440
PARTISAN REVIEW
watches the participants: those who do the bleeding. He as esses their
achievements. He sets the course that they ought to follow. Conversely,
Ezra Pound was the very model of a literary campaigner. He chose his
troops, he trained them, planned the strategy and ta tics , put them in
the right positions, took care of logi tics, provided ammunition, saw to
it that they got a bit of rations.
When he wrote the first few drafts, Joyce had not yet read the letter
disapproving of
Work in Progress.
If
he thought of Pound as a warden
of the status quo, this was limited perhaps to the other's prudence on
the subject of anal activities. By and large, the allusion were to Pound
as commander- to the managerial quality that had moved Joyce to call
him "wonder worker." But there were some of the same nature as the
one Joyce had put in
Ulysses.
These allusions were adapted to the
frame of Waterloo. A no-non ense Wellington-Pound makes his blunt
remarks. For example-(under the distortion)-"This is the Welling–
ton cry. Bromme, Cambrommel''' He is
brumming,
(German for
grumbling, growling), that the other side is using
le mot de Cam–
bronne.
This is
merde-the mot
Cambronne used at Waterloo. As in
the case of Joyce, it was a refusal to surrender. (Notice that " the big
Wellington telescope" is in contrast to "the other orifice." It is
extendible and is shaped like a phallus.)
The first few drafts were written in the fall of 1926. In February,
1927, Joyce started to revise the early chapters for publication in
transition.
In the interval, he had seen the letter and in
transition
there
are several allusions to it. Thus-in Chapter Five, Joyce has a list of
phrases which may be used to describe his new work. He added
A New
Cure for an Old Clap-a
reference to Pound's remark , with the
implication that,
pace
Ezra Pound, it may be "worth all the circumam–
bient peripherization."
In 1936, looking forward to publication of
Finnegans Wake,
Joyce
turned again to revision of these chapters. In the Waterloo passage, a
charge was added to the "cry" of Wellington. "Art i too loose!" The
hostility to
Work in Progress
has been related to Pound's previous
complaint about Mr. Bloom and his anal activity. The
100
eness of
which Pound grumbles is an amplification of the looseness suggested
by
le mot de Cambronne.
(About this time, Pound made a similar
comparison. In a letter of March, 1937, he wrote to Hilaire Hiler; "No
need of
transition
crap or Jheezus in progress. I am about through with
that diarrhoea of consciousness.")
This was later. In the
transition
version, (April, 1927), Joyce
showed a more immediate response. He had thought of Pound as a
