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PARTISAN REVIEW
modeling.
In
the earlier book
The Stones of Rimini
was deemed
"perhaps indispensable" as a commentary on the
Cantos:
now it is
dispensable, not mentioned at all. Perhaps this only means that the
new book should be read as marking the present moment in Davie's
relation to Pound, a relation which has waxed and waned, altered its
emphases, changed its mind. Davie's critiques of
Hugh Selwyn Mau–
berley
make the point. He first wrote about the poem in 1961 , changed
his mind about it in
Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor
and has now lost
interest in it altogether, if my ear has picked up the vibration of his
prose accurately. He now disowns the first critique entirely. I mention
this case not to say that Davie cannot make up his mind about Pound,
but to suggest that the relation between his mind and its objects is
topical and provisional rather than definitive: there is a difference
between the two statements. What is edifying in Davie's critical books
is the impression of a mind in the process of engaging itself with its
objects.
It
would not be difficult to show that many of his arguments
are mutually incompatible: as a poet he has never known whether he
wanted to be like Samuel Johnson or like Rimbaud; as a critic he has
been vivid rather than consistent. His current Pound is a musician
rather than a sculptor, specifically an Edwardian troubadour, a conser–
vative man of letters, a Mediterranean man, an American who made
himself a European for love of the Romance languages and the songs
of their literatures. But we may not have heard the end of Davie's story
yet.
A few details, to finish with. Davie has a wonderful passage about
Pound's reading of Laforgue and Corbiere and Rimbaud, making the
point that "what Pound admired in these Frenchmen was what he
admired also in Crabbe-the naming of quotidian or ignoble objects
with an accuracy that depended on purging from the mind any sense of
the associations that had accrued to them: just that purged accuracy
was what constituted
le mot juste,
whether in verse or prose." I think
the point applies to modern American poets generally. I took part some
weeks ago in a seminar with Hugh Kenner in Dublin : our text was
Marianne Moore's poem "Virginia Britannia," and we agreed that
Miss Moore often deprives a word of its history and asso iations so that
she can improve its mobility. This is an American rather than an
English procedure. A final note about
Mauberley :
Davie says that when
Pound wrote of "conservation of the 'better tradition'" and put the last
two words in quotation marks he baffled many commentators "who
assumed that when they detected two traditions at work in a given
period, they were in duty bound to decide which is 'the better' ; to
