Art for whose sake? Reading Pound's reputation in Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words and The Trials of Ezra Pound

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 1998/1999 by Donna Krolik Hollenberg

In these works about Ezra Pound, Timothy Findley engages the disturbing legacy of this modernist predecessor, whose fascist sympathies have not precluded praise by the academy. The majority continue to separate Pound's poetry from his politics, the art from the man. Findley's works, I argue, encourage us to remove this cordon sanitaire around Pound. Through several framing techniques, Findley validates opposing points of view. He encourages readers to understand the subtle psychological realities that inform Pound's reputation, to question the basis of his primacy and to reconnect aesthetic with ethical values.

Dans ces travaux sur Ezra Pound, Timothy Findley engage le legs perturbant de ce predecesseur moderniste, dont les sympathies fascisantes n'ont pas empeche les louanges du monde academique. La majorite des critiques continue h separer la poesie de Pound de sa politique, l'art de l'homme. Les ecrits de Findley, d'apres moi, nous encourage a eliminer ce cordon sanitaire autour de Pound. A l'aide de techniques de cadrage, Findley rend valide des points de vue opposants. II encourage les lectrices et lecteurs a saisir les realites psychologiques subtiles qui nourrissent la reputation de Pound, afin de questionner la base de sa predominance et de rdtablir le lien entre l'esthetisme et les valeurs ethiques.

Books are mediators between our desire and our despair. . . they set down questions and arguments that, by their very nature inside fiction, prompt us to think again about our response to being alive. (Findley, Inside Memory 188) In his workbook Inside Memory, Timothy Findley records two memories that enable our understanding of his imaginative engagement with the disturbing legacy of Ezra Pound, whose fascist sympathies did not preclude praise by the literati after World War II. In relation to that legacy, Findley recalls his mentor, Thornton Wilder, admonishing him to take seriously his place in the literary tradition. "Know where you enter," Wilder advised him back in 1955, "know where you enter into the literature of your language ..." (33). In a later entry, Findley recalls coming upon a book of unofficial photographs of the victims of Dachau when he was in his twenties, and he describes the indelible impression made upon him: "Of course I could give the pictures a context.. .. But nothing - not my nightmares, not the worst of my imagination, not the worst of my experience - had opened the door on the remotest possibility of what I saw that night. I was looking into hell - and hell was real" (310). This "revelation of horror" made him realize that "We are all a collective hiding place for monsters" (311).

In his novel Famous Last Words (1981) and his play The Trials of Ezra Pound (1994), Findley takes up the imaginative challenge implicit in this pair of memories: he places Pound's literary reputation in the context of awareness of the Holocaust, and he attempts to reconcile Pound's politics with his status as a poet.

In so doing he raises questions that bring into focus the postmodern writer's moral and psychological dilemma. As he said in an interview, "How could writers advocate what Hitler was about?... What was Ezra doing there - or any of these people?"(Shields 87). Further, Findley passes this dilemma on to his readers, particularly those of us in the academy who teach modernism. By manipulating our sympathy and judgement in these works, Findley makes us participants in the continuing debate about the value of Pound's contribution to modern literature. Findley's engagement with Pound, his precursor and bete noir, provides a moral filter for his readers. We vicariously experience, understand and reject the dark side of Pound's imaginative power: its unconscionable alliance with brutality. Consequently, we question his ascendancy in the canon. In this paper I investigate the ways in which Findley's writings about Pound encourage this process in the reader. I conclude with a recent letter from Findley to myself that, interestingly, recasts his ambivalence about Pound as univocal reconciliation.

The debate about Pound became public when he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos in 1949, despite his fascism, anti-Semitism and indictment for treason. At that time, the committee of eminent American poets who awarded the prize did so on the basis of an "objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest," separating his poetry from his politics, the art from the man (O'Connor and Stone 45). The equally eminent critics of the award countered that the twisted elements of Pound's philosophy and the anti-humanistic role he played in the struggle of the times had also corrupted his poetry. These arguments have been developed in the proliferation of books and essays about Pound since then, the majority of which have upheld Pound's literary honour.

The critics who support Pound's literary reputation employ aesthetic criteria that downplay his racism and the political reality from which his work emerged. They focus on his early poetic innovations, his criticism and his influence upon other writers, and they argue that his technique of collage in The Cantos - in its "indeterminacy" - unsentimentally engages the evil and carnage of our age (Perloff). Their only suggestion that Pound's value system may have been objectionable is to point out instances of selfrecrimination in The Pisan Cantos. Even those critics who have argued that Pound's influence is degenerative, by clarifying his connection with fascist politics, have done so largely on philosophical and sociological grounds rather than on aesthetic ones (BarYaacov). Until very recently, the split between Pound's poetry and his politics has been perpetuated,1 thus ensuring Pound's continuing centrality in the modernist canon as well as discrediting the legitimacy of "question[s] of conscience" as a viable perspective from which to critique that centrality (Bar-Yaacov 25).2