The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [134]
A writer with greater trust in the will works the text, turning the plasm of the moment into more durable gems. Such work has the virtues that come of revision—precision, restraint, intellectual consistency, density of images, coherence, and so forth. For a certain kind of author, Pound is correct, I think, to connect the presence of the will to the durability of the creation. Yeats, for example, may have cultivated his “spooks” and written in trances, but unlike Kerouac, he educated the will. He worked at his craft; he refined what the imagination gave him.
I have gone into the issue of willpower a little because it is through this particular element in Pound’s Confucian side that we can come to understand the tension between fecundity and order. Pound’s work displays a curious incongruity: it is framed by clear declarations of erotic and spiritual ends which it does not achieve. There are moments of remarkable light in the Cantos, yes, but taken as a whole the poem scatters the very unity it set out to preserve (and the last lines of the last Canto read: “Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made”). Pound’s work is acerbic, impatient, argumentative, obsessed, and disappointed. The young man had written that he was “interested in art and ecstasy,” but the poem he came to write does not convey “the feeling of a soul in ascent”; it conveys the feeling of a soul in torment.
Pound’s tone of voice in his prose writings offers a way to approach this incongruity. His shortness with something called “stupidity” seems particularly telling. The tone of voice of the man who wrote the ABC of Reading, for example, is that of a schoolmaster irritated by the ignorance of his pupils. The reader who approaches the book with sympathy begins to feel either like the dunce receiving the lecture or like the peeved schoolmaster set above the class. Either way, the sympathy is betrayed, the self divided. Eliot once asked Pound to write an explanation of Silvio Gesell’s economic ideas for The Criterion. Pound handed in his usual complaint about the thickheadedness of his audience. Said Eliot to Pound, “I asked you to write an article which would explain this subject to people who had never heard it; yet you write as if your readers knew about it already, but had failed to understand it.”
If we return to Whitman for a moment, we may be able to triangulate the irritability these examples reveal. We have seen Pound’s “Religio”; Whitman’s is found in the original preface to Leaves of Grass:
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy…, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people …, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families…, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body …
Contrast this passage with lines from the opening paragraph of Pound’s Guide to Kulchur: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man … to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom it is blamed. One may quite well be fighting the same idiocy that he fought and where into his followers have reslumped from laziness, from idiocy …” The point may be well taken, but mark the underlying assumption, to wit, that culture will only stand up if we fight stupidity, idiocy, and laziness, as if culture were a slouching adolescent being sent to a military academy in Pennsylvania.
I do not pretend that I can unravel the mare’s nest of Pound’s psychology in this one chapter, but I can proffer at least one intuition: what Pound is calling “stupidity” and “idiocy” and