The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham Read Free Book Online Page B

while Yeats, twenty years his senior, would slash the air with his foil. They met in London in 1909, shortly after Pound published his first collection of poetry. A glowing review appeared in London’s
Evening Standard
: “Wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original imaginative, passionate, and spiritual. Those who do not consider it crazy may well consider it inspired . . . words are no good describing it.” Pound had written the review himself.
    Pound began attending Yeats’s Monday dinner gatherings in London. He dashed about with his wild mane of hair, flung himself into fragile chairs, and leaned back in luxuriant repose. His black velvet jacket and facial hair—a long mustache and a tuft on his chin trimmed to a point—were part of his poetic regalia. His flowing capes, open-necked shirts and billiard-green felt trousers rankled London’s staid sensibilities. At one of Yeats’s gatherings, Pound began plucking the petals off the red tulips on the table and, one by one, he ate them. When the conversation paused, Pound asked, “Would anyone mind having the roof taken off the house?” At which point he stood up and began reading one of his poems in his unabashed American accent.
    Yeats needed a secretary for the winter of 1913–14 so he could focus on his work. He wasn’t sure Pound’s nervous energy made him suitable for the job, but Pound admired Yeats, and Yeats, at the time, needed the admiration. He had written virtually no poetry in the seven years before he met Pound, and he was still fighting rumors that his career was waning. But the winter retreat deepened Yeats’s concentration. After breakfast, Pound could hear him through the chimney humming and chanting his poetry. Yeats would write while Pound read Confucius and translated Japanese Noh plays. When the afternoon weather was good enough to put away the foils, they took long walks or drank cider at a nearby inn. In the evening, Pound would read to Yeats from Wordsworth, Rosicrucian philosophy and
The
History of Magic
before talking late into the night.
    Ezra Pound was a brilliant editor, a good essayist and a mediocre poet, which is to say he’s famous for all the wrong reasons. He thought good poetry was economical. Adjectives, for example, often obscured the object they tried to describe. He once wrote to another poet in exasperation, “Have you ever let a noun out unchaperoned???” When Pound edited one of Yeats’s poems, he cut the first seventeen lines down to seven and whittled the last fifteen to eight, slashing every unnecessary word he could find and getting rid of abstractions that he blamed on Yeats’s admiration for Milton. Pound had no patience for grand gestures to emotion. He wanted poems to treat objects directly—poetic emotions emerged from things.
    This hardnosed turn from the ornamental and symbolic toward directness and geometric austerity—a precision suitable to the machine age—was happening in various artistic circles. Painters rediscovered hardness through cubism, and Pound drew inspiration from the stark lines of London artists like Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. When Yeats met Pound, Yeats was already abandoning escapist lyrics for poetry with “more salt,” as he put it. Mythical themes paled against dire news. “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” Yeats wrote in his poem “September 1913”—he was no longer, as Joyce had said, pandering to the Irish public.
    For Pound, the hardness of art was something empirical. A good poem was not a matter of taste. It was either right or wrong, like mathematics or chemistry. “Bad art is inaccurate art,” he declared. To rail against adjectives was to defend the truth, though it was far easier for Pound to edit the truth than to render it. One day he stepped onto the platform of a Paris metro station, and in the bustle of people he caught a glimpse of a transcendent face. As he turned to follow it, he saw another, and then