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Two Gems from Pound’s Letters…

March 24, 2010 in literature, modernism | 1 comment

Reading Ezra Pound’s correspondence (which is now collected in a whole of slew of volumes, many dedicated to his correspondence with a particular figure) is always a fascinating, if frustrating, experience. This morning I grabbed The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907 – 1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950) to check a citation and bumped into two quotations too fascinating not to share (and too long for twitter).

Writing to W. H. D. Rouse in 1935, Pound offers this wonderful summing up of the character of Odysseus:

As to the character of Odysseus. Anything but the bright little Rollo of Chambers’ Journal brought up on Sam Smiles. Born on po’ misero, don’t want to go to war, little runt who finally has to do all the hard work, gets all Don Juan’s chances with the ladies and can’t really enjoy ‘em. Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa. Always some fly in the ointment, last to volunteer on stiff jobs. (273).

The second comes from a letter to James Laughlin of New Directions, describing a production of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral which Pound heard on the radio in 1936. It is a nice example of Pound’s dialect prose, but also captures the melancholy which is frequently present in Pound’s work from this period for a earlier moment—for pre-war London, and the circle of Eliot, Joyce, and Lewis.

Waal, I heerd the Murder in the Cafedrawl on the radio lass’ night. Oh them cawkney woices, My Krissz, them cawkney woices. Mzzr Shakzpeer still retains his posishun. I stuck it fer a while, wot wiff the weepin and wailin. And Mr. Joyce the greatest forcemeat since Gertie. And wot iz bekum of Wyndham!
My Krrize them cawkney voyces!

As is so often the case, these passages are ripe for links and annotations; but back to work for now…

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“For an old bitch”: Mining Obscenity

November 5, 2009 in Digital Humanities, literature, modernism, obscenity

The beginning of Ezra Pound's Canto 42.

The beginning of Ezra Pound's Canto 42.

I’ve been spending time tinkering, using a very basic question as an occasion to play with some digital tools. In this post I’ll introduce the question, and in a few others talk about some of the ways I’ve been trying to answer it. Ultimately I’m interested in mining large amounts of text (I’m thinking mostly novels) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explore uses of obscenity; but that is a big question and is a long way off yet. So let’s start with a more manageable question.

That question is: How “obscene” is the term “bitch”? How frequently did it appear in print? When? What did it mean?

The more immediate relevance of this question came from reading Ezra Pound. Consider two quotations, both from Pound. First:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

These lines from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are quoted frequently as representative of modernist disillusionment after World War I. They nicely encapsulate an anger about the first World War that seems to call into question the value of culture itself. Pound returned to this anger throughout his career. Here are some lines from the beginning of Canto 42, first published in 1937:

‘We ought, I think, to say in civil terms: You be damned’
(Palmerston, to Russell re/Chas. H. Adams)
‘And how this people CAN in this the fifth
et cetera year of the war, leave that old etcetera up
there on that monument!’ H.G. to E.P. 1918

(To quickly explain the references, as best as I understand them: the first line draws on the English response to the American Civil War. Palmerston was the British PM during the Civil War; Charles Francis Adams, son of J.Q. Adams, was Lincoln’s minister to England during the war. [So is Chas. H. Adams a mistake?] Russell is Earl Russell, British Foreign Secretary during the war.

The next lines describe a comment by H.G. Wells to Pound, here referring to a statue of Queen Victoria.)

Here, however, “et cetera” replaces obscenity (“leave that old bitch up / there on that monument” was an earlier version). In the first instance “et cetera” stands in for some intensifying, presumably obscene adjective. In the latter “etcetera”—now with no spaces—stands in for “bitch.”

The use of “et cetera” as a sort of circumulocution is interesting, but not unique. Compare Augustin, from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, who replaces an actual obscene verb with “obscenity”: “I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness.” In “Typhoon,” Conrad’s sailors replace actual obscene language with “blank”:

His teeth flashed angrily in hsi dirty face. He didn’t mind, he said, the trouble of punching their blanked heads down there, blank his soul, but did the condemned sailors think you could keep steam up in the God-forsaken boilers simply by knocking the blanked stokers about?

Cummings, in the delightful little poem “[my sweet etcetera]“, uses “etcetera” more playfully than Pound, but in an essentially similar way. (Indeed, both Pound and Cummings strategically toy with prohibitions on obscene speech to make a political point about war, but I digress. . .)

So here is the puzzle: in Mauberley, published in 1920, Pound writes “an old bitch” but in the Cantos, published nearly two decades later, (the Fifth Decad of Cantos was first published in 1937), he replaces the word with “etcetera.”

That’s odd, isn’t it? Why would the later text be censored, rather than the earlier one?

One possible explanation is that the second passage is potentially more libellous than the first. While Queen Victoria is not named explicitly, the reference to “that old etcetera up / there on that monument” is clear enough to bring the comment into the domain of libel.

Or perhaps it is because the word is more obscene in the latter than the earlier. For while the same phrase “old bitch” is used in both, it seems to in fact have two different meanings. When, in the Cantos, Pound/Wells refers to “that old etcetera up there on the monument,” the derogatory force of that obscenity is evident. But in Mauberley the word “bitch” is not necessarily used in the obscene sense. The “old bitch / gone in the teeth” for whom a myriad have died is a “botched civilisation” (botch and bitch chiming off another), not a specific (female) figure. And the abstraction of the indefinite article and the reference to “gone in the teeth” seem to make clear that if the tenor of this metaphor is “civilization,” its vehicle is an old female dog.

Today “bitch” is a minor-level obscenity. However offensive some may find it as a piece of sexist insult, its obscene force is not so great that it is prohibited from broadcast television. But it is still definitely impolite. And while the semantic borders of the word seem to be quite flexible, it continues to carry gendered meanings. One can refer to a male as a “bitch” (it was not always the case), but at least part of the derogatory force of so doing comes from the concomitant emasculation.

More could be said about the gendered complexities of contemporary usage of the word “bitch,” as both a noun and a verb. (And what about its short-lived career as an adjective—as in, “That fluorescent t-shirt and acid-wash denim combination is totally bitchin”?). But the primary meaning of the term “bitch” is clearly this derogatory one. To use the word to refer to a female dog is quaint. But for how long has this been so?

Here’s a guess: Pound’s lines from Mauberly capitalize on an ambiguity, drawing on ire of the obscene sense of bitch even while keeping the term printable by clearly attaching it to its older meaning.

Such an argument assumes a basic historical development of the meanings of the word “bitch,” and a parallel, evolving set of standards of print decency; the earlier, primary meaning of bitch as “female dog” at some point takes a back seat, becoming today what I think is almost a “technical” meaning (used, for instance, by dog breeders). And the primary meaning becomes the one we’re all familiar with.

Sound convincing? Well, how would you prove it?

Over the next couple of posts I’d like to use this question as an occasion for thinking about how such a question could be further explored with available digital tools.

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Modernism, After Dark

June 12, 2009 in modernism, obscenity

Ezra Pound might not be the first person you’d turn to for sex advice. Nor would you expect T. S. Eliot to recommend a salacious read. Yet, to judge from some midcentury pulp publications (or at least from their covers), some poor publisher thought that these highest of the “High Modernists” could lend a little pique to their wares. Consider this 1957 edition of Bubu of Montparnasse:

Bubu of Montparnasse

Bubu of Montparnasse

The back cover reads:

NAKED BODIES FOR SALE
Night after night the girl sold her body in the dark streets of Paris. In the rented room she would slowly strip herself before the men who paid for love . . .
Toward morning she would return to the arms of the man who took her earnings–the same man beat her until she cried out aloud for the sensual release of his love-making. . .

The cover illustration and back copy lead one to believe that this is, shall we say, a “certain kind of book.” For those unfamiliar with Phillipe’s short realist novella of Parisian prostitution, it is worth pointing out that the “Bubu” of the title is not the buxom “girl [who] sold her body in the dark streets of Paris,” described in the back copy and represented (I assume) on the cover, wearing an outfit that seems a little anarchronistic for the novel’s setting in 1901; Bubu is, in fact, a rather violent and unpleasant pimp (“the man who took her earnings”).

But if this is that kind of book, the kind of book the back copy describes, then what is Eliot doing here? Admittedly, a typo at the end of Eliot’s preface gives his name as “T. E. Eliot.” Yet, this infelicity aside, the book seems strangely eager to announce its literary pedigree. A blurb on the inside cover brags, “Charles-Louis Philippe is now recognized as one of the most individual, as well as influential of modern French writers . . . Bubu of Montparnasse is usually regarded as the greatest of his novels.” The cover announces a “Preface by T. S. Eliot,” and, if she didn’t know already, the title page assures the reader that this T. S. Eliot guy is no slouch, proudly proudly proclaiming “With a Preface by T. S. Eliot, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

This tiny, pocket-sized book seems to simultaneously flaunt its status as a consumable piece of quasi-pornography (worry not, the cover assures us, it is “complete and unabridged,” wink, wink) while simultaneously claiming the literary imprimatur of Eliot and the Nobel prize. It may be cheap–25c, which the inflation calculator informs me is an astoundingly affordable $1.90 in 2009 dollars–but it is literature.

Eliot had written the preface for an edition of the novel that had appeared in 1932, twenty five years earlier. In the preface Eliot recalls how he first read the book while he was in Paris in 1910, and how it seemed to capture that experience. “The Paris of 1910 was more like the Paris of 1900 than like the Paris of 1932,” he explains; it was, that is, a different time. The book, for Eliot, captures the life of the poor Parisian of the turn of the century, before the arrival of a more politicized sense of class consciousness. But whatever else the book might be, it is certainly not, Eliot assures us, that kind of book. His brief preface concludes:

There have been many novels of low life, of metropolitan vice and degradation. Novels of sentimentality, novels of satire, novels of indignation, novels of social reform, novels of prurience. Bubu de Montparnasse succeeds in being none of these: emphatically not the last. Philippe certainly disturbs any lingering complacency that we may feel towards the world as it is; but he has no cure to advocate. He is both compassionate and dispassionate; in his book we blame no one, not even a “social system”; and even the most virtuous, in reading it, may feel: I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed.

Not a sense of prurience, but of sin is what is in store for the reader of this text (“even the most virtuous”!). Boy, what a disappointment–and the back cover made it sound so promising. But how to explain the disjunction between what the book at one level says–in its preface or on its title page–and on another level what it is–a cheap book ($1.90!) with a cheesecake cover illustration?

The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche describes the process of “propping” whereby one drive emerges by essentially piggy-backing on another. Following a Freudian model, Laplanche describes how the adult sexual drives emerge by “propping” themselves on the earlier, more fundamental, somatic drives (hellenophile James Strachey translated Freud’s Anlehnung [propping] as “anaclisis”). Whatever you may think of psychoanalysis, I would suggest a similar process occured in the middle of the twentieth century, whereby pornographic modes of reading often propped themselves on existing literary modes of reading. As a mode of reading that was noninstrumental, literary reading provides a model for aestheticized, readerly engagement with a text that is not necessarily as antithetical to “pornographic reading” (as a practice of reading) as we might today think.

And, in the wake of the obscenity trials of Ulysses and, most importantly, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, literature itself seemed to have a sexual charge–a patina of prurience. The back pages of this 1957 edition of Bubu list other works of Interest to the reader. “If you enjoyed this book,” it says, “you will also want to read:” and then lists a number of works with title like “Perversity” and “The Sign of Eros.” Among the titles included is Jean-Paul Sartre’s (!) Intimacy, which, a blurb assures us, “… leaves Lady Chatterley’s Lover asleep at the post.”

As for Pound’s sex advice–that will have to wait for a future post.

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