122
PARTISAN REVIEW
accept his interpretation of the results . "Adams' most important actions,"
he writes ,
...are made recurrent. Adams ' mission
to
Holland
to
secure allies and
money for the colonies is presented first by a statement of the mission's
results
(p . 92);
the results are again stated
(p. 122)
but now in the
more expanded, less official form ofJohn Adams' diary; the documents
of the mission are then presented (pp.
146-152)
to
show how that
result was attained; and finally Adams' own estimation of his mission
is recorded ...The same method of restatement is used
to
focus atten–
tion upon all Adams' most important activities ....
Aside from being implausible , this analysis neglects the fact that Pound
himself did not subscribe to the notion of restatement. At the front of the
Adams cantos volume he offered a table of contents that, contrary ro Vasse ,
claims a strictly chronological presentation of Adams 's life. Though Pound
of course wrote no such thing in the Adams cantos, the repetitions which
occur in the
W orks
made it possible for him ro make such a table . Neither
Pound nor his followers, then , offer a true picture of the contents of the
Adams cantos .
That picture is amply provided in Frederick Sanders's
J ohn Adams
Speaking,
which brings together "the lines of the poem and Pound's sources
in a way that permits a reader to see for himself what relationship exists
between them . " Marvelous to report, no irony is intended here. For
Sanders, too, finds a structure of " thematic repetitions" in the Adams
cantos, and reports that he is working on a book that will demonstrate this
in an "elaborate srudy of each one of the 'Adams Cantos. '"
Sanders has nothing
to
say about Kenner's misreadings bur does note
some of Pound's. To Vasse's original list offifty errors in the Adams cantos
he adds ninety-nine of his own. (These, however, do not include the
misreadings and misidentifications that led Kenner astray . ) When Pound
uses "Imperative" for Adams's " impracticable," Sanders points out,
"Pound's reader would have every reason to form just the opposite impres–
sion [from the truth] ." Nevertheless Sanders believes that Pound's errors
raise no more than the "matter of judgment" concerning "whether a
particular textual deviation is to be taken as an error or as an example of the
way the poet has adapted his sources to his art. " Understandabl y, Sanders
does not speculate on those errors, clearly not typographical, which
pointlessly reverse the meanings of passages, change dates, or wrongly
identify writers and recipients of letters. The lack of pattern in these
suggests intellectual breakdown; indeed, Pound's only consistency IS In
tending to miscopy when a passage concerns money .
