Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  He was sensitive to the charge that he was representing the Italian point of view, that he was writing Italian propaganda. No, he insisted in the British-Italian Bulletin, which had been set up to put the Italian point of view in London during the Abyssinian crisis, ‘I am, if you like, writing European propaganda for the sake of a decent Europe wherein the best people will not be murdered for the monetary profit of the lowest and rottenest, and wherein the divergent national components might collaborate for a sane unstarved civilization’. Or again, he was representing an ‘international’ point of view; and, beyond that—this was in that note in Polite Essays—‘I am writing for humanity in a world eaten by usury.’

  Those disclaimers don’t altogether carry conviction. Pound, who had been at Aquila in the Abruzzi with Dorothy, went immediately to Rome when the invasion was announced, put up at the Albergo Italia, and (as he would write in the British-Italian Bulletin) remained there ‘during the two months of greatest tension, and did not leave the Capital until, to my mind, the time of that particular danger was past’. His idea appears to have been to rally to the Italian cause. On 15 October he submitted for Mussolini’s consideration a project for an international organization to replace the damned League of Nations. He wanted to talk with Il Duce, but was rebuffed. He called on the Minister of Agriculture, and met Olivia Rossetti Agresti, an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini’s economic policies. His most important contact appears to have been Odon Por, 1 who described himself as ‘an old New Age–Orage man…trying to propagate Social Credit here’, and who had influential contacts within the Fascist government. Pound seems to have worked on some pro-Italian journalism with Por; and it may have been Por who introduced him to the British-Italian Bulletin. Pound began contributing to this supplement to L’Italia Nostra, a newspaper for Italian-speaking residents of Great Britain, in December 1935, and sent in nearly thirty articles over the following ten months. He told Por, ‘British Ital Bulletin offered to pay me and of course I can NOT accept money for writing Ital propaganda.’ That could mean that he knew he was writing propaganda, and felt there was something not straight about his doing it. On the other hand, it could mean that he would not be hired to write propaganda, and thought that it if he were to accept money it would appear that he was.

  There is evidence that Pound did have his own agenda and would not be dictated to. In January 1936 Por arranged for him to discuss doing some radio broadcasts for the Ministry of Press and Propaganda. He warned him, ‘do not talk about money & so on. It confounds them…they think you are crank and try to avoid you.’ (The previous June Por had persuaded the editor of Civiltà Fascista to let him ask Pound for an article, and been told ‘anything except economics’. Pound did not write for Civiltà Fascista.) Pound’s response on this occasion was to the point: ‘what do I want to talk about on the RADIO? unless it IS money??’ He was not tempted, as Redman comments, by the possibility of the regular position Por hoped he would be given, ‘without the understanding that he would be free to speak about what he wanted’. And what he wanted, he told Por, was ‘1. Stave off pan European war…2. get sane economics started SOMEWHERE’; and he did not ‘care a fried hoot about talking over the radio UNLESS it conduces to one or all of the above activities’.

  If we look again, in the light of that, at Pound’s correspondence with US senators, and at his contributions to the British-Italian Bulletin, it is apparent that for the most part he was pushing his own line of political and economic propaganda, and that his attempts to justify Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia are infrequent asides or interjections. When he was writing in an organ of Fascist propaganda, it was not on the whole Fascist propaganda that he was writing, and the Ministry of Press and Propaganda was wary of him on that account. Por was told, ‘can’t put [him] on the wireless—because [he] said strange things before’. ‘The Foreign Office is afraid of you’, he wrote to Pound in May, ‘so is the Ministero Stampa’. The fact was that the Italy Pound was promoting was not so much their Italy as the exemplary and ideal Italy he believed in, one that, whether it existed or not, he was bent on projecting. Moreover, his war was not theirs.

  In his mind, as he wrote in his first article for the British-Italian Bulletin, ‘A strong Italy is the key-stone of Europe for peace, for the good life, for civilization’. In fact, as he saw things, Italy alone was standing out against the pressure towards war in Europe. (As for Italy’s small war in Africa, that, he suggested in a letter to Borah, was a price worth paying to keep war out of Europe.) ‘The pressure towards wars is economic’, he wrote, ‘usury is the root of ruin’. Europe had ‘lost the distinction between usura and partaggio, [between] usury and fair sharing’, and had lost with it the sense of ‘civic responsibility’ which Italy still maintained. It followed, for Pound, that in imposing sanctions on Italy, England and France, themselves in a depression brought on by a usurious financial system, and in the grip of financiers with vested interests in arms sales and wars, were attacking the preserver of peace, of the good life, of civilization in Europe.

  The evil of the moment, then, was not Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, but the League of Nations’ attack on Italy. The real war, for Pound, was between usury and a good society, with the League as the arm of usura. To Senator Borah he declared that ‘the attempt to starve Italy, for the sake of crushing the Duce over a technical quibble is larger scale crime than any implied in colonial settlement’. And behind that attempt was the English Government whose ‘main purpose…is to hide the MONSTROUS fake and evil of the usury system’. ‘The question of Abyssinia’, he had written to both Borah and Senator Tinkham when the invasion was about to be launched, is ‘whether ANY nation that doesn’t crawl on its belly and take orders from London (from the most treacherous nation of earth) is to have the league used against it; is to suffer unlimited and unscrupulous blackmail, wangled by England’. He had in his files, he assured the readers of the British-Italian Bulletin in February 1936, ‘signed statements and first-hand information to the effect that the U.S. regards Geneva as a bureaucracy hired largely by London, as a shop front, a camouflage covering financial iniquity, as a tool of Britain’. The clinching detail for Pound was his discovery that Anthony Eden, who represented Great Britain on the committee of the League which decided on sanctions, had ‘married into the powerful banking family of Beckett—Sir Gervase idem. director of Westminster bank’, had entered parliament in the same year, and ‘Nacherly hiz rize wuz rapid’. The plot thickened when he learnt that Lord Cranbourne, who had joined that same Westminster Bank as a director in 1933, had just resigned to become Under Secretary for League of Nations Affairs. To Pound it seemed obvious that ‘the men now crying out for the starving and, as they call it, “sanctioning” of Italy represent the same errors, the same weaknesses of mind that have caused the “sanctioning” of great masses of the English and French and American population’. What Italy was doing in Abyssinia—(which in any case would be better off, he thought, under the Duce’s rule)—appeared to Pound insignificant beside the economic war he could see being waged against, not just Italy, but against humanity.

  Mussolini’s secretariat at the Palazzo Venezia thought Pound deluded and out of touch with reality. His project for a new league to take the place of the existing League and thus break British tyranny was dismissed as the weirdly conceived project of a befogged mind which, having seen a small glimmer of truth, imagined it had discovered a brilliant solution. Pound proposed that Italy call a conference at once, within 24 hours, before England could become suspicious, a conference in which the world’s peoples could come to know each other’s genuine will and aspirations, without interfering in each other’s internal affairs and commerce, and without any coercive power, without sanctions. Japan, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, Austria, would be glad to join such a league. Germany could join without being humiliated; and the United States—which had kept out of the League of Nations—could join this purely moral league without breaking its principle of isolation from European
politics. Why not call in the foreign ambassadors at once and issue invitations with Roman ceremony, with Latin grace, in Bodoni typeface. Act now, Pound urged at one point, dropping for the moment from moral idealism into realpolitik, create a tactical diversion, and Abyssinia will be forgotten. An official in the secretariat coolly advised that, given Pound’s enthusiasm and goodwill towards Italy, it would be enough to point out that, however ingenious the proposal, such a conference could not be put together in 24 hours; that, as things stood, Italy, Austria, and Hungary were members of the League of Nations and would not be free to set up an alternative to it for at least two years; and that his proposal would be held over for detailed consideration of its legal implications at some future date. This was to treat Pound diplomatically as a fantasizing friend of Italy who should be brought gently down to earth.

  In the end it is difficult to know quite what to make of Pound’s behaviour in relation to Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia. Certainly he went on pursuing his own quixotic agenda. In his last words in the British-Italian Bulletin, in October 1936, he was insisting that ‘The total purchasing power of the community must equal the total needs, and stretch thence upward toward the total desires of the whole people, before prosperity reigns in any nation.’ He would write about money, and for a peaceful society.

  But then his war on usury became mixed up in an attack on the League of Nations for imposing sanctions on Italy. And his defence of Italy as a just society became contaminated with justifications of its aggression against Abyssinia. Some of those justifications, moreover, such as the assertion of Italy’s need to attain economic independence, and the apparently damning exposure of Eden’s links with banking, are close to what he would have been reading in the Fascist press. Then there is his writing almost weekly for an organ of Fascist propaganda. He was on the whole speaking his own mind there, and the Italian authorities certainly did not read him as speaking for them. Yet it is not to be wondered at if others in England and America thought he was writing propaganda on Italy’s behalf.

  One thing at least is clear, that through these complications and confusions Pound was trying not to be distracted from what seemed to him most real and urgent, the great economic war. Basil Bunting, who kept a more open mind, was moved to tell him mildly, ‘You turn a blind eye to a good many things, Ezra.’ Bunting had decided, even before the conquest of Abyssinia, that while Mussolini was a great man he had done all the good he was likely to do for Italy or for Europe, and that it was high time he was got rid of. But Pound maintained his faith in Mussolini, and saw only what he believed or hoped was the case. When Mussolini celebrated the military virtues Pound somehow saw his militarism as leading, not to war, but to Italy’s having the courage to resist the forces of international usury. And when the Bank of Italy was nationalized in March 1936 he saw that as a victory over the usurers, and was confirmed in his belief that Italy was driving towards what Jefferson had called for, and what Social Credit called for, that the nation should have control of its own credit and should use it for the good of the whole people. In December 1936 he would be urging Mussolini to go further. ‘DUCE! DUCE!’, this letter begins, ‘Molti nemici molto onore’. But the enemies of Italy he had in mind were the usurers, and he was telling Mussolini again, as he had when he spoke to him in person in 1933, that his next step should be to abolish taxes. The letter was filed by the secretariat, probably unseen by Mussolini, and probably not understood by anyone who did see it.

  Music, money, cantos

  In the spring of 1936 Pound announced in Rapallo’s Il Mare that in place of the usual concert season there would be a series of ‘Studi Tigulliani’, or musical seminars. Gerhard Münch had gone back to Dresden the previous summer, fearful of ‘being interned in event of war’, and hoping to get on as a pianist and composer in the new Germany. Attendance at the concerts had become disappointing. And there was the distraction of the war, then at its height. To maintain Rapallo’s standing as a musical centre, and so that the League of Nations sanctions should not altogether break them up, as Pound put it, the Amici had resolved themselves ‘into a study circle with the immediate intention of hearing as many of the…concerti of Vivaldi as were available in printed editions and executable by one or two violinists and a piano’.

  Vivaldi’s music was at that time of interest only to a few ‘eccentric musicologists’. Pound was able to list as in print just twenty-nine sonatas and concerti; and Grove’s Dictionary of Music said Vivaldi had composed no more than seventy. Olga Rudge, however, would shortly find 309 hidden away in the National Library in Turin, and there were 90 more lying neglected in the State Library in Dresden—Pound would have Münch send him photocopies of those. The great Vivaldi revival had yet to get under way, and Pound and Olga Rudge were among the first to appreciate his rich musical heritage and to set about getting it performed and published. 2

  Accounts of Pound’s lectures for the first two ‘Studi Tigulliani’ appeared in Il Mare in April; and a summary by Olga Rudge of the third session appeared there in May. ‘The problem of the relationship between Vivaldi and Bach’ had been discussed, and whether Italy could claim in Vivaldi a composer equal to Bach; but there could be no answer to that, it was concluded, until Vivaldi’s manuscripts had been edited and published. The third meeting seems to have been the last, but through the following years Olga Rudge’s work, and Pound’s, to bring the lost music to performance and to add it to the cultural heritage would go on.

  Music makes order, or at least it presents ‘an example of order’, so Pound would write in his Guide to Kulchur. More, ‘its magic…is in its effect on volition’, on the will to order. And its contrary, subverting every good work, is usury or money-greed. At this time, in 1936, Pound’s thinking about economics was tending to fix upon that evil. What would become canto 45, ‘With Usura’, appeared in J. P. Angold’s little magazine called Prosperity in London in February; and what would become canto 46, attacking the ‘hyper-usura’ of the modern banking system, would appear in Laughlin’s New Directions in Prose and Poetry with a dateline ‘30 Jan XIV’. The major preoccupation of the entire block of cantos he had been working on through the months of the Abyssinian crisis and war, and which he would deliver to Faber & Faber in November 1936 as The Fifth Decad of Cantos [XLII–LI], was ‘usura, sin against nature’.

  Henry Swabey’s recollections of Pound in 1935 and 1936 bring out how dominant this preoccupation was at that time, not only in his writings but even in his daily conversation. Swabey (1916–96), then a very young Englishman studying at Durham University and preparing to take orders in the Church of England, had found Make It New ‘more stimulating than Thucidides’ and had written to Pound as ‘the most approachable of the sages of my youth’. Pound had suggested that since the bishops of Durham had once minted money he might ‘make a study of ecclesiastical money in England’, and find out ‘When, if ever, did usury cease to be a mortal sin?’ Swabey duly wrote his thesis on ‘The Church of England and Usury’. He visited the sage in Rapallo in the early summer of 1936, and Pound met him at the station wearing ‘an orange blazer’ and appearing ‘larger and tawnier’ than Swabey had expected. (The orange blazer, a surprising sartorial detail, may have been down to his membership of the Rapallo tennis club. Pound was rather proud of having been defeated by the champion of Italy, no less, in the doubles in the town’s recent International Tournament.) At tea in the Pounds’ flat Swabey noticed the Gaudier Hieratic Head, ‘but EP steered me away from his book on Gaudier and lent me a book on the Governors of the Bank of England’. They went out once or twice into the bay on a raft fitted with a seat, EP paddling skilfully; evenings they ‘wandered round the town, pausing for glasses of water at various cafes’, EP leaving ‘an appropriate consideration at each stop’; and all the time, Swabey remembered, ‘He talked mostly about economic subjects.’

  To George Antheil, who didn’t particularly enjoy talking about credit and taxes, Pound was off-putting. Antheil was looking for concert open
ings, but Pound wrote, ‘I don’t see you functioning publicly in Italian picture.’ There was no American colony of the kind they had known in Paris. And Italy was ‘more interested in getting a good life for the peasants than in spending money on ballets’. It was ‘a damn good country for a bloke interested in ECONomics’, only that was not Antheil’s line. ‘If you were a specialist in manure or drainage…’, Pound offered, rubbing it in that he now saw Antheil as just another unawakened aesthete.

  His treatment of young Swabey was so different. ‘Now that I had reached Italy he opined that I should see as much of the country and its works of art as possible,’ Swabey recalled, ‘So, he wrote out a full itinerary’, and ‘spared no trouble on my behalf, even sending a telegram to a Rome hotel’. Swabey was advised to spend one day in Pisa, and sleep that night at ‘Hotel Corallo, Livorno (20 minutes further by train)’. Then 2 days in Rome; 1 day in Siena—‘(hotel Canone d’Oro)’, ‘can walk round Siena in half hours’; 2 or 3 days for Perugia and Assisi; Firenze—‘Hotel Berchielli, on the Arno’; 2 days in Venice—‘Pensione Seguso, sulle Zattere…Bar Americano, Piazza San Marco. for sandwiches…Santa Maria Miracoli, hard to find. But best renaissance…San Giorgio Schiavoni, back of S. Marco (Carpaccio)’; Verona could be seen ‘Between trains’, i.e. ‘San Zeno (inside)’, the central piazzas, ‘get into any d. church you see’, and ‘Also an arena’; and finally Milan, ‘2 nights’ to take in galleries and churches. Swabey gives the impression that he followed Pound’s ‘guide to Italy’ both dutifully and gratefully.

  Towards the end of July Pound joined Olga in Siena in her apartment with a painted ceiling in the Palazzo Capoquadri. Dorothy wrote from England, ‘Depressing country and rotted and decayed top & bottom—more especially top.’ Pound wrote back that he had been in the Biblioteca Communale looking into a big history of Siena’s Monte dei Paschi bank, and was glad to find ‘Main points Monte P. OK== abundance of natr & will of the whole people as basis of credit // nacherly the 10-vol bloke don’t stress that’.