Note: A historian, the Bank Wars, and the New Deal
Our accounts of the past ‘are far from stable’, Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote in the New York Review of Books in April 2006, ‘They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present.’ So he had written The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little Brown, 1946) in the light of Roosevelt’s ‘struggles to democratize American capitalism’, wanting to show that ‘FDR was acting in a robust American spirit and tradition’: ‘Jackson’s war against Nicholas Biddle and the Second Bank of the United States…provided a thoroughly American precedent for the battles that FDR waged against the “economic royalists” of his (and my) day.’ Roosevelt himself had seen the precedent as early as November 1933. Schlesinger cites a letter of that month to Colonel Edward M. House in which Roosevelt wrote,
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson…The country is going through a repetition of Jackson’s fight with the Bank of the United States—only on a far bigger and broader basis.
Schlesinger continues,
Jackson and Roosevelt, it appeared, had much the same coalition of supporters—farmers, workingmen, intellectuals, the poor—and much the same coalition of adversaries—bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and the rich. There was consequently a striking parallel between the 1830s and the 1930s in politics, and there was a striking parallel in the basic issue of power—the struggle for control of the state between organized money and the rest of society.
That striking parallel was what Pound was pointing out to America in 1933 and 1934, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini and the Eleven New Cantos, and quite directly in canto 37. Only he could not see Roosevelt defeating ‘organized money’.
1 I have been asked why there is no mention here of anti-Semitism, and the answer is simply that Mussolini’s Fascism, unlike Hitler’s National Socialism, was not racist nor anti-Semitic. Jews along with all other Italians were incorporated into the Fascist state, and criticized or attacked, like any other Italian, only insofar as they resisted or gave their allegiance elsewhere (see Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews (1978), ch. II). In 1933 American Jewish publishers selected Mussolini as one of the world’s twelve ‘greatest Christian champions’ of the Jews (John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1973), p. 40). However, anti-Semitic laws were introduced in 1938 following the alliance of Italy with Nazi Germany.
2 For the full text of this important statement of Pound’s thinking about economic reform in America see Appendix D.
3 Andrew Mellon as US Secretary of the Treasury (1921–32) had advised President Hoover after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, for which he bore heavy responsibility, ‘Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system.’ EP probably knew that, but neglected to mention such telling details. Mellon is mentioned in canto 38/188.
4 JQA Minister Plenipotentiary to the Russian Court, 1809.
5 JQA speaks ll. 4 and 7, introducing main subject; Romanzoff, Tzar Alaxander’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, speaks ll. 5 and 6, the counter-subject (or antithesis). ‘Un étourdi’= ‘a scatterbrain’, even ‘a dolt’.
6 These four lines introduce a contrasting (or second) subject, which is given some development in the second movement. (See also ll. 30 and 44.)
7 Main subject and counter-subject developed—‘our peace’ would be with England, and would be made by France opening its ports to US trade and so breaking its agreements with other European states.
8 ‘peace of Tilsit’, agreed between Napoleon and Alexander 1807. Napoleon’s forces were finally driven out of Spain by the Duke of Wellington in 1814. In June 1812, breaking the Tilsit treaty, Napoleon invaded Russia—this ten-line passage develops the Bonaparte component of the counter-subject into a first episode.
9 The off-rhyme with l. 3 marks a close to the first half of the movement. The second half will repeat the structure while developing the thematic material.
10 Re-statement of the England component of the counter-subject.
11 Further development of Bonaparte component, concluding the 1812 episode; and contrasting with the following five lines. ‘La sottise’= ‘senseless folly’ or ‘stupid mistake’.
12 Resolution of main subject and the England component of its counter-subject: US delegation negotiating a treaty of commerce with Russia, and a peace with England based on respecting the commercial interests (or rights) of both parties. (Americans keeping their word.)
13 This fifteen-line passage is the second Bonaparte episode, and the conclusion of the first movement (apart from a five-line bridge passage.) Napoleon, having escaped from Elba, becomes Emperor once more in Paris, thanks to the Bourbon King’s ‘misconduct’. (He will be finally defeated at Waterloo in June.) The movement has been built upon the contrast between the constructive will of JQA in working to establish American independence in peaceful commerce with other nations, and the destructive will-to-power of Napoleon, Europe’s representative man of the moment.
14 Orage returned to England and started up his New English Weekly in April 1932 to promote Douglas’s new economics. ‘He was completely convinced of the general truth of the Douglas analysis … that the cause of the economic frustration of our civilization, ever since the Great War, was essentially financial’, and ‘that the accepted principles of finance were a tangle of illusions, obscuring all true values and tending to disintegrate all genuine human relations’ (Philip Mairet, A. R. Orage: A Memoir (London: Dent, 1936), pp. 112–13). Orage died in October 1934. Pound continued to contribute to the NEW articles, letters, and light verse (his Social Credit ‘Poems of Alfred Venison’) until June 1940.
4 : THINGS FALL APART, 1933–1937
To spread order about him
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him
Joseph Bard, the Hungarian novelist who had told Pound about Frobenius’ concept of paideuma, spoke in a lecture in 1961 of the Pound who had been his friend in Rapallo in the later 1920s and early 1930s. He recalled how alive and irreverent he was, and how his vehemence ‘radiated from a deep and serious intention’—
I could see a unique dedication, a rare sense of responsibility for the clarity and proper functioning of the mind, but nothing either obscure or wild…Never did I observe anything excessive in him, in fact, the order he was cultivating in himself to be adequate to the experiences he may have to undergo forced a certain sense of order on his friends.
Theirs was a tragic time, Bard said, ‘in which dormant forces have woken up, hidden but unfolding to the sensitive eye, forces which human reason in its present potential cannot control’. He was thinking of the ungraspable forces behind the Great Depression and the approaching world war, and celebrating Pound as a source of order in a disintegrating world.
Bard recalled in particular how for Pound ‘the stress of earning a living by good literature against the deviating pressure of commercial literary nabobs was a necessary discipline and a participation in the life of the struggling mind’. He recalled also how Pound ‘was always on the alert to save his friends’ mental energies from being drained by trivialities, by small pleasures within the range of every idiot’. He cared that their minds should be nourished and recreated by the better human achievements.
Bard’s Pound is not the single-minded revolutionary out ‘to GET ACTION’, as in his work for Orage’s New English Weekly; nor the frequently raging Pound of the crusading journalism flung in the face of those who could not and would not see the saving truth; and not the overreaching megalomaniac single-handedly taking on the evil economic system of the capitalist democracies and their empires. He is the man Bard knew among his friends in Rapallo, an individual in a small town, spreading about him in that little world such order as he could ‘build in his own ambience’. It
was good for the energetic American with his characteristic desire to get hold of the best and to be the best in the world—so Pound himself admonished small-town America—it was good for him to learn from the older countries such as Italy that civilization is local. His friend Manlio Dazzi had shown him in 1923 in Cesena, where he was then librarian of the Malatestine Library, how it was possible ‘to have first rate music in a small town’. ‘There is all the difference in the world’, Pound wrote, between the man who builds well with what he has to hand, ‘and the lunatic who thinks he is Napoleon’.
By the end of March 1933, within two months of being appointed Chancellor, Herr Hitler had seized total control of the German state. The burning down of the Reichstag on 27 February had given him cause to suspend civil liberties, to set his Brown Shirt thugs upon his Communist and Social Democrat opponents, to create concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau as instruments of terror—27,000 had been imprisoned by the end of the year—and to spread anxiety and fear among the people at large. On 1 April a one-day boycott of Jewish shops was decreed as a statement of intent; then laws were issued excluding Jews from the public services, the professions, and the universities; and the robbing, beating up, and murdering of Jews began. On 10 May a torchlight parade of thousands of students ended opposite the University of Berlin and there the students burned twenty thousand ‘subversive’ books, thus inaugurating the new Nazi era of German culture. And still too few of those whom it concerned elsewhere in Europe and in the United States took notice of the Nazi agenda openly laid out by Hitler in Mein Kampf—an agenda driven by the will to lead an Aryan Master Race destined for world conquest.
Through May 1933 Pound was in Paris at the Hotel Foyot; Dorothy was in London. Ezra reported to her his catching up with old friends—Joyce, Léger, Bill Bird; ‘Miss Weaver present for 5 mins.’; Caresse Crosby, Duchamp the surrealist, Tibor Serly the Hungarian-American composer who was often in Rapallo, Walter Rummel, Natalie Barney. Brancusi had been ill and was a bit low. Cocteau had done a new play. Harding of the BBC was over to discuss the proposed production of Cavalcanti. Cummings, whose new book about Russia, Eimi, Pound was impressed by, was in Paris; also George and Mary Oppen. In his last letter to Dorothy before returning to Rapallo he mentioned that Max Ernst had presented him with a ‘beeyewteeful blue seascape worth much more than emergency chq. I sent up’. Ernst had said, ‘“entre nous—such questions—i.e. re value—can’t arise”’.
Back in Rapallo he wrote to Dorothy, ‘O is livin up at St Ambrog/ but I trust will be able to combine something with Muench & thereby have a status. Also hopes for Siena job, which wd start before long.’ ‘Muench’ was Gerhart Münch, a gifted young pianist and composer from Dresden with a scholarly interest in early music, and Pound at once seized on the chance of his presence in Rapallo to organize a ‘Settimana Mozartiana’. The Teatro Reale cinema was hired for the evenings of 26, 27, and 28 June, and twelve of Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano were performed by Olga Rudge and Münch, four each evening, ‘under the auspices of the Fascist Institute of Culture’. The rest of Mozart’s thirty-four violin sonatas were ‘done privately so that a few of us heard the whole set’. Then ‘the aristocracy of the Gulf of Tigullio’, as Pound expressed it in a note in Il Mare, ‘decided to organize a private subscription concert’, at which Münch would play Scriabin, in order to encourage him to remain permanently in Rapallo as the pivot of the ‘effort to achieve a higher degree of musicality in the Gulf’. The Musical Section of the ‘Amici del Tigullio’, Pound declared, were determined to put on in the future more concerts like the Mozart series. After the Scriabin concert on 12 July Pound left for Siena to join Olga, who had just been confirmed as administrative secretary to Count Guido Chigi Saracini’s very distinguished Academy of music. Dorothy wrote that she was not telling Olivia that Pound was with Olga in Siena, it was ‘too complicated’.
Dorothy was finding England ‘deader than mutton’; but ‘Omar was fairly lively: knows his twelve times table’. He was too old now to stay with the Norland Nurseries, and she was at her wits’ end to know what to do about him. That problem was solved at the end of June when a Miss Dickie, who was retiring from the Nurseries to a cottage near Bognor, offered to have him with her and to send him to school nearby. This arrangement would cost Dorothy about the same as with the Norland. Earlier in June she mentioned a ‘Very lucid and well-spoken street-corner meeting of British Fascists on Sunday 12.30 in High Street [Kensington]’. In July she noted that Wyndham Lewis was very positively interested in Social Credit. She would return to Rapallo about 10 August, and wanted Ezra to be back from Siena for her then. ‘All right’, she wrote as that date approached, ‘We will try cooking upstairs if you think so.’ To which Ezra replied, ‘Don’t purrpose to cook more’n one meel a day anyhow.’
In August there was a stellar conjunction in Rapallo of Pound, ‘the pride of the town’, Basil Bunting (who observed him in that role), Louis Zukofsky the Objectivist, and, in brief transit, an 18-year-old Harvard undergrad who signed himself ‘James Laughlin IV’. Bunting, because Pound was there, had been drifting in and out of Rapallo since 1924, when he was not being a music critic in London—1925–8 on The Outlook—or getting married in America, in 1930. Yeats had seen him as one of Pound’s ‘more savage disciples’, though he was at the same time rather fiercely independent. Bunting was named as a contributing editor on the stationery Pound got up for the Il Mare Supplemento Letterario in August 1932, and was a member of the committee for the concerts inaugurated with the Mozart Week in June 1933. In November a lack of money would force him to move with his wife and child to the Canary Islands. Zukofsky, having been frequently urged by Pound to see Paris, i.e. to encounter the writers and artists Pound thought worth knowing there, had dutifully sailed from New York and done a fortnight in Paris, assisted by 500 francs from Pound. But he had his own reason for the trip, ‘to see you’, as he wrote to Pound, ‘& discuss what can be done for ’Murka’. To an interviewer in Budapest he said he had come ‘chiefly to meet the master of American poetry and in a sense its father’. In Rapallo he was put up in a large room with its own bathroom in Homer and Isabel’s apartment, formerly the Yeatses’, and was impressed by their gallery of photographs of Ezra and of Omar. He had his meals with the Buntings, for which Pound paid, went out with Basil in his boat, and observed Ezra swimming far out on his own. The main event of each day was leisurely tea with Ezra and Dorothy, Ezra talking with ‘wit and brilliance’, and Dorothy ‘silent most of the time’. Zukofsky asked Pound to read a canto, then read it back to him ‘very quietly and clearly’. With Bunting he tried to persuade Pound to read in a more natural voice—they both thought their own very different ways of reading the cantos better than his Yeatsian chaunt. At the same time Pound and Bunting were telling Zukofsky that he should cultivate a more natural language, to no effect. He returned to New York in September confirmed in his devotion to Pound and also—like Bunting, his fellow leading light in Pound’s Active Anthology—confirmed in his determination to go on working out his own independent poetics.
Young Laughlin had yet to grow into his independence. Introducing himself to Pound he declared a readiness to become his most devoted servant, if Pound would advise him ‘about bombarding shits like Canby & Co’, and elucidate for him ‘certain basic phases of the CANTOS’ so that he could ‘preach them intelligently’. Though he was from a Pittsburgh steel dynasty, he was, he assured Pound, ‘full of “noble caring” for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US’; and, being an editor on both the Harvard Advocate and Yale’s Harkness Hoot, he was in a position ‘to reach the few men in the two universities who are worth bothering about, and could do a better job of it with your help’. He clearly knew how to appeal to Pound as a well-instructed neophyte, and was hospitably received in Rapallo. After his two or three days there he thanked Pound ‘cordially for…the most vital experience of the summer’, and returned to Harvard fired up to do ‘A comple
te exposure of Jeffers and Robinson’, something on the arms merchants, ‘an estimate of WCWms: proper praise of ACTIVE ANTH. when it comes’, and did Pound think ‘Zukofsky or Doc Williams could be enlisted in the cause?’ Soon Pound was sending him prose blasts for the university magazines, and for New Democracy, Gorham Munson’s Social Credit magazine in which Laughlin, at Pound’s instigation, had been given a column under the rubric ‘New Directions’.
That summer of 1933 Pound was issued with a journalist’s pass entitling him to a 70 per cent reduction on the Italian State Railways. He used it, according to the record on the pass, not for journalism but to travel from Siena to Rapallo on 9 August; to go from Genoa to Brunico in early September—that would have been to see Maria—and on the 8th to return from Bolzano to Genoa; to go from Genoa to Venice on 15 October, and to return on 25 October.
A series of concerts to make ‘music in winter’ was announced by the ‘Amici del Tigullio’, one in each month from October to March. The Mayor of Rapallo was showing his support by putting at their disposal the ‘Gran Sala del Municipio’, the newly panelled and decorated grand chamber of the Town Hall. The concerts would be under the auspices of the Instituto Fascista di Cultura Commune, and would be sponsored by the Amici. Among the named supporting Friends were two marchesas, a contessa, and a conte, Mrs Ephra Townley, Reverendissimo Desmond Chute, Miss Natalie Barney, Dottoressa Bacigalupo, Signor H. L. Pound, and Mrs D. Pound. The Friends had opened a subscription to pay for a Steinway which they would present to the town, to be ‘used only for concerts of distinction’.
Pound wrote a series of articles for Il Mare, starting with three in September setting out the idea of the concerts. Later articles would introduce the music and the performers, and review some of the performances. The emphasis was to be on early music up to Bach and Mozart, with a few examples of later music for purposes of comparison. Münch, with funding from the Amici, would be preparing for the concerts transcriptions from the rich collection of unpublished early music built up by the musicologist Oscar Chilesotti, and would thus be making ‘a real addition to the whole body of existing music’. One of his first transcriptions was Francesco da Milano’s sixteenth-century setting for lute of Clement Jannequin’s Le Chant des Oiseaux, a chorus for several voices imitating the songs of many birds. In Münch’s ‘metamorphosis’ of the song for Olga Rudge’s solo violin this featured frequently in the Rapallo concerts, and Pound would reproduce Münch’s score dated ‘28.9.33’ in canto 75. Along with Münch and Rudge the regular performers would be ‘prof. Marco Ottone, ’cellist from Chiavari’ just down the coast from Rapallo; and ‘Maestro Sansoni, whose merits are sometimes forgotten by those who see him conducting the municipal orchestra in the open air or playing jazz in the Kursaal’. ‘Our aim’, Pound wrote, ‘is to develop a group of local performers sufficient for our needs and desires, and not to spoil our musical life as in so many countries by trusting and encouraging only the so-called “stars”.’ First-rate musicians who happened to be ‘passing through the town’ would also be invited to perform—and would feature, indeed, more and more in the later series. But Pound was aiming at the creation of a local culture of musical excellence, founded on the well-ordered harmonies of pre-romantic composers, and in this he largely succeeded until the coming of war in 1939 put an end to all that.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 27
