Pound-Lewis: the letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

IN HIS 1951 review of Ezra Pound's Letters, Wyndham Lewis described the tone as "authoritative, not to say pontificatory," but said that "his rock-drill action is impressive: he blasts away tirelessly, prodding and coaxing." So the correspondence of two of the most lively, energetic, and original minds of the twentieth century was bound to be interesting. Pound and Lewis had collaborated on BLAST ("the great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus"), criticized each other's work, portrayed and parodied each other; and Lewis had done a number of brilliant portraits of Pound. Since both men had notoriously rebarbative personalities, only profound mutual respect could have enabled their friendship to survive the vicissitudes of poverty and prison, blindness and madness.

Timothy Materer of the University of Missouri has done an excellent job of transcribing and annotating these learned and allusive letters, and has provided an illuminating commentary on each phase of the friendship. And yet the exasperating style and repulsive content of Pound's letters after about 1930--when he became obsessed with economics, fascism, and anti-Semitism, and lapsed into a private language--make them torture to read. Some of his puns are mildly amusing (Bertie Rustle, Wm. Jim. [James], Dustyoffsky), but his style is intensely irritating: "Vurry nobl blast, but I dunno az on the interlexshool plane I can accept all yr dicta"; "EF you must diddle an MONKEY with problumbs you take a GNU canvass or paper an you do a ABtrakk dEEsign." Lewis soon conceded: "I am not very good at deciphering his impulsive and temperamental script," and found Pound's last letters impenetrable. Now that we have the Authorized Version, with all its baffling eccentricities, someone at the New Directions temple ought to translate Pound's gospel into a more comprehensible Revised Standard.

The 252 letters go from 1914 to 1957 (a month before Lewis's death), with a hiatus during the Second World War. Since the best ten letters by Pound and 23 letters by Lewis have been previously printed, and all the unpublished letters have been used by both men's biographers, this collection does not significantly alter our view of their characters and careers.

The main emphasis of the early letters is on how the loyal Pound can get Lewis money, publishers, exhibitions as well as--through the influence of powerful patrons--promotion to officer and then transfer out of the Royal Artillery. Lewis was temperamentally unfit to do any good for himself "in the subterranean galleries of our Aristocratic Golcondas, or amongst the peevish streams of remoter Klondykes." But Pound was a master at handling patrons like John Quinn, who worked like an ox and sent checks to buy art; skeptical dealers, who had to be reassured that the new art was coming in; and lonesome tycoons, who had "no one to play with in between stocks and bonds and the goodlife." Pound's selling the idea of Joyce to Harriet Weaver, who privately published Ulysses, "was the nearest approach to supernatural experience Jimmie J. ever knew." But there was no question of Lewis doing anything for Pound, who was also (if not equally) hard up.

Lewis's Great War letters are the best in this volume. He is characteristically vituperative ("may their next fart split up their backs, and asphyxiate them with the odour of their souls!"), showed real courage in combat, and continued to write at the front. He was eager for violent experience that he could use in his art, though firing Howitzers was appropriate for the editor of BLAST, was under heavy fire every day, and fought at Passchendaele.

From an advanced observation post on the top of a hill, Lewis's imagination transformed the panorama of war into an aesthetic spectacle: "I saw an immense and smoky struggle for a village: saw tanks advancing, cavalry etc.: tanks hit, air fights, [with planes] partially embedded in an archipelago of tiny clouds. . . . Shells never seem to do more than shave the trees down to these ultimate black stakes, except in the few cases where they tear them up, or a mine swallows them." When Lewis passed through the battleground in Flanders where the artist Gaudier-Brzeska had been killed in 1915, "the ground was covered with snow, nobody about, and my god, it did look a cheerless place to die in."

Lewis named Pound his literary executor, instructed him to look after his two illegitimate children, and asked him to write a memoir (as he had done for Gaudier) if Lewis was killed. Pound offered some paternal but witty advice about venereal disease, and feared that Lewis might "spill his gore in heathen and furrin places." But all Pound's extraordinary efforts, Lewis menacingly exclaimed in 1925, did "not give you a mandate to interfere when you think fit, with or without my consent, with my career. If you launch at me and try and force on me a scheme which I regard as malapropos, you will not find me so docile as Eliot." To which Pound bluntly replied: "There are some matters in which you really do behave like, and really do write like, a God damn fool."

In 1925 Lewis had jokingly asked: "Could you get me the Nobel Prize next year? or do you want it yourself?" In 1948, when their close friend Eliot creamed off the Order of Merit, the Legion d'Honneur, and the Nobel Prize, Lewis was still impoverished and obscure, Pound confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. Struck by the irony of their situation, Lewis observed: "You might almost have contrived this climax to your respective careers: yours so Villonesque and Eliot's super-Tennysonian."

Lewis had abandoned his "disinfectant" political treatises in the 1930s, but Pound remained unregenerate--even after his release from St. Elizabeth's. Lewis wisely urged him to throw his economics books out the window, give up his fascist disciples, and stop his rabid anti-Semitism. He believed that Pound, for all his brillance, was deficient in perception. After a lifetime of study, Pound had outlived his intelligence.