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By Root 1889 0

key to Pound’s equanimity? Is it that, as a worshipper of the Greek gods rather than the Hebrew god, he is immune to guilt? Or is Pound so steeped in great poetry that his physical being is in harmony with his emotions, a harmony that communicates itself immediately to women and opens their hearts to him? Or, on the contrary, is Pound’s secret simply a certain briskness in the conduct of life, a briskness to be attributed to an American upbringing rather than to the gods or poetry, welcomed by women as a sign that the man knows what he wants and in a firm yet friendly way will take charge of where she and he are going? Is that what women want: to be taken charge of, to be led? Is that why dancers follow the code they do, the man leading, the woman following?

His own explanation for his failures in love, hoary by now and less and less to be trusted, is that he has yet to meet the right woman. The right woman will see through the opaque surface he presents to the world, to the depths inside; the right woman will unlock the hidden intensities of passion in him. Until that woman arrives, until that day of destiny, he is merely passing the time. That is why Marianne can be ignored.

One question still nags at him, and will not go away. Will the woman who unlocks the store of passion within him, if she exists, also release the blocked flow of poetry; or on the contrary is it up to him to turn himself into a poet and thus prove himself worthy of her love? It would be nice if the first were true, but he suspects it is not. Just as he has fallen in love at a distance with Ingeborg Bachmann in one way and with Anna Karina in another, so, he suspects, the intended one will have to know him by his works, to fall in love with his art before she will be so foolish as to fall in love with him.

Seventeen

From Professor Guy Howarth, his thesis supervisor back in Cape Town, he receives a letter requesting him to do some academic chores. Howarth is at work on a biography of the seventeenth-century playwright John Webster: he wants him to make copies of certain poems in the British Museum’s manuscript collection that might have been written by Webster as a young man, and, while he is about it, of any manuscript poem he comes across signed ‘I. W.’ that sounds as if it might have been written by Webster.

Though the poems he finds himself reading are of no particular merit, he is flattered by the commission, with its implication that he will be able to recognize the author of The Duchess of Malfi by his style alone. From Eliot he has learned that the test of the critic is his ability to make fine discriminations. From Pound he has learned that the critic must be able to pick out the voice of the authentic master amid the babble of mere fashion. If he cannot play the piano, he can at least, when he switches on the radio, tell the difference between Bach and Telemann, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Spohr, Bruckner and Mahler; if he cannot write, he at least possesses an ear that Eliot and Pound would approve of.

The question is, is Ford Madox Ford, on whom he is lavishing so much time, an authentic master? Pound promoted Ford as the sole heir in England of Henry James and Flaubert. But would Pound have been so sure of himself had he read the whole Ford oeuvre? If Ford was such a fine writer, why, mixed in with his five good novels, is there so much rubbish?

Though he is supposed to be writing about Ford’s fiction, he finds Ford’s minor novels less interesting than his books about France. To Ford there can be no greater happiness than to pass one’s days by the side of a good woman in a sunlit house in the south of France, with an olive tree at the back door and a good vin de pays in the cellar. Provence, says Ford, is the cradle of all that is gracious and lyrical and humane in European civilization; as for the women of Provence, with their fiery temperament and their aquiline good looks they put the women of the north to shame.

Is Ford to be believed? Will he himself ever see Provence? Will the fiery Provençal women pay any attention