The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [144]
Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for cats—“some of them so ungrateful,” a friend says—he never nurses the cafe cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own.
Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organise the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power. I examine his criticism in this new light, his praise of writers pursued by ill-luck, left maimed or bedridden by the War …
Yeats sensed a touch of coldness in Pound’s generosity. The gift does not move out of simple compassion here, but out of a desire of some oppressed part of the soul to come to power. And Yeats would untangle these threads, for charity will not survive when the good politician sells it for power. Power and generosity can sometimes live side by side, but that harmony is a delicate balance, a rare resolution. In politics—and Yeats wants to mark this in Pound as well—affection and generosity usually lose their autonomy and become the servants of power.
In Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine reflects on power and poets, thinking of the American attitude toward its self-destructive artists. He lists our dead—Edgar Allen Poe, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman—and comments:
This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet’s testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.”
The paragraph confuses two sorts of power. The “power” that draws the trees toward song is not the “power” that sends men to the moon, any more than the “energy” in Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight” is the same as the one in “the energy crisis.” But, of course, this is the confusion of the age. We wake up to it every morning. It is a modern drama in which a man of frustrated compassion begins to trade his compassion for power. Yeats sensed in Pound’s politics the same tension we addressed in the poetry: a will to power born of a frustrated compassion begins to acquire a life of its own and live apart from that compassion.
And so we come to Mussolini. There is an oft-quoted letter of Pound’s to Harriet Monroe, oft-quoted because it is one of the first times that Pound mentions his Italian hero: “I personally think extremely well of Mussolini. If one compares him to American presidents (the last three) or British premiers, etc., in fact one CAN NOT without insulting him. If the intelligentsia don’t think well of him, it is because they know nothing about ‘the state,’ and government, and have no particularly large sense of values.” The context of Pound’s remarks is not usually noted: most of the letter is addressed to the problem of artists being unable to earn a living. Monroe had asked Pound to consider a lecture tour in the States and he asked if it might pay enough to free him to work: “If I blow all that energy, I have got to have a few years free from WORRY AFTER it. Poverty here is decent and honourable. In America it lays one open to continuous insult on all sides …” Later: “You might devote a special number, poesy contest for best