Ezra Pound: Poet
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On the Saturday of the Purcell week a Debussy sonata for violin and piano was preceded by a study hour examining the use of microfilm in researching and making available unpublished music. Pound saw, well ahead of the professional musicologists and music publishers, that the new microphotography made possible accurate and inexpensive reproduction and diffusion of the ‘enormous quantities of musical treasures still buried in libraries’. In June 1938 he told Agnes Bedford that he had ‘another 600 pages of Vivaldi’ on film from Germany. He persuaded the editor of Broletto, a monthly magazine published in Como, to publish a complete Vivaldi concerto ‘in small half-tones taken from “microfoto” Leica films’. He tried to persuade Faber & Faber to become the first in the field by publishing Olga Rudge’s Vivaldi: A Preliminary Survey, ‘with five or six inedited Vivaldis in photostat’, and a thematic catalogue which would do for Vivaldi what Köchel had done for Mozart. ‘The new process will OF NECESSITY revolutionize music publication,’ he urged, but Mr Eliot was cautious. Even the assurance that ‘there is bound to be a Vivaldi BOOM’ did not convince him. So Pound presented his microfilm copies of the Dresden manuscripts to Siena’s Count Guido Chigi Saracini in 1938, and they provided the scores for the performance of unpublished Vivaldi in the 1939 Settimana Musicale Senesi. Then after the war, in 1949 and 1950, Olga Rudge edited for the Accademia Musicale Chigiana two neat books presenting four and two concertos in photo-facsimile of Vivaldi’s manuscript. That was when microfilm was finally catching on.
In May 1938 Pound was urging Katue Kitasono to get in touch with the US Government’s Science Service with a view to making available on microfilm ‘the 100 best ideogramic and japanese texts IN THE ORIGINAL’; and at the same time he was himself doing what he could ‘to stir up the Washington people both about music study and oriental studies by means of this new system’. ‘It will encourage them to hear from Japan’, he wrote, ‘and of course collaboration between the two governments should follow. Here is a field where there can be no clash of interests, and where better understanding between the two peoples wd/ be automatically promoted.’
Kitasono (1902–78), an important modernist poet in Japan and the founder and editor of the avant-garde magazine VOU, had first written to Pound in 1936 as, ‘since Imagism movement’, ‘a leader on new literature’. In his reply Pound, as if to make clear how far he had come since his Imagiste days, had remarked that ‘a poet can not neglect ethics’, and had wondered if Gesell was yet known in Tokyo along with Douglas. ‘Two things I should do before I die’, he wrote, ‘and they are to contrive a better understanding between the U.S.A. and Japan, and between Italy and Japan.’ He followed this up by saying that ‘neither Zen nor Christianity can serve toward international understanding in practical action in the way the Ta Hio of Kung fu Tseu can…[T]hat gives us a basis of ethics & of national
As a practical act Pound had had Kitasono arrange for a letter of introduction to be sent on his behalf to the Japanese Ambassador in Rome, and he himself wrote to the Ambassador to say how glad he would be ‘to meet any member of the Embassy…who is interested in improving the understanding of Japanese culture in Europe and America and arranging better methods for mutual cultural comprehension’. That had led to a three-hour talk when he was in Rome at the end of December 1936 with a ‘Councillor of the Embassy’—‘Naturally we had too many things to discuss to do anything very thoroughly,’ he told Kitasono. But he would try to have published in England the ‘Councillor’s’ book in English on Japanese poetry; and he would send him his ABC of Reading, ‘and perhaps he will approve of it as a text book to introduce Japanese students to western literature’. Nothing came of either possibility, but in the way of cultural exchange VOU was publishing some of Pound’s poems and essays, and Pound did manage to get a selection of poems by the VOU group published in translation in Ronald Duncan’s Townsman in January 1938 and later in Laughlin’s New Directions anthology.
Pound made that the occasion to write again to the Japanese Embassy in Rome hoping for a more significant exchange through the use of ‘The new microphotographic and photostat process…[which] opens a totally new possibility for bilingual texts’. And a year later, in May 1939, in the first of a dozen articles he would contribute to the Japan Times and Mail, he respectfully asked that the Japanese Society for Promoting International Cultural exchange should consider commissioning ‘a bilingual or trilingual edition of the hundred best books of Japanese and ideogramic literature’, the latter ‘taken direct from works of master calligraphers’. With microphotography the edition could be produced commercially ‘at the same price as the Loeb library of Greek and Latin texts’. Further, all the Noh plays, ‘a treasure like nothing we have in the Occident’, could be made available on film, ‘or at any rate the best Noh music could be registered on sound-track’. In effect he was proposing a programme for the as yet uncreated UNESCO, and resolutely promoting his idea of a common Oriental culture above the ongoing war between Japan and China. When Kitasono mentioned in February 1939 that ‘Two young poets from VOU have gone to the front’, Pound’s response was to write about the importance of filming and recording the Noh plays, and about ‘my chinese Cantos/ now on desk’, and that he wanted ‘a translation of the ECONOMIC volume of the Chinese encyclopedia’.
Anschluss
The Anschluss, the union of Austria with Germany, was effected in March 1938. In January Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, had initialled a plan for the very opposite of a modus vivendi between the two nations: Austrian Nazis were to stage an open revolt and in the ensuing disorder the German Army would be ordered into Austria to prevent ‘German blood being shed by Germans’. In February and March Schussnigg, the Austrian Chancellor and head of a one-party right-wing dictatorship which had suppressed Austria’s Social Democrats, was put under extreme pressure by Hitler to resign in favour of a pro-Nazi member of his government—in effect to hand over the government to its Nazi element as the price of avoiding bloodshed. When he played for time in a vain effort to preserve Austria’s independence Hitler issued an instant ultimatum, upon which he resigned, the Austrian Nazis took over the Chancellery and the streets of Vienna, and Hitler ordered the invasion which met no resistance. A telegram was then forged requesting Germany’s military assistance and thus cloaking the takeover in a spurious legality. On 12 March Hitler was received with enthusiasm in Linz, his home town, where he declared that he had fulfilled a solemn mission ‘to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich’. On the 13th he declared himself President of Austria, and at the same time reduced it to a mere province of the Reich. ‘Unreliable elements’ were immediately rounded up by Himmler’s Gestapo, as many as 80,000 in Vienna alone; persecution of Jews began at once, and a special office was set up by Heydrich’s SS under Karl Adolf Eichmann to seize and administer their property—Baron Louis de Rothschild’s palace was looted but he was allowed to leave Vienna in return for handing over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works; a huge concentration camp was set up at Mauthausen; Dr Schacht arrived to take over the National Bank on behalf of the Reichsbank and to make its staff swear an oath to be faithful and obedient to the Fűhrer. Through all this Great Britain, France, and the League of Nations scarcely murmured a protest. Hitler was more anxious that Mussolini might be moved again to protect Austria’s independence, but to his immense relief Il Duce let it be known that it was no longer of concern to him. A plebiscite staged by the Nazis in April returned a 99.75 per cent vote in favour of the union with Germany.
Going wrong, thinking of rightness
‘you are NOT to concede anything to my follies
prejudices and partialiti
es’
—EP to Montgomery Butchart, 12 December 1938
For relaxation in the summer of 1938 Pound played tennis in Rapallo, six or even eight sets on some days. In Siena, in Olga’s apartment in the Palazzo Capoquadri, he transcribed Vivaldi scores, ‘copying out the Dresden concerti…note by note’ from the microfilms with the aid of a magnifying glass, ‘and being pleased by the quality of Vivaldi’s mind therein apparent’. His idea of relaxing could include going through Binyon’s translation of the Purgatorio ‘with a microscope’ and advising on fine shades of meaning and on how a thing might be said more naturally. Another kind of amusement came from Faber & Faber’s deciding that a number of passages in Guide to Kulchur were libellous or scurrilous and must be excised or put more politely. Eliot sent him a copy of the book, which had already been printed and bound, in which he had marked the banned passages—names were not to be named, and offensive things were not to be said of The Times or the Church of England, or of other British institutions such as Rudyard Kipling. Nor might he call Hardy’s sisters ‘his stinking old sisters’ and ‘aged hens’ on account of their saying after his death ‘that they hadn’t thought it quite nice for him to write novels’, a remark which Pound regarded as ‘savage and degraded’, and an indication of why no civilized man would have wanted to immigrate into the England Hardy had had to live in. He left a considerable blank space in the middle of p. 286 to show where that passage had been cut out. In August Dorothy wrote, ‘Omar says you haven’t written to him for 18 months and please will you?’, and he did write. Dorothy was thinking of leaving the boy, now 12, with Mrs Dickie and at his present day school for another two years, since ‘he is not yet very grown up for his age’.
In their letters that summer there was a lot about a new Fascist attitude to Jews in Italy. In July Dorothy wrote, ‘Daily Mirror (vile—low—) says M. has turned jew-baiter’, and ‘Pope reported to be versus Muss. re Jews? Sure to be only half right in Eng. Papers.’ Ezra wrote back, ‘A consciousness of racial difference is appearing in It. Press.’. ‘Is the Pope opposing racial purity?’, Dorothy insisted. Pound sent a cutting from a French newspaper with a report from Castel Gondolfo, the Pope’s summer residence, that he ‘again and emphatically condemns racism and extreme nationalism, and regrets that Italy should be imitating Germany’. Mussolini’s response, as reported in another cutting from an Italian newspaper, was that Italian Fascism was not imitating anyone.
It does appear that the race laws being introduced in Italy were Fascism’s own and quite distinct from those of Nazi Germany. Indeed Dorothy Pound was quite mistaken in thinking they were concerned with racial purity—that idea meant nothing either to Mussolini or to most Italians. Under the new laws if either parent were not Jewish then a person was to be deemed non-Jewish, exactly the contrary of the Nazi laws. Mussolini’s concern was for the political and social purity of the Fascist state, and the laws were directed against those suspected of maintaining a separate, non-Fascist or anti-Fascist, identity. They were directed particularly against Italy’s 50,000 Jews, but not so much for being Jewish as for not being Fascist, or not Fascist enough. Jews were thought liable to have international loyalties, to ‘World Jewry’, or to be Zionists working for a Jewish state, or to be Communists obedient to the Comintern—there were many anti-Fascist Italian Jews in the International Brigades supporting the Republican side in Spain. Again, Jews were identified as typical members of the bourgeoisie, which had been condemned by Mussolini as ‘a spiritual enemy of the Fascist faith’ on account of its putting individual interests before those of the corporate state. All those who set themselves apart from the Fascist project were to be subject to what Mussolini called ‘a policy of segregation’. That would mean that 8,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism must leave Italy; that over 5,000 Jewish school and university students would be excluded from state education—though those already enrolled at universities might continue their studies—and that 180 of their teachers would be dismissed; that Jews would be banned from the professions of law, medicine, journalism, and from owning large businesses or more than fifty hectares of land; that 400 government employees would lose their jobs—though not their pension rights; and that 7,000 Jews would be expelled from the armed services. At the same time ‘loyal’ Jews, ‘Jews of Italian citizenship…who have unquestionable military or civil merits’, in Mussolini’s words, would ‘find understanding and justice’. Italian Jews who were over 65, or who had married an Italian before 1 October 1938, or who had fought for Italy in the First World War or in Ethiopia or Spain, or who had been a Fascist of the first hour between 1919 and 1922, would be exempt from the new laws. And ‘a Jew could embrace the Fascist faith, convert to Fascism’, and so be exempt, though there must be no pressure upon them to recant their Jewish faith. Freedom of worship was to continue unchanged; elementary and secondary schools for Jews were to be permitted; and Jewish communities might continue their activities. Strictly speaking, then, Fascism’s ‘race laws’ were not racist. In their application, in the alienation and persecution of Jews and in depriving them of certain fundamental rights, they were inhumane; and in being directed specifically against Jews they were certainly anti-Semitic. Yet this was not the endemic anti-Semitism based on racial and religious prejudice which Hitler was carrying to its extreme in Germany and Austria. It would be the Nazis, not the Fascists, who would send Italy’s Jews to the concentration camps.
In their reactions to the new laws Pound and Dorothy were far more anti-Semitic than most Fascists and than Italians in general. Throughout August Pound was telling Dorothy about the regular flow in the Italian press ‘of excellent and sober stuff about jews’, about their ‘living ON us, not with us’. Calm, reasonable, irrefutable analysis, he thought it, though coming out ‘like it has been bottled from good manners and everybody relieved to let fly’. At the beginning of September he greeted the new laws in a spirit of simple anti-Semitism: ‘Waaal all yits wot come to Italy after 1919 iss to leave in six months | and to get OUT. and all yitts is not to be in Italian schools and in scientif/ bodies etc./…It is looking THOROUGH.’ He had just heard from Gerhart Münch, now in good standing with the Nazis in Germany, how ‘DEElighted’ he was by the news. Münch, just then resting at Lake Garda, had written that his daily enjoyment was reading in the Italian newspapers about the turn ‘the jewish Problem’ was taking in Italy, ‘so much cleverer than in Germany’. Dorothy wrote from London, ‘Lots today [2 September] in papers re Jews being expelled. What a day of Judgement.’ Pound was to tell a Jewish friend in Venice, according to one report, ‘I am sorry for you, but they have done the right thing.’ In fact he sometimes thought, in line with an earlier Fascist statement, that it would be best for all Jews to be removed from western Europe and resettled somewhere out of the way—not in Arab Palestine, possibly in Poland and Roumania ‘where they touch Russia’.
Lina Caico protested to Pound, ‘What are Jews to do? Suicide en masse?’ He should tell ‘every single Italian that you meet that he is no Christian if he allows the Jews to be driven out of Italy’. Pound replied that she should wake up to the real cause of anti-Semitism, ‘Get down to USURY/ the cause WHY western man vomits out the Jew periodically.’ Moreover ‘the JEW wont take responsibility for civic order…JEW parasite on principle’, and it was necessary to ‘Segregate/ Quarantine/’ as ‘defence against parasites’, and in order to resist usury. In fact, in Fascist Italy, Jews were quite fully represented among those responsible for its civic order; and as banking and finance were controlled by the Fascist state there was no grand usury to be resisted. The new laws were indeed directed against those who could be perceived as parasites, but for the rest Pound was airing his own prejudices and not attending to what was actually the case in Italy. In the early months of 1939 Lina Caico told him frankly what she thought wrong with him: ‘when you have seen the value of some fact clearly it keeps you from seeing the value of subsequent events. You are beclouded by your past vision. That’s your way in politics. Beca
use you saw that something was good, you see everything perfect.’ And conversely, she implied, when he saw that something was wrong, he would see only evil. So, because some Jews were usurious bankers, though not in Italy, all Jews were to be banished, even from Italy.
In ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, an article in the British Union Quarterly earlier in 1938, Pound had argued that the Jeffersonian process in America, so grievously betrayed in the nineteenth century, was being betrayed now by Roosevelt’s ‘aryio-kike’ advisers, all of them steeped in the ‘semitic poison’, usury. The harm done ‘by Jewish finance to the English race in America’, he declared, was such that ‘the expulsion of the two million Jews in New York would not be an excessive punishment’. ‘A race’, he wrote, ‘may be held responsible for its worst individuals.’ Moreover, the Jews would have only themselves to blame, having brought anti-Semitism upon themselves. That was blaming the victim; worse, it was a variant form of scapegoating—not one for the sins of all, but all for the sins of a few. And worst, it was holding the Jewish race responsible for the sins of all usurers, of whatever race. The trick there was in identifying usury as a ‘semitic poison’, and in ‘aryio-kike’, a term pretending to indicate Aryan, or non-Jewish usurers, while actually conveying anti-Semitic prejudice.
Pound was now more or less overtly dealing in that prejudice and seeking to direct it. In October 1938, in a letter in Action, another publication of the British Union of Fascists, he wrote,