bush 22). For her part, after declaring that “Asymmetry is a definite feature of Negro art,” Hurston notes its presence in literature by citing a Hughes blues poem:

I aint gonna mistreat ma good gal any more,
I'm just gonna kill her next time she makes me sore.

Clearly, Hurston does not mean only a literal asymmetry, admired easily in African masks, but a literary one noted by “abrupt and unexpected changes.” In other words, African American culture: The “tragicomic” form of the blues that begins with asserting good intentions, by stressing the bad; in recognizing the power of juxtaposition, the blues are both modern and more.

Hurston's emphasis on “unexpected changes” also predicts the form of bebop—Hughes himself echoed this notion of “sudden changes” in his bebop epic Montage of a Dream Deferred—as well as underscores bebop's emphasis on emotion (as opposed to the impersonation or impersonality found in modern art). Indeed, in looking back, we may see how the bluesman links the 19th century sense of the Romantic wanderer—a major paradigm of the poet—with that of the modern exile much as Pound did, while the blueswoman of the 1920s supplies the modern (and ancient) notion of the artist as a public figure who provides a cathartic sense of private pain and implied protest.

These are generalizations, but important ones—particularly in recognizing Pound's role and its relation to African American Modernism. After all, these “sudden changes” and cathartic emotions may also describe the Pound of The Pisan Cantos, when Pound puts down the mask or at least makes it more like himself. We can see an important parallel with Pound's own poetry and the role “blues people” played in making culture modern—and in turn the postmodern transformation of blues into bebop, of Pound turning away from the modern paradigm of exile that he had helped create to a postmodern one of madness, found in Berryman, Lowell, Plath, Bishop, and The Pisan Cantos.

But far more simply, and years before, Hurston resolves what we have seen as the paradox of the personal or imagistic epic, the oxymoron of Pound, by providing a parallel with Negro expression:

The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but there they are. Both are present to a marked degree. There is always rhythm, but it is the rhythm of segments. Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.

(Hurston 834-35)

Thus, to hear The Cantos properly, we should listen like Negroes, not just listen for them. Perhaps then the black mask of Modernism is not merely Pound's, but our own?

Notes

1. Personae, as Eliot noted, was originally the title of Pound's 1910 collection of poems, as well as “a volume of ‘collected poems’” published in the United States in the 1920s. Eliot, in Britain at the time, helped with “a few suggestions for omissions and inclusions in a similar collection to be published in London; and out of discussions of such matters with Pound arose the spectre of an introduction” by Eliot for what came to be called, for clarity's sake, Selected Poems (Eliot, “Introduction”).

2. Pound, SP 168-169. In this chapter comparing Whitman to Villon, he could be talking about himself, saying “Villon's song is selfish through self-absorption; he does not, as Whitman, pretend to be conferring a philanthropic benefit on the race by recording his own self-complacency. Human misery is more stable than human dignity; there is more intensity in the passion of cold, remorse, hunger, and the fetid damp of the mediaeval dungeon than in eating watermelons.”

3. Anthony Julius puts it this way:

   While he had the instincts of the controversialist, Eliot couched his provocations in conventional courtesies. At times, the courtesies so muffled the provocations that Ezra Pound, reflecting on his own tendency to magnify his provocations by discourtesies, was led to ask: ‘has Eliot or have I wasted the greater number of hours, he by attending to fools and/or humouring them, and I by alienating imbeciles suddenly?

   (4)

4. Charles Olson puts it this way in The Distances in a poem called “ABCs”: “Style, est verbum / / The word / is image, and the reverend reverse is / Eliot / / Pound / is verse” (13).

5. Eliot's famous quote. (“Introduction” 14)

6. For the dangers of sticking to the original, consider Hugh Kenner writing about Amy Lowell's “more accurate” yet horrible versions

   of eleven poems, done correctly, and backed up by an essay signed by Florence [Wheelock Ayscough, “native” speaker and co-translator] which should discomfit Ezra Pound and any residual adherents by explaining for the first time how Chinese poetry really worked, as disclosed to Amy by sudden intuition.

   (A Homemade World 10)

7. I mean by High Modernism not just a Modernism found in Pound's later works, but also a Modernism distinct from the “populist Modernism” of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg. Some may call this Low Modernism, and reserve populist for Williams or Hughes, who certainly bridged the two—for now I want to avoid such suggestion of quality or superiority present in “high” or “low,” but rather use it to describe approach or era of Modernism, as defined by Eliot and Pound, and its dominance.

8. Qtd in The Imagist Poem. Ed. William Pratt. Dutton, 1963. 17-18. Flint's manifesto appeared with Pound's “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” in Poetry March 1913.

9. Bush 21. Ronald Bush quotes Pound from 1912 defining form:

   Form.—I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical form.

Works Cited

Bush, Ronald. The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Eliot, T. S. “Introduction.” Ezra Pound Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1959.

Froula, Christine. A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1983.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” [1934] Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings. Library of America, 1995. 830-46.

Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Laughlin, James. “An Introduction to the Cantos” and “Some Voices from Canto 74.” Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf, 1987.

North, Michael. “Old Possum and Brer Rabbit: Pound and Eliot's Racial Masquerade.” The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth Century Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 77-99.

Olson, Charles. Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Catherine Seelye, ed. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

———. “ABCs.” The Distances. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Fourth Printing. New York: New Directions, 1973.

———. Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1949.

———. Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

———. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.

Wilk, Melvin. Jewish Presence in T. S. Eliot and Franz Kafka. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986. [Brown University Judaic Studies 82]