Ezra Pound’s Cantos De Luxe Preamble

Pound is still thinking about the early years of America as an independent country. The primary figure here is John Adams, which is an interesting choice because, let’s face it,  before McCullough produced that door stopper of a biography, no one gave a s–t about Adams (caveat: I have read that door stopper, a signed copy no less, and it’s a good book, but I’m not going to tell you that Adams was as important as all that, except for the basic fact of having been only our second president).

An interesting little tidbit – five pages into this Canto, Pound uses ‘@’ in place of ‘at’ in a sentence:

Mazzei:  little hope of success  @  so low an interest

While there is little else of interest, I always perk up at mentions of early coffeehouses:

Affaires  (Xmas day, Amsterdam)  still suspended
but stockjobbing goes on uninterruptedly
                   at coffee houses on Sundays and holidays
                   when it cannot be held upon  ‘change

As a simply historical fact, the first modern marker for stock trading (or stockjobbing, as it was, indeed, called) did truly begin in a coffeehouse.

Christopher Hitchens on Auden.

Though I shuddered to read him call Pound’s writings as ‘the sinister gibberish on the page.’

This another Canto taking place in either the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. I would hazard to say it is the eighteenth century.

I say this because if there is one thing Pound does well is capturing the style of that period. If you have done any reading of English letters from the seventeenth through the end of the eighteenth century, you’d see a unique style. Things like writings of Samuels Pepys and Johnson or of Lawrence Sterne’s comic masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The French have a wonderful term for the sort of shapeshifting, genre-less writings of the period: belles letres.

In terms of contemporaries, I think of the scene in Ulysses (the Scylla and Charybdis episode, I believe) when Stephen is drinking with the medical students and entire chapter progresses, stylistically, through the history of English literature, from the Anglo-Saxon through Middle English through Shakespeare through Dickens…

That same commitment to capturing the particular voice of periods in literature is something that Pound clearly shares.

Whereon said Lord Coke, speaking of Empson and Dudley,
the end of these two oppressors
shd/ deter others from committing the like
that they bring not in absolute and partial trials by direction
…by every legal measure, sirs, we recommend you…

At seventeen pages, this is a doozy.

It’s about the American Revolutionary War. Sort of.

This being Pound, it’s also about finance. But less banking than international trade. And international relations. But mainly as they relate to trade.

And mainly trade by sea.

Pound engages in one of his strategies of listmaking, as of lists that might be compiled by ‘characters’ in his Cantos, often written in a sort of short hand.

Benjamin Franklin appears prominently, but I think this has more to do with the prominence of France (Franklin having been ambassador to France on behalf of the Continental Congress) than of a particular focus on Franklin.

While writing about France, he even manages to toss in some ancient history:

Laws of the Visigoths and Justinian still in use in Galicia

(Yes, I know that Galicia is in Spain, but the references to Spain are made, so to speak, by ‘characters’ in France).

Another lengthy Canto.

This one is about the disputes leading up to the American Revolution, namely the Stamp Act.

He spends a lot of time complaining about taxes and regulations (keeping in mind that “strict regulations” in the eighteenth century allowed for things like slavery).

A reminder that though Pound may be most appreciated these days by liberal lovers of literature, he was, by contemporary standards, very conservative. Sort of a Grover Norquist/Tea Party Republican.

One amusing thing, at least for the modern reader, is Pound’s use of the word “bro” in the very first line of the Canto:

To John’s bro, a sheriff, we lay a kind word in passing

He also inserts himself into the action in an amusing fashion:

Upon which he offered me a retaining fee of one guinea
which I accepted
                   (Re which things was Hutchinson undoubtedly scro-
                                                                 fulous ego scriptor cantilenae
                                                                                                          (Ez. P)

New Directions turned 75 years old last Friday!

In case you don’t know who they are, New Directions are they guys who keep modernist greats like Ezra Pound (including my Cantos), William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore in print.