1Pound’s composition of the Malatesta Cantos in 1922 and 1923 is perhaps the event of his time in Paris to which critics have most frequently returned over the past few decades. For scholars interested in the formal development of The Cantos, at any rate, the composition of these poems has come to seem the single most important factor in establishing the shape of Pound’s modern epic. Lawrence Rainey, for example, begins his extended study of the section by encouraging us to recognise its composition as “…the decisive event in the formation of The Cantos… [that enabled] Pound to discover poetic techniques essential to the formal repertory of his poem” (4). And Marjorie Perloff, to quote only one other well-known treatment of the subject, had made a similar claim for the centrality of the Malatesta Cantos a few years previously. For Perloff these cantos offered “a flat surface, as in a Cubist or early Dada collage, upon which verbal elements, fragmented images, and truncated bits of narrative, drawn from the most disparate contexts, were brought into collision” (181). The formal decisions made as the Malatesta Cantos were composed, according to this reading, show Pound putting “the Symbolist masters of his youth squarely behind him [and] in Paris, where A Draft of XVI Cantos took shape, turning to new models” (Perloff 177).
2While there is general agreement, however, that the formal decisions Pound made as he composed these poems provide important insights into broader developments in his poetry of the twenties and thirties, relatively little effort has been made to compare the Malatesta Cantos with similar poems written later in this period. In this essay I will explore some of the possibilities of such an approach by comparing Pound’s “documentary” procedure in the Malatesta Cantos to the one he would later employ in the Adams Cantos (sections written in 1922 and 1939 respectively). In so doing I hope to suggest some ways in which his efforts to “include history” in his poem through the use of written documents led to decisive changes in the way he went about representing individual subjectivity. To what extent, I think we must ask ourselves, did Pound’s effort to present historical “facts” in an objective way result in the erosion of the identities of the subjects responsible for these facts, ultimately threatening to allow them to fall into complete anonymity?
3One of the most immediate difficulties that Pound faced in shaping his poetic rendering of Sigismundo Malatesta, as the early drafts of “Cantos VIII-XI” show, was that of finding a voice capable of handling the voluminous and often contradictory mass of historical information by which the contemporary reader could come to know this historical subject. When Pound began writing what he assumed would be a single Malatesta canto, his first impulse was to employ the voice of a speaker who could claim to have witnessed the events recorded in the poem. He assumed, that is, that Sigismundo Malatesta had actively shaped such events and that they provided a coherent spectacle which a single speaker could observe and then relate drawing on personal experience. An early draft of the poem which Rainey reproduces in his study of the section, for example, begins with the introduction of a speaker who witnesses the unfolding of history in an “arena” and is able to neatly summarise Sigismundo’s construction of the Tempio Malatestiano:
I have sat here for 44, 000 years
yes precisely
and Tontolini has finished
his turn in the arena
(44,000-gradins-etc.)
And the world began again last October—
And the Tempio—in October ==
====
And he commanded and commended
it Sigismundo ==‑1
4The gesture Pound makes in this passage, of course, is the same as the one made in “Canto IV” and “Canto XII,” and the passing use of this type of strategy in the final version of “Canto XI” indicates that he continued to find it attractive even as he explored more radical ways of incorporating historical subject matter into his poem.
5Yet a poetic model that took history to be a coherent spectacle contained within the “arena” of an individual observer’s mind and drawn together synthetically by this subject’s voice was ill-suited to present the heterogeneous “documentary” evidence which Pound confronted as he composed the Malatesta Cantos. In place of this model, the device of juxtaposing fragmentary scraps of heterogeneous material related in a variety of voices gradually emerged as an attractive formal alternative. This strategy had the advantage of allowing Pound the flexibility necessary to present apparently incompatible “evidence” about Sigismundo while also instilling his poem with a greater sense of apparent objectivity. Instead of being told what has happened by a single witness, the reader would now be presented with a range of “documentary” material and encouraged to decide what has happened for him or herself, participating in the poem’s creation of meaning as he or she “decodes” the juxtapositions of which it is composed.
6Once these undeniably radical formal changes have been acknowledged, however, the temptation is strong to overlook some of the more conservative features of the Malatesta Cantos. While Pound’s “documentary method” assumes that knowledge of history emerges from the interaction of fragmentary and often contradictory pieces of evidence, for instance, it is important to bear in mind that these interactions are generally orchestrated in such a way as to favour one set of interpretations over another. Ultimately, our reading of these cantos is conditioned not so much by the concrete “documents” Pound imports into the section as by the broader voices that work to establish the contexts into which such “documents” will be fitted.
7Consider, for example, the following passage from “Canto X”:
As Filippo Strozzi wrote to Zan Lottieri, then in Naples,
‘I think they’ll let him through at Campiglia’
Florence, Archivo Storico, 4th series t.iii, e
‘La Guerra dei Senesi col conte de Pitigliano.’
And he found Carlo Gonzago sitting like a mud-frog
in Ortobello
And he said:
‘Caro mio, I can not receive you
It really is not the moment.’
And Broglio says he ought to have tipped Gorro Lolli.
But he got back home here somehow,
And Piccinino was out of a job,
And the old row with Naples continued. (X 42-43)
8Only three of the thirteen lines in this passage can be considered strictly “documentary” fragments and, far from being allowed to interact freely with one another, these lines are rigidly framed by a narrative voice that far exceeds them both in the space it occupies and in the flexibility it possesses.
9While Pound’s revisions of the Malatesta Cantos call into question the possibility of encompassing historical events through a narrative synthesis and demonstrate the incapacity of individual actors to fully comprehend the historical moment in which they live, they do not abandon the idea that historical knowledge can be structured in a hierarchical way. By the time he composed the final draft of these poems, Pound had certainly realised that the subjective intelligence of a single speaker was not the “arena” in which a coherently structured historical understanding could be achieved. Yet this should not be taken to mean that he had resigned himself to the fact that history could only be “included” in his poem as a formally ambiguous collage of fragments. Rather, the development of the Malatesta drafts indicates that as he radically broadened the formal repertoire of these poems, Pound also externalised their structural centre, shifting it from the subjective mind of an individual speaker to the Tempio Malatestiano—that material fact that both records and exceeds Sigis-mundo’s relation to the world in which he lived. Having come to the conclusion that Sigismundo Malatesta could only be portrayed by presenting the material traces left by his life, in other words, he took the crucial step of placing the trace he considered most important at the structural centre of his poetry. In so doing he permitted the interaction of a range of different voices, while at the same time providing a framework that the reader can use to make some definite judgments. We are urged, as we read, to interpret the isolated pieces of writing we encounter (“documentary fragments,” scraps of narrative, dramatised conversations and other such things) by questioning how they relate to the Tempio Malatestiano. Pound’s method enables us, by these means, to gain a sense of the complexity of Sigismundo and the moment in which he lived while retaining the capacity to draw definite conclusions about them. In the following lines from “Canto VIII,” for example, the Tempio stands as the single fact which is granted permanence and solidity (as Pound’s italicisation encourages us to recognise) in what is otherwise a hopelessly confused catalogue of information about Malatesta’s life and times:
With the church against him,
With the Medici bank for itself,
With wattle Sforza against him
Sforza Francesco, wattle-nose,
Who married him (Sigismundo) his (Francesco’s)
Daughter in September,
Who stole Pèsaro in October (as Broglio says “bestialmente”),
Who stood with the Venetians in November,
With the Milanese in December,
Sold Milan in November, stole Milan in December
Or something of that sort,
Commanded the Milanese in the spring,
the Venetians at midsummer,
The Milanese in the autumn,
And was Naples’ ally in October,
He, Sigismundo, templum oedificavit
In Romagna, teeming with cattle thieves… (VIII 32)
10This passage is, I think, indicative of the role the Tempio Malatestiano occupies throughout the section. It stands immobile at the centre of a rigidly hierarchical framework as a current of voices swirls around it carrying scraps of more or less reliable “documentary” matter. The “documents” themselves, we come to notice, have meaning only insofar as they cling to the central, timeless, and extra-textual monument around which the poems are organised.
11It is not even an exaggeration to say that Pound contextualises many of the “documents” he includes in such a way as to force his reader to disregard them altogether. In doing so, he intentionally limits our faith in the “documentary surface” of his poetry by suggesting its incompleteness, its susceptibility to falsification and its tendency to support established institutions rather than objective truths. The unreliability of historical documents and the danger of too blindly accepting them as gateways to knowledge about the past might even be read as the central theme of “Canto X,” a poem that, broadly speaking, belongs to Pope Pius II rather than Sigismondo Malatesta. Here the “documents” with which the reader is confronted generally work to formulate a negative image of Sigismundo. Yet they are contextualised in such a way as to leave little doubt about how we should react to the information they present. The “documents” that report Sigismundo’s infamous character in “Canto X” are just as tangible as those presented elsewhere in the Malatesta Cantos and, were they really allowed to collide with other “documents” in an even-handed way they would impossibly complicate Pound’s portrait. The manner in which they are framed, however, makes it clear that these “documents” are not to be trusted. We are told with bitter irony that they lack authority because they derive from unreliable sources: “rumour…/And other equally unimpeachable witnesses” (X 45). And, again in “Canto X,” Pound illustrates the falsity of the account they offer by comparing them to the effigy of Sigismundo which Pius II has burned in Rome:
…A rare and magnificent effigy costing 8 florins 48 bol
(i.e. for the pair, as the first one wasn’t a good enough likeness)… (X 45)
12But how are we, contemporary readers awash in this sea of particulars, to tell the “real” Sigismundo from the “rare and magnificent” likeness contained in “documentary” evidence sponsored by Pius and upheld by the money and authority of the Church? We can only, Pound seems to be saying by the way in which he structures these cantos, do so by continually referring to the broader framework which gives the “documents” meaning: the construction of the Tempio Malatestiano. It is possible to achieve a relatively coherent idea of the principal historical subject in these cantos, but in order to do so one must shuttle between the fragmentary information conveyed by a range of more or less reliable voices and the monument that stands, to use one of Pound’s earlier formulas, as the node of the vortex in which these voices swirl. By itself the Tempio is incapable of generating a portrait of Sigismundo, but the energy it imparts to the heterogeneous matter collected around it allows the reader to gradually form a relatively coherent understanding of this subject and the historical moment he occupies.
13By the late 1930s, when he wrote the Adams Cantos, Pound’s approach to the “documentary method” had changed in several ways. Most strikingly, the strategy of implanting “documentary” material within non source-based voices had been eliminated; as had the method of organising such material around an extra-textual monument like the Tempio Malatestiano. The assumption that apparently replaces these devices at this stage of Pound’s career, is that his source-text, The Life and Works of John Adams, is itself a “monument” capable of structuring his poetry. No material traces other than those contained in this source, in other words, will now be admitted into Pound’s portrait of John Adams. The shuttling between structural centre and the heterogeneous matter that swirls around it, which had been such an important part of the “documentary method” in the Malatesta Cantos, is accordingly eliminated.
14It is almost as though Pound’s conviction that history could only be objectively and accurately “included” in poetry through the direct presentation of texts has led him to take literally the idea put forward in the Dynastic Cantos that “history is a school book for princes.” The source, that is to say, has itself become the subject of these cantos; and what is now essential is not so much where events occurred in history, but how they are recorded in the Life and Works of John Adams. History, in the Adams Cantos, does not exist as an abstract series of events arranged chronologically in an unwritten space, but is quite literally shaped by the documents in which it is recorded and through which it will be made available to future generations. Indeed, it is interesting to notice that in the early manuscripts of the section, preserved in the poetry notebooks at Yale, Pound pays relatively little attention to dates as he transcribes passages from his source, but records page numbers systematically.
15While in the Malatesta Cantos an extra-textual monument had been used to order a great variety of material (both “documentary” and “non-documentary”), in the Adams Cantos Pound’s conviction that the direct presentation of his source would provide a coherent and objective vision of history led him to exclude almost all voices that operate outside the sphere of this text. The “documentary method” that had first been used in combination with other strategies to enrich the texture of a piece shaped largely by more conventional modes of writing now almost single-handedly determines the structure of entire “decads” of cantos. As a result, the process of “externalisation” begun in the revision of the Malatesta drafts is carried to extremes which will severely effect the way in which Pound’s “documentary method” represents individual subjectivity.
16Indeed, since Pound’s most probable motive for these changes in his approach was a desire to ensure the objectivity and historical accuracy of his poetry, it is ironic that one of their most important consequences for the Adams Cantos was to drastically complicate the biographical element upon which so many readers of the section have insisted. The Life and Works of John Adams, as numerous commentators have pointed out, is a massive and highly varied compilation of material drawn from various sources and written or edited by numerous individuals. In attempting to use this text as the basis for his portrait of John Adams, therefore, Pound found himself immediately faced with the type of dilemma Henry James describes in the preface to Roderick Hudson: that “really, universally, relations stop nowhere… the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to stop” (452). He was faced, in other words, with the impossibility of extracting any essential core of John Adams from the intertextual web of the Works. Having declared a “tempus tacendi” and sacrificed his original poetic voice for the sake of the objective presentation of historical “fact”, Pound almost immediately found himself confronted with the necessity of making the type of subjective decision James describes in his preface: where should the “circle” be drawn within which John Adams would “appear” to fall? His acceptance of any such move would have meant nothing less than the failure of his project of carrying historical fact into his poetry via the “documentary method” (it would, in effect, represent an acknowledgement that his source text—and by extension any written text—was incapable of serving as the structural basis for an objective incorporation of history into his poem). His solution to the problem was, accordingly, a radical one: if the historical subject could not be represented in an objective manner then perhaps it was not the poet’s task to either create the type of illusion of which James speaks or to use poetry as a means of subtly reflecting the difficulties inherent in any attempts at such representation. Rather, Pound seems to have decided that the only possible solution to the problem was to do away with the idea of the unified subject altogether, pulverising it into shards of textual matter which, singly, could be presented in an objective way.
17The rendering of subjectivity, in other words, becomes a matter of arranging material evidence that records points of physical contact between the subject and the world in which he or she moved. And, since the individual subjects in this section are treated as though they exist only within the “monument” in which the facts of their lives are recorded, they are deprived of independent energy and made entirely dependent upon the poet’s reading of the physical “evidence” left by their existences. Indeed, Pound’s citational strategy throughout the Adams Cantos is characterised by its tendency to eliminate personal pronouns—a pattern which works to remove actors from the actions they perform, speakers from the words they speak and writers from their works. The hundreds of proper names that crowd the surface of the section, therefore, only suggest the interaction of self-sufficient historical subjects in the most superficial way. Pound’s strategy reduces them to very little more than verbal effects which lack psychological depth or subjective integrity and are valuable only insofar as they can be juxtaposed with other such effects from the source in order to create what he terms an “Adams Paideuma”.
18The development of a typical passage through the three major stages in which the section was composed (the manuscript transcription of passages from the source, the typescript and the published text) serves, I believe, as an example of Pound’s attitude on these points. In transcribing lines from his source which would eventually be incorporated into “Canto LXII,” concluding the description of Adams’s defence of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre and marking a thematic shift to more general statements about the Law, Pound made the following notations:
And law rules that it be sine affectu
---------
---------
P 115
Bad law the worst sort of tyranny (Burke).
==
dispute
right to seize lands
of the heathen
+ give it to any blame king
---------
121
==
if we are feudatory
parliament has no
authority2
19He is careful, we will notice, to isolate individual passages from one another, to record that Edmund Burke is the source of the line “bad law is the worst form of tyranny” and to include the page numbers that indicate where the passages he is transcribing appeared in The Life and Works of John Adams.
20In the typescript version of these lines, however, we find that clear divisions between passages have been removed, that one of the two page numbers recorded in the notebook has been eliminated and that Burke’s name (once clearly associated with the line he actually spoke) is made to hover ambiguously between two passages drawn from different contexts in the Works:
that law rules
that it be sine affectu
p; 115
Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny
(Burke)
Disputed right to seize land of the heathen
and give it to any king
if we be feudatory parliament has no
control over us3
21By the time he came to write the final version of “Canto LXII” all references to pages in the source have been eliminated and Burke’s name has been removed from parentheses and implanted into lines fused together from four separate contexts in such a way as to make it impossible to ascertain which statement should actually be attributed to him:
that law rules
that it be
sine affectu in 1770, Bastun.
Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny. Burke
disputed right to seize lands of the heathen
and give it to any king, If we be feudatory
parliament has no control over us (LXII 343)
22As this passage evolves, then, Pound’s “documentary” strategy works to subsume a variety of historical voices into a single poetic complex so as to render what he terms the “Adams Paideuma.” Edmund Burke, the source of an identifiable line of poetry in the notebook draft becomes, in the final version, little more than a name that hangs loosely in the text, detached from any clearly specified speech or action. Nor, in the absence of the excised page references, is the reader encouraged to clarify such points by returning to the source. What is ultimately important about Burke (and in this he is representative of individual subjects throughout the decad) is not so much what he said or did, but simply that he is part of the intertextual “monument” that Pound takes as his only basis for reconstructing an accurate and objective Adams paideuma. Since Pound had reduced Adams to nothing more that the sum-total of written traces left by his existence and gathered together in The Works, Burke, in a highly literal way, becomes indistinguishable from Adams. The material traces left by these two distinct historical subjects (as well as innumerable others) intersect within the textual “monument” from which the section is composed. And, since Pound concentrates solely on documenting the fact of such intersections (refusing to use a “geometry of his own” to offer a three-dimensional approximation of John Adams), “objectivity” in these cantos is achieved at the expense of the traditional autonomous subject.
23There are, of course, some serious questions to be asked about the ethics and the limitations of this type of approach. Yet I would suggest that in spite of their many faults the Adams Cantos represent a crucial stage in the development of Pound’s “documentary method.” As his most extended effort to use a source-based approach to describe a single historical subject they allow us to gauge both the advantages and the dangers of this type of poetry and serve as an indication of the extent to which the formal development of the “documentary method” over the course of the twenties and thirties is characterised by a progressive movement away from a concern with representing the workings of subjective intelligence. Indeed, while the Adams Cantos foreground the authority of legal texts and call repeatedly for the clear definition of words, one is struck by the fact that these definitions seemingly come at the expense of the clear definition of individuals: a development that becomes all the more interesting when we remember the force with which the struggle against anonymity rushes to the surface of Pound’s poetry at Pisa.