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IX
IN THE 1920s one of the places of refuge from the great cities
of Europe was the charming seaside village of Rapallo, on the
Italian Riviera. Once Nietzsche had stalked its shores, and in 1923,
Ezra Pound arrived, to remove himself from the deadening influence
of the twentieth century's mass man.
Perhaps in the future, we shall come to think of Pound's successive
retreats as abnegations of the modern idea that everything
can be packaged and sold. It was packaged people, who wrapped
themselves in cellophane, who had gotten on his nerves, people
who pushed up to one, peering for a name tag, and asking, "What
group are you with?" It was this desire to turn life into a perpetual
convention of properly labelled "Unpeople", as Cummings would
call them, which galled the artist. And even more, Pound resented
being forced into a group that termed itself "Artists".
This development was one of the consequences of the abdication
of the aristocracy. For they did abdicate. Viereck tells the story
of Prince Rupert, after the Bavarians had pushed him off his
throne. They soon regretted having to rule themselves, and a delegation
came to him and asked him back. He replied, "Clean up
your own mess."
Ezra has written somewhere that it is the function of an aristocracy
to select. Until European civilization collapsed in the First
World War, the artist functioned with some aristocrat's seal of
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