发布时间： 2016年08月10日
TEXT ONE
“WHANG—Boom—Boom—cast delicacy to the winds.” Thus Ezra Pound in a letter to his father, urging the old man to help promote his first published collection. It might have been the poet's manifesto.
Pound is as divisive a figure today as he was in his own lifetime. For some he was the leading figure of the Modernist movement who redefined what poetry was and could be; and who, in his role as cultural impresario, gave vital impetus to the literary careers of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, among others. But for many Pound remains a freak and an embarrassment, a clinical nutcase and vicious anti-Semite who churned out a lot of impenetrable tosh before losing the plot completely.
During the second world war he broadcast pro-Fascist radio programmes from Italy and later avoided trial for treason at home only because he was declared insane. On his release from St Elizabeth's Hospital near Washington, DC, he returned to Italy (“America is a lunatic asylum”), where he died in 1972 aged 87.
David Moody, emeritus professor of English at York University, makes a strong case for Pound's “generous energy” and the “disruptive, regenerative force of his genius”. His approach (unlike Pound's) is uncontroversial. He follows the poet's progress chronologically from his childhood in Idaho—still, at the time of his birth in 1885, part of the wild west—to his conquest of literary London between 1908 and 1920. He marshals Pound's staggering output of poetry, prose and correspondence to excellent effect, and offers clear, perceptive commentary on it. He helps us to see poems, such as this famous, peculiarly haunting 19-syllable haiku, in a new light:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That Mr Moody is constantly being upstaged by the subject of his study is not surprising. Pound was one of the most colourful artistic figures in a period full of them.
According to Ford Madox Ford, who became a good friend of Pound's shortly after the bumptious young American arrived in London: “Ezra would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point and a single large blue earring.” W.B. Yeats's simple assessment was that: “There is no younger generation of poets. E.P. is a solitary volcano.”
A great merit of Mr Moody's approach is the space he gives to Pound's writings. It is love-it-or-hate-it stuff, but, either way, undeniably fascinating. “All good art is realism of one kind or another,” Pound said. Reconciling that tidy statement with practically any of his poems is hard work but, as Mr Moody shows over and over again, hard work that offers huge rewards. His first volume ends in 1920, with Pound quitting London in a huff, finally fed up—after more than a decade of doing everything in his power to rattle the intellectual establishment—with “British insensitivity to, and irritation with, mental agility in any and every form”. His disgraceful radio programmes and the full blooming of his loopiness lie ahead. So, too, do most of his exquisite Cantos.
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