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- [00:00]
A
Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Kristin Grogan, who is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University. She works primarily on 20th century American poetry and literature. And I have her book, Stitch on Stitch. I didn't show you this. I have her book right here. Stitch on modernist poetry and the world of work. Welcome to the show.
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B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:30]
A
I said that we would do this in the pre show, but I want to reiterate. Want to give a quick shout out to your friend Nick, who. Yeah, contacted me on your behalf and basically pitched you for me, which is not a normal experience for the show.
- [01:45]
B
No. But I think that he's a great friend to have. Maybe we can. We can do this more for our friends. I'm gonna quickly, in return, plug Nick's book, which is out with Columbia later this year. Nick is an amazing scholar of poetry and small press communities and he's writing a fabulous book about the New York School.
- [02:02]
A
Great.
- [02:03]
B
And he's a great guy.
- [02:04]
A
Everybody go pre that if it's available for preorder and if not, we will add it to our bookshop. Both Stitch on Stitch and his book will be added to our bookshop. What's the word I'm looking for? Front. That doesn't feel right. Our list. We have a lot. We have a thing. We have a thing through bookshop.
- [02:19]
B
What kind of establishment have I joined?
- [02:21]
A
We have a thing. Our money laundering front.
- [02:24]
B
Great.
- [02:25]
A
You can buy both of these books there and they will be linked everywhere in our description. Et cetera, et cetera. I like to do A question at the start of the show. I've done this quite a few times recently, but I've had very different answers each time. What else would you study if you were banned from English? Like, if someone said, you can't study literature, you can't be an English professor. What are your other interests?
- [02:49]
B
Yeah, I mean, that sounds great. Wow. Not studying English. That sounds like a lot of fun. I actually started briefly as an art history major, and the reason I was in art history, it was a sort of criticism and curation program. Actually, the reason I did that is because I thought it sounded more sensible than doing a fine arts degree.
- [03:08]
A
Mm.
- [03:09]
B
So I would study fine arts. I make a lot of pots. I do a lot of ceramics. I mean, that's what. That's what I'd be doing. I'd be making things and. Yeah.
- [03:17]
A
Cool. I like to tell the audience that, like, we have other interests and hobbies and, like, do things other than think about stuff and write, I think.
- [03:28]
B
You know, I think especially when what you do is read and write books for a living, not doing that is really important. At the same time, like, I don't know if, you know, Theodora Dorno's essay on free time, which is good, of course. Right. And, you know, because Adorno is probably the critical theorist I would be least likely to get a beer with. He's very serious and unfun, and he says that he doesn't have hobbies because he takes everything equally seriously. Like, you kind of. There's, like, a way in which I subscribe to that.
- [03:55]
A
Yeah. I mean, he is also, like, the patron saint of this show as, like, an incredibly famous hater. Like, I love him, and, like, I've been trying for a really long time to get someone to come on the show and do a, like, one of our this guy rocked episodes on Adorno to be like, we just love him. So. But he comes up so constantly.
- [04:16]
B
Okay, all right. That's it. That's an open call for the.
- [04:19]
A
This guy rocked on Adorno like an unprompted. Someone like, you will just say, so I don't know if you know about Adorno. And I'm like, we have talked about him several times. We love him in this household. We're not here to talk about Adorno today, though. Who are we here to talk about?
- [04:36]
B
We are here to talk about Ezra Pound, who was an American poet, critic, translator, radio broadcaster, and fascist.
- [04:51]
A
Well, yeah, I mean, we've already signaled towards. Gestured towards what the issue is gonna be. So he's alive from 1885 to 1972. Can you tell me a little bit about what he's famous for in terms of as a literary figure or as a writer?
- [05:09]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as you say, 1885 to 1972, which is a hugely long. Yes, it always is. Amazing to me that Ezra Pound outlived the Beatles.
- [05:20]
A
Uh huh. I don't normally measure things by. Were the Beatles still alive.
- [05:24]
B
This is like a late modernism measurement. When he's a young man, he moves from, you know, we can get into his early life in a minute if you like, but he's born in Idaho, he grows up outside Philadelphia and studies briefly at UPenn. And when he is a young person he is full of ideas and ambition and cockiness. And he moves to Europe, first to Italy and then to London. And he sort of very quickly inserts himself in the center of the London literary scene. He's really good at meeting people and ingratiating himself with older people. So he both sets about like meeting his heroes and he becomes central to this thing that we call modernism. So Pound has sort of two ways that in terms of his literary legacy that he's remembered. One is his own writing. He writes, translates, writes a long poem called the Cantos over the course of his life is instrumental, creates imagism, this movement that is this sort of early modernist movement. And he also edits, promotes, publishes, supports many, many modernist writers. So famously, he is the reason why the Love Song of JR for Prufrock by T.S. eliot is published. And then he the Wasteland.
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A
Okay.
- [06:42]
B
He describes himself as the sa gem, which is a par non sache femme, which is the French word for a midwife. So he describes himself as the male midwife of modernism. Yes, that's kind of a part of history. He continues writing the Cantos, which is his long poem he will write until nearly the end of his life. He writes it in installments which are put out sort of semi regularly. It changes a lot. It's an 800 page poem and that's his primary literary endeavor.
- [07:12]
A
And am I right in thinking that that goes unfinished ultimately?
- [07:16]
B
Yeah. So there's a sort of. It kind of in the last years of Pound's life, this is a sort of like little spoiler. After he's released from the mental asylum, he sort of writes. Things are put out in this kind of, you know, without his permission. So he's sort of forced into finishing this poem. But he's in very ill health, he's very idiosyncratic and it kind of trickles Away rather than arriving at like a heroic conclusion.
- [07:43]
A
What does just cause I want to get a sense of, like, his early life. What is the context of him growing up? So you say he's in Idaho and then he's in Pennsylvania and he goes to Upenny. Do you feel like any of his early life is useful to understanding him as a person or not at all?
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B
Yeah, no, I think it is. That's such a good question. Because for this generation of writers, so many of them leave the US to come to Europe, and even if they are like, negating their early life, it is still a driver of what they do. Pound, it isn't quite like negation in the same way that, you know, it is for someone like T.S. eliot, who really wants to enter into, like, tradition, religious, monarchical, et cetera, et cetera. So Pound is born in Haley, Idaho. He doesn't live there very long. I have not been to Haley, Idaho. He's born there because his grandfather, Thaddeus Pound.
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A
Good names in this family.
- [08:38]
B
Great names. I know. Yeah. So Ezra Pounds, by the way, his full name is Ezra Weston Loomis Pound. Yeah, excellent names. They'd all be great names for like a dog, you know. So Thaddeus Pound is actually from Wisconsin, or, you know, lives, works in Wisconsin, is a member of the US House of Representatives, and he's a lumberman. This will be important because Pound becomes kind of obsessed with the fact that his grandfather could have been a big railway man and was gazumped by people who were better at it. It becomes this kind of like, the way that the disruption of heritage and patrimony. You can already see how that into something. But Thaddeus gets Homer Pound, another great name. Homer is Ezra's father, a job in the bureau that is like the predecessor to the Bureau of Land Management, the blm, which is why they're out in Idaho. So he's born there, as far as we can tell. His mother hated being there and they eventually come back east. And his father works in the Philadelphia Mint, so he's an assayer. So he is determining the composition of currency. Again, all of this is Pound, in his later life, is obsessed with money and obsessed with currency.
- [09:57]
A
I'm seeing like we're foreshadowing something a little bit, 100%.
- [10:03]
B
It's actually. I haven't presented it like this, and you really, really see the links. Not everybody is quite so driven by the preoccupations of their forebears, but Pound really is. So he grows up in the outskirts of Philadelphia, in Jenkintown, Wincot. And what happens there. He will talk later in his life about. He will call, famously, in a conversation with Allen Ginsberg, he will say that anti Semitism was a stupid suburban prejudice. So there's a way in which he's. You know, how much we take that as truth or as a kind of, you know, excuse for his actions. But he certainly sees antisemitism as something that was linked to his early life, his suburban life in the outskirts of Philadelphia. A couple of other interesting things there. So his father, Homer, was involved in founding two churches in Philadelphia. It's not the sort of, like, religious work of Homer. Pound isn't my area of expertise. Other people have written well on this, but there's this. You can see that this search for a savior is powerful in Pound's early life. And he studies at UPenn. He's not a very successful student. He gets pretty shitty grades. And he transfers to Hamilton College in upstate New York. He'll come back to UPenn for an MA at Penn, he meets Hilda Doolittle, the poet HD and William Carlos Williams, who are both important modernist poets.
- [11:35]
A
Yeah. Cause I was gonna say Penn, in particular has this relationship to poetry that I think is. And writing in general that I think is fascinating. So it's interesting that he's there. Doesn't do great, right? Goes back.
- [11:48]
B
Yeah, exactly. And there's sort of, you know, a theme that you'll see throughout Pound's life is not being a very studious person in a lot of ways, that he is a skim reader rather than a deep or a close reader. So he doesn't do amazing at pen. And there's also this sen. Two things. A, the young person who wants to go out and live their life. And B, Pound is so idiosyncratic. Like, he believes that he will develop his sort of curriculum for poetry and pursue that. He says early on that he, you know, aspired to know more about poetry than any man living. Which is the sort of thing that, you know, young people say, sure, but PEN isn't an amazing fit. But it, you know, puts him into contact with these other people who will be really important in his life.
- [12:32]
A
I also love the idea, like, the hubris involved in like. Which is sort of a real young person thing in general, to be like, look, I am not good at school. I'm not super studious. I'm also not that critical of a thinker. I am, however, equipped with the skills needed to teach everyone about what this other thing I'm Interested in where it's like, surely those initial skills that you said you didn't have are pretty necessary, like fundamental to, for example, developing even a sort of metaphorical curriculum. Right. One with, I don't know, of someone who develops curriculum.
- [13:09]
B
Really. Yeah. There's an inverse correlation between how much he really studies and how much he is willing to teach or tell others what to do.
- [13:16]
A
Yeah, well, we know some people, like, yeah, none of them in the room
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B
right now, but we've certainly encountered them in our lives for sure.
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A
Sure.
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B
And it is absolutely like it flags this kind of complicated push pull relationship with like academia and education. Like, he wants to be seen sort of like a professor. Modernism is a very donnish aesthetic. You know, they're always teaching you and always telling you to go off and read more Dante and why haven't you studied ancient Greek well enough and so on and so forth. He'll eventually get a doctorate, an honorary doctorate from his alma mater. But at the same time this like fundamental disdain of academic work is pouring through, seeping through.
- [13:56]
A
Yeah. I mean, it kind of. This is not to slander all cultural critics that exist in the world because there are many who are great. But it's the same thing sometimes where people are like, look, the only thing restricting me is the formal structure of academia. And if, you know, and I'm like, I get that. But also there are some things that we learn how to do, for example, actually think critically, like, and engage with sources, for example, like, one of the things I thought of before we even did the show when I was trying to figure out what the problem with him was gonna be, and it became immediately apparent was, I know there are some questions about, like his translation, for example, which is Vibes based, basically. And like, that's something that perhaps someone with slightly more adherence to the structure of formal academic study might be, like, we shouldn't translate things this way.
- [14:49]
B
Yeah. So what you're. So the first of the major translations comes in. Pound manages, again, all of these stories are like. And he somehow met this person and he somehow convinced them to do this. Like. But he manages to get the widow of Ernest Fenollosa, who is a Sinologist, to give him pound the notebooks and notes of various classical Chinese and Japanese translations, which Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese, will turn into a book called Kase, a series of, again, translations in the heaviest of scare quotes. And that's, you know, I think approaching it through translation sort of. They're not translations in the. They're Vibes. Yeah, you know, we can assess them, their success as vibes. They're very beautiful vibes, sure, for sure. But it's also not just that. It's that he spins out this entire worldview based on people who have the ability to apprehend something without the training required to know it. What intelligence is, at least for the Pound of like the 1910s and this, all the young Pounds this will feed into his later work, is somebody who can look at something and sort of instantly see to the heart of the matter. So he befriends this French painter, sculptor Henri Godier Zezka, who tragically is killed during the First World War. He writes a memoir about him, this really fascinating painter and sculptor. He does a very famous portrait of Pounds. But Pound writes that this artist could look at a Chinese character with no prior training and instantly perceive what it meant. And he's, you know, there's a theory, like an incorrect theory of, like, the pictographic, that Chinese is somehow like entirely a naturalistic language where a tree is represented to look like a tree and so on. But more interesting, I think, than the theory of language is the theory of intelligence. What it is to be an intelligent person is located in your psych. You can see this and you can know what it's about.
- [16:55]
A
And that there is some romantic inherent thing that we possess where one can look at something and somehow have access to some other layer of knowledge or the universe through that knowledge. And some people are blessed with this and others aren't.
- [17:12]
B
Totally, totally like you can, you know, see and tell of things that are invisible to mortal sight. To quote Milton, not the writer that pound was, but 100%, this is sort of like epiphanic. The person who has, like almost X ray vision, but much more, you know, productive of, like, epiphany or knowledge for sure.
- [17:30]
A
And there's also something there, even to the idea of, like, him not liking Milton but still having some allegiance with some of the ideas where people think that they're counter identifying with something, but they're doing it so hard in such a way that it ends up kind of reinscribing the thing that they're pushing back against, where they're like, I'm not a romantic, I'm a modernist. I'm not doing these things. However, some of the universal truths that Romanticism points to are in fact true. And you're like, yeah.
- [18:00]
B
And I think that that's sort of part of the tale of modernism, self definition, which is always, you know, it is. We are the men of, you know, we are honor about 1910, human character changed and we are creating an art that will transform accordingly. But so much of it is articulated as either negation or a kind of, I want to say, like flimsy modernism, but it is always returning to movements of the past. Like, to understand it as like, plucked out of thin air or as aggressively modernist rather than as like reformulating and digesting and often repeating versions of tradition would be erroneous.
- [18:36]
A
Well, yeah, and especially when you're thinking about Pound, right, where you're. He is the midwife, mid husband of modernism, but his whole thing is an obsession with his family's traditional past and the roles. So, like, there isn't a break in tradition, really in his mind?
- [18:57]
B
Yeah, no, totally. Like, he's constantly saying, you know, he says later to break the pentameter that was the first heave. Like he's using this language of breaking. But there is, I think, more continuity than you might see in others, even, or others who. I think this is a sort of shared characteristic of several of the modernists of that generation who move to Europe in these acts of self definition but continue to think about themselves as primarily or exclusively American. You know, one thing about Pound is he'll never take up Italian citizenship, which is an interesting.
- [19:32]
A
Yeah, which we will get to get to.
- [19:36]
B
But like, Gertrude Stein is similar in the sense that she primarily understands herself to be like a product of the west coast of the United States who is articulating the American promise of modernity. But she's doing it from Paris's Left bank. And her first major work is something. We're not talking about Gertrude Stein today, although in all sorts of ways she both sucked and rocked. But her first major work is something called the Making of Americans, this incredibly long novel which is all about the production of an American middle class. So there is this thread throughout this literary movement that is again supposed to have been moving across the Atlantic in these acts of self definition and of making a new poetics and a new literary world that are really tethered to childhood.
- [20:23]
A
Thanks for listening to this preview of a Patreon exclusive episode. To subscribe and listen to it in full, head over to patreon.com thisguysuff whether
- [20:33]
C
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- [20:51]
B
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- [20:55]
C
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