Finding a Form (22 page)

The second footnote occurs 100 pages later, near the end of this volume, and it concerns that one “particular fact” that Wittgenstein could not get over. To the suggestion, offered by another writer, that the philosopher was experiencing guilt about his homosexual
encounters, McGuinness does everything for his subject but take the Fifth. “I have not paid much attention to this hypothesis,” he says:

It is, however, the only hypothesis that makes sense. Instead of the offending proposal, McGuinness would have us accept hopeless simplicities instead: that Wittgenstein was tempted to suicide by the example of his brothers; that he felt he was not perfect; that he was in despair over the human condition; and that he was principally kept from the deed by the offense he knew it would give to his faith—factors that may have been important, certainly, and even sufficient, if we knew what they meant. McGuinness may have had frank discussions with Wittgenstein’s friends, but he has not had one with us. We have no other choice but to imagine a man driven along the edge of life by sexual shame and unspeakable guilt, half hoping for the excuse (that combination of cowardice and courage) that would take him over the edge—out of grief into expiation.

Some of McGuinness’s shortcomings as a biographer can be attributed to inexperience and a lack of literary skill. He often cannot make up his mind what to include, what to leave out, what quietly to decide, what openly to debate. There are indications that he has postponed—for a second volume—divulging certain information that we may badly need now. Although the Russell material is wonderful, he can’t do much more than hand it to us. In any case, he is unable to revivify a scene or create any kind of narrative sweep, nor does he weave thought-lines and life-lines together very well (it is admittedly difficult); and he seems happy to refuse every opportunity to conjecture. His discussion of the
Tractatus
(as well as a number of other technical points) is not
nearly careful enough to interest a professional and will be wholly confusing to an interested layman.

Furthermore, McGuinness’s coyness concerning the sexual life of his subject leaves the reader wondering whether he has given no account of such a life because Wittgenstein didn’t have one, or because evidence is massively absent, or because the facts are being suppressed in order to protect the philosopher’s “good name,” as well as the good name of unnamed others. Since McGuinness gives us no help with these conjectures, except by his silence to encourage them, the reader loses confidence in his guide and, in addition, begins to suspect the sources he cites, since Wittgenstein’s followers (as I’ve already suggested) have frequently been jealous about the ownership of ideas, and overly imitative and protective of their teacher, even to the point of aping his stammer, his gestures of intellectual effort, his expressions of despair, and pretending to his impatience, aspiring to his arrogance. It is not just one disciple who betrays the master. All of them do. And the master who encourages sycophants begins the sellout by betraying himself.

There are a few vocations (like the practice of poetry or the profession of philosophy) that are so uncalled for by the world, so unremunerative by any ordinary standards, so inherently difficult, so undefined, that to choose them suggests that more lies behind the choice than a little encouraging talent and a few romantic ideals. To persevere in such a severe and unrewarding course requires the mobilization of the entire personality—each weakness as well as every strength, each quirk as well as every normality. For any one of the reasons that a philosopher offers to support the principle he has taken in to feed and fatten, there will be in action alongside it, sometimes in the shade of the great notion itself, coarse and brutal causes in frequently stunning numbers, causes with a notable lack of altruism and nobility, causes with shameful aims and antecedents. This has to be understood and accepted. Valéry’s belief that every philosophy is an important piece of its author’s autobiography need not be rejected as reductive; for whatever
the subliminal causes and their kind are like, the principle put forth must stand and defend itself like a tree against the wind; it must make its own way out into who knows what other fields of intelligence, to fall or flourish there.

The psychological space between a work of intellectual will like the
Tractatus Logico-philosophicus
and the energies and organs supporting it, between the fears and foolishness and childish avowals of the unsophisticated self and the forms of its sophistication: these are far from thoroughly explored or understood. It seemed to me there was a chance, in McGuinness’s book, to shorten some of that distance. But the steps taken have been tentative, as if the full truth about the breath within the trumpet might sour the tones the trumpet told, as if against the force of Wittgenstein’s uncompromising search for form there was still some strength for shame.

I
t is too easy—the name game—in this case.

Christened “Pound, Ezra Loomis.” If used as a verb, “pound” means to beat. If used as a noun, “pound” signifies a unit of weight, a measure of money, pressure of air, or physical force. From time to time, apropos poetry, Pound wondered which should be sovereign, the verb or the noun, and concluded, if his practice may be entered as evidence, that the verb was most noticed when knocked off the sentence like a phallus from a kouros—“Spiretop alevel the well curb”—and when effects were hammered back into their causes with naillike hyphens—“Seal sport in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash”—hence into a compaction like a headache … splitting.

As location, a pound sequesters sick animals and strays. “Places of confinement for lawbreakers” is the definition that immediately precedes Pound’s name in
The American Heritage Dictionary
, after which we encounter the listing for “pound of flesh” and read of “a debt harshly insisted upon.” Certainly a pound is a large bite by any standard, yet it resembles, in being Shylock’s payment, the
neschek
of the Jews: money for the rent of money; not a gnaw, but, in the way it feels coming due, not a nibble either. It is a tax on use, this thinning of the dime, as if money would otherwise be free of entropy; although to put the bite on someone has come to mean to beg for a loan, possibly as a return of favor, where the request is clearly not intended to invite the interest of the loan’s own teeth.
So one meaning of “pound” has a relative called “blood money.” It suggests racial forfeiture.

On the other hand, the pound of flesh we subtract from the flank of a steer may increase our girth and relieve many a primordial anxiety. We call it “putting our money to work.” Wear and repair, profit or loss, depends upon your point of view, the angle of the bank and the direction of the bounce. Our poet depended without protest, for much of his life, upon funds supplied by the family of his wife.

Ezra Loomis Pound was born in a tidy white frame house in Hailey, Idaho. Hailey was like the little mining town of song and soapy story, salooned among mountain-sized stones; yet when Ezra’s father moved back to Philadelphia, it was to work at the United States Mint, unintentionally obedient to the resonances of his name. Consequently, Pound was Amurrican right down to the potato, right down to the silver and gold in them thar hills, or, as we complained of it during the Depression, to the paper in them thar bills.

Pound had a Homer for a father, and, following his Pre-Raphaelite devotion to whatever was medieval, an almost German love for the Greeks. Appropriate to this passion was his grandmother’s maiden name, Loomis. Penelope wove and unwove and rewove on one to put off her suitors, but the return of her hero was also artfully, persistently postponed, since he was usually stranded somewhere, an exile—as the poet would say—enisled.

Then there was his allegedly Egyptian initial syllable,
Ez
, which he said meant “rising,” so that it could be followed by
ra
, which, of course, stood for the sun. His parents pronounced that ending, wrongly, “ray,” but got the part about getting up in the morning right. It was a version he preferred for a long time. Everybody else’s “Ezra” was Hebrew, a prophet’s name meaning “help” and designating a scribe of the Law of the Lord. The Biblical Ezra believed in racial purity too, and castigated the Israelites for spilling their holy seed among strangers—taking strange wives and adopting their ways. Pound’s alternative reading, “Rising Sun,” aside
from the pun on his aspirations, sounded Sioux or Cheyenne rather than Egyptian. In the end, he settled for a folkmarked “Ole Ez,” a designation backwoodsy, cracker-barrel, and American, clean through from clown to crank, and admirably suited to the village explainer he had become. Suffering a village explainer, Gertrude Stein said, was all right if you were a village, but if not … not.

On the way to that comfortable “old shoe” locution, Pound enjoyed learning that the phonetic translation of his name into Japanese would yield a joke: “This picture of a phallus costs ten yen”; as well as the fact that James Joyce had instructed his children, because of Ezra’s kind monetary assistance, to address him as “Signore Sterlina.” He invented Aesopian names for T. S. Eliot and himself. He was Brer Rabbit while Eliot was Possum, both down-South aka’s, and as quaint as a picture postcard of St. Louis. He spent some time as E.P.—a memo signer’s initial—and concealed himself behind various noms de plume like someone playing peekaboo: he translated a French thriller while pretending to be Hiram Janus (a two-faced American hick, we must presume), and signed the art and music reviews he wrote for
New Age
with the names B. H. Dias and William Atheling; whereas he was simply T.J.V. when he covered drama for
Atheneum
and Marius David Adkins on the day he was fired from a similar post at
Outlook
. It was not for shame he hid himself, because he padded his slender study of George Antheil’s nearly nonexistent theory of harmony with old performance notices. As Alfred Venison he wrote terrible parodies of Tennyson. Pound also recognized the cute connection of his name with Robert Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra even before Conrad Aiken began calling him that. These nicks, dimins, and anons were but a few of his personae, since he sometimes summoned the spirits of Andreas Divus, Sextus Propertius, Bertrans de Born, Arnaut Daniel, François Villon, Guido Cavalcanti, and others, including the tortured soul of the poet Ri Haku (whom misconception created when Ole Ez read the Chinese ideograms for Li Po as if they were Japanese), in each case in order to seize them for his muse.

He also liked to press his name into words like “EZthority,” “EZucation,” and “EZuversity,” as if they were slabs of fresh cement (and in a manner now associated with the fast-food chain—“eggs McMuffin”), just as he constantly jostled the language and upset its spelling, not quite concealing his resentments and animosities behind the jocular.

Pound realized that some people thought he resembled The Savior, an appearance he did not neglect to cultivate; nevertheless, he worried more than a little about his Semitic look and claimed, concerning his given name, that “the goddam yitts pinched it as they did everything else.” Of course, it was the Quakers who pinched it (if pinching, here, is possible), and his father who attached it to a family name as plain and workmanlike and literal as Smith, Carpenter, or Wright.

What’s in a name? Pound would distort the names of people he came, for whatever reason, to dislike—thus Lincoln Kirstein was dubbed “Stinkum Cherrystein,” and the radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, called “Kaltenstein”; “-stein” was apparently his all-purpose Jewish suffix. Gertrude Stein felt that people grew to resemble the name they had been given, as if it contained an important element of their fate. In the case of Ezra Pound, whose self was so problematic, around his first name there remained an uneasy aura, while his last had a weight too relevant to his obsession.

Ezra, whose person was mostly putty and pretense and whose home address was next door to Nowhere, invented a rude and outrageous “poetic” self to perform its dance in public. Behind an American air of confidence and bumptious arrogance, he concealed uncertainties, shyness, innocence, naiveté—American as well, Yankee as all git. He also hid his massive ignorance of nearly everything, including literature, behind a few out-of-focus facts and generally impertinent judgments, becoming, in this way, a person of opinions: views he then watched at work as children watch an ant farm. He used his undoubted generosity to insinuate himself into other people’s lives, appropriating, if not their efforts,
at least their reputations, to himself. He behaved a lot like a manager of prizefighters who has a stable of stiffs, one of whom he might send out against the opposition at selected times, and whose failures he would excuse and defend as energetically as he would crow over their occasional success. He created movements, galloped to the sound of every trumpet, railed and hectored, bullied and petted, aided and pressured, handing out advice as if it were alms; and while in the business of doing the Lord’s work and waging the good fight, actually did win some big ones, really did assist some important writers at critical times (most particularly Eliot and Joyce), and did improve the state of poetry (although, listening to the pipsqueaking that passes for poetry these days, his improvements were not to be prolonged).

Pound was a pirate, and plundered selected texts as if they were captured ships. He embraced principles he rarely if ever practiced (like the vague admonishments of “Imagism”), maneuvered both behind the scenes and in front of the lights, always in support of “modernism,” a movement in his own case oddly made of pagan materials, medieval mannerisms, and Swinburnean swan song.

Between them,