3 : A DEMOCRAT IN ITALY, 1933
Il Poeta meets Il Duce
Signor Benito Mussolini was now in his own person, by law, the supreme law-maker of Italy, and as such was known as Capo del Governo; more, he was by both law and popular assent capo of the nation, its head and leader, Il Duce. Though formally subject to the King, and only to the King, he ruled much as kings had ruled before there were republican revolutions. He went so far as to claim to embody mystically the State and the People as kings were once held to do; and the Italian people for the most part, rather than holding him answerable to themselves, put their faith in him and loved and followed him as if he were indeed the incarnation of the nation’s spirit.
Yet it was by a republican, even a socialist, revolution that Mussolini had come to such singular power. His position was altogether a cornucopia of contradictions. And it was by virtue of those contradictions that this son of a village blacksmith had managed to unite in himself an Italy which just ten years before had been breaking down into anarchy as the old ruling class proved powerless to contain the rising but still weak forces of Communism and socialism. It had been a dogfight lacking a top dog until Mussolini seized absolute power by a combination of calculated violence, inspired opportunism, ruthless suppression of opponents and dissenters, and acute political insight amounting to genius. The cartoon versions of him as a puffed up buffoon or thick thug are good for anti-Fascist propaganda, but are otherwise simply ridiculous. He was a man to be taken very seriously. In the ten years since the King had appointed him to form a government in October 1922 he had seen off the opposing parliamentary parties by parliamentary process, so that his Fascist party, having full control of the state, in effect became the state; and he had purged his party of its violent and criminal elements once they had served their turn, and then subordinated its at-first independent regional leaders to his will, so that he now stood over and above his party and personally ran the state. At the same time he had replaced trade unions, employers’ organizations, and professional bodies with Fascist organizations, effectively incorporating all classes and kinds of workers into the Fascist project; along with that he had required of all teachers, university professors, and public servants an oath of loyalty to the state; and he had set up Fascist institutions to organize and direct all intellectual, cultural, sporting, and leisure activities. He had thus brought into being not only the idea but a partial realization of a totalitarian state, one in which all its consenting members and all its activities should be bound together as in a single entity with one mind, one purpose, one will, and that mind, purpose, and will his own. That was the idea of the Fascist emblem taken over from ancient Rome and emblazoned everywhere in Mussolini’s new Italy: thin rods each weak in itself but of great strength when cut and shaped by the axe of lawful authority and bound tightly together.
Mussolini was still generally perceived, in 1933, as a benevolent dictator, that is as one exercising his all-encompassing authority to promote a better order in Italy. The great Decennale Exhibition in Rome had some major reforms to celebrate, beyond getting the trains to run on time. The Fascist social and welfare provision for workers was ahead of even that of New Zealand: there were already in force an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, guaranteed work and continuity of employment, regulation of the work of women and children, compulsory TB and sickness and accident insurance, provision for old age, and workers’ representation alongside employers in the new Fascist corporations. Then there was a vast programme of public works, ‘whose crowning glory was the draining of the malaria-infested, largely uninhabited Pontine Marshes to the south of Rome which emperors, popes, kings and the odd prime minister had all tried and failed to make habitable’. Millions of hectares of once waste land were brought into cultivation. There was new housing; new towns were built and old ones, especially Rome itself, were renovated. New roads were constructed, including Europe’s first motorway, and new bridges and aqueducts. ‘The great Public Utilities of the State’, Mussolini could claim, ‘railroads, mail, telegraph, telephone’ had been made to function efficiently, and even ‘the Italian Bureaucracy, proverbially slow, has become eager and agile’. Not only did the trains run on time but they ran faster, thanks to the electrification of the railway network. And still there were people, Mussolini observed, who ‘whine because there is efficiency and order in the world’.
His new ‘efficiency and order’ did involve a good deal of regimentation. ‘The citizen in the Fascist State’, Mussolini had declared, ‘is no longer a selfish individual to whom is given the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity.’ Put another way, the Fascist individual would find his fulfilment in transcending his personal desires and living within and for the state. Fascism was austerely, religiously, anti-individualistic and anti-democratic, and indeed rather despised capitalist democracy as having failed—perhaps terminally in the 1929 Crash—through allowing excessive freedom to the selfish individual. At the same time Fascism was not against private property or private wealth, the former being accepted as making for social stability; and capital being welcomed as ‘an increasingly important actor in the drama of production’, on condition that it be deployed not for private profit but in the collective interest as determined by the Fascist state.
It was held to be in the collective interest that Italy should become strong among the industrially advanced, capitalist nations; but it was also held to be in its collective interest to solve the problem of the unequal distribution of wealth and ‘to end the cruel fact of poverty in the midst of abundance’, a socialist aspiration. This synthesis of capitalism and socialism was Mussolini’s ‘Third Way’. Fascism was to supersede the economic liberalism of capitalism, by regulating and directing the economy in the national interest; and it was to supersede the Marxist Leninist form of socialism by not abolishing private property and not nationalizing the means of production. That said, it was on good terms with capitalists and capitalism; and at enmity with Communism—its own Communists were regarded as enemies of the state and were the most liable of its dissenters to be sent into exile or imprisoned. Hence the bitterness of Communist critiques of Fascism; and hence the early friendliness of the capitalist democracies to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.
Winston Churchill, speaking in February 1933 as a Conservative member of parliament to the British Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist League, declared that ‘The Roman genius impersonated in Mussolini, the greatest law-giver among living men, has shown to many nations how they can resist the pressures of Socialism.’ America’s Fortune magazine, the glossy display window of US capitalism, praised him for showing ‘the virtue of force and centralized government acting without conflict for the whole nation at once’. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, newly inaugurated as President of the United States, let Mussolini know that he regarded Italy as ‘the only real friend of America in Europe’.1
Pound’s frequently expressed admiration for Mussolini and his works thus placed him in good—if for him rather odd—company. The democratic consensus, especially in the United States and most especially among its business leaders, was that Fascism was not only good for socially chaotic and economically backward Italy but a reproach to both the anarchy of capitalism and the tyranny of Communism. But it was not the anarchy of capitalism that Pound objected to so much as its injustice and its anti-social conduct; and his objection to state tyranny was muted when the state made itself responsible for the needs of the whole society. He was caught up in the contradictions of a time when a Fascist dictator cared more for the welfare of his people than the governments of the capitalist democracies did for theirs.
When Pound visited the Decennale Exhibition he particularly remarked the reconstruction of the Milan office in which Mussolini had edited his socialist newspaper, Il Popolo, and from which he had organized the rise of Fascism to power. Pound associated the exhibit with the New Age office in which at about the same time he had got hold of the gist of Major Douglas’s Social Credit. ‘Ours was like that’, he would note in a canto, ‘minus the Mills bomb’—that was the hand grenade Mussolini kept on his desk. It was as if he was seeking common ground between his own and Mussolini’s efforts to change the existing economic order, while recognizing that Mussolini’s had had more force behind it. The nature of that force, as he explained it to the readers of Il Mare back in Rapallo, was ‘VOLONTà’. It had struck him for the first time, he told them, that the power behind the constructive action of the Fascist revolution was emotion, the WILL to get things done. It was that which made all the difference between merely having a good idea and carrying it through into practice. He instanced Mussolini’s having cleared away in central Rome a mess of squalid building accumulated over the centuries to reveal again the glory that had been Rome and to create a new imperial avenue, ‘la Via dell’Impero è la VOLUNTÀ’, leading from the Coliseum to the Piazza Venezia where he had his office.
The Palazzo di Venezia overlooked the Piazza, and from its balcony Il Duce would address the great crowds who gathered to hear him. His office was in its Sala del Mappamondo on the first floor, a vast room forty feet high, sixty feet in length, and as wide as it was high. The space was quite empty from one end to the other except for the desk at which Mussolini worked at the far end, with just one or two tables nearby and a few chairs. He insisted on absolute silence, no sound being allowed in from the piazza outside, and if a fly buzzed he called for it to be swatted. It was into this room that Pound was brought for his audience with Mussolini at 17.30 on Monday, 30 January 1933.
Pound presented to Mussolini a copy of the Hours Press A Draft of XXX Cantos and opened it to show him the Malatesta cantos. But, as Pound later told Mary de Rachewiltz, he ‘went poking around till he got to Trotsk and the zhamefull beace’ in canto 16, and said—he was learning English at the time—‘But this is not English’, and Pound said, ‘No, it’s my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English’, and that led Mussolini to say, ‘How entertaining!’, ‘Ma qvesto è divertente’. Pound would put that remark into canto 41, and tell a correspondent that ‘One of [my] most valued readers seemed to find the Cantos entertaining; at least that’s what he said after 20 minutes, with accent of relieved surprise, having been brought up to Italian idea of poetry: something oppressive and to be revered.’ Mussolini asked what was his aim in writing The Cantos, and Pound replied, ‘to put my ideas in order’; and Mussolini said, ‘What do you want to do that for?’, ‘Perché vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?’, and to that Pound had no better answer than ‘Pel mio poema’.
‘Then’, as Pound told it, ‘we turned to economics, and I showed him a list of things that I thought ought to be done’, a handwritten list eighteen items long apparently. Mussolini ‘started to read it, and said, “Ugh, these aren’t things to answer straight off the bat. No, this one about taxes”—it would have been the third or fourth item, that in the Fascist state taxes were no longer necessary—“Ungh!”, he said, “Have to think about THAT”.’ And that was the end of the interview.
Pound wrote to Dorothy that evening that he had ‘had a long hour’ and was ‘feelin a bit weak after the event’. The Capo del Governo had been ‘vurry charmin’, but vurry’. He had told Pound to get his questions ‘re/ economica’ typed out and to stay on in Rome in case he wanted to see him again about them. One of the things Pound did while waiting for another appointment was to see Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel—the early ‘talkie’ in which she vamped ‘I want to be alone’—and he marvelled at ‘the perfect clarity in every word’ of the film. By the end of the week it was apparent that there was not going to be a second meeting, although the private secretary was being ‘very cordial & said C.G. wd. like to see me’. There were new affairs of state to be attended to, among them Hitler’s coming to power in Germany. Hitler had in fact been appointed Reichschancellor about noon on the day of Pound’s audience with Mussolini.
The big news back in Rapallo was that their American poet had met Il Duce, and when Pound returned in early February the town band was at the station to greet him in communal celebration.
He immediately went to work on a book in which he would attempt to define the genius of Mussolini. He had other commitments on his mind—his fortnightly articles for Orage’s New English Weekly, a series of lectures on ‘volitionist economics’ he was to give in Milan in March, the cantos dealing with the early American law-givers and their war with private banks for control of the nation’s credit—and nevertheless he completed Jefferson and/or Mussolini and sent it off to his agent before the end of the month.
The ground of his argument, as he put it in a letter dated 18 February, was the confident faith that Mussolini ‘would end with Sigismondo and the men of order’. ‘I believe’, he affirmed, ‘that anything human will and understanding of contemporary Italy cd. accomplish, he has done and will continue to do.’ He believed in Mussolini, he said, because of his own direct experience of Fascism in Italy—‘Fascism as I have seen it’ stands as the subtitle to Jefferson and/or Mussolini. In the course of the book, however, it becomes apparent that the things he has seen interest him only as outward evidences of Mussolini’s genius, and that he is more deeply engaged in comprehending the genius than in analysing the Fascism. Further, as he develops his understanding of the genius, he perceives Mussolini more and more in his own terms rather than those of Fascist practice. And his own terms, as he declares under his name on the title page, are those of his ‘Volitionist Economics’. His Mussolini is the leader he could believe in, one who is like himself an artist, a maker, only an artist able not only to conceive an enlightened social order but actually to will it into existence. He is in effect, though Pound does not so designate him, what Pound himself had aspired to be, an avatar of Zagreus, or, to go further back in his mythology, of Isis–Osiris, the bringer of grain and laws and civilized ways into a failing world.
Among the things Pound had noticed in Italy was ‘“Dio ti benedica” scrawled on a shed where some swamps were’, and he read that as a prayer for Mussolini in gratitude for his persuading ‘the Italians to grow better wheat, and to produce Italian colonial bananas’. Then there was his hotel-keeper in Rimini, the Fascist Commandante della Piazza, who got the local library opened up for him out of what Pound took to be a sense of responsibility fired by devotion to Mussolini. (‘This kind of devotion…doesn’t come to a man like myself,’ he reflected.) There was the time in Modena when the regional Fascist leader, Farinacci, had his squadristi beating up all the working men in the district as his way of honouring ‘the Fascist martyrs’, and after a few days notices signed ‘Mussolini’ had appeared on the walls indicating Farinacci’s summons to Rome and an end to that violence. There was another occasion early on, before Pound knew anything at all about Fascism, before the March on Rome, when he had been sitting in Florian’s in the Piazza San Marco in Venice and the ‘cavalieri della morte’ in their black shirts and ‘with drawn faces’ passed through ‘and everyone stood to attention and took off their hats’, but ‘damned if he would stand up or show respect until he knew what they meant’, and ‘Nobody hit me with a club’, he recorded, ‘and I didn’t see any oil bottles’. He may not have seen any, but by the time he wrote that he evidently knew how clubs and purges of castor oil had been weapons of choice in the Fascist takeover of local powers throughout Italy, and still it did not concern him. That was because he would see through such details to what they meant to him, to what much of his experience of Italy now pointed to, and that was Mussolini’s superhuman ability both to move his fellow Italians to action and to control and direct their action according to his will.
WILL, a complex word implying a will to do something or to have something done, is the key word in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which Pound once said was his De Monarchia or blueprint for efficient government. ‘Will-power’ adds an emphasis, meaning the power to effect what is desired; but the will-to-power is excluded from Pound’s lexicon, at least so far as it signifies the desire for power for its own sake. Moreover, before concerning himself with the power to govern, Pound nearly identifies the will to govern with the intelligence to do so, so that the intelligence, knowing the desired end, shall direct the will’s power to that end. Directio voluntatis, he insisted, taking the Latin tag from Dante’s De Monarchia: what matters is that the will-power be rightly directed. At the same time, as he insisted with equal force, intelligence counts for nothing ‘until it comes into action’. What might be a good idea is no good until there’s the will to do it.
Pound’s key word, will or volition, thus comes to signify, beyond mere force of will, efficient intelligence, or intelligence in action. And here Pound shifts the emphasis once again by proposing an analogy between the most efficient kind of human intelligence and the instinctive intelligence of insects. He refers the reader to the ‘chapters on insects’ in Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour, and there we read (in Pound’s translation) that instinct is ‘a partial crystallisation of intelligence’, in that only ‘Useful acts habitually repeated…intellectual acts…useful for the preservation of the species’ become instinctive. ‘When a human being’, Pound wrote, ‘has an analogous completeness of knowledge, or intelligence carried into a third or fourth dimension, capable of dealing with NEW circumstances, we call it genius.’ And—here shifting his analogy and taking a further step in his argument—‘The ideas of genius, or of “men of intelligence” are organic and germinal’, they are seed ideas which both conserve patterns of behaviour and come up differently under different conditions—witness the effectiveness of the conviction that All men are born free and equal, and the variety of its flowerings in France and the United States and elsewhere.
It follows in this line of thought that the ‘germinal ideas’ of Pound’s two men of genius, his Jefferson and his Mussolini, must be nearly related to what he understood Frobenius to mean by paideuma, that is, as noted in Chapter 2, ‘the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal…conditioning actively all the thought and action’. In effect, Pound is now locating the paideuma, the cultural matrix, in the individual genius. That would be the meaning of his observation that Italy had had ‘a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently’. But the deeper and more challenging meaning there is that the will of this one man, this dictator, represented in an unusually profound sense the will of the people.
Lincoln Steffens, the hardboiled, muckraking, American journalist with unimpeachable democratic credentials, wrote in his own terms that he had witnessed just that: ‘I was there. When Mussolini said that they, the people, might stop governing and go to work—he would do it all—it was almost as if all Italy sighed and said, “Amen”. And the people did go back to work, and they worked as they had not worked before’, and Steffens found himself questioning whether Fascism might be a more effective way to achieve the government of the people and for the people than democracy as practised in the United States or in England or France. A later historian, A. James Gregor, found reason to conclude that Mussolini’s Fascism was a genuine expression of the experience and the aspirations of Italy following the 1914–18 war, and that his undoubted political genius consisted in leading its people in the direction they needed and wanted to go in the conditions then actually prevailing. It would appear that Pound’s perception of Mussolini, in 1933, as ‘driven by a vast and deep “concern” or will for the welfare of Italy…for Italy organic, composed of the last ploughman and the last girl in the olive-yards’, that this perception, though frankly a construct of faith and hope, and though invoking the unfashionable idea of society as an organism organized by its men of genius, did indeed have its truth. It may be an uncomfortable truth, as Steffens found, but then, as he also remarked, it does us no harm to have our settled notions shaken up.
Steffens was able to come to terms with Mussolini’s abolishing individual liberties by reminding himself that all governments and peoples abolish liberty and submit themselves to dictatorial leadership in the emergency of war. Pound did it by concentrating on ‘his passion for construction’ and treating him as an artist—‘Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place’. First among the ‘details’ was the principle that ‘Who wills the end wills the means’; and then that ‘any means’, i.e. any legal or administrative forms, ‘are the right means’ if only they will ‘remagnetize the will’ to put into effect ‘the best that is known and thought’. So authoritarian dictatorship could be the right means to the end of reconstructing Italy, and the very sign indeed of Mussolini’s ‘intelligence’. Instead of sighing worthily for social justice he had been ‘presumably right in putting the first emphasis on having a government strong enough to get the said justice’. And to achieve that it had been necessary, given the critical condition Italy was in, for him to take the power and the responsibility of the state upon himself alone.
Steffens wrote of how in a financial crisis Mussolini had told parliament they were incapable of decisive action and had sent them out to cuss him in their cafés while he, within a week or so, ‘did, somehow, stabilize the lira’. Steffens and Pound both made much of his breaking free from the preconceptions and precedents, the established axioms and theories, the obfuscating rhetoric and social snobberies, which got in the way of the facts and prevented effective action. That had always been a main task of the artist for Pound. ‘It takes a genius’, he now wrote, ‘a genius charged with some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast [humanity, Italian and every other segment of it] out of [its] preconceptions’. Mussolini invented new laws and altered existing ones to suit the circumstances of the moment, to the distress of distinguished lawyers who could not know from one day to the next what the law would be. He put an embargo on emigration, as to America, a restriction which Pound, who loathed passports and all such restrictions, nevertheless approved of since Italian workers were needed at home; and ‘the material and immediate effect [were] grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restorations, new buildings’. He did something about ‘birds friendly to agriculture’—presumably banning the snaring or shooting them in spite of ingrained tradition—and already there were ‘more birds in the olive-yards’, as Pound must have seen for himself as he walked up the footpath from Rapallo to Sant’ Ambrogio. Such were the dictator’s original works of art.
Along with its celebration of what Il Duce was achieving, Jefferson and/or Mussolini outlined what Pound thought Mussolini ought to be doing in the way of economic reform. Basically, he wanted the problem ‘of poverty in the midst of abundance’ to be seen as not just a problem of the distribution of goods but as, fundamentally, a problem arising from the unequal and inadequate distribution of credit or purchasing power. ‘We have had the century of the “benefits of concentration of capital” (and the malefits)’, he wrote, and ‘We have come to the point where money must be got into people’s pockets if goods are to move and modern life to continue “the good life”.’ And the only way to achieve that, he argued, instancing America’s ‘bank wars’ in the time of Jefferson and Van Buren, was by taking over control of credit and finance from private interests so that they should be used not for the profit of the few but for the benefit of the whole nation. In 1920 he had seen ‘nothing in Europe save unscrupulous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human)’. In 1933 he could see ‘no other clot of energy in Europe’ save Mussolini ‘capable of opposing ANY FORCE WHATEVER to the infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of men’s blood for money’. By 1934 he was convinced that Mussolini was in fact ‘damning and breaking up the bankers’ stranglehold on humanity’, and that the dividends were being ‘distributed as better wheat, and better drainage and cheaper railway transport’. The following year he informed anti-Fascists in England that while Italy had not nationalized its banks they were subject to national orders, and that ‘the use of the public credit for the ultimate public weal of Italy has been in process and is being accelerated’. A ‘GREED system’ had been replaced by a ‘WILL system’.
Pound was seeing Mussolini as a dynamic, even a daemonic force for a new order in Italy, one directed by the human will toward social justice and equity. On the last page of Jefferson and/or Mussolini he reasserted his ‘firm belief that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of | ORDER’; to which he added, as if to define ‘ORDER’, ‘τὸ ϰαλόν’, signifying the thing—it would be the public thing or republic—that is beautiful because rightly and harmoniously ordered. Behind that he would have had the Confucian vision of the Chinese empire as a well-ordered totality. Also, he was dreaming again as he had dreamed in London in 1915 of a renaissance born when ‘the very apex of power coincided with the apex of culture’. ‘I dream for Italy an epoch’, he wrote in December 1933, that ‘will resemble somewhat the [quattrocento], an epoch in which the highest culture and modern science functions at maximum’. That is what Pound expected, or hoped for, from Mussolini’s dictatorship of Italy.
He did not advocate Fascism in and for America, and thought ‘the American system de jure…probably quite good enough [for America], if there were only 500 men with the guts and the sense to USE it’. At the same time he considered that Mussolini’s Fascism, with its ‘greater care for national welfare’, did put ‘our democratic system’ on trial with the challenge, ‘Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actually in the America of this decade to the extent that they function in Italy under the DUCE?’ Pound’s opinion was ‘that they DON’T’, and that America needed ‘an orientation of will’ under the stimulus of Mussolini. It did not need to import the ‘accidental’ features of Fascism, the parades and the methods peculiar to the culture and condition of Italy at that time, but only ‘the permanent elements of sane and responsible government’. It would appear, since Pound was calling for the Constitution to be not altered but followed more faithfully, that dictatorship and totalitarian ways were to be classed as ‘accidentals’ and not as necessary means to a more enlightened American order. Indeed, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated as President of the United States in March of 1933, began talking about a New Deal for America, Pound paid attention in hope that he would be the one to effect the needed re-orientation of will in what he subscribed to as ‘our democratic system’. When Roosevelt proposed his Civil Works Administration Pound wrote to Dorothy, ‘At last I have a country.’
3. Invitation to Pound’s series of lectures, ‘An Historic Background for Economics’, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, March 1933.
Revolutionary economics
It was not only with Mussolini that Pound wanted to talk economics. He would talk and write economics at anyone and everyone through the rest of the 1930s, very often as if it were the only bee in his bonnet. The capitalist democracies, America, Britain, France, and the rest, were in deep crisis, with their millions workless, their industries shut down, their markets stagnant, their farmers foreclosed upon by mortgagors, and with their governments paralysed by the contradiction between the needs and interests of their impoverished citizens and the needs and interests of the gravely threatened system of self-regulating capitalism in which they put their trust. Pound could see with blinding clarity what needed to be done, quite simply, that capital, the nation’s wealth, should be made to serve the needs and interests of the whole nation. He thought this should be self-evident to anyone of good will; and that it was the duty of everyone with a sense of social responsibility, from writers up to president or prime minister, to proclaim that solution and to make it happen.
For the moment, for the decade, the struggle to make other people see what was needed to bring about a just economic order was his dominant preoccupation. ‘Contemporary economics goes over my desk NOW,’ he told Morton Dauwen Zabel, the new editor of Poetry in 1934, ‘just as the Joyce, Lewis, Eliot etc/ went over it in 1917’. And to Ibbotson, his old Hamilton mentor who had become the college librarian, he wrote, ‘the vitality of thought NOW (1935) is in econ/ that is where the live thought is concentrated | for a few years’. To the young American writers associated with Contempo he was more insistent: ‘Without an understanding of economics no one can have any grip on the modern world or any understanding of what goes on, or what anything means. No one can understand the “news” in the daily papers.’ ‘Your generation has got to BOTHER about economics, and even politics, as mine bothered about philology’, he advised them in another little magazine, since ‘no man can write anything valid unless he has brains enough to SEE the social order about him and to know cause and effect in that order.’ Moreover, as he cordially informed W. E. Woodward, a historian and Roosevelt adviser, ‘god dam it to understand | history you GOT to understand ECON.’
In 1934 he was chiding Eliot for showing no awareness, when writing about ‘the modern mind’, of the economic realities confronting that mind. It was not that ‘economics constitute “the ONLY vital problem”’, he allowed, but, given that ‘poverty and the syphilis of the mind called the Finance-Capitalist system kill more men annually than typhoid or tuberculosis’, it seemed to him that to engage in purely aesthetic discussion just then was like stopping to discuss ‘blue china in the midst of a cholera epidemic if I possessed the means to combat the epidemic’. Pound was even more impatient with Joyce’s indifference to economic realities—Joyce who had once been his model realist. And he berated ‘son’ Zukofsky as ‘worse than blind Joyce’, and warned him, ‘The next anthology will be econ/ conscious and L/Z won’t be in it’. He even wrote to McAlmon, a rather tough-minded observer of his world, ‘I think both you and Hem have limited yr. work’—which he still held in high regard—‘by not recognizing the economic factor’. Williams, another he would not accuse of being out of touch with reality, he attempted to stir up to spread the word about Social Credit and stamp scrip—‘if you agree, GIT AXSHUN’—but Williams wrote back, ‘Aw what’s the use, you wouldn’t understand.…But as fer action as action. Taint in me. No use gettin mad.’
Pound did get mad, not at Williams and not at individuals he knew personally, but at the whole uncomprehending and apathetic world in general, and at young writers in particular who didn’t want to know about economics. He declared himself fed up, in January 1935,
fed u p (up) with young idiots who can’t see that history does not exist without economics; who do not know that Bithinian mortgages at 12% are a matter of history; who think that…‘l’histoire morale’ can get on without economics any more than any other department of history, or that literature keeps its head in a bag.
It was left to him, he raged, to do all the work of instruction on his own, and to write out the ABCs of economics, ‘because the circumjacent literati are weaklings, they are piffling idiots that can’t get on with the job, they can not even write text books…and I can type for eight hours a day’.
It is necessary for me to dig the ore, melt it, smelt it, to cut the wood and the stone, because I am surrounded by ten thousand nincompoops and nothing fit to call an American civilisation or a British civilisation…
He saw himself as the lone hero desperately embattled, or as the scorned prophet seeing the truth none dared face. In a prefatory note drafted for a proposed collection of his essays, possibly late in the 1930s, he refracted the alien image his opponents had of him, ‘a stray crank’, into a drama of doomed heroism, then found consolation and a kind of triumph in the certainty that anyway his vision was superior to their ignorance:
Against [the] phalanx of academic writing the stray crank hurls himself vainly. He has seen the light, he has seen the landscape illuminated during tempest by one flash of lightning. His adversary has never seen it at all.
And they were afraid of him, he boasted—this was as early as November 1933—‘The college presidents of America dare not read either How to Read or my ABC of Economics’; and the professors of economics, and all the ‘clercs’ in the beaneries, dared not face his facts. ‘The cretinism of their era has left them no shred of decency,’ he fulminated. Then, having boiled over with rage—and observed himself doing so with detached interest and approval—he would temper it by saying to someone not an imbecile, ‘all my cursing and blasting is against ONLY those who refuse to look facts in the eye’.
Deeper than his rage there was his hatred, a murderous hatred, as he himself declared, for a murdering capitalism. ‘What causes the ferocity and bad manners of revolutionaries?’, he asked rhetorically in an essay in Eliot’s Criterion in July 1933, ‘Why should a peace-loving writer of Quaker descent be quite ready to shoot certain persons whom he never laid eyes on?…What has capital done that I should hate Andy Mellon as a symbol or as a reality?’ The direct answer was this, ‘I have blood lust because of what I have seen done to, and attempted against, the arts in my time.’ He was thinking back to what he had seen in London, the lack of support for and the suppression of the radically new writing and sculpture and painting of the time, and the best musicians ‘gradually driven off the platform’. He had ‘no personal grievance’, he said, ‘They tried to break me and didn’t or couldn’t.’ But ‘hatred can be bred in the mind’, and ‘head-born hatred is possibly the most virulent’. He had come to understand that the source of the harm done to the arts was the unjust distribution of credit at the heart of the capitalist economic system. And that, evidently, was why he nursed his virulent hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and politicians whom he held responsible for obstructing the flow of creative intelligence in England and France and America.
The evil, he now saw, afflicted not only the arts but infected the whole society, and the cure therefore must be a radical reform of the entire socio-economic system. There had been a time when he had imagined that the problem of the unemployment of the best artists might be settled by one millionaire patron, and ‘without regard to the common man, humanity in general, the man in the street, the average citizen’. That idea he now retracted and apologized for. The unemployment of artists was only a special case of the general unemployment of the millions. The miserliness towards the arts went with the ‘miserliness in regard to sanitation, healthy houses, medical and dental services’; the waste of talent went with the waste of lives—in England ‘three million lives in peace time for every million lives spent in the war’. And what was needed ‘to release more energy for invention and design’ was the same as was needed to overcome the social evil, nothing less than a new economic system that would deliver social justice to all.
Pound conducted his own campaign for economic enlightenment on two fronts, in his cantos containing history where he was inventing objects for contemplation, and in his prose where he was trying at once to make people see the light and to blast the forces of darkness. Cantos XXXI–XLI are largely concerned with banking and economics from Jefferson to Mussolini, with the focus mainly on the American Revolution and its betrayal; The Fifth Decad of Cantos is concerned with banking and economics mainly in Europe, with much attention paid to the founding of a bank in Siena and the very different founding of the Bank of England. More or less at the same time as he was composing those cantos Pound was hammering out on his typewriter letters to editors, articles for whatever newspaper or periodical would publish him, and letters to senators and anyone else whom he thought might be moved to use their influence in the cause of economic reform. Of the 375 items he contributed to newspapers and periodicals in the years 1933, 1934, and 1935, about four in every five were on economic matters, with the frequency of those rising year on year from 80 to 100 to 130. On top of that there was his very extensive and no less furious private correspondence.
Pound particularly targeted a few US senators whom he hoped would steer Roosevelt in the desired direction, and also some of the officers of the President’s think-tank, the Committee for the Nation to Rebuild Prices and Purchasing Power. He wrote as ‘A Jeffersonian or very left wing Fascist’, though one who didn’t ‘care a damn about the theory’ or ‘the political system’ of Fascism—‘Call me a Jeffersonian. brought up to date’, he told W. E. Woodward who was serving on two government advisory councils. Whomever he was writing to, whether it was Woodward, or Senator Cutting of New Mexico, or Senator William Borah of Idaho—or indeed to whatever newspaper or periodical or fellow writer—it was always the same few fundamental ideas out of Douglas’s Social Credit and Gesell’s stamp scrip that he was trying to get across.
The immediate and pressing problem was the mass unemployment of the Depression and the damage being done by that to both the unemployed and the economy. In the United States in 1932 around four hundred in every thousand of the farming population were out of work; in 1934 about 17 million workers altogether were reckoned to be unemployed, and there were forty million living below the poverty line. The Secretary of Agriculture was ordering the destruction of crops and livestock because so many hadn’t the money to buy the food. Pound urged that the available work be shared among those willing and able to work, with a reduction in the hours each worked, but with no reduction of wages. A government subsidy would be needed to keep up wages, but that would be a better use of the state’s money than leaving men workless and doling the money out to them. He was all in favour of creating useful new jobs through Public Works schemes such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, provided they were financed from government credit and not by borrowing from private banks. But the main thing was to tackle the root cause of the Depression, which was not excess production, as orthodox economists maintained, but the lack of purchasing power where it was most needed, among the mass of the people. ‘There is NO real overproduction as long as there are people who WANT the stuff/ god damn it there is plenty of stuff still WANTED | the clog is in the money system. | (overproduction begins when the stuff is not WANTED, not when people merely can’t buy it.)’
The banks having control of the nation’s credit was one side of the problem, as Pound had learnt from Major Douglas, and as quite a number of economists and politicians now perceived. (The other side was how to get the purchasing power to the people.) The banks were called upon to create new money to meet the nation’s demand for credit, but they held it as their money not the nation’s, and lent it out and called it in to their own profit without regard to the common interest. And the worst of it was that the nation’s government, in order to finance its projects, went to the private banks for the money, which the banks created out of nothing, and on which the government then paid them interest. This was ‘an infamy’, Pound protested, ‘It is an infamy that the STATE in, and by reason of, the very act of creating material wealth should run into debt to individuals.’ It was infamous because it was directly contrary to the Constitution, which vested the power to issue money in the government of the Union; and behind that was the idea of natural justice, that the nation’s credit was its common wealth and belonged to the whole people. The Constitution and its democratic principle had been overridden after the Civil War as the power to issue money and control credit had passed from the government to private banks. Senator Cutting was one who wanted to put the government back in control. ‘What does the government do’, he asked in anger in a speech in May 1934,
when it goes to the rescue of its needy and starving citizens? It floats loans through the banks. It pays interest to private organizations for the use of its own credit. The thing becomes more preposterous when we realize that an enormous proportion of the relief expended by the government has gone to the aid of great banking institutions. So that actually the government is getting itself into debt to the banks for the privilege of helping them to regain their stranglehold on the economic life of the country.
Cutting proposed in the Senate that the banks should be nationalized in order to ‘monopolize the credit system of the country for the benefit of the public not for the benefit of the bankers’. Pound, while maintaining that it was not necessary to nationalize the banks Bolshevik fashion in order to control them—Mussolini had demonstrated that—thought Cutting might have made it clear that in any case the profits on the nation’s credit should accrue to the nation. That was underlining the radical principle, which Cutting was asserting, ‘that the nation owns its own credit, and that the whole people should benefit by this fact’.
The basis of credit, in this view, is the nation’s common wealth, that is, its natural resources, or ‘the abundance of nature’, plus the labour to make useful products of those resources; and then the accumulation of skills and knowledge which increases the productivity of labour in both quantity and quality. Marx, in his nineteenth century, had made labour the measure of value, but ‘that’s OLD stuff | no longer fits facts’, Pound insisted to Woodward; ‘Values now from a little (ever decreasing) amount of work: | AND a huge complex of mechanical inventions | which are “the cultural heritage” | and have got to be used for THE WHOLE PEOPLE, | nobody really owns ’em ANYHOW.’ More largely, the cultural heritage consists of ‘the whole aggregate of human inventions’, ‘improvements of seed and of farming methods’, ‘and the customs and habits of civilization’. Douglas had brought forward this perception of the cultural heritage as the main source of economic and social value, with the correlative that it belonged to no one man and to no group; and he had thus expanded the proposition that all men are born free and equal into the claim that all therefore have a right in common with others to the earth’s resources and to the benefits of human progress.
Douglas’s idea was that the surplus value or credit accruing from the cultural heritage should be distributed to all citizens as a national dividend, and that this would be a fair mechanism for providing the needed increase of purchasing power in the economy. Pound took up the main idea but wanted it modified. Douglas did not mind whether people worked for their dividend or not. In Pound’s view, however, everyone had both a right to work and a need to work, though only for so many hours a day as would get the nation’s work done and allow everyone to share in it, and he therefore would have wanted the social dividend to go into subsidizing work-sharing and keeping up wages. At the same time he allowed that the dividend might take various forms, such as the control of rents and prices to keep them in line with wages, as was being done in Italy; or it might go into the improvement of public utilities and infrastructure, and the provision of better education, health care, and welfare. All such public benefits could be, and should be, financed out of the public credit, without recourse to ‘the buggering banks’.
These were revolutionary ideas threatening the freedoms of the capitalist order in its moment of crisis, a moment when the contradiction between the interests and workings of capitalism and the interests and needs of society as a whole was painfully exposed by the Great Depression. Of course the ideas were dismissed as unworkable, as ‘crank economics’, by those who opposed or simply feared the changes that would follow from them. And because they were not effectively carried into action in any capitalist democracy their power to bring about a more truly democratic order remained unproven.
Yet the principles behind those ideas, Pound and others maintained, were fundamental to democracy, especially to one which honoured Jefferson as a founder. In the United States they were upheld by many responsible legislators addressing the disastrous breakdown of their social economy. In 1933 Senator Hugo Black of Alabama proposed a six-hour working day and a five-day week to spread the existing jobs among 25 per cent more workers, and a majority in the Senate approved. In 1934 and 1935, according to Walkiewicz and Witemeyer, ‘There was a growing consensus that the causes of the Depression had more to do with poor distribution and underconsumption’ than with problems of production, and in March 1934 President Roosevelt called for ‘an increase in the purchasing power of the people’. His Administration’s large-scale public works schemes were one way of bringing that about, though, as Senator Cutting pointed out, his financing those schemes by borrowing from private banks was counter-productive. Cutting’s own proposal to nationalize the banks had considerable support in the Senate and in the country, though it died in committee, the great objection to it being, as he noted, that it was too radical.
There were other, less temperate, voices spreading these ideas over the radio, the mass medium of the time, and getting a responsive hearing for them from millions of listeners. There was Father Coughlin, the radio evangelist of his day, who, as Pound observed, was preaching social justice in simple terms the populace could understand. Pound, enthusiastic about the texts of his broadcasts and deeply impressed by his speaking to and for so vast an audience, bombarded him with suggestions and instigations, and received only form letters in return.
Another powerful voice attracting Pound’s particular interest was that of the Governor of the State of Louisiana and US Senator Huey P. Long (1893–1935), known as the ‘Kingfish’, and much followed and much castigated as ‘a populist demagogue’. Woodward told Pound that Long had ‘a splendid education—brilliant mind…with the manners and speech of a ward politician or a street corner orator’. ‘Better a wild man that wants justice than a tame one who just don’t care for the people and who won’t look at the nature of money,’ such was Pound’s attitude. On that basis he urged American Social Creditors to work with Long, though they might disagree, as he did himself, with some of his ideas. The essential thing was that ‘Long WANTS a new economic system. The root is in VOLITION; in the direction of the WILL.’ As evidence of direction he cited Long’s ‘radio speech of March 7th [1935]’, in which he had spoken against the situation in which too few controlled the nation’s money and wealth, while too many were without the money ‘to buy the things they needed for life and comfort’; along with that he cited Long’s broadside, ‘The Share Our Wealth Principles’, which affirmed as a founding American idea ‘that all the people should share in the land’s abundance’. ‘Huey for president’, Pound fantasized,2 wanting to see him where he would be most able to put ‘his WILL into practice’. Long, however, was assassinated in the Louisiana State Capitol in September 1935.
ABC of Economics (1933) in gists.
Exhibits from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long.
‘The root is in VOLITION; in the direction of the WILL’—that emphasis, with the implication that the means to the desired end of social justice are negotiable, is the key to understanding Pound’s economic propaganda. The means and methods by which the fruits of abundance might be distributed were not of fundamental importance to him. ‘With sane economics’, he told Woodward, ‘the political system can be pretty much ad lib/.’ So Mussolini’s totalitarian regime could be ‘utterly necessary in Italy’ given that country’s history and present conditions, but ‘inconceivable’ in England with its parliamentary tradition, or in America with its own democratic principles that it ought to be following. The system of distribution could be equally ‘ad lib’, whether by a ‘national dividend’ or a ‘material dividend’ or whatever else, just so long as everyone received enough to ensure life, liberty, and happiness. Pound cared about the end, but not so much about the means.
Moreover, the instrumental ideas which he promoted so persistently were in no sense his own, being derived from Douglas and Gesell and other reformers, and being very widely known and debated in that time of economic crisis. Indeed in respect of having ideas about how best to manage the nation’s credit Pound was rather like Churchill in the anecdote in canto 41: ‘“Never”, said Winston…waste time having ideas”,’ ‘“Be a GUN, and shoot others’ munitions”.’ That is very much how Pound behaved in the field of economics, shooting off the gists and piths of a few of the more explosive ideas that were then current with the aim of driving them into ‘the mind of the people’, and more especially into ‘the few powerful public leaders who really desire the good of the people’. His purpose was to generate a passion for social justice, and to move leading politicians to enact it.
‘Can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics’, so Griffith, the Sinn Fein leader, had informed him back in 1921, and now Pound seemed determined to do something about that. The people and their politicians had to be motivated, their will to act had to be roused. The rationale of his ABC of Economics, he declared, was ‘to base a system on will, not on intellect’, on ‘will toward order, will toward “justice” or fairness, desire for civilization’, and on ‘the intensity of that will’. He was consciously echoing Dante’s definition of rectitude as direction of the will towards justice, and conscious also of being probably ‘the first writer to formulate an economic system…from that point’. Volitionist economics, ‘an heretical movement’, was to be his original contribution to the science of economics, the heresy being in his seeking to make the economics answer to the desire and the will for social justice. In doing that he was very deliberately shifting its ground from cold science to ethics and morality.
Dante also wrote, in his De Monarchia, that it is the love of justice which animates and directs the will towards right action, and from that it would follow that to ‘move ’em’ Pound should be rousing a love of the desired order of things. Pound’s agitprop prose, however, as he frankly admitted in 1928 when comparing himself to Williams, was given rather to murderous hate than to love. A typical letter would go like this one in the New English Weekly in May 1934:
Sir,—Without claiming that stamp scrip distributes purchasing power as effectively as the Douglas dividend would do, there are the following reasons for mentioning it (stamp scrip) LOUDLY and on every possible occasion.
That was to charge the idea of stamp scrip with vehemence and invective, and the effect was unlikely to be a better understanding of it or a deeper desire to have it put into practice. A reader not already in the know might be some time discovering that ‘Unterguggenberger’ was the mayor of the small town of Wörgl in the Austrian Tyrol who had been responsible for issuing, in the autumn of 1931, a local currency or stamp scrip of the sort advocated by the economist Silvio Gesell (1862–1930). The scrip was good for payment for goods and services within Wörgl, but to remain valid it had to have a stamp worth 1 per cent of its face value stuck on to it every month, and that was both a tax and an incentive to keep spending. The town had been on the verge of bankruptcy because of the Depression, and suddenly, within little more than a year, it was prospering thanks to the speedy circulation of just 12,000 or 30,000 schillings (accounts differ) of this local money. The more often it was used the more value was got out of it. The town’s books were balanced and, so the story goes, it had been able to spend up to the value of 100,000 schillings on public works including a new bridge and a ski jump. There are appropriately arcane explanations of how the miracle was worked, but Pound hardly went into them. He would make more of how the story ended. In November 1933 the National Bank took the mayor to court and had him found guilty of violating its sole right to issue banknotes. The bank was terrified, Pound concluded, by the demonstration that ‘the state need not borrow’, and ‘all the slobs in Europe were terrified’. So the Wörgl experiment came to represent in Pound’s repeated references to it not so much the virtue of Gesell’s stamp scrip, as how enlightenment might come to a small town only to be snuffed out by ‘the enemies of mankind’ determined to maintain their ‘strangle hold on the unfortunate townsmen’.
Even when he was writing for the first time to a US senator Pound could be instantly on the attack as if assuming the worst. Senator William A. Borah of Idaho held views similar to Pound’s on a number of issues, among them the need to restore purchasing power instead of reducing acreage and destroying food. In 1933, when the Bankhead–Pettengill bill was before the Senate calling for an issue of $1b in stamp scrip to get the currency circulating, Pound wrote to Borah,
Sir: As an Idahoan, it wd. interest me to know whether your ignorance of the Bankhead bill is real or pretended, and whether the American press boycotts mention of it from decent or indecent motives.
Is there a political game on, which requires that Stamp Scrip remain unmentioned, or are all of you crooks and ALL OF YOU afraid to touch the dangerous subject of a real and PROVED remedy for a lot of trouble?
Borah replied mildly but pointedly, ‘“As an Idahoan” I suggest that you come back to Idaho and to the United States. It isn’t fair to give us so much “hell” at so great a distance.’ Pound continued to write to Borah from Italy, in fragmentary, exclamatory, hectoring letters, putting him straight on stamp scrip and related matters and laying out for him the basic platform on which he should run for president. His influence on the senator, not surprisingly, was negligible. After a couple of years Borah wrote back a brief note, ‘Thank you for your several letters.…We have had a perfectly marvelous autumn…’ Later, in 1937, he would be saying in his speeches that any American citizen who advocated or believed in Fascism must be a traitor to America.
In one of his more extreme bids for influence with the powerful Pound nominated himself to be Secretary of the Treasury under Huey Long as president, in a letter which affected the lingo and persona of a gangster’s enforcer, or of the redneck rough-houser he may have imagined Long to be:
| KINGFISH; You iz’ goin’ ter |
| need a CABINET |
| DIFFERENT |
|
from the present one. You iz goin to need a sekkertary of |
| the treasury whose name is NOT Morgenthau/stein, or |
| Richberg/ovitch |
| or Mordecai Ezekiel OR Perkins. |
|
You is going to need a Sekkertary of the Treasury, |
|
THAT’S ME. |
|
I’m a tellin you ’cause no one else will. |
| LET THE NATION USE ITS OWN CREDIT |
|
instead of paying tax FOR IT |
| to a gang of sonsofbitches that DON’T own it. |
The senator’s response, if any, is not recorded. The letter might have amused him, if he ever saw it; it is unlikely he or anyone around him would have given it a moment’s serious consideration. As a way of getting his attention it was surely self-defeating.
Pound’s economic propaganda is often rubbished as ‘crank economics’, as ill informed, wrong-headed, even wicked. In fact, so far as it was advocating his chosen ethically based economic prescriptions, it was none of those things. But there was crankiness, there was self-defeating error, in the manner of his advocacy. One fundamentally disabling defect, given the nature of his project, was that the predominance of rage and hate meant that there was too little evident love of the justice he was after. Even when there is a glimpse of the shining city set on a hill, or a radiant image of the just society to move the will to act, it is attributed to Fascism—there seem to be none in the capitalist democracies—and Fascism, after 1935, ceased outside Italy to be a recommendation for any line of action.
A further and not unrelated disability was that generally there was more vehemence and invective than specifying detail in his attacks. It was as if he were impatiently assuming that the reader ought already to be in possession of the facts; though it could also seem that he did not himself have immediate and intimate knowledge of what he was going on about. Why, for example, did he hate Andrew Mellon?3 As he well knew, it needs ‘a sufficient phalanx of particulars’ to enforce a general truth; and yet in his prose propaganda his tendency was to assert the general truth as if it were self-evident fact—‘It is definitely a form of currency (auxiliary) that cannot be hoarded’—and then to enforce it with a charge of emotion, usually negative emotion—‘the enemies of mankind are afraid of it’. The emotion, the invective, stands in for the demonstrative detail; and that leaves the desired constructive action as a relatively abstract idea, while any will towards it is directed by a hatred of evil rather than by a positive attraction toward the good to be done.
Worse, the evil itself tends to be defined by the fear and hatred directed against it rather than by a demonstration of its effects. All we are told about ‘the enemies of mankind’ in that letter is that they are terrified of stamp scrip and will not discuss it; and instead of their names, places, actual words, we read ‘ranks of filth’, ‘liars, scoundrels and paid pimps’. Sometimes the hatred is given a more definite focus by naming names, as in ‘Morgenthau/stein, or Richberg/ovitch’; and the names more often than not are Jewish or are given a Jewish twist, so that the stereotyped and prejudicial association of Jews with money is stirred up and anti-Semitism is drawn on to reinforce the hatred of the evil banks do. ‘The people are damn well FED UP with slimy and ambiguous crooks’, Pound wrote in a letter to Borah in May 1935, ‘also with Morgenthaus, Baruchs, Mordecai Ezekiels, Lehman’s etc.’ Those names, generalized and altogether detached from anything in particular the individual persons might have done or said, but potentially charged with the endemic fear and hatred of Jews, are made to stand in for the entire private banking system and its ‘stranglehold’ on America. In that way Pound’s ‘will to order’ would be more and more subverted in his fighting prose by the will to destroy, with Jewish names and the Jewish race standing in for what was to be destroyed. Anti-Semitism would become the dark force in his propaganda for revolutionary justice in America, to the tragic undoing of his enlightened intention.
And yet—and this is hard to take in—Pound’s anti-Semitism was, like his stamp scrip or National Dividend, instrumental, a means to the end of financial revolution, not an end in itself. He did not hate Jews, he hated what they could be made to stand for; and when writing to those who were simply anti-Semitic he became concerned lest their prejudice distract them from the real enemy. When he became disillusioned with Roosevelt for continuing in the old way of financing public works by borrowing from the private banks, he called him ‘Roose(n)velt’, said he was under the thumb of ‘the Lehmanns, Barachs, Morgentsteins, etc.’, and was ‘fundamentally the usurers’ champion’. That was using anti-Semitism to attack the President’s economic policy. But to the Silver Shirts, who were modelling themselves on Nazism and were as anti-Semitic as Hitler could wish, Pound wrote that the ‘S/S/ should attack financial tyranny BY WHOMEVER exercised, i.e. whether by international jew or local aryan’. And to an English writer in sympathy with Nazism and its anti-Semitism he wrote, ‘The anti-semitic fury blunts perception’, that is, it distracts attention from all the usurers who are not Jewish, and ‘EVERY IRRELEVANCY weakens your attack’. His real enemy was always the banking system which he held responsible for a great deal of human misery. He could see that anti-Semitism would distract and deflect the attack from that enemy; and still he would persist in using it as a weapon in his economic war. He was able to do that because his objection to it was superficial, merely instrumental. And his indifference to its inhumanity would negate his humane intention.
There can be no doubt though that he was genuinely struggling to bring about a just society. And he really did believe that the principles of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence were made new in Mussolini’s speech in the Piazza before Milan Cathedral ‘on the 6th of October anno XII (1934)’, when the Duce promised to resolve ‘the problem of the distribution of wealth, so that we will no longer experience the illogical, paradoxical and cruel fact of poverty in the midst of abundance’. Pound understood that to mean ‘No more an economy putting the accent on individual profit, but an economy concerned for the interest of the whole people (interesse colletivo)’. That made the Fascist dictator, in Pound’s view, the proponent of a higher social justice, and a shining example to the United States.
Making music of history: ‘Cantos 31–41’
Here is another paradox. In his cantos, even when dealing with those same matters of economics and banking in the United States and in Italy, Pound was able to write in a manner totally opposed to that of his agitprop prose. In the cantos there are no urgings to instant action, no raging animosities, no generalizations and abstractions. Instead there are great heapings up of demonstrative detail, whole phalanxes of particulars; and readers are not told what to think but—often to their dismay—are required to discover their own reactions and to draw their own conclusions from the data laid out before them. They find themselves in an absolutely different mental world, though of course it is objectively the same world, only the mind perceiving it has altered in its way of operating. Now it is intent on what is to be known and understood rather than on what is to be done, and the aggressive mentality of the activist wielding a range of fixed ideas against the enemies of society gives way completely to its opposite, the open intelligence of the poet about its proper work.
‘An epic is history set to music’, Pound noted about 1936, meaning, presumably, that the poet would be studying the facts of history with a mind sensitive to their harmonies and discords, and intent on discriminating their values, their moral or ethical overtones, and on composing them into a pattern to appease the humane rage for order.
‘Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’ Behind that lies the principle of le mot juste; but for the poet there is more to it than the accurate word; there must be justice also in the arrangement of the words and in their tones and rhythms. That sort of justice, the natural justice of language, does not come naturally. It was as much as he could do, it was like forging pokers, Pound told another young poet, Mary Barnard, ‘to get economic good and evil into verbal manifestation, not abstract, but so that the monetary system is as concrete as fate and not an abstraction’.
It is demanding work for the poet, and even more so for the reader. This is what the readers of the New York little magazine called Pagany had to contend with in the summer of 1931:
| Tempus loquendi, |
| Tempus tacendi. |
| Said Mr Jefferson: ‘It wd. have given us |
|
time.’ |
| ‘modern dress for your statue… |
| ‘I remember having written you while Congress sat at Annapolis, |
| ‘on water communication between ours and the western country, |
| ‘particularly the information…of the plain between |
| ‘Big Beaver and Cuyahoga, which made me hope that a canal |
| ‘…navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. You must have had |
| ‘occasion of getting better information on this subject |
| ‘and if you wd. oblige me |
| ‘by a communication of it. I consider this canal, |
| ‘if practicable, as a very important work. |
|
T. J. to General Washington, 1787 |
| …no slaves north of Maryland district… |
| …flower found in Connecticut that vegetates when suspended in air…. |
| …screw more effectual if placed below surface of water. |
Those details at the opening of canto 31 are all, apart from the Latin lines, from the historical record, mostly from the ‘ten fat volumes’ of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson which Eliot had been given by his father and had passed on to Pound. The whole canto in fact is made up of snippets of the known history of the American Revolution and its times, and so too are the following three cantos. They are composed of what Jefferson actually said and wrote, and of what his friends and fellow founders of the United States of North America, Madison and John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the rest, actually said and wrote. Pound invented nothing, put no words into their mouths. What he did was to select passages, or, more often, phrases, from their correspondence with each other and from their journals or state records, and set them down item by item. Sometimes the source and context is indicated, but often not; and how one item might relate to another is left to the reader to fathom.
Many readers, if not most, give up and write off the poem as a ragbag stuffed at random with odd scraps out of unfamiliar books. An early reviewer of Cantos XXXI–XLI in the New York Nation amused himself with the conceit of Mr Pound taking correspondence courses in such subjects as ‘History of the U.S. Treasury from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the Original Documents)’ and making notes diligently on small pieces of paper which a gust of wind scattered over the hills about Rapallo, and which he then picked up and sent to the printer as he found them. Seventy years on and J. M. Coetzee, the distinguished novelist, critic, and then member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, still felt able to assure the seriously cultured readers of the New York Review of Books that The Cantos is ‘a great ruin…built out of fragments’ and best ‘quietly dropped’, apart from ‘a handful of anthology pieces’. The only alternative, according to one determined scholar, William M. Chace, would be an immense labour of dogged source-hunting and explication. The sources must be known before any sense can be made of a canto, he insisted, while recognizing the very real risk of thus burying the poem beneath a mountain of prosing exposition. That way one might well be turning a ragbag into a dustheap.
Pound firmly dismissed the ragbag reaction in an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1968, and at the same time he raised the possibility of an unprosaic approach. ‘They say they are chosen at random, but that’s not the way it is’, he said, ‘It’s music. Musical themes that find each other out.’ He had evidently attempted to explain this to Yeats, but without much success. ‘Can impressions that are in part visual, in part metrical, be related like the notes of a symphony,’ Yeats had queried sceptically in the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), or ‘has the author been carried beyond reason by a theoretical conception?’
One would have to allow that a music made of words will have quite different possibilities and conditions as compared to a music of sound only. Its resonances and its accords and discords will arise as much from the meanings and associations of the words and images as from their melody and rhythm. It would be a music of the whole mind at work. Thus there is an intellectual chord in the first two lines of canto 31, A time of speaking, | A time of silence. The resonant phrases are from Ecclesiastes, and they go with the Preacher’s exhortation, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’ Speak, act, while you have time in this world of vanities, is the Preacher’s message. Jefferson’s saying ‘It wd. have given us time’ rhymes with that, and with both time and speaking, not to the ear but to the understanding. A feeling for the time is there again in ‘“modern dress for your [i.e. Washington’s] statue”’. Speaking and acting in time modulates in the following lines through ‘remember having written you…water communication…information…a canal | navigation…better information…a communication of it…T. J. to General Washington, 1787’. Those lines compose an ‘intellectual complex’ or vortex and generate a general idea of constructive communications at a particular moment in time. The reader makes out their idea precisely by attending to ‘musical’ relations over and above the straight sense of Jefferson’s prose. The last two lines of the extract are another instance of themes finding each other out. Jefferson’s insight, that the newly invented ship’s screw will be ‘more effectual if placed below surface of water’, first accords (as a matter of scientific interest) with the curious flower ‘that vegetates when suspended in air’; and then plays off against it, visually, and also intellectually since the screw is a product not of vegetable nature but of human invention and insight. All that is an effect quickly passed over, and yet the pair of lines encapsulates an enlightened culture out of which came the discovery that would prove to be a major contribution to navigation. Things not syntactically connected can link up thematically.
When they do so link up they are likely to yield more than their surface meaning. Two lines can specify a culture at a certain moment; a dozen and a half lines can define the virtù of Thomas Jefferson. In Pound’s view, as he expressed it in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Jefferson was the shaping force in the American Revolution, guiding and governing it ‘by what he wrote and said more or less privately’, especially in ‘conversation with his more intelligent friends’, and with his influence lasting through to Van Buren’s presidency. ‘He canalized American thought by means of his verbal manifestations’—and that is what Pound has him doing in cantos 31 to 33. His Jefferson exhibits, in the detail of his private correspondence as much as in drafting the Declaration of Independence, a highly developed ‘civic sense’, characterized by a rational direction of will towards what will be useful and beneficial to the new Union, and by unwavering contempt for ignorance and error, especially in unelected heads of state and aristocrats. He stands, in effect, as the inventor of the new American paideuma.
A major theme running through canto 31 is that the basis of Jefferson’s revolution is intelligence in all its senses: first the gathering of accurate intelligence about whatever needs to be known; then the intelligence that carries sound knowledge into practice; and beyond these, enlightenment about the ends of government. The counter-theme, in Jefferson’s and John Adams’s observations, is a general lack of intelligence in the way Europe’s kings and governments manage their affairs. The theme is taken up and developed in canto 32, beginning with this statement of it, ‘“The revolution,” said Mr Adams, | “Took place in the minds of the people”.’ In the next canto he will add, ‘and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 in the course of the fifteen years…before Lexington’. That is a quite radical revision of the usual perception of how the American states freed themselves from British rule. The War of Independence, 1776 and its battles, all of that is eclipsed by ‘“Took place in the minds of the people”’, where the overthrow of monarchical government is registered in the democratic ‘“minds [plural] of the people [collective singular]”’. At the heart of canto 32 is a setting off against each other of the new mind of America and the old European mind. Jefferson would civilize the Indians, but not in ‘the ancient ineffectual’ way of religious conversion—
| The following has been successful. First, to raise cattle |
| whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property… |
| arithmetic to compute that value, thirdly writing, to |
| keep accounts, and here they begin to labour; |
| enclose farms, and the women to weave and spin… |
| fourth to read Aesop’s Fables, which are their first delight |
| along with Robinson Crusoe. Creeks, Cherokees, the latter |
| now instituting a government. |
That is of course a purely eighteenth-century, patriarchal, and un-Native American model of civilization. One might even call it European, if it were not that the monarchical European way, in Jefferson’s view, was ‘to keep [the people] down’
|
by hard labour, poverty, ignorance, |
| and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings |
| as that unremitting labour shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus |
| barely to sustain a scant life. And these earnings |
| they apply to maintain their privileged orders in splendour and idleness |
| to fascinate the eyes of the people…as to an order of superior beings |
In fact these ‘superior beings’ behaved as ‘cannibals’ eating their own people. Worse, having always their own way meant they never had to think about anything, ‘and thus are become as mere animals’—
| The successor to Frederic of Prussia, a mere hog |
| in body and mind, Gustavus and Joseph of Austria |
| were as you know really crazy, and George 3d was in |
| a straight waistcoat. |
‘A couple | of shepherd dogs, true-bred’ would be more worth importing from Europe, as being likely to prove more intelligent and more useful for any rational purpose.
Canto 33 states its general theme in its opening lines, with John Adams writing to Jefferson in November 1815—a few months after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo—that all despotisms, whether monarchical, aristocratical, oligarchical, or of ‘a majority of a popular assembly’, are ‘equally arbitrary, bloody, | and in every respect diabolical’. Jefferson had observed this in his own fashion in 1779, in the case of a quartermaster who failed in his duty to distribute to the troops the resources plentifully available in the country. Whether the possessor of wealth and power be ‘baron, bojar or rich man matters very little’, Adams remarked, implying that private interest would always win out over public service. The canto moves through various instances of that to come to Marx’s account, in Das Kapital, of how the diabolical factory-owners of England ruthlessly exploited child labour while denouncing the ineffectual factory inspectors ‘as a species of revolutionary commissar pitilessly sacrificing the unfortunate labourers to their humanitarian fantasies’. The final self-serving despotism is that of the American Federal Reserve banks—this is in Senator Brookhart’s time, in 1931, the year in which the canto was written—and the bankers’ manipulation of the public credit for private gain and their insider dealing marks the extent of the betrayal from within America of Jefferson’s democratic revolution.
Canto 34 goes back in time to the beginnings of that betrayal. Pound condensed into seven printed pages Allan Nevins’s 575-page Diary of John Quincy Adams (1928), a selection from the twelve large volumes of The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848, published by Charles Francis Adams between 1874 and 1877. John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), son of John Adams, spent his entire life in the public service, as a diplomat in Europe (1794–1816), and at home as senator, Secretary of State to President Monroe (1817–25), President (1825–9), and representative in Congress (1829–48). Throughout his last twenty years in the House he worked tirelessly, and of course unsuccessfully, for the abolition of slavery in the Southern states. Pound thought that ‘the new or then renascent CIVIC sense’ of John Adams and Jefferson ‘reached its highest point in John Quincy Adams’. The canto demonstrates that, and demonstrates also that both as President and in Congress he failed to win consent to his enlightened policies.
This is a large and ambitious canto and its composition is worth pausing over. Pound began by working through, possibly ‘skim-reading’, the Nevins abridgement of the Diary, and copying fragments onto a ‘Blocco Rapallo’ notepad. He then typed up from the notepad a first draft, occasionally altering the wording or phrasing, but keeping to the order of the excerpts and including nearly all of them. The whole canto was almost there in the earliest notes. Some further revising of the first typescript and then of a second typescript, apart from adding some telling details (such as ‘“The fifth element: mud.” said Napoleon’), was simply intent on clarifying the sense and refining the music of sound and rhythm. The canto can be divided into three main sections or movements, the first covering Adams’s time as a diplomat in Russia and Paris (1809–16); the second his return to America and service as Secretary of State and President; and the third his twenty years as representative for Massachusetts.
Analysis of the first movement reveals how Pound was composing his fragments into a form of music. (Underlinings and other markings, bold type for key words, have all been added; also the dividing spaces, apart from the space after ‘Journal de l’Empire’.)
Evidently it is necessary to possess or to be willing to acquire a little historical knowledge. Beyond that, reading the canto involves distinguishing one item from another, discriminating the bearing of each one, then making out their relations and interactions as the organization of the particular details builds the dramatic contrast between Adams’s will to civilized order and Napoleon’s barbaric—the mention of Tamburlaine is not accidental—will to power.
The common reader is entitled to say, ‘I can’t read it, that’s not my way of reading.’ The critic, if willing and able to read it musically, will quite properly question the utility and the validity of this way of thinking. But one thing that cannot justly be said is that the writing lacks form and makes no sense. Far from being a random ragbag those pages are thoroughly organized by an intensely active intelligence, only that intelligence is making out the meaning of things in an original and still unfamiliar mode. We are accustomed to the re-orderings of our ways of perceiving the world in the visual arts and in music, but we do find it more difficult when it comes to words to venture beyond the reliable disciplines of hard-learned grammar, syntax, and logic. But there it is, whoever would read The Cantos must risk a new way of ordering things in the mind, one which might lead to an unconventional understanding of the world.
At the least this ideogrammic method, as Pound called it, has the virtue of forcing the mind to attend to the detail and to the various possible relations of the things that concern it; and thus of keeping the mind free from powerful and dangerously simplifying generalizations and abstractions. For Pound himself it was the antidote to the one-eyed or closed mind, and it made all the difference, in his own case, between the tendency in his propaganda to narrow down into murderous prejudice and the open and growing vision of his poetry.
In the second and third movements of canto 34 John Quincy Adams is back in America. He reflects upon the prevailing manners and morals there and finds little to praise. ‘Banks breaking all over the country’, he observes, most of them fraudulently, and ‘prostrate every principle of economy’. In the minds of statesmen, ‘moral considerations seldom | appear to have much weight…| unless connected with popular feelings’. Henry Clay, bidding to be Vice-President, is ‘Defective in elementary knowledge and with a very | undigested system of ethics’. In fact, ‘almost all eminent men in this country’ are ‘half educated’. When he was President, ‘They (congress) wd. do nothing for | the education of boys but to make soldiers, they | wd. not endow a university (in 1826)’. Later, from the House of Representatives, he tried unsuccessfully to prevent the states from sacrificing ‘all their rights to the public lands’. (He might have saved some of the nation’s land ‘for the nation’, Pound remarked in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, if he had not been ‘deficient in capacity for human contacts’.) Everywhere he observed greed subverting the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, principles which he still steadfastly defended—
| The world, the flesh, the devils in hell are |
| Against any man who now in the North American Union |
| shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to |
| put down the African slave trade… |
The canto closes with a Latin inscription, ‘Constans proposito.…| Justum et Tenacem’, words which, as Adams recorded, were applied to him in recognition of his constancy of purpose and his tenacity in the abolitionist cause. Alongside them Pound set the Chinese character for true sincerity, which he read as an upright man standing by his word.
With that character Pound seals Adams’s self-portrait in his diaries as a faithful upholder of the revolutionary values of Jefferson and his father. Indeed he appears to stand, in his own account, as the solitary upholder of those values among a mob of venal, corrupt, and hostile mediocrities. However, the canto, as a dramatic monologue will do, brings out other less flattering features. The other side of his self-righteous isolation might be that ‘deficient…capacity for human contacts’, a considerable handicap in a politician, and he does indeed declare himself at one point in the canto ‘a misanthropist, an unsocial savage’. Moreover, whereas Jefferson and John Adams established the revolution ‘in the minds of the people’ through networks of correspondence, John Quincy, as we read him, is talking only to himself. He may be dramatizing what has happened to the democratic revolution, that it now depends on the mind of one man. At the same time, though, he is revealing his own unfitness to govern efficiently in a democracy. He suffered from ‘puritanitis’, Pound wrote in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, implying an inability to take humanity as it comes and to be committed to the politically possible. He was too absolute in his demands for justice and for social justice, perhaps because too concerned to be justified. He saved his own honour, Rhadamanthus might judge, but the state he could not save. A less severe judge could say, he stood for what was right, but could not bring it into effect. In canto 37 it will appear that Martin Van Buren, whom Adams rather looks down on as ‘L’ami de tout le monde’ and as a protector of the scandalous Mrs Eaton against ‘the moral party’, will be more successful in defending the public currency against the greed of private interests.
The banking and financial system will be the dominant concern of a sequence of cantos starting with 37. First though, the story of the American Revolution is interrupted by two very different cantos.
Canto 35 is concerned, in its first half, with the condition of ‘Mitteleuropa’ in the aftermath of the 1914–18 war and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A series of anecdotes in the sardonic manner of ‘Moeurs contemporains’ suggests that with the passing of the imperial order the prevailing values are now those of the cultivated Viennese Jewish family, personal, aesthetic, most warmly familial. One comment is, ‘sensitivity | without direction’; but another goes, ‘and the fine thing was that the family did not | wire about papa’s death for fear of disturbing the concert | which might seem to contradict the general indefinite wobble’. The general impression, especially after the four cantos concerned with the values of good government, is that there is now little or no civic sense in Austria and Hungary. The second half cuts to Mantua in 1401 and Venice in 1423, to observe two varieties of civic sense in that earlier age of Europe. In Mantua a loan bank is decreed, ‘to lend money on cloth so that they cease not to | labour for lack of money’; and with that arrangements are made to give Mantuan cloth a competitive edge over the surrounding cities, ‘to the augment of industry’ and increase in the wealth of the city. Also, it is sardonically remarked, to the luxurious clothing of ‘Madame ὕλη, Madame la Porte Parure’, alias Lucrezia Borgia who came, in canto 30, clothed ‘with the price of the [altar] candles’. Venice also is wholly materialistic in its dealings, regulating all trading in and out of Venice ‘for the upkeep of “The Dominant”’. Both cases, the Mantuan and the Venetian, exemplify a civic sense directed by a rational but rather limited self-interest.
Canto 36, placed in the middle and as the pivot of the 1934 Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI, consists of a translation of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’—a radically different translation from the one printed in Rime and the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay—and to that is attached, as if in response, a passage drawing in the Carolingian philosopher Scotus Erigena (?800–?877) and the Mantuan troubadour Sordello (?1189–?1255). Suddenly we are in another realm from that of the surrounding cantos, in the realm of ‘the intelligence of love’, apparently at the furthest remove from the events and concerns of the capitalist era. That distance suggests the readiest relation of this canto to the other ten, that it is presenting a reach of intelligence lost to the modern mind. Certainly Pound’s American observers see nothing of it in the courts of Europe, nor in Napoleon, nor in the owners of banks and factories, nor indeed among the majority of their fellow Americans; and that could be because that concept of love does not enter into their conversation and is simply not part of their culture. Nonetheless it may prove pertinent to our understanding of Pound’s representation of them, and to his dominant concern with economic order.
He gave a hint in 1933, when, in responding to the question ‘what has been the most important meeting of your life?’, he wrote that it was with Guido Cavalcanti, and that the meeting of minds was important for its bearing on ‘le problème des surréalistes: état de conscience et (ou) force morale’. The problem would be in the ‘and (or)’—to cultivate hyper-real (or ‘super-in-human’) states of consciousness with a moral or ethical direction, or to go for the one or the other. The remarkable thing, given that Cavalcanti is likely to be thought of as a love poet, is that there is no mention of romantic love. His significance for Pound is now in the sphere of the intellect and the will to order.
The argument of the Canzone d’amore, very simply put, is that the Light which is the life of all we know illuminates the receptive mind, takes form there, and thus informs and directs it to enlightened action. When Pound wrote that Jefferson ‘informed’ the American Revolution, ‘both in the sense of shaping it from the inside and of educating it’, he is likely to have had that idea in mind. The form of the beloved in that case was of course not figured as a donna ideale, but as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States; and its shaping power was constantly manifest in Jefferson’s ‘verbal manifestations’, in John Adams’s care for justice (the subject of the later ‘Adams Cantos’), and also in John Quincy Adams’s clear sense of the principles of the democratic revolution. One might say that the essential form of democratic justice so profoundly possessed their minds that it directed their every political word and action. The effect of thinking back to their cantos in the light of the Canzone d’amore is to have the focus shift from their words and deeds to that ‘forméd trace in [the] mind’, a telling shift from what passes in time to what is ‘in the mind indestructible’. In the Pisan prison camp Pound will be encouraged by the conviction that the precisely defined Constitution, though ‘in jeopardy | and that state of things not very new either’, is among the resurgent icons ‘formed in the mind | to remain there | formato locho |… to forge Achaia’.
Following the paradisal canto 36 we descend again into the purgatory of political action, and then, in canto 38, into the inferno of those who profit from arms sales.
Canto 37 contains the major episode in Pound’s treatment of the American Revolution in this suite of cantos: the critical war for supremacy between the effectively private Bank of the United States and President Jackson representing the people of the United States. The war was carried on in the Senate, in the financial economy, and in the press from 1829 to 1835. Pound took as his principal source for that part of the canto The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (published in 1918). Van Buren (1788–1862) was Secretary of State and then Vice-President (1833–7) to Andrew Jackson, and succeeded him as President (1837–41). Pound credited him with having been the brains behind Jackson’s saving the nation by freeing the Treasury from the despotism of the Bank, and the canto could lead the reader to see him as the main protagonist in that war, and to assume that his is the epitaph ‘HIC | JACET | FISCI LIBERATOR’, ‘here lies the Treasury’s Liberator’. However, in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s fully documented account of the Bank war, in his Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the Working of the American Government (1854), the hero is unquestionably President Jackson, and Van Buren is not seen to play a leading role, in part because while Vice-President he chaired the Senate Debates and could have no voice in them. (That difference raises the question of historical accuracy to which I will return.)
The first third of canto 37 weaves together thirty or more items, most of them things said by Van Buren or taken up by him over the many years from 1813 when he was a New York state senator to 1840 when he was President. The passage is a prime instance of Pound’s method of adding one detail to another without providing the conventional syntactical and logical connections, in order to allow a more complex web of relations to develop. Banks fraudulently failing, wealthy landowners and factory owners, high judges and the Chief Justice himself, senators, financial speculators, all are implicated in defrauding immigrants of the value of their banknotes, in driving settlers off the land they would cultivate, in denying workers the vote, in preventing local government of local affairs, and in ‘“decrying government credit. |…in order to feed on the spoils”’. Van Buren exposes and opposes this systematic injustice of the wealthy and powerful towards both the people and the state. He reaffirms the basic cause of ‘our revolution’, No taxation without representation; he insists that government revenue ‘be kept under public control’ and not be given over to the banks to speculate with; and he endorses President Jackson’s saying ‘No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, | Wealth ain’t’. All the details add up to an account of Van Buren’s ‘life-long fight for economic and social rightness in the U.S.’; and at the same time they indicate a national state of affairs in which the Bank war was a major and symptomatic event.
A condensed account of that war, from Van Buren’s point of view, is given in the rest of the canto, interspersed with his views of certain of his contemporaries, mostly unflattering, and with some of his political opponents’ unflattering views of him. John Quincy Adams had remarked ‘servility’ in him, others that he was ‘a profligate’; he remarks in return that Adams ‘deplored that representatives be paralyzed | by the will of constituents’. In short, he observes the imperfections of others and they observe his in the usual way of politics. But in the serious business of putting an end to the despotic power of the Bank he is impersonal and coolly forensic. He gives figures for how much the Bank increased the amount it had out on loan, from forty to seventy million dollars within two years, when its charter was coming up for renewal; he mocks Daniel Webster’s then complaining that if the charter were not immediately renewed that thirty million dollars of loans would have to be called in; he gives figures again to show that while the Bank controls ‘6 millions of government money | (and a majority in the Senate)’, the President has control of only ‘15 to 20 thousand’; he charges the Bank with deliberately creating panic to obtain ‘control over the public mind’, and to keep control over the public credit; and he charges Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, with ‘controlling government’s funds | to the betrayal of the nation’ and never hesitating, on the precedent of Alexander Hamilton the Bank’s first founder, ‘to jeopard the general | for advance of particular interests’. In the event President Jackson vetoed the Senate’s bill which would have renewed the charter, gradually withdrew the government’s funds from the Bank of the United States, and so ‘saved the nation and freed the American treasury’.
Those are Pound’s words, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, only he was applying them there to Van Buren, as he does at the end of the canto. For that he could be open to the charge of misrepresenting the historical facts. But then it could be said in his defence that he was presenting an interpretation of the facts, as historians generally do. In crediting Van Buren with freeing the public treasury from private control he was in effect declaring that while Jackson wielded the presidential veto it was Van Buren’s brains and will that were the efficient force directing him in that act. There is more going on here than an alternative version of who did what. Pound was privileging the moral force over the mere fact, in order to create another Jeffersonian hero, an ethical hero, consistently committed to a just ordering of society.
‘Canto XXXVIII. where is FACTS’, Pound wrote to Ford in 1934, ‘where facts is what there aint nothing else BUT.’ He had been telling him how to read the earlier Hell cantos, and mentioned canto 38 in that connection, with the implication that it was a more ‘lyric’ hell and of ‘greater force’. Its hell is not that of England just after the war, but rather that of contemporary Europe at large; and its facts are mainly drawn from Pound’s current reading and recent conversations. It would have been thoroughly topical to the readers of Orage’s Douglasite New English Weekly in which it first appeared in September 1933.14
Its central and blindingly illuminating fact—a light from paradise, the canto declares it—is Douglas’s diagnosis of the canker at the core of capitalism, the fact that ‘the power to purchase can never | (under the present system) catch up with | prices at large’. That, Pound would have readers of his prose understand, is ‘THE evil of the capitalist system’, by which he meant ‘the basic evil causing all the particular evils’. The prevalent Depression would have been the most immediate particular evil, but this canto does not go into that.
Instead its final part brings into focus the anomalous fact that, while all else in the economy was sinking, the arms industry remained buoyant. Governments that could not or would not subsidize the consumption and thus the production of the necessities of life nevertheless could and did invest in the production and purchase of the means of mass killing. That meant that manufacturing and trading in armaments was more profitable, as Pound observed in one of his prose articles, ‘than the production of foodstuffs, the improvement of housing or any other act conducive to causing men to live like human beings’. In the canto he has ‘Herr Schneider of Creusot’ say, “More money from guns than from tractiles”’. Monsieur Schneider had said words to that effect in 1932, at a meeting of the Société Anonyme Schneider et cie at which a dividend was declared ‘of 100 francs on every 400 franc share’. ‘“While our departments of railway and marine…are suffering considerably from the general crisis”’, he reported, ‘“the departments preparing the defence of our country have…been more than moderately satisfactory.”’ Another French manufacturer of both agricultural machinery and artillery reported likewise that the ‘works engaged on war material are going nicely’ thanks to important government orders, while ‘the others work with great irregularity’ because ‘orders from private concerns have greatly diminished’. The arms industry was becoming the dominant force in the French economy. It was able to draw on unlimited bank credit since profits were guaranteed by government investment and a sellers’ market of both ‘friends and enemies of tomorrow’; it was able to control the press through its shareholdings; and it had its representatives in parliament. In effect the Comité des Forges, the union of arms manufacturers, now held the position in France that the Bank of the United States had held in America a century before, that of a virtual state within the state, and one able and willing to put its own business interests before the interests of the nation—‘“faire passer ses affaires | avant ceux de la nation”’. The war now, as Pound saw it, was ‘between humanity at large and one of the most ignoble oligarchies the world has yet suffered’. And that oligarchy, that military–industrial complex, was the creation, as the private Bank of the United States had been, of the evil financial system.
The canto carries a pertinent epigraph from Dante’s Paradiso, in which the Just Rulers speak of the woe brought upon Paris by Philip the Fair’s debasing the currency to finance a war. Its first line then names ‘Metevsky’ who figured in canto 18 as the type of the arms dealer who created his own military–industrial complex. What happens then, however, is disconcerting. A recapitulation of Metevsky’s way of selling arms to both sides is intercut with several unrelated items—the Pope’s curiosity about Marconi’s wire-less radio, Lucrezia wanting a rabbit’s foot, ‘(three children, five abortions and died of the last)’, and Dexter Kimball’s account of cigar-makers being read to ‘for the purpose of providing mental entertainment’ as they worked ‘almost automatically’. The canto goes on like that for the first one hundred lines, in the most extreme instance so far of Pound’s ‘not proceeding according to Aristotelian logic but according to the ideogrammic method of first heaping together the necessary components of thought’.
The ‘thought’ in this case turns out to be an ideogram composed of what was in the news in the mind of Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s, and signifying the lack of vital intelligence in that news. The immediate effect of the passage is rather like glancing through a newspaper and registering one miscellaneous item after another—the day’s news, gossip, titbits of interest, information both relevant and useless, opinions informed and misinformed, sheer silliness—all are indiscriminately thrown together. The news that the Italian marshes have been drained at last is buried in a brief item, with no thought given to how it was done or what it might signify. Ghandi’s revolutionary thought, ‘if we don’t buy any cotton | And at the same time don’t buy any guns’, receives no more attention than ‘the soap and bones dealer’s’ precisely wrong assurance, in May 1914, that there would be no war, ‘“On account of bizschniz relations”’. There are disconnected indications of the drift towards another war—Metevsky’s dealings, two Afghans at the Geneva Disarmament Conference looking to pick up ‘some guns cheap’, money in Persian oil-wells, ‘So-and-So’ with shares in Japan’s Mitsui corporation—but no conclusions are drawn as to what is happening and why. The culminating item concerns a modern Juliet being prepared for burial and knowing that her Romeo was suiciding outside her door, a stark image of failed communications amidst warring factions.
In all that heap of news one looks in vain for a European paideuma to set alongside Jefferson’s American paideuma, for a sense of values held in common, for some basis for constructive action beyond the business of making money from guns. And one looks in vain for what Pound clearly considered the most vital news, first, Douglas’s potentially life-saving and civilization-saving revelation of the economic cause of depressions and wars, and then intelligence of the war against humanity being carried on by the military–industrial complex. There is the ironic suggestion that the Africans who ‘spell words with a drum beat’ may be more efficient at getting their message through, and the further suggestion that there may be more intelligence in primitive ‘languages full of detail | Words that half mimic action; but | generalization is beyond them’. After a tailor’s wonderful assertion, at the close of the first movement, that ‘“Sewing machines will never come into general use”’, the poet breaks away to spell out the real news from Douglas and about the cannibals of Europe being at it again.
He then turns, in canto 39, from the contemporary shambles and goes right back to his starting point, Odysseus’ epic wandering after the shambles of Troy, and his being shown his way home by Circe, the bewitching goddess. Circe (like Aphrodite), born of Sun and the Sea, is a force of divine nature, seductively beautiful and wise in her ways, fatal to some men and to others life-enhancing.
Odysseus’ men, war-weary and hungry, thoughtlessly take what she offers and instantly she makes swine of them. That happens in the first movement of the canto, where Circe is the young witch, her ‘Song sharp at the edge, her crotch like a young sapling’; she is surrounded as if in a Titania’s brothel by ‘fucked girls and fat leopards’, ‘All heavy with sleep’; and she feeds the sailors ‘honey at the start and then acorns’. The rhythm of this movement is heavy, as if with her drug. Its first line is ‘Desolate is the roof where the cat sat’; and its last, ‘illa dolore obmutuit, pariter vocem’, tells how Hecuba, wife of King Priam of Troy and now an item in Odysseus’ spoils from that war, is struck speechless by the grief of coming upon the corpse of the one child she thought had survived. In Ovid’s account the line marks the ultimate desolation of that war fought for possession of a Circean woman. The first movement thus enforces the alienated view—an essentially male view—and the bestial experience of Circe’s powers.
The second movement is framed by Circe’s directions to Odysseus, given here in the original Greek—they will be given in translation in canto 47—and, at its close, by Odysseus’ awed response to being told he must go by way of Persephone’s bower, this in Divus’ Latin with a colloquial rendering, ‘Been to hell in a boat yet?’ This movement is relatively light and quick, and associates Circe with a series of light-bringing mother-figures. Egyptian Hathor, ‘bound in that box | afloat on the sea wave’, is a divinity of many benign aspects, mother of the sun, goddess of love and joy, of dance and music, and protector of the dead on their arrival in their other world. After Hathor come two lines from Dante’s Paradiso. In the first Dante declares that the delight of the circle of illuminated spirits surrounding the mother of Christ and singing ‘Regina coeli’, ‘O Queen of Heaven’, will never leave him; in the second, Beatrice, herself a resplendent light, empowers him to perceive as a fiery river of light, ‘fulvida di folgore’, the perfected forms of all that divine Love generates. And Circe, taking Odysseus into her bed, will initiate him into her mystery. He is prepared for the initiation by Hermes who gives him a herb to keep his mind and senses clear of Circe’s charm, yet bids him not refuse the pleasures of her bed. ‘Coition, the sacrament’, Pound had noted, ‘The door to knowledge of nature’; and in canto 36 he had followed Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone with the statement, ‘Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu’. The illumination of mind is the saving grace, the becoming conscious of ‘the unity with nature’ and actually seeing nature alive.
The vision of Circe’s mystery comes in the song and dance of the third movement, a rite of Spring out of Catullus and the Pervigilium Veneris. Instead of ‘fucked girls’ there is ‘“Fac deum!”’, and the bride’s song, ‘“His rod hath made god in my belly”’. These girls are not ‘leery with Circe’s tisane’, rather they are ‘Beaten from flesh into light’. The flame and the lightning that is in them is implicitly the god Dionysos, but this is the women’s rite under Circe. The vision of Dionysos was in canto 2, and that was all male. Here in both the initiation and the vision the manifest powers are all female, and all, including Circe when approached intelligently, would initiate the male protagonist into the realm and the process of generative love.
Against the chorus of girls making the spring, and against the bride’s ‘Beaten from flesh into light’, the opening lines of canto 40 sound harshly ironic:
| Esprit de corps in permanent bodies |
| ‘Of the same trade,’ Smith, Adam, ‘men |
| ‘never gather together |
| ‘without a conspiracy against the general public.’ |
Those lines state the main theme of the canto. There follows the counter-theme, that the nation’s money should be held by the nation’s own bank, a notion advanced in medieval Venice but only carried into practice two centuries later. The rest of the canto down to ‘Out of which things seeking an exit’, pivots on the isolated line restating the counter-theme, ‘“If a nation will master its money”’. Both the passage preceding that line and the one following—each of thirty-four lines—develop the main theme through variations upon ‘conspiracy against the general public’. J. P. Morgan figures prominently, for selling the government its own arms (condemned arms) in the Civil War at extortionate profit; business in general took advantage of that war and prospered by its failures; the banks (with the Rothschild bank leading) got control of treasury bonds to their own profit, and made a killing by buying up depreciated Civil War bonds then having them redeemed in gold, the price of which Morgan had forced up; then there were the cheating manipulations of bonds for railway construction. And all this was for private luxury, ‘Toward producing that wide expanse of clean lawn | Toward that deer park’, ‘With our eyes on the new gothic residence, with our | eyes on Palladio, with a desire for seignieurial splendours’. The statement and the restatement of this third theme enclose the passages developing the main theme, and expose the vanity of anti-social greed. Its monument might be a list of the accumulated objects to be auctioned when the failed seignieur’s residence is sold up, ‘haberdashery, clocks, ormoulu, brocatelli, | tapestries, unreadable volumes bound in tree-calf, |…flaps, farthingales, fichus, cuties, shorties, pinkies | et cetera’.
That is a view of what became of America during and after the Civil War. ‘We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us’, Pound had complained in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, ‘The de facto government became secret, nobody cared a damn about the de jure.’ That had led him on to propose that the governing ideas of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy were now to be found in Mussolini’s Fascism, and that is the starting point of canto 41. Taking an overview of the cantos from 31 up to this point one might say that the thesis of the sequence is the democratic heritage of Jefferson, Jackson, and Van Buren; that the antithesis is the rule of private greed in Europe and the falling off from Jeffersonian democracy into private greed in the United States; and that now Mussolini is to be put forward as the synthesis, that is, as a European proponent of democratic values with an active and exemplary sense of civic responsibility. (Cantos 36 and 39, representing the life of the spirit, appear to stand rather apart from the rest, while having a significant bearing upon them.)
Formally canto 41 is a fugue, that is, its thematic materials are organized as they might be in a musical fugue. Fugue is not a set form—as Yeats may have thought, and so failed to understand what Pound was trying to tell him in 1928—but is rather a set of procedures for developing two or more melodic lines in interaction with each other. Thus one episode of the canto is in strict counterpoint; and there is, as is common practice in musical fugues, an accelerated stretto passage preceding the final cadence. The first theme (or subject, in musical terms) is good government as exemplified by Mussolini at the start of the canto and Jefferson at its close. The second theme, which grows out of the first, is good intelligence or news concerning the management of the economy. Then there is the inversion of each theme, misgovernment, and misinformation or ignorance. Those have been the leading preoccupations of the preceding ten cantos, and this fugue is the way of drawing them together into a concluding statement.
Each canto has been a new experiment in form, a new invention, and this one, while following a classic musical form, is at the extreme of innovation in English poetry. It is difficult, as it needs to be given its ambition, but probably no more difficult than a Bach fugue once one has made out the themes and the process of their development.
| A.1 1st subject |
Mussolini, ‘the Boss’, is introduced as the man of quick intelligence and efficient action in the common interest—draining the marshes, causing grain to grow there, providing water supply and housing; |
| B.1 response |
a story of the Boss’s dealing with ‘the potbellies’ who want their cut from the public works by sending them into internal exile; |
| C.1 counter-subject |
the commandante della piazza’s ‘we’d let ourselves be scragged for Mussolini’, demonstrating popular devotion to the Boss. (25 lines, 1–25) |
| D.1 2nd subject |
The ignorance of the people (out of the mouth of a babe); |
| E.1 response |
Messire Uzzano’s advice, in 1442, on how to manage the money supply, thus overcoming ignorance and its ill-effects; |
| F.1 counter-subject |
‘and you must work…| to keep up your letters’. (20 lines, 26–45) |
| 1st episode |
(related to 1st and 2nd subjects: the Boss, and formation of the young) Details of the Boss’s youth and training—his being exploited and underpaid as a mason in Switzerland, then trained for mountain warfare (in the 1914–18 war), and deliberately bombed (so it was said) while wounded in hospital—these details counterpointed against the formation of ‘the young Uhlan officer’ (i.e. a German cavalry lancer), ‘never out of uniform from his | eighth year until the end of the war’, and trained up in a militarism characterized by a book depicting the ‘Renewal of higher life | in the struggle for German freedom’, a book presented to him by the empress in 1908 ‘with a tender and motherly dedication’. (31 lines, 46–76) |
| 2nd episode |
(inversion of 1st episode: military commanders lacking intelligence) ‘Feldmarschall Hindenburg’ (the young Uhlan’s General in command), characterized by his ignorance of music—‘Mozart…all this god damned cultural nonsense’—and his concern for his pension; the (presumably French) high command being on vacation in the summer of 1914, a minor bureaucrat files ‘the Hun ultimatum’; and Winston Churchill (being in 1914 First Lord of the Admiralty) at least ‘had the fleet out’, according to his ‘mama’ (cp. the ‘motherly dedication’ of the German empress), though he would not ‘waste time having ideas’. (23 lines, 77–99) |
| D.2 2nd subject |
(a natural modulation from the 2nd episode into) ‘That llovely unconscious world’ of European decadence; |
| E.2 response |
what it has for news is ‘“Pig and Piffle”’, (highly profitable); The Times, which it ‘Pays to control…for its effect on the markets’; and a press free from state censorship, but with ‘a great deal of manipulation’— (this is an inversion of E.1); |
| F.2 counter-subject |
(a return to E.1) a proper ‘news sense’ notes ‘Cosimo First’s’ banking (see canto 21); the self-regulation of the bank of Siena, Monte dei Paschi (see cantos 42–4 in the following decad); also Douglas; and ‘Woergl in our time’. (22 lines, 100–21) |
| B.2 1st response |
As Mussolini dealt with the profiteers, Jefferson exposed the tobacco tax racket in France (see canto 31); |
| A.2 1st subject |
as Mussolini’s good government is manifest in his public works, Jefferson governed by his ‘verbal manifestations’, represented in a stretto passage climaxing in ‘Independent use of our money…toward holding our bank’. (26 lines, 122–47) |
| Cadence |
A sequence of closely related news items concerning the arms trade and its indiscriminate arming of belligerents—‘120 million german fuses used by the allies to kill Germans’ etc. (cf. canto 38 and the two war episodes above)—this being the consequence of not mastering the nations’ money for the benefit of the whole people. (5 lines, 148–52) |
At the end of the canto is a dateline, ‘ad interim 1933’, equivalent to ‘up to now’ or ‘this is the state of affairs in 1933’. It is a reminder both of the time in which Cantos XXXI–XLI were being written, and of the fact that their historical leads always come out at what is going on in the present. The American story from its revolution to the post-Civil War robber barons and bankers runs in counterpoint with the European story over the same period and on through its Great War up to the present moment, a moment at which it appears that America’s revolutionary will to secure life, liberty, and happiness to all the people is now to be found at work in Europe in the person of the Boss, Il Duce. The root of good government is shown firmly planted in the American Revolution, and these cantos are unequivocally committed to the American idea of democracy. But then that idea of democracy evidently transcends America, since the United States can lapse from it into the reign of private greed, while it can be seen to be more effectively practised by the Italian dictator.
It has to be recognized, if we are to get on, that Mussolini is as much an invented or mythical figure in these cantos as Jefferson, or Van Buren, or indeed as Odysseus. He is just as much transfigured out of history into the poem Pound is making up, and he plays his part there in an ethical drama which may be not at all an accurate fit with the political drama of the era. Pound is not writing Mussolini’s story, nor Jefferson’s nor Van Buren’s. He is writing, as it will turn out, the epic of the capitalist era, in which the will to social justice, as embodied in some few heroic individuals, must contend against the greed of the wealthy and powerful and the abuleia of the many. It is a story based on real persons and real practices, and its credibility does depend in some degree on its truth to what is commonly known of those persons and practices. Beyond that believability, though, there is another order of reality, that of meanings and values; it is with these that the epic poet is most engaged, and in creating images of what is to be admired or hated he will bend history to his ends. But then the nearer a reader is to the history in question, the more problematic this can be. There is a problem, and there will be so long as the actual Mussolini is remembered, in accepting the Mussolini of the Cantos as a hero of the struggle for universal social justice. It is a problem that anyone who wants to read the work must just learn to live with. History may instruct us that the myth has grievously simplified the facts; and the myth may reveal things facts alone can never tell. We need both history and myth, but should take care not to confuse either with the other.
Note: A historian, the Bank Wars, and the New Deal
Our accounts of the past ‘are far from stable’, Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote in the New York Review of Books in April 2006, ‘They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present.’ So he had written The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little Brown, 1946) in the light of Roosevelt’s ‘struggles to democratize American capitalism’, wanting to show that ‘FDR was acting in a robust American spirit and tradition’: ‘Jackson’s war against Nicholas Biddle and the Second Bank of the United States…provided a thoroughly American precedent for the battles that FDR waged against the “economic royalists” of his (and my) day.’ Roosevelt himself had seen the precedent as early as November 1933. Schlesinger cites a letter of that month to Colonel Edward M. House in which Roosevelt wrote,
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson…The country is going through a repetition of Jackson’s fight with the Bank of the United States—only on a far bigger and broader basis.
Schlesinger continues,
Jackson and Roosevelt, it appeared, had much the same coalition of supporters—farmers, workingmen, intellectuals, the poor—and much the same coalition of adversaries—bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and the rich. There was consequently a striking parallel between the 1830s and the 1930s in politics, and there was a striking parallel in the basic issue of power—the struggle for control of the state between organized money and the rest of society.
That striking parallel was what Pound was pointing out to America in 1933 and 1934, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini and the Eleven New Cantos, and quite directly in canto 37. Only he could not see Roosevelt defeating ‘organized money’.
1 I have been asked why there is no mention here of anti-Semitism, and the answer is simply that Mussolini’s Fascism, unlike Hitler’s National Socialism, was not racist nor anti-Semitic. Jews along with all other Italians were incorporated into the Fascist state, and criticized or attacked, like any other Italian, only insofar as they resisted or gave their allegiance elsewhere (see Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews (1978), ch. II). In 1933 American Jewish publishers selected Mussolini as one of the world’s twelve ‘greatest Christian champions’ of the Jews (John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1973), p. 40). However, anti-Semitic laws were introduced in 1938 following the alliance of Italy with Nazi Germany.
2 For the full text of this important statement of Pound’s thinking about economic reform in America see Appendix D.
3 Andrew Mellon as US Secretary of the Treasury (1921–32) had advised President Hoover after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, for which he bore heavy responsibility, ‘Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system.’ EP probably knew that, but neglected to mention such telling details. Mellon is mentioned in canto 38/188.
4 JQA Minister Plenipotentiary to the Russian Court, 1809.
5 JQA speaks ll. 4 and 7, introducing main subject; Romanzoff, Tzar Alaxander’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, speaks ll. 5 and 6, the counter-subject (or antithesis). ‘Un étourdi’= ‘a scatterbrain’, even ‘a dolt’.
6 These four lines introduce a contrasting (or second) subject, which is given some development in the second movement. (See also ll. 30 and 44.)
7 Main subject and counter-subject developed—‘our peace’ would be with England, and would be made by France opening its ports to US trade and so breaking its agreements with other European states.
8 ‘peace of Tilsit’, agreed between Napoleon and Alexander 1807. Napoleon’s forces were finally driven out of Spain by the Duke of Wellington in 1814. In June 1812, breaking the Tilsit treaty, Napoleon invaded Russia—this ten-line passage develops the Bonaparte component of the counter-subject into a first episode.
9 The off-rhyme with l. 3 marks a close to the first half of the movement. The second half will repeat the structure while developing the thematic material.
10 Re-statement of the England component of the counter-subject.
11 Further development of Bonaparte component, concluding the 1812 episode; and contrasting with the following five lines. ‘La sottise’= ‘senseless folly’ or ‘stupid mistake’.
12 Resolution of main subject and the England component of its counter-subject: US delegation negotiating a treaty of commerce with Russia, and a peace with England based on respecting the commercial interests (or rights) of both parties. (Americans keeping their word.)
13 This fifteen-line passage is the second Bonaparte episode, and the conclusion of the first movement (apart from a five-line bridge passage.) Napoleon, having escaped from Elba, becomes Emperor once more in Paris, thanks to the Bourbon King’s ‘misconduct’. (He will be finally defeated at Waterloo in June.) The movement has been built upon the contrast between the constructive will of JQA in working to establish American independence in peaceful commerce with other nations, and the destructive will-to-power of Napoleon, Europe’s representative man of the moment.
14 Orage returned to England and started up his New English Weekly in April 1932 to promote Douglas’s new economics. ‘He was completely convinced of the general truth of the Douglas analysis … that the cause of the economic frustration of our civilization, ever since the Great War, was essentially financial’, and ‘that the accepted principles of finance were a tangle of illusions, obscuring all true values and tending to disintegrate all genuine human relations’ (Philip Mairet, A. R. Orage: A Memoir (London: Dent, 1936), pp. 112–13). Orage died in October 1934. Pound continued to contribute to the NEW articles, letters, and light verse (his Social Credit ‘Poems of Alfred Venison’) until June 1940.