`East German Plastic Bag'

Les Murray on Ezra Pound, his Cantos and their devotees:

“The approach is historical and progressivist, concerned more with state-of-the-art than with art. It is better to be new and daring than to write well. The resulting damage to poetry from all this has not been fatal, of course; the more grievous damage has been to its reception by readers.”

Murray published his review of a new edition of The Pisan Cantos in 1974, less than two years after Pound’s death, in the Sydney Morning Herald (later collected in The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose, 1992). Had I read it thirty-eight years ago, I might have been spared the precious hours of my youth squandered on Pound’s ravings. But probably not. Like other autodidacts and other young people smitten with literature, I was a sucker, easily impressed by kulchur (Pound’s favored spelling). For all my supposed independence, I was naïve and credulous. I took the word of too many readers and critics who sounded authoritative, without realizing they too were following the pack and denying their own good sense. I remember being shocked by the essay in which Karl Shapiro, who had voted against the Bollingen Prize going to the obscene bric-a-brac of The Pisan Cantos, bluntly called Pound “stupid.” Shapiro, of course, was being fair and correct, but only slowly did I come to understand that literary reputation and most of the writers and critics who fashion it are engaged in a vast Ponzi scheme. We buy shares in their investments, with little or no hope of a return. The scheme succeeds because each fortune-hunter wishes to appear daring, sophisticated and, above all, hip. All, after all, is vanity. Murray writes:

“All establishments exist to compel acceptance and to deflect, for as long as possible, the question of absolute quality. In both respects the Pound establishment has been highly successful.  In an era of the political test in literature, they have even been able to gloss over their hero’s fascism [and anti-Semitism]. There is an unpleasant sense in which Pound has been forgiven much because he is the universities’ man.”

Things have only fallen further apart. Political posing is pandemic. The Language Poets make Pound read like a model of Dick-and-Jane clarity. Murray sees in Pound the germ of subsequent literary hipsters:

“Pound went on to promote the ideal of the bohemian guru standing over against the Establishment, an ideal which led on to the grotesqueries of Messrs Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and a score of others. The Sharon Tate murders may be said to have consummated that line of historical development.”

In his preface to The Paperbark Tree, Murray refers to the mass of assumptions that regulate the literary world as the “East German Plastic Bag.” He defines it as “that clammy sheath of expected allegiance and enforced style which is still jammed over your head as soon as you come near the world of literature or commentary.”