[ilds] Gifford's "Late Modernism's Migrations"

[James Gifford]

Hi Bruce,

I was, just this morning, reading through Duncan's translations of Breton:

http://jacket2.org/commentary/translating-andr%C3%A9-breton-robert-duncan-david-antin

There's still a lot to do on Durrell and Duncan in comparison, and for 
that matter how Duncan and Gascoyne knew each other (I still don't know 
how to unravel that, and it's not in the recent biography).  Duncan also 
had a peculiar relationship with Pound and kept up contact during 
Pound's incarceration -- after all, Duncan's great poetic love was H.D., 
and she was Pound's college sweetheart and lover (and in a tidy circle, 
she was reading Durrell and sketching a book on "Claudia" just before 
her death...).

As for Durrell's review of Pound, it's not favourable to his later work 
(Section: Rock-Drill) nor Pound's politics but does emphasize the 
importance and influence of his earlier work.  As much recent 
scholarship has been showing (Mark Antliff's recent collection 
/Vorticism/ in particular), Pound was clearly aligned with anarchist 
groups and ideas in his earlier years, most especially during the 
Vorticist period.  The conversion to fascism was later, and Matthew 
Feldman's recent /Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45/ shows that 
there really is very little room for excusing or diminishing the 
fullness of that conversion (Pound's proposal to distribute /The 
Protocols of Zion/ to prevent sympathy for Jews after arrest was, as 
Feldman points out, written on a German typewriter).

The review, btw, is included in /Elephant's Back/: "Enigma Variations" 
(235-238).  Durrell notes "I have always loved the early Pound and no 
writer of my generation can fail to acknowledge the debt he owes to so 
brilliant an innovator and exploiter of metrical forms" but at the same 
time Durrell asks seriously if Pound's later work is just a hoax...

All best,
James

On 2015-05-01 2:08 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> James,
>
> I think you’re right that Durrell’s ending to /Justine/ (1962 ed.) — “So
> that . . . ” — is a deliberate allusion to Pound’s “Canto I,” which also
> ends with “So that.”  I haven’t read Durrell’s 1957 review of Pound, but
> Durrell was probably mimicking a modern epic convention/,/ as
> established by Pound at the beginning of the /Cantos./  Like his mentor
> at Faber in London, Durrell was also acknowledging/il miglior fabbro/.
>   There’s a lot of irony here, for Pound had strong fascist sympathies
> (a notorious fact in 1957), and Durrell was anti-fascist and
> anti-authoritarian, as you make clear.  I guess Durrell’s “kingdom of
> the imagination” is apolitical in some respects.
>
> Nor have I read Read’s, Miller’s, and Durrell’s letters side-by-side.
>   It’s hard to say exactly what prompted Durrell to discover his
> “Heraldic Universe.”  As you argue, the original impulse could well have
> been anti-authoritarian.  The final product, however, was metaphysical.
>   I don’t find this change alarming.  It takes a while to know what you
> know.
>
> I think more can be done with Duncan’s and Durrell’s “unknown self,”
> namely, just what it represents.  I find the analogy and connections
> between the two poets fascinating.  Thanks for pointing this out.  And
> thanks for clarifying “desublimation” and “interpellaltion.”
>
> Bruce
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Apr 30, 2015, at 3:17 PM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com
>> <mailto:james.d.gifford at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I should have added, in the book and article, I'm really looking at
>> the 1930s-40s Durrell (and perhaps as late as 1962), but that doesn't
>> in any way negate your contention:
>>
>>> Durrell’s “Heraldic Universe,” in all its complexity and
>>> evolution and confusion, is a big aspect of both of these concerns.  I
>>> tend to treat the matter metaphysically/metaphorically, as Durrell
>>> himself describes in /A Smile in the Mind’s Eye/ (New York, 1982), that
>>> is, as some imaginative dimension:  “the alchemical sigil or signature
>>> of the individual; what’s left with the ego extracted.  It is the pure
>>> nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram” (p.
>>> 86).  My approach follows Ray Morrison’s as he explains Durrell’s Taoism
>>> in his excellent article, “The City and Its Ontology in Lawrence
>>> Durrell’s /Alexandria Quartet (Mosaic/ 46 [2013]).
>>
>> That "meta-" and anti-egoic discussion in /A Smile/ is 46 years later
>> than the first appearance of the term, although the "Tao and its
>> Glozes" was originally published in 1939.
>>
>> I would, however, point to "ideogram" and Ezra Pound.  I do still
>> believe the "So that..." that ends the revised Justine (in the 1962
>> omnibus) reflects Durrell's reading (and reviewing) of Pound in 1957
>> (Canto I ends with the same phrase that Durrell adds close Justine).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> James
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