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

When we read Findley's Famous Last Words and The Trials of Ezra Pound, questions of conscience again become paramount.3 We make identifications and judgements that clarify the psychological and aesthetic issues at stake. Findley places us in the position of moral and aesthetic arbiter by means of two main artistic strategies: first, he blends fiction with history in order to underscore the power of storytelling to evade as well as to accept moral responsibility; and second, he inscribes into the text a chorus of opposing "readers" whose views differ. These chorus characters allow us, as readers, to engage in an internal debate that brings into focus our responsibility for the story's reception and transmission (Marshall 17-22). As Findley's view of Pound develops from the novel to the play, his incorporation of minority voices alerts us to the need for new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and society at the end of the century.

Like D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel or E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Findley's Famous Last Words deliberately blurs the distinction between fiction and history in order to achieve, as he puts it, "the clarity obscured by facts" (Inside Memory 181). In this case the subject to be clarified is the reader's response to the fascist sympathies of some high modernists, most blatantly, Ezra Pound. Findley chooses Hugh Selwyn Mauberley as the main character of his novel, a character first conceived by Pound in a suite of poems on which Findley draws in several epigraphs (Scobie). Deliberately blurring the boundaries between fiction and history, Findley bases his fictional Mauberley on Pound's character, while also giving him a life of his own that initially appears less reprehensible than Pound's. Indeed, to increase the illusion of Mauberley's separate existence from Pound, the older Pound is included as a minor character, who is full of "venom" as he prepares to present himself to his "FE LOW AMERICAN SONS OF BITCHES" on the occasion in which he was indicted for treason (Famous Last Words 7). Although once a devoted disciple of Pound and also a fascist collaborator, Findley's Mauberley is now at odds with his mentor over Pound's continuing adherence to fascism at the expense of his art. From his point of view, Pound has given up poetry for politics: "all the old traditions of order and articulation fading under the roar of bombast and rhetoric" (5). Findley's Mauberley differentiates himself from Pound on the basis of a purer aesthetic enterprise. Unlike Pound, the character, who plans to give himself up to the Allies, Mauberley tries to escape to an abandoned Austrian hotel, "the Grand Elysium," where he carves his last testament into the walls for posterity before he is tracked down and murdered.

In ways that remind us of the historical Pound, Findley presents Mauberley as essentially unreliable. His aesthetic enterprise, which he describes as the desire to bear witness, coincides with an inner weakness that ensures his entrapment in the perfidy of the rich and powerful. In flashbacks, we are shown a rootless, vain aesthete who went to China as a young man under the influence of his mentor to immerse himself in its culture.4 While there, as much interested in social climbing as in art, he befriended the glamorous Wallis Simpson, the soon-to-be Duchess of Windsor, whose unscrupulous ambition to be queen mirrored Mauberley's own fantasies of artistic supremacy. In the time frame of the novel proper, during which Mauberley is middle-aged, his writing on the wall is his mea culpa: he recounts how, through Simpson, he became a witness to, and participant in, the rise of fascism, eventually becoming an accomplice to murder in the service of an (imagined) international cabal. Thus, while not referring to Pound directly, Findley's portrait of Mauberley cleverly reminds us of aspects of Pound's biography: most crucially, his adherence to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that poisoned much of The Pisan Cantos, and his alleged mea culpa during incarceration at Pisa.5