More on Pound

MoreonPound Wendy StallardFlory.Ezra Pound and 7heCantos:A Record of Struggle. New Haven: Yale Umversity Press, 1980.321pp. Forrest Read. '76:One World and . TheCantosofE:ra Pound. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.476 pp. Carroll E Terrell.A Companion to the Cantos ofE:wPound. Berkeley:University of California Pr 6 ,, 1980. VolumeI (Cantos 1-71 ).362 pp. .\nthony Woodward.Ezra Pound and the Pimn Cantos. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1980.128pp. Stephen J. Adams Thesefour books on Pound's Cantos are an ill-assorted lot. One, Carroll F.Terrell'sCompanion, is the single most important aid toward an understandingof this daunting text yet published, and it should be in the hands of every serious reader. I shall save it for last. The three critical books all have theirlimitations, though the most successful-Anthony Woodward on The PisanCantos-is a pleasure to read. The most curious thing about these threebooks is the way in which their value varies in inverse proportion to theirauthors' reputation, pretension and garrulity. The name of the late Forrest Read has been familiar to Pound scholars formanyyears as author of pioneering articles and editor of the collection Pound/Joyce (1967). He is the only one of the present critics to have made majorcontributions to Terrell's Companion. So the inanity of his enormous bookcomes as a shock. Not that the shock was unprepared. Read first advanced his thesis in a 1978 Paideuma article, on which occasion Paideuma's editor, Terrell, felt boundto editorialize: Forrest Read, he said, "is as completely conversant withthe text of The Cantos as anyone other than Pound ever was," but "personally I believe his whole thesis ... is ingenious but complete nonsense." 1 Sadly, I can only agree. Read,in his first six chapters, proposes that Pound had a complete but crypticplan for his Cantos from the start: this plan involved a complicated Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1982 246 Stephen J.Adams system of correspondences between the projected 100or 120sections andthe Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution (with Bill of Rights),the symbols in the Great Seal of the United States, and as well a mysterious calendar published anonymously in the Little Review in 1922.He pressesthese correspondences and others in elaborate detail, much of it numerological, that is hard to follow exactly. Indeed, it is hard to say whether Read'sideas are more cranky or his prose more crabbed. A sample: we may note the special application of the formula "ONE, ten, eleven, chi con me B,tan,.,.. to XVI Cantosand therefore also to the epitome for the whole poem. "ONE" referstoJas an archetype. I-IV is not referred to in the formula. "Ten" refers to I-X, in whichJhas become a first. For a coda "eleven" extends "ten" in its own terms (the fourth of four Malatesta cantos,Xl). "Chi con me" (who's with me?) shifts to the personal for the American XII. The ideogram for dawn refers to the hopeful Chinese XIII .... (p. 109) Obviously, the burden of proof for such an argument, so silly on the surface, rests with Read himself. But I will be surprised if his evidence convinces anyone. One could quibble endlessly about details- his way of wiggling numbers (thirteen sometimes equals ten), or his fantastic equation of the Great Seal with the card suits in Canto 88 ("the heart symbolizes the sunvision , the diamond symbolizes the Mount built on the shield ... the club symbolizes the constellation, and the spade symbolizes the shield on the Eagle's breast," p. 36). But the assumptions are wrong from the start. To begin, Read must foster a myth of Pound's "reticence about his poetry" (p. ix). Now, I can hardly name a poet whose hints, public and private, are more fully recorded; and I find it impossible to believe that Pound, frustrated by years of incomprehension, kept the key to his masterwork to himself.What he did say,in fact, was "I haven't an Aquinas map; Aquinas not valid now" 2 a familiar remark whose omission from this book verges on the dishonest. Although Pound's devotion to the Constitution (at least in later years)iswell known, Read...