The first volume of David Moody's trilogy on the life of poet Ezra Pound, subtitled The Young Genius 1885-1920, was published in 2007. The third, The Tragic Years 1939-1972, is due out next year.
I first gained a sense of Moody's work on modern English and American literature in 1972, when I gave a lecture at the University of York, under his auspices, to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of TS Eliot's The Waste Land. In 1979 Moody published Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet, a major work, scrupulously honourable and far-reaching. I was not surprised to hear that he was then turning his mind to a more contentious poet, Ezra Pound.
Most of us in the profession were content to have our say on Pound and move on. I offered my pennyworth to say that the enabling motive of Pound’s Cantos is a line in Canto LIV, “History is a school book for princes”. Each of the Cantos displays an example, a parable, a moral lesson, an anecdote, the kind of thing a good governor should think about. Not that that would lead readers swiftly through the detail of the Cantos or make straight their path.
Paris pastimes
The second volume of Moody’s splendid biography begins with Pound and his wife Dorothy in Paris. By April 10, 1921, they had taken up residence at 70 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, Paris VI, she to sketch and generally divert herself, he to engage with the avant garde artists there – Brancusi, Cocteau, Picabia, Léger, Braque, Picasso – and receive visits from Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, John Quinn and others.
Ezra and Dorothy were not strict in their marriage. He had an affair with Nancy Cunard, and in 1922 began an intimate relation with the violinist Olga Rudge. On July 9, 1925, Rudge gave birth to their daughter, Mary, and later arranged that the child would be reared by a local family in the Italian Tyrol. Dorothy appeared to be complaisant about this event and about the relation between Ezra and Olga.
A year later, on September 10, 1926, Dorothy gave birth to a child, a boy to be named Omar Pound, even though Ezra was not the father. Among his “legal papers” there is an undated note: “I, Ezra Pound, declare that Omar is not my son save in the legal sense. I am cuckold.”
Moody draws attention, in a late footnote, to an Egyptian army officer named E Hassan Riffai, whom Dorothy may have met in Egypt in 1924, but he stops short of saying that Riffai fathered Omar. Dorothy brought Omar to London, where he was reared and eventually adopted by Dorothy’s mother, Olivia Shakespear.
Dorothy was easygoing about Ezra and Olga, but Olga did not return the favour. She contrived to live within easy distance of Ezra and Dorothy and to see him when Dorothy was out of town, as she often was, but that was not enough. Pound’s letters to Olga tried to cool her jealousy by protesting that he had no emotions other than those that impelled his art.
He had already started on the Cantos in Paris, out of Homer to begin with but ready at any moment to leap into Renaissance Italy. And he had the bones of an opera, Le Testament de Villon, to work on in 1921 or thereabouts.
Pound was, so far as I can judge, musically illiterate. He had sounds in his head but no skill to write them down. Determined to turn the Testament into playable music, he persuaded his friend Agnes Bedford, an accomplished pianist, to show him how the orchestration should go.
When Pound met the American pianist and "bad boy of music" George Antheil, he let him loose on the score, apparently with more dashing result. Le Testament de Villon was performed, in a fashion, in 1926 and tinkered with by divers hands until the BBC broadcast it in one version in 1931 and another in 1962. Moody has listened to several performances, as I have not, and reported that a few musicologists regard the work as, at least, significant (of what?), but he has not indicated how the opera sounded to him.
Literature into music
Moody is not the first to take music seriously in relation to Pound. When A Draft of XXX Cantos was published in 1930, one of the first reviewers, the poet Marianne Moore, wrote that "the experienced grafting of literature upon music is here very remarkable – the resonance of color, allusions, and tongues sounding one through the other as in symphonic instrumentation". Nearly every scholar of Pound has said something about the opera, usually a few short sentences, before passing on to more discussible topics.
Moody stays with the difficult subject, and relates it to Pound's The Treatise on Harmony (1924), in which he asserts that "a sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be followed by a sound of any other pitch, or any other combination of such sounds, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for any series of sounds, chords or arpeggios." By "time interval" I think he means duration.
Pound also had a theory of what he called Great Bass. Instead of composing in a particular key, as in Mozart’s Sonata in C Major (K545), he would take a fundamental bass note and observe the range of frequencies or “overtones” generated from it. I wish I understood these ideas. Moody moves with ease among them, but in the end he explains them without saying whether they’re any good, or whether any music worth listening to has turned these theories into practice.
Between 1921 and 1939, Pound wrote about 70 Cantos. In Moody’s interpretation: “The drama of this epic is the struggle of a few individuals throughout history to establish an enlightened order amidst and against blank apathy, malignant stupidity, rapacious greed, and jealous possessiveness, while (in Yeats’s words) ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity’.
But the political philosophy must be turned to music: “An epic is history set to music”, Pound noted about 1936. This means, presumably, that “the poet would be studying the facts of history with a mind sensitive to their harmonies and discords, and intent on discriminating their values, their moral or ethical overtones, and on composing them into a pattern to appease the humane rage for order”.
Some of those words sound as if they referred to the kind of harmony that composers from Bach to Mahler practiced, though “overtones” is a word from Pound’s theory.
Moody may be of two minds. In his most elaborate commentary on the musical character of the Cantos, he examines Canto XLI as a fugue, “a set of procedures for developing two or more melodic lines in interaction with each other”. The canto begins with Mussolini (“the Boss”) and ends with Thomas Jefferson. Moody distinguishes subjects and counter-subjects. “It is difficult,” he concedes, “but probably no more difficult than a Bach fugue once one has made out the themes and the process of their development.”
Memorable line
In much the same spirit, he comments on most of the 70 cantos, but not on Canto XI, which contains the most memorable line of the early Cantos: “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it.” The same Canto XI gives the substance of the Cantos, “books, arms, and men of unusual genius,” “de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis.”
Some of the later Cantos show Pound being naive, justifying Mussolini’s appropriation of Abyssinia on the grounds that Italy needed more raw material to achieve economic independence. And many more issues. Anti-Semitism: Moody explains Pound’s version of it, but doesn’t offer to explain it away. “In time he became simply unable to keep clear of it whenever the issue of usury came up.” Or when he brought it up.
In his last years, with his errors and wrecks lying about him, Pound repented his anti-Semitism, denouncing it in himself as a suburban prejudice. But that, and so much more, await David Moody in his final volume.
Denis Donoghue's most recent book is Metaphor (Harvard University Press, 2014)
