Posts From Author: ezra pound
Legalize Joyce!
A June day in Dublin would be a fractal of Western civilization. – Kevin Birmingham Kevin Birmingham‘s splendid first book is so packed with smut hounds, tortured geniuses, anarchists, and iconoclasts that it’s hard to pinpoint where its greatest pleasures lie. Although ostensibly an account of the publication ordeal and legal furore surrounding one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (The Penguin Press, 2014) casts a much wider net. As in Kevin Jackson’s excellent Constellation of Genius (reviewed here), there’s literary gossip aplenty. We first see one of its main characters, Ezra Pound, teaching W.B. Yeats to fence. Later, Ernest Hemingway teaches Pound to box and meets Joyce. The great Joyce, unable to see an assailant in a barroom quarrel, would instruct his rambunctious young friend, “Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!” From a present-day perspective, it’s also a valuable reminder of where we were, culturally, a mere century ago. “All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words,” wrote one of Ulysses‘s earliest reviewers, in London’s Sunday Express. Powerful censorship bodies on both sides of the Atlantic agreed, and between its publication date, […]
Read More1922 and All That: Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius
Let’s try to imagine the reactions of an unprepared, average reader of 1922, content with his beer and skittles and his Kipling. Suddenly, enter a skinny, shabby Irishman and a natty, quietly sinister American between them hell-bent on exploding everything that realistic fiction and Georgian poetry held dear. Enter also Pound, Proust, Freud, Hemingway, Kafka, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Le Corbusier, Chaplin, Buñuel… The cast list of Kevin Jackson’s marvellous journal of a watershed year, Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One, certainly justifies its title. It was a year bookended by the publications of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but to isolate the two would be to cut them senselessly adrift and Jackson wisely immerses us instead in context. He moves day by day, noting the major and minor biographical details of his subjects and the principal political events of 1922, from Mussolini’s rise to power to the Irish Civil War. Letters and diaries are ransacked for their contemporary insights. And there are some great one-liners, too (January 20, Iowa: “Christian K. Nelson took out a patent on the Eskimo Pie”). Here are ten things I learned: André Breton helped Proust with the corrections […]
Read More“everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes”: Susan Cheever’s E.E. Cummings: A Life
Susan Cheever’s new biography of E.E. Cummings (Pantheon Books, 2014), “one of the great and most important American poets”, begins with the two of them meeting. By the second half of his career Cummings had become a successful public speaker, supplementing the income he brought home with his poetry by accepting invitations to colleges and public venues across the US, and in 1958 he addressed Cheever’s girls’ school. Afterwards Cheever and her father, also a famous writer at this point, drove Cummings back to New York. He’d made quite an impression. “It wasn’t those in authority who were always right,” recalls Cheever; “it was the opposite. I saw that being right was a petty goal — being free was the thing to aim for.” Cummings’s life and work, in Cheever’s splendid book, exist in a state of constant tension between these forces of freedom and authority. Edward Estlin Cummings was born into a well-to-do family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He was well loved and received generous encouragement in his artistic development from his mother, who greatly desired a poet-son, and his uncle George, one of many influences on his early poetic development. Estlin’s was a mostly happy childhood — […]
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