Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Poets of Rapallo, a Review
The
Poets of Rapallo,
Lauren Arrington, Oxford University Press is a brilliant first draft; one looks
forward to reading the completed work.
As
it is, Dr. Arrington has accomplished brilliant research on the poets - Yeats, Bunting, Pound, Aldington, MacGreevy,
Zukofsky - and their acquaintances who happened to be in the Italian resort
town Rapallo (they were not a coterie) in the 1920s and 1930s. The notes alone run
to 54 pages of too-small type, and the bibliography to 8.
Unhappily,
the text appears to have been rushed, possibly by an impatient publisher, and
along with numerous small mistakes there are some serious failures in stereotyping,
hasty generalizations predicated on little evidence, and a few condemnations more
redolent of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor than a scholar.
One
of the best things about The Poets of Rapallo is the exposition
explaining why a great many intellectuals were attracted to Italian Fascism as
it was idealistically presented through propaganda early on and not as the
moral and ethical disaster it soon proved to be.
Mussolini
cleverly promoted his program as primarily cultural, a reach-back to the
artistic and architectural unities of an imagined ancient Rome restored and
enhanced with modern science and technology. He promoted the arts for his own
purposes, of course, but deceptively. In almost any context the construction of
schools, libraries, museums, theatres, and cinema studios would be perceived as
a good, and absent any close examination accepted by everyone. But in Mussolini’s
scheme these cultural artifacts, like Lady Macbeth’s “innocent flower,”
concealed the lurking serpent: wars of conquest, poison gas, bombings of undefended
cities, death camps, institutionalized racism, mass murders, and other
enormities.
The
Fascist sympathies of W. B. Yeats and other influencers (as we would say now)
in the Irish Republic, including Eamon de Valera, are certainly revelatory. That
the new nation came close to goose-stepping through The Celtic Twilight might help
explain Ireland’s curious neutrality during the Second World War.
Professor
Arrington explains all this very well, and initially is professionally
objective. Most of the Rapallo set were not long in learning what Fascism was really
about and quickly distanced themselves from it in some embarrassment. Some were later even more of an embarrassment
in their denials and deflections; few seemed to have been able to admit that,
yes, they were suckered, as we all have been from time to time
But
with the exception of the unrepentant and odious Pound, who was himself a
metaphorical serpent to his death, Professor Arrington seems to lose her objectivity
with the others.
And
why Pound?
As
with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, it is difficult to take seriously someone
who considers Pound’s pretentious, pompous, show-off word-soup Cantos to
be literature. Pound is now famous only for being famous, and while Arrington
appears to forgive Pound for his adamant and malevolent anti-Semitism and his pathetic
subservience to Mussolini, in the end she is ruthless toward anyone else who, under
Pound’s influence, in his or her naivete even once told an inappropriate joke,
appreciated Graeco-Roman architecture, or perhaps saw Mussolini at a distance.
This is inexplicable in a text that is otherwise professional and compassionate
in avoiding what C. S. Lewis identifies as chronological snobbery.
One
also wishes the author had discussed Pound’s post-war appeal as a fashionable
prisoner adored or at least pitied by a new generation (Elizabeth Bishop, how
could you?).
The
book ends abruptly, as if the author were interrupted by a demand by the
printers for it now, and so, yes, one hopes for a complete work to
follow.
The
Poets of Rapallo
is not served well by the Oxford University Press, who appear to have been more
interested in cutting costs than in presenting a work of scholarship to the
world. The print is far too small, the garish spine lettering is more suited to a
sale-table murder mystery, and the retro-1930s holiday cover would be fine for
an Agatha Christie yarn but not for a book of literary scholarship.
A
question outside the scope of this book but more important is this: why, in a
free nation, do so many people feel the desperate need almost to worship a
leader? Yes, of course we have presidents and chiefs of police (some of whom love
sport shiny admiral’s stars on their collars, and what’s that about?) and
bosses and so on, and we depend upon their wise leadership. But why do people
wear pictures of some Dear Leader or other on their clothing and chant his name?
I
think the president or the famous movie star should wear YOUR name on his shirt
and pay YOU for the privilege.
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