Ezra Pound's Radio Operas (review)

Few book covers are more appropriate than the cover of Ezra Pound's Radio Operas, by Margaret Fisher. Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1917 photograph of Pound shows him as sideways-looking and blurred. The image is a double exposure that makes it almost impossible to identify who Pound is.

One pleasant surprise is that Fisher's book does not merely discuss Ezra Pound's radio operas. Instead it is also a fly-on-the-wall view of how the BBC operated in the 1920s and 1930s. One revelation is that it was the Research Department that got Pound to the microphone, not the Music Department. At the time, Edward Archibald "Archie" Harding was head of the BBC Research Department. Fisher writes: "One of Harding's goals for the research section was to bring the best English writers of the time to the BBC." And indeed, for a special 1930 New Year's Eve broadcast, T.S. Eliot had been asked to do a translation of Francois Villon's "Le petit testament." But Eliot did not have the time for it. Pound's intelligence and connections made him a logical substitute. "With only two weeks before the scheduled broadcast, Harding sent a telegram to Pound asking for the translation." As a consequence Pound was brought in to the production studio, and an important historical relationship began.

Fisher describes the persona of an individual who was as much a political opportunist as he was an artist. Before his BBC experiences, Pound had been living in Italy, where he was involved in fascist politics. His love of ancient languages and his theories, such as Vorticism (not to mention his rabid anti-Semitism), made Mussolini's Rome seem like the perfect place for him. Throughout the late 1930s Pound spent much of his time defending fascism. When the war began, he surprised many of his former colleagues (and the literary world at large) with a series of fanatical addresses to American troops, which were broadcast on Rome Radio. The price Pound paid for his fanaticism was that after the war the name Ezra Pound became shorthand for the corruption of the intellect. The message was that if it could happen to someone as brilliant as Pound, then it could happen to anyone.

Fisher shows how in many ways Pound's radio opera productions at the BBC led directly to his fascist propaganda readings in Italy during World War II. It no doubt occurred to him that his personal and artistic influence could only increase when communicating with the huge audience that radio granted him. Pound was exposed to this possibility at the BBC while working with Harding. Having been the editor of one of the 20th century's most important books, The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, and a tireless promoter of James Joyce, he was already a powerful force in the literary world. But along with the power, there came responsibility.

Fisher's style makes one feel almost as if she had been there herself. This is the kind of voice that comes from knowing her subject very well. It is also the kind of writing that benefits readers on many levels from just plain old history, to biography, to even the nature of radio as a medium. She mentions in her acknowledgements that the entire book came out of a project by the composer Robert Hughes, who was working on a study of Pound's other opera, Cavalcanti. She had been developing a chapter for him when she began to examine her own subject more deeply. When writing about Pound, inevitably, the rest of the world creeps in.

Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1917 vortograph of Ezra Pound depicts a man who even looks like a shady character.

Ezra Pound's Radio Operas illuminates the turbulent 1930s, a decade when people everywhere were forced to take sides. After the world economy collapsed in 1929, people were faced with...