IMAGINARY LETTERS

V

(Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn)

Ezra Pound

My Dear Lydia:

Russians! No. William is matto over his Russians. They are all in the beginning of Fumée—all the Russians. Turgenev has done it: a vaporous, circumambient ideologue, inefficient, fundamentally and katachrestically and unendingly futile set of barbarians. Old Goff says of savages: “I like savages. They do nothing that is of the least use, they do nothing the least intelligent, they do nothing of the least interest. They are bored. They have ceremonies. The malice of boredom: the medicine man makes them dance in a ring for hours in order to degust their stupidity, per assagiarlo, to bask in the spectacle of a vacuity worse than his own.”

I mistrust this liking for Russians; having passed years in one barbarous country I can not be expected to take interest in another. All that is worth anything is the product of metropoles. Swill out these nationalist movements. Ireland is a suburb of Liverpool. And Russia! The aged Findell comes back in ecstasy, saying “It is just like America.” That also bores me. They say Frankfurt-am-Main is just like America.

Paris is not like America. London is not like America. Venice is not like America. Perugia is not like America. They are not the least like each other. No place where the dew of civilization has fallen is “just like” anywhere else. Verona and Pavia are different. Poictiers is different. Arles is a place to itself.

Dostoevsky takes seven chapters to finish with an imbecile’s worries about a boil on the end of his nose. Dostoevsky is an eminent writer. Let us thank the gods he existed. I do not read Dostoevsky. Several young writers have impressed me as men of genius, by reason of tricks and qualities borrowed from Dostoevsky. At length when the craze is over, I shall have to read Dostoevsky. And so on.... I have also read Samuel Butler. And Poetry? As the eminently cultured female, Elis writes me that her little cousin will have nothing to do with it. Rubbish! Her little cousin will read Li Po, and listen to the rondels of Froissart. I know, for I tried her.

Elis has imbibed a complete catalogue, with dates, names of authors, chief works, “influence” of A, B, C, on M, N, O, etc., etc., with biographies of the writers, and “periods”. Buncomb! Her cousin, who knows “nothing at all”, is ten times better educated. No? She “doesn’t like poetry”. Anglice: she doesn’t like Swinburne. It is not the least the same thing. And she is worried by most of Dowson, etc.

Elis appeals to me as possessing “manner” or “prestige”, i. e. professorial aspects, to coerce the rebellious infant.

She says I used to read Swinburne “so splendidly”. Damn it all! I believe this to be true. The “first fine”, etc. “The hounds of swat are on the wobbles wip wop”. Magnificent sound. Now as a matter of fact I tried to read A. C. S. to the small cousin and broke down lamentably. The constant influx of “wrong words” put me out of it altogether.

And Browning is full of jejune remarks about God. And only parts of Landor are left us. And Elis says the girl will be no use to me whatsoever. (Neither she may, perhaps. But who is any use to me? Hackett I see once a month in a state of exhaustion, i. e. H. in a state of exhaustion). He makes two negative but intelligent remarks, and departs before the conversation develops. Your spouse is afar from us both. We are surrounded by live stock.

I enjoy certain animal contacts ... without malice. I have a “nice disposition”. I pat them like so many retrievers ... ebbene? I live as a man among herds ... for which I have a considerate, or at least considerable, if misplaced, affection. “Herds” is possibly a misnomer. A litter of pups that amuses me. I am not prey to William’s hostilities ... save that I dislike ill-natured animals.

As for poetry: : : how the devil can anyone like it ... given, I mean, the sort of thing usually purveyed under that label?

The girl asked me the only sane question I have ever had asked me about it.

“But is there no one like Bach? No one where one can get all of it?”

That staves in my stratified culture.

The Odyssey? But she does not—naturally, she does not read greek. She is “wholly uneducated”. That is to say I find her reading Voltaire and Henry James with placidity.

And Dante? But she does not read italian. Nor latin. And besides, Dante! One needs a whole apparatus criticus to sift out his good from his bad; the appalling syntax from the magnificence of the passion. Miss Mitford said “Dante is gothic.” Out of the mouths of prudes and imbeciles! Gothic, involved, and magnificent, and a master of nearly all forms of expression. And what, pray, is one to reply to a person who after having read Maison Tellier, refuses to stand “The fifth chariot of the pole, already upturning, when I who had etc., ... turning as Pyramus whom when the mulberry had been tasted ... not otherwise than as etc.” The quotation is inexact, but I can not be expected to carry english translations of Dante about with me in a suit case. Dante is a sealed book to our virgin, and likewise Catullus, and Villon is difficult french ... and Sappho ... perhaps a little Swinburnian? Ille mi par esse ... is possibly better than the Aeolic original; harder in outline. (If this bores you, give it to Elis). Chaucer writes in a forgotten language. One must read earlier authors first if one is to run through him with ease as with pleasure. What the devil is left us? What argument for a person too sincere to give way to the current mania for assenting to culture? The fanaticism of certain people who believe they ought to “read poetry” and “be acquainted with” art. A person, I mean, who has taken naturally to good prose; who is so little concerned with appearing educated that she does not know whether Shelley is a dead poet or still living, ditto, Keats. It is quite oriental. Ramdath told me a tale from the Mahabharata, but it was only when I found it in the Mahabharata that I discovered it had not happened to Ramdath’s grandpapa. If people would forget a bit more, we might have a real love of poetry. Imagine on what delightful terms the living would compete with their forbears if the doriphory of death were once, for even a week or so, removed from the “brows” or “works” of the “standard” authors. No more Job and Stock’s “Works of the Poets”, series including Mrs. Hemans, Proctor and Cowper 7/6, 5/, 2/6, hymn-book padded leather with gilding, real cloth with gilding, plain covers. The great Victorian age has done even better. Culture, utility!! I found in lodgings a tin biscuit-box, an adornment. It represented a bundle of books, of equal size, bound in leather, a series, the spiritual legacy of an era, education, popularity. The titles of the tin books were as follows:

History of England. Pilgrim’s Progress. Burns. Pickwick Papers. Robinson Crusoe. Gulliver’s Travels. Self-Help. Shakespeare.

Is it any wonder we have Gosse cautioning us against De Maupassant’s account of Swinburne, and saying that De M’s unbridled fancy gave great offence when it reached the recluse at Putney. Or dribbling, i. e. Gosse dribbling along about “events at the Art Club which were widely discussed at the time” (italics mine) when he might have said simply “Algernon got drunk and stove in all the hats in the cloak-room”.

Yours, Walter Villerant.