Showing posts with label Prose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prose. Show all posts

Sunday, March 24, 2024

 Ending Up

An Appreciation of B.S. Johnson



Even today, when asked at an annual physical if I entertain suicidal thoughts, I answer, no.  I’ve never been so desperate as B. S. Johnson; because, I knew at a young age, I had to get away from London.  True, I also suffered from desperation, it’s not uncommon among those that are young, but its force drove me away from England. 

I’m 80, older than B. S. Johnson’s 40.  I’ve overtaken the eleven years he had on me and then some.  I was born in London during an air-raid in 1944 when he had already experienced four years of war.   I’m finding many parallels now that I did not see then on those two occasions we met.  It seems more might have been lost in the fog of beery crowds that appeared at events held by the Poetry Society in London where I heard MacDiarmid and Bunting both give readings in the days of Eric Mottram.

I can claim to have one up on B. S. Johnson.  My initials are R. M. F. R.  I’m Michael Friend book-ended by two letter Rs.  In the U.S., where I live, BS is short for bullshit and MF means motherfucker.  A much worse imprecation.   

BS spent the war years separated from his parents, encouraged by letters from them to study hard for his eleven-plus, which he failed the same year that MF was born.  MF also failed his, eleven years later.  What was left of the war, MF spent frequently separated from his mother in the care of his grandmother.   

We both went to night school while working day jobs.   We both started degrees.  He finished his, having studied Latin and English.   I dropped out in my second term, part-time, having lost interest in the Sciences and discovered computer programming.  I didn’t study Latin until in my seventies.  We both had a communication with Samuel Beckett.

From reading Jonathan Coe’s biography, it seems B. S. Johnson never stepped over into the Computer Age.  Ironically, while he toiled as a bookkeeper and accountant, Lyons the Caterers, of Lyons Corner House fame, were demonstrating it was possible to replace humans with a computer named Leo. Their factory in London seems a likely template for Tapper’s, a place where Christie worked in BSJ’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry.  The first humans affected would be clerks capable of working with double entry bookkeeping, a topic with which Johnson was familiar.  He knew of its origins in a work by a Tuscan monk, Pacioli.  With his domain knowledge, a thorough grounding in accounting basics and how companies kept their books, he could have started a software company, Better Books, although that name had already been taken by John Calder.

Despite his erudition, BS missed the boat when it came to digital computing.  Just as I, with my computer skills, missed the boat when it came to writing.  I stopped writing and started making money, which turns out to be a somewhat creative process.  He missed having an ability to make a living at something other than being a freelance writer dependent on a London literary world to give him a living but mostly dependent on being a sports journalist writing about soccer.  MF experienced a little of the London literary scene and was happy to be well out of it.

I remember telling two friends in London once, that a poet should be able to make a living with his voice.  For me, that has meant being able to do well at interviews and obtain access to exciting opportunities.  Ultimately, I became a successful salesman, selling Cray-1 supercomputers worldwide.  Coe’s biography shows BSJ capable of asserting that he was somebody special in his dealings with publishers and others.  I never had such illusions although I always had confidence in myself.

BSJ lived in a world whose people were becoming surplus to requirements.  I escaped that world trained as a computer programmer by IBM.  Because of the money I earned in New York, tax-free, as a programmer with a science background, working for UNESCO, I could take time, several years, in England and Spain to write.  Mostly poetry.   As far as I can tell, BSJ never took several years off to write.  It seems ironic that he never had time because he was a full-time writer.

When I was writing in England, I lived in a remote forestry commission farmhouse called Roughside, in Northumberland.   At other times, in Holland Park, or Cabbell Street in London, and even, sometimes, at Foyers in the New Forest.  At the time, I met B. S. Johnson, I had run out of savings but been given an Arts Council Bursary of 500 pounds which kept me afloat for long enough for me to realize that life as a full-time poet meant a life of poverty and of mooching on friends.  I went back to work as a freelance programmer at British Rail making as much in a few weeks as I made in a year by writing.

While Christie Malry helped deliver wage packets to employees by hand, systems analysis was underway designing the software that would replace that function.  In an air conditioned, pristine computer room at Whitbread, I got my start in computing and saw first-hand how systems analysis was done at Whitbread’s head office during the early sixties.   I was a programmer analyst in a purpose-built computer command center below the street but above the cobblestoned cellars which dated from Shakespearean times.  We programmers had our own kitchen facilities and a fully stocked refrigerator.  We translated the logic flow charts the systems analysts gave us into computer programs.  We often worked through the night debugging software.  Given the nature of the business, there were also crates of beer in the kitchen. 
 
Colonel Whitbread lived upstairs in a private apartment.  He had a butler.  Gentlemen from the shires, sons of brewing families from Somerset or Warwickshire, had rooms across Chiswell street.  They also worked through the night supervising the brewery.  The Lord Mayor’s carriage was kept in view of passing pedestrians under the archway leading into the brewery courtyard.  It was rumored that the Queen Mother would frequently visit The City Cellars, a wine bar beneath the pub on the brewery corner nearest Moorgate.  We frequented both pubs but preferred the one facing Aldgate.

It was from such surroundings that cyber warfare began.  First computer programs took over the Finance Department, one ledger at a time.  They then conquered Sales.  Before long, they invaded Personnel, as well as Payroll, Supply Chain, Inventory.  Process control was robotized. Paper stock certificates became a thing of the past.  Archives started to become digitized on memory devices, not records on paper.  B. S. Johnson knew chaos was the coming thing.  But he didn’t live to see it commoditized.

He would have made a good programmer.  Putting together, or comprehending, Latin sentences is not unlike computer programming.  He seemed to approach the art of the novel as if it was a structure.  He wanted to furnish the structure with things like tunnels cut through the pages to give a glimpse of what was coming.  If only he had lived to realize how a novel could be packaged by a computer.  How special effects could be programmed into the text to leap from a Kindle-like screen so that a sex scene with Shrike and a vacuum cleaner could be re-enacted by actors, or, the splash of cyanide barrels falling into a reservoir could be heard.

As a programmer, he could have made a decent living, supported his wife and family.  True, it would have taken time away from writing but how much writing did he do?  Eric Mottram once told me that my own writing was a means for survival.  At the time, I did not understand what he meant although I agreed with his premise that whatever else I did, I would write, even if it was only a few lines here and there, as months and years went by. 

One of Ezra Pound’s last poems was his translation of a famous poem by Horace.  No matter how it is translated, the same assertion is made: “My poems will live on long after I am dead.   I will not die.”  Horace asserted this.  Pound did as well.  B. S. Johnson?

I first heard about B. S. Johnson when I was living in Manhattan, New York City.  My programming skills had snagged a tax-free job working for the International Education Authority (IEA) which was part of UNESCO.   IEA’s computer project was based at Columbia University, so I lived in a university-run apartment building, just off campus, Butler Hall, where the famous Indian journalist and novelist Inderjit Badhwar once pissed in the elevator to show his disdain of the building manager, a fierce thin woman with an Irish temper.  Inder and his wife Shama were about my age, early twenties, and we became friends.  One afternoon he and his wife took me to visit the New York office of Transatlantic Review, where we met Joseph McCrindle.   I was introduced as a poet.  McCrindle was looking for a poetry editor.  Was I meant to take him seriously?  At that point, I was an unpublished poet.  Inder had a job with a upmarket publishing house and was probably already in contact with Jack Anderson, whose syndicated column he would soon help write as an investigative reporter.   B.S. Johnson was not pleased when he heard this story. 

The last time I met B. S. Johnson was in a dingy, smoke filled, pub.  Frenchies comes to mind.  It was his suggestion.   I seldom went into pubs.  Most of my evenings were spent happily stoned with friends or writing articles I might try and get published, desperate for an income.  I remember having no more than half a pint, then leaving, probably unable to stand a round.   I was living on Barclaycard cash advances at the time and always short of cash not yet having taken the fateful step of getting another programming job.  I cannot remember who paid for my beer.  Probably the great man himself.  But it was clear we were not going to get on.  Michael Horowitz showed up, a slight, wiry man compared to bulky Brian, but I was not in a good mood.   Poverty isn’t any fun.  I was interested in setting up The Co-operative Front, whatever that was.  B. S. was looking to set up a cooperative publishing venture to allow authors to make more money from their work.  The meeting was to talk about this, but we never talked about it, or anything else, as far as I can remember. 

Some months later, I remember hearing BSJ’s name come up in conversation.  There was a classical guitarist, Brad, who was, it was implied, more than just a guitar teacher to BSJ’s wife.  I remembered that conversation when, later that year, married, living in the U.S., I read BSJ had killed himself.

I put pennies on a railway line in a poem published in Wolfprints 1971.  He did the same in Christie Malry.  His last contact with me was a letter rejecting some poems for Transatlantic Review.  He said my earlier work was better.  It was.



Dick Russell © 2024
 Richard M Russell

Saturday, January 28, 2017


Sallust's treatment of Sempronia reminded me of how Hillary Rodham Clinton was treated by parts of the U.S. and Russian media.  It struck me then, that her treatment by her Republican opposition was comparable with how Roman literature, in general, treated women.

Sallust's description of the Catiline conspiracy also illuminates the great divide between Left and Right in those days, similar to today's lack of bi-partisanship.

Could we speculate that, two years later: A. O. C. has inherited Hillary's mantle?

                                           Before the Age of Chivalry

In Bellum Catilinae, Cicero, a Roman consul, learns details about Catiline’s conspiracy from Fulvia, a woman Sallust describes as of noble birth, although another source dismisses her as merely vilissimum scortum, a cheap price whore.[1]   Fulvia betrays her impoverished lover’s boastings to her circle of friends, who, alarmed by hearing about dire threats to the Republic, endeavor to have Cicero, their new man, elected Consul to deal with this situation.  Fulvia’s informant is one of Catiline’s close conspirators who can no longer afford to buy her expensive gifts.[2]  He is, in fact, a disgraced former Senator.  From this, we can infer that Fulvia was a courtesan with access to influential people in Rome.  Cicero finds Fulvia invaluable in spying on Catiline’s intentions (Sallust 23).
If Fulvia was married, she was committing adultery, no doubt excused because of the value of her information and the general permissiveness towards educated women of her time.  In any event, at the time Sallust was writing, adultery was less of a crime than it became later under Augustus.[3]  If a prostitute, she was merely conducting her legitimate business.  There were strict divisions between women at that time.  “Roman society had almost no honorable place for women who never married.”[4]  By providing sexual services as well as entertainment, women could have a recognized profession even if it was one considered dishonorable.  Fulvia as a legitimate citizen, is likely to have had servants and staff who were illegitimate (mostly slaves).
In Sallust’s telling it is remarkable how many supporters Catiline’s conspiracy had.  Yet from among this vast multitude none were prepared to betray his cause for money when it was offered (Loeb 36.5).  Thus, the conspiracy was initially betrayed, he makes clear, by the agency of one person alone, Fulvia, who continued to act as Cicero’s spy.  It is interesting that to accomplish the plot of what he called an historical monologue, Sallust required the services of a woman, a meretrix; and, in Chapter 25, the passage on Sempronia, he describes one in detail.
 Sallust spends an entire chapter describing Sempronia.  Some see in Sallust’s description a resemblance to Catullus’ poems about Lesbia.[5]   This essay also suggests that Sallust and Catullus were both influenced by Roman comedy, particularly in the way that women are portrayed.[6]   Sallust depicts a stereotype of a courtesan, recognizable from Plautus’ play Menaechmi and others.  Whatever his intent, this chapter provides a diverting interlude in an otherwise somber story.  In any event, Sempronia has proven to be good box-office as Sallust’s work has survived!  
Chapter 25 comes as a surprise to readers of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae.  Sallust has been writing about the perils of allowing laziness and a luxurious mode of living to usurp virtues like those of hard physical work and integrity.  He has been critical of Rome’s moral decline.  This has been a constant theme throughout his work.  As discussed below, in this he was echoing a contemporary of his youth, the poet Catullus, who had written scathingly about the corruption of one of Caesar’s associates as well as the current depravity of Rome.[7]  Plautus, whose works were being performed a hundred years before Catullus and Sallust were born, also took up this theme.  For example, In Menaechmi, Plautus criticizes “the dubious practices of contemporary Roman businessmen” and the prevailing culture of Rome (Plautus 571-601).  In the same play, Plautus also depicts a meretrix, Erotium, who has similarities to Sallust’s Sempronia.
Sempronia is depicted as a woman of high social standing with a scandalous reputation.  Sallust alleges that Sempronia was one of those women who supported Catiline.  Such women he says had “first met their expenses by prostitution but later, when their time of life had set a limit to their traffic but not their extravagance, had contracted a huge debt” (Loeb 24.3).  He typecasts Sempronia as beautiful, a gifted musician and dancer, learned in both Latin and Greek, promiscuous, proactive in seeking sexual affairs with men, a liar, a debtor, immodest in language but, notwithstanding all her defects, excellent company.  Sallust allows nobody to come to her rescue with an opposing point of view.  Thus, it is possible an old woman still living at the time of Sallust’s writing could have been offended by his detailed description, his lack of chivalry, if chivalry to women existed in Rome then.   Sempronia is associated with the Catiline conspiracy on only one specific occasion in Sallust’s history as he mentions her husband’s house once being used for a meeting place, although Sempronia herself presumably played hostess for the conspirators, alone, as, Sallust writes, her husband, Decimus Brutus, was away from Rome at the time (Loeb 40.5). 
By choosing to write about Catiline, Sallust used a convenient story from recent history to mirror a contemporary, ongoing conflict between political factions in Rome, perhaps one in which Sempronia’s husband and children played an important part.  It is likely that Sallust was writing at a time when it was dangerous to take sides among competing factions.[8]  Among those dangerous to offend were those loyal to Octavian, Caesar’s heir, who would subsequently become sole ruler of Rome; senators, like Brutus, complicit in Caesar’s murder; those loyal to Mark Antony, or to Crassus, Cassius, other generals.
Catullus is thought to have died about ten years before Caesar’s assassination, but he would have lived to witness the Catiline conspiracy also, creation of the First Triumvirate.[9]   The twelve-line coda which Catullus wrote to end his longest work, an epyllion, Poem 64, credits the bad behavior of Roman citizens with driving the gods away so that they no longer honored mortals with their presence at events, festivals, state marriages.[10]  It has been suggested that Catullus used a famous marriage in mythology, that of Pelius and Thetis, as a vehicle to write, safely, about the marriage of Caesar’s seventeen years old daughter, Julia, to Pompey, thirty years older, in 59 BC, a marriage sealing the establishment of The First Triumvirate in 60 BC.[11]  Whether the bad behavior Catullus has in mind in this passage alludes to the uprising prompted by Catiline, or whether this was an editorial comment on the wedding of Pompey and Julia, or not, the passage would certainly resonate with Sallust.  If Sallust died in 35BC, after the turmoil of Catiline’s conspiracy he had seen both a Civil War eventually won by Caesar, then the struggles post-Caesar, including massive proscriptions, leading up to the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC and the marriage of Antony and Octavia (Octavian’s sister), reminiscent of the marriage of Pompey and Julia, in 40 BC.
Sallust credits Catiline with one of the crimes listed by Catullus in two lines of his coda, a father’s guilt at murdering his adult son to clear the way for a marriage to a young woman.  He cites Catiline’s subsequent guilt at murdering his son as driving Catiline in his conspiracy to lead a revolution against the State (Sallust 15.2-15.3).   Sallust is likely alluding to the Catullus lines when citing this same charge against Catiline.  Both Catullus and Sallust would have been in their youthful twenties at the time of the conspiracy.[12]  Sallust writes that Catiline was generally believed to have murdered his grown son to facilitate a marriage to Orestilla who was hesitant to marry when Catiline’s stepson was about her own age.  In Sallust’s account, he attributes to Catiline an acknowledgement that Orestilla’s wealth (and that of her daughter) had helped him clear away not only his own debts “but those incurred by others.”  (Sallust 35.3)
Catullus’ short coda is a condemnation of some of the same immoralities that Sallust will go on to enumerate throughout his much lengthier prose work.  By extolling long dead, hard-working, virtuous great grandfathers and older, who had built the Republic and its tributary empire, Sallust could indirectly imply criticism of current events, perhaps the excesses of the Second Triumvirate.[13]  
Clearly, Sallust had a purpose when devoting one of his sixty-one chapters to Sempronia.  A plausible reason could be that she was illustrative of how much support Catiline was alleged to have among the ancient, powerful, families of Rome.   Passages in Sallust indicate that both Crassus and Caesar could have been sympathetic or supportive of Catiline (Sallust 48.9, 49 and 52.1).  Also, her son, D. Junius Brutus Albinus, was later a conspirator against Caesar and one of those contending for power following the death of Caesar.  So Sempronia is more than a courtesan, she symbolizes Rome’s most powerful families.
Finally, there is the suggestion that if Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae is historical fiction, rather than an historical monograph, then Sallust was throwing in some spice to interest his readers, pointing out that women as well as men were jointly responsible for Rome’s moral decline.  After Sallust’s death the Emperor Augustus passed laws encouraging marriage and procreation as well as proscribing serious penalties for adultery.[14]  If Sallust was employing fiction to convey a story based on known facts, he could either have been writing propaganda for Caesar’s successors in Rome; or attempting a readable, definitive history, with some invention on his part, along the lines of what Cato was likely to have said in rebuttal to Caesar, when punishment for the conspirators was debated in the Senate, or, how Catiline might have addressed his troops before the death of all of them in battle.  Whatever his motive, he would have been influenced by the literary culture of his time when comedies by Plautus and other playwrights were popular.   In such comedies, women are often depicted as prostitutes, usually self-employed.[15]  In Menaechmi, Erotium is depicted as a business woman in control of her own house, presumably in a good part of town as she is the next-door neighbor of her wealthy client, Menaechmus, whose long-lost twin brother, also called Menaechmus, has just now arrived in town seeking his abducted brother.  Plautus gives us a vivid impression of Erotium.  We can assume she is attractive.  She has a professional cook working for her, as well as at least one maid and other attendants.   Like Fulvia and Sempronia, she enjoys receiving expensive gifts from her clients, even if they have been stolen from her client’s wife.  The character that Sallust presents named Sempronia is essentially the same woman as Erotium with the main difference being that Sempronia has a husband, albeit often out-of-town, and she is well educated in Latin and Greek whereas Erotium is described as stupid and ignorant by newly arrived Menaechmus II (Plautus 439).   In his time, women are thought to have had less access to education than at the time Sallust was writing.  If so, it could be said that Plautus provided a template of a typical meretrix that Sallust embellished in his history by bringing her up to date with an education and a husband.  Sempronia was presumably in a form of marriage that allowed her to be independent of her husband and in control of her assets.[16] 
Some Plautine imagery from the same comedy is also reflected in Catullus’ poems.  For example, in a footnote, the editor of a work on Plautus compares Erotium to a bird intent on a tasty morsel (Plautus 193 Commentary 158-9); suggesting that the word passer (masc. sparrow) would have been a better word for Plautus to use than meretrix (fem. prostitute), in the line meretrix tantisper blanditur dum illud quod rapiat videt (a whore fawning all over that which she sees as prey) thereby linking Plautus with Catullus, Poem 2.  In another footnote, a line or two later, the same editor contrasts Plautus describing how Erotium is so promiscuous as to smother a man’s face, almost bite off his nose, with kisses in appreciation of a gift (Plautus 194-195), with Catullus who wonders whose lips his former girl will bite instead of his (Cat. 8.18).
In Chapter 25, Sallust, despite devoting a full chapter to her, gives us only a list of the complexities inherent in a character like Sempronia.  She is merely a diversion from the main plot of the story he is telling.  Women at the time of Plautus are disposed of just as easily in the comedies.  In Menaechmi, a happy ending is two twins becoming re-united and deciding to return home to their birthplace together, leaving the women of one of them, Erotium and the aggrieved wife, behind with presumably no care for their future. Sometimes they might marry, sometimes they might get their freedom, only rarely are they dominant and powerful as in the play Truculentus.[17]   Sallust does not tell us what fate has in store for Fulvia and Sempronia.   We should probably assume that aspects of Sempronia and Fulvia resemble Catullus’ Lesbia, a married woman who had illicit affairs, one of which Catullus documented.   For Catullus and Lesbia there is no happy ending except that their relationship marks the first time in literature that a love affair was subjected to examination in a series of “mutually deepening poems.”[18] 
What meaning does Chapter 25 add to Sallust’s work?  Sallust dates Rome’s moral decline as beginning after the final destruction of Carthage when: “Fortune began to be cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs” (Loeb 10.1).   He also suggests that Roman manliness was contaminated by prolonged contact with the effeminacy of the East (Loeb 11.6).  He suggests that a man’s natural ambition to succeed in Rome’s increasingly confused culture made it easy for avarice to destroy honor and integrity (Loeb 10.1).  But, by his own example, admitted at the outset of Bellum Catilinae, he demonstrates that while he once let ambition compromise his own morals, he, himself, reverted to a higher standard (Loeb 3.3-3.5).   Thus, from the vantage point of Sallust’s peak of redemption, perhaps Sempronia is a reminder of his own misspent youth, of his own adulterous affairs, which are said to have included an affair with Fausta, daughter of the dictator Sulla, for which he was caught and flogged by Fausta’s husband.[19]   He craves a time when Rome was great, so that is why he is a supporter of Octavian, Caesar’s heir, whom he believes will make Rome great again.


Copyright © Dick Russell, 2017


Bibliography


Boardman, John, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray eds.  The Oxford History of the Classical
World.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986

Boatwright, Gargola, Talbert.  The Romans.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Catullus.  Catullus, The Complete Poems.  Trans. Guy Lee with an Introduction and Notes,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Lowe, N.J. Comedy.  Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Plautus.  Menaechmi.   Ed. A.S. Gratwick with an Introduction and Commentary. Cambridge:
            Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Sallust. Bellum Catilinae.  Ed. J.T. Ramsey with an Introduction and Commentary, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.









[1]Florus who wrote about 100 years after Sallust, probably in the time of the Emperor Hadrian. (Bellum Catilinae, Commentary 23.3, page 128).  An interesting research topic might be how a woman of Fulvia’s standing is treated in literature starting with Greek comedy through the present.
[2] Quintus Curius.  He is noteworthy for having been expelled from the Senate for immorality (Sallust 23.1 
[3] The Romans, 211.
[4] Ibid 209.
[5] Claus CLAS461 lecture on Sallust 25.
[6] For example, in an analysis of 21 comedies attributed to Plautus, fully 13 have plots that involve a meretrix: Asinaria, Bacchides, Casina, Cistelaria, Curculio, Epidicus, Menaechmi, Mercator, Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, Rudens, Truculentia.  Source: Comedy.
[7] Catullus xix
[8] As Sallust refers to Caesar in the past tense, we can assume Bellum Catilinae was written after his death in 44 B.C (Loeb 53.6).
[9] Catullus, Introduction, xviii.
[10] Catullus 64.397-408.                  After Catullus (64.397)

The gods will not come now impiety stains us
now that nobody desires justice for injustice
brothers killing brothers parents un-mourned

they will not come now to funerals
for a father wished death on his grown-up son
so he might marry her hesitant of his heir

they will not come now to marriages
for they see auguries in incest
even household gods flee such pollution

an evil mix blended thoroughly with madness
has turned them away they will not mind us
they do not want to dignify our feasts
not suffer their clear brilliance to be stained. 

[11] The Glenn Hughes Lectures.  Dick Russell Senior Paper for Professor J. J. Clauss. Summer 2016.  University of Washington.  https://www.academia.edu/28055193/The_Glenn_Hughes_Lectures
[12] Jerome’s Chronicle provides dates of birth for both Sallust and Catullus.  Catullus died aged 30, while Sallust lived to be 51.  Sallust was comparable in age to Catullus, possibly two years older than Catullus.
[13] Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, Introduction, page 5: Retirement from Public Life.
[14] The Romans, 211.
[15] For example, in an analysis of 21 comedies attributed to Plautus, fully 13 have plots that involve a meretrix: Asinaria, Bacchides, Casina, Cistelaria, Curculio, Epidicus, Menaechmi, Mercator, Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, Rudens, Truculentia.  Source: Comedy.
[16] The Romans 209.  A woman could elect for a manus marriage in which case she had no independence.
[17] Truculentus provides an example in Plautus of a dominant meretrix juggling three men at once.
[18] Catullus xxiii
[19] Sallust 4.

Sunday, August 5, 2012


The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Greek Gods

            The Cantos begins by retelling a key part of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey.  In Book 11 of The Odyssey, referred to as “the Nekuia,” meaning journey into the underworld, Odysseus undertakes a journey at the goddess Circe’s urging.   It is significant that Pound, using the story of Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War, chooses to start his long poem with this incident.  Odysseus sails with his crew to the “western limit” of the world to learn from the dead prophet Tiresias how he could return home to Ithaca.[i]   In the version of The Odyssey that was written down in Athens in the fifth century BCE, this passage comes roughly halfway, Book 11 of 24, through the work.  Pound, writing about 2500 years late, makes his own version of the myth to suit his needs.
            The Cantos refers to The Odyssey frequently, but Pound also freely invokes Homeric Hymns.[ii]   Pound assumes that the reader is familiar not only with Greek mythology but also with allusions to Classical Greece.  For example, he frequently refers to Aphrodite as Cythera, a name associated with the island of Cytherea where legend has it that Aphrodite was born out of sea foam.[iii]  Pound does not alter the attributes of these mythical figures; instead he deploys them to support the narrative thread of The Cantos.  For example, in Canto 23, and Canto 24, he includes allusions to Anchises, the father of Aeneas by Aphrodite, and the tale of Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle.
            Odysseus’ story is archetypal.  A man striving to return home must overcome numerous challenges along the way.  Not only does Pound make selective use of parts of The Odyssey in The Cantos, he also makes technical changes to Homer’s meter in Canto 1.  Pound had earlier published a translation about a sailor’s journey, entitled The Seafarer.[iv]  This poem is based on Anglo Saxon poetry from about 900 A.D., that is, probably a thousand years more recent than Homer.  Early Anglo Saxon poetry depended mainly on a four beat line, with alliteration, to drive its verse forward and so Pound’s treatment, condensing but not altering the sense of the Greek original, is markedly different in sound effects to the recent translation of The Odyssey by Robert Fagles.   For example, compare:  “Now down we came to the ship at the water’s edge/we hauled and launched her into the sunlit breakers first” (Fagles) with “And then went down to the ship/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea” (Pound).  Pound’s version is crisper and in the tradition of English verse while Fagles attempts to follow the hexameters of Homer.   Having translated just enough of Book 11 to set the stage for his long poem, Pound abruptly interrupts the flow of the poem with the phrase: “Lie quiet Divus”.  Research yields the information that Divus is the name of somebody who had translated The Odyssey from Greek into Latin.[v]  Once this is understood, it becomes clear that Pound, who had access to both the Greek and Latin versions of The Odyssey, created an English version using an antique verse format deliberately, to make the point that he is just the latest in a series of bards to tell, and reinterpret, this mythic story.
            Canto 1 stops translating from Homer with Odysseus’ return to Circe’s isle.  Then to round off this poem, Pound introduces an image he says is worthy of worship, “Venerandam”: Aphrodite bearing “the golden bough of Argicida,” Hermes’ golden wand.[vi]  This combines two symbolic figures.  Aphrodite typically symbolizes love and Hermes is the guide who conducts souls to the underworld.  However, both of these gods are also associated with inspiration and poetry.  In the next Canto, Pound begins to combine other historical eras with Classical Greece as he begins to weave the tapestry of Cantos that will ultimately number more than one hundred.  In Canto II, the story of Dionysus kidnapped by pirates has center stage with allusions to Homer, Browning, So-shu and Picasso and others including King Pentheus who features in a famous Greek play about Dionysus, The Bacchae, by Euripides.  These allusions come before, during, and after, the depiction of the pirate’s ship becoming festooned with ivy, grape leaves and vines due to the power of  “the male god of vegetation.”[vii]  The story of Dionysus and the pirates is taken from the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.[viii]  In Canto 2, Pound introduces the symbol of a Lynx, an animal sacred to Dionysus, and the Lynx will reappear later in the Cantos, particularly in Canto 79.
            In Canto 17, Pound devotes an entire Canto to the world of Classical Greece as he portrays images of Artemis, “the goddess of the fair knees…with white hounds leaping about her,” Zagreus (another name for Dionysus), and Odysseus cast up on the beach of the island of the Phaeacians.  This world is beautiful, fertile and full of light and comes as a striking contrast to Canto 16’s depiction of the “hell mouth” of the Second World War.[ix]  In Canto 17’s pastoral setting, Odysseus is depicted hiding in a cave near the beach, but we know, if we are familiar with The Odyssey, that Odysseus will soon be rescued.  The Pheaeacians will honor him and return him to his home on Ithaca.  From Pound’s translation in Canto 1, we know also that Tiresias prophesied that Odysseus would return home alone.   He will lose all of his friends and comrades either in the Trojan War or his return journey.  In Canto 16, which precedes the idyllic Canto 17, Pound mentions the names of his many comrades who died or suffered during World War 1.  Perhaps the reader is expected to draw the conclusion that like Odysseus, survivors of the Great War will now be able to return to a better world.
            Canto 79 is part of The Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was held captive in a military camp in Italy after the Second World War.   He had been arrested on charges of treason and was waiting to be sent back to the U.S. to face trial.  Dionysus is not mentioned in this Canto but his symbols abound as Pound contrasts the remembered fertility of an orchard with the bleakness of his captivity, held in solitary confinement in a wired cage.  In the subsequent Canto, Canto 80, Pound specifically compares himself to Odysseus, cast into the sea, before being washed up on the island of the Phaeacians: “hast’ou swum in a sea of air strip/through an aeon of nothingness,/when the raft broke and the waters went over me.”[x]  In Canto 74, which begins The Pisan Cantos, Pound had already identified himself as Odysseus: “I am noman, my name is noman.”[xi]  This is a reference to Book 9 of The Odyssey where Polyphemus, the Cyclops, has been blinded by “nobody.”[xii]
            When beginning to write The Cantos, Pound could not have anticipated the Odysseus-like travails that his own life would entail. At the beginning of The Cantos, written before 1920, Pound translates Homer to create a foundation on which to construct a modern myth that incorporates a larger world than Homer knew.  Pound will incorporate Norse mythology, the New World of the Americas, as well as China into the Classical World.  Later, as in Canto 79, written in 1945, it seems he is praying to the Homeric gods as he comforts himself with memories of antiquity.  Once again, Aphrodite and Hermes appear at the end of Canto 79, echoing the closing image of Canto 1.  Only now, in his prison cell, Pound needs Aphrodite’s love and Hermes’ guidance.
            “Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom.”  So begins Canto 81.  Pound refers to the sky god Zeus and to Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of fertility.  He is about to note that although Christianity is widespread there is little “religion.”    Again, Aphrodite (Cythera) is invoked to bless this union of earth and sky.  As the Cantos move towards completion, they were eventually abandoned unfinished, Pound continues to keep the Greek Gods nearby. In Canto 113, he writes: “The hells move in cycles/No man can see his own end/The Gods have not returned/“They have never left us”/They have not returned.”[xiii]  This appears to mean that while Pound knows in his heart that the gods remain omnipresent, they are invisible in modern life.  In the final published fragments of The Cantos, Pound states his desire to build an altar to Zagreus (Dionysus) and his mother Semele, the lover of Zeus.[xiv]  In the last fragment, he concludes The Cantos in the style of a Homeric bard:
                        “I have tried to write Paradise
                         Do not move
                                    Let the wind speak
                                                that is paradise.
                         Let the Gods forgive what I
                                                have made
                         Let those I love try to forgive
                                                what I have made.”[xv]

END
ENDNOTES


[i] Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 8th ed. (New York:             Oxford University Press, 2007) 20.530. 
[ii] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era.  (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1971) 361.
[iii] Morford, 9.179.
[iv] Ezra Pound, Personae, (New York: New Directions, 1971) 64.
[v] Kenner, 350.
[vi] Ezra Pound, The Cantos, (New York: New Directions, 1981) 5.
[vii] Morford, 13.311.
[viii] Morford, 13.315.
[ix] The Cantos, 68
[x] The Cantos, 513.
[xi] The Cantos, 426.
[xii] Morford, 20.527.
[xiii] The Cantos, 787.
[xiv] The Cantos, 801.
[xv] The Cantos, 803.


Works Cited
Homer.  The Odyssey.  Trans. Robert Fagles.  New York: Penguin, 1996.
Kenner, Hugh.  The Pound Era.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
            Press, 1971.
Morford, Mark P. O, and Lenardon, Robert J. Classical Mythology.  New York: Oxford
            University Press, 2007
Pound, Ezra.  The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1981.
Pound, Ezra.  Personae. New York: New Directions, 1971.


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