The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Soon the servant met a little dwarf who asked him for help, saying that he was poor and needy and too old to work. The kindhearted servant took pity on the dwarf and he handed over his three farthings. Then the dwarf said, “Because you’ve been so good to me, I shall grant you three wishes.” “All right,” said the servant, “I’ll wish myself first a blowgun that will hit everything I aim at; secondly, a fiddle which, when I play it, will make everybody dance who hears the sound; and thirdly, if I make a request of anybody, that he may not refuse it.”

  The wishes granted, the servant went merrily on his way. Soon he met a Jew who was standing by the road, listening to a bird singing in the top of a tall tree. “Miracle of God!” the Jew cried, “to think that such a small creature should have such an awfully powerful voice! If only it were mine!” Whereupon the servant shot the bird with his newly acquired blowgun. It fell dead into a hawthorn hedge.

  “You dirty dog,” said the servant to the Jew, “go and fetch your bird!” “Oh my!” said the Jew. “If the gentleman will drop the ‘dirty,’ the ‘dog’ will come on the run! I’m willing to pick up the bird, for after all, you hit it.” He lay on the ground and began to work his way into the bushes. When he was in the middle of the hawthorns, a spirit of mischief got the better of the good servant: he took up his fiddle and started to play. The Jew began to dance wildly; the thorns tore his coat, combed his goatee, and pricked him all over. The Jew begged the servant to stop but he wouldn’t, thinking, “You’ve skinned plenty of people; now the hawthorn hedge won’t be any kinder to you.” Finally the Jew offered to give the servant a whole purse of gold if he’d stop his fiddling. The servant took the gold and went on his way.

  When the servant was quite out of sight the Jew began to curse him. “You wretched musician, you tavern fiddler! You rogue, put a penny in your mouth so that you may be worth four farthings!” When he had thus given vent to his feelings he went into town to find a judge. The judge sent his people after the servant, who was brought back to town, tried, and condemned to the gallows for highway robbery. As he mounted the ladder with the hangman, however, the servant asked the judge to grant him one last wish. “I beg you let me play my fiddle one last time.” Of course as soon as he started to play, everyone began to dance, even the town dogs, until all were so tired the judge offered to free him and give him anything if he would only stop playing. The good servant put down his fiddle and climbed down from the gallows. He stepped up to the Jew, who was lying on the ground and gasping for breath. “You dirty dog, now confess where you got your money or I’ll begin to play again.” “I stole it, I stole it!” screamed the Jew, “but you earned it honestly.” The judge had the Jew led to the gallows and hanged as a thief.

  This repulsive little story belongs to a group of tales in the Grimms’ collection in which the imaginative growth of the plot is cut off by some unquestionable collective attitude. It comes from a culture (early nineteenth-century Germany) that had not learned to live with the Jew in the hedge any more than Pound ever did.

  The servant in the story is “softhearted,” a character at home with gift exchange but not with money. The first thing we should note is that his softheartedness, by itself, is not a weakness or failing: his gift exchange works. It has its own power. He gets his wishes. In a different tale—if, for example, the problem of the story were to find the servant a bride— things would have proceeded with no further ado after the gift exchange with the dwarf. But the problems in this story are power, greed, and social relations mediated by money. This seems to be a land where people sell their labor in the marketplace. The servant’s soft heart is not enough. He’s a naïf, somebody who just got off the boat. He’s Walt Whitman lifted from a Civil War hospital, 1862, and set down in London, 1914.

  At the start of the tale the miser cheats the servant and the servant doesn’t feel the insult. On a conscious level, he has no idea what three years’ labor is worth. He goes singing and skipping down the road, and we are left waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then on his first wish our happy worker calls for a weapon! Clunk. Now we know the insult was felt. It is not yet conscious, but the servant does have a money side to him, one that felt both hurt and unarmed when he was cheated.

  The Jew appears. I take the Jew to be the servant’s shadow, a personification of that part of him that felt the blow. The Jew is exactly the man the servant needs to meet, too. Here is someone who knows about money, who could tell him the market value of a year’s work. The Jew makes this clear with his parting insult: “Put a penny in your mouth so that you may be worth four farthings.” The image sums up the problem: our simpleton with his three farthings is a three-quarter wit, so to speak, and needs a Jew to provide him the fourth coin.

  Arthur Rackham’s illustration for “The Jew in the Hawthorn Hedge.”

  Although the Jew shows a touch of greed (“If only it were mine!”), he first appears as a man who responds spiritually to beauty: he is moved by the song of the bird and he praises the Lord. Also, he appears immediately after the gift exchange, as if he were drawn into the circle of consciousness not only by the servant’s need for him but by his own longing for something—something to do with song and gift.

  So we have two men drawn to each other by mutual need. The servant might teach the Jew about the gift, and the Jew could teach him about money. The singing bird is the promise of their possible harmony, something beautiful and higher. For a moment we see the three of them together.

  But the servant kills the bird. The touch of anger in him and the touch of greed in the Jew dominate and prevent the union. Then a “spirit of mischief” comes over the servant and he tortures the Jew. What might have been a simple anger at the start of the story has turned into a bitterness that possesses the servant and sours him for the rest of the tale.

  When the robbed Jew goes to find the judge, the imaginative tension of the tale collapses. The judge carries a solidified collective attitude. He seems to know only one law—“Thou shalt not steal”—and applies it first to the servant and then to the Jew, never looking into the particulars of the case. At the end the Jew is simply murdered, and the problems of the story are left unsolved. The miser is never dealt with (a miser who is not a Jew, by the way); the servant’s meanness and greed (it is he who steals the gold) are not addressed; his naïveté is left intact. Nor does the Jew’s wonder and spiritual longing lead him anywhere. The bird is killed. There is no dialogue, no change. The death at the end of the tale redeems nobody, it is simply brutal.

  There are three or four ways of dealing with shadow figures. The Christian way has been to say that everything on the dark side is “not-God” and must be avoided or attacked. Another way is to face the shadow, address it and see what it wants. Such a dialogue requires that the ego position be suspended for a moment so that the shadow may actually speak. There is a similar mystic or Buddhist approach in which one disidentifies with both the ego and the shadow. Finally, one could switch allegiance and identify with the shadow itself. In a Black Mass, for example, the priest approaches the dark side not to fight it or debate it but to worship. Many cultures have annual festivals— like the Mardi Gras—during which everyone may put on a mask and act out what is hidden during the rest of the year.

  The servant in our story never gets close to the shadow, of course. He doesn’t take the Jew seriously enough to either talk with him or be wary of him. As a result, his own shadow side takes control without his conscious self becoming aware of it. At the end of the story the servant himself has become what one expects will be a sanctimonious miser, bad-mouthing the Jews as he invests his stolen gold. In short, he leaves the tale a possessed simpleton, skipping and singing and killing birds!

  Ezra Pound, from the time he left college until sometime in the 1920s, was the hardworking servant—the first out of bed in the morning and the last to sleep at night. Like our hero, he had an authentic sense of the gift and its power; not only was he personally gifted, but his relationship to the outer
world was successfully mediated by generosity. At the same time, however, he seems to have suffered some insult that became buried in the unconscious. William Carlos Williams says that he and Pound had an ongoing argument about which was the correct food for a poet, bread or caviar. Pound favored caviar. Some part of Pound felt he was a king—and yet he had no castle and no kingly powers. Out of some disappointment— an unreciprocated gift, a lost kingdom—the poet turned to the money question and began looking for a thief. As if in answer to his own invocation a figure came toward him, a Hermes/Jew who might have been carrying the missing farthing. If he were an Old Testament Jew, he might have been able to teach Pound how to protect his gift, how to deal in cash at the edges of the self so that life might go on within.

  But Pound, like the servant, went haywire when he met the Jew.

  For a man given to invoking deities, Pound was strangely scornful of psychological phenomena. He once wrote to Joyce that “Preserving public morality is more important than exploring psychological hinterlands.” As for modern psychotherapy:

  The general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.

  I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.

  In short, the best physic for a man with bad dreams is a hitch in the army.

  With Pound’s own righteousness coupled to such an attitude toward the psyche—no wonder Hermes never got out of the shadow. As with the servant, the insult Pound felt to his own worth turned into an unending bitterness; what had been singing fell dead. An obsession with money and political thinking began to cut off the poetry, as Yeats had feared. Then everything escalated. Pound took the growing dead-ness as caused by the Jews—Jews were cutting him off from the news, Jews were stealing the gold, Jews were destroying the crops, Jews were fouling the nest. Like the servant, Pound never turned to face the Jew as a part of himself. He called for the judge, for men with a will toward order who could enforce “public morality.” By the 1930s he could write a whole treatise on sharing the wealth with not a drop of compassion in it. And by the 1940s his hobbled imagination could only produce the old solution to the old story—kill the Jew:

  Don’t start a pogrom. That is, not an old-style killing of small Jews. That system is no good, whatever. Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom at the top …, there might be something to say for it.

  IV • Imagist Money

  In Federico Fellini’s movie Amarcord, one of the workmen building a house pauses to say a little poem:

  My grandfather was a bricklayer.

  My father was a bricklayer.

  I am a bricklayer.

  How come I don’t have a house?

  In London before the First World War, Pound became involved in an economic reform movement called Social Credit. Organized around the ideas of a Scottish engineer, Major C. H. Douglas, the Social Creditors sought to answer the bricklayer’s question. Credit refers to our trust in the ability and intention of a purchaser to make payment at some future time of a debt incurred in the present. With credit, earning power over time can be concentrated in the present so that a third-generation worker might own outright a house his grandfather once bought “on credit.” “Credit is the future tense of money,” says Pound.

  To explain why the bricklayer doesn’t in fact own a house, Social Creditors distinguished between “real credit” and “financial credit.” Real credit is the purchasing power of a group over time—all that comes of labor, technology, and the gifts of nature. Financial credit is the same thing expressed with money. Social Creditors did not oppose the monetary expression of credit—large industries and nations cannot operate without that abstraction—but, they said, financial credit should equal real credit. What happens instead is that self-interested bureaucrats take over the management of financial credit and it begins to become detached from the real. If money managers with houses begin to appear alongside bricklayers who can’t get a mortgage, then something is the matter with credit.

  Pound, in his elaboration of these ideas, rests financial credit not only on real wealth but quite specifically on natural increase. “What constitutes a sound basis of credit … was and is, the abundance, or productive capacity, of nature taken together with the responsibility of the whole people.” In the comparison of two banks which I mentioned some time ago, for example, the bank of Siena was a good bank because it based credit on natural abundance. As Pound describes it:

  Siena was flat on her back, without money after the Florentine conquest. Cosimo, first duke of Tuscany …, guaranteed the [bank’s] capital …

  Siena had grazing lands down toward Grosseto, and the grazing rights worth 10,000 ducats a year. On this basis taking it for his main security, Cosimo underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats, to pay 5 per cent to the shareholders, and to be lent at 5H per cent; overhead kept down to a minimum; salaries at a minimum and all excess profit over that to go to hospitals and works for the benefit of the people of Siena …

  And the lesson is the very basis of solid banking. The CREDIT rests in ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep …

  Pound’s stock example of an evil bank was the Bank of England. In a book by Christopher Hollis called The Two Nations Pound came across a quote attributed to that bank’s founder, William Paterson. A prospectus written in 1694 for potential investors included this sentence: “The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” Pound repeats the sentence over and over in the Cantos and in his prose. Here value is detached from its root in the natural world; here lies the seed of the dissociation between real and financial credit. Money “created out of nothing” cannot have real value or real increase, but the “hell banks,” through abstraction and mystification, make it appear to have both. Once such false money is at large, it secretly gnaws away at the true value that rests on the growing grass and the living sheep.

  Pound divided all goods into three classes:

  1 transient goods (“fresh vegetables, luxuries, jerry-built houses, fake art, pseudo books, battleships”),

  2 durable goods (“well constructed buildings, roads, public works, canals, intelligent afforestation”), and

  3 permanent goods (“scientific discoveries, works of art, classics”).

  In phrases reminiscent of our description of a gift, Pound adds that the goods in his third group “can be put in a class by themselves, as they are always in use and never consumed, or they are … not destroyed by consumption.” The only change I would suggest in these groups would be to move vegetables—or any life that is cyclically reborn—into the last category, in the spirit of Pound’s own lines from a late canto: “The clover enduring, / basalt crumbled with time.” Clover endures the way art endures. The verb is the same as in the usura canto, “no picture made to endure nor to live with / but to sell and sell quickly.”

  Pound felt that as long as we are going to use money as a symbol of value, there should be different kinds of money to stand for different kinds of value: clover money for clover and basalt money for basalt. “For every bit of DURABLE goods there ought certainly to be a ticket [i.e., a piece of money] … But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is eaten …?” he asks. “It would be better … if money perished at the same rate as goods perish, instead of being of lasting durability while goods get consumed and food gets eaten.” He sought, therefore, a currency “no more durable than … potatoes, crops or fabrics.” Until the symbols of value accurately reflect the various kinds of wealth, we will always have the unfair situation of some folks having “money wealth” that increases in their bank accounts while others have “potato we
alth” that decays in their larder. So Pound proposed a vegetable currency which, like the bread the fairies leave at night, would perish in the hands of those who did not use it.

  He was particularly keen on stamp scrip, a form of currency proposed by the German economist Silvio Gesell. As Pound tells it, Gesell “saw the danger of money being hoarded and proposed to deal with it by the issue of ‘stamp scrip.’ This should be a government note requiring the bearer to affix a stamp worth up to 1 percent of its face value on the first day of every month. Unless the note carries its proper complement of monthly stamps it is not valid.” With stamp scrip, you lose money by having money. Whoever has something in his pocket on the first of the month will see it shrink by 1 percent, rather than grow. If you keep it a hundred months it will perish completely. (Stamp scrip is Schwund geld in German, “shrinking money.” Pound sometimes calls it “counter-usury,” and in letters to Mussolini refers to it as “transient currency” and as money that bears “negative interest.” It’s money that decays.)

  Both Pound and Gesell thought that stamp scrip would prevent hoarding and increase the velocity of the money in circulation. Nobody would want to hold on to it. I’m not sure that it does this any better than conventional interest—when all money bears interest, uninvested money shrinks, too. But there is one obvious difference between stamp scrip and conventional interest: the direction of the increase is reversed. A conventional interest payment goes to the owner of the money; with stamp scrip (as with gifts) the increase goes away from the owner of the wealth (it goes to the state, about which more later). Moreover, again as with a commerce of gifts, the increase of stamp scrip goes to the group as a whole, not to individuals. “Anyone who thinks to keep it put by in a stocking will find it slowly melting away. Anyone who needs it to live by, or who uses it to stimulate and increase the well-being of the nation, will profit by it.”