Among passages from Ezra Pound that I can never get out of my head is a short stanza from his magnificent suite, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts). The suite is an excoriating, yet purposely flip inventory of the world that was emerging from the Great War of 1914-18; the dawn, as I would put it, of the post-modern era, or hyper-modernity, if you will.
“All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says; / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days.”
The greatest poets are prophets, often in spite of themselves. As everyone knows, this was Pound’s case: for he ended up spouting malicious nonsense, over Mussolini’s propaganda radio station, and had to be incarcerated in a mental asylum after the Second World War, as a legal device to spare him from hanging for treason.
His final Canto, collected at his death in 1972, says it all:
“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.”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who seems to be in vogue at the moment, for reasons I wish I didn’t understand, is famously another of these. A man of mixed angelic and demonic possession, he wrote some of the slimiest anti-Semitic pamphlets ever to serve the Nazi cause, possibly in the sincere belief that he was being droll.
Trained as a medical doctor, he’d also selflessly served the poor of a Paris slum, without payment, and was unspeakably gentle with children and animals.
But he would not be remembered at all were he not, perhaps, the greatest manipulator of the French language in the 20th century, and among the greatest satirists in any language, who could disembowel a poseur in two or three words. He is also the man who wrote the account of the smashed boxcars of a demolished Europe that will stand the test of time.
Writers like the perpetually cool George Steiner have devoted academic careers to dining on this paradox. In a review in the Times Literary Supplement, earlier this year, of Céline’s freshly edited Lettres, he makes the same point made repeatedly before: that the man was not only genius, and monster, but the two of them in one indissoluble package. It is not as if the utterly vicious, Jew-baiting tract, Bagatelles pour un massacre, were not as brilliantly composed as the epic, Voyage au bout de la nuit.
My university-nurtured readers may supply several other names for this category of 20th-century prophets wandering over freely to the “dark side.”
They were not just poets.
Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher of considerable reputation, actually thought his way into the embrace of the Nazi Party.
Jean-Paul Sartre, with all the genius at his command, bought Communism. That these evils are not equated (Nazism and Communism) is only a function of the bias of the academy which, for decades now, has been unable to discern enemies on the nominal Left, and worship a beret.
To my mind, the poets are more worth reading. (Céline I count unambiguously as a poet, though he wrote in a form emulating the novel.) Curiously this is because they are less responsible: they say what comes to mind whether or not it is compatible with what else they have said; and the grand system they seem to be presenting is purely feigned—a trick founded only in continuity of voice.
Whereas, a Heidegger or a Sartre may come very close to saying something systematically intelligible. And that means every word is infected with the same disease.
But let us get back to the moral of this column, that began with that motto from Ezra Pound.
In his cute inversion of the sound-bite Heracleitus—the pre-Socratic thinker who is believed to have taught that the only reality is constant change—he exposed the notion itself for a lie. And, moreover, he exposed it for a lie that pins together almost every aspect of post-modern life, and provides the excuse for doing everything in a tawdry, cynical, dysfunctional way.
In his heart, the hyper-modernist not only still believes in progress (or, “hope and change”) in the face of all evidence to the contrary. He also deeply believes that nothing matters, because everything is going to change anyway. Hence his inability to make anything worth keeping.
We have a society that ought to be haunted by Chartres: by the fragments of our landscape over which great steeples once rose, declaring truth in stone meant to outlast ages. Instead we look around at a clutter of cheap franchise operations; and traffic accelerating from nowhere to nowhere.
Of course, things are much worse today, in this regard, than they were in 1919.
You have only to go to a flea market to realize that almost everything in those days was better made.
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