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A return to the scene of the postmodern: Ezra Pound Reading.

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In the summer of 1952, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell visited St. Elizabeths Hospital in order to persuade Ezra Pound to make a spoken-word LP for their record company. Founded in March of that year, Caedmon Records specialized in recording modern poetry as the verbal content of the LP, the first medium to reproduce the complex harmonics of the human speaking voice. Spoken-word LPs reproduced the sound of poetry and responded to the modernist complaint (advanced notably by Pound) that the medium of print was incapable of accurately recording and representing prosody. Indeed, the liner notes to the 1961 Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading suggest the entire Caedmon venture could be seen as a response to Pound's critique of the limitations of print media. As they observe, "Decades ago, Ezra Pound strove for the same effect when he introduced a sort of musical notation system, placing phrases slightly above or below one another" (Caedmon).

Caedmon's founders met as humanities majors at New York's Hunter College. Before she co-founded Caedmon, Mantell (nee Roney) was pursuing a doctoral degree in comparative medieval literature at Columbia while working part-time in the classical record industry. Holdridge (nee Cohen) was pursuing an M.A. degree in the same field while working full-time as an assistant editor at Liveright Corporation, which was then headed by Horace Liveright's former accountant, Arthur Pell. The two founded Caedmon with a recording of Dylan Thomas, who was then travelling across America with his popular poetry-reading series. They reasoned that audiences who enjoyed poets' live readings would purchase spoken-word recordings. The economics of LP publishing favoured the enterprise: sales of only five hundred copies were required to break even, and sales of one thousand led to modest profits. From humble beginnings, Caedmon became the largest company of its kind before it was sold to the military industrial conglomerate Raytheon Corporation in 1970, for a value in excess of four million dollars.

Dylan Thomas Reading established the label, but Caedmon soon began to specialize in recordings of modern poets and prose stylists whose works Liveright had published in print during the 1920s. A constellation of cultural enterprises--including Random House, New Directions, Anchor Books, and the Reader's Subscription Book Club--popularized Modern Library works and authors during the post-war era, as part of a publishing formation Raymond Williams labelled "the second face of 'Modernism'" (130). Caedmon enjoyed connections with all of these institutions, but New Directions was a particularly important ally. James Laughlin distributed Caedmon LPs before the company could afford national and international distribution. He also provided Caedmon with previously recorded material that featured New Directions' authors, including material from several recording sessions that Ezra Pound made in June of 1958, which Caedmon published in 1960 and 1962. That moment of publishing history is the subject of this essay.

Greg Barnhisel has demonstrated that Laughlin was at the centre of efforts to remake Pound's literary reputation during the post-war period (Barnhisel, James Laughlin). This essay will argue that Holdridge and Mantell were part of this project, even as it suggests they were at the forefront of a separate effort to rehabilitate the poet's voice image. Both projects were haunted by Pound's status as America's "designated fascist intellectual," a status that arose largely as the result of his wartime radio broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini (Flory 300). Pound was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane as a consequence of these broadcasts--with an imprecise diagnosis many thought was arranged to prevent his trial for treason and the death sentence that would have been its likely outcome (Torrey 193). Arguably, Caedmon's publication of Pound's voice image was central to the post-war rehabilitation of his reputation. This essay also theorizes what was at stake in that publication as part of the second face of modernism, which I reframe here as the scene of postmodern (or post-print) publishing.

This essay is based on interviews with Holdridge and Mantell, unpublished correspondence from the working business records of Caedmon, and testimony from a 1975 lawsuit that Holdridge and Mantell launched against Raytheon Corporation. The liner notes on Pound's first LP, the only previously published account of Holdridge and Mantell's visits to St. Elizabeths, are another source. I have also drawn from published correspondence and from biographies and memoirs about Pound. I assume an audience that is familiar with early- and mid-twentieth-century publishing history (see Menand; Satterfield; Barnhisel, James Laughlin and "Perspectives"); with publishing theory (see Bourdieu; North); with cold-war cultural history (see Williams; Whitfield; Nadel; Saunders); with theories of post-war mass culture (see Horkheimer and Adorno; Huyssen); and with media theory and the philosophy of media (see McLuhan; Derrida; Ong).

This essay undertakes a cultural and media studies approach to spoken-word LP recording. It is not directed to scholars in the fields of Pound studies or literary history per se. Instead, it documents and theorizes the rehabilitation of Pound's reputation in the LP as a popular medium. My method involves an interpretive reconstruction of the publication history of Pound's LPs. Like North's study, this essay attempts "a reconstruction of the public world into which these works were introduced" (30). My primary objective is to document the material production of Pound's LPs. However, I also theorize their production by drawing on liberal and leftist accounts of post-war publishing and media history. These approaches are incommensurable, and both are characterized by omissions of different types. Nevertheless, some attempt to bridge them must be made in order to recover an accurate history of this era and to synthesize a theory of publishing that is appropriate to this period.

I must acknowledge that my account does not always conform to how Holdridge and Mantell have characterized the Caedmon venture. The two have sometimes been unreliable informants. There are discrepancies between some of information they have given me in interviews and information from other sources. Furthermore, there are differences between their recollections and interpretations of various events. Given this, I have adopted an open-ended approach to reconstructing the publication history of Pound's LPs. This has been valuable not only in accounting for the divergent claims of Caedmon's founders but also in negotiating a liminal space between liberal accounts of publishing history (which privilege the individual agency and aesthetic motivations of publishers) and leftist accounts (which argue that publishing is ideologically determined). At present, no theoretical model allows either for the economic, aesthetic, and ideological motivations involved in publishing or for the multiple forces at work in the field. However, in my conclusion I suggest these forces and motivations are conscious and unconscious, individual and collective.

Holdridge's and Mantell's positions in the sound-recording industry established commercial spoken-word recording as a field of cultural production and also determined that poetry became the verbal content of the LP medium. Their positions appear to have been largely...

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