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412 Hugh Kenner. the POUND ERA. Berkeley & Los 412 413 order, the content gives one the impression of a montage -- a proliferation of topics, people, places, histories, anecdotes, theories, and speculations, held together by the authors dynamic manipulation, as in one of Eisensteins films. Alongside the full portrait of Ezra Pound, with its many "luminous details" about his early lyrics as well as about his Cantos, are individual profiles of literary and artistic giants: T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, William Carlos Williams, etc., with Henry James leading the pageant. The Pound era may be likened to a Vortex -- the Vortex is indeed a recurrent image in the book -- which is "a circulation with a still center: a system of energies drawing in whatever comes near" (p. 239). In reading the book one is aware of the orches- tration of figures, artifacts, ideas of past and present, East and West, whirling across the pages, drawn together into the "Pound Vortex." Pound once said, "Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time" (Impact, p. 210). One of the ideas that Hugh Kenner. THE POUND ERA. Berkeley Los Angeles: University constantly rushes through the radiant node of the "Pound Vortex" in this book seems of California Press, 1973 (1971), xiv, 606 pp. $5.95, to be that which the poet derived from what Kenner calls the "Persistent East," more specifically, that which paperback. he borrowed or adopted from China. This specific aspect of In his "Acknowledgements" to The Pound Era Kenner tells Pound is recognized by Kenner more acutely perhaps than by any us that "this book was planned as an X-ray moving picture of how other Poundian critic. And he draws the readers attention to it early in the book: our epoch was extricated from the fin de siecle" (p. xi). As its title indicates, The Pound Era is not merely a biography of. They say, among the many things they say, that some thousand Ezra Pound the poet, as was Noel Stocks cut and dried Life of years before Trojans founded Rome a scholar named Tsang-kie (New York, 1970); it is simultaneously a cultural history, a was commanded by his emperor to invent Writing, and took his portrayal of an era with all its intellectual currents and the inspiration from bird tracks in the fluvial sand, by whose titanic figures of the arts and letters of our century. As a print we know what songs were heard here. Whence men write simulation of a motion picture, the book is a stunning success today as birds feet do, in little clustered lines. (p. 14) in adopting certain cinematographic techniques such as flashbacka ,, close-ups, dynamic cuttings, and fade-outs, with the key light :! After this brief introductory remark on the mythological origin unmistakably focused on Ezra Pound. The author also acknowledges Chinese writing, Kenner takes great pains to analyze the at the outset that he, belonging to the third Pound-taught gene-t:i etymology of the ideogram ration, owes the poet its testimony. The reader, therefore, shbad: ling, which appears in Cantos 85 be forewarned by this that even though the books treatment of .-1" tittid. 104. may be as penetrating as the X-ray, the light under which Unless one is curious enough to check the notes at the Pound p the subject is scrutinized cannot be totally objective, despite ack of the book to find out that Kenner has his sources of information from Wai-lim Yips letter to him and from L. Weigers the authors intellectual honesty. inese The physical format of the book is almost as weighty as ip$, Character, one cannot but marvel at Kenners recondite anowledge of Chinese. What is more, the reader is further subject matter. In the 606 pages there are 54 illuetrations, including the Sappho parchment, the "horse" ideogram, and signedg. Informed: stone column of San Zeno in Verona, and Gaudiers marble hieratic;,::: • . and out of all the lingo that chime through Chinese head of Pound, to name but a few. These are indications of the: speech, and mean in different tones and contexts a multitude authors vast research on a variety of subjects, and of the of unrelated things, you have designated the ling which means scope and cultural radius of Pounds life that the book attempts the spirit or energy of a being, in harmony with the invisible to encompass. There are thirty-one chapters divided into three and by ritual drawing down benefice: we may say, sensibility. parts: Part One, "Toward the Vortex," consists of fourteen It is used of the work of poets, denoting their reach into chapters; Part Two, "Interregnum," has only three short chapters: the realm of the natural (and the drops look like mouths; "Toward Now," comprises again fourteen chapters. Part Three, hence Pounds "under the cloud/the three voices" 104/740: Despite its tripartite divisions, which suggest a chronologic 766) . • . (p. 15) 414 415 discourse, Kenner Parallels, paradigms, affinities and antitheses (cf. "Mao This is fine. But like Pound, the subject of his or Presumption," pp. 289-298), but the "persistent East" seems does not stop at the literary or linguistic level in his expli- to loom large on Kenners canvas of The Pound he shows Pound mistaking Era. Of interest cation. In the same paragraph where to me most are the chapters, "The Invention of China," (pp. the pictograph of three rain drops for three mouths (hence "the 196-222) and "Inventing Confucius" (pp. 445-459). Since Pound three voices"), he also delves into contemporary world politics had long been dubbed "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our and editorializes: time" by T. S. Eliot, because of his translation or "trans- China had lost hold of ling and fallen to barbarian ideologies, lucence" of Cathay, I am neither impressed nor depressed by Chiangs western or Maos Stalinist, according to your system such titles used by Kenner, which are neither inventive nor new. of disapprovals . At first he [Pound] thought the poet What is new, however, is his extensive research in his reappraisal Mao possessed ling, but before long Maos men were harassing of Pounds creativeness in his translations: Kenner had the good Confucians. In the State Department a few miles from the fortune to examine the original notebooks of Fenollosa; part of poets cell the winning side had persuasive American spokes- which have been reproduced as illustrations of how the raw men." (p. 15) material looked before Pound transformed it into poetry. But Kenner does not rest on being informative alone; he interprets I quote at length here, because this is one of the many instances and instructs: which exemplifies Kenners mode and method of presentation through- out the book. It shows that Kenners over-reaching, associative Cathay has more instructive deviations to exhibit; the ones mind is in a way very much like the "vibrating mind of Pound"; to which Pound was driven when the notes sagged. On one moreover, his writing is at times as arcane and cryptic, not occasion we can follow him as he virtually invents a poem, caring whether he loses his audience in his labyrinth of thought an accretion of small deflections steering melancholy toward ("Thought is a labyrinth," p. 561). Most of his readers probably metaphysics, and the poet, unguided, conniving. (p. 207) know such international personages as Chiang Kai-shek and Mao More often than not, he turns Pounds errors of translation Tse-tung without having their names fully spelt out, but "poet into strokes of genius. If he occasionally admits that Pounds Mao" is certainly not so easily identified to be "Chairman Mao"; inaccuracies "are what are normally called mistranslations, in the "persuasive American spokesmen" for the "winning side," one case grotesque mistranslation," in the same breath he also without being specified, are certainly unidentifiable, at least tells us that "they are deflections undertaken with open to me. eyes ... It is a question, purely and simply, of taking all Ezra Pound has been to many "sacred places" which are etecessary measures to protect the course of a poem, which having and are illustrated and mapped out in recorded in the Cantos i....begun as it did (and brilliantly) could only finish in accor- Kenners book (p. 345). But Taishan (the sacred mountain of s . • :,-dance with the mood of its beginning" (p. 213). It is in instances Confucius) appeared only in Pounds minds eye under the glaring Bike DTC camp near Pisa. Pound this that the label "The Invention of China" is truly Pisan skies, when he was caged in the Austifiable. never visited China, but the raw material with which he sculp- But what about "Inventing Confucius?" Did Pound really tured was brought to him by way of Japan and London Cathay invent Confucius as he did Cathay? Definitely not. If anything, through the work of Ernest E. Fenollosa. Even more vital than 4• to Pounds literary career was Fenellosayeli Pound took his Confucius dead seriously, whether his sources. the material for Cathay ere M. G. Pauthier or Legge. When he declared in 1934 "I believe essay on "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," he Ta Hio w in answer to Eliots query, "What does Mr. Pound which had become his Are Poetica. The Chinese idiogram that so lieve," he was not fabricating a Confucius (or Kung) after his fascinated Fenollosa, confirmed for Pound his early literary wn image; rather he was converted to Confucianism, which to theory of Vorticism and later gave birth to his "idiogrammic m was "the real paideuma" (p. 507). methods," is comparable to the Vortex, a patterned energy.
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