WHY WAS EZRA WESTON LOOMIS POUND SUCH A LOST CAUSE? “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1885 October 30, Friday: Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, to Homer Loomis Pound (“Euripides Weight”) and Isabel Weston Pound (“Hermione”). At the age of eighteen months, the family moved with its infant to Pennsylvania and “Ra” or “Ray” would grow from the age of four in the town of Wyncote, there, where his father would become the assistant assayer to the US Mint. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1889 The Pound family moved to 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote, Philadelphia, where they would be members of the Calvary Presbyterian Church. After a summer of picking hops for Shaker farmers in the Pacific Northwest, the Paiute prophet Wavoka journeyed in a dream to the Christian heaven, and found that Jesus was not a stuffy old white man, but an Indian who liked to dance and sing. On his return to his home at Walker Lake, Nevada, Wavoka would sponsor the Native American religion known as “Ghost Dancing.” NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1898 With his great-aunt Frances “Frank” Wessels Weston, whom he called “Heeb,” 13-year-old Ezra Pound went on a 3-month tour encompassing London, Brussels, Cologne, Paris, the Alps, Venice, Granada, Tangiers, etc. The Spanish-American War became the final major war to be fought using black powder (and the initial major war to be started by the power of the popular press). Brennecke introduced rifled shotgun slugs in Germany (while very powerful, they would not become popular in the United States until 1936, or in the British Commonwealth until after World War II). In Tientsin, the YMCA embarked on an agenda to “increase the capacity of the [Chinese] race” (to this end they would be introducing basketball in 1896 and baseball in 1907). In order to limit the gore and carnage during lineage feuds, the Chinese government banned sword-making in Shantung Province. This outraged clan elders and increased the popularity of stage plays depicting mortals who through intensive training and intense concentration achieve almost magical fighting skills. Training for the human roles in these morality plays would take place in boxing grounds called ch’uan chang and such training would be open to all, with rank based on the fighting skill that was exhibited during contests (instructors in such schools were termed “Senior Brothers,” while the students were known as “Junior Brothers”). LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1901 In the year in which Harry S Truman graduated from Independence High School with 40 other students, his father, John Anderson Truman, was losing his savings in the grain-futures market. He visited aunts in Illinois and St. Louis, and began to attend Spalding’s Business College (he would become our sole president without a college degree). In this year the Germans were inventing something typically German, the flamethrower, while the British were inventing something typically British, the concentration camp. From this year into 1903, Ezra Pound would be studying Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would meet Hilda Doolittle and a medical student, William Carlos Williams. THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1903 In an article published in Strand Magazine, H.G. Wells described the sort of armor-plated behemoths that would be carrying machine guns about the battlefield of the future. Although at this point Wells’ vision of “land ironclads” was viewed as “pure phantasy,” within a dozen years this magazine article would cause Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to establish a “Landships Committee” charged with designing such an battlefield armored tractor (for reasons of security, for the time being, this new military device would be referred to as a “tank,” but then this temporary coded designator would come to be ensconced in our warfare lingo). From this year into 1905, Ezra Pound would be studying at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1905 Ezra Pound was awarded the degree of Ph.B. at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. G.P. Putnam’s Sons of New York published Nitobe Inazo’s BUSHIDO: THE SOUL OF JAPAN. Nitobe was a Quaker schoolmaster and his English-language ghostwriter was Anna Hartshorne, a Canadian; this monograph presents bushido (“Military-Knight-Ways”) as a far-Eastern version of European chivalry. Nitobe downplayed mathematical skill, offering that “chivalry is uneconomical: it boasts of penury.”1 In Nitobe’s consideration, what all that training in judo, fencing, and archery did was build character.2 1. Or at least, penury was the ideal for the impoverished. In fact, with the notable exception of the Mitsui family, the traditional mercantile class had resisted modernization and the leaders of the ten largest zaibatsu (“financial cliques”) that had come to control Japanese land, labor, and industry and had therefore become inordinately wealthy had begun as families of the samurai caste. 2. It will come as a considerable surprise to those of us who have heard stories about the Bataan Death March, and stories about the Rape of Nanking, to learn that “Tenderness, Pity, and Love were traits which adorned the most sanguinary exploits of a samurai.” HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1906 Ezra Pound was awarded the degree of M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. Harry S Truman moved from his boardinghouse in Kansas City to the 600-acre family farm near Grandview, Missouri to help his parents, and his brother Vivian, manage and operate it. Under the “Indians not taxed” exclusion of the civil rights act, members of the native American “domestic dependent nations” (tribes) had needed to get along somehow without any civil rights. In this year the United States of America enabled these people to pay taxes and provide their young men for military service exactly as if they were white, by extending “dual citizenship” to its “wards.” (This granted a few civil rights, but, don’t think that this gave them the right to visit a polling station on election day: to vote you must not only be a citizen of the USA but also a citizen of the state in which you reside — and such natives were definitively still not citizens of the states in which they resided.) CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1907 Ezra Pound was an instructor in Romance Languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a small Presbyterian school. His term there would come to an abrupt end in the following year when he would be caught in the sin of entertaining an actress in his rooms. (In Indiana, as I can testify from personal experience having grown up along the Wabash River, if they happen to disapprove of anything you do or anything you say or anything they suppose you are thinking, they are going to defend to the death their right to abuse you — this being understood as Hoosierismo. :-) WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1907 July: Ezra Pound read a little Confucius (in translation, of course). DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EZRA POUND EZRA POUND 1908 Resigning his instructorship at Wabash College, Ezra Pound headed for Europe (you can venture interesting things in Europe that it would be wrong to attempt in Hoosierismo Indiana; he would there found the Imagist movement, which encouraged experimentation with verse forms, and Vorticism, which opposed representational art in favor of abstract forms). Why should war be limited? German chemist Fritz Haber patented a way to make high explosives out of nitrogen obtained directly from the atmosphere. Since there was atmosphere all over Europe, this would render it feasible to have more protracted European wars by eliminating Germany’s need to import its war nitrates from Chile and Peru. –And yet some people will say that there is no such thing as progress! Why should it be only the privileged youth who die in war? In this year Robert Baden-Powell established the Boy Scouts of England to prepare the working-class youth as well for future military service. This organization would offer the public school spirit minus the public school elitism, and teach military skills without so great an emphasis on the nicenesses of close-order drill. Stated goals of the Scouting organization included instilling patriotism and good moral character into pre-pubescents (90% of British Boy Scouts of the 1910s were younger than 14). Baden-Powell asserted “We shall establish a standard and bond throughout the cadets of the coming Imperial Army” (what, pray tell, could be wrong with that?) Eventually people would be saying that Ezra Pound must be insane, but you will note that nobody has ever offered that Fritz Haber was insane, and nobody has ever offered that Robert Baden-Powell was insane! Perhaps insanity is the sort of thing that is easier to detect in some cases than in others? July: In Venice Ezra Pound published his initial collection of poems, A LUME SPENTO (WITH TAPERS QUENCHED).