Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  I mean if the man has it in him to want his ex-subjects nourished, to want the fruits of the Empire delivered and eaten, and the spun cloth of his ex-realm worn, and the fuel used to heat poor men’s houses, he can now say so.

  The ex-king, however, showed no disposition to express those humane sentiments. It was a case—a minor instance—of Pound’s following wishful thinking beyond any real knowledge.

  Pound’s efforts to come to terms with the Hitler phenomenon present a more complex case. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Pound dismissed his incipient Nazi state with its ‘pseudo-Fascist rage’ as ‘a parody, a sickly and unpleasant parody of Fascism’. To spread the interesting element of Fascism, he wrote in the conclusion to Jefferson and/or Mussolini, there was no need for ‘parades, nor hysterical Hitlerian yawping’. A year later he was objecting in the New English Weekly to the confusion of ‘Italian Fascism with the Hun’s travesty’. ‘Adolphe is an, almost, pathetic hysteric’, he wrote, and, ‘so far as I can make out, a tool of almost the worst Huns’. In whose interest was it, he demanded to know, ‘to create confusion re the Thyssen-owned Hitler, and the founder of the Italian Corporate State’. A further year on, in 1935, he wrote to Gorham Munson of New Democracy, ‘Do CAN those asses who talk of Fascism as if the Corporate State/ Hitler and stinky Mosley were all one’. And to Claude Cockburn he wrote, ‘I am not a HITLERITE/ thass another kettle of MOlasses’.

  One fundamental distinction between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was that, as he told Cockburn, there was ‘certainly no anti-semitism in Italy’. ‘There has never been any anti-Semitism HERE’, he told Arnold Gingrich of Esquire in August 1934, so ‘it might be time to dissociate Germany and Italy’. The leading characteristic of Nazism for Pound at that time was its anti-Semitism, and while that, as he wrote in the New English Weekly in April 1935, was one of the two ‘main trends or drifts of Europe’, Italy’s Corporate State stood for the other and very different trend, meaning economic enlightenment. Behind that was an implicit objection to Nazism on economic grounds, Pound believing in 1935 that since Nazism was partly financed from London Hitler must be the puppet of international finance.

  So far Pound’s negative view of Nazism was fairly much in line with Mussolini’s determination to keep his distance from Hitler. Later though, in 1936 and 1937, when relations between the two dictators were becoming closer, he began to find signs of economic sense in the Führer. In a letter to Congressman Tinkham in March 1936 he noted that ‘EVEN Hitler in one clause of his last outbreak [had seen] certain FACTS’ about money. He had said something about ‘Germany being forced to “accept credits”’ which put it in debt to international finance, and that was in accord with Henry Ford’s observation, ‘“Debt business, only business that hasn’t suffered from the depression”’, and with the fact that happy bankers were enjoying ‘largest dividends in years’, and all this somehow went to show that ‘Hitler is “ON”’ the Social Credit programme. Better, Germany was imitating and learning from the new Italy, though ‘under very unfavourable conditions’. It was at least showing a disposition, in Pound’s view, to follow the Fascist state’s ‘principle of LIFE, of continuous renewal and renovation’, and so to go against the destructive injustice and inhumanity of the ‘usury State’. In April 1937 he told Tinkham that ‘both Germany and Italy seem to begin to see that nations money shd/ be based on national productivity’, not on usurious lending, and that Hitler, according to Por, ‘was out for National Dividend—The Führer [had] said “jeder Kontrahenten” ought to have his part’. Evidently he was, along with India, Alberta, and Italy, ‘getting wiser to London (Jew and nonjew) Bank racket’. About that time Pound was congratulating Wyndham Lewis in Guide to Kulchur for having sensed on a visit to Berlin in 1931 that Hitler was a force for ‘the resurrection’ of Germany. ‘I hand it to him as a superior perception’, he wrote, ‘Superior in relation to my own “discovery” of Mussolini’. Lewis had associated Hitler’s with Social Credit’s hostility to Leihkapital, the loan capital of international finance, thus reinforcing the hopeful notion that Hitler was ‘ON’.

  By April 1938 Pound’s perception of Nazism had become altogether positive. When Gerhart Münch, still desperately poor and unable to get work as a musician in Munich, wrote that while he had previously preferred not to work with the Party circumstances were now forcing him to do so, Pound wrote back at once, ‘Do for God’s sake work WITH THE PARTY the party is right and is the future.’ He may have been thinking simply of Münch’s career prospects, but his urging him to work with the Party in those terms does imply an endorsement of Nazism as the future for German culture and society. He could do that because he had become convinced that its economic programme was now fully in accord with his own principles. In May 1938, following the successful invasion and takeover of Austria, Hitler made a state visit to Italy, accompanied among others of his ministers by Schacht, head of the Reichsbank and responsible for Germany’s economic miracle. On 26 May Pound sent Tinkham a ‘Note // in case it has missed you’—

  SCHACHT during the Roman love feats has come out VERY clear for monetary ideas that I was pestering you with in Venice.

  Ribbentrop apparently started letting parts of the cat out last year at Leipzig fair/ Hitler this spring/ and now Hjalmar H. Greely Schacht to all intents using my definitions (naturally in blissful ignorance of the honour)

  He was quite right about Schacht’s monetary ideas being largely in accord with his own. What he did not see was that Schacht had successfully implemented those ideas and proved their effectiveness in order to enable Hitler to mobilize Germany for total war.

  Dr Schacht had been charged even before September 1934 with the economic preparation of Germany for war, and in a secret law of 21 May 1935 he was appointed Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy. Everything in the economy was to be subordinated to the build-up towards war, and it was that policy which brought about the reconstruction of Germany. In January 1933 there were 6 million unemployed—by 1937 there was full employment. The transformation was effected by the state taking total control of credit and doing away with private banks and Leihkapital; by strict regulation of wages, prices, and dividends; by state-financed public works—such as the new autobahnen, designed for the rapid deployment of armoured troops; and by the stimulation, regulation, and direction of both private enterprise and the labour-force. Schacht’s creation of credit in a country that had been effectively bankrupt by printing money at need within a tightly controlled economy demonstrated that the Social Credit theory did work in practice. That it was directed by a totalitarian dictator towards bringing on the hell of war, and not at all towards the more just and more humane democracy Pound and the Social Creditors dreamed of, was another of the terrible contradictions of the time.

  That Nazi Germany showed signs of being on what he believed to be the right lines economically was enough to persuade Pound that Nazism was altogether right. He either didn’t notice or didn’t really give his mind to everything else that was going on there. He signally failed to connect the economic miracle with the militarization of Germany and Hitler’s mounting belligerence. And though he did know about it, he appears to have been untroubled by the ever-intensifying Nazi persecution of Jews.

  But then his attitude to anti-Semitism in general had become thoroughly mixed up and conflicted. There was a lot of it about. It was licensed and commonplace and also objected to in much of Europe and America, though only in Nazi Germany was it state policy and turning murderous in a way that would shortly lead on to genocide. I have noted in previous chapters how Pound would resort to the racist stereotypes of anti-Semitism in his war on usury. What emerges now is his struggle with the endemic prejudice, as with a tar-baby. He ‘Never expected to go anti-Semite’, he told a correspondent, and there is evidence that he wanted not to; and yet, though he could be critical of anti-Semitism, he seems to have regarded it strategically, and never to have seen it clearly as an offence against fundamental human rights and valu
es. In time he became simply unable to keep clear of it whenever the issue of usury came up.

  By his own standards he began to go wrong when he fell into the way of speaking of Jews in the abstract, as a race instead of as individuals. In a letter to his father in 1926 he mentioned that he had recently read some selections from the Talmud and commented, ‘Never disliked jews before; but as it now seems they were responsible for Christianity, I dare say they deserve all the kicks they get.’ The next day he added, perhaps after reflecting that his father was after all a Christian, that Christ had ‘tried to kill judaism, [but] the racial force was too strong…and all the worst features cropped up again’. ‘Racial curse too strong for the individual’, he wrote the same day to Richard Aldington. The particular curse he had in mind was ‘the monotheistic idea’, which he might have had reason to judge ‘the root of evil’, but not to attribute to Jewish genes. At other times he did think of Jews as individuals, as when some friend of his father suggested in 1927 that Pound hated Jews—

  oooo sez I ’ates the jews? Ask him why he thinks I ’ate the jews. I hate SOME JEWS, but I have greater contempt for Christians. Look wot they dun to america: Bryan, Wilson, Volstead, all goyim. horrible goyim…Of course some jews are unpleasant, ask any Jew if they aint.

  ‘Personally I like jews (I mean some jews)’, he wrote in a letter to Olga that year, ‘but it is not necessary to embrace the Torah or wot ever they call it.’

  Louis Zukofsky was one Jew he related to very positively, and precisely as a Jew. In their correspondence which was sustained right through the racially problematic 1930s both were always conscious of his racial and religious situation, even when Zukofsky would declare himself an anti-Semitic Jew, or write, ‘The only good Jew I know is my father: a coincidence.’ In 1929, when Zukofsky followed up his own submissions to Exile with a selection of Charles Reznikoff’s writings, Pound was excited by the thought that the dynamic ‘next wave’ of literature might be Jewish. At the same time he accepted as simply a fact of American and European life the prejudice and the exclusions Zukofsky would be subject to. In February 1929 he wrote to his father, ‘Zukofsky is coming to Phila. re/ a new quarterly mag. I shd be glad if you cd. put him up for a night or two…you might invite him at once, unless N/Y/ race prejudice intervenes.’ (It did not, as he would have known it would not.) In April 1933, when Hitler had just come to power in Germany and Pound was encouraging Zukofsky to make a trip to Europe, he warned him of what to expect:

  Mittle and Nord Europa less seasonable for Semites than they wuz/ last year. HAVE just seen THE most perfect specimen here on the sea front. But HE got out in a box car.

  Nooz is that H.D. is consortin with Siggy Freud. Have axed her to axe F. to hexplain it, (I mean the outburst toward pogrom in boscheland)

  That reads as the expression of a detached curiosity about some natural phenomenon.

  By 1934 Pound was suggesting that ‘the Jews’ were themselves to blame for what was being done to them. Zukofsky had sent him an issue of William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirt journal Liberation, thinking that it should alert him to the fact that Pelley’s Silver Shirts were followers of Hitler’s Nazism and anti-Semitism. Pound’s response, however, was to write at once to the Silver Shirts in the hope of persuading them to adopt his Social Credit ideas and to heed ‘Mussolini’s great work for the benefit of the ITALIAN PEOPLE’; also to urge them (as noted in the previous chapter) to ‘attack financial tyranny BY WHOMEVER exercised, i.e. whether by international jew or local aryan’. They should expose and foil the plots and conspiracies of ‘jews AND others’ in order to keep the attack focused on usury rather than on Jews. (All the same he fell for Pelley’s story that, ‘According to Bismarck, the awful Civil War in America was fomented by a Jewish Conspiracy’, and he repeated that in two lines in canto 48.) To Zukofsky he wrote that Pelley was a stout fellow who understood ‘the murkn mind’, and that he, Zukofsky, should take his anti-Semitism to heart. ‘Waal I sez, sez EZ/ serve yeh god damn well right IF YOU don’t wake up and start/ a anti=bankshit movement right inside the buggarin sanhedrim.… If you don’t want to be confused with yr/ancestral race and pogromd.’ He may not have been wholly serious—the tone of the letter is somewhere between jokiness and earnest—but he was nonetheless intimating that Jews were persecuted and killed because they were responsible for usury, and that even if they were not themselves usurers they would still be held responsible, unless they actively mobilized against it. He was finding a rationale for anti-Semitism, even an implicit justification, in the old prejudice that identified Jews as usurers and usurers as ‘Jews’; and still he protested to Zukofsky, in all sincerity, that he was not speaking to him ‘aza anti-semite’ but simply trying to prod him into right action ‘with two pronged fork of terror and cajolery’.

  Pound would insist that race was not the issue, that it was ‘utterly irrelevant’, that ‘Race prejudice is red herring—The tool of the man defeated intellectually, and of the cheap politician’; and that, moreover, it was a distraction which served the conspiracy of bankers and usurers. ‘Usurers have no race’, he would write, one is as another and ‘Hell makes no distinction’. He could bring forward Shakespeare’s Shylock as the archetype of the usurer without mentioning his race. In demanding a pound of Antonio’s fair flesh he is out to castrate Antonio, and that makes him ‘an allegory not only of the usurer, but of concentration of sabotage, the fundamental opposer of natural increase…The root sin in person.’ That is a penetrating insight into one side of the play, and into the nature of usury, and it has nothing to do with race. But then in a later article, in November 1935, Pound returned to the play and asked, ‘Are we never to see that Shylock betrays his race, by hiding behind it? Charged as a usurer in attempt toward mayhem, he cries “I am a jew.”’ The argument was carried further in another article published about the same time. ‘The Jew usurer…runs against his own people’ because ‘No orthodox Jew can take usury without sin, as defined in his own scriptures.’ Worse, when the outlaw hides behind his race he makes his own people the scapegoat for usury, and sets up ‘the plain man Jew to take the bullets and beatings’. He named Rothschild the great Jewish banker as the contemporary ‘great chief usurer’, the prime sinner against natural abundance; and he wanted to write on the first page of canto 52 that his sin was ‘drawing vengeance’ on ‘poor yitts’. ‘The Jews are supposed to be clever’, Pound wrote, but there was a lack of cleverness in their not finding a way to stop ‘the whole Jewish people’ being made the ‘sacrificial goat for the usurer’.

  He was not advocating genocide, which in any case was not then in anyone’s mind, unless it was hidden in Hitler’s. He was rather wanting, as in his letter to Zukofsky, to terrorize and cajole clear-headed Jews and their leaders into at least enforcing observance of their own law, and beyond that into forming a principled opposition to the practice of usury. In March 1936, having read in the New English Weekly mention of a book by Mordecai J. B. Ezekiel, an American government economist, he wrote to him that ‘If the book is honest social credit it shd/ be very useful in checking antisemitism’, and that there was ‘No doubt that semitophobia has been encouraged by the lack of jews in MONETARY reform movements’. In March 1937 he told James Taylor Dunn, editor of The Globe, that ‘there wd. be no need of any anti-semitic stuff at all’ if only ‘the Jews wd. take any sort of part in econ/ reform’, and that ‘The fight ought NOT to have been fought on the lines of race prejudice’. The ‘Only way to avoid that’, he insisted, ‘is by spread and acceleration of economic light’. But as things were, ‘Even in Engl/ and Italy people are being forced into anti-semitism by Jewish folly—I mean people who never thought of it before and who ON PRINCIPLE are opposed to race prejudice and race discrimination.’ The Jews themselves were making it ‘hard as hell to do justice’.

  But was it the case that anti-Semitism in the 1930s was directed against usury? Hitler’s anti-Semitism, being the product of racial hatred allied to a mad fantasy of ‘Aryan’ raci
al purity and supremacy, had little or nothing to do with that. And the endemic anti-Semitism of Europe and America, for all that it drew on historical resentments of Jewish money-lending, was hardly the expression of a burning concern for bank reform. The fact is that Pound was using racial anti-Semitism to enforce his own economic agenda. That made his a rather special variant, and all the more extraordinary insofar as it was deployed not to incite race hatred but to motivate Jews to save themselves from persecution.

  At the same time it was remarkably disingenuous of him to be surprised, when his 1934 letter to Pelley’s Silver Shirts was printed in New Masses in 1936, to receive letters ‘warning ME against antisemitism in the face of the fact that I was answering an antisemitic manifesto, and capitalizing “AND Aryan” almost every time I wrote jew’. Zukofsky was one of those warning him that ‘Even decent Jews will miss yr “And” “or Aryan”’, and that ‘the cry of anti-semitism [will] be raised all over the country against you’. Rather than protesting that he had no anti-Semitic intent, he might have asked himself why, since race was irrelevant, he kept bringing it up, and why was he constantly reinforcing the prejudicial association of Jews with usury? Why speak at all in terms of Jew and non-Jew if it was not the historical origins but the contemporary practice of usury that was in his sights? Given the militant anti-Semitism of the Nazis, of Mosley’s British Union, of Action Française, why was he not more careful to keep clear of what could only confuse the issue?