Writing

The Hall of Mirrors

• An Online Review of The Hall of Mirrors by John Young
• Introduction: Pound Reads "Pound" (excerpt)

A group of Cantos readers, nearing the end of their rich and daunting project, is in a state of some confusion. They each have the poem's third American collected edition, in printings ranging from the first in 1970 to the twelfth in 1991, and have proceeded through their texts at a similar rate. Nevertheless, one of the readers is inexplicably two cantos behind the others by the end of the fifth section, the Pisan Cantos. Later, beginning to discuss the poem they have finished, it becomes evident to them that one has read at least three cantos that another cannot remember -- a Canto LXXII, a Canto LXXIII, and a poem titled "Fragments (1966)" dedicating The Cantos to Ezra Pound's companion Olga Rudge. Another reader recalls all three of those poems at the end of the text; another confidently remembers reading Cantos LXXII and LXXIII some days before (their celebratory fascism rendering them unforgettable) but in their numerically correct positions in the Pisan Cantos section, and encountering "Fragments (1966)" at the very end. Yet another reader is sure that a canto numbered CXX containing the memorable lines "Let the Gods forgive what I / have made / Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made" ended the poem, that there was no "Fragments (1966)," no Canto LXXII, no Canto LXXIII. One of them returns to his text and locates the lines of the "CXX" poem elsewhere, in a group of four fragments titled "Notes For CXVII et seq.," close to the end of The Cantos. But another whose text has a group under that title counts only three fragments in it, not four, and the lines of the "CXX" poem are not among them. In fact, there is no "CXX" in her text at all, and the other readers' relief that Pound at the end seems contrite and regretful (particularly given the fascist shrillness of LXXII and LXXIII, say a couple of readers to their uncomprehending companions) leaves her rather uncomfortable.

In an attempt to sort out these various problems, they arrange the printings of their edition chronologically, but the inclusions, exclusions, and repositionings refuse to settle into some comprehensible evolution. Canto CXX, in particular, poses thorny problems, since it is not included in the printings during Pound's lifetime but appears and then repositions itself rather awkwardly and inexplicably after his death in 1972. Nor do the Faber and Faber editions corroborate any one of the many Drafts & Fragments variations -- its 1976 edition does not include the Canto CXX that New Directions, its source for the sheets no less, contained four years before.

They agree on one thing: asking that "the Gods forgive what I / have made" is a significant act, gathering as it does the religious and ethical resonances of error, sin, and their admission. In the case of Ezra Pound's Cantos, the site for many of this century's profound and identifying engagements between aesthetics, politics, the individual, culture, and history, the request has tremendous implications for interpretation. If it is included in the text, it might, as an example, permit one to soften a condemnation of the more unpleasant aspects of The Cantos' politics, and the anti-Semitism that accompanied them. It might also facilitate the separation between writer and text that generated much debate over the value of The Cantos since the Second World War. Or, if "what I made" refers both to his life and his text, it may just as easily fuse them as declare their difference.

What the readers do not know (though the confused state of their various texts hints at it) is that their options for interpretation are governed not only by the poem's semiotics but by its material produc-tion as well. Pound wrote the lines contained in "CXX," but it may be that he wrote them in a different order and scattered through a different poem, that he never recomposed them in their "CXX" variation and did not authorize their publication as a poem of that number to culminate The Cantos. The request for forgiveness therefore hovers over The Cantos as one of Pound's several explored, but not decisively chosen, possibilities for its termination. But critics, readers, and editors can remain uncomfortable with such momentous hesitation, particularly when the text that is denied resolution is the contentious and intricate Cantos. After all, the text must eventually achieve some canonical form, must it not?

It is perhaps best commemorative of the enterprise of writing The Cantos that its termination would frustrate, and continue to frustrate, such an assumption. The poem's exotic and unrehearsed negotiation between form and flux, interpretation and fact, narrative and lyric, reading and writing, language and what it signifies would find its ironic testament in a series of Drafts & Fragments texts, none of which stands as unequivocally "correct." Yet together, as a series of closural possibilities entertained by Pound, his readers, and his editors, and by extension fostered by the literary and political cultures that contained them, the various texts of Drafts & Fragments and the circumstances of their production tell us much about the poem they were to terminate.

In whatever form, or more accurately, across the accumulation of its many unresolved forms, Drafts & Fragments is the place where Pound attempts to create the paradise of natural and private harmony, and of limpid verse, that he had frequently predicted for the end of his long poem. To read the various portions of the volume where that paradisal vision fitfully and incompletely emerges is to encounter some of The Cantos', and Pound's, most powerful and luminous poetry. That vision, however, is only one dimension of the volume, compromised by many personal and poetic forces that seemed almost to conspire against its realization. The complex problem of defining and achieving a paradise, and the graphic absence of a satisfactory solution, pervade Drafts & Fragments as thoroughly as, or perhaps even more than, any mastery of the poem's expected paradisal close could. These final poems of The Cantos are dignified and deepened by Pound's expression in them of his distress over their partial failure, which he felt went beyond its boundaries of Cantos CX-CXVII to encompass much of the poem and its writer.

The full character of the Drafts & Fragments poems emerges, therefore, only when they are read within that context of the culminating volume in The Cantos. Pound's composition of them is inseparable from his sense of his long poem's imminent close and is shaped and troubled by that horizon. Too, as the last volume of The Cantos, sanctioned by the authority of that imposing text to which it now belongs, the volume is frequently regarded as Pound's intended close to the poem. Since the structure of The Cantos itself has been described so variously, it is not surprising that its final volume attracts a wide spectrum of responses. Drafts & Fragments has been interpreted as an indication of "Pound's refusal to provide a coherent ending," but also as the "open-ended and relaxed finale that [The Cantos] needs." It ends Pound's long poem in "an appropriately indirect, but rather pathetic manner" offers another reader; yet another, though, senses among its "unforgettable words and images" a direct reference to Canto I, and hence a circular structure, in which the final fragments of "Notes For CXVII et seq." do not communicate pathos but a "hopeful warning to fellow human beings."1 Retroactively, through Drafts & Fragments, The Cantos has been read as incomplete, closed, failed, and successful, and its critical reception has tended to remain within this quadrangle of possibilities. Yet Drafts & Fragments generates not only readers' reassessments of The Cantos but contains Pound's own responses to it, periodically similar, but eventually operating outside the strict parameters of failure or success. The act of trying to write a paradise for his Cantos forced him to review the poem, and himself as well, and Drafts & Fragments thus becomes the fascinating site where Pound reads "Pound"-as he has been composed and refracted by The Cantos -- where the poem becomes, in the language of CXIV, a "hall of mirrors." Its fragmentary form is but one of many indications that this personal and poetic reappraisal was extremely difficult for him. The composition and publication histories of the volume, in fact, suggest that it all but caused his abandonment of the poem during its writing.

In this study I have attempted to trace Drafts & Fragments' complex mixture of poetic and private exploration and reassessment. To do this I have avoided offering exhaustive interpretations of each canto and have chosen instead to trace the complicated dynamics of The Cantos' close from a specific and hardly conclusive set of perspectives, in the process examining the numerous passages in the volume relevant to that task. In chapter 1 I discuss Pound's evolving conception of paradise in his Cantos, of which Drafts & Fragments is to be the realization, but of which it is more truly the reconsideration. If the achievement of a paradisal close to the poem seldom exists untroubled by its own undoing, that tension is displayed in the composition and publica-tion histories of these cantos, which offer the earliest indications of Pound's struggle and disenchantment with them, as I discuss in chapter 2. The process of composing Drafts & Fragments occasioned Pound's greatest awareness of The Cantos' infirmities and insecurities -- entertaining the possibility of a paradise for his poem would illuminate and reflect the irresolvable conflicts that had remained latent in it for the 109 poems that precede its final volume. Their appearance troubles the waters of that paradise and in the process shifts Pound's relationship with the last poems during their composition, and afterward with The Cantos as a whole. As a result, their publication is less in accordance with his wish to see them in print than with peculiar circumstances outside the text that demanded their authorized appearance. Though the very inclusion of the Drafts & Fragments volume with The Cantos implies Pound's blessing of the close, the facts of its publication are that he did not actively pursue its appearance, and that its various forms mirror his readers' and editors' desires for the poem and its poet as much as they mirror Pound's. The case of the "Let the gods forgive what I / have made" lines, which have been editorially added, deleted, and then repositioned several times over the publishing history of the volume, represents one of a number of crucial inclusions and revisions that were not his. It illustrates how Drafts & Fragments has become, since its first appearance, a site where conflicting responses to his fascism, anti-Semitism, and other contentious issues of his inseparably public and poetic lives are interpreted and reconstructed. What we read as Drafts & Fragments is partly Pound's inconclusive text for the close of The Cantos, but the very fact of its incompletion has left it open to a subtle, equally endless refurbishing, creating an historically conditioned and evolving text of "Pound."

The measure of editorial and readerly control over these poems is partly a result of Pound's failing health during their publication, but it is also permitted by the ambivalence he felt toward the poems, itself a consequence of his intricate response to his life and Cantos, each approaching its close. To an extent the poem's uneasy termination is contoured by his declining health and effective exile from America between 1958 and 1968, the years of Drafts & Fragments' composition, editing, and publication, during which he frequently endured illness, fatigue, and despondency. His ability to participate actively in the volume ' s editing was severely diminished by these conditions at the time of its first authorized production and publication in 1968, and he died four years later in October 1972 without regaining the energy and health necessary to oversee such a demanding task. The final poems are as a result profoundly contoured by insights afforded the elderly, and by the imminence, the emerging threshold, of silence and death. But another of this study's implications is that the end of a modern long poem such as The Cantos is neither fully administered by the circumstances of its poet's life nor entirely contingent upon his death. These relationships probably occur as frequently as they do because a long poem does not begin until a poetics has been devised by its poet that is significant enough to be tested by its imposing stature. In most cases, this requires a mature vision; and, of course, the composition of the poem itself takes a long time. The assumption behind the view that the length of the poem coincides with the longevity of the poet, and that the poet's death marks its own, must be that the long poem is perpetually unfinished and that, had the poet persevered, the poem would have too. One critic, writing on The Cantos' termination, points out that since "Ezra Pound always was in The Cantos -- indeed, his mind is the medium in which the poem operates -- there is really no possible ending for the poem except death." (Another, speculating in a similar manner on the close of Paterson, wrote that Williams's "work will end only with his death; and the Paterson format, with its provision for letters, reminiscences, odds and ends, gives him a place for those things which interest him as he attempts to keep going").2 The composition and publication histories of Drafts & Fragments (and, as I discuss in the Afterword, those of Paterson books 5 and 6, and Maximus: Volume Three as well) tell a different story. They urge us to recognize that Cantos CX-CXVII were not only the last group of poems Pound could muster the energy to write, but the last that his poem, his relationship with his poem, and his view of himself permitted to be written. This final act in the drama of The Cantos is not a tragic admission of defeat by death and time, but a somber and intricate contemplation of the lure of silence, of escape from the labyrinth of the poem to a reacquaintance with the self and with doubt, and to a new mode of perceiving the world unmediated by language.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Drafts & Fragments volume, even upon a cursory reading, is its frequent replacement of the paradise Pound seemed to desire for it with the poignant expressions of human frailty and incoherence that the last "complete" poem, CXVI, most famously contains:

               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.

The reasons for this, I think, are to be found in Pound's act of writing the poem's termination, which caused him to reflect upon his Cantos, its partly distorted revelation of him, and the extent of its success or failure in joining the aesthetic with the political. As I discuss in chapter 3, the volume's first canto introduces its many levels of equivocation; Canto CX is powerfully self-reflexive, and it simultaneously contains and redesigns The Cantos' various predictions of closure. Beyond CX The Cantos' earlier nonclosural principles of imagism and vorticism complicate any coherence that would close the poem, as I discuss in chapter 4. It becomes evident that many nonclosural characteristics in Drafts & Fragments have little to do with "unstable events" that the poem relates,3 for The Cantos has largely been "about," and written in the language of, what Marjorie Perloff calls "the poetics of indeterminacy."4 The nonclosural dynamic in The Cantos is its early vorticist method, whose mandate is the continuation of pattern, whose model is the semiotic principle in Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, and whose elementary particle is the Poundian image, which contains the nucleus of perpetual poetic motion. In chapter 5 I examine how these early principles eventually conflict with the several teleological narratives gradually absorbed into the poem, which envision a poetic close structured by what Robert Casillo in The Genealogy of Demons calls a "fascist myth of order."5 By trying to satisfy The Cantos' various narrative demands for closure Pound spurns its early vorticist request for incompletion -- a problem that cannot be resolved without an acknowledgment of its existence and then the relinquishing of the demands of one side or the other. In the midst of the attempts by various readers and others connected with Pound at the time to organize a close to the poem, his own expression of the problem can be discerned, and his abandonment of The Cantos' political narratives and return to a prefascist stage of the poem detected, though not, perhaps, with the assurance and volume that some would wish.

The Cantos had always relied on the mediation of its discourse, on the masking of the poet by the personae of other texts; in Drafts & Fragments, suddenly, the voice is that of Pound's encounter with the self that the poem has so long concealed, and that now is almost virtually unknowable, as I examine in chapter 6. If The Cantos' end is orchestrated by its self-contesting dynamics, which culminate in Pound's examination in Drafts & Fragments of himself and his poem, this self-consciousness is one of the evocative dimensions of the Drafts & Fragments volume, and possibly a reason why, along with the Pisan Cantos, it is a most accessible and revealing section of the poem, read with great empathy and emotion. In the Pisan Cantos the introspection concerns Pound's own situation, incarcerated in a cage, humbled by the magnitude of historical forces and by nature's inexorable patterns and beauties. The protean shapes of the final volume indicate how that introspection is complicated by a shifting appraisal of his political views and of his personal relationships, and of their effect on the poem itself, no longer suspended in a state of imminent harmony, and no longer an unquestioned medium for the poet's exclusive articulation of his "tribe." In Drafts & Fragments Pound believes he no longer occupies a central position as spokesman for anything but himself and sees his own reflection instead as scattered around the circumference of the political and cultural influence he sought since his early years in London. Such fragmentation and marginality, he eventually believed, came perilously close to defining his Cantos too, whose words were reduced to evidence of his "unsound mind" in 1946, and whose final plea to its readers not to be "destroyers" (CXVI) went unheard, for Pound, by the "600 more dead at Quemoy" ("Notes for CXI") and by the emergent political powers of the 1950s and 1960s in America, Europe, and the East.

Some of these characteristics of closure, or its absence, are peculiar to The Cantos, but the authorial self-examination, and the return to the poem's earliest poetics, are not entirely so. The backward glance in the case of The Cantos is a result of Pound's desire to return to a point in the poem and his career free of their particular overt, and covert, political and racist voices, but in other long poems of the twentieth century the pattern occurs as well, though for slightly different reasons. It suggests that the modern long poem is always a poem in conflict with itself, that the characteristic of length creates the limitless potential for the poem's successive stages to contest its earlier mandates. It is constantly imperiled by its own growth, and by the anxiety that no closure can satisfy all the requests of its perpetually burgeoning and protean self. The Cantos began partly in order to test the poetics of imagism and vorticism, to see if they had the stamina to travel the extended path of the long poem, and not just the local two-line space of "In a Station of the Metro." If Milton wrote a long Paradise Lost to justify the limitless ways of God, Pound (and other modern writers of the long poem, too) began his longest work to justify the poetics of his time in the enlarged field of action of the long poem. Drafts & Fragments, the furthest point in The Cantos from those original dynamics, is the clearest index of their stamina, and the site of greatest self-revelation in his "tale of the tribe." The Cantos becomes an ironic model for at least two long poems in this way -- William Carlos Williams's Paterson and Charles Olson's Maximus. While The Cantos offers later poets such as these the assurance that the modern long poem can be written, it simultaneously embodies a code of self-termination that its progeny will struggle unsuccessfully to break. In the Afterword, I examine this structural legacy of The Cantos by looking at how Paterson and Maximus attempt to transcend that code and instead embody its characteristics of self-investigation, authorial self-revelation, and unstable termination.

It was to be an irony, not lost on Pound, that a poet who sought through The Cantos and his many other writings a measure of political and cultural authority, and embodied it for many, would find himself incapable of managing its close in a manner satisfactory to himself, and thus of controlling the poem that had seemed to acquiesce to his inviolable mastery for so long. A recognition of this irony, too, is involved in our response to Drafts & Fragments, a text that partly reveals a person behind the many masks and voices, behind the often frustrating didacticism and inflexible beliefs, whose poetic methodology has been admired, but whose ideologies have been questioned. In 1970 one biographer, Noel Stock, wrote that Pound will be remembered "because he was one of the few to whom is granted the gift of giving words to that which is beyond words," a gift that will supersede "the broadcasts and the manias, the economics and the sense of justice."6 And in response to Pound's Bollingen award, Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1949 that the judges were finally able to separate "Mr. Pound the poet" from "Mr. Pound the fascist, Mr. Pound the anti-Semite, Mr. Pound the traitor, Mr. Pound the funny-money crank, and all the other Mr. Pounds whose existence has properly nothing to do with the question of whether Mr. Pound the poet had or had not written the best American poetry of 1948." In the Drafts & Fragments poems, composed between the two statements, Pound delivers a very different and less sympathetic judgment. He senses that neither those other Mr. Pounds, nor their broadcasts and manias, could be entirely ignored any longer, and that their acknowledgment late in life and poem would irrevocably complicate any possibility for a paradisal close. From this perspective the statement in CXVI that he "cannot make it cohere" is not so easily an admission of defeat or failure, but a recognition of how coherence is ultimately foreign both to the poem and to the self. In Drafts & Fragments he exchanges some illusions of the equation between authority and coherence for alternative perceptions -- not unaccompanied by defensiveness or confusion, however. Its poems tell us it is neither an easy transaction nor one that is fully accomplished, but one that, though perhaps originally unintended, just may permit a version of the humanity The Cantos and its many different readers have sought.

NOTES

1. Respectively, Michael Andre Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 125; Massimo Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 489; Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 260; James J. Wilhelm, The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Walker, 1977), 168.

2. Respectively, Wilhelm, Later Cantos, 168; Benjamin Sankey, A Companion to William Carlos Williams' "Paterson" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 213.

3. Barbara Hernstein-Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). She suggest that one reason for "minimal closure effects" in a poem can be that the "last allusions are . . . to unstable events" (210).

4. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

5. Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 325.

6. Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 460. In his revised version of 1982 Stock did not change the wording. Stock's critical response to The Cantos contains in miniature the tensions pervading the universal appraisal of the poem; while his biography of Pound contains this kind of sympahty, in his earlier Reading "The Cantos": A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967) he believes that:
 

we are unlikely most of the time to have any idea what [The Cantos] is about unless we locate the precise subject he was turning over in his mind at the time of composition . . . . Pound is no visionary poet peering into the heart of things, or the depths of the spirit. Of these he knows little, and this at second hand. (194)