Ezra Pound's and Olga Rudge's The Blue Spill

A Manuscript Critical Edition

Ezra Pound, Olga Rudge, Mark Byron, Sophia Barnes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474281065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Written during the Italian winter of 1930, The Blue Spill is an unfinished detective novel written by Ezra Pound – the leading figure of modernist poetry in the 20th century – and his long-time companion Olga Rudge. Published for the first time in this authoritative critical edition, the novel reflects both Rudge's and Pound's voracious reading of popular fiction as it echoes and parodies such writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse. Based on the original manuscripts of the novel, this critical edition includes annotation and textual commentary throughout. The book also includes critical essays exploring the contexts of the work, from the dynamics of artistic collaboration to the growing popularity of detective fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. Taken together, this unique publication sheds new light on the relationship between the literary avant-garde and popular culture in the modernist period.

PART ONE

The Edition

FIGURE 1.1: YCAL MSS 54, Box 115, Folder 2816, TS1, 68. Courtesy of the Ezra Pound Trust and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

FIGURE 1.2: YCAL MSS 54, Box 115, Folder 2816, TS1, 69. Courtesy of the Ezra Pound Trust and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

‘Brilliant Detective cut off …’: The Blue Spill as an Incomplete Murder

The Blue Spill, an unfinished detective novel, has been brought out from its crypt in the Olga Rudge Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where it has lain, mostly untroubled, for more than forty years. Consisting of two unfinished and partially overlapping typescripts, this collaborative project between Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound was undertaken in the winter of 1929 (according to Rudge’s biographer Anne Conover) or 1930 (according to the Beinecke Library’s accession data). The novel draws heavily for its style – and its parodic force – upon the detective fictions of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and others writing during what has come to be known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. The rising popularity of English detective fiction in the 1920s saw the emergence of such subgenres as the country-house murder mystery – Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) which introduced Hercule Poirot, the ‘closed room’ mystery – from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) to Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) and Nicholas Blake’s Thou Shell of Death (1935) to the ‘cosy’ mystery – Dorothy Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) – all of which inform the narrative tone, plotting and themes of The Blue Spill to varying degrees. In keeping with the sardonic wit, genteel treatment of sexual activity and violence, and varying modes of understatement appropriate to the class implications of these genres, The Blue Spill also draws on Rudge’s and Pound’s extensive reading of the stories and novels of P. G. Wodehouse, especially those featuring Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. The translation of English detective fiction into the Italian publishing scene, evident in the very rapid rise in popularity of Gialli novels (named for their distinctive yellow covers) may also have played a role in the decision to attempt writing a financially lucrative novel. This was by no means the most obvious literary project for a concert violinist and music scholar, and an avant-garde impresario and pre-eminent poet.

Quite clearly the novel is Rudge’s – specific evidence for this view is presented in the textual essay to follow – but Pound’s influence and enthusiasm are palpable in his many marginal comments, certain aspects of dialogue and elements of setting and character. Although Rudge never completed the project, it carries a tone and balance evident nowhere in Pound’s writing. An argument for collaboration may be made similar to that of Pound’s role in the production of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land of seven or eight years before. Rudge did the hard work of setting down narrative episodes – perhaps conceived in private meditation as well as discussion, although lacking any record of how the story came about such notions are strictly speculative – and typed the text for Pound’s editorial and annotative energies to do their work. Rudge indicates near the end of the typescript that the resolution to the mystery rests in Pound’s hands: ‘Writ by order of EP who was to supply reason in last chapter!’ This resolution was never declared, and the reader must be satisfied with their own resolutions as well as any other diversions picked up along the way. This strange confluence between detective fiction and avant-garde writing arises in the feature of narrative irresolution: from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1946) and Carlo Emilia Gadda’s Modernist masterpiece, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana) (1957) to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy of City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986). Inspector Love’s irascibility seems to be a private joke between Olga and Ezra, where his habits of murmuring (perhaps recalling W. B. Yeats in the Stone Cottage winters of 1913–16) and his blasting of the press, not to mention his impatience with ponderous witness statements, all point to Ezra Pound’s infamous energy and cantankerousness (the fun to be had with such names as Love and Bryde might also suggest a sentimental element in the story’s composition). The figure of Rodney, an avant-garde artist with a licence to behave badly, as well as the Soho scene of the French Café in the late 1920s fictionalized in Carpentier’s French restaurant on Dean Street, also point to Pound’s direct contributions to the novel’s atmosphere.

The Blue Spill centres upon the murder of Mr Marshall, an irritable patriarch of a nouveau riche family who reside in the Graylands estate near the village of Ripton in Surrey. As the plot develops more figures become credible suspects of the murder, and the introduction of stock investments complicate the potential lines of desire and culpability. However, all elements of the narrative point to the material object central to the narrative and surely linked to the murder. The titular blue spill is the mystery document hidden in plain sight throughout much of the narrative, comprising the fifth compromising page of the industrial report that serves as financial guarantee, catalyst for blackmail and ticket to freedom for the characters. Its removal from the crime scene by persons unknown is a mystery unsolved at the endpoint of the typescripts, but a certain amount of careful reconstruction and speculation leads to a proposed solution to the novel at the conclusion of this chapter. What is of particular interest in terms of the material and thematic emphases of the narrative is that a written text, seen and disappeared, mimics the incompleteness of the typescript in which its story is developed. The final, crucial pages are missing, denying the reader the payload just as the missing sheet has the capacity to do at each stage of its existence: first as evidence of a failed experiment, then when that danger passed as evidence of a corrupted scientific method and source of blackmail. As it appears and disappears in the typescript, the blue spill is its own curious MacGuffin. The missing page 90 of the second typescript turns up in a different folder in the archive, where Inspector Love invests considerable energy pondering the significance of the paper: did it exist? Was it of any importance? Was its apparent triviality actually a cleverly concealed mode of subterfuge on behalf of certain persons in the Graylands household?

But what of the blue spill itself, as an object? A spill is a paper, often twisted, used to light candles or cigarettes: Darrow uses this device to light his cigarettes in Chapter 22. It may also echo the taper of Pound’s first published volume of poetry, A Lume Spento of 1908. The colour of the missing sheet in this narrative is telling in terms of its potential literary implications. The blue sheet of paper used in the Parisian Pneumatique telegram system from 1866 to 1984 was known as the petit bleu. On 6 June 1923, soon after they first met, Olga Rudge sent Ezra Pound a petit bleu to excuse herself from a scheduled meeting. The choice of a blue spill as the central prop or MacGuffin in the novel no doubt bore the symbolic weight of their mutual affection. But they also drew on a significant literary and cultural history too, whether intentionally or otherwise. The discovery of a petit bleu between a German intelligence officer and a French military officer contributed to the retrial of Albert Dreyfus in the infamous Dreyfus Affair that scandalized the Third Republic between 1894 and 1906 (see Colaresi 90). Maurice Leblanc’s stories in the early years of the twentieth-century feature the ‘gentleman thief’ and detective Arsène Lupin, who often receives ‘a little blue’ in the course of the narrative. The petit bleu was in common usage as an instrument of communication, but notably Marcel Proust was well known for his reliance upon them for urgent messages. Madame de Vionnet sends a petit bleu to Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, published in 1903 and a subject of Pound’s essay ‘Henry James’, published in the Little Review in August 1918. The key to the object’s identity in the present narrative is that it is a commissioned laboratory report, a document meant to be read and preserved: it is not yet a means for igniting a fire but the possibility of its doing so, flagged early and prominently in the title, becomes potentially significant in solving the clue-puzzle.

The composition of The Blue Spill in 1929 or 1930, when Rudge and Pound were living in Italy, provides an unusual perspective on their collaborative projects in the 1920s and 1930s. This is the subject of an essay in Part Two. A few features of the novel might be noted here, as preliminary context for the reading text to follow. At the time Pound was turning to matters of legal and political institutions and the distribution of justice in The Cantos and in various prose projects, most n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Figures
• Editorial Preface to Modernist Archives
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: The Edition
• Part Two: Essays
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright