Poet in Fancy Dress

As it happens, the first biography of Ezra Pound (Ezra Pound, by Charles Norman, Macmillan, $6.95) comes not from the lime-kilns of Academe at all, but from the quarter where Sunday supplements are incubated. Mr. Norman is no scholar, though he has a scholar’s antennae for the opinions of right-thinking people. He does not even really dislike his subject; has no desire to suggest that once we have mastered the contours of the life our interest in the work will be slaked; quotes, in fact, and generously, not always with the ghost of an idea of what he is quoting. (On page 19 an excerpt from Canto XXII is made to document the date and place of Pound’s attendance at a trial which took place, if at all, six centuries before he was born: the account in the Canto not being drawn from the life but paraphrased from a fourteenth-century novella of Franco Sacchetti’s.)

He has been industrious, but not to the point of exhaustion; though his publisher’s claim that he “has been in touch with every living person who knew Pound or knew anything about him” is simply untrue, he has tracked down the recollections of surviving schoolfellows (“lone wolf,” recalled one; “quite a chess-player,” said another) and long-ago protégés (“. . . the cat-like cries too,” one of them recalled, “and the elegant black stick and somewhat voluminous overcoat, flying hair . . .”). Whole pages dance with sartorial detail: an omelette-yellow dressing-gown, a fawn-colored dressing-gown, a green robe, a green coat with square blue buttons; even details of the costume George Antheil wore to Stravinsky’s Les Noces in Paris, June 13, 1923, not omitting the name of the tailor. Nor do we look in vain for Amy Lowell’s cigar, or “her innumerable trunks and boxes,” nor for the worth of the wooden chair in Gaudier-Brzeska’s studio (one shilling). With sporadic lavishness, in fact, everything is documented except those movements of Pound’s mind that are of permanent moment.

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Hugh Kenner

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As it happens, the first biography of Ezra Pound (Ezra Pound, by Charles Norman, Macmillan, $6.95) comes not from the lime-kilns of Academe at all, but from the quarter where Sunday supplements are incubated. Mr. Norman is no scholar, though he has a scholar’s antennae for the opinions of right-thinking people. He does not even really dislike his subject; has no desire to suggest that once we have mastered the contours of the life our interest in the work will be slaked; quotes, in fact, and generously, not always with the ghost of an idea of what he is quoting. (On page 19 an excerpt from Canto XXII is made to document the date and place of Pound’s attendance at a trial which took place, if at all, six centuries before he was born: the account in the Canto not being drawn from the life but paraphrased from a fourteenth-century novella of Franco Sacchetti’s.)

He has been industrious, but not to the point of exhaustion; though his publisher’s claim that he “has been in touch with every living person who knew Pound or knew anything about him” is simply untrue, he has tracked down the recollections of surviving schoolfellows (“lone wolf,” recalled one; “quite a chess-player,” said another) and long-ago protégés (“. . . the cat-like cries too,” one of them recalled, “and the elegant black stick and somewhat voluminous overcoat, flying hair . . .”). Whole pages dance with sartorial detail: an omelette-yellow dressing-gown, a fawn-colored dressing-gown, a green robe, a green coat with square blue buttons; even details of the costume George Antheil wore to Stravinsky’s Les Noces in Paris, June 13, 1923, not omitting the name of the tailor. Nor do we look in vain for Amy Lowell’s cigar, or “her innumerable trunks and boxes,” nor for the worth of the wooden chair in Gaudier-Brzeska’s studio (one shilling). With sporadic lavishness, in fact, everything is documented except those movements of Pound’s mind that are of permanent moment.