Friday Reading: Selling A Lume Spento
From K.K.Ruthven’s Ezra Pound as Literary Critic:
What were really needed to launch A Lume Spento properly were ghosted reviews: “I shall write a few myself,” he told his mother, perhaps recalling that Walt Whitman had written favorable reviews of his own Leaves of Grass, “and get someone to sign ‘em.” One such review is quoted by T.S. Eliot in a promotional pamphlet he wrote at Pound’s request and published anonymously…to boost the American sales of Lustra in 1917. The review is attributed to the London Evening Standard…. Pound calculated that if he could place such “genuine and faked reviews” in London and New York newspapers then “Scribner or somebody [could] be brought to see the sense of making a reprint.” Nobody did, but that hardly matters: for what is revealed in the first and unsuccessful attempt to market a literary commodity of his own is his conviction that literary texts make their way in the world not by some supposedly intrinsic merit as literature but by claims made on their behalf by criticism. The persistence of that conviction created one of this many disagreements with Amy Lowell about Imagisme. “Advertising is all very well,” she told Harriet Monroe in September 1914, “but one must have some goods to deliver, and the goods must be up to the advertising of them.” The metaphor she uses evokes the world of commerce, but the issue she raised had political implications: she thought Pound had “never learned the wisdom of Lincoln’s adage about ‘not being able to fool all the people all the time.’” But the history of criticism had taught Pound that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to enable a new way of writing to survive until its potential readership has been educated into appreciating it. He also knew that you sell a product by first stimulating desire for it and then supplying the demand. By 1920 E.E. Cummings was calling him “one of history’s greatest advertisers.”
Recognizing the prime importance of criticism in the circulation and reception of literary texts, Pound did everything he could to control it by telling people what they ought to say about them, especially about his own poems. Flint’s favorable review of Pound’s Ripostes (1912) in the March 1913 issue of Poetry and Drama was done with Pound’s assistance, although (Flint told Robert Frost a few months later) at Flint’s own request, because he “didn’t know what to say about the book.” Friends were also instructed in detail on how to defend him against unsympathetic critics like that professor of classics at the University of Chicago who ridiculed his Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919): one such reply-kit was sent to May Sinclair and another to A.R. Orage, each of whom incorporated it in a defense of Pound’s versions of the Latin. This dissemination of favorable accounts of Homage to Sextus Propertius was designed to create the illusion (especially in America, where the most adverse criticism had come from) that Pound’s latest work was being appreciated already by a discerning readership in London; and those co-opted into the deception went along with it because it helped establish their own reputations as acute critics of one of the most obscure modern poets. By the 1930s such practices had become so much a matter of routine to Pound that he would not have understood why a young American admirer of his poetry, Robert Fitzgerald, had misgivings about reviewing on Pound’s instructions the recently published Guido Cavalcanti: Rime (1932), edited by Pound, and placing his review either in the Criterion (edited by Pound’s friend Eliot) or the New English Weekly (edited by Pound’s friend Orage.)
Pound divided people into “wheels” and “cubes”: wheels “get things done,” but “you can’t lean on ‘em” because “they’ll roll out from under you”; cubes, on the other hand, are the “foundations,” because you can not only lean on but build on them. Cubes would understand the ends justify the means; if the only way of breaking the hegemony of a literary critical establisement is by ethically dubious reviewing practices, then these become inevitable, especially if you are convinced that the opposition habitually behaves just as reputably…. Pound was willing to double as a publisher’s reader in recommending that a certain book be published, and periodical reviewer in welcoming what he had already recommended. Both publishers and editors saw benefits in this practice. Publishers liked the guarantee of a favorable review without too much delay, and editors liked to have reviews of the very latest publications…. In special cases, like Eliot and Joyce, each of whom he regarded as his “discovery,” Pound would review the same book twice, using the opportunity not for diversification but for reiteration: “Joyce is a writer, GODDAMN your eyes, Joyce is a writer, I tell you Joyce etc. etc.”
The only people short-changed by these practices were readers naive enough to believe that criticism is produced by impartial experts.
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Fascinating. Modernist revolution as insider trading. Ruthven seems to approve, portraying the reader who expects critical disinterestedness & impartiality as a naive dupe. “Ends justify means.” But this kind of approach has all kinds of consequences, some of them hard to measure…
Every time you try to manipulate the reader & rig the system, you add another tiny fracture in the relation between art & its audience… there may be ripple effects over time.
If the Internet had existed, I have the intuition that EP would have haunted comment boxes on blogs and cultural news sites, and would have leaned on his friends to do so as well, on his behalf.
Thanks for the citation!
I wrote a paper once, back in the 80s, for a special seminar Keith Waldrop was running, for the Pound centenary… it was about the affinities between the jump-cut method of the Cantos & advertising techniques…
Ruthven’s other book is Faking Literature, published by Cambridge a few years back, an encyclopedic study of “spuriously” authored writing, which shows how incredibly extensive the practice has been over the centuries– practiced, indeed, by a number of canonical writers. Such writing is of course generally regarded, in polite circles (especially amongst the current “avant-garde” it seems), as a marginal, freakish kind of phenomenon. I think he refers to “faked” literature as the “repressed unconscious” of writing. I get a couple pages in it, actually. I think K.K. Ruthven might be his pseudonym.
Seems literary fakers have a special obsession with their own author status. Most writers are too caught up in the composition itself to focus much on that issue. & most writers recognize that to write is to put on a mask, to play a role, to act a part. Usually they just want credit for the care & effort they put into their particular role.
In my view, since “the Word became flesh & dwelt among us, full of grace & truth”, the Person exists in a dimension beyond all writing. The real interest is not in rendering ambiguous his/her ontological status : it’s in discovering the complex actual ground of same. Though I’ll grant the dialectical obsession of the fakers helps sharpen these issues… makes for conversation…
But Kent, it seems like you’re shifting away from the specific topic of this particular post. Could that have anything to do with your obsession with authorship, per se? This post is more about the theft of criticism by ambitious poets.
>Could that have anything to do with your obsession with authorship, per se? This post is more about the theft of criticism by ambitious poets.
Well, but the writing of pseudo-criticism under assumed identities has much to do with the matter of authorship and its various possible expressions, no? Correct me if I’m missing something.
I don’t think I’ve ever hidden the fact that I’m quite fascinated by questions and conundrums of authorship! Surprised that you seem to find this a fault: You, whose name is entered and punned upon everywhere in his work (Henry Gould may well be the most self-nominally obsessed poet living in America today), are not? :~)
That’s not a criticism. I find it totally endearing, myself.
You all see the piece in teh TLS a few weeks back on Tudor collections of manuscript poetry? Unprinted-because-over-the-line but circulated material…
Return of the repressed is most of my time!
Manuscript collections were often unprinted at that time because printing was only emergins as a real and desirable mode; ms. circulation was not lesser. It conferred many advantages, too: ease of production, control over circulation, intimacy, etc. But also protection, including political, as unlike printing no licensing was required. It was a mode we can scarcely imagine now, I’d say…
Reasons of politics, yes. And it was, to some extent, a “class” or status thing, too, wasn’t it, Don? In the Elizabethan period, a good number of authors associated with the court chose to not to publish (or to only do so anonymously/pseudonymously) because open, commercial publication was regarded as unseemly. The more demure practice of manuscript circulation for an audience of choice was more in line with protocol. This was one strong factor, it seems. The point is often used by proponents of an alternative Shakespeare authorship, as I’m sure you’re aware.
Class/status - too simplistic: how would you characterize ms. transmission of Donne’s work, really? Or even Marvell’s, though politics surely had to do with the latter. One thing seems clear: whether one was male or female had something to do with it. Cf. Lucy Hutchinson, for example.
Since there ARE no surviving mss. of Shakespeare, I don’t get the connection from which to draw conclusions… and as the transmission of plays was no doubt different from that of poetry collections, you’ll need to fill me in.
I mean: sincere there are no surviving mss. of S. I don’t know how to make any connections, or what evidence there is from which to draw conclusions.
Dam handheld devices!!! (No, not an iPhone.)
Don, I just meant that the Shakespeare authorship was pseudonymous and that there probably were, as part of the psychic mix of it all, social pressures related to “proprieties” of publication. Or so the argument goes. That the author (or authors) chose to not attach identity to publication. And wasn’t saying that the pressure to shun attributed publication was abided in all cases by poets attached to the court, nor that poets of commoner background like Donne didn’t circulate work in manuscript.
Dam handheld comment boxes!!!
> was pseudonymous
Not you too! Oh of course you too.
Why can’t Shakespeare have been a cagey ambiguous ambitious middle class kid out of nowhere?
How could he possibly have been anyone else?
>Why can’t Shakespeare have been a cagey ambiguous ambitious middle class kid out of nowhere?
Well, in the case of Jonson or Marlowe you certainly have “cagey ambiguous ambitious middle class kids,” though there’s a history in those cases to account for the learning and the work. But with Shakespeare there are a lot of big questions, and the “out of nowhere” in relation to the work becomes a bit untenable. Or at least makes the asking of questions reasonable. Not to mention the strong hints that only someone intimately connected to the court (and with experience of travel and knowledge of multiple languages, among other things) could have written much of the stuff. It used to be one was considered a loon for raising questions about the role of the Stratford man (one of the great Oxfordians, in fact, was named Looney, unfortunately). But things have been changing recently in that regard.
But don’t just say “Not you too!” to me. Say it to these folks: http://doubtaboutwill.org/past_doubters
Though the list is incomplete– there are a few Supreme Court judges missing.
OK fine. Also, Shelley didn’t drown.
Pseudonymous authorship, admittedly fascinating. & writerly motives for a nom de plume, various as a peacock’s plumage. But self- or group-promotional fake criticism seems particularly shady to me. A type of theft - fleecing the critic’s role - with few if any redeeming aspects.
John Latta has a post on this post, today, at http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/
Petered out. I thought I’d mention that Cavafy and Rilke are modern poets who circulated poems among friends rather than via print publication.
Stuart Blazer, of Providence, is another. But he’s not much heard from. Copper Beech Press published an interesting book of his about 30 yrs ago, titled “Ricochet”.