260
WILLIAM H.
PRITCHARD
mentioned) he should get out of poetry, into a medium where you
need have nothing to say. That would be preferable, Lewis claims,
to using language in the manner of the Champz Elyza
argot
above;
that and comparable passages "though they represent Pound the
artist at his worst, they show us, I believe, the true Pound, or that
part that has not become incorporated in his best highly traditional
poetry. And a simpleton is what we are left with." Such a remark
made in 1927 might look to be the merest arrogance, and
m~staken
to boot in view of Pound's dogged perseverance as the
Cantos
roll on.
But just how mistaken is it? With the very important exccp'ion of
the
Pisa'n Cantos,
where suddenly the poet creates an identi ty out of
which he can speak, sometimes with great power, Lewis' judgment
still makes sense. And it is in teresting that the scene from contem–
porary life Pound was finally able to portray so affectingly involved
putting the simpleton in a cage and exposing him to the world as a
persecuted hero.
JOYCE
Lewis' cntlclsm of Pound is a combination of admiration and
condescension; in one paragraph he tenns Pound a "kind of intel–
lectual eunuch" but then shows how the limitation can also be a
virtue: "He has not effected this in timate entrance into everything
that is noble and enchanting for nothing. He has really walked with
Sophocles beside the Aegean; he has
seen
the Florence of Caval–
canti...." With J oyce, Lewis employs a somewhat related strategy,
mixing respect and annoyance for J oyce's achievement into a highly
creative criticism of
Ulysses.
"An Analysis of the Mind of J ames
Joyce" makes up the major part of the "Revolutionary Simpleton"
section of
Time and Western
Al
an,
and
Ulysses
appears with Proust's
novel as one of the two most important "time-books" in modern
literature. Yet the essay contains much observation about Joyce's
mind and art that is independent of Lewis' war against the time–
philosophy; his perceptions about Joyce are simply more interesting
than the idea in the name of which the perceptions are offered.
In brief the analysis runs as follows: Joyce like Pound is a
craftsman preoccupied with ways of saying or doing things, rather
than an inventive, creative intelligence preoccupied with things to
be done or said. He is technically progressive and humanly conserva-
