Abstract
When H.D. begins her 1958 memoir of Ezra Pound ‘frozen’ at the moment of their first meeting, we might expect that, faithful to the doctrine of her long-time lapidary friend, what will follow is a memoir of stone-cut precision, a recollection carved into the ‘right word’. But H.D. never arrives at the ‘right word’ for Pound, not least because her memories of him are the results of her sessions with the analyst Eric Heydt, prompted, in part, by the traumas of Pound’s Rome broadcasts, his post-war incarceration and now, in 1958, his imminent release. The ‘right word’, the word to crystallize the relation between H.D. and Pound, or the word, as H.D. puts it, to make Pound ‘manifest’, is suspended and deferred through the threads of the psychoanalytic transference — the very ‘pig sty’ Pound once admonished H.D. to crawl out of.3 Just as her earlier Tribute to Freud is notable for the way it troubles the frontiers between modernism and psychoanalysis, End to Torment, once again, shifts the relation between the two; not by arriving at the right word but, one might say, by asking the right questions.
Some sort of rigor mortis. I am frozen in this moment. Perhaps I held it all my life, it is what they called my ‘imagery’; even now, they speak of ‘verse so chiselled as to seem lapidary’, and they say, ‘She crystallizes — that is the right word’. They say, ‘that is the right word’. This moment must wait 50 years for the right word.
H.D. End to Torment1
Down are the arches, and burnt are the walls
Of the secret bed of the divine Ixotta …
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXII2
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Notes
‘Giù son gli archi e combusti i muri/Del letto arcano della divina Ixotta’, Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound London: Faber and Faber, 1990, p. 428. Trans. Massimo Bacigalupo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73’, Paideuma: A Journal of Pound Scholarship vol. 20, nos 1–2, p. 13.
For an account of male writers’ sojourns ‘abroad’ see Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Adrian Stokes, ‘Painting, Giorgione and Barbaro’, The Criterion vol. 9, April 1930, p. 489.
See Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry London: Macmillan, 1924. For analogies between writing and sculpture see’ style’ in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style London: Macmillan, 1924, pp. 1–36. For a detailed analysis of Stokes’ aesthetic inheritance and psychoanalysis, see Stephen Bann, ‘Adrian Stokes: English Aesthetic Criticism under the Impact of Psychoanalysis’, in Freud in Exile, Psychoanalysis, and its Vicissitudes pp. 134–44, and Richard Read, ‘Freudian Psychology and the Early Work of Adrian Stokes’, PN Review ‘Adrian Stokes’ vol. 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 37–40.
Donald Davie, ‘Adrian Stokes and Pound’s Cantos’, Twentieth Century vol. 260, 957, 1956, p. 424. See also Davie’s Ezra Pound: The Poet as Sculptor London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, and his ‘Adrian Stokes Revisited’, Paideuma: A Journal of Pound Scholarship vol. 12, nos. 2–3, 1983, pp. 189–97.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’, The Nigger of Narcissus (1897), London: Everyman, J.M. Dent, 1960.
Friedrich Nietszche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 81. My thanks to Stephen Bann for suggesting this comparison.
Peter Nicholls, ‘Violence, Recognition and Some Versions of Modernism’, Parataxis 4, Summer 1993, pp. 19–35.
Adrian Stokes, The Stones of Rimini, CW1, p. 230. Compare Gaudier-Brzeska’s similar affirmation of modern sculpture: ‘the modern sculptor is a man who works with instinct as his inspiring force … light voluptuous modelling is to him insipid’. Quoted in Lisa Tickner, ‘Now and Then: The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound’, Oxford Art Journal vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, p. 57.
Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991, p. 220.
Ezra Pound, ‘Frontispiece’, Guide to Kulchur London: Faber and Faber, 1938.
Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini London: Stanley Nott, 1934, pp. 66–7. As noted by Peter Brooker in ‘The Lesson of Ezra Pound’, Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading ed. Ian F.A. Bell, London and Ottawa: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1982, p. 23.
See Alan Durant, Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis Brighton: Harvester, 1981.
Adrian Stokes, ‘Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Development of Ball Games, Particularly Cricket’, IJPA 37, 1956, pp. 185–92.
William Barrett in W.H. Auden, Robert Gorham Davis, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, George Orwell, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, William Barrett, ‘The Question of the Pound Award’, Partisan Review vol. 16, no. 5, 1949, p. 522.
W.H. Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’ was first published in Horizon vol. xviii, 103, July 1948, pp. 1–3 and republished in Nones New York: Random House, 1951. The poem was revised in later printings. This reading refers to the version in Selected Poems (1979), ed. Edward Mendelson, London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Adrian Stokes et Ezra Pound’, in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne: Adrian Stokes 25, Automne, 1988, p. 30.
Cited in Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981, p. 357.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 87. There is a quarrel to picked here with Eagleton’s over-emphasis on the reassuring plenitude of the imaginary, and also with his collapse of Lacan into Althusser, not to say into Kant. On the first point, compare Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Imaginary’, Sexuality in the Field of Vision pp. 167–99
on the second compare Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology London: Verso, 1989.
Eagleton seems to overlook the extent to which, as Howard Caygill has cogently demonstrated, Kant self-consciously uncovers the ‘aporia of judgement’ in the relation between the development of civil society and the aesthetic. See Howard Caygill, The Art of Judgement Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Isobel Armstrong, ‘So what’s all this about the mother’s body? The aesthetic, gender and the polis’, in Intertextuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices ed. Judith Stills and Michael Worton, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 225.
Adrian Stokes, Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes ed. Richard Wollheim, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 73.
Adrian Stokes, ‘Primary Process, Thinking and Art’, A Game that Must be Lost Cheshire: Carcanet, 1973, p. 124.
See George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius London: Secker and Warburg, 1941, p. 54. I owe this crossreference to Denise Riley.
Christian Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, trans. Ben Brewster, Screen vol. 16, no. 2, Summer 1975, p. 23.
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© 1998 Lyndsey Stonebridge
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Stonebridge, L. (1998). Stone Love: Adrian Stokes and the Inside Out. In: The Destructive Element. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26721-7_5
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