BOOKS
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is the mediocre lives attributed
to
Pound and Eliot . Simpson is grudging in
his account of Pound ; he doesn't think much of the poetry, puts down
Mauberley,
gives an inert account of the
Cantos,
and thinks the only re–
deeming motive in Pound is his love of art , "the true Penelope
to
whom
E.P. is returning . " Pound's life is glossed as a dreary narrative of wrong–
headedness and vanity. I happened
to
be reading
Three on the Tower
when
Donald Davie's new book on Pound reached me , and a few days later I got
Catherine Seelye 's
Charles Olson and Ezra Pound.
Olson on Pound is
extraordinarily warm, impassioned, and tender. And Davie's little book
shows that it is possible
to
write about Pound, after all, while holding
"reality and justice in a single thought ." Simpson 's brief life of Pound is
unresponsive , and it is bound
to
encourage others to lapse into the conclu–
sion ("and thank God that 's over ," I hear them say) that they may safely
give Pound the cup of his deserving: indifference .
The chapter on Eliot is a mixture, good and bad . There is a good com–
ment on Eliot's criticism, that " in reading Eliot's criticism of men who have
been dead these hundreds of years, one feels that one is witnessing a drama
the ending of which is still uncertain." I feel that is true when Eliot is dis–
criminating between the sermons of Andrewes and of Donne, or between
the relative merits of two languages, English and Italian. Simpson has also
some excellent observations about Eliot's early poems, and he quotes Jung
most tellingly at one point. But he perpetuates the old notion of Eliot's
time-serving prudence, his clerical cut, and incites the reader
to
exclaim:
"How could anything noble and true come from such a shoddy fellow?"
Again Simpson doesn 't respond very much
to
Eliot's major poems;
Four
Quartets
doesn 't mean much to him ; he could even live without "Marina,"
I gather.
The Waste Land
is alive to him, and he is alive
to
it . But generally
his sense of Eliot is sluggish if not hostile . He says that " Eliot was not a
Fascist, though he has been called one," but in the next paragraph he dis–
poses of an episode in Eliot 's political life by reporting that "in 1928, com–
menting in
The Criterion ,
Eliot said that the statement of policy by
The
Bn'tish Lion,
the organ of the British Fascists, was 'wholly admirable .' " I
protest. Here is precisely what Eliot said:
We have received three periodicals, all of quite different inspiration
from
The enten'on
and from each other, each of which provokes a word
of comment or enquiry .
The first is called
The Bn'tish Lion,
and is the organ of the British
Fascists . Avery angry lion on the cover is demolishing the symbols of the
present Russian government , and is supported bya couple of fasces . Our
copy is accompanied by two pamphlets setting forth the aims of the
British Fascists. The accusations made by
The Bn'tish Lion
against British
