One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott (review)

Douglas Paige’s The Letters of Ezra Pound (1951) was the foundation stone on which Pound scholarship rested for many years. Wyndham Lewis in his New Statesman review wrote, “The Letters of Ezra Pound are a pedagogic volcano. One of the finest poets of his time, his gift was indissolubly linked with the function of prophet and teacher. He could not create without at the same time teaching and he could not teach except as a product of creation [. . .]. He is a double-barreled genius of simultaneous action. But whereas his teaching is volcanic, his creation is a highly disciplined discharge” (Lewis 1965, 198).⁴ From the several thousand letters Paige is known to have examined, he published 384 selected from 1909 to 1941. In the decades since Paige, Pound’s incredibly rich and varied correspondence has appeared in volumes which isolated his relationship to particular individuals and institutions (i. e., The Little Review).

When Lawrence Rainey surveyed the editorial practices at work in making Pound’s correspondence available to the public, there were nine volumes (Rainey 1994). Today there are twenty volumes of Pound’s correspondence available — a far cry from the two available to Hugh Kenner when he published The Pound Era in 1973. The two most recent additions are Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929 (de Rachewiltz, Moody and Moody 2010, which published 849 letters) and the Miranda B. Hickman volume here under review, which collects the 109 extant letters Pound exchanged with Stanley Nott (1887–1978), an enterprising and politically sensitive English publisher, between 1935 and 1939.

Whether James Laughlin, the owner of New Directions and the principal advisor to Pound and to Dorothy Pound (acting as the Committee for Ezra Pound), envisioned the vast undertaking that the correspondence would become when he authorized the Pound / Joyce correspondence (1967) is not clear. Laughlin wanted saleable volumes, and linking Pound with his contemporaries (Joyce, Williams, Cummings, and others) was a way of making him palatable to the general reader. He discouraged overzealous scholarship which might increase production costs. Pound possessed, Rainey notes, “an uncanny sense of the page (or mutatis mutandis, the postcard, the leaf of stationery, etc.) as a physical medium — not as a bearer of ‘pure’ information, but as a unit of display”. There was no uniform editorial approach to the New Directions volumes, and editors had a free hand to decide how to present Pound’s distinctive, idiosyncratic style. Each editor seems to have had a wide mandate as to how to select letters for inclusion. One’s admiration, for example, goes out to Barry Ahearn who had the difficult task of selecting 96 letters from the 430 extant Pound / Zukofsky correspondence for his 1987 edition. It was a loss for modernist scholarship that Emily Mitchell Wallace was frustrated in her attempt to edit the complete correspondence of Pound and William Carlos Williams (1907–1963). Hugh Witemeyer’s selected EP / WCW letters (1996) published approximately 30% of the extant letters.

Hickman in her Editorial Principles acknowledges the influence of Rainey’s thinking on how to edit Pound’s letters. Her edition follows the principles of documentary (“diplomatic”) editing. But unlike Timothy Materer, who edited the Pound / Lewis letters (1985), she presents the nuances of both Pound and Nott in a manner which remains legible. She has been guided in part by Wyndham Lewis, whose letter to D. D. Paige of 25 October 1948, she quotes in her Editorial Principles, “E.P.’s letters tidied up would no longer be E. P.’s letters. The ‘old hickory’ flavor is essential. The more ‘Waal me deah Wyndham’ you have the better. Change this to ‘Well my dear Wyndham,’ and it is somebody else speaking-writing. It is not a Yankee-exoticism...