(Image from Tate)

In a nice case of serendipity, I’ve been reading Charles Olson’s collection of writings on Pound the past few weeks, and he mentions EP’s relationship to Gaudier. Just days into his visits to see Pound at St. Elizabeth’s in 1946, as EP awaits his treason/insanity trial, Olson reflects:

“Everything Pound has to say and feel politically is…thirty years old and dead as a duck. He talks about the middle of the century just as young pacifists did during the first world war. It is clear he only experienced war and politics once: in England, World War I. And the sickness he describes in Mauberley…became Pound’s sickness—and he suffers from it today. Maybe it was accidental, but the conjunction of Gaudier Brzeska’s death to the whole conversation appears to me important. It is as though Pound has never got over it, that Gaudier’s death is the source of his hate for contemporary England and America, that then, in 1915, his attack on democracy got mixed up with Gaudier’s death, and all his turn since has been revenge for the boy’s death.”     (Olson 44-45)

If much of our focus in this class revolves around preserving, paying respect to the lasting impact of WWI, maybe it’s worth starting with the people who “never got over it” and passed on their trauma(s) to those who came after them. Olson also describes EP’s fixation on the remaining Gaudier drawings, outlining with grave Poundian authority what he would do with them if he could get his hands on them. In an innocent attempt at sympathy, Olson remarks to Pound, “’You make Gaudier seem so young’—and I went on with what I have thought so often, ‘as you seem to me yourself, so young.’ And he crushes his head and face in his hands, and says nothing” (Olson 60).

Thirty years after Pound published his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, his absence remained ever present for the poet in ways that perhaps only war can produce. The impact is also more immediately evident in BLAST. His voice between the 1914 and 1915 issues, while no less essentially EP’s, differs in tone and range. The poems in Issue 1 still contain echoes of Whitman’s influence, a voice prophetic in its cocky defiance (and already demonstrating the rage that will only grow worse later on):

                “BUT I will not go mad to please you.
                 I will not FLATTER you with an early death.
                OH, NO ! I will stick it out,
                I will feel your hates wriggling about my feet,
                And I will laugh at you and mock you,
                And I will offer you consolations in irony,
                O fools, detesters of Beauty.” (“Salutation the Third” 45)

By the time we get to the War Number, EP sounds simultaneously more reflective and more resigned to the deepening presence of war: “Friends fall off at the pinch, the loveliest die. That is the path of life, this is my forest” (“Et Faim Sallir le Loup des Boys” 22). In the midst of his shifting rhetoric, Gaudier’s parting words to the BLAST world stand frozen in time in more than one sense: “LIFE IS THE SAME STRENGTH.…MY VIEWS ON SCULPTURE REMAIN ABSOLUTELY THE SAME” (“Written from the Trenches” 33). How do you live on past your friends when your view of the world changes beyond the one they died for—or does it just stay the same, like Olson says of Pound? How else do you keep honoring them other than producing art? These questions don’t have immediately evident answers for me, but they make me hurt even more for the ways in which this particular friendship contributed to EP’s implosion down the road.

I love Ezra Pound. I love him in a sense that defies ethics or rationality—for a number of reasons, but perhaps most poignantly for the fact that he was part of this vital group of friends and colleagues during such a watershed in literary-cultural history, that he supported their genius inasmuch as he aggressively asserted his own (I mean, he bought Gaudier a rock so he could make his most famous work of art; it just happened to be of EP’s head--interesting that it gets a place in the War Number as well). And yet, despite all this, even art ultimately could not save them from death; even “the loveliest die.” This growing reality of the hell on earth war becomes in the twentieth century makes their continued faith and hope in art all the more powerful for its run through the fire—even if they have to use a few more “Goddamns” (EP’s “Ancient Music” 20) after they come out on the other side.