Ezra Pound\'s Canto 37 - A Vorticist Portrait of Martin van Buren

Canto XXXVII – A Vorticist Portrait of Marin van Buren “Perché” asked Mussolini “vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?” The question, asked during Pound’s audience with the Italian dictator in January 1933, was directed at a concern that Pound may have had for some time, at least since the publication of A Draft of XXX Cantos, the volume he had brought with him to give to the Duce. It may not have been obvious to a stranger why Pound needed to put his ideas in order. And yet. If Pound wanted to finish writing drafts of cantos and gain the confidence for a poem that should be a statement of certitude about the world and himself, he needed to organise his ideas and this is what in all candour he must have told Mussolini. At the time of the interview, Pound had finished six more Cantos that marked a different direction in his work, changing focus from European culture to American politics. The interview prompted him in February 1933 to write his pamphlet, Jefferson and/or Mussolini that in retrospect appears as a synthesis of the ideology underlying Eleven New Cantos still in the works. In that text, he implied he was just working on a seventh canto, about Martin van Buren. This president occupies pride of place in J/M: to judge by the material contained in pages 94-97, Pound’s reading of van Buren’s Auobiography was fresh and the points he wanted to make in the canto were taking shape in his mind. He states: “I have already started to put the bank war into a canto. I don’t know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of “Van’s” autobiography” (J/M 95). ‘Just beginning’ to write about the bank war was the shadow that was to accompany this canto ever since, as readers to this day do not very well distinguish among possible foci of interest: is the canto about the bank war or about van Buren? It is still difficult to regard this canto on its own, and not as a preamble to cantos 88-89, where the bank war would be treated in more detail. At the same time, the prose work of the period signalled that Pound was re-assessing his roots to clear the way forward. J/M tied naturally to his earlier pamphlet, The ABC of Economics, which was meant to revisit Social Credit, the economic theory he had allowed to slip into the background during the preceding ten years. The ABC of Reading (1934) became his synthesis in poetics, deriving most of its strength from the re-contextualisation of the ideogram as presented in Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry, which Pound had discovered in 1913. Finally, his ‘Vorticism’ article, initially published in the Fortnightly Review in September 1914 was translated into Italian and published in Il Mare in spring 1933 (Hickman 2005 92). It bore witness to the high opinion he still had of that text and to the potential of Vorticism as a valid statement of his poetics relevant to the present. Thus it can be argued that ‘putting ideas in order,’ consisted in re-evaluating the three main strands of innovation in which Pound had been involved in the London period: Vorticism, the ideogram and Social Credit, which he re-contextualised for the Fascist world of 1932-34. Both Miranda Hickman and Catherine Paul have shown the impact of the Fascist regime of cultural events and signs on the evolution of Pound’s thought during the early 1930s. The poet may have been encouraged to a personal retrospective by a public one, happening under his very eyes: La Mostra di rivoluzione fascista (MRF), which Pound called ‘Il Decennio’. La Mostra opened its gates in October 1932 and Pound visited it by December (Paul 69): it was an exhibition which by a collage 1

of posters, objects, photos, and newspaper articles aimed to show the history of the Fascist development and success. This history had two phases: the first one, between 1914 and 1922, detailed the roots and pre-history of Fascism; the second one, the Decennio proper, showed the struggles and successes of Fascism after the attainment of power in 1922. Pound may have been reminded of the crucial events of his own history, beginning with his discovery of the Fenollosa manuscripts and the doctrine of the ideogram in 1913, his participation in the Vorticist avant-garde in 1914 and finally his discovery of Social Credit in 1918. His own Decennio, the decade in which he had added his Draft of XXX Cantos to the publication of Eliot’s Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), needed to be more confidently based on his special knot of influences and modernisation. In many ways, the history of Fascism and that of Pound’s own poetic project had run in parallel. Mussolini’s question, “why do you want to put your ideas in order?” became unforgettable, resonating with Pound’s deepest need of the moment and generating his natural response: “for my poem.”i Around 1932 Pound revived the old ties with Orage and Douglas while keeping up the friendship with Wyndham Lewis, responding positively to Lewis’s work of the twenties. For Lewis, Vorticism had been destroyed in the Great War. Pound was not willing to let it go so easily, as for him Vorticism had been cut too short, before realizing its potential. All through his London years, from 1914 to 1920, he had tried to keep up the flame of the movement, first by writing his Memoir of Gaudier Brzeska, (1916), and further, by selling Vorticist work to John Quinn. Pound declared in The Little Review in that year: “Gaudier-Brzeska’s life work may have been stopped by a German bullet but Vorticism has not yet had its funeral” (‘Death of Vorticism’ P&P 3: 279). Pound’s correspondence with Lewis shows his nostalgia of the pre-war days when they had been involved in Blast together. Writing to him in 1924, Pound remarked: “We were hefty guys in them days; an [sic]… we seem to have survived without a great mass of successors… can we kick up any more or any new devilment?” (Pound/Lewis 138-9). Yet there was another reason why on the ground of revisiting old devilment at the start of the thirties Pound could think of new. Lewis had visited Germany and praised Hitler in his book by the same name in 1931. Parallels with Pound’s situation in Italy and his appreciation of the Duce invited themselves naturally. Besides, as Hickman argues, Pound had a regime of Vorticist signs and wonders in the immediate context of Italian visual culture under fascism (Hickman 2010 294). The ‘hefty guy’ was Mussolini in action, the Vorticist man of perfect integrity cutting through the masses of weaknesses and corruption of his age with remarkable drive and determination. In Blast Lewis had been attacking the ‘stagnant’ fin de siècle England; in his turn Mussolini was destroying the historical accretions of tradition that were preventing Italy’s modernisation. At the time of writing the Eleven New Cantos Pound was involved in an “intense effort, nearly twenty years after the publication of Blast to revive Vorticism in the context of fascist Italy” (Hickman 2005 92). Around 1932 he was also planning to write a book about Lewis, probably a portrait conceived in Vorticist manner, as he had done previously about Gaudier. Lewis did not cooperate, though, and the project ran into sand. This might help explain why the Eleven New Cantos, written between 1930 and 1933 has a distinctive Vorticist mode of organisation that is a synthesis of all versions of Vorticism in Blast, Lewis’, Gaudier’s and his own. In 1914, Pound had still been very much an imagist poet, trying 2

unsuccessfully to adjust to Lewis’s aesthetic demands for a new avant-garde. He had tried mordant satire, expressionist colour, sparse diction and strong visual approach. His poems for Blast were unpersuasive though, experiments that needed to be corrected by a more coherent and mature Vorticist poetics. Pound’s definition of it, insisting on the concept of ‘turbine’ – a whirl of significant events of the past relevant to the present, differed from that of Lewis, which demanded an art of the North, responding to the essential character of the British nation, an art that should be unsentimental, abstract, and satirical. The Eleven New Cantos could be considered a more serious and elaborate attempt on Pound’s part to produce a model of Vorticism in poetry, being arranged as a whirl of historical events and characters around the still center of Canto 36, Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s Donna mi prega. The use of contrast between history writing and philosophical poetry, between capitalism and love is shown in the very construction of the cycle, which starts with the American presidents Adams and Jefferson in dialogue, continues with cantos dedicated to their descendants, John Quincy Adams and van Buren and ends with Mussolini. For Lewis, the still axis is the rationale of the vortex, its very justification. In his Blast manifesto he declared: We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes. We discharge ourselves on both sides … The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest The Vorticist is not the slave of commotion, but its master (Blast Manifesto). Eleven New Cantos can then be considered a vortex, established as a play of continuities, analogies and recurrences on both sides of the still pivot. The tone, subject matter and contrast between the historical material and love poetry, speed versus stillness, satire versus ideal, become the opposite poles of a scale of values. Pound follows Lewis in the creation of a drab journalistic style to give a certain austerity to the historical material. Lewis had said that: “The artist of the modern movement is a savage: … this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man”. For Lewis, this was part and parcel of what he called the art of the ‘North’ as distinct from the ‘sentimental’ fascination with beauty and eternity specific of Romance cultures (Blast, 1914): the art of the North was marked by ‘barrenness and hardness.’ By contrast ‘Latins’ were the defenders of Romance even in their Futuristic posturing. The contrast between what is Anglo-Saxon and Northern and what is Romance and Romantic occupy centre stage in the architecture of the Eleven New Cantos in the same way they stand at the forefront of Lewis’s aesthetic concerns in Blast. Canto XXXVII in the economy of the Eleven New Cantos It is important to consider van Buren in Canto 37 not only as a separate portrait belonging only to this particular poem but also as a character meant to serve the system of checks and balances 3

within the cycle as a whole. Pound presents van Buren as the spiritual descendant of a revolutionary genius (Jefferson), a pendant to John Quincy Adams and an honest fighter for democracy and for the interests of the common man. Like John Quincy Adams who does not quite escape the greater shadow of his father, John Adams, van Buren treads in the footsteps of a greater man, he is someone in the second rank who fights for his convictions to the extent that his own limitations allow. To understand the significance of van Buren largely depends on the answer we give to the essential question: “what is the Eleven New Cantos about?” The answer of the critical tradition, that of Leon Surette, Wendy Flory, Peter Makin and Alec Marsh is that this cantos cycle as a whole is a critique of usury. This answer reflects on the critical handling of Pound’s portrait of van Buren: he is seen as a hero in the fight against the corrupting influence of finance. And yet, political and not exclusively financial concerns move the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson in cantos 31-33. The portraits of John Quincy Adams and Van Buren in Cantos 34 and 37 respectively show us an implicit controversy between two figures in the second range. Pound binds their political biographies in his overall critique of democracy as instances of the struggle between strong individuals and the system in which their lives are embedded. Pound’s main claim about the democratic system, spelled out very clearly in J/M, is that it is not efficient in doing public good. It allows greed to replace responsibility in the minds of the political players. Just, humanitarian measures are delayed and weakened because the democratic arena structurally allows counterclaims from special interests to occupy the stage. The most scorching criticism of democracy occurs in Canto 33, where Pound quotes and reformulates Marx’s critique of the issue of child labour in England, 1830-1860. The law against it battled the industrial interests: it was delayed 20 years and when finally passed, it was so feeble as to be impossible to implement (Redman 126-30). The idea that the democratic system is corrupt, allowing political players in Parliament/Congress/Senate to be bought by financial or industrial lobbies to actively represent their interests is further consolidated ideogrammically by Canto 37, showing the American situation, contemporary with the child labour issue in Britain. At that time, Andrew Jackson was battling a financial force that had been allowed to rise and compete with the government in the political arena – the Second Bank of the United States (18171836). The Bank had been chartered for twenty years by President Madison as an instrument of fiscal policy in the aftermath of the Anglo-American war of 1812-1816. The Bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle was not going to leave the re-charter to chance. The bank held government deposits and disposed of funds much higher than the government of the US. It wielded a power that was not only financial, but also political. Senators Clay and Daniel Webster, its paid agents, were the most vociferous and eloquent in the debates around the re-charter in 1830s, not shirking to block the entire political system by demagoguery and red herrings (as the scandal around Peggy Eaton). The bank campaigned for its re-charter in the press, affecting national political opinion in its favor. Through its intermediaries, it could influence the result of presidential elections; and by flooding the country with “credit” it could create a financial crisis out of the blue, since all the loans would have had to be called in case the charter was not renewed. 4

To this situation Pound poses the counterclaim that the interests of the many are much better served by a strong individual player who is incorruptible and willing to do the national good. He has Mussolini in view, about whom he commented in J/M: The second act [of the fascio] was to free it [Italy] from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern. As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government. (93-94) The players of the first degree, the heroes, are many-sided – they are involved in politics but also art, both through patronage and through their drive to order the world. They feel responsible for the nation as a whole and always put the national interest before their private one. They are successful to the extent that their language is adjusted to the situation of their time and place. This adjustment between language and their respective space/time is what Jefferson and Mussolini have in common and the key to their political success. On this criterion, both John Quincy Adams and Van Buren fail, even if they feel responsible towards the nation. In spite of their great service and merit, neither of them had the degree of adjustment needed to become saviours or revolutionaries: Pound shows John Quincy Adams as a covert aristocrat who did not recognize the necessities and values of his time: in a country in which land was plentiful, he wanted to set aside land “for the nation.” In Pound’s opinion, “the idea was unseasonable and would have held back the settlement of the continent for who knows how many decades” (J/M 37). Van Buren did recognize the pressing need of his time and was involved in the major event of the 1830s (the Bank war). He was firm enough to bear the brunt of the ensuing crisis and resist the pressures for re-chartering the BUS. But he lost the re-election because he did not have the quality of a successful revolutionary spelled out in J/M: the ability to formulate language perfectly adjusted to the historical conditions. Van Buren was prolix and his message was uncertain. The voters did not get his meaning and a clear orientation as to his political position: Said one of the wool-buyers: "Able speech by Van Buren "Yes, very able." "Ye-es, Mr Knower, an' on wich side ov the tariff was it? "Point I was in the act of considering" replied Mr Knower In the mirror of memory: have been told I rendered the truth a great service by that speech on the tariff but directness on all points wd. seem not to have been its conspicuous feature. (XXXVII/186) Pound’s portrait of van Buren is that of a second rank figure who does not succeed: he gets an awful reputation, since he is made responsible for the economic crisis of 1837-41; he is accused of intrigue, servility, love for luxury, demagoguery. His failure is not one of nerve or energy or 5

political talent – it is one of language. Both Alec Marsh and Peter Makin have observed that Pound ‘improves’ van Buren by radically cutting through the rhetoric of his autobiography. Pound definitely streamlines van Buren’s language, making it direct and sharp, not voluminous and undecided; he also points out that it was the use of language (“which side of the tariff was it?”) that ruined his presidential re-election. In spite of his early political successes, Van Buren was not suited to his time and place, he was not of first intensity.ii As Alec Marsh pointed out, Pound’s choice to see the corrupting and dangerous existence of the BUS as more important than the slavery issue was the reason why he seemed to favour van Buren over Adams. But if we consider the economy of The Eleven New Cantos as a whole, Pound needed to balance an American struggle to the British one of child labour. The BUS episode had that quality of being bound in its time, 1830s to 1860s. The slavery issue, though humanitarian like the child labour one, had another, much longer time-span, affecting Jefferson and the American founders in general. The BUS was more circumscribed in time and a brilliant example of the failure of democracy: it allowed corruption to wreck havoc with the political machinery and to create a financial crisis affecting the whole nation; the BUS’s director created an artificial inflation by flooding the country with loans, which would have had to be returned in the event of the failure to re-charter. From the common man to political elite, the whole nation was put under pressure. "To which end, largely increased line of discounts 1830, October, 40 million May, 1837 seventy millions and then some. Remembered this in Sorrento" in the vicinage of Vesuvius near exhumed Herculaneum ... "30 million" said Mr Dan Wester "in states on the Mississippi "will all have to be called in, in three "years and nine months, if the charter be not extended .. "I hesertate nawt tew say et will dee-precierate "everyman's prorperty from the etcetera "to the kepertal ov Missouri, affect the price of "crawps, leynd en the prordewce ov labour, to the embararsement......" de mortuis wrote Mr Van Buren don't quite apply in a case of this character. (XXXVII/183-4) It is indeed difficult to avoid feeling that the Bank War does seem to occupy centre stage in Canto 37 anticipating Cantos 88-89. Yet if we look at it in its own right we see that its construction serves another, more general agenda. What van Buren ultimately fights for is not only the financial interest of the nation, but the viability of democracy as a political system. Pound consistently shows him as championing the rights of the common man: against imprisonment for debt, against the lash, for the extension of voting rights. Van Buren is also an able player in Senate politics, he is elected, takes part in the debates, knows friend from foe, sees corruption and demagoguery for what they are. Pound shows him as a strong, brilliant, honest individual playing a game he knows inside out. If

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he fails, the system must be structurally deficient. And van Buren does fail, his missed re-election, his unhappy retirement in Sorrento, his memoirs forgotten, his reputation in tatters, all show it. Pound shows Van Buren as defeated, but seems to suggest that though he failed, the honesty and intelligence of his struggle can and should serve as historical precedents. Van Buren then is a Malatesta-like figure, someone who did an important cultural service and was submerged into the conflicts of the day, a player whose name is saddled with the misfortunes of his time. Van Buren’s main merit is to have upheld Jackson’s victory against the BUS and resisted the pressure for the charter of a third BUS, or else a demand for inflation. And Van Buren, like Malatesta, seems to be a prelude to a successful fight – that of Mussolini, who is shown to be involved in the same political effort for the common man against the greed of the rich and the corruption of the parliamentary system. Moreover, Pound’s portrayal of van Buren owes much to his earlier response to Lewis’s art. When writing about figures like Timon or Tarr, Pound commented that Lewis wanted to convey “the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity” (“Vorticism”). In a similar vein, Pound shows van Buren fighting against the ‘circumjacent stupidity’ of his corrupt opponents who defend the bank or the limited franchise out of ignorance and blindness or out of outright bad will – the ‘fury of intelligence’ of a hero who defends democracy and the working man’s interests, gives this canto a particular Vorticist slant. The poem begins with a blast similar to the screaming title of Lewis’s magazine: Thou shalt not," said Martin Van Buren, "jail 'em for/ debt." It ends with an epitaph that is the natural conclusion of the beginning: Hic jacet fisci liberator. Between the powerful statement of the beginning and the quietness of van Buren’s legacy in the epitaph, lies his portrait as Vorticist hero. Every other bit of information is draped around this strong axis. Pound follows Lewis in his requirement that the style of a work has to be adjusted to the essential character of the ethnic group it belongs to – for Lewis the art of the North was marked by bold contrasts that partook of each other, especially the comic and the tragic. Canto 37 does merge the two, in its satirical take on the American political life of the 1830s mingled with van Buren’s nostalgic even melodramatic retrospective of his life “at a moment his fortunes were too low in ebb/ […] at that moment to compromise” (XXXVII/186). For Lewis “tragic humour is the birthright of the North.” Pound structures van Buren’s interaction with his peers in the Senate as a comedy, juxtaposing his quietness and self-assuredness with the demagoguery of his opponents: "In Banking corporations" said Mr Webster "the "interests of the rich and the poor are happily blended." Said Van Buren to Mr Clay: "If you will give me "A pinch of your excellent Maccoboy snuff ..." (XXXVII/182) The canto seems to follow Lewis’s aesthetic in creating a sense of intensity by using modern journalistic style complete with political slogans and newspaper headlines. Peggy Eaton’s story, the red herring of the 1830s Senate debate recurs to punctuate the silliness of the political goings-on of a country whose institutions are primitive but a dangerous jungle nevertheless. Chunks of text

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derived from the source materials are chopped and juxtaposed to create the reading experience of someone skimming a newspaper. The satirical slant is unmistakable, intensifying to the guffaw similar to the one Pound had used in his “Salutation the Third” in Blast. The scene of the debates in the Senate approximates simultaneity in the quick changes of direction among various speakers. The speech of one participant is brusquely interrupted to turn the reader’s attention to the reply of the other and to van Buren’s comment. All through the canto we find frequent changes of perspective derived from pairing van Buren with various other characters, Jackson, Clay, Webster, Clinton, the wool-buyers, by departures and returns. The way in which Pound manipulates the masses of text of various lengths in relation to each other follows Gaudier’s definition of sculpture as masses in relation and intersecting planes. His frequent turns in unexpected directions re-create Lewis’s jagged line in the verbal medium. Van Buren’s portrait done according to the Vorticist aesthetic ties this American president to the main concern of Eleven New Cantos - the critique of democracy and the need for the strong incorruptible leader that understands, formulates, and responds to the needs of his time. It is an abstract portrait, done in mellowing colour, merging America and Italy, his past experiments with his now mature practice.

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Works Cited Brogan, Hugh. The Penguin History of the USA. London: Penguin, 2001. Flory, Wendy. Ezra Pound and ‘The Cantos”: A Record of Struggle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Hickman, Miranda. “Vorticism.” Ezra Pound in Context. Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 285-297. Hickman, Miranda. The Geometry of Modernism. Vorticist Idiom in Lewis Pound, H.D. and Yeats. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Lewis, Wydham. “Manifesto.” Blast. 1 (1914) in 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. Ed. Alex Danchev. London: Penguin, 2011. 77-80. Makin, Peter. Pound’s Cantos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Marsh, Alec. “John Quicy Adams and/or Martin van Buren: Cantos 34 and 37.” Paideuma 34.1 (2005): 59-89. Paul, Catherine. “Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Ezra Pound’s Move to the Imperial.” Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 (2005): 64-97. Pound, Ezra. Jefferson and/or Mussolini. I’dea statale. Fascism As I Have Seen It. London: Nott, 1935. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1995. Pound, Ezra. The Selected Letters 1907-1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971. Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to periodicals. Vol. 3. Ed. Lea Baechler and Walton Litz. New York: Garland, 1991. Pound/Lewis. The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Ed. Tim Materer. New York: New Directions, 1985. Redman, Tim. “An Epic is a Hypertext Containing Poetry: Eleven New Cantos (31-41) by Ezra Pound.” A Poem Containing History. Textual Studies in The Cantos. Ed. L. Rainey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 117-150. Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Notes i Pound quotes the question once in J/M as a proof of Mussolini’s intuition and grasp of the essence of an individual. He then refashions it three times in the late cantos: 87/569, 89/601, and 93/626. ii Mainstream historians confirm this point: Hugh Brogan remarked that van Buren was distrusted in the South as a gentleman of New York (277). The suspicion of elitism and love of luxury was as damaging to his reputation as the decorum of his rhetoric.

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