Irritating, captivating, quirky Pound

I: The Young Genius 1885-1920

By A. David Moody

Oxford. 507 pp. $47.95

Reviewed by Mary Dixie Carter

Ezra Pound wore a turquoise earring, ate tulips from the centerpiece at dinner, and sometimes broke the legs of chairs because he could not sit still. He literally kept shoes on James Joyce's feet and funded T.S. Eliot when he himself was broke. Then he turned into a fascist who signed his letters "Heil Hitler," was charged with treason by the U.S. government, and landed in a Washington mental hospital for 12 years. W.B. Yeats called him a "solitary volcano," the man who revolutionized English poetry.

In the first of a two-volume biography, A. David Moody brings Pound's early years into focus (1885-1920), emphasizing his poetry more than previous biographies. Ezra Loomis Weston Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, and raised in Philadelphia. At 15, he informed his parents that he would "know more about poetry than any man living" before he turned 30.

At the University of Pennsylvania, he happily ignored any requirements if they did not fall into his self-devised curriculum of comparative literature. Among other things, Pound intended to find out "what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost by translation, and . . . what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated." William Carlos Williams, his classmate and friend, had to acknowledge Pound's "conceits and affectation." As he wrote to his mother, "he delights in making himself exactly what he is not: a laughing boor."

Later, in 1907, when he was trapped teaching languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., Pound took comfort in the example of James Whistler, the American painter, who transcended his unfortunate birthplace and escaped mediocrity. Whistler moved to Europe at 21. Pound moved at 23. Only in London could he practice poetry. "It was there he hoped to find a publisher and to find Yeats," writes Moody. Once he arrived, however, he saw what Americans had that the British lacked - that "raw spirit of America's self-creation." He considered it his duty to challenge the literary establishment and, as he put it, "shake off the lethargy of this our time." As the driving force behind the modernist movement, he would do just that.

Pound worked hard to insinuate himself into certain circles (specifically any that included his hero Yeats), but he irritated his English hosts, who saw him as "egregiously American," in Moody's words, and oblivious to social cues. He would neglect to put his jacket on in the drawing room after tennis, or would aggressively dominate the conversation. "He read his lyric poems rather loudly and in a Philadelphia accent," writes Moody, "which sounded barbarously of the Wild West in their English ears."

Irritating he may have been, but also captivating, at least in the picture that his mentor, Ford Madox Hueffer, paints: "Ezra . . . would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."

Hueffer played a major role in helping Pound move his writing from the elevated language of verse to a more natural voice, the "living tongue," as Hueffer put it. At one point, Pound's stilted language prompted Hueffer to fall down and roll around on the ground, mocking him into submission. Moody shows a masterful command of Pound's work and its progression, from

A Lume Spento

in 1908 to "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" in 1920, but his detailed analysis slows narrative momentum, especially in the earlier chapters.

For all Pound's pomposity, his investment in his own work was dwarfed by the amount of time, energy and resources he committed to his friends (without any compensation), especially Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. "He drove himself hard to ensure that those three were kept in funds," writes Moody, "and that their work got written, published and noticed." Without Pound as "impresario, publicist, patron finder, agent, editor and universal sponsor," masterpieces such as

Ulysses

and "The Waste Land" might not exist.

But his friends did not return the favor. Pound was living frugally and directing his patrons' money away from himself toward his modernist compatriots. Joyce accepted the cash, but used it to keep up his expensive lifestyle, including cafes and swanky accommodations. Meanwhile, T.S. Eliot would sneer at Pound behind his back. Pound's generosity seems to have bordered on the self-destructive, perhaps an indication of mental instability foreshadowing the dangerous fanaticism to come.

In writing this biography, Moody relied only on documents, refrained from speculation, and ignored hearsay, as he explains in his preface. Overall, he treats his subject and the facts with great respect and precision, at the expense, sometimes, of the narrative's urgency. He does not impose an emotional through-line that might require more deduction. But his mastery of his subject is impressive, and Pound's life story does not fail to fascinate.