walked before him, during our firstnnational catastrophe, when the futurenmadhouse was a hospital for Unionnsoldiers (“Bearing the bandages, water,nand sponge . . . “).nHowever hard Pound tried to writenin the Dantean tradition of comedynand paradise, the times would permitnof nothing short of Apocalypse —nApocalypse therefore discounted, especiallynby those happy to be living innthis Age of Fools because they wereninstrumental in bringing it on, or becausenthey are inadvertent beneficiariesnof it. There is a third factor, of course,nthe unmentionable, unpleasant factnupon which democracies stumble andntyrannies ride: that most men are foolsn— but let it pass. For the rest of us, innspite of this underdone study of the lifenof Ezra Pound, there might be somenmeaning in The Cantos’- music, a cyclenas bitter in the end as Winterreise:nIn meiner heimatnwhere the dead walkednand the living werenmade of cardboard.nWe might hear, and out of shamenregain, that gait we had “of persons whonnever knew how it felt to stand in thenpresence of,a superior.” Otherwise it isnjust as well that the nation of, by, andnfor the people perish from the earth.nPeter Laurie is a poet and scholarnwhose work has appeared in Poetry,nSt. Andrews Review, and ThenHarvard Advocate.nPound Foolishnby David R. SlavittnA Serious Character: The Life ofnEzra Poundnby Humphrey CarpenternBoston and New York:nHoughton Miffiin;n1,005 pp., $40.00nThe question arises very early onnand looms ever larger as one progressesnthrough this thousand-page-longnlife: how did Humphrey Carpenternstand it? Pound’s range was from loathsomenor contemptible at the beginningnto hateful at the apex of his career, andnfinally to pitiable at the end. To haven40/CHRONICLESncontinued with this distasteful project,nto be obliged each day to face oncenagain the dreary prospect of returningnto Pound’s dank and unremitting unattractiveness,nmust have been taxingnindeed. It isn’t easy for a reader, even innboots, to wade through this swampynstuff.nOn the other hand, the book isnadmirable for its thorough and evenhandednpresentation of most of the factsnof Pound’s life. It makes a valuablencontribution — if only as a corrective tonmuch of the bemusement of the pastngeneration or two. Pound scholarship isna medium-sized academic industryn(particulariy among those who dislikenliterature and who hate students, andnfor whom the obvious choice is betweennJoyce and Pound). Philip Larkin wasnquite correct when he said that ThenCantos were nothing more than “anlong twentieth-century poetic curiosity.”nPound’s odd career and influencenwere symptomatic of what was and tonsome degree still is awfully wrong withnhigh culture.nLet’s begin with Carpenter’s title,nwhich has got to be at least pardynironic. The line, as the biographernmakes clear in a couple of epigraphs, isnfrom Pound himself He was quoted bynCharles Olson as having asked, inn1913, “are you or are you not, anserious character?” Pound used thenphrase again, in 1936, in a letter tonJames Laughlin, this time spelling it “anseereeyus kerakter,” which is hardlynwhat any halfway serious characternwould do. Indeed, that pidgin EnglishnPound invented quite early, perhaps tonmask his deficiencies in spelling andntyping, gave rise eventually to his bizarrenmature style, a blend of thenantique and the high-flown with anjokey private patois that verged on babyntalk. The dreadful character of thatnidiolect, it seems to me, lies very closento the heart of the trouble.nEven though he was born in Hailey,nIdaho, Pound was essentially a Philadelphian,ngrew up there, and went tonschool there (Cheltenham MilitarynAcademy, two years at the Universitynof Pennsylvania, and then, after finishingnhis undergraduate work at HamiltonnCollege in Clinton, New York,ngraduate work at the U. of P.) And it isnwith W.C. Fields, another Philadelphian,nthat Pound shares his odd twangyndrawl, at the same time high-flown andnnnapologetic, pompous and cringing, innwhich the mask of aggression is all thenmore compelling because we know itnto be at least partly real.nPound was a nasty kid, a misfit atnCheltenham, a washout at Penn (hendid well in geometry, got an acceptablenB in English, but failed history, whichnsounds about right) and so out of stepnat Hamilton that no fraternity wouldnhave him even though that was verynmuch a fraternity school. WhatnPound’s reaction was to this, what henlearned from the experience and seemsnto have followed him for the rest of hisnlife, was his use of literature and thenintellect as a weapon. He learned hownto sound as though he knew more thannhe did, to talk authoritatively aboutnbooks he hadn’t read through (or evennat all), and, in short, how to be the epicnpain in the ass he later turned into.nMore important, the particularlynstupid and unattractive shape of hisnunease begins in this formative period.nAs Carpenter says, speaking of hisnmoves from Hailey and from house tonhouse in Philadelphia and its suburbs,nJenkintown and Wyncote, “throughoutnhis life he never lived anywherenthat was unarguably ‘home,’ a placenwhere his family belonged and had anpersonal history.” Carpenter nowherenmakes explicit the connection thatnseems clear to me — that in his woundednpride he needed inferiors to lookndown upon. It was not at all original fornhim to pick on foreigners, for there wasnanti-Semitic and anti-Italian sentimentnin Wyncote before Pound. What isninteresting is that he became a foreignernhimself—living much of the time innItaly and acting all the time as ancosmopolitan, a polyglot, a man ofnexotic books, and an exile, at first fromnhis native country and then, in 1920,nwhen he left England, from the territorynof his native language. With the oddnbroken English he affected, these arenall the conventional attributes of thenJews he hated, wrote about, and camenso much to resemble, even down tonthat scraggly beard. It was — withoutnindulging too much in what Poundndismissed as “kikeiatry” — a curiousnand deadly combination of envy andnself-loathing. And it wasn’t just annincidental irrelevance either, but a centralnfeature of his life and, more important,nhis work.nLiterature is a club of one kind orn