switching biographies, perhaps

I’m thinking I’ll drop the Eliot biography and read the Pound biography in our library instead.

As a person, Eliot is too depressing. Don’t get me wrong: I have immense human sympathy for his sufferings, which are greater than I imagined. Though biography is my favorite genre (the best there is for showing the emergence of real thoughts out of deadening everyday environs) I had for some reason never read a full-length biography of Eliot. It’s not what I imagined. I was expecting a calm, self-assured borderline snob who wrote important things amidst a deliberately chosen conformist lifestyle. Parts of that supposition are true, but he was anything but calm and self-assured. He was in fact a nervous man, given to pathological fretting and morbid self-critique. And one can only sympathize with such problems, which can threaten any of us at times. But I tend to get sufficiently wrapped up in biographies that the life in question starts to seem like the definition of human normalcy, no matter how unusual that life was. And Eliot’s life is too unsatisfying to dwell on for days at a time. A quick taste, for information’s sake, is all you’ll really want, unless you’re a serious fan of his work.

Pound obviously has his drawbacks: fascism, anti-semitism, and insanity among them. But these traits emerge later. The young Pound is a constant source of vital energy. He discovers people. He congratulates and encourages people. He drums up subscribers to help Eliot financially, despite Eliot’s helplessly neurotic indecision over whether or not to accept it. Pound selflessly promotes the fortunes of others while still having enough energy left over to promote his own as well (I like to see a bit of that self-interest accompanying any altruism, as a sign of fundamental honesty; otherwise, one wonders where it’s hiding). He’s always making new friends and assimilating new influences.

Someone ought to write a good study of the American expatriate phenomenon (naturally, I’d be interested in such a book for personal reasons as well as intellectual ones). Henry James is one of the obvious classics of the type. They’re usually located in Europe, though Lafcadio Hearn gives the strange example of self-exile to Japan. Then there are American authors who were expats in a non-literal sense: the obvious case is Poe, who really ought to have lived in France, where his works eventually went to live.

But Pound may have done it with more gusto than any of the others. Often there is a sort of overly introspective identity crisis linked with the American intellectual abroad (Eliot again), but Pound shows nothing of the sort. He just goes over to Europe and starts cutting down trees and building things. It feels supremely healthy, no matter how badly he derailed in later decades.