[The protagonist of Pound's modernist poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"] is the main character—initially, at least—in Timothy Findley's new novel, Famous Last Words. Immediately, one recognizes it as a brilliant idea that sparks a variety of possibilities in the reader's imagination. Findley has re-invented Mauberley for his own purposes, making him a younger man than Pound's, American, and a novelist. But any artist—according to Brecht, anyway—has the right to steal another man's work, provided he transforms it in the process. And it's in that transformation that the roots of our initial excitement grow. Pound's Mauberley was a symptom of a world that had apparently been wiped out by the First World War. Findley revives him and uses him to examine the way in which that old world of class and style had not been eliminated after all, but went on clinging to its power with increasing avidity for another 20 years or more. (Even now, has its grip been broken?) Naturally enough, Findley's Mauberley, like Pound, is drawn to fascism, but a fascism attenuated and sweetened by the desire to reconcile itself to the pretences and subtleties of an older aristocratic tradition. The Duke of Windsor for Führer?!
The concept is a fine one. It affords Findley the freedom to move easily between the old hypocrisies and the new barbarism that was replacing them in the 1930s. In the process there's a lovely, wicked irony: that Pound's alter ego, whom he had used to liberate himself from the past, should now be used to expose the political falsehoods that he in his own due course was seduced by.
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