Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  An exchange of private letters in March 1937 shows how his monomania about usury was skewing his intelligence and preventing him from facing the facts of anti-Semitism in the Europe of his time. Lina Caico, an Italian writer, critic, translator, and literary friend of Pound, wrote asking if he would do something to help a gifted German Jewish pianist who was ‘eating her heart out in despair’ in Berlin because the Nazi race laws made it impossible for her to pursue her career or even to earn enough to live on. Would Pound use his musical contacts to seek help? Pound, usually so generous, especially towards artists, would not. ‘You hit a nice sore spot’, he replied, and proceeded to sound off about Jews as a race. ‘Let her try Rothschild and some of the bastards who are murdering 10 million anglo saxons in England,’ he began; and then, ‘I am not having any more’ until the Jews accept their responsibilities as a race, and in particular until ‘they at least participate in study of and attack on usury system’. That system had crushed out almost all the musicians he had known over twenty-five years, and ‘the Jews NEVER attack’ it. Besides, he went on, the Jews themselves ‘are the GREAT destroyers of value…the shifters of boundary stones’. So to his conclusion: ‘Occasionally a good one has to suffer for the sins of the race.’ He did add, ‘Hubermann [in Tel Aviv] is your friend’s one hope’, thus not wholly ignoring the individual victim of Nazi anti-Semitism. But she had become an occasion for Pound to attack, first, his great figure of usury, ‘Rothschild’, and then the Jewish race as a whole.

  He was shifting the issue from a specific instance of the Nazi persecution of Jews on racial grounds to his own concern with the economic war, and shifting from the individual case to an unrelated abstraction. It was a shift which enabled him to view the Jewish race not as the victims but as the destroyers; and thus to see them as deserving persecution—not on racial grounds, he would insist, but because of the economic harm they could be held responsible for. Thus he could be against anti-Semitism as a race-prejudice, while endorsing it on economic grounds—a distinction which would make little or no practical difference. Lina Caico wrote back very gently on a postcard, ‘Dear Ez, really you’re getting economics on the brain! I don’t deal with races but with individuals.’

  In June 1937 Nancy Cunard printed in Paris SPAIN: THE QUESTION , a single sheet inviting writers and poets to declare themselves ‘for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain |…for, or against, Franco and Fascism | For it is impossible any longer to take no side’. The paragraphs leading up to the question left no doubt of the right answer:

  We have seen murder and destruction by Fascism in Italy, in Germany—the organisation there of social injustice and cultural death—and how revived, imperial Rome, abetted by international treachery, has conquered her place in the Abyssinian sun. The dark millions in the colonies are unavenged.

  Today, the struggle is in Spain.…

  But there are some who, despite the martyrdom of Durango and Guernica, the enduring agony of Madrid, of Bilbao, and Germany’s shelling of Almeria, are still in doubt, or who aver that it is possible that Fascism may be what it proclaims it is: ‘the saviour of civilisation’.

  Nancy Cunard sent a copy to Pound and appended this note: ‘Dear Ezra, I have no idea what you feel about these things embodied in this. Please answer it. Love, N.’

  ‘Dearest N’, Pound typed back, ‘I am very happy indeed to see that you aint leff yr/ blood an bones in Barrcerloner.’ But then, ‘As to the questionaire, I think your gang are all diarohea…IF they wont look at WHY men are oppressed. If they will talk about ISMS.’ Her ‘gang’ were mainly Communist or Communist-sympathizing anti-fascists, and Pound was clearly not with them. At the same time, surprisingly, no more was he with Franco’s Falange. ‘Spain is one barbarism and Russia another,’ he wrote. His formal answer, as published in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, was simply this:

  Questionnaire an escape mechanism for young fools who are too cowardly to think; too lazy to investigate the nature of money, its mode of issue, the control of such issue by the Banque de France and the stank of England. You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.

  Evidently the real question, for him, and the only one that mattered, was one that was not being asked: are you for, or against, a people controlling its own credit for its own benefit? His response was classed as ‘Neutral?’ along with 15 others—there were 126 for the Republicans, just 5 for Franco—but in fact he was not being neutral as between the opposing Communist and Falangist-Fascist-Nazi sides, he was saying ‘neither of these’. He would not choose between them because both sides, in his judgement, were serving the interests of their military–industrial–financial supporters. Instead he was taking his stand on his own singular perception of the fundamental struggle of the time, and that meant, in the eyes of the majority of his fellow writers and poets, that he was not ‘on side’, indeed that he was putting himself offensively ‘off-side’.

  Zukofsky told Pound in March 1935, ‘you’re not being read in the U.S.A. for reasons you ought to be able to find out for yrself’. ‘You seem to think you are the Messiah’, he complained in another letter. And in March 1936, when Pound’s letter to Pelley’s Silver Shirts was published, he told him it was ‘purblind’ of him to have written it, but ‘If you’re dead set on completely losing whatever readers you still have in America, keep it up.’ Zukofsky seems to have been right about Pound losing readers: the American edition of Eleven New Cantos: XXXI–XLI (1934) sold about 1,000 copies up to the summer of 1940, whereas The Fifth Decad of Cantos, published in November 1937, had sold only about 300 copies by then.

  Bunting wrote from London in September 1936 to warn Pound that he appeared to be in danger of finding himself ‘on the wrong side all round’. ‘You are suspect to the [Social Credit] brethren, or else I very much misread the signs, because of your pro-Italian propaganda.’ ‘And if your activities have really led you to Hargrave, I’m convinced there’s something wrong with your activities’—Hargrave of the Green Shirts being a ‘footling Fool’. Again, ‘Angold accuses you of connections with the British Union of Fascists: which I refuse to believe.… They spell Finance with three letters, J E W, and that’s all you’ll get out of them.’ Bunting went on—

  You are too valuable a pearl to go and cast yourself before swine of that sort, and I think, too acute to imagine that an identity of name necessarily indicates any further correspondence whatever with Italian Fascism. If that lot takes up Social Credit, it will complete the discredit which is patently threatening the whole movement.

  Altogether, Bunting was trying to save Pound from being, in Zukofsky’s words, ‘too damn gullible’.

  Hargrave had his own view of Pound. His propaganda for Social Credit was ‘worthless’—‘It was like a series of explosions in a rock quarry,’ he told Gorham Munson, one of the founders of the American Social Credit Movement. And Munson told Charles Norman that Pound had become a liability, because of his anti-Semitism—both his Movement and Hargrave’s Social Credit Party of Great Britain said that they did not accept anti-Semites as members—and because ‘Pound was trying to combine social credit economic democracy with Fascist political totalitarianism’.

  Munson was quite right about what Pound was trying to do, and, being anti-fascist, he would not even try to understand how Pound could see more promise of economic democracy in Fascist Italy than in the American or British democracies. In trying to combine what American democracy, according to his understanding of its founding principles, ought to be, with what Italian Fascism, to his mind, promised to be, Pound was projecting promises and possibilities upon a world riven by contradictions and by competing ideologies. Zukofsky, writing to Pound as a Marxist Communist, chided him for lauding ‘the Boss’s reclamation of the marshes’ yet saying ‘nothing about the Soviets doing the same’. (Did Zukofsky not know that Soviet farm collectivization had involved the imprisonment and exile of millions of peasants, and that it had ca
used such a famine that 4–5 million peasants died of malnutrition and hunger-related diseases in the winter of 1932–3?) Bunting was more conscious of contradictions. He reported himself grateful that Britain had not gone to war with Italy over Abyssinia, or with Germany over the Rhineland; but found it unsettling that ‘the manoeuvres by which the peace was kept…were engaged in patently at the behest of the bankers, who have a lot invested in both Hitler and Mussolini’.

  The simple black and white view of the political situation of the 1930s would set up the free democracies against the totalitarian dictatorships. But then how to account for the way Mussolini and Hitler were enthusiastically received as saviours of their countries by vast majorities of their peoples? And what to make of the way the freely elected governments of the democracies were floundering and failing a great mass of their people? To explain how those contradictions could come about the economic story needs to be told. Once the political situation is understood in terms of laissez-faire economies on the one side, and state-controlled economies on the other, it becomes clear that in the one freedom to vote went with having a very limited claim upon the state in respect of one’s basic human needs; whereas in the other the state, while denying the individual a voice, did provide for the basic needs of all who served it. The individual was likely to be better off materially, therefore, under the Italian or the German dictatorship which suppressed his individuality, than under the democracies which left individuals free to provide for themselves or go under. The dictatorships were frankly undemocratic, even anti-democratic, and allowed no appeal to individual liberty. The free democracies though had a worm of contradiction at their core—the contradiction between the spirit of democracy and the spirit of capitalism. From the founding principle of universal equality should flow equal rights for all to a fulfilling life, and for that there must be government of, by, and essentially for the good of the whole people. But capitalism does not favour the ideal of the common wealth; and it rejoices in its freedom to use its accumulations of financial power to shape societies to serve private ends.

  Pound passionately believed that the aim of democratic government should be ‘to distribute the purchasing power of the nation so that both social and economic justice shd/ be attainable in degree not heretofore known, to give every human being…his share in the inheritance of humanity’. When he looked into the capitalist democracies he saw not true democracy serving the needs of all; he saw the capitalist financial system serving the greed of the few, and taking over democracy, cynically and perversely, in the name of individual liberty. Concerned by this crisis in democracy, and very much in the contradiction-ridden spirit of the time, he held up Italian totalitarianism as a model of how democracy might be saved from capitalism. Totalitarian democracy was of course a contradiction in terms, but not more so than that other oxymoron, capitalist democracy. Pound was not against democratic equality and social justice; he was against the subversion of democracy by the injustices and inequalities of the capitalist system. But even his friends in America and Britain had little patience with his claim that this was why he endorsed Mussolini’s Fascism. He was isolating himself and alienating a good many people by his singular idea of how the disorders of the time might be put right.

  1 Odon Por (b. 1883): Hungarian-Italian journalist and economist; in London around 1912 had contributed to Orage’s New Age, and served as correspondent for Mussolini’s Avanti; took up Social Credit; wrote an early account of Fascism, Fascism (1923), and other books on the Corporate State; became director of the Rome office of the Institute for the study of International Politics; in May 1935 wrote on Pound’s economic thought in one of his ‘Cronaca della “Nuova Economia”’ in Civiltà Fascista, an important monthly review published by the Fascist National Institute of Culture and edited by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Described himself as ‘Syndicalist. Guild Socialist. NOT fascist. Free lance’. (Redman, 156, 160; Witemeyer in EP/WCW 333.)

  2 Olga Rudge was probably the prime mover. In January 1936 she was in Cambridge and seized the chance ‘to look up the Vivaldi mss. in the Fitzwilliam [Museum]’. Among her finds was the oratorio Juditha Triumphans which would be given its first modern performance by Count Chigi’s Accademia Musicale in Siena in 1939. More important was her bringing to light the vast collection in Turin. She had stopped off there for a day in December 1935 to look into the Vivaldi manuscripts, and had been permitted to see just two of the many volumes. When she went back the following October with the intention of making a thematic catalogue she was told she could not see the manuscripts because a Milan publisher was contracted to publish the music. However, she did contrive to see at least 131 unpublished concerti and to begin copying them. Her Antonio Vivaldi: Note e documenti sulla vita e sulla opere was published in Siena in 1939. She was called on in that year to rewrite the entry on Vivaldi in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

  3 Into the Attack! rant Pound introduced a verse from his music hall ‘Song of the six-hundred-odd M.P.s’ by ‘Alfred Venison’, his Social Credit persona.

  ‘We are ’ere met together

  In this momentous hower

  Ter lick the’ bankers’ dirty boots

  an’ keep the Bank in power.

  We are ’ere met together

  Ter grind the same old axes

  And keep the people in its place

  a’payin’ us the taxes.

  We are six hundred beefy men

  (but mostly gas and suet)

  An’ every year we meet to let

  some other feller do it.’

  ……………….

  ‘O Britain, muvver of parliaments.

  ’Ave you seen yer larst sweet litter?

  Could yeh swap th’ brains of orl this lot

  fer ’arft a pint o’ bitter?’

  ‘I couldn’t’, she sez, ’an’ I aint tried,

  They’re me own’, she sez to me,

  ‘As footlin’ a lot as ever was spawned

  to defend democracy.’

  4 In 1970 this note (which Pound first published in 1957) was added to canto 45: ‘N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)’

  5 For details see Appendix E.

  5 : IDEAS OF ORDER, 1937–1939

  ‘Immediate need of Confucius’

  ‘Am sending you a spot of Confucius,’ Pound wrote to Congressman Tinkham in July 1937. What he sent under separate cover could have been any one of a number of items he had then on his desk. There was ‘Immediate Need of Confucius’, an article he had just written for a Bombay magazine, Aryan Path. Or it might have been his 1928 version of the Ta Hio, recently republished by Stanley Nott in London. He had described that in the Aryan Path article as ‘the most valuable work I have done in three decades’, valuable, that is, as a remedy for the desperate condition of the Occidental world. Most likely, though, it was his Confucius/Digest of The Analects, a small pamphlet published the previous month by Giovanni Schweiller in Milan and consisting of the first chapter of Guide to Kulchur. That chapter digests the Analects into the Ta Hio’s fundamental principle of good government, ‘To call people and things by their correct names…to see that the terminology [is] exact’—so that, for instance, ‘a man should not be called controller of the currency unless he really controls it’. Precise verbal definition, or complete integrity, as defined in the first chapter of the Ta Hio, was now Pound’s urgent prescription for the ills of his time.

  Guide to Kulchur can be read as an extended doctor’s note diagnosing the cause of the disease and recommending the appropriate treatment. It was written rapidly and off the top of his head in just three months, between February and the beginning of May 1937. On the original dust-jacket it was said to be ‘a digest of all the wisdom [Pound] has acquired about art and life during the course of fifty years’, and to be ‘emphatically a book of wisdom—a concentration of t
he “new paideuma”’. At the core of his ‘new paideuma’, as the first chapter would make clear, was the wisdom of Confucius. Even before he received the contract from Faber & Faber Pound was ‘a-sailing into what the Greek flyozzerfers ain’t by comparison with Kung-fucius’; and at the head of the final chapter he affirmed, ‘I believe that the Ta Hio is veritably the Great Learning, to be taken with the Odes…and the rest of Confucius’ teaching.’

  What the Greek philosophers lacked was the sense of social responsibility, ‘a feeling for the whole people’; and Christian thought was just as bad. ‘Plato’s Republic notwithstanding, the greek philosophers did not feel communal responsibilities…The sense of coordination, of the individual in a milieu is not in them. Any more than there is a sense of social order in the teachings of the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament.… The concentration or emphasis on eternity is not social.’ Over time an excessive emphasis upon the life and fate of the self-fulfilling individual had led to private greed being valued above public need, to the point where ‘Rapacity is the main force in our time in the occident’, and the ‘hoggers of harvest’ have become dominant. In the Analects, in absolute contrast, ‘you have the main character filled with a sense of responsibility. He and his interlocutors live in a responsible world, they think for the whole social order.’ That was the foremost reason for Pound’s prescribing for the modern world the Confucian ‘way of life’ and its ‘disposition toward nature and man’.

  This thinking for the whole social order was necessarily ‘totalitarian’, Pound insisted. That is, it involved understanding all ‘the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual in a social order’. It meant seeing those processes not in isolation but as interactive. And it required the discrimination of the relative value of things, and a perception of their right order. Thomas Jefferson ‘had the totalitarian view’ in this sense. And Confucius, Pound would say, was ‘superior to Aristotle by totalitarian instinct. His thought is…root volition branching out, the ethical weight is present in every phrase.’