Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Winston Churchill, speaking in February 1933 as a Conservative member of parliament to the British Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist League, declared that ‘The Roman genius impersonated in Mussolini, the greatest law-giver among living men, has shown to many nations how they can resist the pressures of Socialism.’ America’s Fortune magazine, the glossy display window of US capitalism, praised him for showing ‘the virtue of force and centralized government acting without conflict for the whole nation at once’. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, newly inaugurated as President of the United States, let Mussolini know that he regarded Italy as ‘the only real friend of America in Europe’.1

  Pound’s frequently expressed admiration for Mussolini and his works thus placed him in good—if for him rather odd—company. The democratic consensus, especially in the United States and most especially among its business leaders, was that Fascism was not only good for socially chaotic and economically backward Italy but a reproach to both the anarchy of capitalism and the tyranny of Communism. But it was not the anarchy of capitalism that Pound objected to so much as its injustice and its anti-social conduct; and his objection to state tyranny was muted when the state made itself responsible for the needs of the whole society. He was caught up in the contradictions of a time when a Fascist dictator cared more for the welfare of his people than the governments of the capitalist democracies did for theirs.

  When Pound visited the Decennale Exhibition he particularly remarked the reconstruction of the Milan office in which Mussolini had edited his socialist newspaper, Il Popolo, and from which he had organized the rise of Fascism to power. Pound associated the exhibit with the New Age office in which at about the same time he had got hold of the gist of Major Douglas’s Social Credit. ‘Ours was like that’, he would note in a canto, ‘minus the Mills bomb’—that was the hand grenade Mussolini kept on his desk. It was as if he was seeking common ground between his own and Mussolini’s efforts to change the existing economic order, while recognizing that Mussolini’s had had more force behind it. The nature of that force, as he explained it to the readers of Il Mare back in Rapallo, was ‘VOLONTà’. It had struck him for the first time, he told them, that the power behind the constructive action of the Fascist revolution was emotion, the WILL to get things done. It was that which made all the difference between merely having a good idea and carrying it through into practice. He instanced Mussolini’s having cleared away in central Rome a mess of squalid building accumulated over the centuries to reveal again the glory that had been Rome and to create a new imperial avenue, ‘la Via dell’Impero è la VOLUNTÀ’, leading from the Coliseum to the Piazza Venezia where he had his office.

  The Palazzo di Venezia overlooked the Piazza, and from its balcony Il Duce would address the great crowds who gathered to hear him. His office was in its Sala del Mappamondo on the first floor, a vast room forty feet high, sixty feet in length, and as wide as it was high. The space was quite empty from one end to the other except for the desk at which Mussolini worked at the far end, with just one or two tables nearby and a few chairs. He insisted on absolute silence, no sound being allowed in from the piazza outside, and if a fly buzzed he called for it to be swatted. It was into this room that Pound was brought for his audience with Mussolini at 17.30 on Monday, 30 January 1933.

  Pound presented to Mussolini a copy of the Hours Press A Draft of XXX Cantos and opened it to show him the Malatesta cantos. But, as Pound later told Mary de Rachewiltz, he ‘went poking around till he got to Trotsk and the zhamefull beace’ in canto 16, and said—he was learning English at the time—‘But this is not English’, and Pound said, ‘No, it’s my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English’, and that led Mussolini to say, ‘How entertaining!’, ‘Ma qvesto è divertente’. Pound would put that remark into canto 41, and tell a correspondent that ‘One of [my] most valued readers seemed to find the Cantos entertaining; at least that’s what he said after 20 minutes, with accent of relieved surprise, having been brought up to Italian idea of poetry: something oppressive and to be revered.’ Mussolini asked what was his aim in writing The Cantos, and Pound replied, ‘to put my ideas in order’; and Mussolini said, ‘What do you want to do that for?’, ‘Perché vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?’, and to that Pound had no better answer than ‘Pel mio poema’.

  ‘Then’, as Pound told it, ‘we turned to economics, and I showed him a list of things that I thought ought to be done’, a handwritten list eighteen items long apparently. Mussolini ‘started to read it, and said, “Ugh, these aren’t things to answer straight off the bat. No, this one about taxes”—it would have been the third or fourth item, that in the Fascist state taxes were no longer necessary—“Ungh!”, he said, “Have to think about THAT”.’ And that was the end of the interview.

  Pound wrote to Dorothy that evening that he had ‘had a long hour’ and was ‘feelin a bit weak after the event’. The Capo del Governo had been ‘vurry charmin’, but vurry’. He had told Pound to get his questions ‘re/ economica’ typed out and to stay on in Rome in case he wanted to see him again about them. One of the things Pound did while waiting for another appointment was to see Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel—the early ‘talkie’ in which she vamped ‘I want to be alone’—and he marvelled at ‘the perfect clarity in every word’ of the film. By the end of the week it was apparent that there was not going to be a second meeting, although the private secretary was being ‘very cordial & said C.G. wd. like to see me’. There were new affairs of state to be attended to, among them Hitler’s coming to power in Germany. Hitler had in fact been appointed Reichschancellor about noon on the day of Pound’s audience with Mussolini.

  The big news back in Rapallo was that their American poet had met Il Duce, and when Pound returned in early February the town band was at the station to greet him in communal celebration.

  He immediately went to work on a book in which he would attempt to define the genius of Mussolini. He had other commitments on his mind—his fortnightly articles for Orage’s New English Weekly, a series of lectures on ‘volitionist economics’ he was to give in Milan in March, the cantos dealing with the early American law-givers and their war with private banks for control of the nation’s credit—and nevertheless he completed Jefferson and/or Mussolini and sent it off to his agent before the end of the month.

  The ground of his argument, as he put it in a letter dated 18 February, was the confident faith that Mussolini ‘would end with Sigismondo and the men of order’. ‘I believe’, he affirmed, ‘that anything human will and understanding of contemporary Italy cd. accomplish, he has done and will continue to do.’ He believed in Mussolini, he said, because of his own direct experience of Fascism in Italy—‘Fascism as I have seen it’ stands as the subtitle to Jefferson and/or Mussolini. In the course of the book, however, it becomes apparent that the things he has seen interest him only as outward evidences of Mussolini’s genius, and that he is more deeply engaged in comprehending the genius than in analysing the Fascism. Further, as he develops his understanding of the genius, he perceives Mussolini more and more in his own terms rather than those of Fascist practice. And his own terms, as he declares under his name on the title page, are those of his ‘Volitionist Economics’. His Mussolini is the leader he could believe in, one who is like himself an artist, a maker, only an artist able not only to conceive an enlightened social order but actually to will it into existence. He is in effect, though Pound does not so designate him, what Pound himself had aspired to be, an avatar of Zagreus, or, to go further back in his mythology, of Isis–Osiris, the bringer of grain and laws and civilized ways into a failing world.

  Among the things Pound had noticed in Italy was ‘“Dio ti benedica” scrawled on a shed where some swamps were’, and he read that as a prayer for Mussolini in gratitude for his persuading ‘the Italians to grow better wheat, and to produce Italian colonial bananas’. Then there was his hotel-keeper in Rimini, the Fascist Commandante della Piazza, who got the local library opened up
for him out of what Pound took to be a sense of responsibility fired by devotion to Mussolini. (‘This kind of devotion…doesn’t come to a man like myself,’ he reflected.) There was the time in Modena when the regional Fascist leader, Farinacci, had his squadristi beating up all the working men in the district as his way of honouring ‘the Fascist martyrs’, and after a few days notices signed ‘Mussolini’ had appeared on the walls indicating Farinacci’s summons to Rome and an end to that violence. There was another occasion early on, before Pound knew anything at all about Fascism, before the March on Rome, when he had been sitting in Florian’s in the Piazza San Marco in Venice and the ‘cavalieri della morte’ in their black shirts and ‘with drawn faces’ passed through ‘and everyone stood to attention and took off their hats’, but ‘damned if he would stand up or show respect until he knew what they meant’, and ‘Nobody hit me with a club’, he recorded, ‘and I didn’t see any oil bottles’. He may not have seen any, but by the time he wrote that he evidently knew how clubs and purges of castor oil had been weapons of choice in the Fascist takeover of local powers throughout Italy, and still it did not concern him. That was because he would see through such details to what they meant to him, to what much of his experience of Italy now pointed to, and that was Mussolini’s superhuman ability both to move his fellow Italians to action and to control and direct their action according to his will.

  WILL, a complex word implying a will to do something or to have something done, is the key word in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which Pound once said was his De Monarchia or blueprint for efficient government. ‘Will-power’ adds an emphasis, meaning the power to effect what is desired; but the will-to-power is excluded from Pound’s lexicon, at least so far as it signifies the desire for power for its own sake. Moreover, before concerning himself with the power to govern, Pound nearly identifies the will to govern with the intelligence to do so, so that the intelligence, knowing the desired end, shall direct the will’s power to that end. Directio voluntatis, he insisted, taking the Latin tag from Dante’s De Monarchia: what matters is that the will-power be rightly directed. At the same time, as he insisted with equal force, intelligence counts for nothing ‘until it comes into action’. What might be a good idea is no good until there’s the will to do it.

  Pound’s key word, will or volition, thus comes to signify, beyond mere force of will, efficient intelligence, or intelligence in action. And here Pound shifts the emphasis once again by proposing an analogy between the most efficient kind of human intelligence and the instinctive intelligence of insects. He refers the reader to the ‘chapters on insects’ in Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour, and there we read (in Pound’s translation) that instinct is ‘a partial crystallisation of intelligence’, in that only ‘Useful acts habitually repeated…intellectual acts…useful for the preservation of the species’ become instinctive. ‘When a human being’, Pound wrote, ‘has an analogous completeness of knowledge, or intelligence carried into a third or fourth dimension, capable of dealing with NEW circumstances, we call it genius.’ And—here shifting his analogy and taking a further step in his argument—‘The ideas of genius, or of “men of intelligence” are organic and germinal’, they are seed ideas which both conserve patterns of behaviour and come up differently under different conditions—witness the effectiveness of the conviction that All men are born free and equal, and the variety of its flowerings in France and the United States and elsewhere.

  It follows in this line of thought that the ‘germinal ideas’ of Pound’s two men of genius, his Jefferson and his Mussolini, must be nearly related to what he understood Frobenius to mean by paideuma, that is, as noted in Chapter 2, ‘the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal…conditioning actively all the thought and action’. In effect, Pound is now locating the paideuma, the cultural matrix, in the individual genius. That would be the meaning of his observation that Italy had had ‘a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently’. But the deeper and more challenging meaning there is that the will of this one man, this dictator, represented in an unusually profound sense the will of the people.

  Lincoln Steffens, the hardboiled, muckraking, American journalist with unimpeachable democratic credentials, wrote in his own terms that he had witnessed just that: ‘I was there. When Mussolini said that they, the people, might stop governing and go to work—he would do it all—it was almost as if all Italy sighed and said, “Amen”. And the people did go back to work, and they worked as they had not worked before’, and Steffens found himself questioning whether Fascism might be a more effective way to achieve the government of the people and for the people than democracy as practised in the United States or in England or France. A later historian, A. James Gregor, found reason to conclude that Mussolini’s Fascism was a genuine expression of the experience and the aspirations of Italy following the 1914–18 war, and that his undoubted political genius consisted in leading its people in the direction they needed and wanted to go in the conditions then actually prevailing. It would appear that Pound’s perception of Mussolini, in 1933, as ‘driven by a vast and deep “concern” or will for the welfare of Italy…for Italy organic, composed of the last ploughman and the last girl in the olive-yards’, that this perception, though frankly a construct of faith and hope, and though invoking the unfashionable idea of society as an organism organized by its men of genius, did indeed have its truth. It may be an uncomfortable truth, as Steffens found, but then, as he also remarked, it does us no harm to have our settled notions shaken up.

  Steffens was able to come to terms with Mussolini’s abolishing individual liberties by reminding himself that all governments and peoples abolish liberty and submit themselves to dictatorial leadership in the emergency of war. Pound did it by concentrating on ‘his passion for construction’ and treating him as an artist—‘Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place’. First among the ‘details’ was the principle that ‘Who wills the end wills the means’; and then that ‘any means’, i.e. any legal or administrative forms, ‘are the right means’ if only they will ‘remagnetize the will’ to put into effect ‘the best that is known and thought’. So authoritarian dictatorship could be the right means to the end of reconstructing Italy, and the very sign indeed of Mussolini’s ‘intelligence’. Instead of sighing worthily for social justice he had been ‘presumably right in putting the first emphasis on having a government strong enough to get the said justice’. And to achieve that it had been necessary, given the critical condition Italy was in, for him to take the power and the responsibility of the state upon himself alone.

  Steffens wrote of how in a financial crisis Mussolini had told parliament they were incapable of decisive action and had sent them out to cuss him in their cafés while he, within a week or so, ‘did, somehow, stabilize the lira’. Steffens and Pound both made much of his breaking free from the preconceptions and precedents, the established axioms and theories, the obfuscating rhetoric and social snobberies, which got in the way of the facts and prevented effective action. That had always been a main task of the artist for Pound. ‘It takes a genius’, he now wrote, ‘a genius charged with some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast [humanity, Italian and every other segment of it] out of [its] preconceptions’. Mussolini invented new laws and altered existing ones to suit the circumstances of the moment, to the distress of distinguished lawyers who could not know from one day to the next what the law would be. He put an embargo on emigration, as to America, a restriction which Pound, who loathed passports and all such restrictions, nevertheless approved of since Italian workers were needed at home; and ‘the material and immediate effect [were] grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restorations, new buildings’. He did something about ‘birds friendly to agriculture’—presumably banning the snaring or shooting them in spite of ingrained tradition—and already there were ‘more bir
ds in the olive-yards’, as Pound must have seen for himself as he walked up the footpath from Rapallo to Sant’ Ambrogio. Such were the dictator’s original works of art.

  Along with its celebration of what Il Duce was achieving, Jefferson and/or Mussolini outlined what Pound thought Mussolini ought to be doing in the way of economic reform. Basically, he wanted the problem ‘of poverty in the midst of abundance’ to be seen as not just a problem of the distribution of goods but as, fundamentally, a problem arising from the unequal and inadequate distribution of credit or purchasing power. ‘We have had the century of the “benefits of concentration of capital” (and the malefits)’, he wrote, and ‘We have come to the point where money must be got into people’s pockets if goods are to move and modern life to continue “the good life”.’ And the only way to achieve that, he argued, instancing America’s ‘bank wars’ in the time of Jefferson and Van Buren, was by taking over control of credit and finance from private interests so that they should be used not for the profit of the few but for the benefit of the whole nation. In 1920 he had seen ‘nothing in Europe save unscrupulous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human)’. In 1933 he could see ‘no other clot of energy in Europe’ save Mussolini ‘capable of opposing ANY FORCE WHATEVER to the infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of men’s blood for money’. By 1934 he was convinced that Mussolini was in fact ‘damning and breaking up the bankers’ stranglehold on humanity’, and that the dividends were being ‘distributed as better wheat, and better drainage and cheaper railway transport’. The following year he informed anti-Fascists in England that while Italy had not nationalized its banks they were subject to national orders, and that ‘the use of the public credit for the ultimate public weal of Italy has been in process and is being accelerated’. A ‘GREED system’ had been replaced by a ‘WILL system’.