Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pound As Wuz by James Laughlin

1989; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1989.0099

1948-7142

Michael Jennings,

American Literature and Culture

384 Western American Literature Like many other western writers, she isconcerned with primal human qualities that are somehow stifled by dense populations, social systems and the press for conformity. A few of her most sympathetic characters are socially deficient, but much more human for their inadequacies. Wanner carefully weighs mundane social demands such as dressing fashionably or balancing checkbooks against the human imperatives of compassion and love. Her not-so-rugged individuals are compelling and evocative Although they are not always triumphant, her protagonists are always heroic in spite of, or perhaps because of, their unwillingness to adapt to social dictates. A self-destructive veterinarian’s suicide becomes acceptable for Wanner’s readers because it follows the simple logic common to his profession: “put down” the afflicted that have no hope for recovery. The separation of husband and wife that drives a linguistics professor westward results in his rejuvenation. And this isone of Wanner’s major motifs: the curative, redemp­ tive power of the land, of the world out-of-doors. As the narrator of the title piece demonstrates, one may overcome adversity and loss through a close identification with one’s landscape. By acting upon their inherent attraction for the physical and universal, as opposed to the abstract and esoteric,Wanner’s characters become confident, competent and compassionate beings, her fic­ tion moving. JOHN PURDY Central Oregon Community College Pound As Wuz. By James Laughlin. (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987. 203 pages, $17.00.) If Ezra Pound had not existed, someone would certainly have had to invent him: the quintessential Modern, master of collage, montage and raspytongued inscrutability, whose gift for what Harold Bloom likes to call “strong misreading” extended into thirteen languages, myriad cultures, disciplines, thrones, dominions, cantos, etcetera. It’s hard to imagine our world, however snipped, pasted and rearranged, without him. And yet without his long-time friend and steadfast publisher James, known to “Ez” as “Jaz,” Laughlin, the Pound impact might have been much dulled, and certainly more belated. It was Laughlin (New Directions Press) who kept him in print, along with Williams and others, through the thin years of marginal sales; and Laughlin who valiantly saw into print some thirty or so volumes of poetry, plays, social and critical tracts in what must have been, given Pound’simpatience with most all forms of consistency, spelling andotherwise, a proofreader’s nightmare. How pleasurable, then, to have at last Laughlin’s small, lucid recount­ ing: from the charming “Ez as Wuz” reminiscences of Pound at Rappalo in the “Ezuversity” days (lectures delivered mostly over lunch in assorted dialects Reviews 385 and burlesques—Laughlin later delineates at least eight such accents including Arab and lower-class French—on subjects ranging from medieval lit. to Chinese to the “Worse Libre of Rabbit Britches”) ;to the hilarious correspond­ ences, many addressed (“to the embarrassment of the Norfolk Postmistress”) to “Nude Erections”; to the economic theories (perhaps not entirely cockeyed afterall) ; to Laughlin’sown highly suggestive lectures, mostly to his students at Brown University, on Homage to Sextus Perpertius, The Cantos, and Pound’s earlier medieval translations—all studded with little gems of insight into Pound’s associational, often punning mode of thought and extension. What emerges is Pound as a very funny man, a joker and trickster of Odyssean verve, a didactic and virtually hyperactive intelligence (he taught himself Chinese from a dictionary and composed for W. C. Williams a com­ plete course in carpentry), a very sweet man (exceptionally loyal to parents and friends), a ravishing correspondent (he allowed ashow it only took about 600 people to compose a civilization, and he seems to have kept up correspond­ ences with about that many), and yes, at last, a very sad old man—paranoid, depressed, and, in his own estimation, a failure as a poet and thinker. A gem of a book. MICHAEL JENNINGS Marietta, New York Larry McMurtry’s Texas: Evolution of the Myth. By Lera Patrick Tyler Lich (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1987. 71 pages, $9.95.) “I realized that the place where all my stories start is the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country, its customary and legendary range,” stated McMurtry in 1968...