The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (6 page)

So when Joyce asked Nora, “Is there one who understands me?” Nora said yes.

3.

Ezra Pound pushed the furniture to the edges of the study in Sussex so that he would have enough room to teach William Butler Yeats how to fence. Pound would lunge and retreat across the room while Yeats, twenty years his senior, would slash the air with his foil. They met in London in 1909, shortly after Pound published his first collection of poetry. A glowing review appeared in London’s
Evening Standard
: “Wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original imaginative, passionate, and spiritual. Those who do not consider it crazy may well consider it inspired . . . words are no good describing it.” Pound had written the review himself.

Pound began attending Yeats’s Monday dinner gatherings in London. He dashed about with his wild mane of hair, flung himself into fragile chairs, and leaned back in luxuriant repose. His black velvet jacket and facial hair—a long mustache and a tuft on his chin trimmed to a point—were part of his poetic regalia. His flowing capes, open-necked shirts and billiard-green felt trousers rankled London’s staid sensibilities. At one of Yeats’s gatherings, Pound began plucking the petals off the red tulips on the table and, one by one, he ate them. When the conversation paused, Pound asked, “Would anyone mind having the roof taken off the house?” At which point he stood up and began reading one of his poems in his unabashed American accent.

Yeats needed a secretary for the winter of 1913–14 so he could focus on his work. He wasn’t sure Pound’s nervous energy made him suitable for the job, but Pound admired Yeats, and Yeats, at the time, needed the admiration. He had written virtually no poetry in the seven years before he met Pound, and he was still fighting rumors that his career was waning. But the winter retreat deepened Yeats’s concentration. After breakfast, Pound could hear him through the chimney humming and chanting his poetry. Yeats would write while Pound read Confucius and translated Japanese Noh plays. When the afternoon weather was good enough to put away the foils, they took long walks or drank cider at a nearby inn. In the evening, Pound would read to Yeats from Wordsworth, Rosicrucian philosophy and
The
History of Magic
before talking late into the night.

Ezra Pound was a brilliant editor, a good essayist and a mediocre poet, which is to say he’s famous for all the wrong reasons. He thought good poetry was economical. Adjectives, for example, often obscured the object they tried to describe. He once wrote to another poet in exasperation, “Have you ever let a noun out unchaperoned???” When Pound edited one of Yeats’s poems, he cut the first seventeen lines down to seven and whittled the last fifteen to eight, slashing every unnecessary word he could find and getting rid of abstractions that he blamed on Yeats’s admiration for Milton. Pound had no patience for grand gestures to emotion. He wanted poems to treat objects directly—poetic emotions emerged from things.

This hardnosed turn from the ornamental and symbolic toward directness and geometric austerity—a precision suitable to the machine age—was happening in various artistic circles. Painters rediscovered hardness through cubism, and Pound drew inspiration from the stark lines of London artists like Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. When Yeats met Pound, Yeats was already abandoning escapist lyrics for poetry with “more salt,” as he put it. Mythical themes paled against dire news. “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” Yeats wrote in his poem “September 1913”—he was no longer, as Joyce had said, pandering to the Irish public.

For Pound, the hardness of art was something empirical. A good poem was not a matter of taste. It was either right or wrong, like mathematics or chemistry. “Bad art is inaccurate art,” he declared. To rail against adjectives was to defend the truth, though it was far easier for Pound to edit the truth than to render it. One day he stepped onto the platform of a Paris metro station, and in the bustle of people he caught a glimpse of a transcendent face. As he turned to follow it, he saw another, and then another. He labored over a thirty-line poem about it and reused repeatedly before tearing it up. He was still thinking about that moment six months later, but when he tried to write it again he failed. A year after that, Pound finally finished the poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” that cost him so much effort.

Two juxtaposed images, sharp and direct. No long-winded elocution, no tricks or persuasion, no tinsel or frills—there was not even a
verb.
He peeled away layers of rhetoric until all that was left was the epiphany. He named his theory of poetry
Imagism,
and he promoted it vigorously. He gave prescriptions for would-be
Imagists
. “Use no superfluous word.” “Go in fear of abstractions.”

Pound was reacting to what he considered contemporary London’s sloppy, ill-fitting verse—a hand-me-down romanticism—with a poetic style that was, above all, new. “The artist,” Pound wrote in 1913, “is always beginning.” Pound’s polemicism was a way to summon kindred spirits—his enthusiasm and his love of novelty anchored itself in clannishness. England’s literary world was a constellation of groups, and Pound wanted one of his own. By the end of 1913, he was compiling an anthology of
Imagist
poetry, and he asked Yeats if he knew anyone he should add to his collection. Yeats said that he did. There was a young Irishman, about Pound’s age, named James Joyce, who was unknown outside of Dublin but who might suit Pound’s tastes. Yeats talked about Joyce’s style and, it seems, his defiance and his abrupt departure from Ireland with Nora Barnacle, which had been the talk of literary Dublin. Yeats recalled a particular poem Joyce had written in 1903, “I Hear an Army,” and while he searched for it, Pound decided to type a letter to Mr. Joyce.

Pound’s letter was an unlikely request for materials. He never wrote to people he didn’t know, he informed Joyce, but he was willing to give him a try. Then he wrote out longhand, as an afterthought, “—don’t in the least know that I can be of any use to you—or you to me. From what W.B.Y. says I imagine we have a hate or two in common—but that’s a very problematical bond on introduction.”

—

WHEN EZRA POUND was seven years old, his parents told him to rewrite his letter to Santa Claus more politely. “My Dear Mr Santa Claus,” the revision began, “If it pleases you to send me the following list of articles I would be very much obliged if you would.” He wanted a tool chest, a battle ax and “a toy World.” He left the United States for London to plunge into the center of everything because provincialism was one of Pound’s enduring hates.

London was the largest city in the history of the world. With over seven million people, it was more than twice as large as Paris (the second biggest city), and the population had grown by nearly a million every decade since 1880. London’s spectacular productivity generated its growth. Forty percent of London workers manufactured goods (furniture, armaments, light bulbs) that were sold throughout the British Empire with the help of a merchant fleet that dominated the seas. Despite New York’s growing prominence, London was the financial center of the world. The city’s exchange markets set global commodities prices, and the world’s governments came to London to finance their projects. London’s unprecedented size made the British government a pioneer in law enforcement. The city established its first centralized police department in 1829, and Parliament empowered it with laws banning public prostitution, gambling and obscenity—all for the sake of controlling large populations.

Yet the years before World War I were among the most turbulent in the city’s history. As other nations began to challenge Britain’s economic dominance, real wages and employment rates began falling, which radicalized British trade unions. Coal miners, dockworkers and railroad employees struck simultaneously. Food lay rotting on the docks and London’s coal supply (over three hundred thousand tons each week) ground to a halt. British industries lost thirty-eight million workdays in 1912 alone. The political climate was just as volatile. Liberal electoral landslides led Parliament to cripple the power of the unelected House of Lords in 1911. The British aristocracy suddenly found itself without its traditional power to veto tax and spending bills, and their Lordships’ vetoes on all other measures became temporary. The fall of the House of Lords signaled the decline of the old social order. Ezra Pound came at just the right time.

The most disturbing change was a wave of radical attacks throughout England. Radicalism should not have been a surprise for a city that sheltered political refugees like Marx, Trotsky and Lenin, all of whom had lived among the socialists and anarchists in the East End. Bombs were planted to sabotage the water supply. Windows were smashed on Downing Street as well as in government buildings and shops across the country—they used bricks, stones and hammers. A steel spike was thrown through the window of Chancellor David Lloyd George’s cab, striking him inches away from his eye and cutting his face. Winston Churchill was horsewhipped at a train station. Empty houses, garden pavilions and churches were burned. Bombs exploded in Westminster Abbey, in churches, trains, castles and houses. Scotland Yard purchased its first camera to take surveillance photos of the suspects. They were all women.

England’s most determined radicals were suffragettes. Despite the decline of the House of Lords, Britain’s politics lagged far behind its culture. Women were earning university degrees, refusing unwanted marriages and becoming financially independent. In 1911, more than a third of London’s workforce was female—an increase of 22 percent over the past ten years. Women were more important to the empire than ever before only to find that they had no voice in national politics.

The suffragettes’ campaign for voting rights gained momentum when they began disrupting Liberal Party meetings in 1905. Suffragettes had no choice but to force their way into the democratic process, going beyond parades and Votes for Women banners. In 1910 several hundred women trying to storm Parliament met violent resistance from the police and male bystanders. Several women were injured, and two died. When suffragettes began hunger strikes in prison, the guards put them in straitjackets and used funnels to force-feed them semolina through their noses. At least one woman’s nasal membrane was torn away. The public outcry against force-feeding led Parliament to pass the Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed authorities to release a hunger-striking prisoner and rearrest her as soon as she was healthy again. Officials seized suffrage headquarters and intercepted their letters, but the hunger strikes continued, as did the arson campaign, the window smashing and the bombings. Several suffragettes plotted to assassinate the prime minister.

The revolutionary mood swept London culture as well. The first sign of change was the Grafton Gallery’s 1910 exhibition, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” Post-Impressionism was the catch-all term for a generation of artists experimenting in the wake of Impressionists like Monet and Renoir. Museumgoers muttered harsh judgments. “Admirably indecent” and “pure pornography.” One wall displayed a portrait of Madame Cézanne with bluish tones shading her flattened face. Her hands and dress seemed to have been left unfinished, as if Cézanne did not love her. One man laughed so uncontrollably in front of the portrait that he had to be escorted out of the gallery.

The Post-Impressionist show was unsettling partly because Londoners hadn’t absorbed Impressionism—England’s art world was decades out of style. In fact, the Grafton Gallery show was rather tame. Many of the paintings on display were from the 1890s. Gauguin and Cézanne were dead, Van Gogh was two decades in the grave, and the two most radical Post-Impressionists, Picasso and Matisse, were barely represented. Nevertheless, Post-Impressionism seemed to be a harbinger of social turmoil, as if the sketched, indistinct hands of Cézanne’s wife rejected centuries of Western civilization’s accomplishments. “To revert in the name of ‘novelty’ to the aims of the savage and the child,” one critic wrote, “is to act as the anarchist, who would destroy where he cannot change.” Anarchists, suffragettes and Post-Impressionists were militating against civilization.

For people like Ezra Pound, however, the Post-Impressionist exhibit was just the retail version of an underground art scene developing in Soho nightclubs and cabarets. After midnight, as London’s pubs issued their last calls, artists gathered in venues like the Cave of the Golden Calf at the end of a tiny lane off Regent Street, where a single electric light shone over the entrance of a cloth merchant’s warehouse. After knocking on the door, members and their friends lowered themselves through an opening resembling a manhole and descended a flight of wooden stairs into a large cellar with exposed beams latticing the ceiling. The walls were covered with goblinesque figures in orange and purple performing grotesque gymnastic feats. Golden Calf patrons watched Spanish gypsy dances, shadow plays and poetry readings. Cabaret singers and ragtime bands took their turns on the small stage, and half-drunk couples danced the Turkey Trot and the Bunny Hug, their chests pressed together until dawn. Even the women smoked cigarettes, and their hemlines were well above the ankle.

One of the artists to appear at the Cave of the Golden Calf was Filippo Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, who celebrated violence and dynamism rendered through an aesthetic of noise and speed. The veins swelled in Marinetti’s head when he imitated explosions and the ratatat of machinegun fire. The Futurist manifesto advocated wholesale cultural destruction, as if the future would not arrive until the past was burned away: “Set fire to the shelves of the libraries!” the manifesto commanded. “Deviate the course of canals to flood the cellars of museums! Oh, may the glorious canvasses drift helplessly! Seize picks and hammers! Sap the foundations of venerable cities!”