It will be a great pity if the present wave of anti-Semitism is allowed to end in the mere beating up of a few block-headed yids in the London ghetto. It will be a great pity if the indignation isn’t persistent enough to REACH the damned gold-breakers whether Hebrew or Quaker or lickspittle Anglican.
Pound must have known that the Blackshirt thugs who were beating up Jews in the East End of London were not after usurers, nor after Quaker and Anglican bankers. That is twisted thinking in twisty language, with It will be a great pity and the indignation masking an endorsement of racist thuggery. This is not straight naming, it is the technique of propaganda and of rabble-rousing, and a calculated attempt to convert racist violence, Nazi-influenced anti-Semitism, into an attack on usurers.
Another contribution to Action, this one in June 1938, is evidence that Pound knew what he was doing. Having noted that international usury was not entirely Jewish, and that indeed there was more Calvinism than Judaism in it, and that the Calvinist was more dangerous and deadly than the Jew, he then remarked that it was more difficult to stir up mob violence against the Calvinist than against the Jew; and further, that it had been Hitler’s stroke of genius in Mein Kampf to find the language needed and effective to rouse the German people into turning upon their enemies, that is, upon usurious financiers. Since the dynamic of Mein Kampf was the most rabid and paranoid anti-Semitism, it would appear that Pound was approving and seeking to follow Hitler’s insight, ‘that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs and knowledge but only with feelings and beliefs’. He was willing to deploy anti-Semitism strategically to rouse the victims of usury to action by fear and terror of ‘the Jew’.
Pound had dedicated Guide to Kulchur ‘To | LOUIS ZUKOFSKY | and | BASIL BUNTING | strugglers | in the desert’, and in November Zukofsky told Pound that he was finding it hard to get past his sentence praising Wyndham Lewis’s discovery of Hitler in 1931 as superior to his own discovery of Mussolini. Pound hadn’t made it clear that it was Lewis’s picking out a sentence on Leihkapital from Mein Kampf that had so impressed him, and for Zukofsky Hitler was simply ‘the German terror’. Pound responded, ‘Why curse Adolphe/ why not git down to bedrock/ NESCHEK and the buggering vendetta of the shitten Rothschild which has run for 150 years/ and is now flopping back on Jewry at large.’ There was more, to the effect that because the Jews would do nothing about the Rothschilds and neschek generally they were digging their own graves. Bunting was in New York in December, saw the letter, and made it the occasion for breaking with Pound. In clear and direct terms he wrote that his spewing out ‘anti-semite bile’ to Zukofsky was unforgivable, an abomination:
You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one man guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-jews have contributed their fair share, or more than their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty. You have the relevant facts without any need of information that cannot be found in Italy. I can find no excuse, no way of considering your activities as anything else than wilful and thought-out perversion of what you know to be true.
…It makes me sick to see you covering yourself with that kind of filth. It is not an arguable question, has not been arguable for at least nineteen centuries. Either you know men to be men, and not something less, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind at large.
Pound was unaffected. ‘Dear Zuk’, he wrote in January 1939, ‘Lot of hot steam from Bzl/ amounts to saying that I am a shit because I won’t regard a SYMPTOM as a cause…The ROOT is avarice.…The outbreaks of [anti-Semitic] violence are mere incomprehension/ like inarticulate violent language.’ And he went on justifying his own deployment of verbally violent anti-Semitism along his usual lines, arguing that it was a reaction to usury, that its cause was Semitic banking practices, and that Jews, even if they were not themselves usurers, nevertheless deserved to be attacked for doing nothing to prevent usury.
Zukofsky’s attitude was that there was no use arguing with Pound. His politics were a mess, he told him, so ‘let’s not correspond about politics’. As for his anti-Semitism, ‘I believe you’re no more anti- than Marx himself, tho’ the cluttered mess of the rest of your economic & political thinking makes it appear so.’ Zukofsky had long been in the line of fire of Pound’s anti-Semitic invective and was as well placed as anyone to pass judgement. Other Jewish friends would share his conviction that Pound was not personally anti-Semitic. Carlo Izzo would resolve the apparent impossibility of Pound’s being both anti-Semitic and yet not anti-Semitic by viewing Pound’s anti-Semitism as not personal but ‘almost ludicrously theoretical… Aldo Camerino was a Jew and yet Pound held him in great esteem.’ It was to Camerino that Pound had said, in Izzo’s presence, ‘they have done the right thing’. Those best placed to judge, then, would not dispute Pound’s claim, in Purpose in 1938, ‘I am not anti-semite’, while they would say, as Izzo did, that they detested his politics. And Bunting was right about what Pound was doing in his journalism and correspondence—he was guilty of practising anti-Semitism there. In his one-man crusade against usury he was, while thinking of rightness, going wrong, terribly and tragically wrong.
Czechoslovakia sacrificed
With Austria annexed, Hitler was determined that Czechoslovakia should be next to fall to the Reich, and this time Britain and France, in their anxiety to appease him, acted as his enforcers. Czechoslovakia, a creation of the peace settlement following the 1914–18 war, had a mixed population of Czechs, Slovaks, German-speaking Sudetens, Hungarians, and Ruthenians. In spite of its minorities, under its founders Tomáš Masaryk and Eduard Beneš it was, in the words of the contemporary American journalist William Shirer, ‘the most democratic, progressive, enlightened and prosperous state in Central Europe’. In the 1930s, however, Nazi Germany had been covertly encouraging the German-speaking Sudetens to demand autonomy and to create violent disturbances so that Hitler could invade, as he had invaded Austria, under cover of going to the aid of oppressed and endangered fellow Germans. When in May 1938 the Czechoslovak government under President Beneš mobilized its forces to resist an invasion Hitler was infuriated and gave orders for his army and air force to be ready to invade and to destroy the Czechoslovak state on 2 October. Britain and France had treaty obligations to defend that country’s independence. At the same time Neville Chamberlain, now the British Prime Minister, and Édouard Daladier, the French Premier, desperate to avoid another war in Europe, believed they could buy peace by giving in to Hitler’s demands. Chamberlain, who could see no British interest at stake in the fate of Czechoslovakia, made light of the crisis, describing it in parliament as ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’. On 29 September Chamberlain and Daladier met with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich to settle the affair—Czechoslovakia was excluded from the meeting—and they agreed that the German army should march into the Sudetenland on 1 October and complete its occupation by the 10th. Non-German Czechs were to be evacuated at once, leaving behind all their goods and property, even their cows; and all natural resources, industries, railways, public buildings, etc. would pass to Germany without compensation. What remained of Czechoslovakia, they said, they would protect against unprovoked aggression. The next morning before flying home Chamberlain secured Hitler’s signature on a sheet of paper declaring that the Munich Agreement was ‘symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’. Back in London he waved the piece of paper from a window of no. 10 Downing Street and told the cheering crowd that he had secured ‘peace with honour’, ‘peace for our time’. President Beneš was told that if he did not submit to the Munich terms Britain and France would now back Hitler in the use of armed force. About the time in the afternoon of 30 September 1938 when Chamberlain was proclaiming as a noble victory the abandonment and betrayal of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak radio annou
nced the country’s surrender, ‘under protest to the world’. ‘We have been forced into this situation’, the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister told the British and French ministers who were enforcing Hitler’s terms; ‘today it is our turn, tomorrow it will be the turn of others’.
Comings and goings
The Times of London reported on 5 October that Anthony Eden approved of what Chamberlain had done at Munich, and also that Chamberlain himself had paid a handsome tribute to Signor Mussolini for his part in the saving of the peace. Pound noted these facts in his next article in the New English Weekly, and added his own approving comment that ‘Chamberlain is the FIRST British statesman to inspire any respect on the continent since 1918’. He went on to write, ‘War against Germany would have meant war against a clean concept of money’. That was his remarkable view of what was now at issue, not Hitler’s seizure and spoliation of Czechoslovakia, not that country’s loss of its freedom and independence, not the threat to other European countries from the militarization and mounting belligerence of Nazi Germany, and not the betrayals of free nations by Britain and France in the vain hope of appeasing Hitler’s lust for conquest. ‘If ever war is made against Germany in our time’, he insisted over the editor’s protest in the Chicago Delphian Quarterly, ‘it will be a war against this conception of MONEY’—that was a concept going back, as he explained in the British Union Quarterly, to ‘the Monte dei Paschi’s “abundance of nature and responsibility of the whole people”’. That is what Hitler and his Germany meant to Pound in the autumn of 1938, simply ‘a clean concept of money’.
He made a fairly clear statement of where he stood politically at this time in a contribution to Fascist Europe/Europa Fascista, an Anglo-Italian symposium published under the auspices of the National Institute of Fascist Culture at Pavia in October 1938. There was the Confucian basis: ‘a ruler promotes the peace of the world by the good government of his own country.’ Then there was the current imperative: ‘unless the root economic evils are tackled and eradicated there can be neither peace between nations nor justice within them.’ And the enemy was ignorance, ‘ignorance of the nature of money, its source and its mode of issue’—an ignorance which allowed the cancer of usury to spread from New York and from London. Against it Pound invoked the Fascist Corporate State, with this exceptional qualification, ‘My understanding of the Corporate State can not be made clear unless I carry the reader back into the Tuscany of Pietro Leopoldo and Ferdinando III in the period that preceded Napoleon’—in short, he implied, see his Fifth Decad of Cantos with its celebration of the responsible use of ‘the abundance of nature’ for the benefit of the whole people. That spirit he saw at work in Mussolini’s battle to harvest more grain and to ensure its equitable distribution. ‘And when that spirit unites with the spirit behind [Hitler’s] words on Leihkapital’—a singular take on the Axis—then ‘we approach a new Europe’, and a new paideuma. 1
At that point in his article Pound turned to consider a role for himself in the development of a Fascist Europe. Perhaps he could have none, since ‘It is no longer up to us, a handful of highbrow propagandists’; and anyway, while ‘I can make blue prints and plans as well as the next man…I have probably no talent at all for getting the mass of mankind to accept them’. But then again, if asked, he would know how to start organizing a fascio or sindicato of ‘men of my own profession’, artists and writers who shared the dream of the new paideuma and who would spread abroad its germinal ideas. One senses there not only a willingness but a yearning to be head-hunted into the Fascist project. That was followed, though, by a counter-assertion of the prerogatives of the artist. ‘The “new Paideuma”,’ he declared, ‘the new cosmos of “culture”, in the sense of the best standards of writing, of sculpture, of scholarship, is now the dream of a few dozen intellects’—that would imply that the new paideuma was those intellects’ own vision of Fascism, as distinct from what the Fascist party might say and do. ‘As poet’, Pound went on, ‘I have a perfect right to my preconceptions, to my projects.’ Those, however, he added, quickly bridging over the possible difference, ‘are certainly not independent of social organization’. Exactly what that might mean was left to the reader’s speculation. All in all, one might make out that Pound was uncertain about his role as a ‘highbrow propagandist’; that he did want to be recognized as a poet, an artist among artists; and that he did want to have a part in creating a Fascist Europe, only as a poet and according to his own very special vision of Fascism.
He evidently believed that he could maintain his independence and integrity as a poet, and that he could maintain even his own vision of Fascism, within a political system which demanded the total subordination of the individual citizen to the state. That he was a foreigner, and that his poetry was in English, must have helped him get away with that. And then the regime did allow him to put over his own idea of Fascism in his propaganda—on condition perhaps that he was otherwise uncritical of it. But how could he take his personal stand upon the right of the individual poet to his own preconceptions and projects while remaining undisturbed by the denial of that right to the people he lived among? The explanation is perhaps in the word ‘poet’, in the idea of the artist as having the capacity and the need to exercise an unfettered freedom of mind while the mass of the people, lacking his creativity, need to be guided and led by the poet’s vision. It seems certain that he was indulging the delusion that by his cantos he could shape the Axis towards the ideal Europe of his dream.
In the autumn of 1938 and into 1939 Pound was working on the next two blocks of exemplary history cantos, those dealing with China and with John Adams of the American Revolution. Their composition was interrupted in October 1938 by his having to go to London following the death of Olivia Shakespear. He had scarcely arrived in Venice to be with Olga and Mary when a telegram came from Dorothy to say that her mother had died on the 2nd—Dorothy herself was in bed with a temperature of 102o and quite unable to travel. Mary remembered Olga’s being ‘animated and indignant’ at Pound’s leaving them, while he ‘struck his characteristic pose: hands deep in trouser pockets balancing on toes and heels, looking straight ahead of him toward the window, lips tightly closed’. He had to go to clear out Olivia’s flat and dispose of her possessions, now Dorothy’s, and that was that. Entries in Dorothy’s diary indicate that in fact he did not go straight to London, but stopped over in Rapallo from the 5th to the 17th, presumably to look after her. In a note to Olga on the 13th Pound wrote, ‘gotta start on Canto 61 or thereabahts/ i;e; wot is ter follow the chinKantos’.
Olivia had treasured Omar’s childish things—his first tooth, a Teddy bear—and Dorothy, asked ‘What to do with Teddy’, wrote, ‘Oh… Cremate.’ She was also ‘against letters being kept’, and Ezra should tear up Omar’s to his grandmother. But ‘For goodness sake’, she told him, ‘tip the Child 5/- when he leaves you—and look at his school report’. Omar, now 12, would enrol as a boarder at Charterhouse. Pound was inviting his friends to carry off Olivia’s books and furniture ‘on ridiculously generous terms, if any’, according to Henry Swabey. Pound gave Swabey a Gaudier charcoal drawing and an Ovid in Latin, and offered him ‘a number of books’ at ‘10/- the lot’. Wyndham Lewis was seen by a policeman carrying home a chair on his head one midnight and stopped upon suspicion of theft. Ronald Duncan and his wife went away with their ‘pockets bulging with Chinese ivory and jade, fish knives and forks’, and with ‘an inscribed copy of Yeats’s poems…and a stool ornamented with quotations from Virgil’. Dorothy asked Ezra to ‘bring her back some thing of her new possessions’, and he did arrange, even after being so liberal with them, to have 13 cases of Olivia’s things shipped to Rapallo.
Duncan (1914–82), a young poet, playwright, and opera librettist, was the editor—with much advice and encouragement from Pound—of Townsman, a lively small quarterly distantly modelled on Eliot’s grander Criterion. He had visited Ghandi in India and was a member of the Peace Pledge Union, and Pound involved him, alon
g with Swabey and J. P. Angold, in discussions of economic matters and international peace. Neville Chamberlain had ‘acted as the leader of Europe’, he told them. Because he knew Benjamin Britten and theatre people Duncan was able to arrange for a Noh play to be attempted one afternoon in the Mercury Theatre, with a musician playing gongs, a dancer, and Pound reading the words. In the sparse audience were Lewis and Eliot—Pound was spending time with both of them.
Lewis had recently done a portrait of Eliot—the one the Royal Academy refused to exhibit, and which the Tate Gallery declined to purchase—and now Pound sat for him. He would swagger in, Lewis recalled, ‘coat-tails flying’, fling himself ‘at full length into my best chair’, adjust his leonine mane to the cushioned chair top, close his eyes, gruffle ‘Go to it Wyndham!’, and remain silent and motionless ‘for two hours by the clock’. Lewis reflected that it was as if he had exhausted his aggressive vitality for the moment and had just dropped; but in his painting there is no relaxation, the reclining figure is tense, and there is concentrated energy in the still head with its closed but unsleeping eyes. It took Lewis some time to decide what to put in on the left to balance the strong diagonal of the figure, and in the end it was some folded newspapers on a small table against an expanse of blue-green sea, as if to suggest the scope of his subject’s mind and its immediate preoccupations. This portrait the Tate did take.
There was a last meeting with Yeats who gave a dinner for Pound at the Athenaeum. Yeats’s health was failing—he would die at the end of January—but he was cheered by his old antagonist telling him that his recent poems were ‘rather good’ which, from Pound he felt, was ‘rapturous applause’.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 39
