BOOKS The Revolutionaries

By MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

WHAT is often called the poetic revolution in this century, in the public sense of how the vast majority of readers react to what they read, was inaugurated 6y Ezra Pound, and

carried through by T. S. Eliot. However we value the two men, this fact remains unassailable. The final effect of their public influence was to shift the emphasis in the way poetry was read from a sentimental or, at best, vague attention to a general drift of meaning, to the words them- selves; from a comfortable and often deliberately narrow provincialism to a civilised awareness of the whole of European culture.

Other men were associated with them—notably Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis—but Pound and Eliot were far more ambitiously con- cerned with exercising influence. The measure of agreement between Ford and Pound, for example, Was almost wholly accidental. Again, Pound and Eliot (more cagily) were fascinated by and admired Wyndham Lewis; but Lewis never whole- heartedly shared their ideas or their intentions. Although the reputations of both Pound and Eliot—whose recent death produced less positive Praise than reverential nostalgia—are perhaps at their lowest ebb, the view that Ford and Lewis are more important writers, and therefore ulti-

Mately more worthy of study, will nevertheless be. regarded as somewhat heretical. Pound and Eliot's main work, of stamping themselves in- delibly on theVage, was so well done.

.Eut it is precisely because they were concerned With doing just this, with writing poetry and criticism that would be influential, that they may have dissipated their full potentialities as indi- Victual poets. That this can be looked upon either as self-conscious personal sacrifice or a mistake arising from wrongly orientated ambition does not affect its truth. The history of both is essen- tially one of continual strategic adjustment to a sense of how the world, 'the public mind,' would take them; personal conviction is always sacri- ficed to what will 'work.' (Pound's personal disaster did not arise from his pursuit of a mis- taken conviction, but, at least in part, from over- concern with changing the world before he had Changed himself; as he now [1963] says, 'I have Only the certainty of my total uncertainty.) Lewis Was tragically fascinated by the mechanics of Power and public persuasion, but from a sufficiently external position to save himself in the end: The Human Age became a massive commentary, not only upon his own failings, but also on the failings of a considerable portion of humankind. Ford, too, experienced some degree of personal disaster: he developed into a silly liar, a pitiable caricature of himself—at least Until his obscure last years.

. He had, it is true, been connected with chang- ing the literary scene of his day; but he was less obsessed with the future, with the whole Picture of literature and literary education, than Pound. He was always immediately involved in Producing what was best in the immediate Present. As a result of this immediacy, which contrasts with Pound's wider ambitions, only Frank Harris—not Eliot or Pound—can rival Ford as a literary editor in this century. No one has thought seriously of suggesting that The Criterion rivals The English Review: the former is acknowledged as Eliot's own instrument of power, and evaluation of it depends on evalua- tion of Eliot himself. We think less of Ford himself in connection with The English Review than of the contents. The one, an organ, repre- sents a tactical deployment of Eliot's own views; the other, a magazine, is a remarkably varied collection of individual talents, often at their best—the editorial 'system' was tc gather to- gether good writing. • The greater fame of Pound and Eliot is not altogether due, however, to their own intentions in this respect, although eventually it springs from this cause. Ford's early historical trilogy, The Good Soldier, the Tietjens series, and other shamefully neglected later novels (such as When the Wicked Man), and Lewis's Time and Western Man, The Enemy of the Stars, The Human Age and his .other late masterpiece, Self .Condemned, are all books that do more and say more, in prose, than Eliot and Pound do and say, in verse, in their more celebrated works—notably The Waste Land, The Four Quartets and The Cantos. Such an assertion will, no doubt, seem deeply shocking—most especially to those Who have not read or studied Lewis and Ford (and many have not). But it will also provoke protest of a different order from that aroused by mere novelty: the later and most widely read verse of Eliot and Pound is essentially a receptacle into which the reader, often a critic with his own reputation to think about, may deposit his own thought.

Eliot's own equivocations about what his poetry 'means' need no more explanation than this. Basically his poetry is an exercise in mean- ing nothing-in-particular: within a conservative, multi-coloured ambience, with religious and mys- tical overtones (the fact that he used a great deal of material, which he did not necessarily accept as valid, gained from Gurdjieff through A. R. Orage, is not generally recognised), it can mean what the reader wants it to mean. The same applies to Pound, whose later 'elliptical' method of composition is self-explanatory in this con- nection.

I am not suggesting that this was a deliberate procedure; I take it to be the inevitable result of consciously using poetry as an instrument of persuasion—persuasion not to a particular view of existence (this is ruled out by the nature of the whole process), but to a certain highly civilised, ultra-conservative, super-nostalgic mode of accepting the impossibility of developing par- ticular views, of there ever being agreement between men (the comfortable, graceful Anglican life may be just such a mode).

To produce verse at all, you must have some kind of personal motive; Pound's task when he reduced the legendary original text of The Waste Land to a third of its length was to edit out this personal element. When a young critic tried to discover what it was, in a speculative

essay (I do not say that he was right), the periodical in which the essay appeared was with-

drawn, initially under legal duress. . . . The moral is obvious: to exist as an actualiser of your readers' own thought, and thus to gain by mechanial attribution all the reverence that self- love can bestow when it imagines it is acting in other interests, all unequivocal explanations must be discouraged—if necessary, by the threat of legal action.

Two interesting new books, on Pound and Eliot respectively, do not inhibit this view. Miss Patricia Hutchins, who has already powerfully evoked Joyce's Dublin, has now completed the first part of an exhaustive exploration of Pound's background from the time he first arrived in Europe to stay, until just before the outbreak of the First World War.* Miss Hutchins's attitude is reverential rather than critical, but this adds to rather than detracts from the value of her beautifully written, wistful study of a bygone era. Here we are able to see Pound, for the first lime, as he really was when young: generous, enthu- siastic, full of seriousness about the right things, admirably ambitious—but pathologically ner- vous and, as a consequence, already morbidly exhibitionistic. Miss Hutchins provides some re- vealing photographs, and quotes well from many of Pound's Pre-Raphaelitish early poems. It is clear from these that he never had much poetic talent, and that his original mistake—made, I think, in all good faith—was to' try to implement his whole over-excited, ever-proliferating pro- gramme by means of his own poetic practice. Miss Hutchins's is a touching book, because it shows us so much of the real man, the man at his amusing and generous best, and hits at what he might have been had he not fallen into self- inflation.

Mr. Herbert Howarth's modestly entitled Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. EIiot,t also reverential, is a patchier and duller book; the author is tempted into making literary generali- sations for which he does not seem qualified. Whereas Miss Hutchins has for her real subject her own well-informed nostalgia for Edwardian Kensington, Mr. Howarth lacks a valid emo- tional attachment to any aspect of his subject, and thus tries to apply a mind more attuned to the enjoyment of nineteenth-century poetry than to the examination of twentieth-century poetic texts to a pseudo-critical appreciation of T. S. Eliot. But his book is valuable for the factual light it casts on many obscure figures in Eliot's Hip: his remarkable grandfather, his mother (a frustrated poet), George Pierce Baker, and many others who influenced him either per- sonally or by their teachings or writings. Pound is, of course, mentioned a good deal; but Mr. Howarth does not seem to be aware of how masterfully (and some would say cynically) the cannier younger man exploited the figure whom he so slyly called il miglior fahhw (thus Dante of Arnaud Daniel).

Mr. Hugh Kenner has evolved an ingenious theory in which Eliot is regarded as an 'invisible poet,' operating behind a series of disguises, such as 'the banker,' the Clubman,' the archdeacon' and 'the Weekly Reviewer.' There is much to be said for this view. But where, finally, was the poet himself? What was he really concerned about? May not Eliot's often remarked lack of sensitivity to the issues of the world he actually lived in imply a lack of ultimate seriousness rather than a semi-mystical union with God? Is it not somehow significant that he ended his life —and he was never senile—approving of the newspaper and the activities of Mr. Edward Martell (a figure not mentioned by Mr. Howarth)? For a very long time, I think, the poet, the serious person, was invisible for the simplest of reasons: he no longer existed.

* EZRA POUND'S KENSINGTON: AN EXPLORATION.

1885-1913. (Faber, 30s.). Chan° aid Nitindus, 30s.