An Anachronism at Chinon

Ezra Pound

Behind them rose the hill with its grey octagonal castle, to the west a street with good houses, gardens occasionally enclosed and well to do, before them the slightly crooked lane, old worm-eaten fronts low and uneven, booths with their glass front-frames open, slid aside or hung back, the flaccid bottle-green of the panes reflecting odd lights from the provender and cheap crockery; a few peasant women with baskets of eggs and of fowls, while just before them an old peasant with one hen in his basket alternately stroked its head and then smacked it to make it go down under the strings.

The couple leaned upon one of the tin tables in the moderately clear space by the inn, the elder, grey, with thick hair, square of forehead, square bearded, yet with a face showing curiously long and oval in spite of this quadrature; in the eyes a sort of friendly, companionable melancholy, now intent, now with a certain blankness, like that of a child cruelly interrupted, or of an old man, surprised and self-conscious in some act too young for his years, the head from the neck to the crown in almost brutal contrast with the girth and great belly: the head of Don Quixote, and the corpus of Sancho Panza, animality mounting into the lines of the throat and lending energy to the intellect.

His companion obviously an American student.

Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting yet, since you are here at all, you must have changed many opinions.

The Elder: Some. Which do you mean?

Student: Since you are here, personal and persisting?

Rabelais: All that I believed or believe you will find in De Senectute: “... that being so active, so swift in thought; that treasures up in memory such multitudes and varieties of things past, and comes likewise upon new things ... can be of no mortal nature.”

Student: And yet I do not quite understand. Your outline is not always distinct. Your voice however is deep, clear and not squeaky.

Rabelais: I was more interested in words than in my exterior aspect, I am therefore vocal rather than spatial.

Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting, yet I confess I can scarcely read you. I admire and close the book, as not infrequently happens with “classics.”

Rabelais: I am the last person to censure you, and your admiration is perhaps due to a fault in your taste. I should have paid more heed to DeBellay, young Joachim.

Student: You do not find him a prig?

Rabelais: I find no man a prig who takes serious thought for the language.

Student: And your own? Even Voltaire called it an amassment of ordure.

Rabelais: And later changed his opinion.

Student: Others have blamed your age, saying you had to half-bury your wisdom in filth to make it acceptable.

Rabelais: And you would put this blame on my age? And take the full blame for your writing?

Student: My writing?

Rabelais: Yes, a quatrain, without which I should scarcely have come here.

(pardon me for intruding my own name at this point, but even Dante has done the like, with a remark that he found it unfitting)—to proceed then:

Student: My license in those lines is exceptional.

Rabelais: And you have written on journalists, or rather an imaginary plaint of the journalists: Where s......, s.... and p..... on jews conspire, and editorial maggots .... about, we gather .... smeared bread, or drive a snout still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire.

Really I can not continue, no printer would pass it.

Student: Quite out of my usual ......

Rabelais: There is still another on publishers, or rather on la vie litteraire, a sestina almost wholly in asterisks, and a short strophe on the American president.

Student: Can you blame ...

Rabelais: I am scarcely ....... eh.....

Student: Beside, these are but a few scattered outbursts, you kept up your flow through whole volumes.

Rabelais: You have spent six years in your college and university, and a few more in struggles with editors; I had had thirty years in that sink of a cloister, is it likely that your disgusts would need such voluminous purging? Consider, when I was nine years of age they put me in that louse-breeding abomination. I was forty before I broke loose.

Student: Why at that particular moment?

Rabelais: They had taken away my books. Brother Amy got hold of a Virgil. We opened it, sortes, the first line:

We read that line and departed. You may thank God your age is different. You may thank God your life has been different. Thirty years mewed up with monks! After that can you blame me my style? Have you any accurate gauge of stupidities?

Student: I have, as you admit, passed some years in my university. I have seen some opposition to learning.

Rabelais: No one in your day has sworn to annihilate the cult of greek letters; they have not separated you from your books; they have not rung bells expressly to keep you from reading.

Student: Bells! later. There is a pasty-faced vicar in Kensington who had his dam’d bells rung over my head for four consecutive winters, L’Ile Sonnante transferred to the middle of London! They have tried to smother the good ones with bad ones. Books I mean, God knows the chime was a musicless abomination. They have smothered good books with bad ones.

Rabelais: This will never fool a true poet; for the rest, it does not matter whether they drone masses or lectures. They observe their fasts with the intellect. Have they actually sequestered your books?

Student: No. But I have a friend, of your order, a monk. They took away his book for two years. I admit they set him to hearing confessions; to going about in the world. It may have broadened his outlook, or benefited his eyesight. I do not think it wholly irrational, though it must have been extremely annoying.

Rabelais: Where was it?

Student: In Spain.

Rabelais: You are driven south of the Pyrenees to find your confuting example. Would you find the like in this country?

Student: I doubt it. The Orders are banished.

Rabelais: Or in your own?

Student: Never.

Rabelais: And you were enraged with your university?

Student: I thought some of the customs quite stupid.

Rabelais: Can you conceive a life so infernally and abysmally stupid that the air of an university was wine and excitement beside it?

Student: You speak of a time when scholarship was new, when humanism had not given way to philology. We have no one like Henry Stephen, no one comparable to Helia Andrea. The role of your monastery is now assumed by the “institutions of learning,” the spirit of your class-room is found among a few scattered enthusiasts, men half ignorant in the present “scholarly” sense, but alive with the spirit of learning, avid of truth, avid of beauty, avid of strange and out of the way bits of knowledge. Do you like this scrap of Pratinas?

Rabelais (reads)

Student: The movement is interesting. I am “educated,” I am considerably more than a “graduate.” I confess that I can not translate it.

Rabelais: What in God’s name have they taught you?!!

Student: I hope they have taught me nothing. I managed to read many books despite their attempts at suppression, or rather perversion.

Rabelais: I think you speak in a passion; that you magnify petty annoyances. Since then, you have been in the world for some years, you have been able to move at your freedom.

Student: I speak in no passion when I say that the whole aim, or at least the drive, of modern philology is to make a man stupid; to turn his mind from the fire of genius and smother him with things unessential. Germany has so stultified her savants that they have had no present perception, the men who should have perceived were all imbedded in “scholarship.” And as for freedom, no man is free who has not the modicum of an income. If I had but fifty francs weekly....

Rabelais: Weekly? C..... J....!

Student: You forget that the value of money has very considerably altered.

Rabelais: Admitted.

Student: Well?

Rabelais: Well, who has constrained you? The press in your day is free.

Student: C..... J....!

Rabelais: But the press in your day is free.

Student: There is not a book goes to the press in my country, or in England, but a society of ....... in one, or in the other a pie-headed ignorant printer paws over it to decide how much is indecent.

Rabelais: But they print my works in translation.

Student: Your work is a classic. They also print Trimalcio’s Supper, and the tales of Suetonius, and red-headed virgins annotate the writings of Martial, but let a novelist mention a privy, or a poet the rear side of a woman, and the whole town reeks with an uproar. In England a scientific work was recently censored. A great discovery was kept secret three years. For the rest, I do not speak of obscenity. Obscene books are sold in the rubber shops, they are doled out with quack medicines, societies for the Suppression of Vice go into all details, and thereby attain circulation. Masterpieces are decked out with lewd covers to entoil one part of the public, but let an unknown man write clear and clean realism; let a poet use the speech of his predecessors, either being as antiseptic as the instruments of a surgeon, and out of the most debased and ignorant classes they choose him his sieve and his censor.

Rabelais: But surely these things are avoidable?

Student: The popular novelist, the teaser and tickler, casts what they call a veil, or caul, over his language. He pimps with suggestion. The printer sees only one word at a time, and tons of such books are passed yearly, the members of the Royal Automobile Club and of the Isthmian and Fly Fishers are not concerned with the question of morals.

Rabelais: You mistake me, I did not mean this sort of evasion, I did not mean that a man should ruin his writing or join the ranks of procurers.

Student: Well?

Rabelais: Other means. There is what is called private printing.

Student: I have had a printer refuse to print lines “in any form” private or public, perfectly innocent lines, lines refused thus in London, which appeared and caused no blush in Chicago; and vice-versa, lines refused in Chicago and printed by a fat-headed prude—Oh, most fat-headed—in London, a man who will have no ruffling of anyone’s skirts, and who will not let you say that some children do not enjoy the proximity of their parents.

Rabelais: At least you are free from theology.

Student: If you pinch the old whore by the toes you will find a press clique against you; you will come up against “boycott”; people will rush into your publisher’s office with threats. Have you ever heard of “the libraries?”

Rabelais: I have heard the name, but not associated with strange forms of blackmail.

Student: I admit they do not affect serious writers.

Rabelais: But you think your age as stupid as mine.

Student: Humanity is a herd, eaten by perpetual follies. A few in each age escape, the rest remain savages, “That deyed the Arbia crimson.” Were the shores of Gallipoli paler, that showed red to the airmen flying thousands of feet above them?

Rabelais: Airmen. Intercommunication is civilization. Your life is full of convenience.

Student: And men as stupid as ever. We have no one like Henry Stephen. Have you ever read Galdos’ Dona Perfecta? In every country you will find such nests of provincials. Change but a few names and customs. Each Klein-Stadt has its local gods and will kill those who offend them. In one place it is religion, in another some crank theory of hygiene or morals, or even of prudery which takes no moral concern.

Rabelais: Yet all peoples act the same way. The same so-called “vices” are everywhere present, unless your nation has invented some new ones.

Student: Greed and hypocrisy, there is little novelty to be got out of either. At present there is a new tone, a new timbre of lying, a sort of habit, almost a faculty for refraining from connecting words with a fact. An inconception of their interrelations.

Rabelais: Let us keep out of politics.

Student: Damn it, have you ever met presbyterians?

Rabelais: You forget that I lived in the time of John Calvin.

Student: Let us leave this and talk of your books.

Rabelais: My book has the fault of most books, there are too many words in it. I was tainted with monkish habits, with the marasmus of allegory, of putting one thing for another: the clumsiest method of satire. I doubt if any modern will read me.

Student: I knew a man read you for joy of the words, for the opulence of your vocabulary.

Rabelais: Which would do him no good unless he could keep all the words on his tongue. Tell me, can you read them, they are often merely piled up in heaps.

Student: I confess that I can not. I take a page and then stop.

Rabelais: Allegory, all damnable allegory! And can you read Brantôme?

Student: I can read a fair chunk of Brantôme. The repetition is wearing.

Rabelais: And you think your age is as stupid as mine? Even letters are better, a critical sense is developed.

Student: We lack the old vigour.

Rabelais: A phrase you have got from professors! Vigour was not lacking in Stendhal, I doubt if it is lacking in your day. And as for the world being as stupid, are your friends tied to the stake, as was Etienne Dolet, with an “Ave” wrung out of him to get him strangled instead of roasted. Do you have to stand making professions like Budé?!!

Student: What is that?

Rabelais: Some verses of Dolet’s. And are you starved like Desperiers, Bonaventura, and driven to suicide?

Student: The last auto-da-fe was in 1759. The inquisition reestablished in 1824.

Rabelais: Spain again! I was speaking of....

Student: We are not yet out of the wood. There is no end to this warfare. You talk of freedom. Have you heard of the Hammersmith borough council, or the society to suppress all brothels in “Rangoon and other stations in Burmah?” If it is not creed it is morals. Your life and works would not be possible nowadays. To put it mildly, you would be docked your professorship.

Rabelais: I should find other forms of freedom. As for personal morals: There are certain so-called “sins” of which no man ever repented. There are certain contraventions of hygiene which always prove inconvenient. None but superstitious and ignorant people can ever confuse these two issues. And as hygiene is always changing; as it alters with our knowledge of physick, intelligent men will keep pace with it. There can be no permanent boundaries to morals.

Student: The droits du seigneur were doubtless, at one time, religious. When ecclesiastics enjoyed them, they did so, in order to take the vengeance of the spirit-world upon their own shoulders, thereby shielding and sparing the husband.

Rabelais: Indeed you are far past these things. Your age no longer accepts them.

Student: My age is beset with cranks of all forms and sizes. They will not allow a man wine. They will not allow him changes of women. This glass....

Rabelais: There is still some in the last bottle. DeThou has paid it a compliment:

Student: There are states where a man’s tobacco is not safe from invasion. Bishops, novelists, decrepit and aged generals, purveyors of tales of detectives....

Rabelais: Have they ever interfered with your pleasures?

Student: Damn well let them try it!!!

Rabelais: I am afraid you would have been burned in my century.

END OF THE FIRST DIALOGUE