1Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916) is not an elegy, nor even a work of art, but an assemblage of documents, photographs, and commentaries pertain-ing to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and his work, including obituaries, press reports; Gaudier’s two “Vortex” manifestos, exhibition review, journal entries, letters from the front to Pound, Olivia Shakespear, Edward Wadsworth; biographical data, anecdotes, impressions, and sound bites from Sophie Brzeska, Horace Brodsky, Alfred Wolmark; letters by Pound and the American collector John Quinn; Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist briefs; Walter Benington’s 1914 photographs of Gaudier with sculptures (Bird Swallowing Fish, Hieratic Head) in his studio under the Putney railway arch and in his French army uniform, the drawings and sculptures, and a page of a letter by Gaudier; quotations from Whistler, Stendhal, Laurence Binyon, and others; additions dated 1918, 1934, 1960 (1960/ 1961 English and American editions) and 1970 (1970 edition), including a 1938 photograph of Pound in Rapallo with three Gaudiers and a Wyndham Lewis. Marjorie Perloff describes Gaudier-Brzeska as a documentary “portrait of the artist as collage-text,” after the montage-technique of Cubism, Futurism, and Blast—a “Vorticist memoir-manifesto,” which renders its subject as “a radiant node or cluster… from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (Perloff 34-35, Gaudier-Brzeska92). But Gaudier-Brzeska is also A Memoir, written to commemorate the artist and his work in the -collective mind of the living; and the elegy’s conventions illuminate the energies swirling through Pound’s portrait of Gaudier’s brief life, prodigious work, and war death, particularly the logic of what one critic calls “its disquieting mixture of memorial with Vorticist polemic” (Tiffany 87).
2Pound insists that this portrait looks much as it would had Gaudier lived, since he had already planned a book on Vorticism in which he “would have filled certain chapters,” and his present aim is “to leave as clear a record as possible of Gaudier’s art and thought” (19). But the Blast death notice, “Mort pour la patrie/Henri Gaudier-Brzeska” (17), announces its elegiac occasion, and the text immediately invokes a community of mourners: “It is part of the war waste. Among many good artists, among other young men of promise there was this one sculptor already great in achievement at the age of 23, incalculably great in promise and in the hopes of his friends” (17). From its first page Gaudier-Brzeska depicts the dead artist and his community: not only such “friends” with dashed “hopes” as Ford Madox Hueffer, whose Outlook obituary Pound quotes, but such “detractors,” “unbelievers,” and mockers of the new sculpture as Hueffer’s unnamed “friend the critic,” whose “horrible achievement” is to have “pour[ed] ridicule upon… this poor, fine, beautiful spirit” and “the very record of his death” (127, 138, 18).1 Gaudier-Brzeska, then, is an elegiac Portrait of the Artist and the Public: a sound-collage that captures the dissonant voices of a community riven by modernity’s ideological fault lines, which began debating the new art well before Gaudier’s death and now does not simply mourn and remember him but contends urgently over his legacy. Pound’s portrait does not simply consolidate Gaudier’s legacy for an existing community’s future but calls out a new, wider community to envision through Gaudier’s art a possible “new civilization” (140).
3Although Pound’s remark that Gaudier’s death little affects his book’s substance is true enough of the record to 1915, Gaudier-Brzeska’s wide-angle focus on the artist and this contentious community aligns it with the elegy. In Peter Sacks’s psychosocial analysis, the elegy is a work of art and of mourning in which a mourner, who speaks for a community, struggles arduously toward renewed hope for the future, epitomized in “Lycidas”’s closing line: “Tomor-row to fresh woods and pastures new.” The pastoral elegy’s conventions include an eclogic division of mourning voices, derived from communal mourning rites such as ritual funeral games and “poetry contests,” which functions to dramatize the survivors’ dialectical “work” of mourning, to negotiate issues of inheritance, and to contest values vital to the community’s survival (35-36). Central to this understanding of elegy as a dynamic, perilous progress from loss and grief toward acceptance of reality, symbolic consolation, and renewed hope are the genre’s rich resources for mediating the dangerous anger that loss and grief entail, which threatens to divert the mourner into the violent path of revenge tragedy. As the mourner struggles to submit to reality and accept consolations necessarily symbolic, the elegy’s conventions channel anger into social critique and contestation in hope of change. Hence such elegiac polemics as St. Peter’s castigation of the clergy in Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s attack on the Reviewer in “Adonais,” Yeats’s condemnation of political violence in “Easter 1916” (119). Even as Pound deprecates the “journalistic squabbles” surround-ing the new sculpture’s early reception and promises to “drag[…]” in the “general topic of vorticism” only as it furthers “a clearer understanding or a swifter comprehension” of Gaudier’s work, his satiric invocation of such adherents of post-Victorian “sentimental aesthetics” as the “Cerberi of the Tate”—who consider pre-Raphaelite painting “a violent and dangerous innovation” and are “robbing the public” by refusing a donated Epstein—stands with these -elegiac contestations of the community’s values and future (26, 96).
4In all these examples, the elegist attacks social corruption or injustice, or engages a conflict of values, that long precedes the loss that occasions the work. In Gaudier-Brzeska Pound wages a culture war whose origin predates by -several years the machine-age war that killed Gaudier. Pound had already exalted him as a hero in this “old war,” opposing his sculpture’s “new sense of form” and the “thought” it inspires to “the glorification of energetic stupidity” in the “battle” or “revolt” that “began with Whistler,” champion of “art for the intelli-gent” (124-27). Now he aims to secure the territory taken by Gaudier in -modern art’s onslaught against public passivity or deadness, “the dough-like -properties and propensities of the race,” writ large in World War I (125). Thus Pound’s foremost purpose of preserving “Gaudier’s art and thought” gains urgency from public indifference and even hostility (19). Noting that Gaudier wished his work made available to other artists in case of his death (though Pound fears his example will be “almost useless” to anyone lacking his rare “sense of form,” “sense of stone,” “wisdom,” and “inexhaustible” physical energy [39]), Pound directs readers to the South Kensington Museum, the Musée du Luxem-bourg, and John Quinn’s “great modern collection”; and he conceives his book as a supplement, a virtual museum antithetical to the Tate with its Cerberi, its “unsatisfactory” photographs “better than nothing” (65, 19).2 Protecting the legacy that marks the limit of Gaudier’s once great -promise against those who dimiss it as “not sculpture but stones,” Gaudier-Brzeska battles for a future that Pound still hopes Gaudier might influence through his work (80).
5Pound assimilates Gaudier’s war death to this culture war—indeed, frames it as a crisis in that culture war in which the community’s future is at stake—and makes his elegiac task to recapture Gaudier’s lost promise, to wrest a legacy from the dead, to reconstitute his friends’ “hopes” in face of public indifference (17). Far from merely constellating a community of mourners around Gaudier’s art, Pound seeks actually to conjure a new community by framing that art as an eloquent speech act, of moment for the individuals called to this community and for its future. The Gaudier of Gaudier-Brzeska thus functions much as does the pastoral elegy’s vegetation deity, through whose death the community confronts loss and mortality, and whose symbolic rebirth restores hope for its future (cf. “Canto XLVII”).
6Pound seeks to seed and cultivate from the destroyed artist-god’s legacy not just a community of artists but a transfigured public—an aspiration forcefully expressed in his 1934 Postscript: “A few blocks of stone really carved are very nearly sufficient base for a new civilization” (140). This elegiac purpose explains why his Portrait of the Artist and the Public expounds Vorticist aesthetics. It also shapes the memoir’s myriad voices, which Pound feared might seem “formal and almost dreary documentation,” into what Bakhtin calls a “speech genre,” fitted to a working concept of the addressee: “how the speaker or writer senses and imagines” the “reader, listener, public, or people”—their degree of familiarity with the situation, their “special knowledge of the given cultural area,” their “views,” “convictions,” “prejudices (from my viewpoint),” “sympathies and antipathies” (98, 95-96). With its disrupted “masses” and intersecting “planes” of discourse, Gaudier-Brzeska invokes, cites, and ventriloquises this public and its conflicting energies: friends, well-wishers, acquaintances, critics, living and future artists, not least, its own readers. Variously addressed as “gracious,” “ferocious and intolerant,” “acrimonious,” and, obliquely, “the right people,” we readers are provisionally exempt from the aesthetic ignominy of that “general public” of whom Gaudier “said nothing whatever,” represented by “bankers with pink satin minds,” consumers of inanely derivative realist art, who also represent the militaristic, capitalist states that are slaughtering young men for “a botched civilization,” and killing with them “a good deal of sculpture” (109, 29, 119, 19, 95, Selected Poems64, Cantos71). Yet even for this general public there is hope. Imagining the Tate curators answer to his charge that they have “robb[ed] the public”—“the public don’t care”—Pound retorts, “the public don’t know”; in any case, in “fifty years” the public may have emerged from its “present public stupidity,” and already a “considerable part” of it is “ready for Epstein” (96).
7Pound’s elegiac claim on the future also accounts for his repeated disavowals of personal sentiment and Vorticist polemics. He would not be misunderstood as promoting a friend and coterie artist, his own poetry, or Vorticism for its own sake. Echoing Hueffer’s “I am not at this moment engaged in appraising Blast as an achievement,” Pound asserts: “I am not writing in a momentary fit of grief or enthusiasm”; “I am not making phrases. I am not adding in any way to statements I had made and printed during Gaudier’s lifetime… Neither do I write in a spirit that is not common to those who had known him”; again: “I am not particularly anxious to make this book ‘my book’”; “I am not over-anxious to enter upon long quibbles either about his work or the group-name he chose to work under” (17-18, italics mine). This rhetoric of negation lifts the memoir out of the registers of personal grief, sentimental memorial, and aesthetic opportunism into the realm of public debates over modernist aesthetics—debates that engage art’s social meanings and values in this period of convulsive social crisis.
8What exactly is at stake in this culture war avant-guerre? The twenty-two-year-old Gaudier’s departure for France on 5 September 1914 interrupted a period of intensive, adventurous experimentation and astounding creativity as he rapidly and freely assimilated the abstract forms of non-Western cultures. In the first eight months of 1914 he made, among other works, Coffer for William Scawen Blunt, Love Scene, Water Carrier, Caritas, Boy with a Coney, Stags, Imp, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, Torpedo Fish, Doorknocker, Faun, Green Stone Charm, Portrait of Ezra Pound (wood), Bird Swallowing Fish, Men with Bowl, Seated Woman, Mlle Borne, and Birds Erect, in a supple yet assured and coherent array of styles, astonishing in their freedom, variety, and inventiveness (Silber 268-276). Although different groups claimed or rejected Gaudier on various grounds at different moments,3 in Gaudier-Brzeska he—and Vorticism—carry the banner of “abstraction,” first raised against the Hellenistic aesthetics of “empathy” by Wilhelm Wörringer in Abstraction and Empathy (1908). Gaudier had abandoned late Hellenistic style by 1911; his later aesthetic theory and practice were influenced by T.E. Hulme, who disseminated Wörringer’s ideas in lectures in England in 1913-1914 (Hulme 271, Silber 131-32).4
9Wörringer presents abstraction and empathy as poles of a continuum: at one extreme, the literal, naturalistic, mimetic realism exemplified by Western European art from the Hellenic period through the nineteenth century; at the other, the abstract forms of non-Western art, preeminently Chinese and African. The aesthetics of empathy, Wörringer argues, expresses pantheistic confidence in the cosmos through mimetic organic forms. Abstract forms spring from dread of nature’s seeming arbitrariness and create a tranquil refuge from unease with humanity’s fortuitous and contingent state in the creation and contemplation of forms felt as “necessary and irrefragable” in themselves (17). Mimetic and abstract art both rescue the object from nature, time, and death, but rather than copy forms given by nature, abstraction seeks to incarnate the object (Ding an sich) beyond the organic world of time, death, and decay. Rather than cultivate resemblance to nature, abstract forms turn aside from appearances; they seek to purify the thing of its dependence on life and death, “to approximate it to its absolute value” (17). Whereas the aesthetics of empathy produces “happiness” in its makers through mimetic representation, abstract form does so by giving objective, material expression to inner realities, subjective intensities (13).
10As described by Wörringer and Hulme as a symbolic refuge from the “flux and impermanence” of the natural world, abstract form has a certain affinity with elegy (Hulme 274). Abstraction arises from a “great inner unrest at outward phenomena,” a “spiritual dread of space” unappeased by intellectual apprehension, since all the thought in the world cannot suffice to grasp the “unfathomable entanglement of all the phenomena of life” (Wörringer 16). Beyond Western rationalism and positivist science, “above cognition,” abstraction creates a refuge from an unknowable cosmos (16). Though both styles express desire for self-alienation (empathy, alienation from individual being; abstraction, deliverance from the arbitrariness and vulnerability of organic existence), for Wörringer abstraction is the “primal artistic impulse” because it does not copy nature but creates an ontological realm independent and apart. The impulse toward “pure abstraction” is “the consummate expression, and the only expression of which man can conceive, of emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture” in the creation of something “independent both of the ambient external world and of the subject—the spectator—who desires to enjoy in it not the cognate-organic, but… the abstraction for which he has yearned” (44).
11Wörringer’s theory of abstract form has affinities with Kant’s formulation, inthe Critique of Judgment, of the “subjective universality” of disinterested aesthetic judgments, predicated on the free play of imagination (which gathers manifold intuitions from nature) and understanding (which gives the concept that brings them together, without any concept being adequate to produce it) (Kant 46f, Wörringer 30-31). A subject who approaches art disinterestedly, not sentimentally—such as, in Pound’s example, one who approaches Whistler’s painting as “Arrangement in Grey and Black” (its earlier title) rather than “Whistler’s Mother”—may be expected to find “beautiful” (not merely “pleasant”) artworks that display this “purposiveness without purpose,” whose virtue lies not in their status as copies of nature but in their manifestation of the imagination’s freedom to create “another nature” out of the material that nature gives it, something different that surpasses nature, that goes beyond the -limits of experience to create a completeness not found in nature (Gaudier-Brzeska 120; Kant 157f). For Kant, art attests to freedom’s “objective reality,” -throwing a bridge between nature’s sensible realm and freedom’s supersensible realm (327). In communicating “inmost feeling” through forms created in imaginative freedom conjoined with discipline, art cultivates “universal… sympathy,” the “social spirit of humanity” through which people seek “permanent community”; it furthers the sociability that Kant sees as humanity’s highest end (201).
12The social dimension of Kant’s aesthetics highlights the rich encounters with other civilizations that gave rise to twentieth-century Western abstract art and foregrounds certain features of Gaudier’s and Pound’s theories of Vorticist abstraction: their opposing of permanent, universal forms to “sentimental” copying of nature; their global perspective; and what eventually emerges as their antiwar stance. In “Vorticism,” which appeared as Gaudier left for France, Pound compares “[g]reat works of art” to the “eternal equations” of analytic geometry: like the formula of the circle, they are “lords over fact,” “the thrones and dominations that rule over form and recurrence” (Gaudier-Brzeska92). Assimilating Vorticism’s formal language to this concept, he distinguishes it from impressionism (“the copying or imitating of light on a haystack”) and geometric abstraction: in their abstraction of “organic forms,” Gaudier’s and Epstein’s “planes in relation” differ from “the relations dealt with in geometry” (92). Pound also defends Vorticism as “not a movement of mystification” but a new “common speech,” “energetic and creative” (92). In “Affirmations” (1915) Pound marks Vorticism’s divergences from Futurism, an “accelerated impressionism” that “shirk[s] comparison with the best art of the past” (“gross cowardice”) (104).5 Whereas Futurism extols geometric machine art and glorifies combat, Vorticism is “not in thrall to violence” and keeps organic forms in play: the sculptor “‘abstracts’ form, takes form from natural objects, and puts it together again in his work” (Cork 78; Gaudier-Brzeska145).6
13Before leaving for war, Gaudier planned an essay titled “The Need of Organic Forms in Sculpture” for Blast 2 (25). Although that essay remained unwritten, his art and two “Vortex” manifestos make the case. “Gaudier-Brzeska Vortex I” in Blast I—“one of the most succinct and witty histories of sculpture in English”—might almost be called a natural history of world sculpture (Silber 137). “Sculptural energy is the mountain,” begins its bird’s-eye survey of the Dordogne caverns, stone-age humans and animals “disput[ing] the earth,” the carved horses of Font-des-Gaumes, “Egypt, the land of plenty” that nurtured “far reaching speculations,” the Greek who narcissistically “petrified his own semblance,” “Germanic barbarians” “like oxen stampeding” in quest of “new arable lands,” semites “slay[ing] each other cruelly for the possession of -fertile valleys,” the “man-headed bulls,” “flayed captives,” and “howling lions” of the Middle East, the peaceful and prosperous ancient Chinese of the Yellow River valley, “tilling their lands”; their “off-shoots” in the Mexican and Yucatan highlands; “other races” in Africa and the Ocean islands who, struggling to win the soil from nature and beset by storms, fevers, epidemics, created the “Vortex of Fear” and “its masterpieces the fetishes”; finally, “WE the moderns: Epstein, Brancusi, Archipenko, Dunikowski, Modigliani,” and Gaudier, who by “Will and consciousness” wrest form from “incessant struggle in the complex city”—the metropole of that imperial, rationalist Western European “civilization” that now “embraces the world” (Gaudier-Brzeska 20-24).
14Gaudier’s passion for Asian art preceded his friendship with Pound; “the yellow civilization is better than our own,” he wrote after viewing an exhibition of Japanese prints and sword hilts in Paris in 1910 (Silber 129). But Pound probably introduced him to Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (London, 1912), which a passage of Gaudier’s first Vortex echoes (Nolde; cf. Cayley); and, his imperialist overtones aside, Gaudier’s world-embracing modern West-ern civilization echoes the vision of “world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races,” that opens Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (3).7 Pound, meanwhile, concludes Gaudier-Brzeska’s 1916 text with Binyon’s citation of “a Chinese author”’s observation that brushstrokes “announce… the freedom and nobility” of the creator’s soul “or its meanness and limitation”—an analogue to Kant’s aesthetics of freedom, voiced, in the spirit of -sociability, by another civilization (135).
15Gaudier—who believed from childhood that he would die in war and had fled to England to evade serving in the French army, which he called “the slaughterers of the Arabs”—was filled with patriotic rage on hearing that the Germans had destroyed his grandfather’s house and bombed Rheims Cathedral (Materer 68). He departed England in euphoria, assuring Richard Aldington that he would rescue the Düsseldorf Picassos; two months before his death he reported, “I am enjoying the war,” “a fine sport” (Silber 45, 48). But his war writings trace tensions between Futurism’s machine-art abstraction and glorification of combat and Vorticism’s organic abstraction, and between technocratic capitalist-nationalist warfare and art’s manifestation of will and freedom toward community, sociability, a “common language,” peace. Gaudier’s -second “Vortex,” written in pencil from the trenches, poses the “paltry” war machine against the landscape’s impervious grandeur and abstracts “the intensity of life” from the spectacle of war. Impersonal teeming masses die on the battlefield and, like crops, horses, dogs, are replaced by others. The destruction changes “nothing… even superficially. Life is the same strength, the moving agent that permits the small individual to assert himself” (27). Bursting shells make no dent in the hill; partridges scuttle along his trench. In a shot across Marinetti’s bow, Gaudier writes, “It would be folly to seek artistic emotions amid these little works of ours” (27). War blasts individual “arrogance, self-esteem, pride,” and numerous “unimportant units whose economic activities become -noxious as the recent trades crises have shown us” but leaves Gaudier’s “views on sculpture… unchanged”: “The vortex of will, of decision… begins”; the new sculpture derives “emotions solely from the arrangement of surfaces” (27-28). Gaudier recounts how he pinched an enemy Mauser, saw in its “heavy unwieldy shape” “a powerful image of brutality,” then broke off the butt and carved “a design, through which I tried to express a gentler order of feeling, which I preferred” (28).
16Even as Gaudier insists that the gun too derives its effect from a “composition of lines and planes” (28), he parts ways with Futurism’s aestheticization of brutality. The genesis of his (now lost but presumably abstract) “design” expressing a “gentler order of feeling” marks a shift as the “dread” of nature that, for Wörringer, inspires abstract form becomes aversion to the manmade war machine. Three weeks before his death, Gaudier wrote drily from a trench blooming with lily of the valley, “we have the finest futurist music Marinetti can dream of, big guns, small guns, bomb-throwers reports, with a great difference between the German and the French, the different kinds of whistling from the shells, their explosion, the echo in the woods of the rifle flares… but it is all stupid vulgarity, and I prefer the fresh wind in the leaves with a few songs from the birds”; and, less than a week before he was shot: “To-day is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun and larks singing cheerfully. The shells do not disturb the songsters. In the Champagne woods the nightingales… solemnly proclaim man’s foolery and sacrilege of nature” (69, 70).
17As Pound’s book would have been much the same had Gaudier lived, and “Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture would have been just what it was” even without a “vorticist movement,” so Gaudier professes his formalism unchanged by trench warfare’s ghastly horrors. But now nature’s enduring forms provide refuge from manmade hostility and violence—the finest Futurist scenario Marinetti could dream of—and sustain his awareness of “the intensity of life” and the futility of war, that “paltry mechanism, which serves as a purge to over-numerous humanity,” to “alter in the least the outlines of the hill we are besieging” (27). The war that does nothing to alter his views on sculpture bodies forth not just the vulnerability of organic existence that Wörringer links to abstract form but the redundancy of the manmade violence fostered by the public stupidity and passivity to which Pound opposes the new sculpture. As such, the war is an accidental interruption of the prewar aesthetic movement in which Gaudier’s art and thought originated: the formal dialogue of Western aesthetic traditions with African, Chinese, Oceanic, and other civilizations, in a mode of sociability intrinsically opposed to war.
18Deploring Epstein’s need to pawn his “Sun-God” and two other works for sixty pounds, Pound observes that curators’ stupidity “is not due to the war”; but it is less clear that the “gigantic stupidity of this war” does not implicate everyone who failed to resist it, from curators to a pervasively mindless -public that included, he acknowledges in 1934, “ourselves” (100, 53, 140). In the “Preface to the Memorial Exhibition 1918” (appended in 1961), Gaudier’s death is no longer just “part of the war waste” but “the gravest individual loss which the arts have sustained during the war”—a lament echoed in the “cry” of “Belgian poet Marcel Wyseur on first seeing” Gaudier’s work, “Il a eu grand tort de mourir, cet homme! Il a eu grand tort de mourir” (136, 139). Pound would later mark 1918, the year of the Memorial Exhibition and the last year of the war, as a watershed in his own thought and work: “1918 Began investiga-tion of causes of war, to oppose same” (Selected Poems viii), and attribute his turn toward politics and economics to Gaudier’s death (letter to Lewis, 25 January 1949, cited Materer 63). After symbolically interring the “E. P.” of Personae in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Pound arrived by 1928 at the conviction that first among the causes of war are “Manufacture and high pressure salesmanship of munitions, armaments,‑etc.” (“Peace” Selected Prose222). The 1934 Postscript finds Gaudier’s death still “unremedied”: Epstein’s best work was behind him by 1918; only Brancusi “continued to use form to express a reality with greater” precision and knowledge (though perhaps without Gaudier’s intellectual curiosity, stylistic inventiveness and range, and “amazing faculty for synthesis”) (143, 20, 25). As the Great War illuminates the Vorticist culture war as a war against war itself, and as a second world war looms in the future Pound hoped Gaudier might influence, Pound sees “no reason to pardon” Gaudier’s death “either to the central powers or to the allies or to ourselves” (140). It is almost as though, had Gaudier lived, history would have been different; as though his death were not simply caused by the war but becomes, by virtue of his lost “promise,” an indirect cause of Europe’s continuing violence.
19Here we return to the vicissitudes of modernist elegy, as Gaudier-Brzeska’s shaping belief that art must influence world events founders against economic and political forces upon which art has no purchase. Pound’s elegiac portrait of 1916 holds out hope for the future in several ways: through Gaudier’s -influence upon other artists, the slow enlightenment of public taste, the polemic that consigns modern art’s “opponents” to the “basso inferno” and hails readers into community with those who “invent and create,” against the “amorphous and petrified and copying”; most of all, through the new art’s power, as Pound attests, to “awaken” one’s “sense of form” and create “new life” (122, 126). By 1934, Gaudier’s legacy is secure as it was not in 1916, yet Pound’s greater hope for a vital community opposed to war seems as wishful as his claim that “A few blocks of stone really carved are very nearly sufficient base for a new civilization” (140).8 As the “garbage of three empires collapse[s],” “as the map of a new Europe becomes visible, Gaudier’s work reemerges, perfectly solid”; the “last country” to collapse is his own, the “France of the banks and gunworks,” Pound writes, in what is less a non sequitur than a materialist turn on the elegy’s fresh woods and pastures new (140-41). Allying Gaudier’s sculpture with “the work of outlaws,” with a “revolution in the arts” that heralded a “social revolution,” Pound frames it as created “against the whole social system,” “against poverty and the lack of materials,” even as Gaudier’s Vortex—a “volitionist act stretching into the future”—proclaimed a “new birth out of the guttering and subsiding rubbish of 19th‑century stuffiness” (141, 144). Gaudier’s “complete revaluation of form,” he continues, was “a complete revaluation of life in general, of human life in particular, of man against necessity… social and physical,” though “social necessity is nothing but the temporary inconvenience caused us by the heaped up imbecilities… of a dull and lazy conglomerate of our fellows, which… it is up to the artist to alter” (144). “There is still enough energy” in Gaudier’s legacy, Pound optimistically reckons, to create a world community of the postwar nations: “to modernize Russia, to bring communism… into harmony with the best thought of the occident, and to make America fit to live in” (144).
20This must strike us as a heavy burden to place on Gaudier’s stones and words. In the context of the elegy, Pound’s insistence that art actually redeem the world calls into question the mourner’s submission to reality, to consolation’s necessarily symbolic relation to loss, as his 1934 Postscript evokes elegy’s dark double, revenge tragedy: “With a hundred fat rich men working overtime to start another war… for the sake of their personal profit, it is very hard for me to write of Gaudier with the lavender tones of reminiscence. The real trouble with war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people” (140). No one could mistake this rhetorical bloodlust for real violence, nor could any student of the Great War fail to understand Pound’s fury at Gaudier’s manmade death or his frustration at the modern political and economic structures that render the agents of war unaccountable. Still, however intelligible, Pound’s revenge tragedy manquée betrays the spirit of the legacy that he identifies almost in the same breath with “a revaluation of life”—with vital energy against necessity, with the freedom and will that art actualizes, with the disinterested sociability it fosters, with the future of a “new Europe” at peace.
21Yet this contradiction points to an understanding of Gaudier-Brzeska’s elegiac dimension different from Daniel Tiffany’s reading of Pound’s “necrophiliac,” “aberrant” mourning, his “cryptaesthetics” (81f & passim). For Gaudier’s life and work did intensify his community’s revaluation of life. Two days before his death Gaudier asked Pound for news of “artistic London” and lamented having nothing to read—“a desert in the head a very inviting place for a boche bullet or shell” (64). Lewis learned of Gaudier’s death while serving in a gun battery and later recalled his depression on seeing him off to war: “It is easy to laugh at the exaggerated estimate ‘the artist’ puts upon his precious life. But when it is really an artist—and there are very few—it is at the death of something terribly alive that you are assisting. And this little figure was so preternaturally alive, that I began my lesson then: a lesson of hatred for this soul-less machine, of big-wig money-government” (114-15). John Cournos recounted a “legend” among Gaudier’s friends that one “so gifted with genius, so abundantly endowed with aliveness,” “could not die” (Silber 48). Gaudier’s death in what he called the war’s “blood bath of idealism” ironically highlights his life’s and work’s triumph over—and futility against—the machine-age culture that put a bullet through his head (60). And insofar as Pound remained “obsessed” with the “loss” of Gaudier from 1916 to 1934 and beyond, it was not his death that mattered but the imminent practical failure of his legacy—that revaluation of life through form whose “promise” Pound did all he could to make good (Selected Letters 61).