Imaginary Letters

IV

(Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn)

Ezra Pound

My dear Lydia:

Your rather irascible husband asks for “Aunt Sallys”[5]; with the Pyrenees before me and at this late date, it is difficult to provide them. I agree with at least half he says. I am, with qualifications, Malthusian. I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim—beautiful perhaps, but a victim: expiring of aromatic pain from the jasmine, lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti. At present “valga mas estar soltero”, I will not take Miss J., nor her income, nor the female disciple of John.

There is no truce between art and the public. The public celebrates its eucharists with dead bodies. Its writers aspire to equal the oyster: to get themselves swallowed alive. They encompass it.

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be “in on it”.

Even the botches of a good artist have some quality, some distinction, which prevents their pleasing mass-palates.

Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of intelligence commands the mass to adore it. His contemporaries call him a nuisance, their children follow his instructions, include him in the curricula. I am not lifting my voice in protest; I am merely defining a process. I do not protest against the leaves falling in autumn.

The arts are kept up by a very few people; they always have been kept up, when kept up at all, by a very few people. A great art patron is a man who keeps up great artists. A good art patron is a man who keeps up good artists. His reputation is coterminous with the work he has patronized. He can not be an imbecile.

There are a few more people capable of knowing good art when they see it. Half of them are indifferent, three fourths of them are inactive, the exceeding few side with the artist; about all they can do is to feed him. Others, hating his art, may from family or humanitarian motives, feed and clothe him in spite of his art ... and attempt to divorce him from it.

These statements are simple, dull. One should write them in electric lights and hang them above Coney Island, and beside the Sarsaparilla sign on Broadway! The Biblical Text Society should embellish them upon busses.

Unfortunately the turmoil of yidds, letts, finns, esthonians, cravats, niberians, nubians, algerians, sweeping along Eighth Avenue in the splendour of their vigorous unwashed animality will not help us. They are the America of tomorrow....

(The good Burn believes in America; the naive English, mad over apiculture, horticulture, arboriculture, herbiculture, agriculture, asparagriculture etc., always believe in America ... until they have seen it.)

The turmoil of Yidds, Letts, etc., is “full of promise”, full of vitality. They are the sap of the nation, our heritors, the heritors of our ancient acquisitions. But our job is to turn out good art, that is to produce it, to make a tradition.

“My field must be ploughed up, but the country has need of quiet” (La Famille Cardinal). “I admire Epicurus. He was not the dupe of analogies”. Need I give references for all my quotations?

This nonsense about art for the many, for the majority. J’en ai soupé. It may be fitting that men should enjoy equal “civic and political rights”, these things are a matter of man’s exterior acts, of exterior contacts. (Macchiavelli believed in democracy: it lay beyond his experience). The arts have nothing to do with this. They are man’s life within himself. The king’s writ does not run there. The voice of the majority is powerless to make me enjoy, or disenjoy, the lines of Catullus. I dispense with a vote without inconvenience; Villon I would not dispense with.

Bales are written on the false assumption that you can treat the arts as if they were governed by civic analogies. The two things are not alike, and there is an end to the matter.

It is rubbish to say “art for the people lies behind us”. The populace was paid to attend greek drama. It would have gone to cinemas instead, had cinemas then existed. Art begins with the artist. It goes first to the very few; and, next, to the few very idle. Even journalism and advertising can not reverse this law. I have scribbled a very long letter, and not answered half the good William’s diatribe. My regards to Mrs Amelia.

Yours, Walter Villerant.