The previously unpublished pages of Pound’s great poem highlight its visionary grandeur
Ezra Pound’s life is worth several fictions, but one unlikely novel he turns up in is Elmore Leonard’s Pronto, where a Miami Beach bookie, Harry Arno, uses the money he has skimmed from his bosses to retire to the Italian town of Rapallo. Rapallo has obvious attractions for a small-time fraudster on the run – the food, the climate, the girls – but the real draw, we discover, is Pound. Arno was a US soldier in Pisa in 1945, where the poet, imprisoned for treason, was in an outdoor steel cage writing what would become the Pisan Cantos. They spoke, and Pound read Arno a couple of lines: “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity …” Two decades later, Arno returns to Rapallo, and sees Pound, in his 80s and accompanied by his mistress of 50 years, Olga Rudge, in a restaurant. Arno speaks the lines back to him but Ezra “walk[s] right past to the can, doesn’t say a word”. This is 1967: it’s late Pound, the last Pound, the mythical, Lear-like old man, who wrote, in “Canto 116”, “my errors and wrecks lie about me”, and who, after a performance of Endgame, told Beckett: “C’est moi dans la poubelle” – that’s me in the dustbin.
Arno’s fascination with Pound’s poetry will resonate with readers of The Cantos: we recognise their vastness of conception, we may admire the grandeur and the hubris of a poem that sought, as Pound put it, to “include history”, that tried to describe the interconnectedness of things, to “make it cohere”. But what we are drawn to first is the fragmentary, the broken, the lyrical; the contemplative, almost-whisper of a voice that floats free of the rambling, shouty, megaphone epic that TheCantos became. As Joyce, Arno’s girlfriend, puts it: “He spent 40 years writing a poem that hardly anyone in the world can understand.”
The gondolas dying in
their sewers
& she, Olga, with serene
courage
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