An ABC of Reading Miscellany
In my review of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, I wrote that Pound had many interesting insights and asides that, though they didn’t fit with the main review, are nonetheless worth discussing. So, here, I’ll go over some of the highlights. I’ll cover them in no particular order, and much of it will be direct quotations from the book with a few comments from me.
Whose opinions are worthwhile?
First, what kind of person should we consult for instruciton or opinions? Pound uses an analogy to drawing a cheque:
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. […]
The same applies with cheques against knowledge. If Marconi says somethinga bout ultra-short waves it MEANS something. Its meaning can only be properly estimated by someone who KNOWS. […]
An abstract or general statement is GOOD if it be ultimately found to correspond with the facts.
BUT no layman can tell at sight whether it is good or bad.
So, we shouldn’t just listen to anyone who happens to speak on a given subject; the speaker must be able to back it up with some substance. Later, he specifies that there are two types of men whose opinions we should be cautious in accepting:
- From men who haven’t themselves produced notable work.
- From men who have not themselves taken the risk of printing the results of their own personal inspection and survey, even if they are seriously making one.
Pound, of course, is worth listening to (at least regarding literature) because he’s cleared both of these hurdles: He produced a great deal of notable poetry in his career, and his ABC (among other works) are, at least in part, him printing the results of his inspections and surveys.
Should you, dear reader, listen to me? That is up to you; I won’t pretend to have produced any notable poetry, but this blog is something like a result of my own personal inspections and surveys.
Different classes of authors
Pound defines six different classes of authors in the literary world:
- Inventors, that is, “Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.”
- The masters.
- The diluters, meaning, “Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.”
- Good writers without salient qualities, who are authors who benefit from living during a high point of literature, like authors of sonnets in Dante’s time, or of short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time.
- Writers of belles-lettres, i.e., specialists in “some particular part of writing.”
- Starters of crazes.
Intellectuals and sloth
We like to complain, for good reason, about the rotten state of our authors and intellectuals, but the root of the problem stretches back at least to Pound’s day. “Sloth is the root of much bad opinion,” he writes, and offers this anecdote:
I once heard a man, who has some standing as writer whom Mr. Yeats was wont to defend, assert that Chaurcer’s language wasn’t English, and that one ought not to use it as basis of discussion, ETC. Such was the depth of London in 1910.
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparitively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
Pound does give his reader a few tips on reading Middle English, by the way. “Go slow,” he writes, “the key to most of the unfamiliar-looking words in the sound. Don’t be afraid to guess.” He also glosses a few particularly difficult words in the poems that he shares as exhibits.
A Hot Shakespearean Opinion
Speaking of Chaucer, here’s a good HSO:
As to the relative merits of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English opinion has been bamboozled for centuries by a love of the stage, the glamour of the theatre, the love of bombastic rhetoric and of sentimentalizing over actors and actresses; these, plus the national laziness and unwillingness to make the least effort, have completely obscured the values.
To make his point explicit, though he does give Shakespeare his due as an author, Pound argues at some length that Chaucer is notably superior. The crux of the matter is that, “Chaucer had a deeper knowledge of life than Shakespeare.” He had more experiences to draw on, more personal contact with the rest of Europe, whereas Shakespeare lived in a time when England was more isolated from the rest of the continent and drew more heavily from books.
Now, I have read a good deal of Shakespeare (several of his works are reviewed here at Everything), but I’m much less familiar with Chaucer. Since I haven’t read them both deeply, I’ll defer judgement on the matter out of fairness to both men.
Guessing the author
In reading old books, you’ll occasionally come across works whose authors are uncertain or unknown. Pound includes an anonymous poem among his exhibits with a word of caution:
The first effort of misguided ink-page scholars would be to FIND THE AUTHOR. Note that the author particularly refrained from signing the poem. As the great medieval architects and stone-cutters refrained from signing their work. One of the great maladies of modern criticism is this first rush to look for the person, and the corresponding failure EVER to look at the thing.
Chinese ideograms, how do they work?
This is a topic Pound is frequently and fiercely criticised for, but does he deserve it?
Honestly, yes, mostly.
He writes that the Chinese ideograms are fundamentally pictures of things, or combinations of things. More complex ideograms are formed from combinations of simpler ones. The problem is that this is strictly true of very few characters – 90% of them have a phonetic component! I feel like he had to have been aware that at least some characters have this phonetic aspect, but he doesn’t say so here.
Pound even claims that sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska “could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY.” Unless that number is trivially small, I highly, highly doubt that this was true. The idea of creating ideograms by combining concepts and pictures is a romantic one and one that fits with Pound’s poetic theory and practice, but alas, it just doesn’t work the way he describes.
If you’d like to read more on the origin and nature of the ideograms, you may find this article interesting.
A specialised form of archaeology
You may recall from the main review of ABC that Pound’s most important principle for identifying bad writing is the use of too many words, and he critices several authors for using a lot of words without actually saying much. Searching for words to match their sentiments in one way he puts it; to put it another way, the best authors are focused on having something to say, rather than focused on how they say it. One of his victims is Alexander Pope, about whom he does have a few good things to say, but he also says this about the Dunciad after sharing an excerpt:
Book II, along about l. 270, gets up a momentum and I find it possible to run on for a while without skipping. But I am a specialist getting on toward my fiftieth year, with a particular and matured interest in writing and even in literary criticism. I think it would be sheer idiocy to try to force this kind of reading on the general reader, and nothing could dry up the interest of a young student more quickly than tellihng him he must, should, or ought to BE INTERESTED in such pages. Such reading is not even training for writers. It is a specialized form of archaeology.
That archaeology image has stuck with me ever since I first read it back in college.
It’s interesting that Pound shows some consideration for what students will find interesting. On the surface, it contrasts with an essay of Flannery O’Connor’s on literary education (in the collection Myster and Manners), where she says that the student’s taste should not be consulted, because it is being formed. Pound’s allegation of Pope being boring, though, isn’t just a matter of taste – it’s not good writing due to being overly verbose, and is dull largely for that reason. We shouldn’t put too much stock in students’ preferences for reading, but genuinely good literature will naturally be of interest to at least a decent proportion of students.
Looking at my outline of this book, I see I still have several points that may be of interest, but this post is already getting long so I’ll just say: If you’ve found any of this interesting or insightful, by all means read ABC. Even if you disagree with Pound on something (and as we’ve seen, he’s undeniably wrong on some counts), he’s never boring.