4 : THINGS FALL APART, 1933–1937
To spread order about him
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him
Joseph Bard, the Hungarian novelist who had told Pound about Frobenius’ concept of paideuma, spoke in a lecture in 1961 of the Pound who had been his friend in Rapallo in the later 1920s and early 1930s. He recalled how alive and irreverent he was, and how his vehemence ‘radiated from a deep and serious intention’—
I could see a unique dedication, a rare sense of responsibility for the clarity and proper functioning of the mind, but nothing either obscure or wild…Never did I observe anything excessive in him, in fact, the order he was cultivating in himself to be adequate to the experiences he may have to undergo forced a certain sense of order on his friends.
Theirs was a tragic time, Bard said, ‘in which dormant forces have woken up, hidden but unfolding to the sensitive eye, forces which human reason in its present potential cannot control’. He was thinking of the ungraspable forces behind the Great Depression and the approaching world war, and celebrating Pound as a source of order in a disintegrating world.
Bard recalled in particular how for Pound ‘the stress of earning a living by good literature against the deviating pressure of commercial literary nabobs was a necessary discipline and a participation in the life of the struggling mind’. He recalled also how Pound ‘was always on the alert to save his friends’ mental energies from being drained by trivialities, by small pleasures within the range of every idiot’. He cared that their minds should be nourished and recreated by the better human achievements.
Bard’s Pound is not the single-minded revolutionary out ‘to GET ACTION’, as in his work for Orage’s New English Weekly; nor the frequently raging Pound of the crusading journalism flung in the face of those who could not and would not see the saving truth; and not the overreaching megalomaniac single-handedly taking on the evil economic system of the capitalist democracies and their empires. He is the man Bard knew among his friends in Rapallo, an individual in a small town, spreading about him in that little world such order as he could ‘build in his own ambience’. It was good for the energetic American with his characteristic desire to get hold of the best and to be the best in the world—so Pound himself admonished small-town America—it was good for him to learn from the older countries such as Italy that civilization is local. His friend Manlio Dazzi had shown him in 1923 in Cesena, where he was then librarian of the Malatestine Library, how it was possible ‘to have first rate music in a small town’. ‘There is all the difference in the world’, Pound wrote, between the man who builds well with what he has to hand, ‘and the lunatic who thinks he is Napoleon’.
By the end of March 1933, within two months of being appointed Chancellor, Herr Hitler had seized total control of the German state. The burning down of the Reichstag on 27 February had given him cause to suspend civil liberties, to set his Brown Shirt thugs upon his Communist and Social Democrat opponents, to create concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau as instruments of terror—27,000 had been imprisoned by the end of the year—and to spread anxiety and fear among the people at large. On 1 April a one-day boycott of Jewish shops was decreed as a statement of intent; then laws were issued excluding Jews from the public services, the professions, and the universities; and the robbing, beating up, and murdering of Jews began. On 10 May a torchlight parade of thousands of students ended opposite the University of Berlin and there the students burned twenty thousand ‘subversive’ books, thus inaugurating the new Nazi era of German culture. And still too few of those whom it concerned elsewhere in Europe and in the United States took notice of the Nazi agenda openly laid out by Hitler in Mein Kampf—an agenda driven by the will to lead an Aryan Master Race destined for world conquest.
Through May 1933 Pound was in Paris at the Hotel Foyot; Dorothy was in London. Ezra reported to her his catching up with old friends—Joyce, Léger, Bill Bird; ‘Miss Weaver present for 5 mins.’; Caresse Crosby, Duchamp the surrealist, Tibor Serly the Hungarian-American composer who was often in Rapallo, Walter Rummel, Natalie Barney. Brancusi had been ill and was a bit low. Cocteau had done a new play. Harding of the BBC was over to discuss the proposed production of Cavalcanti. Cummings, whose new book about Russia, Eimi, Pound was impressed by, was in Paris; also George and Mary Oppen. In his last letter to Dorothy before returning to Rapallo he mentioned that Max Ernst had presented him with a ‘beeyewteeful blue seascape worth much more than emergency chq. I sent up’. Ernst had said, ‘“entre nous—such questions—i.e. re value—can’t arise”’.
Back in Rapallo he wrote to Dorothy, ‘O is livin up at St Ambrog/ but I trust will be able to combine something with Muench & thereby have a status. Also hopes for Siena job, which wd start before long.’ ‘Muench’ was Gerhart Münch, a gifted young pianist and composer from Dresden with a scholarly interest in early music, and Pound at once seized on the chance of his presence in Rapallo to organize a ‘Settimana Mozartiana’. The Teatro Reale cinema was hired for the evenings of 26, 27, and 28 June, and twelve of Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano were performed by Olga Rudge and Münch, four each evening, ‘under the auspices of the Fascist Institute of Culture’. The rest of Mozart’s thirty-four violin sonatas were ‘done privately so that a few of us heard the whole set’. Then ‘the aristocracy of the Gulf of Tigullio’, as Pound expressed it in a note in Il Mare, ‘decided to organize a private subscription concert’, at which Münch would play Scriabin, in order to encourage him to remain permanently in Rapallo as the pivot of the ‘effort to achieve a higher degree of musicality in the Gulf’. The Musical Section of the ‘Amici del Tigullio’, Pound declared, were determined to put on in the future more concerts like the Mozart series. After the Scriabin concert on 12 July Pound left for Siena to join Olga, who had just been confirmed as administrative secretary to Count Guido Chigi Saracini’s very distinguished Academy of music. Dorothy wrote that she was not telling Olivia that Pound was with Olga in Siena, it was ‘too complicated’.
Dorothy was finding England ‘deader than mutton’; but ‘Omar was fairly lively: knows his twelve times table’. He was too old now to stay with the Norland Nurseries, and she was at her wits’ end to know what to do about him. That problem was solved at the end of June when a Miss Dickie, who was retiring from the Nurseries to a cottage near Bognor, offered to have him with her and to send him to school nearby. This arrangement would cost Dorothy about the same as with the Norland. Earlier in June she mentioned a ‘Very lucid and well-spoken street-corner meeting of British Fascists on Sunday 12.30 in High Street [Kensington]’. In July she noted that Wyndham Lewis was very positively interested in Social Credit. She would return to Rapallo about 10 August, and wanted Ezra to be back from Siena for her then. ‘All right’, she wrote as that date approached, ‘We will try cooking upstairs if you think so.’ To which Ezra replied, ‘Don’t purrpose to cook more’n one meel a day anyhow.’
In August there was a stellar conjunction in Rapallo of Pound, ‘the pride of the town’, Basil Bunting (who observed him in that role), Louis Zukofsky the Objectivist, and, in brief transit, an 18-year-old Harvard undergrad who signed himself ‘James Laughlin IV’. Bunting, because Pound was there, had been drifting in and out of Rapallo since 1924, when he was not being a music critic in London—1925–8 on The Outlook—or getting married in America, in 1930. Yeats had seen him as one of Pound’s ‘more savage disciples’, though he was at the same time rather fiercely independent. Bunting was named as a contributing editor on the stationery Pound got up for the Il Mare Supplemento Letterario in August 1932, and was a member of the committee for the concerts inaugurated with the Mozart Week in June 1933. In November a lack of money would force him to move with his wife and child to the Canary Islands. Zukofsky, having been frequently urged by Pound to see Paris, i.e. to encounter the writers and artists Pound thought worth knowing there, had dutifully sailed from New York and done a fortnight in Paris, assisted by 500 francs from Pound. But he had his own reason for the trip, ‘to see you’, as he wrote to Pound, ‘& discuss what can be done for ’Murka’. To an interviewer in Budapest he said he had come ‘chiefly to meet the master of American poetry and in a sense its father’. In Rapallo he was put up in a large room with its own bathroom in Homer and Isabel’s apartment, formerly the Yeatses’, and was impressed by their gallery of photographs of Ezra and of Omar. He had his meals with the Buntings, for which Pound paid, went out with Basil in his boat, and observed Ezra swimming far out on his own. The main event of each day was leisurely tea with Ezra and Dorothy, Ezra talking with ‘wit and brilliance’, and Dorothy ‘silent most of the time’. Zukofsky asked Pound to read a canto, then read it back to him ‘very quietly and clearly’. With Bunting he tried to persuade Pound to read in a more natural voice—they both thought their own very different ways of reading the cantos better than his Yeatsian chaunt. At the same time Pound and Bunting were telling Zukofsky that he should cultivate a more natural language, to no effect. He returned to New York in September confirmed in his devotion to Pound and also—like Bunting, his fellow leading light in Pound’s Active Anthology—confirmed in his determination to go on working out his own independent poetics.
Young Laughlin had yet to grow into his independence. Introducing himself to Pound he declared a readiness to become his most devoted servant, if Pound would advise him ‘about bombarding shits like Canby & Co’, and elucidate for him ‘certain basic phases of the CANTOS’ so that he could ‘preach them intelligently’. Though he was from a Pittsburgh steel dynasty, he was, he assured Pound, ‘full of “noble caring” for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US’; and, being an editor on both the Harvard Advocate and Yale’s Harkness Hoot, he was in a position ‘to reach the few men in the two universities who are worth bothering about, and could do a better job of it with your help’. He clearly knew how to appeal to Pound as a well-instructed neophyte, and was hospitably received in Rapallo. After his two or three days there he thanked Pound ‘cordially for…the most vital experience of the summer’, and returned to Harvard fired up to do ‘A complete exposure of Jeffers and Robinson’, something on the arms merchants, ‘an estimate of WCWms: proper praise of ACTIVE ANTH. when it comes’, and did Pound think ‘Zukofsky or Doc Williams could be enlisted in the cause?’ Soon Pound was sending him prose blasts for the university magazines, and for New Democracy, Gorham Munson’s Social Credit magazine in which Laughlin, at Pound’s instigation, had been given a column under the rubric ‘New Directions’.
That summer of 1933 Pound was issued with a journalist’s pass entitling him to a 70 per cent reduction on the Italian State Railways. He used it, according to the record on the pass, not for journalism but to travel from Siena to Rapallo on 9 August; to go from Genoa to Brunico in early September—that would have been to see Maria—and on the 8th to return from Bolzano to Genoa; to go from Genoa to Venice on 15 October, and to return on 25 October.
A series of concerts to make ‘music in winter’ was announced by the ‘Amici del Tigullio’, one in each month from October to March. The Mayor of Rapallo was showing his support by putting at their disposal the ‘Gran Sala del Municipio’, the newly panelled and decorated grand chamber of the Town Hall. The concerts would be under the auspices of the Instituto Fascista di Cultura Commune, and would be sponsored by the Amici. Among the named supporting Friends were two marchesas, a contessa, and a conte, Mrs Ephra Townley, Reverendissimo Desmond Chute, Miss Natalie Barney, Dottoressa Bacigalupo, Signor H. L. Pound, and Mrs D. Pound. The Friends had opened a subscription to pay for a Steinway which they would present to the town, to be ‘used only for concerts of distinction’.
Pound wrote a series of articles for Il Mare, starting with three in September setting out the idea of the concerts. Later articles would introduce the music and the performers, and review some of the performances. The emphasis was to be on early music up to Bach and Mozart, with a few examples of later music for purposes of comparison. Münch, with funding from the Amici, would be preparing for the concerts transcriptions from the rich collection of unpublished early music built up by the musicologist Oscar Chilesotti, and would thus be making ‘a real addition to the whole body of existing music’. One of his first transcriptions was Francesco da Milano’s sixteenth-century setting for lute of Clement Jannequin’s Le Chant des Oiseaux, a chorus for several voices imitating the songs of many birds. In Münch’s ‘metamorphosis’ of the song for Olga Rudge’s solo violin this featured frequently in the Rapallo concerts, and Pound would reproduce Münch’s score dated ‘28.9.33’ in canto 75. Along with Münch and Rudge the regular performers would be ‘prof. Marco Ottone, ’cellist from Chiavari’ just down the coast from Rapallo; and ‘Maestro Sansoni, whose merits are sometimes forgotten by those who see him conducting the municipal orchestra in the open air or playing jazz in the Kursaal’. ‘Our aim’, Pound wrote, ‘is to develop a group of local performers sufficient for our needs and desires, and not to spoil our musical life as in so many countries by trusting and encouraging only the so-called “stars”.’ First-rate musicians who happened to be ‘passing through the town’ would also be invited to perform—and would feature, indeed, more and more in the later series. But Pound was aiming at the creation of a local culture of musical excellence, founded on the well-ordered harmonies of pre-romantic composers, and in this he largely succeeded until the coming of war in 1939 put an end to all that.
The long-running League of Nations Disarmament Conference was getting nowhere and Mussolini proposed in the summer of 1933 that Britain, the old enemies France and Germany, and Italy should make a pact to guarantee the peace of Europe for a decade. Lloyd George, who had been British Prime Minister when the League was set up, said to the Italian Foreign Minister, ‘Either the world follows Mussolini, or the world is doomed.’ The Pact of Four was signed in the Palazzo Venezia on 15 July. In October, however, Germany walked out of the Disarmament Conference, and a few days later withdrew from the League of Nations, thus, said Mussolini, scuppering all at once the Pact, the Conference, and the League. Hitler was determined to re-arm Germany and to prepare for all-out war. In November over 90 per cent of registered voters in Germany endorsed the withdrawal from Geneva and elected a single-party Nazi slate to the Reichstag.
In the autumn of 1933 Mary Barnard, a young woman living in small-town Vancouver across the river from Portland, Oregon, desiring to learn how to write poems and considering that Pound ‘knew more about the technique of writing poetry than any other living poet’, sought out his address in Who’s Who and mailed a sample of her poems to him in far-away Rapallo. ‘How hard and for how long are you willing to work at it?’, came back his challenging response on a postcard. He advised her to study Greek metres since she knew Greek; and, more generally, to study ‘the MEDIUM, i.e. language and everything it consists of. consonants, vowels, AND the relative duration of the different sounds’—‘Get a metronome and learn HOW long the different syllables, and groups of them take’. ‘There aren’t any RULES’, was the only rule he laid down, but also, ‘work to a metric scheme/—when you can do it strictly, on yr/ head, dead, drunk or asleep, then you can begin loopin the loop and taking liberties with it’. When she showed that she was willing to work at writing in sapphics Pound put her in touch with Marianne Moore and with Williams, and sent her poems to Eliot for his Criterion, to the New English Weekly, and to some young poets in America and England whom he was encouraging to put together an anthology of new talent. A quarter of a century later Mary Barnard, by then an established poet and writer, would publish a musically sculpted translation of Sappho.
‘Do understand that at yr/ tender age’—this was Pound writing to Mary Barnard in January 1934—‘too much criticism is possibly worse than none.’ However, his ABC of Reading, then about to be published in England, ‘contains part of the lessons’, he told her. This ABC was written to develop and to simplify ‘How to Read’, his 1929 essay written for the New York Herald Tribune Books supplement. There he had begun by attacking both the American university system as he had experienced it at the University of Pennsylvania, and the general state of literary culture in England as he had found it in 1908–12 when he was young and eager to learn. What had been borne in on him, one gathers, is that the young must find out for themselves what they most need to know. ‘The teacher or lecturer is a danger’, he instructs his young readers in the ABC, because liable to be enforcing his own opinion. Criticism, his own especially, ‘shd. consume itself and disappear’, leaving its readers seeing the thing in question for themselves.
The ABC of Reading is a wonderfully liberating, anti-academic, textbook. ‘Gloom and solemnity’, Pound declares on the first page, ‘are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.’ The joyful students in his book will be the ones who as they work through it grow in confidence in their own power to read and to write well. You do not need to know everything, Pound tells them, lifting one burden of scholarship; you need only to discriminate the best, the exemplary. And you do that by first-hand examination, by direct analysis and comparison, by actually listening to the sounds of words, and seeing the images they create, and thus apprehending their meanings. Melopoeia, the making of music in words, phanopoeia, the making of images in the mind, and logopoeia, ‘the dance of the intellect among words’, these are the means by which the common language is condensed and intensified into poetry. Pound presents as exhibits his selection of poems in which one or more of those qualities are at a peak of attainment, having previously warned ‘YOU WILL NEVER KNOW either why I chose them, or why they were worth choosing, or why you approve or disapprove of my choice, until you go to the TEXTS, the originals’. Enjoy the excitement of working it out for yourselves, he urges the students, and you won’t need to listen ‘to me or to any other long-winded critic’.
As an incitement to study literature the book appeals mostly to the idealism of youth, and then a little also to its nihilism. ‘Literature is news that STAYS news’, Pound declares, meaning that the best of it carries news of what is perennially true of human nature and desire and fate. Its use for the individual is that it both eases the mind of the strain of our endemic uncertainty and ignorance about things, and positively feeds it as incitement to live more fully. Its usefulness to the state is in maintaining the energies and the efficient working of language upon which depend good government and civilization. After that, nearly at the end of the book, comes the bait for ‘The natural destructivity of the young’, a hint of the excitement and the fun of detecting and exposing ‘counterfeit work’ and ‘The hoax, the sham, the falsification’. The young can be instructed in this, Pound writes, while implying that they will go to it very readily. One thinks of young James Laughlin IV and his ‘complete exposure of Jeffers and Robinson’, and his gleeful ‘we debunk Stein (Toklas) in the current issue’.
The winter series of Rapallo concerts are mentioned in ABC of Reading as an example of its method of examining musical compositions under laboratory conditions in order to discriminate the first-rate from the second-rate, with Debussy played after Corelli and J. S. Bach, or Ravel after Bach. ‘The point of this experiment is that everyone present at the two concerts now knows a great deal more about the…relative weight, etc., of Debussy and Ravel than they could possibly have found out by reading ALL the criticisms that have ever been written of both.’ Pound was also eager to introduce newly recovered early music. In March 1934 the Rapallo musicians premiered six of the sonatas by William Young (d. 1672) from the edition just published by W. Gillies Whittaker, and were looking forward to receiving freshly edited scores of Purcell and Dowland.
‘Nevuh hav bin so aktiv as in last 2 or 3 years’, Pound wrote in a letter to Agnes Bedford in April 1934, ‘probably incipient paranoia…vast economic correspondence’. He would tell Langston Hughes, ‘I spend about 95% of my energy at this typewriter trying to CREATE a REAL revolution’. To his old friend Viola Baxter Jordan he did also mention ‘wackin a tennis ball to keep me belly from bulgin’, and going ‘to the movies average of twice or more per week’, that being, after a hard day’s work, ‘Only way to STOP’.
Along with the certainly rather paranoid economic outpourings—the paranoia not altogether unwarranted in the light of current events—Pound was being active as ever on his other fronts, as in shepherding the young who showed promise, and in attempting to keep his peers and his elders in order. To John Drummond, a student at Cambridge in England, he wrote that it was time for ‘a new heave by the young’, and that ‘If you people at Cam. can do anything in the way of a nucleus, I’ll do what I can to bring in the scattered and incongruous units of my acquaintance’. He told his respected elder Laurence Binyon that he had gone through his new verse translation of Dante’s Inferno ‘syllable by syllable’, and offered some very detailed notes on particular words and rhymes as collaborative criticism and encouragement. He was doubtful about ‘syntactical inversions’ in Binyon’s English, having a preference for the natural word order; and he noted that Dante was ‘definitely putting money-power at the root of Evil’. In June Yeats, on his last visit to Rapallo, asked Pound what he thought of the lyrics in something he had just written, The King of the Great Clock Tower, a brief play rehearsing an old romantic theme of his, and Pound, according to Yeats, ‘would talk of nothing but politics’, then returned his manuscript next day saying the lyrics were ‘putrid’, and written in ‘Nobody language’ which was no good for drama. Pound told Bunting that he was finding it increasingly difficult to read ‘the buzzard’.
A young Jewish Lutheran sculptor turned up broke in Rapallo in April 1934. This was Heinz Clusmann (1906–75), who renamed himself Heinz Henghes. He wanted to see Pound’s Gaudiers, and Pound took him in, fed him, put him up in what Laughlin described as ‘a large dog kennel’ on his roof-top terrace, found him some stone and tools from the cemetery stonecutter, and let him get to work. ‘New sculptor loose on roof, and marble dust dappertutto’, everywhere, Pound wrote by way of explaining the seal on the envelope of his letter to an American college student. (He was telling her what her generation should be up to.) Henghes had offered the seal, a little animal carving, to show what he could do; and had shown a drawing of a seated centaur which later became the New Directions’ very Gaudier-like book colophon. According to Laughlin, Pound persuaded Signora Agnelli, wife of the head of Fiat, to acquire some of his first works at a good price; and Henghes went on to become a successful sculptor and to win, after the war, prestigious commissions in London and New York.
In the summer of 1934 Dorothy was as usual in England. Throughout August all her time was devoted to Omar, leaving her ‘unable to do or think anything but Omar’. ‘P.S. This family life seems curiously unreal—like an uneasy sleep,’ she wrote to Ezra. At the end of August he went up to Gais to collect Maria and take her down to Venice for ten days. ‘Child very good,’ he told Dorothy. He would write in the mornings, then take the Leoncina with him while he shopped with care for the best coffee, fruit, pastries, and cheese. Sometimes they would swim at the Lido. He bought her a violin so that her mother might teach her, but Olga insisted she must first learn solfège. The child remembered time hanging heavily that year in the enforced siesta in the small house where the intense music and talk were foreign to her and where it seemed that everything was to be done according to some unforgiving etiquette. She could not feel at home in its demanding order.
Germany’s President and Head of State, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, died on 2 August 1934. The previous day Hitler’s cabinet had decreed Hitler his successor though it had no legal power to do so. Then it was announced that Hitler would combine in himself the offices of head of government and head of state and be known as Führer and Reichschancellor. In this usurpation he had the enthusiastic support of the heads of the armed forces, having assured them that their secret re-arming would be accelerated and that the Nazi private army, the SA or Brownshirts whose violence had brought him to power, would be disarmed. To back up that assurance his SS and Gestapo had massacred all the leading members of the SA in a bloody June purge. All members of the German armed forces now swore an oath of allegiance not to the German state but to its Führer, Adolf Hitler. On 19 August over 90 per cent of Germany’s registered voters endorsed his seizure of supreme power. At the Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress in early September he was acclaimed with frenzied adulation. William Shirer the American correspondent was there and could see that ‘whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions’.
‘Education by provocation, Spartan maieutics’, that was Samuel Beckett’s summary characterization of the essays in Make It New, and it would apply equally well to How to Read, ABC of Reading, and even to Cantos 31–41. There were reviewers who received Pound’s provocations as educative, and there were others who were goaded into reaction. The Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid made How to Read his book of the year; while F. R. Leavis, the fiercely serious academic critic, responded with How to Teach Reading (1932), giving it the acid subtitle ‘A Primer for Ezra Pound’. Although ABC of Reading was generally well received, the London Spectator dismissed it as a ‘bundle of prejudices’, ‘not very convincing as criticism and quite useless in the classroom’. Eda Lou Walton in the New York Times Book Review even found its tone ‘insulting’. The Times Literary Supplement praised the excellence of Pound’s criticism, but deprecated his ‘atrocious style’, his ‘affectations’, and his ‘arrogance’. As for the really Spartan challenge of Cantos 31–41, there was a tendency to discover that it was the poetry and not the reader that was failing to come to a clear consciousness. Pound ‘seems to have been stumped by the problem of combining poetry and economics’, reported Philip Rice Blair in the New York Nation; and Babette Deutsch, in the New York Herald Tribune Books, wrote that ‘The design is wanting’ for ‘these fragments Pound has shored against his ruins’. Then the English poet Rayner Heppenstall, writing in the New English Weekly, warned that Pound’s cantos in general were ‘a serious menace’, because of their influence on other poets. But that was as much as to admit that Pound was now, whether one was receptive to him or not, an important and influential presence as a poet and a literary critic. Still Pound would complain that editors refused to print his views on economics, and that publishers kept asking him instead for his autobiography, when he had no wish to look back and there was so much more to be done here and now.
When young Laughlin, now ‘Jas’ to Pound, proposed that he spend some time in Rapallo—he had taken a long leave from Harvard—Pound wrote, ‘I have more bloody work than I can do | I damn well need assistance’, and then ‘unless you are DOING somfink in Paris, you might just possibly LEARN as much, get just as much eddikashun (without emission of bank paper) here as anywhere else’. A couple of days earlier he had been suggesting in a letter to Zukofsky ‘that some brat educate himself by PUTTING himself at the disposal of New Democracy/ to run my errands’, and ‘cat shit for the young if they can’t at least provide ONE active animal fit for training’. Laughlin would testify that in the two or three weeks he spent at his ‘Ezuversity’ in December of 1934 he ‘learned more that was useful about what mattered in literature than I did in four years at Harvard’. He also found how to make himself useful. He had been writing short stories, with some success, and was ‘trying very hard to write poetry’. Pound wasn’t interested in prose fiction, and was not impressed by his poetry. He advised Jas just before he left Rapallo to give up the writing and try something useful. ‘Go back and be a publisher,’ he said, so Laughlin went back and created New Directions and became the publisher of Pound and Williams and many other independents, and ‘never regretted obeying his edict’.
Laughlin fondly recalled that the daily class usually met before lunch at Pound’s table at the Albergo Rapallo, and ‘began with Ezra going through his mail and commenting on the subjects raised in the day’s letters’—
He had a huge correspondence from all over the world—he told me that postage was his largest expense. Economics were already his major concern in 1934, but there were letters from writers, from translators, from professors, from scholars of Chinese and the Renaissance, from monetary theorists, from artists, from Eliot, from Cocteau, from Hemingway—insulting letters, sycophantic letters…In every case there would be perceptive and witty comments from Ezra with anecdotes to fill in the background.
Then ‘Pound would turn to more serious subjects—literature, history as he wished to revise it, poetics, the interpretation of aspects of many cultures’. All the time he would be speaking ‘in the colloquial’, with mimicry, and in a variety of accents and personae. The instruction would continue on their walks, and Laughlin remembered Pound explaining to him about the Eleusinian mysteries on one of the steep stone paths behind Rapallo.
He observed how organized Pound was for his work: ‘So that he could easily find them, he hung his glasses and his extra glasses, his pencils, his pens, his scissors, and his stapler on strings from the ceiling over his desk’. He also observed how, ‘in the fury of composition’, ‘He would assault his typewriter with an incredible vigor…he couldn’t always take time to go all the way back to the left margin; he would slap the carriage and wherever it stopped that determined the indent.’
Among the items Pound was beating out on his typewriter were those many letters to editors and hurried pithy articles campaigning for the economic revolution needed to save the United States from its financial system, and seeking to persuade Americans that there was much to admire in Mussolini’s Fascism. It was quite natural then that when the Italian Ministry of Press and Propaganda established a short-wave radio service beamed at the United States in the autumn of 1934 it should occur to Pound’s journalist friend Francesco Monotti to propose that he be invited to do a broadcast. Pound was excited by the possibility of an invitation. ‘I spose the keynote will be to giv me opinyum of Italy’, he wrote to Monotti, and then gave the references to a dozen recent letters and articles in which he had been insisting on the constructive element in Mussolini’s Fascism. He knew that at least one article had been seen by Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and head of the Ministry, ‘as we mentioned it over the telephone’ at the time. He hoped he would be able to go through the relevant pieces with Ciano ‘and pick the most useful 8 minutes’—it would have to be ‘condensed | gotter to be oratory or nuffink’. On 23 November he was sent the formal letter signed by Count Ciano inviting him ‘to make a short speech (8 minutes)’, and to record it in Rome on 10 December. ‘They pay nothing’, Monotti warned. Pound replied at once to Ciano, ‘greatly honoured by the invitation to speak to America, and will be in Rome… unless I drop dead on the railway platform running’. His first radio talk, and his only one until 1940, was transmitted on Friday, 11 January at midnight in Rome, 6 p.m. in New York, and was announced as ‘Conversazione di Ezra Pound su “Come il Duce risolve il problema della distribuzione”’. The talk was heard by William Bird who took it to be about ‘the economic triumph of Fascism’. But Pound received a note from the Ministry a few days after the broadcast, ‘don’t understand what you are driving at. Be specific.’
One of Pound’s correspondents in 1935 was W. H. D. Rouse, a former classics teacher and an editor of the Loeb Classical Library, who had published the beginning of his ‘translation of Homer’s Odyssey into plain English’ in the New English Weekly. Pound was encouraging him to keep to plain, direct speech and to avoid literary turns of phrase; and when the completed translation was published in 1937 Rouse credited him with being ‘the onlie begetter of this book’, for having ‘suggested it’ and for having offered ‘trenchant comments’ which gave him the courage of his own convictions. Pound wanted Rouse to say something in the New English Weekly ‘about the campaign for live teaching of Greek and Latin’, and for ‘some means of communicating the classics to the great mass of people…who weren’t taught Greek in infancy’ and whose lives were impoverished by the modern world’s loss of ‘contact with and love for the classics’. But that wasn’t all, there were ‘more questions in my head than I can set down with any apparent coherence’. For instance, ‘Along with direct teaching of the language, is there any attempt to teach real history? Roman mortgages 6%, in Bithinya 12%’. And what was the ‘explanation for the obsolescence and decline of Gk. and Lat. studies after, let us say, the Napoleonic wars?’ Wasn’t it because the classics were taught without facing the economic facts? And wasn’t that because ‘Wherever one looks—printing, publishing, schooling—the black hand of the banker blots out the sun.’ ‘My generation was brought up in black ignorance’, Pound insisted; and could Rouse not ‘see in Brit. education during your time a reason why the country tolerates a governing class that can’t see that: Work is not a commodity. Money is not a commodity. The state has credit. The increment of association is not usury?’ Altogether, ‘I have been for two years in a boil of fury with the dominant usury that impedes every human act, that keeps good books out of print, that pejorates everything.’ Rouse was simply hoping to produce ‘a readable story, that is, a story which can be read aloud and heard without boredom’; but for Pound that laudable if modest undertaking was ineluctably linked through the education of the young to the state of the world.
The Rapallo concerts of course had their economic aspect. ‘What we have done’, Pound claimed in July 1935, ‘we have done by liberating the ability of performers from the noose of international finance.’ More, ‘What Douglasism can do for music in one town (having almost no population) it can do for any and every human activity in any town on this planet.’ Douglasism as practised in Rapallo meant ‘a local demonstration of credit’. The municipality provided the hall and put in steam heating; the interested public provided the piano; the music was largely cultural heritage; and thus all the proceeds went to the performers ‘save ten lire to the janitor and doorkeeper and the small printing expenses’, i.e. the cost of reprinting the programme which the collaborating town paper first printed as news. Concerts in William Atheling’s London had been ‘a racket whereof the main proceeds did not reach the producer’, that is the musician who performed the music in the concert hall. Even well-known performers had to pay expenses in advance to the impresario in order to obtain a booking. And the musicians dared not innovate or depart from the established repertoire.
That was where Rapallo differed most interestingly for Pound. In escaping ‘the black rot of usury’ it had freed its musicians to experiment, to discover lost masterpieces, and, increasingly, to introduce new works. In the 1934–5 season, along with Scarlatti and Pergolesi and Bach and Mozart, there were compositions by Tibor Serly; Bartok’s 4th String Quartet (1928) played after his 1st Quartet (1908); also Stravinsky’s Petroushka (in his reduction for piano), Pulcinella (in his reduction for violin and piano), and the Sonata for piano (1924). Pound wrote that ‘Serly sees the birth of the new music in the use not merely of polytonality, but in correlation (with due opposition) of two scales, major and minor, of the same key’, and Bartok and Stravinsky were of that movement or phase. He also wrote, after mentioning having heard his Capriccio for piano and orchestra directed by the composer himself in Venice, that ‘Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job’.
In July 1935 Pound wrote from Venice to Dorothy in London, ‘am at Dead End & doing NOWT…feeling extremely well // only dead stop in head—which izza blessin.’ He was aware though that something was up over Abyssinia. It was ‘no use arguing’, he wrote, ‘no theory but political and econ. necessity’.
In the first week of August Pound and Olga went up into Austria for the opera at Salzburg. They travelled part of the way, possibly from Innsbruck, with Jas. Laughlin in his hired Ford tourer, and stopped off at Wörgl, about halfway between Innsbruck and Salzburg, to call on Herr Unterguggenberger and hear all about his blighted stamp scrip. The ex-mayor as it happened was out on the mountain, but they had a ‘long tale from Mrs U.—very clear—and human’, and came away with some used, partly stamped, scrip. In Salzburg they heard Don Giovanni, Falstaff, Cosi fan tutte, and Fidelio—which last, according to Laughlin, Pound walked out of in disgust. Laughlin then drove Olga and Pound back to Venice. There is no record of their noticing the troops Mussolini had ordered to the Brenner and other borders to put a stop to the Nazi takeover of Austria and the Alto Adige which Hitler had intended should follow the assassination of Austria’s Chancellor Dollfuss on 25 July. They went by Gais to pick up Maria, who ‘proudly showed them [her] beehives and the goldenrod in full bloom’. After she had been three weeks in Venice Pound wrote to Dorothy, ‘Marieka very satisfactory, great progress since last year’. His pride in her shone in his telling Laughlin, ‘That amazin kid has just sent a communique which went straight on the PAGE of the noo econ. book at the exact place I was typing’. She had written, in the Italian he had told her she needed to learn, ‘Where we live people are sad because store goods cost so much and their sheep, hogs, cows, horses sell for nothing.’
He had somehow instilled in her the gist of some LAWS FOR MARIA:
3. That if she suffers, it is her own fault for not understanding the universe. | That so far as her father knows suffering exists in order to make people think. That they do not usually think until they suffer.
Then three more advanced laws:
There was also a ‘Curriculum’: typewriting, ‘Lingua Italiana without which you will not be able to sell what you write in Italy’, translation, and, query, ‘Inventive writing? first simple articles, then the novel’. In short, ‘I can only teach you the profession I know.’
The turning point: 1935–1936
On 16 March 1935 Hitler publicly decreed a massive re-armament of Germany and instituted universal military service, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The British, the French, and the Italians met at Stresa and condemned his action, but did nothing about it. In May Hitler made a great speech in the Reichstag on the theme of Germany’s need and desire for peace in Europe, telling the governments of Britain and France what they wanted to hear. The Times of London welcomed it as ‘the basis of a complete settlement with Germany’.
On 15 September 1935 Germany enacted the first of its ‘Nuremberg Laws’, by which German Jews were stripped of their citizenship and forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans. By the summer of 1936 ‘Jews had been excluded either by law or by Nazi terror—the latter often preceded the former—from public and private employment to such an extent that at least one half of them were without means of livelihood’. This persecution of German Jews appears not to have become a factor in international affairs.
On 2 October 1935 Mussolini announced to an enormous crowd in the Piazza Venezia that Italy was invading Abyssinia, Haile Selassie’s Empire of Ethiopia. Mussolini’s intentions had been no secret to Britain and France, and he had been given reason to think neither would interfere. However, Abyssinia had been admitted to the League of Nations, and the British Government on this occasion decided to uphold the League’s principle of protecting member states against foreign aggression, even though it wanted even more to have Italy’s continued support in containing Hitler’s Germany. The League declared Italy in breach of its Covenant and called for sanctions, that is, for an embargo on supplying arms, a trade embargo, and financial sanctions. There was no embargo on supplying oil; nor did Britain and France, who owned the Suez Canal, interfere with Italy’s shipping its troops and supplies through it, being anxious to do nothing that might lead them into war with Italy. In search of a resolution they offered to cede to Italy territory from their own colonies neighbouring Ethiopia, and to cede even a substantial portion of Ethiopia itself. Mussolini, caught up now in the pride and glory of conquest, refused their offers, and by May 1936 his vastly superior forces had conquered Ethiopia, and Haile Selassie had fled from its capital Addis Ababa into exile. In July the League lifted its sanctions. Although they had not been applied with much conviction nor to any great effect, they were profoundly resented in Italy, and Britain, being held primarily responsible for them, became an object of anger and hatred. Their main effect was to destroy the loose Stresa alliance of great powers intending some resistance to Nazi Germany, and to drive Mussolini towards an unwilling alliance with Hitler whom he regarded as a mad and very dangerous megalomaniac.
Mussolini apparently foresaw quite clearly what would be the outcome. Already in June 1936 he told a French Socialist that if he were forced by British and French attitudes to reach an agreement with Hitler, ‘First of all there will be the Anschluss [i.e the absorption of Austria into Hitler’s ‘Greater Germany’] within a short time. Then, with the Anschluss, it will be Czechoslovakia, Poland, the German colonies etc. To sum up, it is war inevitably.’
On 7 March 1936 Hitler had sent troops in to garrison the demilitarized part of Germany west of the Rhine, again in deliberate violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. He then offered a twenty-five-year non-aggression pact on his western front: ‘Germany will never break the peace’, he declared in another impassioned speech in the Reichstag, having first whipped up a frenzy of militarism. France, which had demanded the demilitarization of the Rhineland as a buffer against another German invasion, was in a condition of political paralysis; and Great Britain led the way in neither resisting the re-militarization nor imposing sanctions.
One explanation of the British Government’s inclination to appease rather than to oppose Hitler had been formulated by Claud Cockburn, an independent Irish journalist, in 1933. In October of that year, following Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations, he had written in his mimeographed newsletter The Week, that ‘A large and influential body of opinion in the City and in British business circles is more or less vaguely sympathetic to the Nazi regime as a “bulwark” against Communism.’ For finance and industry the enemy then was Communism; and Hitler, who had been helped into power by German industrial interests, was seen as an ally of capitalism and not a threat to it. His Brown Shirts were seen as good for destroying the trade unions and revolutionary organizations. In November Cockburn had reported, ‘The main line of Hitler propaganda in the upper reaches of London society are (1) Hitler is saving the world from Communism, (2) there is a Jewish conspiracy against Hitler, (3) Hitler is providing the German people, especially German youth, with an ideal.’ In February 1934 Cockburn had observed that the British Government, in spite of its denials, was consistently supporting the Nazi regime in Germany as urged by financial interests in the City and by the Bank of England; and that in particular it was letting it be known that in its view it would be acceptable if the Nazis within Austria were to take over the country and choose to unite with Germany, since that would not be the same as the absorption of Austria by Germany. (It was mainly due to Mussolini’s concern to hold on to the Tyrol and Alto Adige that Hitler was prevented from engineering the Anschluss in just that way until 1938.)
In Spain in July 1936 General Francisco Franco led a revolt of military commanders against the Popular Front Republican Government, and appealed for aid from Hitler and Mussolini. The latter sent arms, planes, and 60,000 or more troops; Hitler sent tanks, arms, and planes—the pilots of his Condor Legion perfected dive-bombing techniques which would be used throughout Europe after 1939. German and Italian planes operating together destroyed the town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. The Republicans had appealed for aid from Communist Russia, and received it until the end of 1938 when there was a change of Russian policy, leading to a collapse of the Republican forces early in 1939. Great Britain and France, which had throughout maintained a policy of non-intervention, were quick to recognize the victorious General Franco’s forces as the legitimate government of Spain, and his long reign as dictator followed.
The Spanish Civil War gave Hitler an opening to draw Italy into agreeing a common policy on foreign affairs, one based on the differences between their interests and those of France and Britain. On 1 November 1936 Mussolini referred to this as an ‘axis’ around which other European powers ‘may work together’, and thus gave its name to the Nazi–Fascist Axis. ‘German and Italian rearmament is proceeding much more rapidly than rearmament can in England’, Hitler remarked to Ciano, now Mussolini’s Foreign Minister, ‘In three years Germany will be ready…’
‘The boss knows his business’
In the English, French and Italian newspapers which Pound was keeping up with in August and September 1935 there was a storm over the likely invasion of Abyssinia, and over the League of Nations’ threat of sanctions against Italy if it did invade. Homer Pound became alarmed, and Ezra dashed off a reassuring postcard to him from Venice: ‘Keep KAAAAAAM. The boss knows his business.… Continue yr/ banking habits as usual.’ ‘Ever hear of the Seminoles?’, he prompted, as if to account for what Mussolini was up to.
That was a startling analogy. ‘The long Seminole war of 1835–42, the hardest fought of all the Indian wars’, according to the old Encyclopædia Britannica, ‘was due to the tribe’s refusal to cede their lands’—i.e. the greater part of Florida—‘and remove to Arkansas’. At the war’s end the Seminoles were removed, and then were ‘recognized as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes”’.
In October, with the invasion now well under way, Pound wrote to Senator Borah, ‘you can have perfectly clear conscience that 7 million of subjected population in Abyssinia will be benefitted by conquest’. Still, he was sorry that Italy had started a war. Though it was ‘necessary’, he told Williams, it was ‘regrettable, in some ways’. By November, however, he was telling Borah it was ‘wrong’ to see ‘Italy’s activity in Abyssinia as war’. Apparently it was ‘road building etc.’, and freeing ‘victim tribes’ from slavery. His faith in Mussolini was such that he was sure he would be bringing an ‘enormous advance in living conditions’ to the uncivilized Abyssinians, just as he had done for ‘the people in backward parts of Italy during the past five years’. In a note with the date line ‘6 Dec. anno XIV’ included in Polite Essays, he took the statement ‘We have had no battles but we have all joined in and made roads’, ‘from a letter of Captain Goldoni’s’, to indicate the new Fascist ‘forma mentis’ in action in Abyssinia. Later though, in April 1936, he would frankly declare (here partly echoing what Mussolini had said in March), ‘Italy needs Abyssinia to attain ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE, by which…I mean the MATERIAL WEALTH, the raw materials necessary to feed and clothe the people of Italy.’ To that he added, ‘And I hope Italy gets every inch of it.’ When Italy had conquered Abyssinia, which it was able to do in a matter of months thanks to its great superiority in weapons, to its being able to bomb and strafe unopposed from the air, and to its use of poison gas, Pound at least once referred simply to ‘the Abyssinian acquisition’, and another time to the new ‘Italian empire’.
He was sensitive to the charge that he was representing the Italian point of view, that he was writing Italian propaganda. No, he insisted in the British-Italian Bulletin, which had been set up to put the Italian point of view in London during the Abyssinian crisis, ‘I am, if you like, writing European propaganda for the sake of a decent Europe wherein the best people will not be murdered for the monetary profit of the lowest and rottenest, and wherein the divergent national components might collaborate for a sane unstarved civilization’. Or again, he was representing an ‘international’ point of view; and, beyond that—this was in that note in Polite Essays—‘I am writing for humanity in a world eaten by usury.’
Those disclaimers don’t altogether carry conviction. Pound, who had been at Aquila in the Abruzzi with Dorothy, went immediately to Rome when the invasion was announced, put up at the Albergo Italia, and (as he would write in the British-Italian Bulletin) remained there ‘during the two months of greatest tension, and did not leave the Capital until, to my mind, the time of that particular danger was past’. His idea appears to have been to rally to the Italian cause. On 15 October he submitted for Mussolini’s consideration a project for an international organization to replace the damned League of Nations. He wanted to talk with Il Duce, but was rebuffed. He called on the Minister of Agriculture, and met Olivia Rossetti Agresti, an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini’s economic policies. His most important contact appears to have been Odon Por, 1 who described himself as ‘an old New Age–Orage man…trying to propagate Social Credit here’, and who had influential contacts within the Fascist government. Pound seems to have worked on some pro-Italian journalism with Por; and it may have been Por who introduced him to the British-Italian Bulletin. Pound began contributing to this supplement to L’Italia Nostra, a newspaper for Italian-speaking residents of Great Britain, in December 1935, and sent in nearly thirty articles over the following ten months. He told Por, ‘British Ital Bulletin offered to pay me and of course I can NOT accept money for writing Ital propaganda.’ That could mean that he knew he was writing propaganda, and felt there was something not straight about his doing it. On the other hand, it could mean that he would not be hired to write propaganda, and thought that it if he were to accept money it would appear that he was.
There is evidence that Pound did have his own agenda and would not be dictated to. In January 1936 Por arranged for him to discuss doing some radio broadcasts for the Ministry of Press and Propaganda. He warned him, ‘do not talk about money & so on. It confounds them…they think you are crank and try to avoid you.’ (The previous June Por had persuaded the editor of Civiltà Fascista to let him ask Pound for an article, and been told ‘anything except economics’. Pound did not write for Civiltà Fascista.) Pound’s response on this occasion was to the point: ‘what do I want to talk about on the RADIO? unless it IS money??’ He was not tempted, as Redman comments, by the possibility of the regular position Por hoped he would be given, ‘without the understanding that he would be free to speak about what he wanted’. And what he wanted, he told Por, was ‘1. Stave off pan European war…2. get sane economics started SOMEWHERE’; and he did not ‘care a fried hoot about talking over the radio UNLESS it conduces to one or all of the above activities’.
If we look again, in the light of that, at Pound’s correspondence with US senators, and at his contributions to the British-Italian Bulletin, it is apparent that for the most part he was pushing his own line of political and economic propaganda, and that his attempts to justify Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia are infrequent asides or interjections. When he was writing in an organ of Fascist propaganda, it was not on the whole Fascist propaganda that he was writing, and the Ministry of Press and Propaganda was wary of him on that account. Por was told, ‘can’t put [him] on the wireless—because [he] said strange things before’. ‘The Foreign Office is afraid of you’, he wrote to Pound in May, ‘so is the Ministero Stampa’. The fact was that the Italy Pound was promoting was not so much their Italy as the exemplary and ideal Italy he believed in, one that, whether it existed or not, he was bent on projecting. Moreover, his war was not theirs.
In his mind, as he wrote in his first article for the British-Italian Bulletin, ‘A strong Italy is the key-stone of Europe for peace, for the good life, for civilization’. In fact, as he saw things, Italy alone was standing out against the pressure towards war in Europe. (As for Italy’s small war in Africa, that, he suggested in a letter to Borah, was a price worth paying to keep war out of Europe.) ‘The pressure towards wars is economic’, he wrote, ‘usury is the root of ruin’. Europe had ‘lost the distinction between usura and partaggio, [between] usury and fair sharing’, and had lost with it the sense of ‘civic responsibility’ which Italy still maintained. It followed, for Pound, that in imposing sanctions on Italy, England and France, themselves in a depression brought on by a usurious financial system, and in the grip of financiers with vested interests in arms sales and wars, were attacking the preserver of peace, of the good life, of civilization in Europe.
The evil of the moment, then, was not Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, but the League of Nations’ attack on Italy. The real war, for Pound, was between usury and a good society, with the League as the arm of usura. To Senator Borah he declared that ‘the attempt to starve Italy, for the sake of crushing the Duce over a technical quibble is larger scale crime than any implied in colonial settlement’. And behind that attempt was the English Government whose ‘main purpose…is to hide the MONSTROUS fake and evil of the usury system’. ‘The question of Abyssinia’, he had written to both Borah and Senator Tinkham when the invasion was about to be launched, is ‘whether ANY nation that doesn’t crawl on its belly and take orders from London (from the most treacherous nation of earth) is to have the league used against it; is to suffer unlimited and unscrupulous blackmail, wangled by England’. He had in his files, he assured the readers of the British-Italian Bulletin in February 1936, ‘signed statements and first-hand information to the effect that the U.S. regards Geneva as a bureaucracy hired largely by London, as a shop front, a camouflage covering financial iniquity, as a tool of Britain’. The clinching detail for Pound was his discovery that Anthony Eden, who represented Great Britain on the committee of the League which decided on sanctions, had ‘married into the powerful banking family of Beckett—Sir Gervase idem. director of Westminster bank’, had entered parliament in the same year, and ‘Nacherly hiz rize wuz rapid’. The plot thickened when he learnt that Lord Cranbourne, who had joined that same Westminster Bank as a director in 1933, had just resigned to become Under Secretary for League of Nations Affairs. To Pound it seemed obvious that ‘the men now crying out for the starving and, as they call it, “sanctioning” of Italy represent the same errors, the same weaknesses of mind that have caused the “sanctioning” of great masses of the English and French and American population’. What Italy was doing in Abyssinia—(which in any case would be better off, he thought, under the Duce’s rule)—appeared to Pound insignificant beside the economic war he could see being waged against, not just Italy, but against humanity.
Mussolini’s secretariat at the Palazzo Venezia thought Pound deluded and out of touch with reality. His project for a new league to take the place of the existing League and thus break British tyranny was dismissed as the weirdly conceived project of a befogged mind which, having seen a small glimmer of truth, imagined it had discovered a brilliant solution. Pound proposed that Italy call a conference at once, within 24 hours, before England could become suspicious, a conference in which the world’s peoples could come to know each other’s genuine will and aspirations, without interfering in each other’s internal affairs and commerce, and without any coercive power, without sanctions. Japan, Germany, Brazil, Hungary, Austria, would be glad to join such a league. Germany could join without being humiliated; and the United States—which had kept out of the League of Nations—could join this purely moral league without breaking its principle of isolation from European politics. Why not call in the foreign ambassadors at once and issue invitations with Roman ceremony, with Latin grace, in Bodoni typeface. Act now, Pound urged at one point, dropping for the moment from moral idealism into realpolitik, create a tactical diversion, and Abyssinia will be forgotten. An official in the secretariat coolly advised that, given Pound’s enthusiasm and goodwill towards Italy, it would be enough to point out that, however ingenious the proposal, such a conference could not be put together in 24 hours; that, as things stood, Italy, Austria, and Hungary were members of the League of Nations and would not be free to set up an alternative to it for at least two years; and that his proposal would be held over for detailed consideration of its legal implications at some future date. This was to treat Pound diplomatically as a fantasizing friend of Italy who should be brought gently down to earth.
In the end it is difficult to know quite what to make of Pound’s behaviour in relation to Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia. Certainly he went on pursuing his own quixotic agenda. In his last words in the British-Italian Bulletin, in October 1936, he was insisting that ‘The total purchasing power of the community must equal the total needs, and stretch thence upward toward the total desires of the whole people, before prosperity reigns in any nation.’ He would write about money, and for a peaceful society.
But then his war on usury became mixed up in an attack on the League of Nations for imposing sanctions on Italy. And his defence of Italy as a just society became contaminated with justifications of its aggression against Abyssinia. Some of those justifications, moreover, such as the assertion of Italy’s need to attain economic independence, and the apparently damning exposure of Eden’s links with banking, are close to what he would have been reading in the Fascist press. Then there is his writing almost weekly for an organ of Fascist propaganda. He was on the whole speaking his own mind there, and the Italian authorities certainly did not read him as speaking for them. Yet it is not to be wondered at if others in England and America thought he was writing propaganda on Italy’s behalf.
One thing at least is clear, that through these complications and confusions Pound was trying not to be distracted from what seemed to him most real and urgent, the great economic war. Basil Bunting, who kept a more open mind, was moved to tell him mildly, ‘You turn a blind eye to a good many things, Ezra.’ Bunting had decided, even before the conquest of Abyssinia, that while Mussolini was a great man he had done all the good he was likely to do for Italy or for Europe, and that it was high time he was got rid of. But Pound maintained his faith in Mussolini, and saw only what he believed or hoped was the case. When Mussolini celebrated the military virtues Pound somehow saw his militarism as leading, not to war, but to Italy’s having the courage to resist the forces of international usury. And when the Bank of Italy was nationalized in March 1936 he saw that as a victory over the usurers, and was confirmed in his belief that Italy was driving towards what Jefferson had called for, and what Social Credit called for, that the nation should have control of its own credit and should use it for the good of the whole people. In December 1936 he would be urging Mussolini to go further. ‘DUCE! DUCE!’, this letter begins, ‘Molti nemici molto onore’. But the enemies of Italy he had in mind were the usurers, and he was telling Mussolini again, as he had when he spoke to him in person in 1933, that his next step should be to abolish taxes. The letter was filed by the secretariat, probably unseen by Mussolini, and probably not understood by anyone who did see it.
Music, money, cantos
In the spring of 1936 Pound announced in Rapallo’s Il Mare that in place of the usual concert season there would be a series of ‘Studi Tigulliani’, or musical seminars. Gerhard Münch had gone back to Dresden the previous summer, fearful of ‘being interned in event of war’, and hoping to get on as a pianist and composer in the new Germany. Attendance at the concerts had become disappointing. And there was the distraction of the war, then at its height. To maintain Rapallo’s standing as a musical centre, and so that the League of Nations sanctions should not altogether break them up, as Pound put it, the Amici had resolved themselves ‘into a study circle with the immediate intention of hearing as many of the…concerti of Vivaldi as were available in printed editions and executable by one or two violinists and a piano’.
Vivaldi’s music was at that time of interest only to a few ‘eccentric musicologists’. Pound was able to list as in print just twenty-nine sonatas and concerti; and Grove’s Dictionary of Music said Vivaldi had composed no more than seventy. Olga Rudge, however, would shortly find 309 hidden away in the National Library in Turin, and there were 90 more lying neglected in the State Library in Dresden—Pound would have Münch send him photocopies of those. The great Vivaldi revival had yet to get under way, and Pound and Olga Rudge were among the first to appreciate his rich musical heritage and to set about getting it performed and published. 2
Accounts of Pound’s lectures for the first two ‘Studi Tigulliani’ appeared in Il Mare in April; and a summary by Olga Rudge of the third session appeared there in May. ‘The problem of the relationship between Vivaldi and Bach’ had been discussed, and whether Italy could claim in Vivaldi a composer equal to Bach; but there could be no answer to that, it was concluded, until Vivaldi’s manuscripts had been edited and published. The third meeting seems to have been the last, but through the following years Olga Rudge’s work, and Pound’s, to bring the lost music to performance and to add it to the cultural heritage would go on.
Music makes order, or at least it presents ‘an example of order’, so Pound would write in his Guide to Kulchur. More, ‘its magic…is in its effect on volition’, on the will to order. And its contrary, subverting every good work, is usury or money-greed. At this time, in 1936, Pound’s thinking about economics was tending to fix upon that evil. What would become canto 45, ‘With Usura’, appeared in J. P. Angold’s little magazine called Prosperity in London in February; and what would become canto 46, attacking the ‘hyper-usura’ of the modern banking system, would appear in Laughlin’s New Directions in Prose and Poetry with a dateline ‘30 Jan XIV’. The major preoccupation of the entire block of cantos he had been working on through the months of the Abyssinian crisis and war, and which he would deliver to Faber & Faber in November 1936 as The Fifth Decad of Cantos [XLII–LI], was ‘usura, sin against nature’.
Henry Swabey’s recollections of Pound in 1935 and 1936 bring out how dominant this preoccupation was at that time, not only in his writings but even in his daily conversation. Swabey (1916–96), then a very young Englishman studying at Durham University and preparing to take orders in the Church of England, had found Make It New ‘more stimulating than Thucidides’ and had written to Pound as ‘the most approachable of the sages of my youth’. Pound had suggested that since the bishops of Durham had once minted money he might ‘make a study of ecclesiastical money in England’, and find out ‘When, if ever, did usury cease to be a mortal sin?’ Swabey duly wrote his thesis on ‘The Church of England and Usury’. He visited the sage in Rapallo in the early summer of 1936, and Pound met him at the station wearing ‘an orange blazer’ and appearing ‘larger and tawnier’ than Swabey had expected. (The orange blazer, a surprising sartorial detail, may have been down to his membership of the Rapallo tennis club. Pound was rather proud of having been defeated by the champion of Italy, no less, in the doubles in the town’s recent International Tournament.) At tea in the Pounds’ flat Swabey noticed the Gaudier Hieratic Head, ‘but EP steered me away from his book on Gaudier and lent me a book on the Governors of the Bank of England’. They went out once or twice into the bay on a raft fitted with a seat, EP paddling skilfully; evenings they ‘wandered round the town, pausing for glasses of water at various cafes’, EP leaving ‘an appropriate consideration at each stop’; and all the time, Swabey remembered, ‘He talked mostly about economic subjects.’
To George Antheil, who didn’t particularly enjoy talking about credit and taxes, Pound was off-putting. Antheil was looking for concert openings, but Pound wrote, ‘I don’t see you functioning publicly in Italian picture.’ There was no American colony of the kind they had known in Paris. And Italy was ‘more interested in getting a good life for the peasants than in spending money on ballets’. It was ‘a damn good country for a bloke interested in ECONomics’, only that was not Antheil’s line. ‘If you were a specialist in manure or drainage…’, Pound offered, rubbing it in that he now saw Antheil as just another unawakened aesthete.
His treatment of young Swabey was so different. ‘Now that I had reached Italy he opined that I should see as much of the country and its works of art as possible,’ Swabey recalled, ‘So, he wrote out a full itinerary’, and ‘spared no trouble on my behalf, even sending a telegram to a Rome hotel’. Swabey was advised to spend one day in Pisa, and sleep that night at ‘Hotel Corallo, Livorno (20 minutes further by train)’. Then 2 days in Rome; 1 day in Siena—‘(hotel Canone d’Oro)’, ‘can walk round Siena in half hours’; 2 or 3 days for Perugia and Assisi; Firenze—‘Hotel Berchielli, on the Arno’; 2 days in Venice—‘Pensione Seguso, sulle Zattere…Bar Americano, Piazza San Marco. for sandwiches…Santa Maria Miracoli, hard to find. But best renaissance…San Giorgio Schiavoni, back of S. Marco (Carpaccio)’; Verona could be seen ‘Between trains’, i.e. ‘San Zeno (inside)’, the central piazzas, ‘get into any d. church you see’, and ‘Also an arena’; and finally Milan, ‘2 nights’ to take in galleries and churches. Swabey gives the impression that he followed Pound’s ‘guide to Italy’ both dutifully and gratefully.
Towards the end of July Pound joined Olga in Siena in her apartment with a painted ceiling in the Palazzo Capoquadri. Dorothy wrote from England, ‘Depressing country and rotted and decayed top & bottom—more especially top.’ Pound wrote back that he had been in the Biblioteca Communale looking into a big history of Siena’s Monte dei Paschi bank, and was glad to find ‘Main points Monte P. OK== abundance of natr & will of the whole people as basis of credit // nacherly the 10-vol bloke don’t stress that’.
He was finding confirmation of what he had written about the Monte dei Paschi in his Social Credit: An Impact, a pamphlet published in London in 1935. He had invoked it there as an example of ‘banks built for beneficence, for reconstruction’, as against ‘banks created to prey on the people’. Around 1620, after being conquered by Florence, ‘Siena was flat on her back, without money.’ Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, ‘underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats’, taking as his main security the grazing rights of the Maremma pastures worth 10,000 ducats annually. The bank lent out at 5½ per cent, paid 5 per cent to its investors, kept its expenses to a minimum, and made over any profit ‘to hospitals and works for the benefit of the people of Siena’. It thus stood for Pound as an example of moral banking, contrived ‘not for the conqueror’s immediate short-sighted profit, but to restart the life and productivity of Siena’. And it pointed the lesson of solid banking, that ‘Credit rests in ultimate on the abundance of nature’, in that case ‘on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep’. Evidently the interest charged had to be a reasonable proportion or share of the added value. ‘That bank is open today’, Pound wrote, ‘It outlasted Napoleon. You can open an account there tomorrow.’ And in July 1936 he did just that, opening an interest-bearing current account.
Through the heat of August—‘hot here. but air moving & not suffocating’—Pound spent much of his time ‘on damn HARD Liberry seat’ and in the archives, filling five notebooks with the raw materials and rough drafts for cantos 42–4, drawing them directly from the original documents as well as from ‘the 10-vol bloke’ and from other historians. Those cantos, which tell the story of how the Monte dei Paschi bank was created and how it endured, would be finished off in Venice in September.
He was hearing good music in Siena; and in mid-August there was the excitement of the horse race around the central Campo in which the seventeen contrada or city wards compete against each other to win a banner, the Palio. From his window Pound watched four white oxen being cleaned up and decorated to draw the triumphal chariot in the spectacular parade which would precede the race. ‘Time | consumed 1 hour and 17 minutes’, he noted when recording that operation in canto 43. He sent Omar a postcard of the Palio, and Dorothy returned Omar’s ‘thanks & love’, with (in brackets) ‘he has bought you a little present—all on his own’.
All the while he was looking for signs of the spread of Social Credit. He mentioned to Dorothy that there had been a ‘new raise in pay’, in Italy, and he took that to be Social Credit in practice, because it was centrally controlled and went with price control. In the United States there was a Social Credit Conference at the University of Virginia’s Institute of Public Affairs, with Gorham Munson and Jas. Laughlin of New Democracy among the speakers, and also William Carlos Williams. In England the Green Shirts, the militant wing of Social Credit, were being active. Pound had dedicated his Social Credit: An Impact to them, and was in correspondence with their leader, John Hargrave, though he contributed only once to Hargrave’s journal Attack!, and that was a piece of ranting and bantering street-corner oratory about ‘money money money’ and who makes it. He had told Hargrave that he was all for getting Social Credit ‘OUT of Bloomsbury and into the East End’, and had suggested using music hall routines to put its message across. 3 Then there was the British Union of Fascists. Pound didn’t think much of its leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, at this time, but he was encouraged by a private letter saying that the BUF ‘Accept Social Credit analysis’. That, he told Homer, was ‘Big nooz IF they stick to it’. Perhaps it was in the hope of keeping them to it that he would contribute an article on economics to nearly every issue of Mosley’s British Union Quarterly from its first in January 1937 up to its tenth in April 1939. He was charged with a sense of AGENDA, of what needed to be done. As he told Dorothy towards the end of that summer in Siena, ‘I am not merely pickin’ daiseyes’.
Dorothy in London was noticing the ‘word “fascism” getting more and more hopelessly vulgarized—Spain now’. Evidently it had become a convenient term for lumping together the forces allied against the fissile Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist Popular Front in Spain, even though Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism, and Franco’s nationalistic anti-communism were essentially different from each other. What they had in common at that moment was their hostility to international Communism. Pound’s response to Dorothy, ‘Stalinists acc/ Telegraph are calling the executed Trotskists fascists’, underlined the way ‘fascist’ was being re-defined in the negative, as signifying anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-democratic. The British Union of Fascists may have contributed to this shift of meaning as Mosley moved his affiliation from Mussolini’s Fascism to Hitler’s National Socialism. And shortly the Fascist–Nazi Axis would be declared. Significant distinctions were being lost in the clash and confusion of ideologies. And it was not only the perception of Fascism that was affected. To many at the time ‘socialism’ and ‘democracy’ appeared to be embodied in Stalin and the dictatorship of his Comintern, if only because he was lending some support to the Popular Front.
On a postcard to Homer at the end of August Pound wrote, ‘have got to end of Analects again’—that was the second or third time he had worked his way through the ideograms. One of the sayings of Confucius that he kept coming back to was the answer to a disciple’s question, if he were to form a government what would he do first? And Confucius said, Call people and things by their correct names, otherwise there will be confusion and corruption in the state.
Pound left Siena on 2 September, took the train to Bolzano, a journey of eleven hours, then went on to Gais ‘to fetch Marieka’ and take her with him to Venice and Olga. ‘Waal, the place is hottern Siena’, he told Homer from Venice, ‘but it has not the hellish NOISE of that latter city.’ As soon as he had recovered his typewriter ‘out of O’s attic’, he went to work. ‘Waal this machine sticks but I knocked out 2 articles yester. and a canto collected from notes and a nuther canto this a.m.’—that was on the 3rd or 4th. He had also ‘bathed yester at Lido’.
On the 5th he was telling Dorothy that he would shortly send her ‘imperfect copy 3rd of new cantos’—that would have been canto 44. ‘I think technically the best I have done’, he wrote, ‘& AT last a block to balance the Malatesta | 3 all of a piece with sestina <under work> & seguito’—that is, with continuity. ‘Even if it don’t run to 4’, he went on, remembering how many there were in the Malatesta suite, ‘the USURA wd fit it & cd. count as symmetrizing.’ That in fact is how it worked out, ‘the USURA’ being placed as canto 45. On the 7th he wrote, ‘did frame for a fourth this a.m. but must let that one set/don’t want it thinner than the other 3’—this ‘fourth’ actually found its place as canto 50. He was so sure of the first three, though, that by the 10th he had sent them off to be printed, and they would appear in Eliot’s Criterion the following April.
On the 10th also he told Dorothy, ‘By vast heave the Dunning mss in order & shd go to post oggi’. Ralph Cheever Dunning was the old-fashioned poet he had befriended in Paris, and there was an ‘amateur publisher wanting to print the “whole of D’s poetry”’. (The amateur publisher would change his mind when he saw how bad much of it was.)
There was new music at the Venice Biennale of Music that year, and Pound was greatly stimulated by Honegger’s second string quartet, performed by the Gertler Quartet; by Hindemith’s viola concerto, Schwanendreher, with the composer himself playing the viola; and by Bartók’s fifth string quartet, performed by the New Hungarian Quartet. This last meant most to him, because he felt it to be, like his own Cantos, the record of a struggle and revolt against the entanglements of a civilization in decay. He immediately determined that he must get the New Hungarian Quartet, one of the best in Europe, to play that work in Rapallo, and that he must get Hindemith too, ‘which is some WANT on no assets’, as he admitted to Dorothy. Would the New Hungarians come, he asked Tibor Serly, a mutual friend, ‘for 500 lire and a night’s lodging?’ Not that he was able even to ‘offer the 500 lire yet’, having no assets save what he could earn, and having yet to sell the stuff he ‘proposed to shove into ’em’. Somehow by December he could write to Münch, ‘I think the New Hungarian Quartet is fixed to come,’ and they did indeed perform Bartok’s 5th, together with his 2nd and with a Haydn quartet ‘sandwiched between’ as ‘engine-cooler or whatever’, in the Town Hall of Rapallo the following March, although to a ‘shamefully small audience’. He had hoped that Münch might know Hindemith well enough to sound him out about ‘the minimum he wd. take to give an all Hindemith program’ in Rapallo, ‘with you and Olga if there is a trio’, but nothing came of any approach Münch may have made.
Hearing this new music was probably Pound’s most intense experience that summer in Venice. It was a kind of revelation to him to find contemporary composers doing deep and difficult and beautiful things, and he rejoiced that ‘the richness and abundance of music in 1936 is infinitely greater than it was in the 1920’s, when most of us could deeply admire no one save Igor Stravinsky’. He spread the good news in enthusiastic articles in the BBC’s Listener in October, then in Music and Letters and Delphian Quarterly in January; and in his accounts of the 1937 Rapallo concerts for Il Mare he often referred back to the 1936 Biennale.
An important experience of a different order was spending a few days with US Congressman George Holden Tinkham. Tinkham, with whom Pound had been corresponding since February 1933, was an isolationist and an obdurate opponent of America’s getting involved in the League of Nations, so that was one bond. Moreover, in Tinkham’s view Mussolini was a great man who had had a great triumph—meaning, apparently, in Abyssinia. ‘Any man who can successfully defy England and the League of Nations’, he had told Pound in June 1936, ‘is a man of strength and he has my admiration.’ The congressman arrived in Venice 19 September and flew out on the 25th, and Pound spent much if not most of the intervening days in his company to the exclusion of all else. On the 20th, the Monday, they drove, taking Maria with them, up to the Piave to see the place where, on 11 December 1917, Tinkham had fired the first American big gun against the invading Austrians, and then to the top of Monte Grappa where his staff car had been blown up by the Austrian artillery. Mary recalled how ‘Uncle George’ and ‘her papa talked relentlessly in the back of the car’. ‘Eleven hours solid conversation yester’, Pound wrote to Dorothy on the 21st. ‘And of course much more concentrated than any printed history’, he added on the 22nd, ‘30 years public office, 22 in Congress’. To Homer he wrote that day, ‘Sorry you can’t meet brother TINKHAM. eight hours CONversation yesterday. which you wd have NNNjoyed.’ He wrote again on the 25th, ‘We putt in nine hour day yesterday, an I learned more amurikun history than you cd. in a month of museums.’ ‘Don’t compromise G.T. with the electors by mentioning this incident,’ he warned. And to Dorothy he showed the same impulse to dramatize the significance of their talks, ‘Better not say to anyone how much we have seen of each other.’ Tinkham, writing from Paris on his way home in mid-October, simply thanked Pound ‘for all your courtesies and attention while I was at Venice’. ‘Had I not had you, I should have been deprived of a great deal of pleasure,’ he wrote, ‘All of the places you took me to were little “gems” which I never should have seen.’
Dorothy let Pound know that she would be back in Rapallo about 22 October, and Pound asked, ‘whereafter what does SHE think she wants to do?…Rome in December?’ On 16 October she was in Paris, and Pound wrote to her there, ‘I seem to be pushing out articl/ a day for somewhere or something. Hope it will Rome/ us in affluence’. In mid-November, however, he had to take Dorothy into hospital in Genoa, for haemorrhoids. ‘Worst supposed to be over. operation yesterday’, he wrote to Homer on the 20th, ‘now resting. better reserve strength than I had expected.’ He thought of joining Olga in Turin, where she was working on the Vivaldi manuscripts, but ‘cdn’t figure a way to do it wif decorum an elegance, wot she has so impressed on him’. At the end of December he went down to Rome on his own for a few days. About that time Homer and Isabel entertained Olga in Rapallo with ‘turkey and chocolates’.
‘The Fifth Decad’: against Usura
…you who think you will
get through hell in a hurry… (46/231)
In the ‘Siena cantos’, that is cantos 42–5, the poet is first of all a reader in the archives. He is an exemplarily active reader, extracting the telling details and arranging them to bring alive in the mind the drama and the meaning of what had been buried away in the old volumes of documents ‘most faithfully copied’ in 1623 and 1622 by ‘Livio Pasquini, notary, citizen of Siena’. The poet notes Pasquini’s cross in the margin against the place where a document was to be signed and sealed. He has fun with the copyist’s abbreviations of titles, ‘YYHH’=‘YYour HHighnessess’, plural—(‘the left front ox’ being prepared for the procession will voice that as ‘Mn-YAWWH!!!’). He is generally unimpressed by the pomp and circumstance reflected in the documents, as in ‘present…the | illustrious Marquis Antony Mary of Malaspina | and the most renowned Johnny something or other de Binis | Florentine Senator’. He is thoroughly serious though about the action that does interest him, how they created a new bank in Siena. For this he renders the Italian and the Latin of the records into his own current language, keeping a sense always that he is working through and translating from those originals, but striving for a direct understanding of what was achieved and how it was done.
There was the initial germ or seed, the idea of a new kind of bank, ‘FIXED in the soul, nell’anima, of the Illustrious College’—that was the college of Magistrates, the ruling council of Siena. Actually, the scholar-sleuths point out, the document has ‘nell’animo’, ‘in the mind’, and Pound appears to have misread it; unless, they concede, he was deliberately altering the sense, to fix the idea of the bank not in the mind only but in the spirit. Since that would make all the difference between simply having a good idea, and having the will to carry it into effect, we may take it that Pound’s ‘anima’ was no slip. He was not copying the record, he was interpreting it, in this case to build in his conviction that the new bank of Siena must have been not merely conceived but actively willed into existence. This will be a Volitionist episode.
The idea had been around for ten years when, in 1623, the Magistrates sought the views of the Senate on the details—
| and 6thly that the Magistrate |
| give his chief care that the specie |
| be lent to whomso can best USE IT |
| (id est, piú utilmente) |
| to the good of their houses, to benefit of their business |
| as of weaving, the wool trade, the silk trade |
Before this there had been, in 1622, a petition to ‘YY. HHighnesses’ the regents of the young Grand Duke of Tuscany, this with a rather different emphasis upon the benefits of such a bank to its investors and shareholders. That is, ‘companies and persons both public and private’ might put money into it in exchange for shares and have their 5 per cent guaranteed by the Sienese upon the security of the city’s assets, and even upon ‘the persons and goods of the laity’. Upon that security
| TTheir HHighnesses gratified |
| the city of this demand to |
| erect a New Monte |
| for good public and private |
And they agreed ‘to lend the fund’, that is, to invest in it,
| 200,000 scudi |
| capital for fruit at 5% annual |
| which is 10,000 a year |
| assigned on the office of grazing |
In other words, the Grand Duke’s 10,000 a year was the assured income from the town’s pastures, and for that reason the new bank, or Monte, would be known as the Monte dei Paschi, the Bank of the Pastures. In Pound’s reading the true basis of the bank’s credit becomes then the grass nourishing the sheep, not the Grand Duke’s 200,000 scudi investment; and his interest too, his 5 per cent ‘frutto’, was first ‘the fruit of nature’. As Pound had written, ‘Credit [and, implicitly, a just interest] rests in ultimate on the abundance of nature.’
The other great feature of the bank is that it was brought into being by the will of the people and had the whole of Siena behind it, ‘Senatus Populusque Senensis’. The formal Act, for our enthusiastic reader, shows democracy in action:
| there was the whole will of the people |
| serene M. Dux and His tutrices |
| and lords deputies of the Bailey, in name of Omnipotent God |
|
best mode etcetera, and the Glorious Virgin |
| convoked and gathered together 1622 |
| general council there were 117 councillors |
| in the hall of the World Map, with bells and with |
| voice of the Cryer |
At the start of canto 52 Pound will recapitulate, ‘And I have told you…| the true base of credit, that is, the abundance of nature | with the whole folk behind it’.
Cantos 42 and 43 repeat that main theme several times with variations according to the various (and quite repetitive) records of the steps taken to get the bank set up. (It may have been those recurrences that for Pound gave an under-sense of sestina.) These cantos also weave in some indications of the state of things in Siena before they had their bank, especially the fact that there was a shortage of money, and that what money there was was taken in taxes or tied up in usuries, so that production and ‘licit consumption [were] impeded’, and ‘few come to buy in the market | fewer still work in the fields’. Against that there are indications of the benefits flowing from the bank down to Pound’s time, among them the great Palio and its procession—the Monte dei Paschi supported that. In general, by meeting the need for money it brought ‘WORK for the populace’, and brought back prosperity to Siena’s ‘business | as of weaving, the wool trade, the silk trade’. Over a century later, in 1749, the bank was able to give ‘1000 scudi | for draining the low land | 2000 to fix the Roman Road’. The contrast with the great Medici bank which ran Florence and made loans to the great and powerful throughout Europe is noted with curt irony. Its lending was neither based on the abundance of nature nor invested in useful production and distribution, and in 1743 when its rule ended Florence was left with public debt amounting to ‘scudi 14 million | or 80 million lira pre-war’.
Canto 44 carries the story on through the times of the Grand Dukes Pietro Leopoldo (reigned 1765–90), and his son Ferdinando III (reigned 1790–9, 1814–24)—the interruption in the latter’s reign being due to Napoleon’s conquest of Italy. The Monte dei Paschi is in the background now, and the attention is on the exemplary rule of the Grand Dukes in Tuscany, with Napoleon figuring as the anti-hero. The good deeds of Pietro Leopoldo frame the canto. At the beginning there is his shutting down grain imports in a year when the Grand Duchy had a ‘Heavy grain crop unsold’, and his setting a legal maximum on interest, 4 per cent in 1783. The closing passage is a retrospective celebration of a duke ‘that wished state debt brought to an end’, and ‘lightened mortmain that princes and church be under tax | as were others’—
| that ended the gaolings for debt; |
| that said thou shalt not sell public offices; |
| that suppressed so many gabelle [taxes]; |
| that freed the printers of surveillance |
| and wiped out the crime of lèse majesty; |
| that abolished death as a penalty and all tortures in prisons… |
He also ‘split common property among tillers’, and his actions extended to ‘roads, trees, and the wool trade, | the silk trade, and a set price, lower, for salt’. He was altogether a ruler who cared for the public good above private profit and glory. And his son Ferdinando III was of the same mould. The main episode in the first half of the canto is a great day of celebration in Siena in 1792 to mark Ferdinando’s relaxing a law imposed by Florence to restrict the sale of grain and to keep down its price at the expense of the growers. When he was driven out of Tuscany by the French armies in 1799 his people called him ‘il piu galantuomo del paese’, their best, their most honourable man.
Things were very different under Napoleon—
| the citizen priest Fr Lenzini mounted the tribune |
| to join the citizen Abrâm |
| and in admiring calm sat there with them the citizen |
| the Archbishop |
| from 7,50 a bushel to 12 |
| by the 26th April |
This was a revolution that overthrew the established order in Tuscany, corrupted the clergy, unleashed violence against Jews—the ghetto sacked and ‘hebrews…burned with the liberty tree in the piazza’—and which undid the very meanings of words. In the name of ‘fraternité’ the ‘citoyen’ Monte dei Paschi was invited to ‘turn over all sums in your cash box’. Citizen Tuscany was absorbed into a new kingdom of Etruria, with a ‘King of Etruria, Primus, absolute, without constitution’, and this Louis levied new taxes, ‘so heavy they are thought to be more than | paid by subjects of Britain’. Citizen Napoleon—who had already crowned himself Emperor of France in 1804—had himself crowned King of Italy in 1805. He then deposed and dismissed ‘Madame ma sœur et cousine’, the widow of the first king of Etruria and Queen Regent to her infant son his successor, and installed his own sister, nicknamed ‘Semiramis of Lucca’, as Grande Duchesse of Tuscany. Napoleon is represented by a letter to the Queen Regent in which he shows no care at all for the will or the welfare of the people, and is concerned only for rank and majesty, especially his own, and for the extension of his empire. ‘I have given orders’, he writes, ‘that she’—the dismissed Queen Regent—‘be | received in my kingdom of Italy | and in my French States with honours that are due her’. Mention of Lisbon prompts the thought, ‘My troops shd have by now entered that capital | and taken possession of Portugal.’ He had made himself ‘Primus, absolute’; ‘I’ and ‘my’ rule in his sentences; and, as we know, he would fall. The line, ‘And “Semiramis” 1814 departed from Lucca’, marks his first fall, along with these other lines from the record, ‘and this day came Madame Letizia, | the ex-emperor’s mother, and on the 13th departed’—both sister and mother were sailing to join him in his exile on Elba.
In this revisioning of history Napoleon figures as of less significance than the usually forgotten Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Yet the canto does briefly note the recognitions in the multi-volume history of the Monte dei Paschi that his ‘law code remains. | monumento di civile sapienza’; and that, moreover, his administration ‘dried swamps, grew cotton, brought in merinos’, improved the mortgage system. ‘“Thank god such men be but few”’, is the ambivalent conclusion. The canto turns back with relief to the good times under Pietro Leopoldo, and then to the restoration of Ferdinando III and his enlightened rule. It concludes with this summary affirmation of the Monte dei Paschi, ‘The foundation, Siena, has been to keep a bridle on usury’, a line to bind the first three cantos together, and to lead into canto 45.
Thus far Pound has been rendering the fairly heavy prose of his sources into clearly phrased and measured verse for a flexible speaking voice, a voice inflected with humour or irony or enthusiasm, alert to the moral nuances and complexities of the story, but staying always close to the recorded facts and the implicit viewpoints of the time. He is not writing timeless lyric, but working at recovering what was done in that place at that time, and with a keen awareness that one must act in time. There is this single moment of lyric reflection,
| wave falls and the hand falls |
| Thou shalt not always walk in the sun |
| or see weed sprout over cornice |
| Thy work in set space of years, not over an hundred. |
That might be the notary’s hand, or his own, and his reader’s. That ‘Thou’ is the all-inclusive singular which is addressing equally one’s own self and other selves, speaking to all individually and inwardly. Pound himself walked in the sun in Siena and saw ‘weed sprout over cornice’; and in his sense of the moment there is a timeless, impersonal, insight. It is a moment, a mood, which will be caught up into canto 47.
Canto 45 distils a very different mood from the action of the preceding Siena cantos. This is, on the face of it, an Old Testament preacher’s or prophet’s passionate denunciation of usury. The word occurs twenty times in the fifty lines, and is linked throughout to insistent negatives, as in
| with usura |
| seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines |
| no picture is made to endure nor to live with |
| but is made to sell and sell quickly |
‘Usura’ blurs ‘clear demarcation’, keeps the stone cutter from his stone, ‘blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand | and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning’. The remarkable thing about this canto though, more especially when one thinks of the wholly negative rage of Pound’s attacks on usury in his prose, is that here the fury of denunciation is accompanied by a strong opposite sense of the good things usury destroys. Devastation may be the dominant theme, yet the things that are loved, the productions of nature and craft and art, stand out very clearly as the counter-theme—
| With usura hath no man a house of good stone |
| each block cut smooth and well fitting |
| that design might cover their face |
What usury prevents is nevertheless made present to the mind there, and it is the same throughout the canto. The positive feelings for good bread made of mountain wheat stand against ‘with usura, sin against nature, | is thy bread…stale as paper’. A whole way of life, Siena’s as it might be, is evoked in the painted paradise on the church wall; in the wool that should come to market, and in the spinner’s cunning and the weaver’s loom; in the stone-cutter and his chisel; and in the artists, Duccio and others, who ‘came not by usura’. As the denunciation builds to its powerful climax so the images of what usury undoes grow more urgent and compelling—
| Usura rusteth the chisel |
| It rusteth the craft and the craftsman |
| It gnaweth the thread in the loom |
| None learneth to weave gold in her pattern ; |
| Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered |
| Emerald findeth no Memling |
| Usura slayeth the child in the womb |
| It stayeth the young man’s courting |
| It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth |
| between the young bride and her bridegroom |
|
CONTRA NATURAM |
That is so very different from Pound’s prose, and so much more effective. There is no incitement to immediate action, no association of usury with the Jewish race, and no flailing language. Rather there is precise definition and justice in the measured words—the canto practises what the poet is in love with—and thus while it allows the ill-effects of usury to appear dominant in time, it maintains in the mind a strong vision of a better, a properly natural order. 4
There is an abrupt time-shift in canto 46 from ‘how it was under Duke Leopold’ to how it is now, in the present moment. Moreover the poet shifts his identity. He is no longer a searcher of archives, nor the preacher against usury. Now he is a contemporary investigator and prosecutor of crime. He has been on the case for seventeen years and longer, ever since he grasped what Douglas was going on about in the New Age office in 1918, that is, that the government can create credit and distribute purchasing power to its people. He can see the crime, has the evidence and a confession, but can he get a conviction?
The criminal he wants to put away is the banking system which has usurped the power to create credit and which exercises it for private profit and against the public interest. The confession was made by William Paterson, one of the speculators who set up the Bank of England in 1694, in its prospectus or charter. The Bank, he wrote, ‘Hath benefit of interest on all the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing’. 5 That is placed, underlined for emphasis, as the centre and pivot of the canto. It is followed by an observation said to have been made by Senator John Sherman of Ohio to Rothschilds in London during the American Civil War, and repeated by them in a letter to a New York firm. Sherman was at that time a member of the Senate Committee on Finance and an active proponent of the National Banking Act of 1863, the act which opened the way for US banks to gain control of the nation’s credit and to use it for private gain:
| Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which Roth-schild |
| 1861, ’64 or there sometime, ‘Very few people |
| ‘will understand this. Those who do will be occupied |
| ‘getting profits. The general public will probably not |
| ‘see it’s against their interest.’ |
And because people don’t understand the banking system, and don’t see how it works against the public interest, the prosecutor despairs of getting a conviction. Three times he asks, ‘Will any jury convict?’, and implicitly answers, not while they can’t or won’t see the evidence that is all around them.
The first half of the canto has been working up a general sense of the lack of clear-sighted discriminations and firm convictions in London as Pound knew it around the time of Orage’s New Age. Max Beerbohm’s un-genteel and politically pointed cartoons were suppressed. According to Orage other opinion shapers, Shaw and Chesterton and Wells, would not declare an opinion; while as for Pound, ‘trouble iz that you mean it, you will never be a journalist’. Then there was the amusing suburban garden party, at which he observed religious conviction dissolving into a polite drawing back from conversion or communion; and only the camel driver in the would-be Uniter’s story practises a faith not split off from his way of life. There too Mr Marmaduke remarked on the English government’s habit of not meaning what it said—he might have been talking about T. E. Lawrence’s Arabia—
| ‘They are mendacious, but if the tribe gets together |
| ‘the tribal word will be kept, hence perpetual misunderstanding. |
| ‘Englishman goes there, lives honest, word is reliable, |
| ‘ten years, they believe him, then he signs terms for his government, |
|
‘and, naturally, the treaty is broken. Mohammedans, |
| ‘Nomads, will never understand how we do this.’ |
All that, from genteel obfuscation of facts, through belief with no ground under it, up to governments not meaning their word, is what the prosecutor is up against in making his case.
The latter part of the canto glances hastily, even despairingly, over manifestations of usuries and evasions through the ages, as if hurriedly turning over file upon file of a mountain of evidence. There is too much here to make a clear case—‘London houses, ground rents, foetid brick work’—Regius Professors appointed to spread lies—the Manchester slums—‘Bank creates it ex nihil’—‘Jefferson…Van Buren’—Antoninus, ‘usura and sea insurance’, Athens—‘TAXES to build St Peters’, that is, the Church selling its sacraments and disregarding Luther’s protest, and ‘Thereafter design went to hell, | Thereafter barocco, thereafter stone-cutting desisted’. At that point the poet himself breaks out, speaking as ‘narrator’ in the Church’s own Latin as if taking up its neglected duty to denounce usury, ‘Aurum est commune sepulchrum’, gold, the common grave, ‘Usura, commune sepulchrum’; then, with the epithets Aeschylus coined for Helen as cause of the Trojan war, he names it destroyer of men, of cities, and of governments, ‘helandros kai heleptolis kai helarxe’. He is heaping up denunciations from across the ages, building up to Geryon, the classical monster which Dante placed in the pit of hell as the figure of Fraud, of usury upon usury. That outburst of controlled rage having cleared his mind, there is at last a passage of simple direct evidence—
| FIVE million youths without jobs |
| FOUR million adult illiterates |
| 15 million ‘vocational misfits’, that is with small chance for jobs |
| NINE million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial accidents |
| One hundred thousand violent crimes |
There, in the condition of the United States in 1935, was a ‘CASE for the prosecution’—only the Attorney General of the moment was wanting out, wanting the Postmaster’s job instead, according to ‘headline in current paper’. ‘England a worse case’, the canto concludes, ‘France under a foetor of regents’, meaning the Regents of the Bank of France. Altogether, the canto has been not so much about the iniquity of usury as about the difficulty, the apparent impossibility, of getting people to open their minds to the evil of it, and to stop tolerating it. The key word might be ‘conviction’, that is, the lack of conviction, and the consequent failure to convict.
In his prose Pound would often be driven to baffled fury by that want of conviction. Here, though, in the following canto, instead of the further fulminations against the tolerance of usury that we might expect, he celebrates the profound, primal, vision that is needed to see clearly how usury goes against nature. Canto 47 enacts a rite to open the mind to the generative force of nature, and to dispose it to understand its world and to live in it with the conviction of that illumination.
This rite affirming and renewing humanity’s unity with nature is conducted in the language of natural process and of the alert experience of nature; and it makes a powerful and rich music of its words to concentrate the mind and to bring it into accord with what is revealed in the experience. The vowels are ‘cut’, sharply defined, by the consonants; their tones are composed into quite complex harmonies and a natural melody; and the measure is controlled throughout by a steady though variable double-beat, like the heart-beat;—
| And the small stars now fall from the olive branch, |
| Forked shadow falls dark on the terrace |
| More black than the floating martin |
|
that has no care for your presence, |
| His wing-print is black on the roof tiles |
| And the print is gone with his cry. |
| So light is thy weight on Tellus |
| Thy notch no deeper indented |
| Thy weight less than the shadow |
That particular passage is in the same mood as the lines noticed above in canto 42, ‘wave falls and the hand falls’, a mood in which one lapses out of one’s active self into an impersonal awareness of being simply in and of the living world. That is, strictly speaking, a religious awareness, religion being the binding together of the many that are also one.
The canto is divided into two parts by a line-break (after l. 78), and, reading it as a rite, I take the first part to be the preparation of the candidate for the sacramental act of the second. The preparation consists of three statements or challenges followed by the candidate’s responses. The composition, as Pearlman noticed, is in the manner of a fugue.
The opening statement is Circe’s guidance to Odysseus, that he must sail after knowledge to blind Tiresias who, though in hell, sees the mystery of being that the living are too often blind to. The passage was given in the original Greek in canto 39, in which Odysseus was initiated into Circe’s mystery before being sent on his way. At the outset of the Cantos his voyage had led to his ‘“Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region”’, but to no revelation of Proserpine, the light of Tiresias’ seeing. Now the underworld is represented very differently, as ‘the bower of Ceres’ daughter Proserpine’; and it is Tiresias’ vision of and from Proserpine that he must seek.
The response is indirect, not out of the Odyssey but out of the rites of Babylonian Tamuz and Greek Adonis, rites that were still observed in Pound’s Rapallo. One night at midsummer lights in small jars are set in the water to float seaward, so that ‘The sea is streaked red with Adonis.’ In the ancient rite of Adonis women called upon the god lamenting his death, as his lover Venus-Dione had wailed and wept for him. Yet by his dying ‘Wheat shoots rise new by the altar, | flower from the swift seed’. (Venus, according to Ovid, changed the dead god into a flower.) Adonis dies annually and is deathless, like the other divinities figuring the seasonal dying and self-renewing of nature. He is akin to Proserpine, who, in another version of his myth noted by Lemprière, ‘restored him to life, on condition he spend six months with her, and the rest of the year with Venus’. The response then is the way available to Pound in the 1930s of participating in Tiresias’ knowledge of the undying, perpetually self-renewing life-force.
It is not clear who speaks the second statement. Pearlman suggests Tiresias; I incline to Circe as the speaker, the Circe to whom the witless sailors were creatures of blind instinct. In any case there is no doubt about what is being said, that the life-force in woman, in the shoot of a plant, in moth, bull, and man, is blind, unconscious, driving irresistibly to its end. ‘To the cave art thou called, Odysseus’, she declares; yet she recognizes that he does not go blindly, ‘By Molü art thou freed from the one bed | that thou may’st return to another.’ The response is again indirect, in part out of Hesiod’s Works and Days, and in part out of what Pound could see in the hills and olive groves around Rapallo. ‘Begin thy plowing | When the Pleiades go down to their rest’, that is in November; and ‘When the cranes fly high’, in October, ‘think of plowing’. That came from acquired knowledge of the seasons and birds, and shows both intelligence beyond blind subjection to nature, and an established tradition of working in harmony with nature. The persistence of that tradition is noted in Pound’s own observations, which are very like Hesiod’s, ‘Two oxen are yoked for plowing | Or six in the hill field | White bulk under olives, a score for drawing down stone’—that might be stone for ‘a good house’. The response thus modifies the statement by adding the specifically human component, the conscious determination of what must be done. It does this without setting man apart from or above nature. ‘By this gate art thou measured’, it insists, repeating that line from the first response, ‘Thy day is between a door and a door’—as between birth and death, and between the plowing for sowing and the harvest. ‘Thus was it in time’, this passage concludes, implicitly endorsing the natural scope of human life and work.
The third statement was cited above—‘And the small stars now fall.’ This goes on from ‘Thus was it in time,’ only shifting from rural activities into recognitions of our transience and insignificance. The voice here I take to be humanity’s own inner voice informed by traditional wisdom. The response also is out of experience, but now the inner voice counters the humbling or elegiac intimations of mortality by asserting an active part in the process. First there is the turn upon ‘Yet’—‘Yet hast thou gnawed through the mountain’—as it might be in the tunnelling for the railway and for roads all along the mountainous Ligurian coast. There is a further turn then, back to Circe and her ingle, and back also to Adonis—
| Hast thou found a nest softer than cunnus |
| Or hast thou found better rest |
| Hast’ou a deeper planting, doth thy death year |
| Bring swifter shoot? |
| Hast thou entered more deeply the mountain? |
Those are affirmative questions, leading into the sacrament and mystery of coitus—and here, at the climax of the canto, the initiate speaks in his own person, finding his identity in the act:
| By prong have I entered these hills: |
| That the grass grow from my body, |
| That I hear the roots speaking together, |
| The air is new on my leaf… |
—the almond bough will put forth its flame, and ‘Fruit cometh after’. This rite is a celebration not so much of the union of persons as of an intense awareness of being caught up in the process of nature and of existing at the very quick of it, a celebration enacting the life-principle itself in full consciousness of being for the moment what Adonis represents. That knowledge, that illumination, if it outlasts the act and is constant and deep enough, can become a power to perceive and to live in accord with our constructive and creative part in the universe. And it would confer ‘the power over wild beasts’, making us see at once that usury comes not from love of what we can know and do but from rapacious greed.
Critics tend to pass over canto 48 and to move directly from canto 47 to canto 49, which also closes upon ‘the power over wild beasts’. The serene ‘stillness’ of the idyll of ancient China in 49 appears to accord well with the ‘healing’ rite of Eleusis, and 48 can seem an unnecessary and unwelcome breaking of the celebratory mood. For George Kearns, one of the most perceptive of Pound’s readers, it comes as an ‘annoying interruption’ and seems simply ‘a miscellany into which the poet has crammed scraps of anecdotes, documents and historical bits—a modern babel among which we discern familiar themes’. The change of mood is certainly abrupt and harsh, as jarring as dropping out of rapt contemplation into a brainstorming session. Yet what is in question is still knowledge and the transmission of intelligence, only now we are no longer in the lyrical ideal but in the problematic real world, and here the poet is thrown back upon his method of gathering together and heaping up all sorts of scraps of information and anecdotes bearing upon his central preoccupations: how is vital intelligence to be passed on so that it goes into action? and what obstructs and prevents the communication of it?
The first part of the canto, lines 1–35—already beyond the first stage of tackling its problem, that of simply writing down more at less at random whatever comes to mind—has arrived at a pattern of discriminations. The passage is in fact ring-composed into a sort of vortex around its central anecdote:
a Jefferson’s neglected rhetorical question, who should pay rent on money, ‘Some fellow who has it on rent day, | or some bloke who has not?’
b the death of the last Ottoman sultan, the end of his line and its ways
c the deployment of ‘80 loudspeakers’ to broadcast a Vatican beatification
d a spy whose information helped save Vienna from the Turks, opened the first Viennese coffee-house where people meet and talk
e Herr Von Unruh miming the sergeant at Verdun who ‘jammed down the cadavers…with his boots | to get the place smooth for the Kaiser’
d 2 Charles Francis Adams reported that he had found no good conversation in London
c 2 the non-publication of Van Buren’s autobiography in which he had written of the U.S. bank war
b 2 Marx’s observation that the children whose health was ruined in England’s mills would ‘become fathers of the next generation’ and so pass on their tuberculosis
a 2 a Rothschild’s remark that ‘nations were fools to pay rent for their credit’.
Herr Von Unruh had been a German officer in the late war, and was, when Pound knew him in Rapallo, an Expressionist writer in exile from Nazi Germany. His account of ‘the sergeant tramping down the corpses to get the place tidy for William’ appealed to Pound as effectively communicating an insight into ‘The meaning of capitalism’ or ‘what capitalist mentality leads to’. The same might be said of the several items following the anecdote. Indeed the more one considers the whole passage the further from random it becomes.
The middle passage of the canto is also ring-composed, only this time the main elements—a letter addressed apparently to Queen Victoria, and another from Pound’s own Maria—enclose the lesser items. These latter concern mainly the acquisition and proving of navigational skills by voyagers, and the passing on of those skills—
| They say, that is the Norse engineer told me, that out past Hawaii |
| they spread threads from gun’ale to gun’ale |
| in a certain fashion |
| and plot a course of 3000 sea miles |
| lying under the web, watching the stars |
The letter to ‘Your Highness’ is reassuring about the good pedigree and breeding of ‘yr cairn puppy’. (Details of how a US Secretary of State was appointed without his pedigree being looked into are inserted in counterpoint.) There is a subdued sense of high nonsense about that episode. The other letter is distinguished rather by the simplicity and directness of its description of a ‘bella festa’ in Maria’s mountain village, and by an intelligence that shows her to be her father’s daughter—an intelligence that is in the genes, as one might say. Altogether, this letter off-rhymes quite richly and humourously with the one concerning the Queen’s ‘little dog [that] is doing…very well at Mr McLocherty’s’.
The final third of the canto observes two or three instances of the genetically transmitted intelligence of insects, which Pound had read about in Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour and had referred to in his discussion of volition in Jefferson and/or Mussolini. The instinctive martial behaviour which ensures the survival of their species is set against the broken Cathar fortress of Mt Segur, where the light from Eleusis was put out, and against the buried Roman city six feet down near San Bertrand de Comminges in the same region of southern France. The insect intelligence outlasts civilizations. Yet there is still the wheat field, and ‘an ox in smith’s sling hoisted for shoeing’; and still an eye for the way ‘sun cuts light against evening…shaves grass into emerald’.
After that demanding and unsettling re-encounter with the modern situation canto 49, known as ‘the Seven Lakes’ canto, seems to offer relief and rest in a natural paradise created and recreated over the centuries in paintings and poems by generations of Chinese artists, and made new again in Pound’s limpid verse. That is, many readers find here ‘The still centre of the Cantos [where] the images speak with quiet power, expressing the repose and harmony with the universe of Pound’s Confucianism’. One could be tempted to fall in with that sentiment.
There was in Pound’s family a Japanese ‘screen book’, consisting of eight ink paintings, each accompanied by a poem in Chinese and another in Japanese, representing eight classic views about the shores of the Xiao and Xiang rivers in central South China. In 1928 Pound met in Rapallo a scholar and teacher from that region, a Miss Tseng, and had her translate at sight the eight Chinese poems. His version, in lines 1–30, is not a translation, however, but a free composition of images suggested by both poems and paintings. Zhaoming Qian, in his expert account of this background, notes that the ‘Seven Lakes’ tradition goes back to the time of ‘The eighth Song emperor, Huizong (reigned 1101–25)’, who
turned government over to his ministers in order to spend more time on artistic activities. His neglect of state affairs eventually led to his capture by the invading troops of the Jin, and the loss of half China.
It was an era, in Qian’s words, of artistic vigour and political impotence. The Confucian historians, seeking always models of good government, put Huizong down as a Taoist and a bad example. Pound, following them, will say of him in canto 55, ‘HOEÏ went taozer, an’ I suppose | Tsaï ran to state usury’; his dynasty ‘died of taxes and gimcracks’.
Pound’s version of ‘the Seven Lakes’ is unmistakeably Taoist, not Confucian—the Confucian riposte will come in the final third of the canto. The scene is contemplated in a mood of quietist detachment, autumnal, in twilight, or in the evening at sunset. While there is an attentive sympathy with natural phenomena, and some finely observed images, the human presence is distanced and rendered inert. There are few strong verbs; none at all for human action until, ‘on the north sky line’, ‘the young boys prod stones for shrimps’. A passive, mildly melancholy, peacefulness reigns.
| Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes |
| against sunset |
| Evening is like a curtain of cloud, |
| a blurr above ripples; and through it |
| sharp long spikes of the cinnamon, |
| a cold tune amid reeds. |
| Behind hill the monk’s bell |
| borne on the wind. |
| Sail passed here in April; may return in October |
| Boat fades in silver; slowly; |
| Sun blaze alone on the river. |
The vowel music is pleasing, the rhythm slow-paced, reflective; and the images have a restful clarity. This is the poetry of withdrawal from the troubling world into rural retreats. It refines a state of mind that has its place, its function, in the human economy; but it should not be confused with the Confucian ethos of communal responsibility, nor with Pound’s volitionist ethic. The will to order, to civilize, to act in harmony with others and with the universe, is precisely what it does not express. Further, its way of communing with nature is so very far from the rites celebrated in cantos 39 and 47. To seek repose in nature, harmonizing as that may be for the solitary mind, is not at all the same as responsibly enacting our part in the universe, or in society.
The turn when it comes breaks the quietist mood, asserting, as if in protest, the preoccupation that mood would soothe away—
| State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt? |
| This is infamy; this is Geryon. |
| This canal still goes to TenShi |
| though the old king built it for pleasure |
That return to the realm of constructive action, and to what would undo it, is followed by a block of four lines of four syllables which can be pronounced but which few will understand. This, we are told, is a verse composed by the legendary emperor Shun and regarded as the hymn of an ideal society, a hymn, apparently, for the imperial transmission of the mandate of heaven throughout the empire. In 1958 Pound translated it thus:
| Gate, gate of gleaming, [clouds] |
| knotting, dispersing, |
| flower of sun, flower of moon [rays] |
| day’s dawn after day’s dawn new fire |
Here, however, Pound presents it in a (not altogether accurate) representation of how it would sound in the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters, that being closer than modern Mandarin (so Fenollosa had suggested) to the archaic Chinese pronunciation. In that form, according to Achilles Fang, it would not be especially meaningful to Japanese readers, and would be unrecognizable to Chinese readers. Indeed, for most readers of canto 49 the block of syllables can only represent something not immediately available to us. Their portentous sounds communicate not Shun’s vision so much as its inoperancy. Already in the twilight scenes of the Taoists of the Seven Lakes that ancient tradition of all-energizing light was quite lost.
The imperial hymn is followed by an even earlier folk song, said to express the contentment of the peasants under the rule of the legendary good emperor Yao. In Pound’s version their simple life is bound up with nature and is all strong verbs—
| Sun up; work |
| sundown; to rest |
| dig well and drink of the water |
| dig field; eat of the grain |
| Imperial power is? and to us what is it? |
The naive questions are read as showing that the people are not oppressed by imperial taxes and exactions; and the simple order of their lives shows that the state is well ordered. The folk are behind the abundance of nature; and the emperor, it is to be understood, is making new the total light process of sun and moon day after day. There, rather than in the Seven Lakes verses, was the Confucian idea of the good life.
The canto closes upon a chord: ‘The fourth; the dimension of stillness. | And the power over wild beasts.’ That last line takes us back to canto 47, then to canto 39, and still further back to Dionysos in canto 2. It doesn’t so much arise out of canto 49 as add to it a reminder of what is not there. ‘Kung and Eleusis’, Pound will write later, meaning that each needs the other. ‘The fourth: the dimension of stillness’, is more teasing. One is tempted to connect it with the passive repose the Taoist contemplative is after; but that would make a discord with ‘the power over wild beasts’, and with the active order of imperial power. It connects rather with the stillness of the all-creating Light of Cavalcanti’s philosophy in canto 36—‘He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness’. This is the paradoxical stillness of the unmoved mover of everything that moves, the stillness of light. Its action is implicit, though hidden, in the emperor’s hymn; and shines through in the peasants’ song. That light, properly understood, is one with the light of Eleusis, so that the two lines are a natural chord. The active intelligence of love, the illumination in coitus, and the properly functioning state, all grow from the one root, ‘consciousness of the unity with nature’.
The last two cantos of the decad resume the matter of usury. Canto 50 deals, in a manner close to Pound’s prose polemic, with the defeat by the forces of usury of the attempts at reform and revolution in Tuscany. Most of the canto is drawn from Antonio Zobi’s five-volume history of the Tuscan state up to the failed revolution of 1848, Storia civile della Toscana (1850–2). Zobi saluted the American Revolution as a precedent for Italy’s efforts to free itself from foreign domination, especially from that of Austria. And because Napoleon wrested Italy from Austria and brought in something of the spirit and laws of the French republican revolution he is named here as ‘First Consul’ rather than as emperor, and figures as a righteous opponent of the usurious monarchies of Austria and England.
There is first a keynote ‘rhyme’ of the American Revolution and Pietro Leopoldo’s reforms in Tuscany, both having occurred about the same time. A telling difference, however, is that the one, as John Adams said, ‘took place in the minds of the people’, whereas the other doesn’t appear to involve the people in the same way at all. It is the Grand Duke who sets about clearing the state debt left by the Medici—‘its interest ate up all the best income’—and it is he who cuts down the taxes. These were enlightened reforms, but not a popular revolution, and they left Tuscany still under the Austrian empire.
Vienna, the capital of that empire, is presented in images out of the early ‘hell cantos’, as ‘hell’s bog’, ‘the midden of Europe…the black hole of all | mental vileness…the privy that stank Franz Josef’, all this because ‘In their soul was usura and in their minds darkness’. Given that vision of Austria, Napoleon did well to defeat its army at Marengo in 1800 –
| Mars meaning, in that case, order |
| That day was Right with the victor |
| mass weight against wrong |
Carlyle, in his Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, had seen Napoleon’s ‘brilliant Italian campaigns’ in that light, as inspired by ‘a faith in Democracy’ and as an assertion of the enlightened spirit of the French Revolution against the ‘Austrian Simulacra’. Yet Italy had then come under Napoleon’s empire, and the best Zobi had to say about that was that when Napoleon was forced out in 1814 at least Ferdinando Habsburg ‘got back a state free of debt | coffers empty | but the state without debt’.
And still Tuscany and Italy were not free. With Napoleon exiled to Elba the Congress of Vienna was called to put Europe back together again, and the four great powers, Austria and England, with Prussia and Russia, met to carve it up between them and to restore it to its pre-revolutionary state.
| England and Austria were for despots with commerce |
| considered |
| Put back the Pope but |
| reset no republics: Venice, Genova, Lucca |
| and split up Poland in their soul was usura |
| and in their hand bloody oppression |
While they were still negotiating Napoleon escaped from Elba, gathered an army again, and ‘for a hundred days [hope spat] against hell belch’, that is, until his final defeat at Waterloo. ‘The force which he challenged’, so the argument runs in Christopher Hollis’s The Two Nations, a work which Pound read with approval, ‘was the force of usury’; and the victory of that force ‘laid finally in the dust the great hope of the world’s freedom from the empire of usury’.
The restored monarchies of Europe, Hollis explains, were now ‘weighed down by a burden of debt which made their creditors the effectual masters of policy’. In this analysis, the Napoleonic wars which culminated in the battle of Waterloo had given the bankers who financed them—Hollis names the Rothschilds—the opportunity to become the dominant power in Europe, and to put down the power of the people.
This interpretation, which differs radically from the generally received story, is the key not only to this canto’s treatment of Napoleon, but also to Pound’s understanding of most of the world’s wars from 1815 through the American Civil War to 1939–45. The conflict for him is always between the true values of democracy and the interests of finance, with the latter too often triumphant. He saw the nineteenth century as ‘the century of usury’, the century in which ‘the revolution born of the Leopoldine reforms in Tuscany, and quite manifest in the Jeffersonian process’ in America, was betrayed by men so ‘steeped from the cradle in usurious preconceptions’ that they knew not what they did in following the dictates of finance. So Wellington, when he drove Napoleon’s army out of Spain, ‘was a jew’s pimp | and lacked mind to know what he effected’. And at Waterloo, implicitly, he carried the day for usura, for Geryon.
‘Mind’ is a major motif of the canto: the revolution ‘took place in the minds of the people’; it was betrayed and defeated by minds in ‘darkness and blankness’, and by minds in which ‘was stink and corruption’ of usura. Then there is what Zobi wrote in 1850 as if to account for the failure of the 1848 revolution, ‘Italy ever doomed with abstractions…By following brilliant abstractions’. Pound endorses that with an example—
| Not, certainly, for what most embellishes il sesso femminile |
| and causes us to admire it, they wrote of Marie de Parma |
| [Napoleon’s] widow. |
But isn’t ‘a jew’s pimp’ an abstraction, and a far from brilliant one? And that nasty little charge of prejudice, doesn’t it make for ‘darkness and blankness’? That is street-corner rant, not the poet’s way to make a revolution in the mind. The lapse goes with the rapid shifting of the mind, in the attack on England and Austria, away from the few really telling facts, such as ‘split up Poland’, to the rhetorical abstraction, ‘in their soul was usura’. Further, there is nothing in particular to make the mind see Napoleon standing for Hope ‘against hell belch’. That is another cryptic abstraction, a possibly illuminating one this time, but for want of some defining detail the mind is likely to be left blank and in the dark. After all, Napoleon in 1815 was not an obvious representative of the spirit of the French Revolution.
As Pound said often enough, intelligence is particular, it needs the impress, the direct knowing of things both subjective and objective. There is a deep, Dantescan kind of knowing in ‘hell belch’, if only the intelligence is engaged at that point. It would help engage it if there were more fact to inform the impassioned rhetoric. The new republics in northern Italy were handed back to the Austrian empire. The splitting up of Poland, as Jerome J. McGann has recalled, meant bloody oppression for the Polish patriots whom England had promised to support in their struggle to get free from Russian and Austrian control. McGann also helpfully informs us that ‘Wellington was the key English figure’ in bringing back the old European order at the Congress of Vienna; and that he had not only driven the French out of Spain, but had agreed, at the Congress of Verona in 1822, to the suppression of ‘the newly fledged Spanish patriotic revolution’ and the betrayal of the Spanish nationalists to the restored French Bourbons. If these betrayals of revolutions and reforms are not brought to mind effectively the hellish language will lack warrant and sound as empty rant.
The canto closes on a suddenly personal note. ‘Lalage’s shadow moves in the fresco’s knees’, and she, Lalage, ‘is blotted with Dirce’s shadow’. In classical literature ‘Lalage’ would imply a courtesan or mistress; and Dirce was a woman who imprisoned and tormented her husband’s former wife Antiope when she became pregnant, not knowing that Zeus was the father and thinking her husband unfaithful. Her trying to blot out Antiope and her child would rhyme with the canto’s concern with peoples oppressed and denied justice and independence. The final lines cut from the troubling shadows to the calm light casting them: ‘dawn stands there fixed and unmoving | only we two have moved’.
The opening of canto 51 takes off from that into a snatch of song from the Tuscan poet and precursor of Cavalcanti and Dante, Guinicelli:
| Shines |
| in the mind of heaven God |
| who made it |
| more than the sun |
| in our eye. |
Guinicelli’s canzone, like Cavalcanti’s Canzone d’amore, is concerned with the working of the light of the divine intelligence in the human heart and mind in the form of love—a preoccupation unlikely to have been brought to the reader’s mind for some time. The next line returns us to where we were, ‘Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon’—a line repeated from canto 34, where it was connected with ‘la sottise de Moscou’, his thoroughly unintelligent invasion of Russia.
There follows a reprise of canto 45, ‘With usury has no man a good house’, only condensed to half the number of lines, now in simple current English, and in a quieter, reflective tone. The devastations caused by usury are not so much preached against as stated as plain fact. There is passion still in the words, but the rhythm has lost its assurance, its power, and the sense of the good things in nature and art is much subdued. This is canto 45 with its counter theme muted.
New matter is introduced in lines 33–50, from The Art of Angling by Charles Bowlker, a very popular work first published in 1758, revised and reprinted many times through the next hundred years, and regarded by fly fishermen as a classic of their craft. Pound has abbreviated Bowlker’s description of two artificial trout flies, one of them the ‘Blue Dun’:
| A starling’s wing will give you the colour |
| or duck widgeon, if you take feather from under the wing |
| Let the body be of blue fox fur, or a water rat’s |
| or grey squirrel’s. Take this with a portion of mohair |
| and a cock’s hackle for legs. |
The other fly, the ‘Granham’, requires ‘Hen pheasant’s feather’, ‘Dark fur from a hare’s ear’, ‘a green shaded partridge feather’, ‘grizzled yellow cock’s hackle’, ‘harl from a peacock’s tail’, and it ‘can be fished from seven a.m. | till eleven; at which time the brown marsh fly comes on’ and ‘no fish will take Granham’. To one very persuasive critic, Robert Demott, these artificial flies are ‘examples of traditional craftsmanship and artistry which have withstood usury for centuries and continue to do so’. They require precise observation and accurate imitation of nature, for their creator must copy exactly the tiny insects which are the staples of the trout’s diet in order to lure it into mistaking the artificial fly for the live insect. Demott invites us to see the skilled fly tyer and fly fisherman as a hero of the cantos, in harmony with nature, and the antithesis of the usurer. The Companion to the Cantos goes along with that, asserting that ‘since fly-fishing is an art that depends on nature’s increase…it has none of the destructive effects of usury, which is CONTRA NATURAM’.
The canto itself declares, ‘That hath the light of the doer, as it were | a form cleaving to it’; and adds in Latin, from the same source in Albertus Magnus, words to the effect that the adept intellect in apprehending the works of God takes in with them the creative light, that is, the form cleaving to them, and day by day recreates that form. The idea is cognate with the philosophy in Guinicelli’s canzone, and in Cavalcanti’s. It would seem just here to make the creating of artificial flies a repetition as it were of God’s creating the living swarm. It would regard ‘the doer’ as truly like the Prime Doer, and truly in union with the being and becoming of nature.
Is this then what they have come to, those moments of ‘consciousness of unity with nature’ in the rites of Dionysos and Circe-Aphrodite and Adonis, to the craft of ‘factitious bait’? Well, when Eva Hesse questioned Pound about the passage in 1959 he told her,
| trout rise to artificial fly | no nutriment |
|
vide description, cocks hackle, great art in |
| devising fish-bait by non-aesthetes, |
|
very high degree of craftiness |
|
METAPHOR (cf/ AriStotl) on apt use of |
| for USURA |
That is, for Pound himself in 1959 the passage exemplified not craft but craftiness, craft turned against nature. And indeed, at the simplest level, doesn’t the passage represent a nature morte, and quite lack any apprehension of the life in things? Imagine the bench heaped with all those dead birds and beasts the fly tyer needs to have by him, and his having an eye only for the bits and pieces of them he can use. Then there is his luring the trout with a fraudulent imitation of its food. If this crafty art is to be thought of as an imitation of the action of all-creating love it can only be as a bold parody, or an outright fraud. It can only be Geryon, ‘twin with usura’, who would claim that for it. Geryon is named as the speaker later in this final passage, but the whole passage from ‘That hath the light of the doer’ must be in his voice.
If the passage is not taken that way the reader will be in even greater difficulty with the other item which is said to have ‘the light of the doer’ about it—
|
Thus speaking in Königsberg |
| Zwischen die Volkern erzielt wird |
| a modus vivendi. |
—‘between the peoples may be achieved a modus vivendi’. It was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and close associate, who spoke those words in a radio broadcast on 8 July 1934. Pound, in a note made some years later, took his meaning to be that a ‘system of living together should not be beyond the capacity of…the four main racial groups in Europe’, i.e. German, Italian, French, and English. It was of course not apparent at the time that Nazi Germany was talking peace while secretly preparing for war, nor that it was at that very moment plotting the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss and the annexation of his country. (Dollfuss was killed, on 25 July, but the Nazi takeover was prevented that year.) Only later did it become clear that Hess’s talking peace was a fraud. He was not spreading divine light, but doing the work of Geryon who sings in the following lines, ‘I pay men to talk peace.’
Dante’s Geryon, the figure of Fraud, is ‘the savage beast with the sting in its tail that breaks through walls and weapons and pollutes the whole world’; and ‘His face is the face of a just man’. He is associated with the usurers who are being punished among the fraudulent in the lower region of the Inferno for doing violence to both nature and art. Virgil has previously explained to Dante that as ‘Nature takes her course from the Divine Intellect, and from its art’, and as human art follows nature and ‘is, as it were, the grandchild of the Deity’, then the usurer, in disdaining the way of Nature and her bounty, sins against God, nature, and art. Pound’s Geryon is clearly from the Inferno, and when the allusion is tracked back to Dante’s cantos 11 and 17 it becomes evident that Pound’s canto is following Dante’s lead, that it is in a sense ‘written over’ that part of the Inferno. It is his pit of hell, and the lowest point in his epic.
The utmost fraud of Geryon-Usura would be to put over the unproductive counterfeit as a godlike product of nature and art. The true meaning of ‘The light of the DOER, as it were a form cleaving to it’, is ‘an ACTIVE pattern, a pattern that sets things in motion’, constructively—something not to be found in this canto. This Geryon is ‘merchant of chalcedony’, and that means, if we catch the echo of Revelation 21: 19, that he is in the business of selling off the foundations of the temple of the new Jerusalem.
On the title page of The Fifth Decad of Cantos, and again on the last page after this canto, Pound set the Chinese characters chêng4 ming2 . According to Karlgren’s Analytic Dictionary, ming2 is what is called out in the dark, and in combination with chêng4 , meaning ‘upright, correct, just’, it signifies speaking one’s own identity honestly—not cloaking oneself in darkness—and also correctly identifying what is in darkness. It is close to the Ta Hio’s Confucian ideal that the precise verbal definition of nature and of human nature is the basis of good government. One could think of it as a variation upon the Flaubertian and Fordian ideal of le mot juste, the word that does justice. Pound maintained that a truly enlightened perception and articulation of the things that concern us is the only sure defence against usurious fraud and injustice.
The form and pressure of the time
The idea becomes real only in action, Pound held to that. But did he allow for all that might get in the way of the idea in practice? Did he allow enough for the complexities and contradictions of the time, for proper uncertainties and necessary compromises, and for his own susceptibility to certain of its pressures? To call things by their right names, to discriminate honestly and accurately, that is an excellent idea; but when the things in question are as instant and as opaque as current events tend to be, the judgement is likely to be partial, and right action difficult to determine. Faced with a decision to go to war, or to change the terms of trade or of the social contract, who can see at once all that is involved? We fall back on prepared positions, on our principles and fixed convictions; or we accept what we are told by those who ought to know the facts.
Pound distrusted general principles and established convictions as unlikely to do justice to the particular case. He maintained the awkwardly humane view that the individual should not be oppressed by the majority, and further, that the truth is in the particular rather than in the general case. He advocated his ideogrammic method of piecing together the significant, the luminous details into ‘a sufficient phalanx of particulars’, that image implying an organization of the mind that would go into right action. It was ‘a new mode of thought’, he wrote, which ‘would eliminate certain types of imbecility, in particular the inaccessibility to FACT glaringly lit up in 1935 by the peril of world conflagration caused by the type of mind which festered in the ideologues’ who hold with fanaticism ‘an abstract received “idea” or “generality”’ and ‘who NEVER take in concrete detail’. By mustering the facts he would save the world from destruction by the ideologues, and by those who more or less blindly went along with them. Yet in that darkening time, in haste to keep up with menacing events and to counter the blatant contradictions of high principles by low conduct, he too could rush to judgement upon a conviction of what must be the case rather than upon a sufficient grasp of the details. And then mere opinion, or propaganda, or banal prejudice, could stand in for accurate perception and make an ideologue of him also.
In December 1936 Edward VIII, just a few months after being crowned King of England and Defender of the Faith, was compelled to abdicate the throne. He wanted to marry an American divorcée and the British Establishment would not allow it. According to its strict conventions, being a commoner without wealth or title, a foreigner, and, most damning of all, a divorced woman, made Mrs Simpson simply unacceptable as the consort of the titular head of the nation and defender of its faith. The King, told that he must choose between marrying Mrs Simpson and his duty to the nation’s morals, chose Mrs Simpson and a life of luxury abroad as Duke of Windsor. Before his coronation, as Prince of Wales, Edward had visited South Wales and expressed sympathy with the unemployed miners and their hungry families, and the people at large had liked him for that. Now the Communists and the Fascists and the Social Creditors and others who resented the dominance of the conservative establishment argued that the real reason for the enforced abdication was Edward’s sympathizing with the poor and the unemployed, and that at bottom it was part of the general conspiracy of the ruling class against their people. Basil Bunting, who was back in England at the time, told Pound—even though he was (according to Zukofsky) ‘a British-conservative-antifascist-imperialist’—that he was convinced that it was on account of Edward’s speech in South Wales that Prime Minister Baldwin had made him abdicate. And Pound built that ‘fact’ into an article about the absolute evil being worked against the starving millions in England by Baldwin and the all-powerful bankers, and about Edward Windsor’s being now in a better position to oppose that evil ‘than he ever could have done on a throne surrounded with flummydiddles and gold braid and flunkies’—
I mean if the man has it in him to want his ex-subjects nourished, to want the fruits of the Empire delivered and eaten, and the spun cloth of his ex-realm worn, and the fuel used to heat poor men’s houses, he can now say so.
The ex-king, however, showed no disposition to express those humane sentiments. It was a case—a minor instance—of Pound’s following wishful thinking beyond any real knowledge.
Pound’s efforts to come to terms with the Hitler phenomenon present a more complex case. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Pound dismissed his incipient Nazi state with its ‘pseudo-Fascist rage’ as ‘a parody, a sickly and unpleasant parody of Fascism’. To spread the interesting element of Fascism, he wrote in the conclusion to Jefferson and/or Mussolini, there was no need for ‘parades, nor hysterical Hitlerian yawping’. A year later he was objecting in the New English Weekly to the confusion of ‘Italian Fascism with the Hun’s travesty’. ‘Adolphe is an, almost, pathetic hysteric’, he wrote, and, ‘so far as I can make out, a tool of almost the worst Huns’. In whose interest was it, he demanded to know, ‘to create confusion re the Thyssen-owned Hitler, and the founder of the Italian Corporate State’. A further year on, in 1935, he wrote to Gorham Munson of New Democracy, ‘Do CAN those asses who talk of Fascism as if the Corporate State/ Hitler and stinky Mosley were all one’. And to Claude Cockburn he wrote, ‘I am not a HITLERITE/ thass another kettle of MOlasses’.
One fundamental distinction between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was that, as he told Cockburn, there was ‘certainly no anti-semitism in Italy’. ‘There has never been any anti-Semitism HERE’, he told Arnold Gingrich of Esquire in August 1934, so ‘it might be time to dissociate Germany and Italy’. The leading characteristic of Nazism for Pound at that time was its anti-Semitism, and while that, as he wrote in the New English Weekly in April 1935, was one of the two ‘main trends or drifts of Europe’, Italy’s Corporate State stood for the other and very different trend, meaning economic enlightenment. Behind that was an implicit objection to Nazism on economic grounds, Pound believing in 1935 that since Nazism was partly financed from London Hitler must be the puppet of international finance.
So far Pound’s negative view of Nazism was fairly much in line with Mussolini’s determination to keep his distance from Hitler. Later though, in 1936 and 1937, when relations between the two dictators were becoming closer, he began to find signs of economic sense in the Führer. In a letter to Congressman Tinkham in March 1936 he noted that ‘EVEN Hitler in one clause of his last outbreak [had seen] certain FACTS’ about money. He had said something about ‘Germany being forced to “accept credits”’ which put it in debt to international finance, and that was in accord with Henry Ford’s observation, ‘“Debt business, only business that hasn’t suffered from the depression”’, and with the fact that happy bankers were enjoying ‘largest dividends in years’, and all this somehow went to show that ‘Hitler is “ON”’ the Social Credit programme. Better, Germany was imitating and learning from the new Italy, though ‘under very unfavourable conditions’. It was at least showing a disposition, in Pound’s view, to follow the Fascist state’s ‘principle of LIFE, of continuous renewal and renovation’, and so to go against the destructive injustice and inhumanity of the ‘usury State’. In April 1937 he told Tinkham that ‘both Germany and Italy seem to begin to see that nations money shd/ be based on national productivity’, not on usurious lending, and that Hitler, according to Por, ‘was out for National Dividend—The Führer [had] said “jeder Kontrahenten” ought to have his part’. Evidently he was, along with India, Alberta, and Italy, ‘getting wiser to London (Jew and nonjew) Bank racket’. About that time Pound was congratulating Wyndham Lewis in Guide to Kulchur for having sensed on a visit to Berlin in 1931 that Hitler was a force for ‘the resurrection’ of Germany. ‘I hand it to him as a superior perception’, he wrote, ‘Superior in relation to my own “discovery” of Mussolini’. Lewis had associated Hitler’s with Social Credit’s hostility to Leihkapital, the loan capital of international finance, thus reinforcing the hopeful notion that Hitler was ‘ON’.
By April 1938 Pound’s perception of Nazism had become altogether positive. When Gerhart Münch, still desperately poor and unable to get work as a musician in Munich, wrote that while he had previously preferred not to work with the Party circumstances were now forcing him to do so, Pound wrote back at once, ‘Do for God’s sake work WITH THE PARTY the party is right and is the future.’ He may have been thinking simply of Münch’s career prospects, but his urging him to work with the Party in those terms does imply an endorsement of Nazism as the future for German culture and society. He could do that because he had become convinced that its economic programme was now fully in accord with his own principles. In May 1938, following the successful invasion and takeover of Austria, Hitler made a state visit to Italy, accompanied among others of his ministers by Schacht, head of the Reichsbank and responsible for Germany’s economic miracle. On 26 May Pound sent Tinkham a ‘Note // in case it has missed you’—
SCHACHT during the Roman love feats has come out VERY clear for monetary ideas that I was pestering you with in Venice.
Ribbentrop apparently started letting parts of the cat out last year at Leipzig fair/ Hitler this spring/ and now Hjalmar H. Greely Schacht to all intents using my definitions (naturally in blissful ignorance of the honour)
He was quite right about Schacht’s monetary ideas being largely in accord with his own. What he did not see was that Schacht had successfully implemented those ideas and proved their effectiveness in order to enable Hitler to mobilize Germany for total war.
Dr Schacht had been charged even before September 1934 with the economic preparation of Germany for war, and in a secret law of 21 May 1935 he was appointed Plenipotentiary-General for War Economy. Everything in the economy was to be subordinated to the build-up towards war, and it was that policy which brought about the reconstruction of Germany. In January 1933 there were 6 million unemployed—by 1937 there was full employment. The transformation was effected by the state taking total control of credit and doing away with private banks and Leihkapital; by strict regulation of wages, prices, and dividends; by state-financed public works—such as the new autobahnen, designed for the rapid deployment of armoured troops; and by the stimulation, regulation, and direction of both private enterprise and the labour-force. Schacht’s creation of credit in a country that had been effectively bankrupt by printing money at need within a tightly controlled economy demonstrated that the Social Credit theory did work in practice. That it was directed by a totalitarian dictator towards bringing on the hell of war, and not at all towards the more just and more humane democracy Pound and the Social Creditors dreamed of, was another of the terrible contradictions of the time.
That Nazi Germany showed signs of being on what he believed to be the right lines economically was enough to persuade Pound that Nazism was altogether right. He either didn’t notice or didn’t really give his mind to everything else that was going on there. He signally failed to connect the economic miracle with the militarization of Germany and Hitler’s mounting belligerence. And though he did know about it, he appears to have been untroubled by the ever-intensifying Nazi persecution of Jews.
But then his attitude to anti-Semitism in general had become thoroughly mixed up and conflicted. There was a lot of it about. It was licensed and commonplace and also objected to in much of Europe and America, though only in Nazi Germany was it state policy and turning murderous in a way that would shortly lead on to genocide. I have noted in previous chapters how Pound would resort to the racist stereotypes of anti-Semitism in his war on usury. What emerges now is his struggle with the endemic prejudice, as with a tar-baby. He ‘Never expected to go anti-Semite’, he told a correspondent, and there is evidence that he wanted not to; and yet, though he could be critical of anti-Semitism, he seems to have regarded it strategically, and never to have seen it clearly as an offence against fundamental human rights and values. In time he became simply unable to keep clear of it whenever the issue of usury came up.
By his own standards he began to go wrong when he fell into the way of speaking of Jews in the abstract, as a race instead of as individuals. In a letter to his father in 1926 he mentioned that he had recently read some selections from the Talmud and commented, ‘Never disliked jews before; but as it now seems they were responsible for Christianity, I dare say they deserve all the kicks they get.’ The next day he added, perhaps after reflecting that his father was after all a Christian, that Christ had ‘tried to kill judaism, [but] the racial force was too strong…and all the worst features cropped up again’. ‘Racial curse too strong for the individual’, he wrote the same day to Richard Aldington. The particular curse he had in mind was ‘the monotheistic idea’, which he might have had reason to judge ‘the root of evil’, but not to attribute to Jewish genes. At other times he did think of Jews as individuals, as when some friend of his father suggested in 1927 that Pound hated Jews—
oooo sez I ’ates the jews? Ask him why he thinks I ’ate the jews. I hate SOME JEWS, but I have greater contempt for Christians. Look wot they dun to america: Bryan, Wilson, Volstead, all goyim. horrible goyim…Of course some jews are unpleasant, ask any Jew if they aint.
‘Personally I like jews (I mean some jews)’, he wrote in a letter to Olga that year, ‘but it is not necessary to embrace the Torah or wot ever they call it.’
Louis Zukofsky was one Jew he related to very positively, and precisely as a Jew. In their correspondence which was sustained right through the racially problematic 1930s both were always conscious of his racial and religious situation, even when Zukofsky would declare himself an anti-Semitic Jew, or write, ‘The only good Jew I know is my father: a coincidence.’ In 1929, when Zukofsky followed up his own submissions to Exile with a selection of Charles Reznikoff’s writings, Pound was excited by the thought that the dynamic ‘next wave’ of literature might be Jewish. At the same time he accepted as simply a fact of American and European life the prejudice and the exclusions Zukofsky would be subject to. In February 1929 he wrote to his father, ‘Zukofsky is coming to Phila. re/ a new quarterly mag. I shd be glad if you cd. put him up for a night or two…you might invite him at once, unless N/Y/ race prejudice intervenes.’ (It did not, as he would have known it would not.) In April 1933, when Hitler had just come to power in Germany and Pound was encouraging Zukofsky to make a trip to Europe, he warned him of what to expect:
Mittle and Nord Europa less seasonable for Semites than they wuz/ last year. HAVE just seen THE most perfect specimen here on the sea front. But HE got out in a box car.
Nooz is that H.D. is consortin with Siggy Freud. Have axed her to axe F. to hexplain it, (I mean the outburst toward pogrom in boscheland)
That reads as the expression of a detached curiosity about some natural phenomenon.
By 1934 Pound was suggesting that ‘the Jews’ were themselves to blame for what was being done to them. Zukofsky had sent him an issue of William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirt journal Liberation, thinking that it should alert him to the fact that Pelley’s Silver Shirts were followers of Hitler’s Nazism and anti-Semitism. Pound’s response, however, was to write at once to the Silver Shirts in the hope of persuading them to adopt his Social Credit ideas and to heed ‘Mussolini’s great work for the benefit of the ITALIAN PEOPLE’; also to urge them (as noted in the previous chapter) to ‘attack financial tyranny BY WHOMEVER exercised, i.e. whether by international jew or local aryan’. They should expose and foil the plots and conspiracies of ‘jews AND others’ in order to keep the attack focused on usury rather than on Jews. (All the same he fell for Pelley’s story that, ‘According to Bismarck, the awful Civil War in America was fomented by a Jewish Conspiracy’, and he repeated that in two lines in canto 48.) To Zukofsky he wrote that Pelley was a stout fellow who understood ‘the murkn mind’, and that he, Zukofsky, should take his anti-Semitism to heart. ‘Waal I sez, sez EZ/ serve yeh god damn well right IF YOU don’t wake up and start/ a anti=bankshit movement right inside the buggarin sanhedrim.… If you don’t want to be confused with yr/ancestral race and pogromd.’ He may not have been wholly serious—the tone of the letter is somewhere between jokiness and earnest—but he was nonetheless intimating that Jews were persecuted and killed because they were responsible for usury, and that even if they were not themselves usurers they would still be held responsible, unless they actively mobilized against it. He was finding a rationale for anti-Semitism, even an implicit justification, in the old prejudice that identified Jews as usurers and usurers as ‘Jews’; and still he protested to Zukofsky, in all sincerity, that he was not speaking to him ‘aza anti-semite’ but simply trying to prod him into right action ‘with two pronged fork of terror and cajolery’.
Pound would insist that race was not the issue, that it was ‘utterly irrelevant’, that ‘Race prejudice is red herring—The tool of the man defeated intellectually, and of the cheap politician’; and that, moreover, it was a distraction which served the conspiracy of bankers and usurers. ‘Usurers have no race’, he would write, one is as another and ‘Hell makes no distinction’. He could bring forward Shakespeare’s Shylock as the archetype of the usurer without mentioning his race. In demanding a pound of Antonio’s fair flesh he is out to castrate Antonio, and that makes him ‘an allegory not only of the usurer, but of concentration of sabotage, the fundamental opposer of natural increase…The root sin in person.’ That is a penetrating insight into one side of the play, and into the nature of usury, and it has nothing to do with race. But then in a later article, in November 1935, Pound returned to the play and asked, ‘Are we never to see that Shylock betrays his race, by hiding behind it? Charged as a usurer in attempt toward mayhem, he cries “I am a jew.”’ The argument was carried further in another article published about the same time. ‘The Jew usurer…runs against his own people’ because ‘No orthodox Jew can take usury without sin, as defined in his own scriptures.’ Worse, when the outlaw hides behind his race he makes his own people the scapegoat for usury, and sets up ‘the plain man Jew to take the bullets and beatings’. He named Rothschild the great Jewish banker as the contemporary ‘great chief usurer’, the prime sinner against natural abundance; and he wanted to write on the first page of canto 52 that his sin was ‘drawing vengeance’ on ‘poor yitts’. ‘The Jews are supposed to be clever’, Pound wrote, but there was a lack of cleverness in their not finding a way to stop ‘the whole Jewish people’ being made the ‘sacrificial goat for the usurer’.
He was not advocating genocide, which in any case was not then in anyone’s mind, unless it was hidden in Hitler’s. He was rather wanting, as in his letter to Zukofsky, to terrorize and cajole clear-headed Jews and their leaders into at least enforcing observance of their own law, and beyond that into forming a principled opposition to the practice of usury. In March 1936, having read in the New English Weekly mention of a book by Mordecai J. B. Ezekiel, an American government economist, he wrote to him that ‘If the book is honest social credit it shd/ be very useful in checking antisemitism’, and that there was ‘No doubt that semitophobia has been encouraged by the lack of jews in MONETARY reform movements’. In March 1937 he told James Taylor Dunn, editor of The Globe, that ‘there wd. be no need of any anti-semitic stuff at all’ if only ‘the Jews wd. take any sort of part in econ/ reform’, and that ‘The fight ought NOT to have been fought on the lines of race prejudice’. The ‘Only way to avoid that’, he insisted, ‘is by spread and acceleration of economic light’. But as things were, ‘Even in Engl/ and Italy people are being forced into anti-semitism by Jewish folly—I mean people who never thought of it before and who ON PRINCIPLE are opposed to race prejudice and race discrimination.’ The Jews themselves were making it ‘hard as hell to do justice’.
But was it the case that anti-Semitism in the 1930s was directed against usury? Hitler’s anti-Semitism, being the product of racial hatred allied to a mad fantasy of ‘Aryan’ racial purity and supremacy, had little or nothing to do with that. And the endemic anti-Semitism of Europe and America, for all that it drew on historical resentments of Jewish money-lending, was hardly the expression of a burning concern for bank reform. The fact is that Pound was using racial anti-Semitism to enforce his own economic agenda. That made his a rather special variant, and all the more extraordinary insofar as it was deployed not to incite race hatred but to motivate Jews to save themselves from persecution.
At the same time it was remarkably disingenuous of him to be surprised, when his 1934 letter to Pelley’s Silver Shirts was printed in New Masses in 1936, to receive letters ‘warning ME against antisemitism in the face of the fact that I was answering an antisemitic manifesto, and capitalizing “AND Aryan” almost every time I wrote jew’. Zukofsky was one of those warning him that ‘Even decent Jews will miss yr “And” “or Aryan”’, and that ‘the cry of anti-semitism [will] be raised all over the country against you’. Rather than protesting that he had no anti-Semitic intent, he might have asked himself why, since race was irrelevant, he kept bringing it up, and why was he constantly reinforcing the prejudicial association of Jews with usury? Why speak at all in terms of Jew and non-Jew if it was not the historical origins but the contemporary practice of usury that was in his sights? Given the militant anti-Semitism of the Nazis, of Mosley’s British Union, of Action Française, why was he not more careful to keep clear of what could only confuse the issue?
An exchange of private letters in March 1937 shows how his monomania about usury was skewing his intelligence and preventing him from facing the facts of anti-Semitism in the Europe of his time. Lina Caico, an Italian writer, critic, translator, and literary friend of Pound, wrote asking if he would do something to help a gifted German Jewish pianist who was ‘eating her heart out in despair’ in Berlin because the Nazi race laws made it impossible for her to pursue her career or even to earn enough to live on. Would Pound use his musical contacts to seek help? Pound, usually so generous, especially towards artists, would not. ‘You hit a nice sore spot’, he replied, and proceeded to sound off about Jews as a race. ‘Let her try Rothschild and some of the bastards who are murdering 10 million anglo saxons in England,’ he began; and then, ‘I am not having any more’ until the Jews accept their responsibilities as a race, and in particular until ‘they at least participate in study of and attack on usury system’. That system had crushed out almost all the musicians he had known over twenty-five years, and ‘the Jews NEVER attack’ it. Besides, he went on, the Jews themselves ‘are the GREAT destroyers of value…the shifters of boundary stones’. So to his conclusion: ‘Occasionally a good one has to suffer for the sins of the race.’ He did add, ‘Hubermann [in Tel Aviv] is your friend’s one hope’, thus not wholly ignoring the individual victim of Nazi anti-Semitism. But she had become an occasion for Pound to attack, first, his great figure of usury, ‘Rothschild’, and then the Jewish race as a whole.
He was shifting the issue from a specific instance of the Nazi persecution of Jews on racial grounds to his own concern with the economic war, and shifting from the individual case to an unrelated abstraction. It was a shift which enabled him to view the Jewish race not as the victims but as the destroyers; and thus to see them as deserving persecution—not on racial grounds, he would insist, but because of the economic harm they could be held responsible for. Thus he could be against anti-Semitism as a race-prejudice, while endorsing it on economic grounds—a distinction which would make little or no practical difference. Lina Caico wrote back very gently on a postcard, ‘Dear Ez, really you’re getting economics on the brain! I don’t deal with races but with individuals.’
In June 1937 Nancy Cunard printed in Paris SPAIN: THE QUESTION , a single sheet inviting writers and poets to declare themselves ‘for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain |…for, or against, Franco and Fascism | For it is impossible any longer to take no side’. The paragraphs leading up to the question left no doubt of the right answer:
We have seen murder and destruction by Fascism in Italy, in Germany—the organisation there of social injustice and cultural death—and how revived, imperial Rome, abetted by international treachery, has conquered her place in the Abyssinian sun. The dark millions in the colonies are unavenged.
Today, the struggle is in Spain.…
But there are some who, despite the martyrdom of Durango and Guernica, the enduring agony of Madrid, of Bilbao, and Germany’s shelling of Almeria, are still in doubt, or who aver that it is possible that Fascism may be what it proclaims it is: ‘the saviour of civilisation’.
Nancy Cunard sent a copy to Pound and appended this note: ‘Dear Ezra, I have no idea what you feel about these things embodied in this. Please answer it. Love, N.’
‘Dearest N’, Pound typed back, ‘I am very happy indeed to see that you aint leff yr/ blood an bones in Barrcerloner.’ But then, ‘As to the questionaire, I think your gang are all diarohea…IF they wont look at WHY men are oppressed. If they will talk about ISMS.’ Her ‘gang’ were mainly Communist or Communist-sympathizing anti-fascists, and Pound was clearly not with them. At the same time, surprisingly, no more was he with Franco’s Falange. ‘Spain is one barbarism and Russia another,’ he wrote. His formal answer, as published in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, was simply this:
Questionnaire an escape mechanism for young fools who are too cowardly to think; too lazy to investigate the nature of money, its mode of issue, the control of such issue by the Banque de France and the stank of England. You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.
Evidently the real question, for him, and the only one that mattered, was one that was not being asked: are you for, or against, a people controlling its own credit for its own benefit? His response was classed as ‘Neutral?’ along with 15 others—there were 126 for the Republicans, just 5 for Franco—but in fact he was not being neutral as between the opposing Communist and Falangist-Fascist-Nazi sides, he was saying ‘neither of these’. He would not choose between them because both sides, in his judgement, were serving the interests of their military–industrial–financial supporters. Instead he was taking his stand on his own singular perception of the fundamental struggle of the time, and that meant, in the eyes of the majority of his fellow writers and poets, that he was not ‘on side’, indeed that he was putting himself offensively ‘off-side’.
Zukofsky told Pound in March 1935, ‘you’re not being read in the U.S.A. for reasons you ought to be able to find out for yrself’. ‘You seem to think you are the Messiah’, he complained in another letter. And in March 1936, when Pound’s letter to Pelley’s Silver Shirts was published, he told him it was ‘purblind’ of him to have written it, but ‘If you’re dead set on completely losing whatever readers you still have in America, keep it up.’ Zukofsky seems to have been right about Pound losing readers: the American edition of Eleven New Cantos: XXXI–XLI (1934) sold about 1,000 copies up to the summer of 1940, whereas The Fifth Decad of Cantos, published in November 1937, had sold only about 300 copies by then.
Bunting wrote from London in September 1936 to warn Pound that he appeared to be in danger of finding himself ‘on the wrong side all round’. ‘You are suspect to the [Social Credit] brethren, or else I very much misread the signs, because of your pro-Italian propaganda.’ ‘And if your activities have really led you to Hargrave, I’m convinced there’s something wrong with your activities’—Hargrave of the Green Shirts being a ‘footling Fool’. Again, ‘Angold accuses you of connections with the British Union of Fascists: which I refuse to believe.… They spell Finance with three letters, J E W, and that’s all you’ll get out of them.’ Bunting went on—
You are too valuable a pearl to go and cast yourself before swine of that sort, and I think, too acute to imagine that an identity of name necessarily indicates any further correspondence whatever with Italian Fascism. If that lot takes up Social Credit, it will complete the discredit which is patently threatening the whole movement.
Altogether, Bunting was trying to save Pound from being, in Zukofsky’s words, ‘too damn gullible’.
Hargrave had his own view of Pound. His propaganda for Social Credit was ‘worthless’—‘It was like a series of explosions in a rock quarry,’ he told Gorham Munson, one of the founders of the American Social Credit Movement. And Munson told Charles Norman that Pound had become a liability, because of his anti-Semitism—both his Movement and Hargrave’s Social Credit Party of Great Britain said that they did not accept anti-Semites as members—and because ‘Pound was trying to combine social credit economic democracy with Fascist political totalitarianism’.
Munson was quite right about what Pound was trying to do, and, being anti-fascist, he would not even try to understand how Pound could see more promise of economic democracy in Fascist Italy than in the American or British democracies. In trying to combine what American democracy, according to his understanding of its founding principles, ought to be, with what Italian Fascism, to his mind, promised to be, Pound was projecting promises and possibilities upon a world riven by contradictions and by competing ideologies. Zukofsky, writing to Pound as a Marxist Communist, chided him for lauding ‘the Boss’s reclamation of the marshes’ yet saying ‘nothing about the Soviets doing the same’. (Did Zukofsky not know that Soviet farm collectivization had involved the imprisonment and exile of millions of peasants, and that it had caused such a famine that 4–5 million peasants died of malnutrition and hunger-related diseases in the winter of 1932–3?) Bunting was more conscious of contradictions. He reported himself grateful that Britain had not gone to war with Italy over Abyssinia, or with Germany over the Rhineland; but found it unsettling that ‘the manoeuvres by which the peace was kept…were engaged in patently at the behest of the bankers, who have a lot invested in both Hitler and Mussolini’.
The simple black and white view of the political situation of the 1930s would set up the free democracies against the totalitarian dictatorships. But then how to account for the way Mussolini and Hitler were enthusiastically received as saviours of their countries by vast majorities of their peoples? And what to make of the way the freely elected governments of the democracies were floundering and failing a great mass of their people? To explain how those contradictions could come about the economic story needs to be told. Once the political situation is understood in terms of laissez-faire economies on the one side, and state-controlled economies on the other, it becomes clear that in the one freedom to vote went with having a very limited claim upon the state in respect of one’s basic human needs; whereas in the other the state, while denying the individual a voice, did provide for the basic needs of all who served it. The individual was likely to be better off materially, therefore, under the Italian or the German dictatorship which suppressed his individuality, than under the democracies which left individuals free to provide for themselves or go under. The dictatorships were frankly undemocratic, even anti-democratic, and allowed no appeal to individual liberty. The free democracies though had a worm of contradiction at their core—the contradiction between the spirit of democracy and the spirit of capitalism. From the founding principle of universal equality should flow equal rights for all to a fulfilling life, and for that there must be government of, by, and essentially for the good of the whole people. But capitalism does not favour the ideal of the common wealth; and it rejoices in its freedom to use its accumulations of financial power to shape societies to serve private ends.
Pound passionately believed that the aim of democratic government should be ‘to distribute the purchasing power of the nation so that both social and economic justice shd/ be attainable in degree not heretofore known, to give every human being…his share in the inheritance of humanity’. When he looked into the capitalist democracies he saw not true democracy serving the needs of all; he saw the capitalist financial system serving the greed of the few, and taking over democracy, cynically and perversely, in the name of individual liberty. Concerned by this crisis in democracy, and very much in the contradiction-ridden spirit of the time, he held up Italian totalitarianism as a model of how democracy might be saved from capitalism. Totalitarian democracy was of course a contradiction in terms, but not more so than that other oxymoron, capitalist democracy. Pound was not against democratic equality and social justice; he was against the subversion of democracy by the injustices and inequalities of the capitalist system. But even his friends in America and Britain had little patience with his claim that this was why he endorsed Mussolini’s Fascism. He was isolating himself and alienating a good many people by his singular idea of how the disorders of the time might be put right.
1 Odon Por (b. 1883): Hungarian-Italian journalist and economist; in London around 1912 had contributed to Orage’s New Age, and served as correspondent for Mussolini’s Avanti; took up Social Credit; wrote an early account of Fascism, Fascism (1923), and other books on the Corporate State; became director of the Rome office of the Institute for the study of International Politics; in May 1935 wrote on Pound’s economic thought in one of his ‘Cronaca della “Nuova Economia”’ in Civiltà Fascista, an important monthly review published by the Fascist National Institute of Culture and edited by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Described himself as ‘Syndicalist. Guild Socialist. NOT fascist. Free lance’. (Redman, 156, 160; Witemeyer in EP/WCW 333.)
2 Olga Rudge was probably the prime mover. In January 1936 she was in Cambridge and seized the chance ‘to look up the Vivaldi mss. in the Fitzwilliam [Museum]’. Among her finds was the oratorio Juditha Triumphans which would be given its first modern performance by Count Chigi’s Accademia Musicale in Siena in 1939. More important was her bringing to light the vast collection in Turin. She had stopped off there for a day in December 1935 to look into the Vivaldi manuscripts, and had been permitted to see just two of the many volumes. When she went back the following October with the intention of making a thematic catalogue she was told she could not see the manuscripts because a Milan publisher was contracted to publish the music. However, she did contrive to see at least 131 unpublished concerti and to begin copying them. Her Antonio Vivaldi: Note e documenti sulla vita e sulla opere was published in Siena in 1939. She was called on in that year to rewrite the entry on Vivaldi in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
3 Into the Attack! rant Pound introduced a verse from his music hall ‘Song of the six-hundred-odd M.P.s’ by ‘Alfred Venison’, his Social Credit persona.
‘We are ’ere met together
In this momentous hower
Ter lick the’ bankers’ dirty boots
an’ keep the Bank in power.
We are ’ere met together
Ter grind the same old axes
And keep the people in its place
a’payin’ us the taxes.
We are six hundred beefy men
(but mostly gas and suet)
An’ every year we meet to let
some other feller do it.’
……………….
‘O Britain, muvver of parliaments.
’Ave you seen yer larst sweet litter?
Could yeh swap th’ brains of orl this lot
fer ’arft a pint o’ bitter?’
‘I couldn’t’, she sez, ’an’ I aint tried,
They’re me own’, she sez to me,
‘As footlin’ a lot as ever was spawned
to defend democracy.’
4 In 1970 this note (which Pound first published in 1957) was added to canto 45: ‘N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)’