Ezra Pound: Poet
Page 31
He was finding confirmation of what he had written about the Monte dei Paschi in his Social Credit: An Impact, a pamphlet published in London in 1935. He had invoked it there as an example of ‘banks built for beneficence, for reconstruction’, as against ‘banks created to prey on the people’. Around 1620, after being conquered by Florence, ‘Siena was flat on her back, without money.’ Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, ‘underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats’, taking as his main security the grazing rights of the Maremma pastures worth 10,000 ducats annually. The bank lent out at 5½ per cent, paid 5 per cent to its investors, kept its expenses to a minimum, and made over any profit ‘to hospitals and works for the benefit of the people of Siena’. It thus stood for Pound as an example of moral banking, contrived ‘not for the conqueror’s immediate short-sighted profit, but to restart the life and productivity of Siena’. And it pointed the lesson of solid banking, that ‘Credit rests in ultimate on the abundance of nature’, in that case ‘on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep’. Evidently the interest charged had to be a reasonable proportion or share of the added value. ‘That bank is open today’, Pound wrote, ‘It outlasted Napoleon. You can open an account there tomorrow.’ And in July 1936 he did just that, opening an interest-bearing current account.
Through the heat of August—‘hot here. but air moving & not suffocating’—Pound spent much of his time ‘on damn HARD Liberry seat’ and in the archives, filling five notebooks with the raw materials and rough drafts for cantos 42–4, drawing them directly from the original documents as well as from ‘the 10-vol bloke’ and from other historians. Those cantos, which tell the story of how the Monte dei Paschi bank was created and how it endured, would be finished off in Venice in September.
He was hearing good music in Siena; and in mid-August there was the excitement of the horse race around the central Campo in which the seventeen contrada or city wards compete against each other to win a banner, the Palio. From his window Pound watched four white oxen being cleaned up and decorated to draw the triumphal chariot in the spectacular parade which would precede the race. ‘Time | consumed 1 hour and 17 minutes’, he noted when recording that operation in canto 43. He sent Omar a postcard of the Palio, and Dorothy returned Omar’s ‘thanks & love’, with (in brackets) ‘he has bought you a little present—all on his own’.
All the while he was looking for signs of the spread of Social Credit. He mentioned to Dorothy that there had been a ‘new raise in pay’, in Italy, and he took that to be Social Credit in practice, because it was centrally controlled and went with price control. In the United States there was a Social Credit Conference at the University of Virginia’s Institute of Public Affairs, with Gorham Munson and Jas. Laughlin of New Democracy among the speakers, and also William Carlos Williams. In England the Green Shirts, the militant wing of Social Credit, were being active. Pound had dedicated his Social Credit: An Impact to them, and was in correspondence with their leader, John Hargrave, though he contributed only once to Hargrave’s journal Attack!, and that was a piece of ranting and bantering street-corner oratory about ‘money money money’ and who makes it. He had told Hargrave that he was all for getting Social Credit ‘OUT of Bloomsbury and into the East End’, and had suggested using music hall routines to put its message across. 3 Then there was the British Union of Fascists. Pound didn’t think much of its leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, at this time, but he was encouraged by a private letter saying that the BUF ‘Accept Social Credit analysis’. That, he told Homer, was ‘Big nooz IF they stick to it’. Perhaps it was in the hope of keeping them to it that he would contribute an article on economics to nearly every issue of Mosley’s British Union Quarterly from its first in January 1937 up to its tenth in April 1939. He was charged with a sense of AGENDA, of what needed to be done. As he told Dorothy towards the end of that summer in Siena, ‘I am not merely pickin’ daiseyes’.
Dorothy in London was noticing the ‘word “fascism” getting more and more hopelessly vulgarized—Spain now’. Evidently it had become a convenient term for lumping together the forces allied against the fissile Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist Popular Front in Spain, even though Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism, and Franco’s nationalistic anti-communism were essentially different from each other. What they had in common at that moment was their hostility to international Communism. Pound’s response to Dorothy, ‘Stalinists acc/ Telegraph are calling the executed Trotskists fascists’, underlined the way ‘fascist’ was being re-defined in the negative, as signifying anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-democratic. The British Union of Fascists may have contributed to this shift of meaning as Mosley moved his affiliation from Mussolini’s Fascism to Hitler’s National Socialism. And shortly the Fascist–Nazi Axis would be declared. Significant distinctions were being lost in the clash and confusion of ideologies. And it was not only the perception of Fascism that was affected. To many at the time ‘socialism’ and ‘democracy’ appeared to be embodied in Stalin and the dictatorship of his Comintern, if only because he was lending some support to the Popular Front.
On a postcard to Homer at the end of August Pound wrote, ‘have got to end of Analects again’—that was the second or third time he had worked his way through the ideograms. One of the sayings of Confucius that he kept coming back to was the answer to a disciple’s question, if he were to form a government what would he do first? And Confucius said, Call people and things by their correct names, otherwise there will be confusion and corruption in the state.
Pound left Siena on 2 September, took the train to Bolzano, a journey of eleven hours, then went on to Gais ‘to fetch Marieka’ and take her with him to Venice and Olga. ‘Waal, the place is hottern Siena’, he told Homer from Venice, ‘but it has not the hellish NOISE of that latter city.’ As soon as he had recovered his typewriter ‘out of O’s attic’, he went to work. ‘Waal this machine sticks but I knocked out 2 articles yester. and a canto collected from notes and a nuther canto this a.m.’—that was on the 3rd or 4th. He had also ‘bathed yester at Lido’.
On the 5th he was telling Dorothy that he would shortly send her ‘imperfect copy 3rd of new cantos’—that would have been canto 44. ‘I think technically the best I have done’, he wrote, ‘& AT last a block to balance the Malatesta | 3 all of a piece with sestina
On the 10th also he told Dorothy, ‘By vast heave the Dunning mss in order & shd go to post oggi’. Ralph Cheever Dunning was the old-fashioned poet he had befriended in Paris, and there was an ‘amateur publisher wanting to print the “whole of D’s poetry”’. (The amateur publisher would change his mind when he saw how bad much of it was.)
There was new music at the Venice Biennale of Music that year, and Pound was greatly stimulated by Honegger’s second string quartet, performed by the Gertler Quartet; by Hindemith’s viola concerto, Schwanendreher, with the composer himself playing the viola; and by Bartók’s fifth string quartet, performed by the New Hungarian Quartet. This last meant most to him, because he felt it to be, like his own Cantos, the record of a struggle and revolt against the entanglements of a civilization in decay. He immediately determined that he must get the New Hungarian Quartet, one of the best in Europe, to play that work in Rapallo, and that he must get Hindemith too, ‘which is some WANT on no assets’, as he admitted to Dorothy. Would the New Hungarians come, he asked Tibor Serly, a mutual friend, ‘for 500 lire and a night’s lodging?�
� Not that he was able even to ‘offer the 500 lire yet’, having no assets save what he could earn, and having yet to sell the stuff he ‘proposed to shove into ’em’. Somehow by December he could write to Münch, ‘I think the New Hungarian Quartet is fixed to come,’ and they did indeed perform Bartok’s 5th, together with his 2nd and with a Haydn quartet ‘sandwiched between’ as ‘engine-cooler or whatever’, in the Town Hall of Rapallo the following March, although to a ‘shamefully small audience’. He had hoped that Münch might know Hindemith well enough to sound him out about ‘the minimum he wd. take to give an all Hindemith program’ in Rapallo, ‘with you and Olga if there is a trio’, but nothing came of any approach Münch may have made.
Hearing this new music was probably Pound’s most intense experience that summer in Venice. It was a kind of revelation to him to find contemporary composers doing deep and difficult and beautiful things, and he rejoiced that ‘the richness and abundance of music in 1936 is infinitely greater than it was in the 1920’s, when most of us could deeply admire no one save Igor Stravinsky’. He spread the good news in enthusiastic articles in the BBC’s Listener in October, then in Music and Letters and Delphian Quarterly in January; and in his accounts of the 1937 Rapallo concerts for Il Mare he often referred back to the 1936 Biennale.
An important experience of a different order was spending a few days with US Congressman George Holden Tinkham. Tinkham, with whom Pound had been corresponding since February 1933, was an isolationist and an obdurate opponent of America’s getting involved in the League of Nations, so that was one bond. Moreover, in Tinkham’s view Mussolini was a great man who had had a great triumph—meaning, apparently, in Abyssinia. ‘Any man who can successfully defy England and the League of Nations’, he had told Pound in June 1936, ‘is a man of strength and he has my admiration.’ The congressman arrived in Venice 19 September and flew out on the 25th, and Pound spent much if not most of the intervening days in his company to the exclusion of all else. On the 20th, the Monday, they drove, taking Maria with them, up to the Piave to see the place where, on 11 December 1917, Tinkham had fired the first American big gun against the invading Austrians, and then to the top of Monte Grappa where his staff car had been blown up by the Austrian artillery. Mary recalled how ‘Uncle George’ and ‘her papa talked relentlessly in the back of the car’. ‘Eleven hours solid conversation yester’, Pound wrote to Dorothy on the 21st. ‘And of course much more concentrated than any printed history’, he added on the 22nd, ‘30 years public office, 22 in Congress’. To Homer he wrote that day, ‘Sorry you can’t meet brother TINKHAM. eight hours CONversation yesterday. which you wd have NNNjoyed.’ He wrote again on the 25th, ‘We putt in nine hour day yesterday, an I learned more amurikun history than you cd. in a month of museums.’ ‘Don’t compromise G.T. with the electors by mentioning this incident,’ he warned. And to Dorothy he showed the same impulse to dramatize the significance of their talks, ‘Better not say to anyone how much we have seen of each other.’ Tinkham, writing from Paris on his way home in mid-October, simply thanked Pound ‘for all your courtesies and attention while I was at Venice’. ‘Had I not had you, I should have been deprived of a great deal of pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘All of the places you took me to were little “gems” which I never should have seen.’
Dorothy let Pound know that she would be back in Rapallo about 22 October, and Pound asked, ‘whereafter what does SHE think she wants to do?…Rome in December?’ On 16 October she was in Paris, and Pound wrote to her there, ‘I seem to be pushing out articl/ a day for somewhere or something. Hope it will Rome/ us in affluence’. In mid-November, however, he had to take Dorothy into hospital in Genoa, for haemorrhoids. ‘Worst supposed to be over. operation yesterday’, he wrote to Homer on the 20th, ‘now resting. better reserve strength than I had expected.’ He thought of joining Olga in Turin, where she was working on the Vivaldi manuscripts, but ‘cdn’t figure a way to do it wif decorum an elegance, wot she has so impressed on him’. At the end of December he went down to Rome on his own for a few days. About that time Homer and Isabel entertained Olga in Rapallo with ‘turkey and chocolates’.
‘The Fifth Decad’: against Usura
…you who think you will
get through hell in a hurry… (46/231)
In the ‘Siena cantos’, that is cantos 42–5, the poet is first of all a reader in the archives. He is an exemplarily active reader, extracting the telling details and arranging them to bring alive in the mind the drama and the meaning of what had been buried away in the old volumes of documents ‘most faithfully copied’ in 1623 and 1622 by ‘Livio Pasquini, notary, citizen of Siena’. The poet notes Pasquini’s cross in the margin against the place where a document was to be signed and sealed. He has fun with the copyist’s abbreviations of titles, ‘YYHH’=‘YYour HHighnessess’, plural—(‘the left front ox’ being prepared for the procession will voice that as ‘Mn-YAWWH!!!’). He is generally unimpressed by the pomp and circumstance reflected in the documents, as in ‘present…the | illustrious Marquis Antony Mary of Malaspina | and the most renowned Johnny something or other de Binis | Florentine Senator’. He is thoroughly serious though about the action that does interest him, how they created a new bank in Siena. For this he renders the Italian and the Latin of the records into his own current language, keeping a sense always that he is working through and translating from those originals, but striving for a direct understanding of what was achieved and how it was done.
There was the initial germ or seed, the idea of a new kind of bank, ‘FIXED in the soul, nell’anima, of the Illustrious College’—that was the college of Magistrates, the ruling council of Siena. Actually, the scholar-sleuths point out, the document has ‘nell’animo’, ‘in the mind’, and Pound appears to have misread it; unless, they concede, he was deliberately altering the sense, to fix the idea of the bank not in the mind only but in the spirit. Since that would make all the difference between simply having a good idea, and having the will to carry it into effect, we may take it that Pound’s ‘anima’ was no slip. He was not copying the record, he was interpreting it, in this case to build in his conviction that the new bank of Siena must have been not merely conceived but actively willed into existence. This will be a Volitionist episode.
The idea had been around for ten years when, in 1623, the Magistrates sought the views of the Senate on the details—
and 6thly that the Magistrate
give his chief care that the specie
be lent to whomso can best USE IT
(id est, piú utilmente)
to the good of their houses, to benefit of their business
as of weaving, the wool trade, the silk trade
Before this there had been, in 1622, a petition to ‘YY. HHighnesses’ the regents of the young Grand Duke of Tuscany, this with a rather different emphasis upon the benefits of such a bank to its investors and shareholders. That is, ‘companies and persons both public and private’ might put money into it in exchange for shares and have their 5 per cent guaranteed by the Sienese upon the security of the city’s assets, and even upon ‘the persons and goods of the laity’. Upon that security
TTheir HHighnesses gratified
the city of this demand to
erect a New Monte
for good public and private
And they agreed ‘to lend the fund’, that is, to invest in it,
200,000 scudi
capital for fruit at 5% annual
which is 10,000 a year
assigned on the office of grazing
In other words, the Grand Duke’s 10,000 a year was the assured income from the town’s pastures, and for that reason the new bank, or Monte, would be known as the Monte dei Paschi, the Bank of the Pastures. In Pound’s reading the true basis of the bank’s credit becomes then the grass nourishing the sheep, not the Grand Duke’s 200,000 scudi investment; and his interest too, his 5 per cent ‘frutto’, was first ‘the fruit of nature’. As Pound had written, ‘Credit [and, imp
licitly, a just interest] rests in ultimate on the abundance of nature.’
The other great feature of the bank is that it was brought into being by the will of the people and had the whole of Siena behind it, ‘Senatus Populusque Senensis’. The formal Act, for our enthusiastic reader, shows democracy in action:
there was the whole will of the people
serene M. Dux and His tutrices
and lords deputies of the Bailey, in name of Omnipotent God
best mode etcetera, and the Glorious Virgin
convoked and gathered together 1622
general council there were 117 councillors
in the hall of the World Map, with bells and with
voice of the Cryer
At the start of canto 52 Pound will recapitulate, ‘And I have told you…| the true base of credit, that is, the abundance of nature | with the whole folk behind it’.
Cantos 42 and 43 repeat that main theme several times with variations according to the various (and quite repetitive) records of the steps taken to get the bank set up. (It may have been those recurrences that for Pound gave an under-sense of sestina.) These cantos also weave in some indications of the state of things in Siena before they had their bank, especially the fact that there was a shortage of money, and that what money there was was taken in taxes or tied up in usuries, so that production and ‘licit consumption [were] impeded’, and ‘few come to buy in the market | fewer still work in the fields’. Against that there are indications of the benefits flowing from the bank down to Pound’s time, among them the great Palio and its procession—the Monte dei Paschi supported that. In general, by meeting the need for money it brought ‘WORK for the populace’, and brought back prosperity to Siena’s ‘business | as of weaving, the wool trade, the silk trade’. Over a century later, in 1749, the bank was able to give ‘1000 scudi | for draining the low land | 2000 to fix the Roman Road’. The contrast with the great Medici bank which ran Florence and made loans to the great and powerful throughout Europe is noted with curt irony. Its lending was neither based on the abundance of nature nor invested in useful production and distribution, and in 1743 when its rule ended Florence was left with public debt amounting to ‘scudi 14 million | or 80 million lira pre-war’.