Acc/Kung: not necessary to take all the dirt out of the field before yu plant seed.
Hindoo god of wealth inhabits cow dung. Del Mar: gold mining not only ruins the land, it ruins it FOREVER. No reason to {229} sleep on a middan.
bombs no kulchurl value.
IF possible to educate from the top??
where there is any top. but at least from where one is.
Pound’s adage-like directive to Blackburn—“Acc/Kung”—seems to suggest that preexisting cultural materials are “necessary” for innovations, however regressive those materials might appear (“the dirt”). And indeed this paradox is signified in Pound’s fractured language, “Acc/Kung,” a pun on “Achtung” (“attention”) that made the adage at once Chinese and German, a recovery of Confucianism with a fascistic overtone—the topical resonance of “Achtung” would have been more pronounced, and more ideologically significant, to an English-language reader in the Cold War era. Blackburn’s review transformed this passage from Pound’s letter into a directive that the critic allow the current cultural situation, however regressive, to determine the “requisite labor,” the sort of commentary that will change that situation into one more favorable to Pound’s poetry (Blackburn 1953:215). In the case of Kenner, this meant educating the educators (“the top”) about Pound’s “form or technique or the materials, or what follows from them, what they lead to” (ibid.). Blackburn charged Kenner with “a too-simple discipleship” while he himself presumably exemplified a more complicated one, as we now know, apparent in his plagiarized quotations from Pound’s letters.
In this plagiarism, Blackburn at once assumed and qualified Pound’s identity, recommending a strategic appropriation of modernism at a moment when it occupied a marginal position in American culture. Blackburn’s strategy required an interrogation of Pound’s modernist cultural politics, revising it to intervene into a later social situation. He faulted Kenner for an “uncritical” acceptance of Pound’s modernism
without facing the economic and social axes of his criticism, and the conclusions these entail. The poet, this poet, as economic and social reformer, is a dilemma all of us must face eventually. It must be faced before it can be worked. The problem cannot be ignored, nor will any uncritical swallowing of the man’s facts and theories do. And it is useless and ignorant to abuse him, simply. There is more than one madhouse in Washington these days.
{230} The correspondence shows that Blackburn’s identity as poet-translator was not only modernist, but masculinist. It was constructed on the basis of an oedipal rivalry with Pound, in which Blackburn sought approval and encouragement from his poetic father in frank, personal letters that linked his writing to sexual relationships with women. The oedipal nature of this rivalry shapes Blackburn’s bohemian self-portrait in the correspondence, his deviations from bourgeois respectability, his occasional use of obscenities (“The defense is to not give a fuck”). His letters imitated the gruff colloquialism of Pound’s letters, but far exceeded them in shock value (Pound doesn’t go beyond “goddam”). After Pound wrote that he submitted Blackburn’s version of Peire Vidal’s “Ab l’alen” to an editor (12 August 1950), Blackburn’s response made clear the oedipal configuration of his authorial identity:
THANKYOU, POUND. And the dry season is over! Have been sitting here trying to divert me by reading. NG. Other diversions physical better for the health et alli. Going to sources like sex and finally getting it relaxed and fine and broke the drought in a shower of somethingorother. Pure peace: to go into a woman relaxed, i.e. in control of the tensions; to sit and write again, i.e. in control of the tensions. So up and about and seeing and doing and feeling.
Although this remarkable passage opens with Blackburn thanking Pound “for the practical encouragement” of submitting the translation, it quickly begins to suggest that Blackburn himself “broke the drought” in his writing through “sex.”
Blackburn does not challenge Pound in any direct way: one of the striking things about the passage is the conspicuous omission of any first-person pronouns that would indicate Blackburn’s agency. This passage constructs only one subject-position, Pound’s. Yet an agent appears in the sudden syntactical break at “broke the drought,” which assumes an “I,” distinct from Pound, and thus hints at the sexual competition underlying Blackburn’s identity as poet—translator. This identity is fundamentally a patriarchal construction requiring the female to be an object of male sexuality so that Blackburn might regain his “control” over his writing. A sexual exploitation of “a woman” displaces Blackburn’s literary dependence on Pound.
{231} A few months later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, Blackburn wrote a long letter to Pound that continued this link between writing and sexuality. This time another canonical writer is invoked, and the sexual partners multiply:
A month ago, three weeks, something, I got rid of two girl friends, picked fights, having adequate reasons, broke off. A month later both grace my bed at intervals, much more secure because of the honesty regained in their and my reassessments. One doesn’t break off relationships. Stories don’t end. Shxpr knew and killed off all his major characters, ending THEIR story: la seule methode effectif.
Blackburn is again “in control,” devising his own, sexually powerful concept of “honesty,” writing his own narrative as well as those of his “girl friends,” here likened to Shakespearean characters as he is to Shakespeare.
This is the double triangle of Blackburn’s authorial identity: the rivalry with Pound is worked out through a sexual dominance over women and an identification with other canonical writers:
Funny thing, fear of death. I am twenty-five on this date. Seen, faced, lived with, worked with, death. We are all familiars with it, the twenty-five to thirty group. Somewhat, someh o w.
The defense is to not give a fuck.
I am defenseless.
I care about too much.
Your position too. Why you are where you are.
Elective affinities. Good title. (G. was afraid of his genius.)
(Loved many worthy and unworthy women and married—his housekeeper.)
Blackburn’s imitation of the discontinuous writing in Pound’s letters resulted in a suggestive free-associating that revealed not only the height of his poetic ambitions (Goethe), but also their sexual conditions. The rivalry with Pound, at once literary and sexual, finally becomes explicit near the end of this letter:
{232} Would you care to see more [translations]? I’ll make copies. Reminding me I shall get you some texts of such stuff for xmas. I want to give you something. If you need anything I could find for you let me know. I am unreliable and faithful. If that makes sense to you. I am faithful to two remarkable women at the same time.
Blackburn is “faithful” to Pound in his respect for the elder writer’s literary authority, but “unreliable” in his effort to challenge that authority through assertions of his sexual potency (i.e., when he is “faithful to two remarkable women at the same time”).
It is impossible to know what Pound thought of such personal revelations. None of his letters referred to them. Still, after this last revealing letter from Blackburn, Pound seems to have broken off the correspondence, which was not resumed for three years. “Is anything wrong?” Blackburn suddenly wrote in 1953, “Or is it, on your part, a cessation of correspondence? And do you object if I write you from time to time, if the latter shot is the case?” (4 July 1953). The correspondence had become important enough to Blackburn’s sense of himself as a writer that he needed merely to write to Pound, without getting any response.