Ezra pound's Cantos: "A memorial to archivists and librarians"

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 1999 by O'Driscoll, Michael

Victor Plarr, for his part, takes on an even more significant, though at times even more ambivalent, identity in that he pre-empts his role in the Cantos as the Monsieur Verog of Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley":

Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,

Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,

I found the last scion of the

Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.

For two hours he talked of Galliffet;

Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;

Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died

By falling from a high stool in a pub ...

But showed no trace of alcohol

At the autopsy, privately performed

Tissue preserved-the pure mind

Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;

Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued

With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.

So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood,"

M. Verog, out of step with the decade,

Detached from his contemporaries,

Neglected by the young,

Because of these reveries. (Personae 190)

Plarr serves in the poem as a representative of the 1890s, a period Pound regarded as certainly passe, but also preferable to his present. Plarr stands in opposition to the two more contemporary portraits that follow: Max Beerbohm ("Brennbaum" in the poem), steeped in English correctness; and the materialistic Mr. Nixon, typical, according to Pound, of the degeneracy of his contemporaries. According to biographer Humphrey Carpenter, Pound regularly spent Sunday evenings at Plarr's home in Kensington, taking in "the slightly outre details of celebrated lives that Plarr delighted in providing: the sort of details that would eventually build up the texture of the Canto" (120). The catalogue to which the poem refers belonged to the Royal College of Surgeons, where Plarr worked as a librarian during his acquaintance with Pound. At this point in Pound's career-prior to his direct engagement with the indexical in his revisions of The Waste Land, editing of Ulysses, and writing of the Malatesta cantos-Pound seems to treat Plarr's task of "perfecting the catalogue" with a certain amount of disdain, tempered by a fascination for the character himself. This is the kind of engagement with the material of culture and its keepers to which Pound will react, time and again, with mixed emotions.

Given Plarr's double status in Pound's estimation, it is no surprise that he next appears in the transient ambivalence, the real-life purgatory, that is Canto XVI, midway between the Hell Cantos and the paradise of Canto XVII. The poem's narrator falls asleep in the grass and hears a voice; it is Victor Plarr's: Here the narration is given over to Plarr-the tag on the right margin is Pound's own-much as it is in "Mauberley." Plarr here recounts the famous charge of Galliffet and the liberation of Strasbourg from the Germans in the FrancoPrussian War. Given the importance of memory, forgetting, and its relationship to cultural preservation through both Guide to Kulchur and the Cantos, Plan's reminiscences may well carry a distinct significance for Pound. More importantly, however, his status as a storyteller and his penchant for oral narrative reinforce his identity as one who is "out of step," regardless of his employment as a cataloguer, with the print culture that Pound both despises in the Hell cantos and for which he attempts to compensate in his subsequent poetic and critical efforts.