Saving Appearances: Another Ezra Pound Biography

Abstract

This book is the eighth full-scale biography of Pound so far, the first of which appeared in 1960 and the latest in 2004, and I understand that two more are in progress. In addition, there are a half-dozen specialized biographical studies, among them Tim Redman’s excellent Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1991) and my own Pound in Purgatory (1999)—neither of which rates a mention in Moody’s highly selective list of writing by others. The omission of Redman is perhaps justified because his study is mostly concerned with Pound’s life after he moved to Italy in October 1924, but my study begins well before Moody’s cutoff date of 1920. Other omissions are C. David Heyman’s Ezra Pound:The Last Rower (1976),John Tytell’s The Solitary Volcano (1987), and most surprisingly James Longenbach’s Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988). Moody explains that his list of writing by others includes only works that are referred to frequendy. But that only compounds the problem of a selective attention to previous scholarship. It is true that some of the omitted works are men­ tioned in notes, but their authors’ names are not indexed, making it dif­ ficult for the reader to ascertain Moody’s agreement or disagreement with his predecessors—or his ignorance of their work. None of the previous scholarship is engaged in the text itself. The result is that instead of being guided through the thickets of Pound scholarship, the reader is given the impression that Moody is the first to traverse this terrain. If the reader is diligent enough to turn to the notes—which are collected by page, not superscript number, toward the back of the book—she will find a very combative attitude toward that scholarship in several instances. Matters of scholarly etiquette aside, the first question a reviewer must ask is: does this work justify still another biography of Ezra Pound?