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Part. II. The Aesthetic Referent: Ezra Pound to the artist

MEMOIRS/WHOSE MEMOIRS?

Helen M. Dennis
p. 107-118

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1My focus in this paper is the relation between memory, memoirs and photography as both technological process and as documentary image. Modernist authors vary widely in their conceptions of memory and of the self. Some are drawn to the use of photography and cinematography as an analogy for the mind. Others, including Pound, use the photograph as a metaphor for art which lacks the energy and emotional organization of Vorticism. Thus for Freud and H.D. photography connotes a spatial metaphor for the self, i.e. it is associated with dimensionality, whereas for Pound (following Whistler) it denotes the opposite, an art which is mere surface lacking a deeper aesthetic dimension.

2Yet the revised, enlarged edition of Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir relies on photographic reproductions to convey the meaning of Gaudier’s work, a -meaning, which cannot be explained “by mere talk about the work” (143). Moreover, Pound in the Memoir remarks on the unreliability of memory:

That is the way memory serves us, details return ill assorted, pell mell, in confusion. (40)

3My reading of Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir responds to its recurrent sense of deferral and displacement of meaning. Its most significant moments open up gaps between the speaker (Pound), the subject (and it is ambiguous as to whether this subject is Gaudier the man, or the catalogue of art which survives him) and the possibility of finding any discourse adequate to this dual subject. In these gaps or pauses in the metaphorical potentialities of language Pound gestures towards a modernist sublime, whose enunciation is the stone carving—even the lost and unrealized stone carvings. Pound’s memoir, whilst apparently a collage of documentary evidence, is paradoxically also an articulation of a post-romantic sublime, “where differentiation, the very mode of being of modern culture, can become itself and be experienced as authentic.” (Pease 39)

FREUD’S PHOTOGRAPHIC ANALOGY

4Proust applies the analogy of electric light to the process of voluntary memory, and the analogy of liberating lost souls to the mysterious processes of involuntary memory.1 Freud draws on photography as an analogy for the mnemic systems, which are in the unconscious. Notably Freud’s use of the analogy is connected to his sense of interiority and psychic spatiality, and is often linked to an implicit use of electricity as an analogy, through the use of concepts such as “conductivity,” “resistance” and “transmission.”2 Freud always uses the mechanics or the technicalities of photography in developing his analogies, most often referring to the photographic plate and to the photographic negative, which may or may not be transformed into a positive image. To my knowledge he doesn’t actually refer to the “light chamber,” yet he does concep-tualize the analogy as spatial. This is particularly so in the 1900 (actually 1899) exposition of the analogy, which is accompanied by a series of diagrams indicative of movement from the “front” to the spaces behind where the memory traces are permanently laid down. Even more telling is the reiteration of the suggestion in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), when he moves from the photographic negative as analogous to the unconscious phase to a spatial analogy comparing the “unconscious to a large entrance hall” and “[a]djoining this entrance hall there is a second, narrower, room—a kind of drawing-room—in which consciousness, too resides.” Furthermore, “on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function” of censoring movement from one room to the next. Thus unconscious memories reside in an inner entrance hall, and the consciousness resides in the drawing-room. Even when the unconscious memories make it past the watchman, they do not necessarily catch the eye of the consciousness. Thus, between 1899 and 1938, Freud relies recurrently on the photographic analogy as a means of -describing the psyche, and in particular as a way to convey the sense of the self as having two distinct agencies, the first perceptual and the second mnemonic. He not only uses photographic reproduction as the analogy for permanent memory traces, which may or may not be processed from photographic negatives to positive pictures, but until the “Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” he also links it to a theory of the self as a location with spatiality and depth, composed of and through interiority. In his discourse memories reside in a metaphorical chamber or on a series of photographic plates.

H.D.’S DARK ROOM OF THE MIND

5Peter Jones describes H.D.’s Tribute to Freud as her “attempt to reassemble her recollections of Vienna in 1933 and 1934 when she underwent -psychoanalysis with Freud.” (5) At the same time as she was writing Tribute to Freud, she was also composing Trilogy, in response to the experience of World War II. A further related text is The Gift, which was also written at about the same time (1941 and 1943). As Diana Collecott points out in her introduction to The Gift, the material for it was “initially elicited during H.D.’s sessions with Freud in Vienna” (xi). In Tribute to Freud H.D. doesn’t consider herself a patient, but rather a student of Freud, and one who may question or reinterpret the master. So in The Gift she employs a Freudian conceptual system, but subtly alters it. This is made clear, I believe, by the epigraph:

The brain comes into play, yes, but it is only the tool. […] the telephone is not the person speaking over it. The dark room is not the photograph.

Death and its Mystery, Camille Flammarion

6The Gift is a narrative whose structure mimics the therapeutic model of recollection, repetition, and working through. The use of a photographic and cine-matic metaphor, the “dark room” where film is developed, allows H.D. to reflect upon her origins as poet. Furthermore the metaphor of the process of developing photographic images could be read as figuring how Imagiste technique involves a subjective processing of images, not just an objective presentation of unmediated images. The difference between H.D and Freud, however, is that H.D. seems to hold out for transcendence in a way that Freud’s -deployment of the analogy renders problematic. And in the narrative of The Gift another model of memory emerges, which emphasises intergenerational cultural transmission.

7In “The Secret” the young Hilda finds herself caring for her grandmother who is suffering from senile dementia. Although the old woman confuses Hilda with a number of female relatives, addressing her as if she were the child’s aunts and great-aunts, Hilda hears the story, which connects Mamalie, and her deceased husband Christian, with sacred Indian rituals shared by ancestors who were settlers in the town a century earlier. At the time she doesn’t understand the story:—“Now Mamalie told this story which I did not altogether understand but pieced together afterwards—I mean long afterwards” (The Gift84-5). The recapitulation with intuitive understanding occurs much later, -during the London Blitz:

I saw, I understood… a memory of my grandmother’s or her grandmother’s—a lost parchment, terror that led back finally to the savages, burning and poisonous arrows.

[…] I could not achieve the super-human task of bringing back what had been lost, so the Promise might be redeemed and the Gift restored. (134-5)

8H.D. is unable to rewrite history and actualize a vision of world peace, a universal brotherhood, as she undergoes the terror of the Blitz. But what she does achieve is a development of Freudian theories of memories. In effect the young child receives the grandmother’s demented memories and transfers them to permanent memory traces, without understanding them. Then under the traumatic influence of terror she develops her grandmother’s and also her great-great-grandmother’s memories into positive images. Moreover, she also suggests that because of the cultural exchange of participation in one another’s religious rituals, she can also remember the Shawnee’s vision as well. Thus H.D. clearly remembers not her own but her maternal ancestor’s memories literally in the drawing-room where consciousness resides. And these cross the threshold, not because the watchman/censor permits them access to the preconscious, but in a flash of emotional and intuitive empathy provoked not just by a sense of individual terror but also by a sense of historical responsibility. Thus, despite her grandmother’s senile dementia the cultural memory trace is finally transformed into a positive picture.

9Thus cinematic analogies, demonstrable in H.D.’s autobiographic fiction, transform Freudian theories of memory and transcend the Proustian paradigm. Later in End to Torment H.D. deploys various photographs including one of Sheri Martinelli, whom she has never met, to permit access to buried emotions in relation to Pound (52 and passim). She then works through these recovered emotions, using the photographs as a kind of visual mantra to invoke the spectral but irretrievable past.3 Pound in his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, written in the middle of World War I in 1916 with additional materials included from 1918, 1934 and 1960, displays a more acerbic attitude towards photography. It is, nevertheless, complicated and at times paradoxical.

MR. BENINGTON’S CAMERA HAS THE BETTER OF ME

10My discussion of Freud and H.D. has highlighted that Freud employs the analogy of technical apparatus in his discussion of mnemic systems, and that H.D. transforms that conceptual model in the structure of her memoirs.4 Pound does not share the Freudian photographic or cinematographic aesthetic with H.D.; in fact after immersing oneself in H.D.’s cinematographic writing Pound’s prose in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir can seem Edwardian5 and inadequate to the task in hand. He displays no concept of self as interiority and instead the analogy for the way in which the memoir is constructed that most readily springs to mind is that of a Cubist collage. It is possible that Pound had Vorticist painting in mind, in which case the analogy should be that of an arrangement of lines and planes on a single surface, that is somehow supposed to invoke the illusion of depth and dimensionality in the viewer.6

11However, Pound does include photographs in his memoir, and even states that they can more adequately render the subject than he can through “diminished memories.” It’s worth quoting the passage in its entirety, since it also has implications for the representation and function of memory in The Cantos:

And these [Gaudier’s prose publications], with the reproductions of his sculpture and drawings, and with certain excerpts from his letters and one excerpt from a sketch-book, must be all that I can give of the man himself. The rest is perforce impressions and opinion, mine and those of Mr. Benington’s camera. And Mr. Benington’s camera has the better of me, for it gives the subject as if ready to move and to speak, whereas I can give but diminished memories of past speech and action. (38)

12In the sense that history is news that stays news, Pound is acting as historian here, but without any time for maturation. His is a contemporary account even if his subject is dead; yet he compares his own ability to compose a memoir unfavourably with the “fugitive testimony” of the camera.7 So, how does Pound’s memoir of Gaudier work? What are its procedures? Are they adequate to the task Pound sets out to accomplish?

13Pound states that his aim is “to leave as clear a record as possible of Gaudier’s art and thought” (19). To this end he proceeds mainly through citation and documentation: Gaudier’s letters and postcards, Gaudier’s published statements on art, Pound’s own published articles on Gaudier and related sculptors and artists, accounts of conversations with those who knew Gaudier,etc. He claims objectivity in saying, “I am not particularly anxious to make this book ‘my book’ about Gaudier-Brzeska” (18). Yet this is also a book about vorticism, a book which Pound would “in any case have written” (19). So while this is a memoir about a man who died at Neuville St. Vaast on June 5, 1915, it is moreover a compilation of small press publications, exhibition catalogues, letters and records of conversations and encounters with a practitioner of Vorticism, arranged by a fellow practitioner and publicist for the movement. The art is more significant than the man.

14Pound originally assembled the memoir quite rapidly, so one could merely assume that the method of collage was expedient.8 But other methods were equally available to Pound, and I believe he employs this method by a significant choice since it anticipates the method of The Cantos. If memory is diminished and unreliable then the assemblage of documentation and photographic reproduction is a more reliable means of invoking the lost artist and man. The effect, however, is of a circling around the subject without being able to present it in and for itself. This is most marked in the movement from the end of Chapter X, which has engaged with fellow artists and sculptors of Gaudier who failed to appreciate his experimental, abstract aesthetic, to the beginning of Chapter XI. In a more conventional memoir, one might at this stage expect a fully synthesized account and defence of Gaudier’s innovative aesthetic. Instead the chapter reproduces Pound’s September 1914 article in TheFortnightly Review. The chapter is widely quoted in essays on Imagisme and Pound, for it contains his own poetic manifesto, including the extended account of the genesis of “In a Station of the Metro.” In presenting his own aesthetic for poetry Pound implies that it can be applied to Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture, but he doesn’t say how. Two possibilities strike me; the first is that the disjuncture between the end of Chapter X and the commencement of Chapter XI should be read in the same way as we are being taught to read the “hokku-like sentence” (89). The second is that this is actually a very Emersonian technique: this is reasoning by analogy.

In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention.

The logical end of impressionist art is the cinematograph. The state of mind of the impressionist tends to become cinematographical. Or, to put it another way, the cinematograph does away with the need of a lot of impressionist art.

There are two opposed ways of thinking of a man: firstly, you may think of him as that toward which perception moves, as the toy of circumstance, as the plastic substance receiving impressions; secondly, you may think of him as directing a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing.9 (89)

15I want to turn briefly to Donald Pease’s 1986 essay on “Sublime Politics.” In this essay he offers a wonderful analysis of Emerson’s1836Nature essay, which I am not going to be able to give full justice to here. However, I shall extract some of his most pertinent observations in the hope that piths and gists can make some kind of sense:

In moving from the “transparent eyeball” […] to the “me” that forces pass through, the individual crossing the bare common has become less a person than a site of passage, a personification of the confluences between self and nature. […] Consequently, the subject of the discourse is always in a displaced position relative to the “I” who is speaking. And a space opens up between what is said and who says it. […] After asking the original question, why cannot we also enjoy an original relation with Nature? with enough force to cause nature and man to disappear, light, the transparent medium of being we never see because we always see through it, appears. […] [I]t is as if this question evoked the fiat “let there be light” from another creation of Nature as the only possible response. […] [T]his fiat leads us into a place which is always on the verge of taking place, […] to a place which does not take place in the sublime but takes the place of the sublime. (44-9; -italics mine)

16I think Pease’s essay (despite its cryptic difficulty) is very useful in sketching the movement from a Romantic sense of the sublime, with its attendant sense of the primary imagination, to the inherent displacement of a sense of self, to the opening up of a gap between subject and “the ‘I’ who is speaking,” and to a pause in “discourse, signification and identity”:

Not a place but the precondition for taking place, or more precisely a letting take place be, the transparent eyeball, like the pauses in dialogue of the power to make a metaphor, is what every position passes through before it can become itself. (49)

17The “transparent eyeball” analogy anticipates the light chamber of the -camera in its evocation of optics to describe the psyche. This is a psyche, which is not ego bound, rather a site of confluence. Pound, in perpetuating a Transcen-dentalist tradition, tends to set the Romantic sense of the self, based in a dialogic relation to Nature, in apposition to the mechanistic or scientific sense of self, apparent in Freud’s photographic analogy, which H.D. was to find so useful in transcribing her own transcendentalist experience of recovered cultural memories.

18Not appreciating, and possibly not even being familiar with, Freud’s 1900 (1899) analogy for the psyche, Pound fails to exploit the dimensionality of the photographic analogy. Throughout Gaudier-Brzeska, he uses the photograph as a term of disparagement. For example, he quotes Whistler: “If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer” (120). For Pound, the photograph connotes a superficial image, lacking the “inspiring force” of instinct and emotion (37). He conceives photography to be documentary evidence, lacking the transcendent dimension.

Gaudier’s meaning is expressed in his work. There is no use in anyone’s thinking they can explain that meaning by mere talk about the work. If you can’t get to the actual three dimensional objects, the photographs will give you an approximate idea of his meaning, as they give you an approximate idea of his work. (143)

19The photographs in Gaudier-Brzeska do more than give the reader an approximate idea of his meaning, they also bear testimony to his death. We might compare their effect to that of the photograph of Lewis Payne awaiting his execution, which bears the caption, in La Chambre Claire, “Il est mort et il va mourir” (149). All sense of duration or historical time is erased; the photographic image does not invoke presence in a Proustian moment, but rather confirms absence and death. The meaning of the life is now read retrospectively as imminently/immanently catastrophic:

En me donnant le passé absolu de la pose (aoriste), la photographie me dit la mort au futur. Ce qui me point, c’est la découverte de cette équivalence. […] [I]l y a toujours en [la photographie historique] un écrasement du Temps: cela est mort et cela va mourir.10 (150)

20The paradox then is that the photograph is aoristic, “without further implication as to completion, duration, or repetition” (Webster’s1991),11 but the memoir, this collage of articles, letters and photographs, is occasioned by Gaudier’s death. The reader’s sense of duration is further erased by the anachronistic inclusion of the “HIERATIC HEAD of Ezra Pound. Marble 1914. Shown in its present surroundings; the gardens of Brunnenburg” (XIII). Disruption to a sense of historical time is precipitated by this exhibit, but then perpetuated; since dates on the captions refer mainly to the date the art object was completed, but give no indication as to when the photograph was taken or developed. Indeed some dates are much later than the original memoir. For example: “A section of the Memorial Exhibition of Gaudier’s sculptures and drawings at Milan in 1957” (XIV) and “Ezra Pound at Rapallo. 1938 (circa)” (XXIX). Arranged after the 1957 image in published sequence, but evidently taken earlier in time, “Gaudier standing behind ‘BIRD SWALLOWING FISH’” thus has to be read as “he is dead and he is going to die.”

21Thus a series of erasures take place in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir:

22- Diminished memories of past speech and action cannot revive Gaudier “the man.”

23- The photographic record (initially characterized as giving “the subject as if ready to move and speak”) is undermined and deemed to be superficial and merely imitative, lacking the aesthetic dynamic.

24- Language is “mere talk” and cannot convey the meaning in the sculptures, no more than photography can.

25- The significance of the sculpture is in the sculpture. It can only be gestured towards through metaphor and reasoning by analogy.

26- The Emersonian method of reasoning by analogy contains an inherent unravelling of the positive sublime, and indeed of the negative sublime, creat-ing instead a gap or pause which is the precondition of discourse, identify and signification.

27- The memoir, including the photographic exhibits, reminds us that Gaudier is going to die and is already dead.

28And yet, despite the multiple displacements of discourse of which the memoir is composed, and despite Gaudier the man and Gaudier the sculptor being an assemblage of fragments, one can read another paradigm at work in this text, that of Vorticist energy. For example: “the organization of forms is a much more energetic and creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack” (92). My perplexity is that this central, organizing metaphor is an imperceptible force, not that different from Emerson’s “I become a -transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God” (39). When Pound does attempt an analogy to describe it, ironically he settles on a mechanistic one of the force that drives the engine:

The Renaissance sought for a lost reality, a lost freedom. We seek for a lost reality and a lost intensity. We believe that the Renaissance was in part the result of a programme. We believe in the value of a programme in contradistinction to, but not in contradiction of, the individual impulse. Without such vagrant impulse there is no art, and the impulse is not subject to programme. The use and the limitation of force need not bring about mental confusion. An engine is not a confusion merely because it uses the force of steam and the physical principles of the lever and piston. (117)

29Mere memory is “a confusion.” Yet the individual/vagrant impulse seeks a lost reality. Not subject to a programme it is however the force which drives the engine. This expresses the contradictions of the memoir. There is no adequate analogy for memory nor for identity; yet there is a profound investment in the individual artist as the power that turns the wheel. The memoir (Hermes like) faces three ways:

30- It anticipates a post-modern sense of personality as performative, a series of gestures and surfaces, with no accessible interiority.

31- In contradiction to this first assumption, it retrospectively recapitulates a Romantic and Transcendentalist sensibility in its belief that “a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”

32- It erases durée in order paradoxically to recuperate “a lost reality and a lost intensity.”

CONCLUSION

33In this paper I have considered a number of different models of memory and thus of memoir writing co-existing during the period of High Modernism. I have briefly mentioned Freudian theory and analytic practice as experienced by H.D. and photographic analogies for memory, also evident in Freud’s writing and notably in H.D.’s memoirs. In contrast I have suggested that Pound seems to prefer a compound “last romantics” model, drawing eclectically and not necessarily intentionally on a number of Romantic and Transcendentalist sources. There is specific evidence in Pound’s work of a Paterine, neo-medievalist/Renaissance model, which sets him in opposition to the photographic and cinematic models. Yet, despite their disagreement about Freud12—“What does he mean by telling you to crawl out?” “I didn’t know what Ezra meant. I don’t now.” (26-7)—and despite very different attitudes towards photography as a Modernist aesthetic, H.D. and Pound do share certain Modernist -characteristics in their memoir writing. In both there is a paradoxical tension between on the one hand: diminishment, displacement, and fragmentation; and on the other hand: a vagrant impulse to recover, in the sense of recuperate, a lost reality and a lost intensity. And in both there is a confusion as to motive; is this for the speaking subject, or for the lost subject, or for the art that survives?

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Bibliographie

WORKS CITED

Barthes, R. La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Gallimard: Seuil, 1980.

Doolittle, H. (H.D.). End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. Manchester: Carcanet, 1980.

—. Her. London: Virago, 1984.

—. The Gift. London: Virago, 1984.

—. Tribute to Freud. Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1971.

Emerson, R.W. Selected Essays. Larzer Ziff, ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Freud, S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. James Strachey, ed. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74.

Pease, D. “Sublime Politics.” Mary Arensberg, ed. The American Sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Pound, E. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970.

Proust, M. À la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1999.

White, E. Proust. London: Phoenix, 2000.

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Helen M. Dennis, « MEMOIRS/WHOSE MEMOIRS? »Sillages critiques, 5 | 2003, 107-118.

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Helen M. Dennis, « MEMOIRS/WHOSE MEMOIRS? »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 5 | 2003, mis en ligne le 26 juillet 2015, consulté le 25 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4206 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.4206

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Auteur

Helen M. Dennis

helen m.dennis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published on Ezra Pound and Medieval Provençal, Gender in American Literature and Culture, Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather and Adrienne Rich. She recently edited a collection of essays on Ezra Pound and poetic influence for Rodopi Press.

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