732
PARTISAN REVIEW
Shakespeare was "Lord Somebody's players"; and the Elizabethan
drama, as distinct from the long defunct religious plays, was a court
affair.
As for the degeneration, that becomes apparent when Pound takes
to Social Credit (and Mussolini). "He saw," says the editor in his
Foreword, "Europe drifting towards a war that could have been avoided
by a simple currency reform." About the bullying willfulness of con–
viction with which Pound, in and out of season, asserted that things
were
as simple as that there was not only an element of Jonsonian
comedy; there was also something repellently brutal, a certain native
tough and truculent insensitiveness turning into a positive vice. And
here we come to the famous "brilliant epistolary style."
The letters do indeed exhibit a racy vigor
~nd
a strong directness
and bite, conveying the courage and grapple of a live disinterested mind.
But from early on there are characteristics that, long before the end of
the volume, have become a boring exasperation. There is that facetious
and utterly pointless misspelling which Pound indulges in as soon as–
which is very readily (even-a piquant situation-in writing to myoid
headmaster)-he feels that he has established an epistolary familiarity
with a correspondent. So far from growing out of it he grows into it,
and at the best it is the sign of a portentous established immaturity.
But it is worse than that; it goes with something that is also
im–
maturity
and
worse: "The French," he says, "have a word of five letters
and the English of four." In the one letter I have from Pound (and
which I did not hand over to the editor-but because of its manner of
referring to a distinguished poet and critic, and early friend of Pound)
the "brilliant epistolary style" is mainly a matter of the repetition of
the English word. That word, in the Letters, has for abundant company
a great deal of the same order, and, in spite of some variety of a kind
(e.g.
"bug-headed ape") the total effect is that of the maddening and
depressing monotony of Army obscenity.
It is more than a superficial foible; as we see it growing on the
letter-writer we see a certain native (or cultural) insensitiveness, in–
dulged and sanctioned, developing into a repellently ugly and inhuman
brutality. Pound, translating the Shelleyan exaltations about the crea–
tive mind, writes: "Humanity is malleable mud, and the arts set the
mold it is later cast into." It is significant that, in the same letter, two
sentences further on, he writes: "Victoria was an excrement, Curtis,
Lorrimer,
all
British journalism are excrement," etc. The significance–
the relation of these habits of expression to the bullying and overbearing
