EZRA POUND (493 pp.)—Charles Norman—Mocm/7/on ($6.95).
"Personae," the word with which Ezra Pound titled his first book of poems, originally meant masks. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, who is 75 this week, has worn many. There is Pound the poet, critic, scholar and esthetic perfectionist. There is Pound the economic crank, anti-Semite and Fascist apologist. There is Pound the expatriate bohemian, the discoverer, friend, advocate and ally of Eliot and Joyce, who got them into print. He begged, wheedled, scolded, scandalized others and scanted himself to secure bread-and-but ter money for them and for many another subsequently famed writer. In that role he was, as Horace Gregory once called him, "a minister of the arts without portfolio."
To reveal the man behind the masks and to place the poet among his peers is an urgent task, but Critic Charles Norman (The Magic-Maker: e. e. cummings) has not done it. His book is a triumph of industry and a signal display of disorganization, a patchwork—letters, reminiscences, vignettes—of incoherent research. Apart from a few candid shots of its subject, the book is significant only because it treats Pound seriously and heralds the work that will treat him definitively. It is a reminder that he cannot be written off and must, more and more, be written about. Pound's reputation, largely self-besmirched, has fallen so low that it has indeed no place to go but up.
After Yeats. "Old Ez," as he calls himself, has spent so many years in voluntary exile—London, Paris, Rapallo—that it is easy to forget him as an American. His ancestors came over on the same boat as Roger Williams. Two hundred of them fought in the Revolutionary War, and the towns of Weston in Massachusetts and Connecticut are named after them. Ezra was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, grew up in Wyncote, Pa., attended Hamilton College, and got an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He had sound taste even then. At 18, he told his friend William Carlos Williams that Yeats was the greatest living poet, and began wearing pince-nez because Yeats did.
Young Pound developed a lasting eruditer-than-thou attitude, but he also had a large, unmanageable streak of naivete that would derange his life. As a French and Spanish instructor at Wabash College in 1907, he went out late one night and ran into a stranded burlesque girl, hungry and shivering in the winter streets. He fed her, brought her back to his rented room. and let her sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor. When his landladies, two spinster sisters, found out about it, Pound was fired. This episode triggered his departure for London via Venice.
In London. Pound headed for the salons in his "stage poet" mask — green billiard-cloth trousers, pink coat, blue shirt, an immense sombrero, a Mephistophelean red-blond beard and a single turquoise earring. An even better attention-getting device was Personae, published in 1909, in which he first struck the tone of most modern Anglo-American poetry — spare, objective, unornamented, elliptic. Dante, the medieval troubadours, and his pet hate-love Whitman had been his tutors, but he had done the homework of craftsmanship. (In one undergraduate year he had written a sonnet a day.) Though stripped for action, many of Pound's lines still retained the lilt of romance. In An Immorality, he wrote :