Renegade as a Young Man

PATRIA MIA -- A DISCUSSION OF THE ARTS, THEIR USE AND FUTURE IN AMERICA (97 pp.)--Ezra Pound--Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Chicago ($2.75).

On the edge of World War I, Idaho-born Expatriate Ezra Loomis Pound, whose tentative growls had already made him one of the more notable young lions in the literary jungles of London and Paris, sent a manuscript to a Chicago publisher. In the somewhat hectic conditions prevailing for small, avant-garde publishing firms, the manuscript was lost. Not until this year was Ezra Pound's essay Patria Mia accidentally recovered--in a dusty package which had been supposed to contain only old bills. Thirty-seven years behind schedule, the publisher dutifully sent the work to the printers.

American criticism would have suffered no major loss if this essay had forever remained in limbo, but Patria Mia does provide, along with a lot of Pound-foolishness, a cupful of penny-wiseness, winning freshness, a few flashes of brilliance, and some early glimpses of a talented, disorderly mind that was to approach genius before it sank into insanity.

Whitman Abroad. Patria Mia does not sound as if it had been written, but as if it had been talked--between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m.. in a Bloomsbury attic. As with most such nocturnal monologues, which always seem dazzling in the dark, a lot of Pound's dicta could not survive the dawn; but some would stand up at high noon, e.g., his tribute to Walt Whitman: "One may not need him at home. It is in the air, this tonic of his. But if one is abroad; if one is ever likely to forget one's birthright, to lose faith, being surrounded by disparagers, one can find, in Whitman, the reassurance. Whitman goes bail for the nation."

Much of Patria Mia has the unexpected charm of a period piece, because in it the 28-year-old Pound (frequently sounding more like 18) tilts at dragons long since slain and forgotten. At the time of his writing (1913), Pound averred, there was not an artist worth a damn at work in America. "Any pleasant thing in symmetrical trousers" passed for poetry; American literature was pervaded by "magazitis," i.e., the dry rot of the high-toned magazines. Sneered Pound: "It is well known that in the year of grace 1870, Jehovah appeared to Messrs. Harper and Co. and to the editors of The Century, The Atlantic, and certain others, and spake thus: 'The style of 1870 is the final and divine revelation. Keep things always just as they are . . .' "

But Pound's essay is more than the customary diatribe by a self-exiled literary rebel against America's cultural bourgeoisie. Years before he turned renegade to his nation to back Fascism, Pound had a profound sense of America's vigor and promise. He could sound paternally tender of its youth ("America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation . . .") and he could grow lyrical, in his strangely dissonant way, over a New York crowd--"a crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigor unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at. There is none of the melancholy, the sullenness, the unhealth of the London mass, none of the worn vivacity of Paris."

Arts in Zammbuclc. Defiantly, Pound prophesied that from America's literary dark ages a great renaissance would be born. Unfortunately, his plans for helping along that renaissance are reminiscent of his later harebrained schemes for the world's monetary salvation. Artists in America should be crowded into great academies and subsidized, thought Pound, preferably by millionaires. His ideal of the subsidized artist is best expressed in his anecdote about the Sultan of Zammbuck who, during a British state dinner, was once asked about the state of the arts back in Zammbuck.

"The arts! The arts have gone to pot," replied the Sultan cheerfully. Once his people found a man who could carve well, he went on, they would chain him and give him all the food, drink, women and tools his heart desired, and after some drinking and some lovemaking he would create masterpieces. But then the misguided British stopped the custom. They said it was slavery. "If any great city in America could tether a hundred young artists, chosen for their inventive faculties," concluded Pound, "that city would within two decades become the center of occidental art."

The reader of Patria Mia will regretfully conclude that someone should have tethered Ezra Pound in time, before, like the arts of Zammbuck, he went to pot.

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