FMTP7 essay_english

No.7 September 1999

The clothing habit of Ezra Pound

In his 1912 essay, "The Wisdom of Poetry ", Ezra Pound reflected on the social role of poet and wrote "in former ages, poets were historians, genealogists, religious functionaries." Then he added that in Provence the gay savoir was both theatre and opera, troubadour and jongleur being author, dramatist, composer, actor and popular tenor. (1)

He seems to have felt much intimacy with such aspects of traditional poets and had an intention to retrieve such images of poets. Accordingly for him, the style of clothing or costume was an important factor to form an image of poet. When we look at books which collects many photographs of him from his child years to final years (2, 3), we can notice that his clothing style was generally speaking "rough" but deliberately chosen.

In the photograph of his 1901 freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania, he stands at the left-hand end of back row in beret and white scarf, whereas about sixty other students wore ties of dark color and no hat. (4)

By wearing differently from the other students, he might have intended to show he was different from the others rather than simply making him conspicuous. He regarded himself as not one of the public. For him, poet was not merely a man who wrote poems, but a man who was sort of a prophet. For him to be poet meant to place him as an elite and to alienate himself from the public. Conspicuously wearing was for him not an expression of dandyism but wearing costumes as an outsider.

In London he was forced to wear more conspicuously and even weirdly. In 1913, according to Michael Reck, London literary life was "a rough-and tumble." Many literary personages and groups were "scrambling for predominance, all wanting to be noticed." Pound was said to have worn green trousers as an epater les bourgeois style. But his wife Dorothy Pound denied it to Reck and said it was not Pound but Richard Aldington who wore them. Anyway, Pound was "Sorrel-bearded, outlandishly garbed, with one earring flopping across a cheek". (5)

Amy Lowell who visited London in 1913 wrote a letter to her friend back home, commenting on the clothing style of Pound as " I imagine that never, since the days of Wilde, have such garments been seen in the streets of London."(6)

Reck says Pound apparently heeded Wilde's dictum "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."(7)

In 1920 Pound became a frequent visitor to Paris and started to live there in 1921. Sylvia Beach who in Paris opened a bookshop, Shakespeare & company, wrote in her book her impression of Pound who visited there for the first time in June 1920. "His costume-the velvet jacket and the open-road shirts-was that of the English aesthete of the period." (8)

From her description as "aesthete", it can be supposed that the impression Pound gave to her was of bohemian-like and that of more like painter than of novelist or poet. Beach wrote, "there was a touch of Whistler about him."

The same year in Paris, music and literary critique Paul Rosenfeld saw Pound passing by the Latin Quarter restaurant where he was dining. Describing about a poet who broadcasted from Rome, he wrote in 1944, "Pound appeared to have stepped straight out of the opera La Boheme." Covering his head by swarthy sombrero, Pound wore Wotan-blue shirt, the collar of which lay widely open on the lapels of his English cut coat, setting off a ruddy, well-trimmed beard. Pound sporting a cane resembled the 1830's artists in Puccini's opera and an ornamental Norse pirate who had infrequently been to sea, wrote Rosenfeld. He noticed Pound lingering momentarily and took a glance in the diners. It seemed to him that "Pound did so not so much in order to gather their identity as to gather the impression he was making." (9)

Rosenfeld here is trying to look for Pound's histrionic intention behind this behavior of him as well as behind his broadcasting.

Robert Casillo who cites this passage by Rosenfeld comments, "Pound lingers before a passive crowd of already occupied and "respectable" people whom he seeks to astonish, provoke, and master."(10) In Pound's clothing style and behavior described by Rosenfeld, Casillo too tries to read Pound's histrionic intention, and looks for Pound's psychological inclinations to alienating himself from the crowd, provoking them and trying to attract their attention to him.

T. S. Eliot who was friend of Pound is said to have liked the English gentleman's clothing style (11), though it might have been a mere result of his statuses as a bank employee, a manager of publishing company and a Nobel prize winner. James Joyce, supposed from many photographs of him collected in a book (12), also seems to have been fond of bourgeois dandyism though his way of wearing had an air of theatrical performance.

If traditions of artists such as painter and sculptor were related to those of artisans, literary man's tradition might be strongly colored with "an extra of gentleman's deed." The clothing styles of Pound's contemporary novelists and poets seem reflecting such tradition, whereas Pound's clothing style seems as that of the professional artist who refused the tradition.

We even can say that Pound advancingly took the clothing style of today, in which age many various talents in various costumes, given various roles, fly across the sky like gods in myths.

Literature

1) Pound, Ezra : Selected Prose 1909-1965 , ed. by William Cookson, Faber and Faber,London,1973. p.330-331.
2) Ackroyd, Peter : Ezra Pound , Thames and Hudson, 1981.(Photo in the text)
3) Carpenter, Humphrey: A Serious Character--The Life of Ezra Pound , Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.
4) ibid. p.35 and the photograph near p.370.
5) Reck, Michael : Ezra Pound, a close-up , McGraw-Hill, 1973. p.13-14.
6) Carpenter : op.cit., p.208-209.
7) Reck : op.cit., p.14.
8) Beach, Sylvia : Shakespeare & Company, University of Nebraska Press, 1991. p.26.
9)Rosenfeld, Paul : "The case of Ezra Pound," American Mercury, January 1944, LVIII, p.98-102, reprinted in Homberger, Eric(ed.) : Ezra Pound : The critical heritage, Routledge, 1997. p.353.
10) Casillo, Robert : The Genealogy of Daemons, Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound , Northwestern University Press, 1988. p.168.
11) Ackroid, Peter : T. S. Eliot , Sphere Books, 1989. p.165-166.
12) Anderson, Chester G.: James Joyce, Tames and Hudson, 1967.

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