Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  One of Pound’s correspondents in 1935 was W. H. D. Rouse, a former classics teacher and an editor of the Loeb Classical Library, who had published the beginning of his ‘translation of Homer’s Odyssey into plain English’ in the New English Weekly. Pound was encouraging him to keep to plain, direct speech and to avoid literary turns of phrase; and when the completed translation was published in 1937 Rouse credited him with being ‘the onlie begetter of this book’, for having ‘suggested it’ and for having offered ‘trenchant comments’ which gave him the courage of his own convictions. Pound wanted Rouse to say something in the New English Weekly ‘about the campaign for live teaching of Greek and Latin’, and for ‘some means of communicating the classics to the great mass of people…who weren’t taught Greek in infancy’ and whose lives were impoverished by the modern world’s loss of ‘contact with and love for the classics’. But that wasn’t all, there were ‘more questions in my head than I can set down with any apparent coherence’. For instance, ‘Along with direct teaching of the language, is there any attempt to teach real history? Roman mortgages 6%, in Bithinya 12%’. And what was the ‘explanation for the obsolescence and decline of Gk. and Lat. studies after, let us say, the Napoleonic wars?’ Wasn’t it because the classics were taught without facing the economic facts? And wasn’t that because ‘Wherever one looks—printing, publishing, schooling—the black hand of the banker blots out the sun.’ ‘My generation was brought up in black ignorance’, Pound insisted; and could Rouse not ‘see in Brit. education during your time a reason why the country tolerates a governing class that can’t see that: Work is not a commodity. Money is not a commodity. The state has credit. The increment of association is not usury?’ Altogether, ‘I have been for two years in a boil of fury with the dominant usury that impedes every human act, that keeps good books out of print, that pejorates everything.’ Rouse was simply hoping to produce ‘a readable story, that is, a story which can be read aloud and heard without boredom’; but for Pound that laudable if modest undertaking was ineluctably linked through the education of the young to the state of the world.

  The Rapallo concerts of course had their economic aspect. ‘What we have done’, Pound claimed in July 1935, ‘we have done by liberating the ability of performers from the noose of international finance.’ More, ‘What Douglasism can do for music in one town (having almost no population) it can do for any and every human activity in any town on this planet.’ Douglasism as practised in Rapallo meant ‘a local demonstration of credit’. The municipality provided the hall and put in steam heating; the interested public provided the piano; the music was largely cultural heritage; and thus all the proceeds went to the performers ‘save ten lire to the janitor and doorkeeper and the small printing expenses’, i.e. the cost of reprinting the programme which the collaborating town paper first printed as news. Concerts in William Atheling’s London had been ‘a racket whereof the main proceeds did not reach the producer’, that is the musician who performed the music in the concert hall. Even well-known performers had to pay expenses in advance to the impresario in order to obtain a booking. And the musicians dared not innovate or depart from the established repertoire.

  That was where Rapallo differed most interestingly for Pound. In escaping ‘the black rot of usury’ it had freed its musicians to experiment, to discover lost masterpieces, and, increasingly, to introduce new works. In the 1934–5 season, along with Scarlatti and Pergolesi and Bach and Mozart, there were compositions by Tibor Serly; Bartok’s 4th String Quartet (1928) played after his 1st Quartet (1908); also Stravinsky’s Petroushka (in his reduction for piano), Pulcinella (in his reduction for violin and piano), and the Sonata for piano (1924). Pound wrote that ‘Serly sees the birth of the new music in the use not merely of polytonality, but in correlation (with due opposition) of two scales, major and minor, of the same key’, and Bartok and Stravinsky were of that movement or phase. He also wrote, after mentioning having heard his Capriccio for piano and orchestra directed by the composer himself in Venice, that ‘Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job’.

  In July 1935 Pound wrote from Venice to Dorothy in London, ‘am at Dead End & doing NOWT…feeling extremely well // only dead stop in head—which izza blessin.’ He was aware though that something was up over Abyssinia. It was ‘no use arguing’, he wrote, ‘no theory but political and econ. necessity’.

  In the first week of August Pound and Olga went up into Austria for the opera at Salzburg. They travelled part of the way, possibly from Innsbruck, with Jas. Laughlin in his hired Ford tourer, and stopped off at Wörgl, about halfway between Innsbruck and Salzburg, to call on Herr Unterguggenberger and hear all about his blighted stamp scrip. The ex-mayor as it happened was out on the mountain, but they had a ‘long tale from Mrs U.—very clear—and human’, and came away with some used, partly stamped, scrip. In Salzburg they heard Don Giovanni, Falstaff, Cosi fan tutte, and Fidelio—which last, according to Laughlin, Pound walked out of in disgust. Laughlin then drove Olga and Pound back to Venice. There is no record of their noticing the troops Mussolini had ordered to the Brenner and other borders to put a stop to the Nazi takeover of Austria and the Alto Adige which Hitler had intended should follow the assassination of Austria’s Chancellor Dollfuss on 25 July. They went by Gais to pick up Maria, who ‘proudly showed them [her] beehives and the goldenrod in full bloom’. After she had been three weeks in Venice Pound wrote to Dorothy, ‘Marieka very satisfactory, great progress since last year’. His pride in her shone in his telling Laughlin, ‘That amazin kid has just sent a communique which went straight on the PAGE of the noo econ. book at the exact place I was typing’. She had written, in the Italian he had told her she needed to learn, ‘Where we live people are sad because store goods cost so much and their sheep, hogs, cows, horses sell for nothing.’

  He had somehow instilled in her the gist of some LAWS FOR MARIA:

  3. That if she suffers, it is her own fault for not understanding the universe. | That so far as her father knows suffering exists in order to make people think. That they do not usually think until they suffer.

  Then three more advanced laws:

  I. First thing to learn is: NOT to be a nuisance./I think you have learned this.

  II. Autarchia personale. To be able to do everything you need for yourself: cook, sew, keep house./(otherwise unfit to marry. Marriage: a partnership, mutual help.)

  III. Autarchia. The ideal is that everyone should be Bauernfähig./The moment a family is separated from the land everyone must be able not only to DO something, or MAKE something, but to sell it….

  There was also a ‘Curriculum’: typewriting, ‘Lingua Italiana without which you will not be able to sell what you write in Italy’, translation, and, query, ‘Inventive writing? first simple articles, then the novel’. In short, ‘I can only teach you the profession I know.’

  The turning point: 1935–1936

  On 16 March 1935 Hitler publicly decreed a massive re-armament of Germany and instituted universal military service, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The British, the French, and the Italians met at Stresa and condemned his action, but did nothing about it. In May Hitler made a great speech in the Reichstag on the theme of Germany’s need and desire for peace in Europe, telling the governments of Britain and France what they wanted to hear. The Times of London welcomed it as ‘the basis of a complete settlement with Germany’.

  On 15 September 1935 Germany enacted the first of its ‘Nuremberg Laws’, by which German Jews were stripped of their citizenship and forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans. By the summer of 1936 ‘Jews had been excluded either by law or by Nazi terror—the latter often preceded the former—from public and private employment to such an extent that at least one half of them were without means of livelihood’. This persecution of German Jews appears not to have become a factor in international affairs.

  On 2 October 1935 Mussolini announced to an enormous crowd in th
e Piazza Venezia that Italy was invading Abyssinia, Haile Selassie’s Empire of Ethiopia. Mussolini’s intentions had been no secret to Britain and France, and he had been given reason to think neither would interfere. However, Abyssinia had been admitted to the League of Nations, and the British Government on this occasion decided to uphold the League’s principle of protecting member states against foreign aggression, even though it wanted even more to have Italy’s continued support in containing Hitler’s Germany. The League declared Italy in breach of its Covenant and called for sanctions, that is, for an embargo on supplying arms, a trade embargo, and financial sanctions. There was no embargo on supplying oil; nor did Britain and France, who owned the Suez Canal, interfere with Italy’s shipping its troops and supplies through it, being anxious to do nothing that might lead them into war with Italy. In search of a resolution they offered to cede to Italy territory from their own colonies neighbouring Ethiopia, and to cede even a substantial portion of Ethiopia itself. Mussolini, caught up now in the pride and glory of conquest, refused their offers, and by May 1936 his vastly superior forces had conquered Ethiopia, and Haile Selassie had fled from its capital Addis Ababa into exile. In July the League lifted its sanctions. Although they had not been applied with much conviction nor to any great effect, they were profoundly resented in Italy, and Britain, being held primarily responsible for them, became an object of anger and hatred. Their main effect was to destroy the loose Stresa alliance of great powers intending some resistance to Nazi Germany, and to drive Mussolini towards an unwilling alliance with Hitler whom he regarded as a mad and very dangerous megalomaniac.

  Mussolini apparently foresaw quite clearly what would be the outcome. Already in June 1936 he told a French Socialist that if he were forced by British and French attitudes to reach an agreement with Hitler, ‘First of all there will be the Anschluss [i.e the absorption of Austria into Hitler’s ‘Greater Germany’] within a short time. Then, with the Anschluss, it will be Czechoslovakia, Poland, the German colonies etc. To sum up, it is war inevitably.’

  On 7 March 1936 Hitler had sent troops in to garrison the demilitarized part of Germany west of the Rhine, again in deliberate violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He then offered a twenty-five-year non-aggression pact on his western front: ‘Germany will never break the peace’, he declared in another impassioned speech in the Reichstag, having first whipped up a frenzy of militarism. France, which had demanded the demilitarization of the Rhineland as a buffer against another German invasion, was in a condition of political paralysis; and Great Britain led the way in neither resisting the re-militarization nor imposing sanctions.

  One explanation of the British Government’s inclination to appease rather than to oppose Hitler had been formulated by Claud Cockburn, an independent Irish journalist, in 1933. In October of that year, following Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations, he had written in his mimeographed newsletter The Week, that ‘A large and influential body of opinion in the City and in British business circles is more or less vaguely sympathetic to the Nazi regime as a “bulwark” against Communism.’ For finance and industry the enemy then was Communism; and Hitler, who had been helped into power by German industrial interests, was seen as an ally of capitalism and not a threat to it. His Brown Shirts were seen as good for destroying the trade unions and revolutionary organizations. In November Cockburn had reported, ‘The main line of Hitler propaganda in the upper reaches of London society are (1) Hitler is saving the world from Communism, (2) there is a Jewish conspiracy against Hitler, (3) Hitler is providing the German people, especially German youth, with an ideal.’ In February 1934 Cockburn had observed that the British Government, in spite of its denials, was consistently supporting the Nazi regime in Germany as urged by financial interests in the City and by the Bank of England; and that in particular it was letting it be known that in its view it would be acceptable if the Nazis within Austria were to take over the country and choose to unite with Germany, since that would not be the same as the absorption of Austria by Germany. (It was mainly due to Mussolini’s concern to hold on to the Tyrol and Alto Adige that Hitler was prevented from engineering the Anschluss in just that way until 1938.)

  In Spain in July 1936 General Francisco Franco led a revolt of military commanders against the Popular Front Republican Government, and appealed for aid from Hitler and Mussolini. The latter sent arms, planes, and 60,000 or more troops; Hitler sent tanks, arms, and planes—the pilots of his Condor Legion perfected dive-bombing techniques which would be used throughout Europe after 1939. German and Italian planes operating together destroyed the town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. The Republicans had appealed for aid from Communist Russia, and received it until the end of 1938 when there was a change of Russian policy, leading to a collapse of the Republican forces early in 1939. Great Britain and France, which had throughout maintained a policy of non-intervention, were quick to recognize the victorious General Franco’s forces as the legitimate government of Spain, and his long reign as dictator followed.

  The Spanish Civil War gave Hitler an opening to draw Italy into agreeing a common policy on foreign affairs, one based on the differences between their interests and those of France and Britain. On 1 November 1936 Mussolini referred to this as an ‘axis’ around which other European powers ‘may work together’, and thus gave its name to the Nazi–Fascist Axis. ‘German and Italian rearmament is proceeding much more rapidly than rearmament can in England’, Hitler remarked to Ciano, now Mussolini’s Foreign Minister, ‘In three years Germany will be ready…’

  ‘The boss knows his business’

  In the English, French and Italian newspapers which Pound was keeping up with in August and September 1935 there was a storm over the likely invasion of Abyssinia, and over the League of Nations’ threat of sanctions against Italy if it did invade. Homer Pound became alarmed, and Ezra dashed off a reassuring postcard to him from Venice: ‘Keep KAAAAAAM. The boss knows his business.… Continue yr/ banking habits as usual.’ ‘Ever hear of the Seminoles?’, he prompted, as if to account for what Mussolini was up to.

  That was a startling analogy. ‘The long Seminole war of 1835–42, the hardest fought of all the Indian wars’, according to the old Encyclopædia Britannica, ‘was due to the tribe’s refusal to cede their lands’—i.e. the greater part of Florida—‘and remove to Arkansas’. At the war’s end the Seminoles were removed, and then were ‘recognized as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes”’.

  In October, with the invasion now well under way, Pound wrote to Senator Borah, ‘you can have perfectly clear conscience that 7 million of subjected population in Abyssinia will be benefitted by conquest’. Still, he was sorry that Italy had started a war. Though it was ‘necessary’, he told Williams, it was ‘regrettable, in some ways’. By November, however, he was telling Borah it was ‘wrong’ to see ‘Italy’s activity in Abyssinia as war’. Apparently it was ‘road building etc.’, and freeing ‘victim tribes’ from slavery. His faith in Mussolini was such that he was sure he would be bringing an ‘enormous advance in living conditions’ to the uncivilized Abyssinians, just as he had done for ‘the people in backward parts of Italy during the past five years’. In a note with the date line ‘6 Dec. anno XIV’ included in Polite Essays, he took the statement ‘We have had no battles but we have all joined in and made roads’, ‘from a letter of Captain Goldoni’s’, to indicate the new Fascist ‘forma mentis’ in action in Abyssinia. Later though, in April 1936, he would frankly declare (here partly echoing what Mussolini had said in March), ‘Italy needs Abyssinia to attain ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE, by which…I mean the MATERIAL WEALTH, the raw materials necessary to feed and clothe the people of Italy.’ To that he added, ‘And I hope Italy gets every inch of it.’ When Italy had conquered Abyssinia, which it was able to do in a matter of months thanks to its great superiority in weapons, to its being able to bomb and strafe unopposed from the air, and to its use of poison gas, Pound at le
ast once referred simply to ‘the Abyssinian acquisition’, and another time to the new ‘Italian empire’.