Biography: On the shelves of Greene's now vanished Dublin book shop, on the first landing, one found dusty copies of the collected poems of the Romantics. I came away with a complete Byron, for my summer holidays among the donkeys of Longford. A complete Shelley, in a red binding, I declaimed to the cattle in Garvaghey. They were even less impressed, and I placed it among Butler's Lives of the Saints, as part of the paraphernalia of a pious household.
They were large, but cheap, especially second hand. Now it is the turn of the poets of the 20th century, Auden and MacNeice, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn: weighty volumes of our almost contemporaries bulk on the shelves. For there is a difference; my copy of the Collected Poemsof Robert Lowell weighs in at 1,186 pages, of which, together with the two biographies so far (Ian Hamilton and Paul L Mariani), plus his collected letters (over 700 pages!), makes for a great deal of shelf space. Are we to become door props, marital missiles or stumbling blocks? Anyone writing on recent writing has to contend with a mountain of modern scholarship: this new biography of Ezra Pound ends with 80 pages of notes, and acknowledgements to the great manuscript collections: the Beinecke at Yale; the Harry Ransom at Austin, Texas; the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, and so on.
All this would have offended my old professor at UCD, who felt an author should be well dead before being exhumed. Is Pound dead enough for objectivity, after the scandal of his involvement with Fascist Italy, and his rabid anti-Semitic wartime broadcasts? Prof Moody clearly thinks objectivity is possible, and begins at the beginning, in an older America. After all, Pound's uncompromising American twang, his own version of Whitman's "barbaric yawp", remained untempered despite all his European sojourns.
WHAT'S IN A name? His father was called Homer Pound, and his son's masterwork, The Cantos, begins with Homeric echoes, "And poor old Homer blind, blind as a bat . . . ". And his first literary memory was "old Spencer . . . who first declaimed me the Odyssey on a tennis court". And as well as being called Pound, his father worked in the mint: does this explain Ezra's obsession with usury?
At his first university, the University of Pennsylvania, he more or less invented a course in comparative literature for himself, without graduating. He also met a first-year medic, called William Carlos Williams, and fell in love with a damsel who would call herself HD. She considered herself a kind of American dryad, going so far as to caper in the woods, which must have appealed to Pound's growing love of both the Greek myths and Provençal poetry.
Unhappy at the University of Pennsylvania, Pound moved to Hamilton, a small college in upstate New York. There he had two splendid teachers, Bill Shepard, a specialist in Provençal, and Ibbotson, an Anglo-Saxon scholar. The foundations of much of his later work, like The Spirit of Romance(1910) and his translation of The Seafarer, were laid there, including "the conception of a long poem in three parts, after Dante's". Impressive for a young man, but then he had written to his parents when still a boy, "I want to write before I die the greatest poems that have ever been written". And Homer, the da, believed in him. (There seems to have been, in rustic though genteel American families of that time, a tendency towards classical or ancient names; a father called after a Grecian bard might have had a heightened awareness of the gift of his son, called after a prophet.)
Meanwhile, after two European tours with his aunt Frank, he began his own European odyssey, but not before a ferocious row with his first university, which kept disdaining him for a doctorate, even for his later work on Cavalcanti(1931). Was this why he turned himself into a One-Man University, a literary didact? Hence, Gertrude Stein's witty remark that he was "a village explainer, which was all right if you were a village".
AFTER PUBLISHING A Lume Spentoin Venice, for which he paid, his first village was literary London, where he tried to establish himself: "I'm a Walt Whitman who has learnt to wear a collar and a dress shirt." His first target was Yeats, whom he managed to meet and befriend through Olivia Shakespear's evenings. But he also antagonised a great many resident Georgian bards, challenging Lascelles Abercrombie to a duel, to which the latter pithily replied that they should pelt each other with their unsold books. The antipathy he aroused can be judged by the change of heart of the relatively gentle Edward Thomas, who began by greeting the early work of Pound and then turned viciously against him. When Robert Frost came over a few years later, he was more tactful, modestly allowing himself to be discovered, unlike the hectoring, lecturing Pound.
Was he lonely in his London exile? Rumours still abound that Pound was a lively lad, and Francis Stuart records his shock at being told by his bride, Iseult Gonne, that she had been deflowered by Uncle Ezra. (But Prof Moody describes Stuart as "notoriously untrustworthy".) Iseult was the daughter of Maud Gonne, while Dorothy, Pound's wife-to-be, was the daughter of Yeats's mistress, Olivia Shakespear, a typical bohemian tangle of that time. Yet despite the prevailing belief that bohemia was a place of abandon and excess, Olivia kept a tight rein on her daughter, and sex, in general, seems to have been extremely fraught, especially for the women. Dorothy Pound is described as "a beautiful picture that never came alive" and Pound is credited with the remark that "there are things more important than sex", perhaps because he was addicted to the idealisations of Provençal poetry. However, in a photograph here, Pound looks positively devilish, as if he could eat her, at her request. The most generous comment was that of Yeats, who said that Pound had married "a beautiful and clever wife, and that is what few men get".
A PROBLEM THAT Prof Moody has is that the early work of Pound is no longer widely read. So as the volumes appear, he feels obliged to give us helpful critical summaries, which delay the narrative, part of the problem in a book that becomes part biography and part exegesis. But with his lovely little versions of Li Po in Cathayand his Noh Plays(which influenced Yeats), Pound was bringing another strand of world literature into English, and I was delighted to read that Arthur Waley, oriental expert from the British Museum and leading translator of Chinese poetry, was greatly impressed: " . . . what said about poetry and this business of making poetry is much the best that I've ever heard . . . ".
Surprisingly, "Ezra" in Hebrew means "help" and it must be said that Pound was one of the most generous presences in modern literature. If he liked your work he would do nearly anything for you, including giving up some of his own hard-earned freelance money. Joyce might not have made it into print without his advocacy (he even wore Pound's clothes for a while) and Pound discovered and promoted Eliot. But while he was a great talent scout, was he able to "make it new" himself?
In a way, this first half of a biography of Ezra Pound, like the first volume of Roy Foster's biography of Yeats, reads like a prelude to the main drama. Already, at the end of this book, you can hear the first drumbeats of obsession, as Pound's attitudes begin to harden. He has met Major CH Douglas, for instance, and become enamoured of his Social Credit theories, money being the root of all evil. Indeed, Pound tried to persuade Arthur Griffith "to take up Douglas's theories in the new Irish Free State", before Griffith declared "But I can't move 'em with a cold thing like economics".
He had also shaken the dust of England off his feet, asserting that "British official poetry of the past 15 years has been born dead". But then a review in the Observerhad concluded that "Mr Pound is not, never has been, and almost, I might hazard, never will be, a poet". And John Gould Fletcher, a former Imagist, said: "He can only get life out of books." Pound's invective in the Cantos is especially vitriolic when it comes to England: " . . . greasy as sky over Westminster, / the invisible, many English,/the place lacking in interest/last squalor, utter decrepitude . . . ".
The early Cantospuzzled readers, a patchwork of gists and piths, images from a lifetime's reading. But there was no mistaking the Homeric music: "And then went down to the ship,/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea . . . ". Are the Cantosa glorious adventure, or a grandiose shipwreck like The Faerie Queene? And was Pound indeed "A man of no fortune, and with a name to come"? We await the second volume with some perturbation.
Poet John Montague's second memoir, The Pear Is Ripe, was published recently by Liberties Press
Ezra Pound: Poet A Portrait of the Man and his Work Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 By A David Moody Oxford University Press, 507pp. £25