Literary Gossip

The precise motive behind the writing of this book needs to be ravelled out – for, as the dustjacket blurb specifies, it is neither definitive biography nor literary criticism. The author has side-stepped the massive problems of evaluating Pound’s poetry and interpreting his personal and literary motives.

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Her view of Pound rests on the primary assumption that because he is an important writer a reconstruction of the milieu, principally Edwardian, in which his youth was spent, must be of maximum interest. But reality is not in itself interesting (if Oscar Wilde didn’t say this, he should have) – or rather, its interest is best served by uninhibited gossip. In a sense this book belongs to the genre of high-grade literary gossip. But it lacks the sharpness necessary for success in this genre – who quarrelled with who, who slept with who – those clearcut anecdotes which made (for example) John Brinnin’s book on Dylan Thomas so thoroughly readable and unpleasant.

Thus Patricia Hutchins’s book falls between several stools – neither biography nor criticism nor part of the annals of popular legend. One finds instead an assiduously collected magpie-stack of more or less unsorted facts, events, quotations and opinions. Pound’s own dismembering and iconoclastic spirit does flash out at times through the cracks in the book; but even the sense of literary revolution, thunder among the tea-cups, is all but stifled. One would get no idea from this book just why Pound was able to invigorate T.S. Eliot. I am driven to quote a key passage from the author’s Introduction: ‘. . . Pound’s later interests have alienated a few acquaintances and there is still much suspicion of his motives. Yet to those who knew him during the Kensington years, as Harriet Shaw Weaver said, with a little laugh in her voice, “He was always awfully nice”’.

This twaddle is simply inadequate as comment on man or artist. One turns back with a sigh to the scabrous inscrutable Cantos. If you want to know who Ezra Pound met in London before the First World War, and where he met them, Patricia Hutchins’s book can tell you about it.

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