‘Am sending you a spot of Confucius,’ Pound wrote to Congressman Tinkham in July 1937. What he sent under separate cover could have been any one of a number of items he had then on his desk. There was ‘Immediate Need of Confucius’, an article he had just written for a Bombay magazine, Aryan Path. Or it might have been his 1928 version of the Ta Hio, recently republished by Stanley Nott in London. He had described that in the Aryan Path article as ‘the most valuable work I have done in three decades’, valuable, that is, as a remedy for the desperate condition of the Occidental world. Most likely, though, it was his Confucius/Digest of The Analects, a small pamphlet published the previous month by Giovanni Schweiller in Milan and consisting of the first chapter of Guide to Kulchur. That chapter digests the Analects into the Ta Hio’s fundamental principle of good government, ‘To call people and things by their correct names…to see that the terminology [is] exact’—so that, for instance, ‘a man should not be called controller of the currency unless he really controls it’. Precise verbal definition, or complete integrity, as defined in the first chapter of the Ta Hio, was now Pound’s urgent prescription for the ills of his time.
Guide to Kulchur can be read as an extended doctor’s note diagnosing the cause of the disease and recommending the appropriate treatment. It was written rapidly and off the top of his head in just three months, between February and the beginning of May 1937. On the original dust-jacket it was said to be ‘a digest of all the wisdom [Pound] has acquired about art and life during the course of fifty years’, and to be ‘emphatically a book of wisdom—a concentration of the “new paideuma”’. At the core of his ‘new paideuma’, as the first chapter would make clear, was the wisdom of Confucius. Even before he received the contract from Faber & Faber Pound was ‘a-sailing into what the Greek flyozzerfers ain’t by comparison with Kung-fucius’; and at the head of the final chapter he affirmed, ‘I believe that the Ta Hio is veritably the Great Learning, to be taken with the Odes…and the rest of Confucius’ teaching.’
What the Greek philosophers lacked was the sense of social responsibility, ‘a feeling for the whole people’; and Christian thought was just as bad. ‘Plato’s Republic notwithstanding, the greek philosophers did not feel communal responsibilities…The sense of coordination, of the individual in a milieu is not in them. Any more than there is a sense of social order in the teachings of the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament.… The concentration or emphasis on eternity is not social.’ Over time an excessive emphasis upon the life and fate of the self-fulfilling individual had led to private greed being valued above public need, to the point where ‘Rapacity is the main force in our time in the occident’, and the ‘hoggers of harvest’ have become dominant. In the Analects, in absolute contrast, ‘you have the main character filled with a sense of responsibility. He and his interlocutors live in a responsible world, they think for the whole social order.’ That was the foremost reason for Pound’s prescribing for the modern world the Confucian ‘way of life’ and its ‘disposition toward nature and man’.
This thinking for the whole social order was necessarily ‘totalitarian’, Pound insisted. That is, it involved understanding all ‘the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual in a social order’. It meant seeing those processes not in isolation but as interactive. And it required the discrimination of the relative value of things, and a perception of their right order. Thomas Jefferson ‘had the totalitarian view’ in this sense. And Confucius, Pound would say, was ‘superior to Aristotle by totalitarian instinct. His thought is…root volition branching out, the ethical weight is present in every phrase.’
It was precisely within the ancient and traditional written language of Chinese poetry and thought that Pound was seeking the Confucian way of perceiving the world. James Laughlin, while he was with Pound in Rapallo, had noticed that ‘Most days after lunch he would go up to his bedroom’, lie down with a volume of Morrison’s big dictionary propped on a pillow on his stomach, and study ideograms with the help of Morrison’s analyses of their components. He was teaching himself to read the characters in the light of Fenollosa’s essay on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry—he had managed to get that ‘ars poetica’ republished by Nott in 1936. Then in the summer of 1937 when he was in Siena with Olga Rudge he tried the experiment of spending several hours each day studying without the aid of a dictionary Legge’s editions of the three classic Confucian texts and of the works of Mencius. Legge did provide both a translation and an exegetical commentary under the Chinese texts, but ‘When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it’, Pound recorded, ‘I had only the look of the characters…to go on from.’ On 4 August he wrote to Dorothy, who was as usual in England, that he was learning to read in the original, putting in four hours per day with ‘one hour on and one [hour] rest’. He told his Japanese correspondent Katue Kitasono that he could ‘read a good deal of ideogram (say as much as five year old infant in Japan or China)’. By the 15th he had got through Mencius, ‘and started Kung again’; a fortnight later he had ‘got to end of Analects on 3rd round’; and a week after that he was beginning on Mencius again. The result of going ‘three times through the whole text and having perforce to look at the ideograms and try to work out the unfamiliar ones from their bases’ was that he gained ‘a better idea of the whole and the unity of the doctrine’, and, most valuably, that he had ‘the constants’, the recurrent characters or components, ‘impressed on my eye’.
He wrote up the experiment in an essay published in the Criterion the following year. Among the ‘constants’ impressed on his eye there was the ‘sign recurring and again recurring, of the man who stands by his word’; and also the character which combines the human being with the number two, signifying a life lived in relation to others and to the linked pair of earth and heaven, or humanity in its full scope. He saw ‘Man, man, man, humanity all over the page’; and ‘land and trees’; the ‘constant pageant of the sun, of process’; verbs ‘meaning CHANGE or MOVE’ and ‘RENEWAL’; and everywhere a doctrine of action. Mencius was asked, ‘What is the scholar’s business’, and answered in two characters which Legge translated as ‘To exalt his aim’. Pound saw in the second character ‘the scholar-officer sign, and its base the heart’, and read that as will, ‘definitely Dante’s directio voluntatis’. ‘No one with any visual sense can fail to be affected by the way the strokes move in these characters’, he wrote, ‘the twisted as evil, the stunted’, and ‘the radiant’ as in ‘the bright ideogram for the highest music’ or ‘the sign of metamorphosis’.
The characters read in this way, as visible signs rather than as sounds, would serve, or so Pound believed, as ‘a door into a different modality of thought’, into a different way of perceiving and being in the world from that of Western capitalism. It avoided the Western way of thinking in abstractions and indefinite generalizations, and of speaking in words disconnected from anything in particular and so conveying and effecting nothing in particular. The Chinese written character ‘abstracts or generalizes in the known concrete’, it gives the universal in the particular, so spring is ‘the sun under the bursting forth of plants’, and male is ‘rice field plus struggle’. Moreover, as in those instances, it represents a world of active relations, ‘of things in action and action in things’, as Fenollosa put it. Written and read as a poetic language it preserves a direct experience of things and persons as they are, not just in themselves but in their interactions, and that, in Pound’s view, is the basis of Confucian wisdom in government.
It meant that ‘at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature’, as European thought has tended to do. Because its intelligence was rooted in the total process of nature, it honoured all that is alive and growing, and ‘was for an economy of abundance’. In government it accepted responsibility for improving the whole social order—in Mencius’ words,
an intelligent ruler will regulate the livelihood of the people, so as to make sure that they shall have sufficient to serve their parents, and sufficient wherewith to support their wives and children: that in good years they shall be abundantly satisfied, and in bad years shall escape danger of perishing.
Pound notes that ‘Mencius distinguishes a tax from a share’, and perceives that ‘a fixed tax on grain is in bad years a tyranny, a tithe proper, no tyranny’; also that ‘To treat the needy as criminals is not governing decently, it is merely trapping them.’
But these ethical conclusions, Pound hastened to say, were simply what honest men everywhere would come to, if only they saw straight—
The ‘Christian virtues’ are THERE in the emperors who had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the people; who saw that starvation can gnaw through more than the body and eat into the spirit; who saw, above all, that in so far as governing the people went, it begins with a livelihood, and that all talk of morals before that livelihood is attained, is sheer bunkum and rotten hypocrisy.
Implicit there is Pound’s judgement that in his world the Christian virtues were not active in government. ‘The level of civilisation recorded in these ideograms’, he wrote, ‘is higher than anything in the near eastern tradition.’ He would describe himself indeed as ‘the citizen of a chaos which has long lacked a certain code of ideas and perceptions’. And since China’s civilization, proceeding always from a Confucian centre, had persisted for over five thousand or so years, and through all ‘the alternating periods of order and confusion’ of its historic process, it could well be, so Pound hoped, that the West, in studying the illuminating ideograms of Confucius and Mencius, might absorb what it needed to restore its own civilization to sanity.
In a letter to Congressman Tinkham towards the end of November 1937 Pound mentioned that he had been ‘spending my spare time on Confusius and Mencius and can read more chinese than I cd/’. Tinkham wrote back, ‘I think you are intellectually wise to divert your mind from the present state of affairs by turning to Confucius and Mencius.’ Pound showed how little diverted he was by replying, ‘Am only doing Mencius because he is more explicit statement of where the Confucian ROOT (Ta Hio) sprouts in economics/ against usury, against tax ramp.’ Then in February 1938, wanting to do something useful, he suggested that Tinkham get him over to Harvard or Yale ‘to give a few lectures on Confucius and Mencius’. ‘With the light of two thousand years of Chinese history’, he reassured Tinkham, ‘there wd be NO NEED to allude to the present administration.’
Tinkham had referred to ‘Great historical events…occurring in the Far east’, meaning the Japanese invasion of China—Shanghai had already been captured in November and Nanking fell in December—but Pound showed little or no concern for what was going on in contemporary China. He was more engaged at that moment by the classic anthology of poetry selected by Confucius which he had just received from Katue Kitasono—he had asked for ‘a cheap edition’ of the Odes in the original, meaning one that was ‘good, and clear but not fancy’. Pound’s China was a China of the mind, to be discovered only in the ancient writings attributed to Confucius and his followers. Shortly he would condense the Confucian history of China from its legendary first emperors up to about 1776 to make up his next decad of cantos. His translation of the Odes from the original ideograms would come much later, after the looming world war.
The London Morning Post of 21 August 1937 carried a report of a speech delivered by Signor Mussolini in Palermo the previous day at the conclusion of the naval manoeuvres. Half a million people were massed before him in the Humberto Forum with the Italian fleet in the Bay of Palermo beyond them, and the Duce’s words were carried over the water by wireless. Throughout the length and breadth of Italy all activity ceased, buses came to a standstill, shops were closed, and the people crowded around the loudspeakers. The broadcast was transmitted to twelve nations in Europe, to South and Central America, and was translated into eighteen languages. And what Il Duce had to say was that there had been a great misunderstanding over the previous two years in the relations between Britain and Italy, that it was time for more cordial relations with France, and that Italy had no need to heed the League of Nations in Geneva. There was now a new reality to be taken into account, and that was the Berlin–Rome axis.
Dorothy wrote from London in September 1937, ‘So much prosperity here owing to munitions that Social Credit has sunk to a minimum of members.’ Earlier in the summer, from Nutcombe Heights Hotel in leafy Hindhead, Surrey, she had written, ‘The Child has about 700 stamps and knows a lot…Could you write his initials or summat on a small scrap of paper that we could paste into his yellow Kung?’ The ‘yellow Kung’ may have been the Stanley Nott edition of Ta Hio: The Great Learning, which was bound in yellow paper boards with a yellow-dust jacket—though Scheiwiller’s little book Confucius/Digest of the Analects was also in yellow paper wrappers. If it were the Ta Hio Omar, now 10, might have wondered about the meaning of certain remarks concerning the relations of sons and fathers, particularly in chapter IX where it is said that ‘To govern a state one must first bring order into one’s family’, and that ‘the man who, being incapable of educating his own family, is able to educate other men just doesn’t exist’.
Pound was attending to his 12-year-old daughter’s education. Towards the end of September he brought her down by train from Bolzano to Venice, with a stopover in Verona, and she would recall him on the steps of the Romanesque church of San Zeno there, ‘looking at the bronze doors, and explaining, explaining, focusing his attention on some detail, wondering out loud’. Her own attention, she confessed, had been more on the presents he had bought her, ‘a tiny wristwatch and a pair of new shoes’—‘bring something beautiful for the signorina’, he had told them in the shoe shop.
That autumn she was to enrol as a boarder at a convent school near Florence, the Istituto della Signora Montalve at La Quiete, but in Venice her father ‘seemed very eager to educate me himself’. He gave her Heine’s Buch der Lieder and would have her read to him from it, then take over and read the poems himself, so powerfully that the images became alive and the rhythm unforgettable. To broaden her mind, as she understood at the time, he took her about with him, to the Quirini Stampalia Library, to friends who were painters, musicians, poets, or into ‘a long, narrow second-hand bookshop at the end of the Calle Larga’. Some evenings friends came to hear Pound reading his cantos, and while he read there would be an intense stillness, a tableau of the poet and his listeners with only the sound of his voice, but the questions and long arguments that followed bored her. Some afternoons there were concerts, at which her mother played Vivaldi, or she would be practising for an evening concert. There were few idle moments. Even at the Lido there was ‘No loafing around on the beach; we were there to swim and to row and it was done with zest and speed.’ And on the vaporetto to and from the Lido, ‘If Babbo and I were alone, he would engage in conversation.’ He set her to writing in Italian—which she was still struggling to learn, German being the language of the Pustertal—an account of all she knew about life in Gais. ‘It was the content that mattered’, he told her, and where she could not find the words in Italian ‘he remedied by translating the “Storie di Gais” into English’. Indeed the proud father typed out his translation and sewed the pages to make a little book, which he sent to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, and to Kitasono who translated ‘the charming stories about Tyrol’ into Japanese and had them printed in December 1938 in ‘the most refined girl’s monthly in Japan’. Pound then hoped ‘that she wont get a swelled head’, and that making her debut in Japan ‘will have a civilizing effect on her’. ‘School hasn’t quite quenched her intelligence,’ he told Kitasono, ‘But of course impossible to tell whether she will ever be able to write anything again after having been taught Grammar etc/.’
‘Then a huge fuss broke out over a missal.’ That is, the girls were required to have a Latin–Italian missal, but Mary asked could she have a Latin–German one—she was ‘Mary’ now—and the nuns ordered one for her, and when it came it turned out to cost ‘almost three times as much as the Italian ones’. When Pound, who was paying Mary’s fees, received the bill, he wrote to the Mother Superior, ‘I take a very grave view of encouraging a child to spend money out of proportion to its probable expectations.’ There had been talk of only 30 lire for a missal but this one cost 87 lire—and ‘a book at this price is a luxury’—and ‘the lack of precise statement will do more to destroy any morality’—and ‘You will destroy any respect the child has for religion, if religion or the religious object is associated in the child’s mind with an action not scrupulously honest’—and so on. However, after explanations from the Mother Superior and contrition from Mary the Confucian parent was appeased. All was forgiven, but Mary was to pay off the 57 lire in instalments, ‘simply to get it into her head that one cannot be careless about 57 lire UNLESS one is much richer than she is’. Two things she should learn, that ‘I must always make myself clear’, and that ‘I must not spend money that is not there’: ‘Education is worth nothing unless one has these two habits.’
In Venice on 29 October 1937, under the title ‘Omaggio ad Antonio Vivaldi’, Olga Rudge, with Giorgio Levi and David Nixon, performed a programme composed entirely of music from L’estro armonico, something that had probably not happened, Pound remarked, ‘since the days when Vivaldi himself conducted’. A Vivaldi Society was formed in Venice soon after, and Pound, noting this in Il Mare, pointed out that his Rapallo study group had been ‘the first to seek a revival of Vivaldi’s music’. And now, Olga Rudge reported, David Nixon was agitating to start an international Vivaldi society, with headquarters in Paris and herself as honorary secretary.
The ‘Tigullian Musical Season’ for 1938 was opened by the New Hungarian Quartet on 21 January, with Honegger’s Quartet on the programme, along with Mozart, ‘Quartet to be decided’, Stravinsky’s ‘Concertino’, and a quartet by the unfamiliar Hungarian composer Sandor Veress. Then, ‘Starting [Tuesday] February 1 and continuing all week’, according to Pound’s announcement in Il Mare, ‘there will be a concert every evening, presenting twelve sonatas by Purcell contrasted and compared with music by Debussy and Hindemith, and with references to the important forms of the concerto as conceived by Vivaldi, and of the sonata as envisioned by Mozart’. The aim was ‘to present “the concept of the sonata for strings and keyboard” as it developed in the mind of Henry Purcell (1659–1695), who was among the finest English composers, a great unknown for us, equalled perhaps only by Dowland and Jenkins’. The Purcell sonatas had just been ‘brought to light’ and published in Paris by W. Gillies Whittaker, and this might well have been their first modern performance. The performers would be the usual distinguished local talent, ‘Olga Rudge and maestro Sansoni, violins’ and ‘the fine cellist Marco Ottone from Chiavari’. In the place of Gerhart Münch, however, he having decided at the last minute to remain in Germany, there would be the pianist Renata Borgatti, ‘the daughter of our distinguished fellow citizen Commendatore Giuseppe’, a famed Italian tenor. Pound, as William Atheling, had found her a ‘wooden’ accompanist to Olga Rudge back in 1920, but she had become a successful soloist performing throughout Europe, and Pound in an article in Il Mare had now nothing but praise for her ‘consistent development in musical understanding and intelligence’. She would be the pianist and Olga Rudge’s accompanist in both this season and the next and last in 1939.
Meanwhile, since Münch could not come to Rapallo, Pound gave him a ‘PLAN of work’ to follow in Germany. ‘The first thing you do ANYWHERE shd/ be to LOOK at the catalog/ of local library…and make note of manuscripts and old edtns/ of Vivaldi in it (if any)’—‘That ought to be first act after dumping luggage in hotel’. In Dresden he was to work direct on the manuscripts, going on from what he and Olga already had on film, so ‘Start next on page 160.’ Vera, whom Münch had just married, could do a lot if he were busy with other matters, for instance, she could ‘Look up and report to me on Leica reading machines | is there a cheap portable one.’ ‘The day is 24 hours long//,’ this letter concluded.
Pound seems to have organized the whole Rapallo show himself, securing the musicians, doing the advance publicity and the programmes, writing up the concerts afterwards, no doubt making sure the Amici remembered the dates, then welcoming them on the evening, taking the money of those who were not subscribers, and sharing the takings among the performers. He was in every sense the animator of the season. At the same time, the regular concerts relied absolutely on Olga Rudge and her violin. But we are given another image of her dedication. After each concert she would return by herself in the dark up the hill to Sant’ Ambrogio, a climb that could take an hour. The cobbled mule-track was too stony for town shoes, and, doing as the peasant women did when they had been into town, she would put on the old espadrilles she had hidden at the foot of the salita on the way down, sling the violin-case on a strap over her shoulder, and carrying her ‘high-heeled golden or satin shoes and a music case in one hand and holding up the long evening gown with the other’, she would make her way by such light as came up from Rapallo or from the night sky. ‘Gee, I am tired sometimes,’ she said once to Mary, and ‘It’s awful when it rains, the violin is so sensitive.’
On the Saturday of the Purcell week a Debussy sonata for violin and piano was preceded by a study hour examining the use of microfilm in researching and making available unpublished music. Pound saw, well ahead of the professional musicologists and music publishers, that the new microphotography made possible accurate and inexpensive reproduction and diffusion of the ‘enormous quantities of musical treasures still buried in libraries’. In June 1938 he told Agnes Bedford that he had ‘another 600 pages of Vivaldi’ on film from Germany. He persuaded the editor of Broletto, a monthly magazine published in Como, to publish a complete Vivaldi concerto ‘in small half-tones taken from “microfoto” Leica films’. He tried to persuade Faber & Faber to become the first in the field by publishing Olga Rudge’s Vivaldi: A Preliminary Survey, ‘with five or six inedited Vivaldis in photostat’, and a thematic catalogue which would do for Vivaldi what Köchel had done for Mozart. ‘The new process will OF NECESSITY revolutionize music publication,’ he urged, but Mr Eliot was cautious. Even the assurance that ‘there is bound to be a Vivaldi BOOM’ did not convince him. So Pound presented his microfilm copies of the Dresden manuscripts to Siena’s Count Guido Chigi Saracini in 1938, and they provided the scores for the performance of unpublished Vivaldi in the 1939 Settimana Musicale Senesi. Then after the war, in 1949 and 1950, Olga Rudge edited for the Accademia Musicale Chigiana two neat books presenting four and two concertos in photo-facsimile of Vivaldi’s manuscript. That was when microfilm was finally catching on.
In May 1938 Pound was urging Katue Kitasono to get in touch with the US Government’s Science Service with a view to making available on microfilm ‘the 100 best ideogramic and japanese texts IN THE ORIGINAL’; and at the same time he was himself doing what he could ‘to stir up the Washington people both about music study and oriental studies by means of this new system’. ‘It will encourage them to hear from Japan’, he wrote, ‘and of course collaboration between the two governments should follow. Here is a field where there can be no clash of interests, and where better understanding between the two peoples wd/ be automatically promoted.’
Kitasono (1902–78), an important modernist poet in Japan and the founder and editor of the avant-garde magazine VOU, had first written to Pound in 1936 as, ‘since Imagism movement’, ‘a leader on new literature’. In his reply Pound, as if to make clear how far he had come since his Imagiste days, had remarked that ‘a poet can not neglect ethics’, and had wondered if Gesell was yet known in Tokyo along with Douglas. ‘Two things I should do before I die’, he wrote, ‘and they are to contrive a better understanding between the U.S.A. and Japan, and between Italy and Japan.’ He followed this up by saying that ‘neither Zen nor Christianity can serve toward international understanding in practical action in the way the Ta Hio of Kung fu Tseu can…[T]hat gives us a basis of ethics & of national <patriotic> action, which does not produce international discord.’ It must have appeared to him that since Japan had taken over the ancient Chinese written language they should also share the Confucian culture which he found in it. But Kitasono was more interested in developing a Japanese form of Dada and surrealism than in the ethics of China’s Confucius, or even in Japan’s own Noh.
As a practical act Pound had had Kitasono arrange for a letter of introduction to be sent on his behalf to the Japanese Ambassador in Rome, and he himself wrote to the Ambassador to say how glad he would be ‘to meet any member of the Embassy…who is interested in improving the understanding of Japanese culture in Europe and America and arranging better methods for mutual cultural comprehension’. That had led to a three-hour talk when he was in Rome at the end of December 1936 with a ‘Councillor of the Embassy’—‘Naturally we had too many things to discuss to do anything very thoroughly,’ he told Kitasono. But he would try to have published in England the ‘Councillor’s’ book in English on Japanese poetry; and he would send him his ABC of Reading, ‘and perhaps he will approve of it as a text book to introduce Japanese students to western literature’. Nothing came of either possibility, but in the way of cultural exchange VOU was publishing some of Pound’s poems and essays, and Pound did manage to get a selection of poems by the VOU group published in translation in Ronald Duncan’s Townsman in January 1938 and later in Laughlin’s New Directions anthology.
Pound made that the occasion to write again to the Japanese Embassy in Rome hoping for a more significant exchange through the use of ‘The new microphotographic and photostat process…[which] opens a totally new possibility for bilingual texts’. And a year later, in May 1939, in the first of a dozen articles he would contribute to the Japan Times and Mail, he respectfully asked that the Japanese Society for Promoting International Cultural exchange should consider commissioning ‘a bilingual or trilingual edition of the hundred best books of Japanese and ideogramic literature’, the latter ‘taken direct from works of master calligraphers’. With microphotography the edition could be produced commercially ‘at the same price as the Loeb library of Greek and Latin texts’. Further, all the Noh plays, ‘a treasure like nothing we have in the Occident’, could be made available on film, ‘or at any rate the best Noh music could be registered on sound-track’. In effect he was proposing a programme for the as yet uncreated UNESCO, and resolutely promoting his idea of a common Oriental culture above the ongoing war between Japan and China. When Kitasono mentioned in February 1939 that ‘Two young poets from VOU have gone to the front’, Pound’s response was to write about the importance of filming and recording the Noh plays, and about ‘my chinese Cantos/ now on desk’, and that he wanted ‘a translation of the ECONOMIC volume of the Chinese encyclopedia’.
The Anschluss, the union of Austria with Germany, was effected in March 1938. In January Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, had initialled a plan for the very opposite of a modus vivendi between the two nations: Austrian Nazis were to stage an open revolt and in the ensuing disorder the German Army would be ordered into Austria to prevent ‘German blood being shed by Germans’. In February and March Schussnigg, the Austrian Chancellor and head of a one-party right-wing dictatorship which had suppressed Austria’s Social Democrats, was put under extreme pressure by Hitler to resign in favour of a pro-Nazi member of his government—in effect to hand over the government to its Nazi element as the price of avoiding bloodshed. When he played for time in a vain effort to preserve Austria’s independence Hitler issued an instant ultimatum, upon which he resigned, the Austrian Nazis took over the Chancellery and the streets of Vienna, and Hitler ordered the invasion which met no resistance. A telegram was then forged requesting Germany’s military assistance and thus cloaking the takeover in a spurious legality. On 12 March Hitler was received with enthusiasm in Linz, his home town, where he declared that he had fulfilled a solemn mission ‘to restore my dear homeland to the German Reich’. On the 13th he declared himself President of Austria, and at the same time reduced it to a mere province of the Reich. ‘Unreliable elements’ were immediately rounded up by Himmler’s Gestapo, as many as 80,000 in Vienna alone; persecution of Jews began at once, and a special office was set up by Heydrich’s SS under Karl Adolf Eichmann to seize and administer their property—Baron Louis de Rothschild’s palace was looted but he was allowed to leave Vienna in return for handing over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works; a huge concentration camp was set up at Mauthausen; Dr Schacht arrived to take over the National Bank on behalf of the Reichsbank and to make its staff swear an oath to be faithful and obedient to the Fűhrer. Through all this Great Britain, France, and the League of Nations scarcely murmured a protest. Hitler was more anxious that Mussolini might be moved again to protect Austria’s independence, but to his immense relief Il Duce let it be known that it was no longer of concern to him. A plebiscite staged by the Nazis in April returned a 99.75 per cent vote in favour of the union with Germany.
‘you are NOT to concede anything to my follies
prejudices and partialities’
—EP to Montgomery Butchart, 12 December 1938
For relaxation in the summer of 1938 Pound played tennis in Rapallo, six or even eight sets on some days. In Siena, in Olga’s apartment in the Palazzo Capoquadri, he transcribed Vivaldi scores, ‘copying out the Dresden concerti…note by note’ from the microfilms with the aid of a magnifying glass, ‘and being pleased by the quality of Vivaldi’s mind therein apparent’. His idea of relaxing could include going through Binyon’s translation of the Purgatorio ‘with a microscope’ and advising on fine shades of meaning and on how a thing might be said more naturally. Another kind of amusement came from Faber & Faber’s deciding that a number of passages in Guide to Kulchur were libellous or scurrilous and must be excised or put more politely. Eliot sent him a copy of the book, which had already been printed and bound, in which he had marked the banned passages—names were not to be named, and offensive things were not to be said of The Times or the Church of England, or of other British institutions such as Rudyard Kipling. Nor might he call Hardy’s sisters ‘his stinking old sisters’ and ‘aged hens’ on account of their saying after his death ‘that they hadn’t thought it quite nice for him to write novels’, a remark which Pound regarded as ‘savage and degraded’, and an indication of why no civilized man would have wanted to immigrate into the England Hardy had had to live in. He left a considerable blank space in the middle of p. 286 to show where that passage had been cut out. In August Dorothy wrote, ‘Omar says you haven’t written to him for 18 months and please will you?’, and he did write. Dorothy was thinking of leaving the boy, now 12, with Mrs Dickie and at his present day school for another two years, since ‘he is not yet very grown up for his age’.
In their letters that summer there was a lot about a new Fascist attitude to Jews in Italy. In July Dorothy wrote, ‘Daily Mirror (vile—low—) says M. has turned jew-baiter’, and ‘Pope reported to be versus Muss. re Jews? Sure to be only half right in Eng. Papers.’ Ezra wrote back, ‘A consciousness of racial difference is appearing in It. Press.’. ‘Is the Pope opposing racial purity?’, Dorothy insisted. Pound sent a cutting from a French newspaper with a report from Castel Gondolfo, the Pope’s summer residence, that he ‘again and emphatically condemns racism and extreme nationalism, and regrets that Italy should be imitating Germany’. Mussolini’s response, as reported in another cutting from an Italian newspaper, was that Italian Fascism was not imitating anyone.
It does appear that the race laws being introduced in Italy were Fascism’s own and quite distinct from those of Nazi Germany. Indeed Dorothy Pound was quite mistaken in thinking they were concerned with racial purity—that idea meant nothing either to Mussolini or to most Italians. Under the new laws if either parent were not Jewish then a person was to be deemed non-Jewish, exactly the contrary of the Nazi laws. Mussolini’s concern was for the political and social purity of the Fascist state, and the laws were directed against those suspected of maintaining a separate, non-Fascist or anti-Fascist, identity. They were directed particularly against Italy’s 50,000 Jews, but not so much for being Jewish as for not being Fascist, or not Fascist enough. Jews were thought liable to have international loyalties, to ‘World Jewry’, or to be Zionists working for a Jewish state, or to be Communists obedient to the Comintern—there were many anti-Fascist Italian Jews in the International Brigades supporting the Republican side in Spain. Again, Jews were identified as typical members of the bourgeoisie, which had been condemned by Mussolini as ‘a spiritual enemy of the Fascist faith’ on account of its putting individual interests before those of the corporate state. All those who set themselves apart from the Fascist project were to be subject to what Mussolini called ‘a policy of segregation’. That would mean that 8,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism must leave Italy; that over 5,000 Jewish school and university students would be excluded from state education—though those already enrolled at universities might continue their studies—and that 180 of their teachers would be dismissed; that Jews would be banned from the professions of law, medicine, journalism, and from owning large businesses or more than fifty hectares of land; that 400 government employees would lose their jobs—though not their pension rights; and that 7,000 Jews would be expelled from the armed services. At the same time ‘loyal’ Jews, ‘Jews of Italian citizenship…who have unquestionable military or civil merits’, in Mussolini’s words, would ‘find understanding and justice’. Italian Jews who were over 65, or who had married an Italian before 1 October 1938, or who had fought for Italy in the First World War or in Ethiopia or Spain, or who had been a Fascist of the first hour between 1919 and 1922, would be exempt from the new laws. And ‘a Jew could embrace the Fascist faith, convert to Fascism’, and so be exempt, though there must be no pressure upon them to recant their Jewish faith. Freedom of worship was to continue unchanged; elementary and secondary schools for Jews were to be permitted; and Jewish communities might continue their activities. Strictly speaking, then, Fascism’s ‘race laws’ were not racist. In their application, in the alienation and persecution of Jews and in depriving them of certain fundamental rights, they were inhumane; and in being directed specifically against Jews they were certainly anti-Semitic. Yet this was not the endemic anti-Semitism based on racial and religious prejudice which Hitler was carrying to its extreme in Germany and Austria. It would be the Nazis, not the Fascists, who would send Italy’s Jews to the concentration camps.
In their reactions to the new laws Pound and Dorothy were far more anti-Semitic than most Fascists and than Italians in general. Throughout August Pound was telling Dorothy about the regular flow in the Italian press ‘of excellent and sober stuff about jews’, about their ‘living ON us, not with us’. Calm, reasonable, irrefutable analysis, he thought it, though coming out ‘like it has been bottled from good manners and everybody relieved to let fly’. At the beginning of September he greeted the new laws in a spirit of simple anti-Semitism: ‘Waaal all yits wot come to Italy after 1919 iss to leave in six months | and to get OUT. and all yitts is not to be in Italian schools and in scientif/ bodies etc./…It is looking THOROUGH.’ He had just heard from Gerhart Münch, now in good standing with the Nazis in Germany, how ‘DEElighted’ he was by the news. Münch, just then resting at Lake Garda, had written that his daily enjoyment was reading in the Italian newspapers about the turn ‘the jewish Problem’ was taking in Italy, ‘so much cleverer than in Germany’. Dorothy wrote from London, ‘Lots today [2 September] in papers re Jews being expelled. What a day of Judgement.’ Pound was to tell a Jewish friend in Venice, according to one report, ‘I am sorry for you, but they have done the right thing.’ In fact he sometimes thought, in line with an earlier Fascist statement, that it would be best for all Jews to be removed from western Europe and resettled somewhere out of the way—not in Arab Palestine, possibly in Poland and Roumania ‘where they touch Russia’.
Lina Caico protested to Pound, ‘What are Jews to do? Suicide en masse?’ He should tell ‘every single Italian that you meet that he is no Christian if he allows the Jews to be driven out of Italy’. Pound replied that she should wake up to the real cause of anti-Semitism, ‘Get down to USURY/ the cause WHY western man vomits out the Jew periodically.’ Moreover ‘the JEW wont take responsibility for civic order…JEW parasite on principle’, and it was necessary to ‘Segregate/ Quarantine/’ as ‘defence against parasites’, and in order to resist usury. In fact, in Fascist Italy, Jews were quite fully represented among those responsible for its civic order; and as banking and finance were controlled by the Fascist state there was no grand usury to be resisted. The new laws were indeed directed against those who could be perceived as parasites, but for the rest Pound was airing his own prejudices and not attending to what was actually the case in Italy. In the early months of 1939 Lina Caico told him frankly what she thought wrong with him: ‘when you have seen the value of some fact clearly it keeps you from seeing the value of subsequent events. You are beclouded by your past vision. That’s your way in politics. Because you saw that something was good, you see everything perfect.’ And conversely, she implied, when he saw that something was wrong, he would see only evil. So, because some Jews were usurious bankers, though not in Italy, all Jews were to be banished, even from Italy.
In ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, an article in the British Union Quarterly earlier in 1938, Pound had argued that the Jeffersonian process in America, so grievously betrayed in the nineteenth century, was being betrayed now by Roosevelt’s ‘aryio-kike’ advisers, all of them steeped in the ‘semitic poison’, usury. The harm done ‘by Jewish finance to the English race in America’, he declared, was such that ‘the expulsion of the two million Jews in New York would not be an excessive punishment’. ‘A race’, he wrote, ‘may be held responsible for its worst individuals.’ Moreover, the Jews would have only themselves to blame, having brought anti-Semitism upon themselves. That was blaming the victim; worse, it was a variant form of scapegoating—not one for the sins of all, but all for the sins of a few. And worst, it was holding the Jewish race responsible for the sins of all usurers, of whatever race. The trick there was in identifying usury as a ‘semitic poison’, and in ‘aryio-kike’, a term pretending to indicate Aryan, or non-Jewish usurers, while actually conveying anti-Semitic prejudice.
Pound was now more or less overtly dealing in that prejudice and seeking to direct it. In October 1938, in a letter in Action, another publication of the British Union of Fascists, he wrote,
It will be a great pity if the present wave of anti-Semitism is allowed to end in the mere beating up of a few block-headed yids in the London ghetto. It will be a great pity if the indignation isn’t persistent enough to REACH the damned gold-breakers whether Hebrew or Quaker or lickspittle Anglican.
Pound must have known that the Blackshirt thugs who were beating up Jews in the East End of London were not after usurers, nor after Quaker and Anglican bankers. That is twisted thinking in twisty language, with It will be a great pity and the indignation masking an endorsement of racist thuggery. This is not straight naming, it is the technique of propaganda and of rabble-rousing, and a calculated attempt to convert racist violence, Nazi-influenced anti-Semitism, into an attack on usurers.
Another contribution to Action, this one in June 1938, is evidence that Pound knew what he was doing. Having noted that international usury was not entirely Jewish, and that indeed there was more Calvinism than Judaism in it, and that the Calvinist was more dangerous and deadly than the Jew, he then remarked that it was more difficult to stir up mob violence against the Calvinist than against the Jew; and further, that it had been Hitler’s stroke of genius in Mein Kampf to find the language needed and effective to rouse the German people into turning upon their enemies, that is, upon usurious financiers. Since the dynamic of Mein Kampf was the most rabid and paranoid anti-Semitism, it would appear that Pound was approving and seeking to follow Hitler’s insight, ‘that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs and knowledge but only with feelings and beliefs’. He was willing to deploy anti-Semitism strategically to rouse the victims of usury to action by fear and terror of ‘the Jew’.
Pound had dedicated Guide to Kulchur ‘To | LOUIS ZUKOFSKY | and | BASIL BUNTING | strugglers | in the desert’, and in November Zukofsky told Pound that he was finding it hard to get past his sentence praising Wyndham Lewis’s discovery of Hitler in 1931 as superior to his own discovery of Mussolini. Pound hadn’t made it clear that it was Lewis’s picking out a sentence on Leihkapital from Mein Kampf that had so impressed him, and for Zukofsky Hitler was simply ‘the German terror’. Pound responded, ‘Why curse Adolphe/ why not git down to bedrock/ NESCHEK and the buggering vendetta of the shitten Rothschild which has run for 150 years/ and is now flopping back on Jewry at large.’ There was more, to the effect that because the Jews would do nothing about the Rothschilds and neschek generally they were digging their own graves. Bunting was in New York in December, saw the letter, and made it the occasion for breaking with Pound. In clear and direct terms he wrote that his spewing out ‘anti-semite bile’ to Zukofsky was unforgivable, an abomination:
You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one man guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-jews have contributed their fair share, or more than their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty. You have the relevant facts without any need of information that cannot be found in Italy. I can find no excuse, no way of considering your activities as anything else than wilful and thought-out perversion of what you know to be true.
…It makes me sick to see you covering yourself with that kind of filth. It is not an arguable question, has not been arguable for at least nineteen centuries. Either you know men to be men, and not something less, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind at large.
Pound was unaffected. ‘Dear Zuk’, he wrote in January 1939, ‘Lot of hot steam from Bzl/ amounts to saying that I am a shit because I won’t regard a SYMPTOM as a cause…The ROOT is avarice.…The outbreaks of [anti-Semitic] violence are mere incomprehension/ like inarticulate violent language.’ And he went on justifying his own deployment of verbally violent anti-Semitism along his usual lines, arguing that it was a reaction to usury, that its cause was Semitic banking practices, and that Jews, even if they were not themselves usurers, nevertheless deserved to be attacked for doing nothing to prevent usury.
Zukofsky’s attitude was that there was no use arguing with Pound. His politics were a mess, he told him, so ‘let’s not correspond about politics’. As for his anti-Semitism, ‘I believe you’re no more anti- than Marx himself, tho’ the cluttered mess of the rest of your economic & political thinking makes it appear so.’ Zukofsky had long been in the line of fire of Pound’s anti-Semitic invective and was as well placed as anyone to pass judgement. Other Jewish friends would share his conviction that Pound was not personally anti-Semitic. Carlo Izzo would resolve the apparent impossibility of Pound’s being both anti-Semitic and yet not anti-Semitic by viewing Pound’s anti-Semitism as not personal but ‘almost ludicrously theoretical… Aldo Camerino was a Jew and yet Pound held him in great esteem.’ It was to Camerino that Pound had said, in Izzo’s presence, ‘they have done the right thing’. Those best placed to judge, then, would not dispute Pound’s claim, in Purpose in 1938, ‘I am not anti-semite’, while they would say, as Izzo did, that they detested his politics. And Bunting was right about what Pound was doing in his journalism and correspondence—he was guilty of practising anti-Semitism there. In his one-man crusade against usury he was, while thinking of rightness, going wrong, terribly and tragically wrong.
With Austria annexed, Hitler was determined that Czechoslovakia should be next to fall to the Reich, and this time Britain and France, in their anxiety to appease him, acted as his enforcers. Czechoslovakia, a creation of the peace settlement following the 1914–18 war, had a mixed population of Czechs, Slovaks, German-speaking Sudetens, Hungarians, and Ruthenians. In spite of its minorities, under its founders Tomáš Masaryk and Eduard Beneš it was, in the words of the contemporary American journalist William Shirer, ‘the most democratic, progressive, enlightened and prosperous state in Central Europe’. In the 1930s, however, Nazi Germany had been covertly encouraging the German-speaking Sudetens to demand autonomy and to create violent disturbances so that Hitler could invade, as he had invaded Austria, under cover of going to the aid of oppressed and endangered fellow Germans. When in May 1938 the Czechoslovak government under President Beneš mobilized its forces to resist an invasion Hitler was infuriated and gave orders for his army and air force to be ready to invade and to destroy the Czechoslovak state on 2 October. Britain and France had treaty obligations to defend that country’s independence. At the same time Neville Chamberlain, now the British Prime Minister, and Édouard Daladier, the French Premier, desperate to avoid another war in Europe, believed they could buy peace by giving in to Hitler’s demands. Chamberlain, who could see no British interest at stake in the fate of Czechoslovakia, made light of the crisis, describing it in parliament as ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’. On 29 September Chamberlain and Daladier met with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich to settle the affair—Czechoslovakia was excluded from the meeting—and they agreed that the German army should march into the Sudetenland on 1 October and complete its occupation by the 10th. Non-German Czechs were to be evacuated at once, leaving behind all their goods and property, even their cows; and all natural resources, industries, railways, public buildings, etc. would pass to Germany without compensation. What remained of Czechoslovakia, they said, they would protect against unprovoked aggression. The next morning before flying home Chamberlain secured Hitler’s signature on a sheet of paper declaring that the Munich Agreement was ‘symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’. Back in London he waved the piece of paper from a window of no. 10 Downing Street and told the cheering crowd that he had secured ‘peace with honour’, ‘peace for our time’. President Beneš was told that if he did not submit to the Munich terms Britain and France would now back Hitler in the use of armed force. About the time in the afternoon of 30 September 1938 when Chamberlain was proclaiming as a noble victory the abandonment and betrayal of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak radio announced the country’s surrender, ‘under protest to the world’. ‘We have been forced into this situation’, the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister told the British and French ministers who were enforcing Hitler’s terms; ‘today it is our turn, tomorrow it will be the turn of others’.
The Times of London reported on 5 October that Anthony Eden approved of what Chamberlain had done at Munich, and also that Chamberlain himself had paid a handsome tribute to Signor Mussolini for his part in the saving of the peace. Pound noted these facts in his next article in the New English Weekly, and added his own approving comment that ‘Chamberlain is the FIRST British statesman to inspire any respect on the continent since 1918’. He went on to write, ‘War against Germany would have meant war against a clean concept of money’. That was his remarkable view of what was now at issue, not Hitler’s seizure and spoliation of Czechoslovakia, not that country’s loss of its freedom and independence, not the threat to other European countries from the militarization and mounting belligerence of Nazi Germany, and not the betrayals of free nations by Britain and France in the vain hope of appeasing Hitler’s lust for conquest. ‘If ever war is made against Germany in our time’, he insisted over the editor’s protest in the Chicago Delphian Quarterly, ‘it will be a war against this conception of MONEY’—that was a concept going back, as he explained in the British Union Quarterly, to ‘the Monte dei Paschi’s “abundance of nature and responsibility of the whole people”’. That is what Hitler and his Germany meant to Pound in the autumn of 1938, simply ‘a clean concept of money’.
He made a fairly clear statement of where he stood politically at this time in a contribution to Fascist Europe/Europa Fascista, an Anglo-Italian symposium published under the auspices of the National Institute of Fascist Culture at Pavia in October 1938. There was the Confucian basis: ‘a ruler promotes the peace of the world by the good government of his own country.’ Then there was the current imperative: ‘unless the root economic evils are tackled and eradicated there can be neither peace between nations nor justice within them.’ And the enemy was ignorance, ‘ignorance of the nature of money, its source and its mode of issue’—an ignorance which allowed the cancer of usury to spread from New York and from London. Against it Pound invoked the Fascist Corporate State, with this exceptional qualification, ‘My understanding of the Corporate State can not be made clear unless I carry the reader back into the Tuscany of Pietro Leopoldo and Ferdinando III in the period that preceded Napoleon’—in short, he implied, see his Fifth Decad of Cantos with its celebration of the responsible use of ‘the abundance of nature’ for the benefit of the whole people. That spirit he saw at work in Mussolini’s battle to harvest more grain and to ensure its equitable distribution. ‘And when that spirit unites with the spirit behind [Hitler’s] words on Leihkapital’—a singular take on the Axis—then ‘we approach a new Europe’, and a new paideuma. 1
At that point in his article Pound turned to consider a role for himself in the development of a Fascist Europe. Perhaps he could have none, since ‘It is no longer up to us, a handful of highbrow propagandists’; and anyway, while ‘I can make blue prints and plans as well as the next man…I have probably no talent at all for getting the mass of mankind to accept them’. But then again, if asked, he would know how to start organizing a fascio or sindicato of ‘men of my own profession’, artists and writers who shared the dream of the new paideuma and who would spread abroad its germinal ideas. One senses there not only a willingness but a yearning to be head-hunted into the Fascist project. That was followed, though, by a counter-assertion of the prerogatives of the artist. ‘The “new Paideuma”,’ he declared, ‘the new cosmos of “culture”, in the sense of the best standards of writing, of sculpture, of scholarship, is now the dream of a few dozen intellects’—that would imply that the new paideuma was those intellects’ own vision of Fascism, as distinct from what the Fascist party might say and do. ‘As poet’, Pound went on, ‘I have a perfect right to my preconceptions, to my projects.’ Those, however, he added, quickly bridging over the possible difference, ‘are certainly not independent of social organization’. Exactly what that might mean was left to the reader’s speculation. All in all, one might make out that Pound was uncertain about his role as a ‘highbrow propagandist’; that he did want to be recognized as a poet, an artist among artists; and that he did want to have a part in creating a Fascist Europe, only as a poet and according to his own very special vision of Fascism.
He evidently believed that he could maintain his independence and integrity as a poet, and that he could maintain even his own vision of Fascism, within a political system which demanded the total subordination of the individual citizen to the state. That he was a foreigner, and that his poetry was in English, must have helped him get away with that. And then the regime did allow him to put over his own idea of Fascism in his propaganda—on condition perhaps that he was otherwise uncritical of it. But how could he take his personal stand upon the right of the individual poet to his own preconceptions and projects while remaining undisturbed by the denial of that right to the people he lived among? The explanation is perhaps in the word ‘poet’, in the idea of the artist as having the capacity and the need to exercise an unfettered freedom of mind while the mass of the people, lacking his creativity, need to be guided and led by the poet’s vision. It seems certain that he was indulging the delusion that by his cantos he could shape the Axis towards the ideal Europe of his dream.
In the autumn of 1938 and into 1939 Pound was working on the next two blocks of exemplary history cantos, those dealing with China and with John Adams of the American Revolution. Their composition was interrupted in October 1938 by his having to go to London following the death of Olivia Shakespear. He had scarcely arrived in Venice to be with Olga and Mary when a telegram came from Dorothy to say that her mother had died on the 2nd—Dorothy herself was in bed with a temperature of 102o and quite unable to travel. Mary remembered Olga’s being ‘animated and indignant’ at Pound’s leaving them, while he ‘struck his characteristic pose: hands deep in trouser pockets balancing on toes and heels, looking straight ahead of him toward the window, lips tightly closed’. He had to go to clear out Olivia’s flat and dispose of her possessions, now Dorothy’s, and that was that. Entries in Dorothy’s diary indicate that in fact he did not go straight to London, but stopped over in Rapallo from the 5th to the 17th, presumably to look after her. In a note to Olga on the 13th Pound wrote, ‘gotta start on Canto 61 or thereabahts/ i;e; wot is ter follow the chinKantos’.
Olivia had treasured Omar’s childish things—his first tooth, a Teddy bear—and Dorothy, asked ‘What to do with Teddy’, wrote, ‘Oh… Cremate.’ She was also ‘against letters being kept’, and Ezra should tear up Omar’s to his grandmother. But ‘For goodness sake’, she told him, ‘tip the Child 5/- when he leaves you—and look at his school report’. Omar, now 12, would enrol as a boarder at Charterhouse. Pound was inviting his friends to carry off Olivia’s books and furniture ‘on ridiculously generous terms, if any’, according to Henry Swabey. Pound gave Swabey a Gaudier charcoal drawing and an Ovid in Latin, and offered him ‘a number of books’ at ‘10/- the lot’. Wyndham Lewis was seen by a policeman carrying home a chair on his head one midnight and stopped upon suspicion of theft. Ronald Duncan and his wife went away with their ‘pockets bulging with Chinese ivory and jade, fish knives and forks’, and with ‘an inscribed copy of Yeats’s poems…and a stool ornamented with quotations from Virgil’. Dorothy asked Ezra to ‘bring her back some thing of her new possessions’, and he did arrange, even after being so liberal with them, to have 13 cases of Olivia’s things shipped to Rapallo.
Duncan (1914–82), a young poet, playwright, and opera librettist, was the editor—with much advice and encouragement from Pound—of Townsman, a lively small quarterly distantly modelled on Eliot’s grander Criterion. He had visited Ghandi in India and was a member of the Peace Pledge Union, and Pound involved him, along with Swabey and J. P. Angold, in discussions of economic matters and international peace. Neville Chamberlain had ‘acted as the leader of Europe’, he told them. Because he knew Benjamin Britten and theatre people Duncan was able to arrange for a Noh play to be attempted one afternoon in the Mercury Theatre, with a musician playing gongs, a dancer, and Pound reading the words. In the sparse audience were Lewis and Eliot—Pound was spending time with both of them.
Lewis had recently done a portrait of Eliot—the one the Royal Academy refused to exhibit, and which the Tate Gallery declined to purchase—and now Pound sat for him. He would swagger in, Lewis recalled, ‘coat-tails flying’, fling himself ‘at full length into my best chair’, adjust his leonine mane to the cushioned chair top, close his eyes, gruffle ‘Go to it Wyndham!’, and remain silent and motionless ‘for two hours by the clock’. Lewis reflected that it was as if he had exhausted his aggressive vitality for the moment and had just dropped; but in his painting there is no relaxation, the reclining figure is tense, and there is concentrated energy in the still head with its closed but unsleeping eyes. It took Lewis some time to decide what to put in on the left to balance the strong diagonal of the figure, and in the end it was some folded newspapers on a small table against an expanse of blue-green sea, as if to suggest the scope of his subject’s mind and its immediate preoccupations. This portrait the Tate did take.
There was a last meeting with Yeats who gave a dinner for Pound at the Athenaeum. Yeats’s health was failing—he would die at the end of January—but he was cheered by his old antagonist telling him that his recent poems were ‘rather good’ which, from Pound he felt, was ‘rapturous applause’.
Pound was looking up other old friends—Violet Hunt, Agnes Bedford, Joseph Bard—and meeting political contacts. Someone who had been in the secret service told him that ‘he cd/ buy any of the big politicians EXCEPT Chamberlain’, and that he ‘had the dope on ALL the communist leaders… definitely paid by Russia for military espionage’. He heard Oswald Mosley speak at a public meeting in Lewisham, and later attacked the BBC in Action for keeping off the air what he had said about Chamberlain, apparently that he was not ‘a moral coward’. When they met, Mosley was surprised to find Pound ‘a vivacious, bustling and practical person’, ‘exactly the opposite of what I expected from the abstruse genius of his poetry’. Pound had the idea of telling Chamberlain in person ‘what he was headed for’, but missed a phone call—possibly from the Prime Minister’s office.
Olga Rudge meanwhile was feeling increasingly put out by his giving up to disposing of his mother-in-law’s furniture the precious time he was to have spent with Mary and herself in Venice. At the end of October she calculated that ‘in 13 years the L’cna has had the benefit of His company for say 3 weeks all told’; and as for herself, ‘This one feels that the best years of her life have been spent in solitary confinement out of consideration for His family’s feelings—and she feels it is the limit to be sacrificed now to their furniture.’ A couple of days later she exploded at his ‘damn unfair’ treatment of her, ‘that He should always have her front door key and come and go as He likes and she never has His’. Then she sent a telegram, ‘IN GREAT ANXIETY BEG HIM TO REASSURE HER OF HIS AFFECTION UNALTERED CANNOT STAND MORE DISAPPOINTMENT TENEREZZE OLGA’. Pound responded, ‘ASSURED DURABLE RETURNING SOON’, and wrote, ‘He ain’t stayin in this town for no skoit an thazzat’, also that ‘he purrfers St Ambrogio with her in it to London or elsewhere without her’. At that Olga wrote back, ‘She breathing again—literally’.
‘To make up for the short stay in Venice he took us to Rome’ that Christmas, so Mary remembered. Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was showing, and Ezra said they must see it at once. At the end when the lights went up, he and Mary looked at each other, and they stayed to watch it through again. ‘I think he enjoyed the film even more than I did’, Mary wrote. Her mother developed a cold and spent much of the week in bed. Mary and her father visited the zoo; spent the evenings with Italian friends in the Caffè Greco; visited Marinetti who showed his Futurist paintings but ‘seemed more interested in what I knew about sheep’. One afternoon a monsignor took them to fashionable Doney’s in the Via Veneto for pastries and hot chocolate, Pound and the monsignor ‘two bulky figures talk[ing] with such animation that [Mary] feared tables and chairs would be knocked over’; then he took them in a carriage to St Peter’s, and later to the garden of the Knights of Malta where he told her to look through the keyhole of a door in the high wall, and there was ‘the dome of Michelangelo in the pale golden mist of the setting sun—something to remember’.
At the beginning of January 1939 Pound learnt that Eliot was closing down the Criterion—that month’s number would be the last. He was surprised that Eliot had said nothing to him about it during his recent five weeks in London, and in fact had been rather ‘projecting continuance’. But then Eliot’s reason, it emerged, was that he had been ‘deeply shaken by the events of September 1938’, which he viewed, not as a triumph of peace-making, but as the failure of a civilization to oppose a godless barbarism. He might well have felt that Pound would not have understood his state of mind, nor sympathized with his ‘depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion’. And indeed Pound’s reaction to the end of the Criterion was rather jovial. ‘Who killed Cock Possum? | Who bitched his blossom?’, he enquired of Ronald Duncan. And to Eliot he wrote that ‘Olga, scandalized at my levity thus reproves me: “I liked The Criterion, it was respectable | none of your other magazines are respectable | You have no feeling for the sorrows of yr/ friend Possum”.’
What would prove to be the last of the Rapallo music weeks took place that year between 2 and 13 March, four of the six concerts being devoted, as in the first series in 1933, to Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano, with Olga Rudge and Renata Borgatti the musicians throughout. The assumption behind both the first and the last series of concerts, Pound explained in Il Mare, was that these sonatas ‘constitute a source, a concentration of musical intelligence as unique in its way as Dante’s Paradiso is in the realm of poetry’, and it had been the aim to ensure ‘that at least in one part of the world the public could periodically, every year, have the opportunity to hear and re-hear this series of sonatas in its entirety, sharpening its ear and training its critical judgment’.
At this time Pound was hastening to complete his ‘China’ and ‘John Adams’ cantos. He had decided that he should go to Washington in the spring to talk some sense, his sense, into President Roosevelt if only he could get to see him, and he wanted to get those cantos off to Faber & Faber before leaving. Besides, his two great source books were not portable and he could work from them only while in Rapallo. They were the thirteen thick folio volumes of an Histoire générale de la Chine; and the ten fat volumes of the Works of John Adams. The history of China he had acquired in November 1937 and he had been working intermittently since then at condensing its 6,376 pages down towards the 2,500 lines of Cantos LII–LXI. The John Adams Works he had acquired only in June 1938, and the work of condensing its 8,000 pages down to the matching 2,500 lines of Cantos LXII–LXXI appears to have been his main occupation in January and February of 1939. ‘Chewing thru Adams’, he noted to Olga Rudge on 1 February; then ‘he on vol. Ten and ult. of J. Adams’ on the 3rd; followed by ‘he got to the end’, on the 7th, with the addition, ‘J. Adams, wottaman!’ He had become convinced that the neglected second president was ‘much more the father of Jackson and Van Buren than Jefferson was’, that indeed he was the true ‘pater patriae U.S.A. more than Washington or Jefferson/ though all three essential and all betrayed by the first congress’. In mid-February he was ‘havin a helluva time’ with cantos 53 and 54, and with 60 and 61, and even when he had a clean typescript of them on the 19th he still felt that two needed to be ‘humanised | too condensed as they set’. By 3 March, however, his clean typescript was up to canto 67, and he had all twenty new cantos polished and shined and sent off to Faber before he sailed for America on 13 April.
Hitler had not been appeased by being allowed to seize the Sudetenland. Already on 21 October 1938 he had ordered his military chiefs to be in a state of readiness to liquidate the rest of Czechoslovakia; and then, to further destabilize the now ruined and defenceless remnant, he had encouraged the Slovaks to break away, and the Hungarians to annexe Ruthenia and the Hungarian-speaking districts, and the Poles to annex territory adjacent to their border. Then, at 6. a.m. on 15 March 1939, German troops entered Moravia and Bohemia, and on the 16th occupied Slovakia, nowhere meeting resistance. Hitler made a triumphant entry into Prague, followed by the SS and the Gestapo, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, being now wholly incorporated into the Nazi Reich as Austria had been. ‘Neither Britain nor France’, Shirer wrote, ‘made the slightest move to save it, though at Munich they had solemnly guaranteed Czechoslovakia against aggression.’
Britain and France did, however, begin to realize that Hitler was not to be appeased, and to acknowledge that his next move would be against Poland. On 31 March 1939, Chamberlain declared that the two countries had given assurances to the Polish Government that if it were attacked they would lend it all the support in their power.
Hitler still had September 1939 firmly pencilled in as the moment for all-out war.
More than the history of a State, or even of a people, the history of China is that of a civilization, or rather that of a tradition of culture. Its chief interest…would perhaps be to show how the idea of civilization has been able, in such a lengthy history, to keep priority, almost constantly, over the idea of the State.
—Marcel Granet
As Hitler was driving his people towards a criminal war which would devastate Europe morally as much as materially, Pound was condensing into verse the epic story of how the civilization of China was founded upon, and renewed itself dynasty after dynasty upon, the Confucian conviction that good emperors brought peace and abundance for all their people, and that those who did not would rightly be overthrown. It was a simple enough ethic, this idea that the true aim of government was to secure the welfare, liberty, and contentment of its citizens, and it had served China well through all the vicissitudes of its 5,000-year history. According to its own historians the empire flourished under good rulers, those who observed the processes of nature and distributed its abundance equitably among the whole people; and under bad rulers, those who went against the natural law or who let particular interests come before the common good, the empire fell apart and the people suffered.
It was primarily the historians who kept this ethic, this paideuma, in force through all that vast stretch of time, the historians being Confucian scholars who wrote up, preserved, and revised the records of the successive dynasties. Theirs were moral histories, like the books of the Bible and Shakespeare’s history plays, ‘school books for princes’ they called them, the predominant concern being to so mirror the conduct of emperors and their officers as to make of them examples of wise rule or of misrule for the instruction of their successors. A Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government was the explicit title given to the major compilation put together by a team of scholars in the eleventh century of our era. Their aim was not so much to record events as to pass on and to perpetuate the fundamental principles of good government and to have them acted upon.
That tradition was continued down into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the time when there were Jesuit missionaries in China, learned men who were conveying to the Chinese along with their Christian doctrine the latest advances of European science and technology, and in exchange carrying back to Europe news of China’s own civilization. In this way a knowledge of the Confucian principles of government became current in Europe at just the moment when some of its leading thinkers, notably Voltaire and the Philosophes in France, were conceiving a social order based on natural reason and natural justice rather than on royal prerogative and religious dogma. The revolutionary ideas that were gradually taking hold, that all should have a share in the common wealth, and that governments should not tyrannize over the people but rather serve their needs, such ideas were found to have been long established in China and to have been the key to its enduring civilization. It seemed, to those seeking a more enlightened Europe, that Confucian China afforded a model of their ideal society, and Confucius himself was set up as an icon of enlightenment. His idea of civil government, as transmitted in the Jesuits’ versions of the works attributed to him, and by Voltaire in his Essai sur les mœurs, helped form the minds of those who made the American and the French revolutions.
With the betrayal of the American Revolution very much on his mind, and with Europe descending into political chaos, Pound had written in 1937 of an immediate need for Confucius, meaning specifically a need for his model of responsible government. He had done something towards meeting the need by translating the Ta Hio and by making a digest of the Analects in Guide to Kulchur. Then in the autumn of 1937 he bought the thirteen-volume Histoire générale de la Chine (Paris, 1772–85), a translation of the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government made at the court of the Manchu emperor K’ang Hsi by the French Jesuit Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669–1749). His ‘China Cantos’ would be cantos ‘having to do with instruction’—the second part of his long poem as he had first conceived it at Hamilton College in 1904 or 1905—and they would be addressed implicitly to the governments of Europe and of America, and in a few places fairly directly to Italy’s Il Duce.
Canto 52 opens in the voice of instruction, ‘And I have told you’; and the body of the canto, an account of the rites and customs of ancient China, will begin in the same way with ‘Know then’. What we have been told in the previous ‘Siena’ cantos is that ‘the true base of credit’—and, by implication, of order in society—‘is the abundance of nature | with the whole folk behind it’. This is to be the major theme of this canto, and the underlying theme of the entire decad. Just here the counter-theme is re-stated, that anti-social neschek, a Hebrew term for the usurious taking of interest, goes unopposed in the contemporary world. Even ‘the groggy church is gone toothless | No longer holds against neschek’.
The neschek passage does not reprise the investigation of usury in the preceding twenty cantos, but instead distils from Pound’s worst prose the vicious prejudice which would blame the Jews for the universal blight of usury, and which would go on to hold the Jews themselves responsible for anti-Semitism. ‘Rothschild’s sin drawing vengeance’, Pound wrote, ‘poor yitts paying for Rothschild | paying for a few big jew’s vendetta on goyim.’ When Eliot at Faber & Faber saw this passage he wrote to Pound, ‘if you remain keen on jew-baiting, that is your affair, but that name of Rothschild should be omitted’. Use ‘Stinkschuld’ instead then, was Pound’s unrepentant response; but Faber blacked out the name and blacked out five lines of petulant abuse of the Rothschilds. After Pound’s death, however, the blacked-out lines and ‘Stinkschuld’ were restored, thus fully exposing for censure the most disgracefully flawed page of the Cantos.
The poem recovers from this lapse into wilful prejudice on the next page when the poet is restored to his right mind by attending to the wisdom of ancient China. The rest of the canto, a hundred or so lines, is extracted from Li Ki, the Confucian book of rites and folk customs. Li signifies traditional behaviours that make for harmony in nature and in society—these, rather than government legislation, were the guiding principles of Confucian China. Pound’s rendering of the Li Ki is deliberately selective. He chooses to emphasize just the primary relation of man to nature, and the need for the whole folk from emperor to peasant to observe its seasons and processes in order to secure the abundance:
| Know then: |
|
Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades |
| Sovran is Lord of the Fire |
|
to this month are birds |
| with bitter smell and the odour of burning |
| To the hearth god, lungs of the victim |
|
The green frog lifts up his voice |
| and the white latex is in flower |
| In red car with jewels incarnadine |
|
to welcome the summer |
| In this month no destruction |
|
no tree shall be cut at this time |
| Wild beasts are driven from field |
|
in this month are simples gathered. |
| The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven |
That is when the cultivation of the silk worms is done for the year. And the empress’s offering to the emperor is to be followed, so Li Ki goes on, by all the women, rich and poor, old and young, paying a tribute of cocoons in proportion to the number of their mulberry trees; and the silk from them will go to make the robes used in the customary rites in the countryside and in the halls of the ancestors. Pound barely notices such evidences of a developed social organization. He passes over the mass of detailed directions for imperial ceremonies, and for the written characters and musical tones appropriate to each season and each ceremony; and he leaves out nearly all the directions for the proper conduct of ministers and court officials—for example, that they should advance men of talent and open to them a career with honour. Instead his China in this first canto of the sequence appears in its primitive state, or rather in what Lévi-Strauss preferred to call the primal state of its civilization.
De Mailla’s history, Pound’s source in cantos 53–61, begins with the first stirrings of that civilization. As de Mailla tells it, the condition of the inhabitants of China before the first emperors was nearer to that of the beasts than of men: they lived in the wild without house or cottage, ate their food raw, dressed in the skins of animals, knew no laws or rules of conduct, and had no thought for anything beyond a purely animal existence. They differed from the beasts only in this, that they had a soul capable of arousing an aversion to such a life. De Mailla, being a product of the French enlightenment and a Jesuit, was pleased to see in heathen China’s ascent to a civilized state proof that reason, the divine spark in man, would draw him towards heaven even without the aid of the Christian revelation. His first emperors, horrified by the brute state of their people, teach them to house and clothe themselves, to burn wood and cook food, and by page four are teaching them that in order to live well and happily they should follow the guidance of that reason with which Heaven has supplied them so that they may perform Heaven’s will. In short, de Mailla’s China is a China for his time.
Pound’s too is a China for his own time; that is, he brings to its history his own preoccupations and ignores de Mailla’s. The latter’s first four pages are condensed to just three lines—
| Yeou taught men to break branches |
| Seu Gin set up the stage and taught barter, |
| taught the knotting of cords |
That places the emphasis simply on the teaching of elementary skills, and strips away all reference to ‘reason’ and ‘Heaven’. Pound’s first pages go on to notate in ‘luminous details’ the incremental growth of Chinese civilization over a thousand or more years, with each named emperor both honouring his ancestors’ achievements and moving to a further cultural level. The legendary Chin Nong taught what grains to grow, ‘and made a plough that is used five thousand years’; the Yellow Emperor Hoang Ti, around 2611 ‘ante Christum’, ‘contrived the making of bricks | and his wife started working the silk worms’; money was in use in his time, and he measured the lengths of hollow reeds ‘to make tune for song’; a century later ‘Ti Ko set his scholars to fitting words to their music’; his son Yao noted ‘what star is at solstice | saw what star marks midsummer’; Yu, first emperor of the Hsia dynasty, controlled the waters of the Yellow River, and ‘let his men pay tithes in kind’; and Chun—who reigned between Yao and Yu but is placed by Pound as the peak of this first phase of development—on assuming his responsibilities sacrificed to ‘the spirit Chang Ti’ that moves the sun and the stars, and gave the instruction that ‘your verses should say what you mean, and the music should accord with your meaning’. Tradition acclaims these three emperors, Yao, Chun, and Yu, as the exemplary models for all later rulers, and after naming them over Pound adds the name of Yu’s wise minister of public order, Kao-Yao, with the culminating word ‘abundance’—that being what he would have this first 48-line section of the canto add up to.
The second section of the canto, another episode of 48 lines but in the form of an ode, is concerned with saving and renewing the abundance in a time of dearth. It opens with an empress fleeing a usurper to save her unborn son who will grow up to restore order and continue the Hsia dynasty, and with invocations of the exemplary virtues of former emperors; it will close with further invocations, and the line ‘seek old men and new tools’. It pivots upon the instigation ‘MAKE IT NEW’, the motto of Tching Tang, who founded a new dynasty when the Hsia had fallen through neglect of the people and of the spirits. There was drought, grain was scarce, and prices were rising, and so that what grain there was should be shared equitably Tching made copper coins ‘and gave these to the people | wherewith they might buy grain | where there was grain’; and he ‘prayed on the mountain’ to make rain after the seven years of sterility. For thus contending against scarcity and greed, and for his caring for the people and respecting the spirits, his name is added to the list of honoured emperors in the closing invocations.
The canto then cuts to the fall after 400 years of the dynasty he founded. Wasteful luxury, depraved orgies, and barbaric cruelty characterize the reign of its last emperor; order is restored by the enlightened rebel who defeats him in battle, and a new dynasty is established, that of the Chou which Confucius himself would look back to in admiration. The rest of the canto is devoted to their rise and fall, with their name in ideogram placed at the exact centre of the canto as the pivot of the whole. The founding Chou emperor, observing the li, ‘Dated his year from the winter solstice.’ The first thing he did upon entering the city was to give out grain ‘till the treasuries were empty’. He demobilized the army; set up schools—‘Kids 8 to 15 in the schools, then higher training.’ As a good ruler must, he kept down taxes and cared for the needs of the people. His son continued the good work, ‘kept lynx eye on bureaucrats | lynx eye on the currency’, and regulated weights and measures. There was peace in his reign, and his last will and testament was this, ‘Keep the peace, care for the people.’ That will was fulfilled under the third emperor by the wise counsellor Chao Kong, who is held to have brought about a golden age—
| Honour to Chao-Kong the surveyor |
| Let his name last 3000 years |
| Gave each man land for his labour |
| not by plough-land alone |
| But for keeping of silk-worms |
| Reforested the mulberry groves |
| Set periodical markets |
| Exchange brought abundance, the prisons were empty. |
| ‘Yao and Chun have returned’ |
| sang the farmers |
| ‘Peace and abundance bring virtue.’ I am |
|
‘Pro-Tcheou’ said Confucius five centuries later. |
| With his mind on this age. |
Chao-Kong died ‘on a journey he made for the good of the state’,
| and men never thereafter cut branches |
|
of the pear-trees whereunder he had sat deeming justice |
|
deeming the measures of lands. |
‘And you will hear to this day the folk singing’ about that—a song to be found in the Shih King, the Classic Anthology which Confucius is supposed to have edited as a monument to the Chou.
In the 500 years from the death of Chao-Kong down to Confucius’ lifetime there were good emperors and bad, good times and disasters, but overall a steady decline from peace and abundance towards a breaking down of the great empire into warring petty states. The fourth emperor ‘hunted across the tilled fields’ and died ‘to joy of the people’. His successor meant well but ‘fell into vanity’, though in old age he ‘wd/ have made reparation’ and did reform the criminal law. The tenth Chou was ‘avid of silver’, and had to be reminded of a prince’s obligation to see to it that ‘l’argent circule | that cash move amongst people’—or else, he was told, ‘The end of your house is upon us.’ By the time his son became ruler Tartar barbarians were raiding into China and he fought against them, with some success so long as he performed the rites and was not ‘rash in council’—two odes in The Classic Anthology celebrate his expeditions. He failed, however, to perform the spring rite as laid down in Li Ki and there were four years of famine with ‘the wild goose crying sorrow’; and when he called back his people they were reduced to dwelling amid reeds and pine trees. Thereafter the Chou empire fell into disorder: the ancestral tombs were neglected; its men would not stand together; there was much lawlessness, murders and treasons, ‘Wars, | wars without interest’; and there was disturbance in nature, earthquakes, eclipses, comets. That was the state of things when Confucius was made a minister, and though he had one evildoer beheaded, he could not persuade the ruler to rule responsibly and so retired from office and went off to edit the book of odes. He saved and passed on what could be saved in a time much like Pound’s own, a time of ‘Greed, murder, jealousies, taxes’, and of ‘armament racket, war propaganda’.
Canto 53, taken as a whole, has first refined de Mailla’s diffuse account of about thirteen hundred years of history into the Confucian foundation myth of the ideal state; and then, in its second half, given a summary account of the actual historical conditions under which and in response to which Confucius and his followers fashioned their reforming ideal. There is an exact balance between the early myth-making and the later critical accounts of how princes were behaving in the real world, with the clear imperative to good government poised against the evidence of how rarely and with what difficulty it was actually carried out.
The following eight cantos trace the vicissitudes of the Confucian paideuma through twenty centuries down to about 1776. Dynasties rise and fall one after the other as they follow or fail to follow the Confucian principles. The same fallings off recur, and the same recoveries of virtue—this history does repeat itself. Beyond that truism, though, each canto unfolds a new development in the story, and yields a further insight—there is progression both in the narrative and in the understanding of what has been and what might be. The overall structure is dramatic, much like that of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies: a pattern of civilized order is achieved in spite of enemies within and without through the first three of the ten cantos—is broken down into increasing disorder by those enemies through the middle cantos—and in the final three a new force overcomes the enemies and re-establishes right order. The constant measure is respect for the Confucian books, that is, for the History Book itself and for the Book of Songs.
Canto 54 begins with the fall of the Chou dynasty after eight centuries. A new emperor united all China and ‘jacked up astronomy’, but then ‘after 33 years burnt the books’, and his dynasty fell soon after. Then came the Han and an emperor who saw the need to restore the books and the law code and the record of the rites ‘as check on successors’, and who ‘brought calm and abundance’ so that ‘the men in the vaudevilles | sang of peace and of empire’. The Han enlightenment lasted over 300 years, and near their end an academy of scholars had the books ‘incised in stone | 46 tablets set up at the door of the college’. But by then the emperor ‘was governed by eunuchs’, there were ‘wars, taxes, oppressions’, and Taoists and Buddhists were subverting the administrations. The palace eunuchs, and the Taoists and the Buddhists, now figure as the enemy within, enemies even more threatening than the Tartar enemy without, the eunuchs as being irresponsible and self-seeking, the Taoists as preferring quietism and private pleasures to public service, and the Buddhists as considering ‘their own welfare only’, that is, for seeking individual salvation or nirvana while cultivating indifference to the affairs of this world. It is a telling moment when Buddhists break up the 46 tablets to get stone for a temple—then the empire rotted and ‘Snow alone kept out the tartars’. And when the last Han went Taoist, ‘sat late and wrote verses | His mandate was ended’. The Tang dynasty then rose, and, maintaining that ‘Kung is to China as is water to fishes’, turned out the ‘taozers’ and ‘the damn buddhists’, and for a time there was again justice and abundance throughout the empire. But then an empress was run by Buddhists, ‘who told her she was the daughter of Buddha’; and ‘there came a taozer babbling of the elixir | that wd/ make men live without end’, and the peasants were complaining of being squeezed by taxes on top of tithes. Thus another 1,000 and more years passed, 279 BC to AD 805.
Through the first third of canto 55 things go on in much the same way for another century and a half, as in a repeating pattern in the fabric of time, until the rise of the Sung dynasty under whom China enjoyed both a renaissance and a fatal loss of will. ‘TAI TSONG brought out the true BOOKS’ about AD 978; there was a revolt against the greed of the mandarins and a demand for just distribution; ‘GIN TSONG cleaned out the taozers | and the tartars began using books’; then in the eleventh century came Ngan, the next great reformer after Confucius. He re-established the regulation of markets, that the right price of things be set daily, that a market tax should go to the emperor and the poor be thus relieved of charges, and that commerce be enlivened ‘by making to circulate the whole realm’s abundance’.
| And Ngan saw land lying barren |
|
because peasants had nowt to sow there |
| whence said: Lend ’em grain in the spring time |
|
that they can pay back in autumn |
| with a bit of increase, this wd/ augment the reserve, |
| This will need a tribunal |
| and the same tribunal shd/ seek |
| equity |
| for all lands and all merchandise |
|
according to harvest and soil |
Ngan’s thoroughly Confucian reforms worked for twenty years, yet they were not only complained about by the mandarins and rich merchants whose greed they were designed to constrain, but were argued against as too radical and impractical by a fellow minister, Ssé-ma Kouang, who had them rescinded. Yet Ssé-ma Kouang was the great Confucian scholar who put together the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government. When he died, ‘merchants in Caïfong put up their shutters in mourning’; but Ngan’s fate was to be driven from office, vilified by conservative Confucians as guilty of Taoist and Buddhist errors. Ngan protested, ‘YAO, CHUN were thus in government’, and Pound associates his reforms with ‘Reason from heaven [which] | enlighteneth all things’. On this occasion, though, the Confucian enlightenment was prevented by a Confucian who knew the books but would not carry them into action. Shortly after that the Sung ‘died of levying taxes’ and ‘state usury’; its last emperor, HOEï, ‘went taozer’, and surrendered to barbarian invaders.
The Mongols take over in canto 56 for an interval of 160 years. The terrible Ghengis Khan came in having heard something of ‘alphabets, morals, mores’, and being surprised to learn that it was more profitable to tax his new subjects than to exterminate them in his usual fashion; but Kublai Khan, who extended Mongol domination over all China, ‘was a buggar for taxes’ and his finance minister was ‘stinking with graft’; and though Gin Tsong honoured Kung with the rites ‘his son died of assassins’. Through the main part of this canto the movement is unsettled, scherzo-like, casting rapidly back and forth between occupying Mongol and weak Sung, touching on wars, taxes, and granaries, on bandits, pirates—and a treatise on the cultivation of silk worms. Under the decadent last of these Mongols there were again ‘At court, eunuchs and grafters | among mongols no man trusted other’, and that dynasty fell in confusion ‘from losing the law of Chung Ni (Confucius)’. This time it was the son of a poor labourer, Hong Vou, who rose up to defeat the failing rulers and restore order in the empire. ‘Once again war is over. Go talk to the savants,’ he said, under the ideograms naming Yao, Chun, and Chou; ‘To peasants he gave allotments | gave tools and yoke oxen’; and he ‘declined a treatise on Immortality | offered by Taozers’. His Ming dynasty lasted from 1368 down to 1644.
‘Ming’ in the Occidental mind is likely to be associated with exuberantly decorated porcelain and other works of fine art. There were major literary and historical writings too—including a gigantic encyclopedia consisting of ‘all major works in Confucian classics, history, philosophy and miscellaneous subjects, totalling 22,877 rolls and involving the work of 2,316 scholars’. That is noticed in canto 57—‘And YANG LO commanded a “summa” | that is that the gist of the books be corrected.’ Remarkably though, no other detail of this dynasty’s cultural achievements is mentioned. Pound’s concern, like that of the Confucian historians, is with the increasing corruption of government under the Ming. There is the key statement, ‘HONG VOU restored Imperial order | yet now came again eunuchs, taozers and hochang.’ There was famine, and wasteful expenditure on armaments—a thousand primitive tanks that ‘were never brought into action’; there was ‘a rebellion of eunuchs’; there were heavy taxes, and a young emperor’s chief eunuch was found to have salted away ‘gold bars 240 thousand…| 15 millions in money | 5 million bars silver’, and so forth. The next emperor ‘was a writer of verses | in fact he said he wd/ like to resign’; and in his time another court favourite was found to have hoarded up gold and silver, ‘not to count silk of the first grade, pearls | cut stones and jewels’. Private greed and luxury were at the heart of the later Ming government, and oppression and neglect of the people.
Under the last Ming emperor, with decadence at court and disorder in the state, the hordes on the northern borders were uniting under the Manchu and driving back the Ming armies—
| And the lord of MANCHU wrote to the MING lord saying: |
|
We took arms against oppression |
| and from fear of oppression |
| not that we wish to rule over you |
He wanted peace, he declared, according to the Manchu history, and took laws and letters from China for his own people, ‘set exams in the Chinese manner’, and ‘Chose learning from Yao, Shun and Kungfutseu, | from Yu the leader of waters’. As he raided toward the capital he wrote to the governor of a nearby city,
| If children are cut off from parents |
|
if wives cannot see their husbands |
| if your houses are devast and your riches carried away |
| this is not of me but of mandarins |
|
Not I but yr/ emperor slaughters you |
| and yr/ overlords who take no care of yr/ people |
|
and count soldiers as nothing. |
The Manchu lord might have said that he was destroying China in order to save it, and he did ruthlessly kill and purge its corrupt elements, and impose peace and sound government. So the enemy without overcame the enemy within—the emperor himself and his mandarins being now identified with the latter—and the mandate of heaven to care for the people was assumed by the former barbarian invaders.
The first line of canto 59 is in Latin, ‘De libro CHI-KING sic censeo’, that is, ‘concerning the Book of Odes I think as follows’. The Latin is from a Jesuit’s version of the preface by the third Manchu emperor to a translation of the Confucian Odes into Manchu in 1655. The emperor was affirming the fundamental importance of the Odes for good government—
| all things are here brought to precisions |
| that we shd/ learn our integrity |
| that we shd/ attain our integrity |
| Ut animum nostrum purget, Confucius ait, dirigatque |
| ad lumen rationis 2 |
| That this book keep us in the due bounds of office |
|
the norm |
| show what we shd/ take into action; |
|
what follow within and persistently |
Thus the Manchu re-established the Confucian basis of Chinese civilization; and Lacharme, the Jesuit translator, conveyed the Odes, and that idea of their function, into Europe’s language of the learned.
Now the threat to China’s Confucian culture came from Europe, in the form of Jesuit missionaries seeking converts, and from Portuguese and Dutch merchants. This canto and the next are much concerned with the interactions of the Europeans and the Chinese, more especially with Jesuit–Chinese relations. At issue is how great a presence and how much influence the Europeans are to be allowed. Kang Hsi who reigned from 1662 to 1723 had the Jesuits at his court, de Mailla among them, busy translating and exchanging the science and technology and the intelligence that each had to offer the other. The Jesuits’ astronomy was welcomed—‘(Galileo’s, an heretic’s)’—and their founding of cannon, ‘which have served us in civil wars’, and their mathematics and science; as missionaries, however, they were not to build churches nor to convert any Chinese. This emperor was all for the advancement of learning, but was careful at the same time to safeguard China’s own traditions and culture.
Both the son whom he appointed to succeed him, and that emperor’s successor, were exemplary Confucian rulers, so that the Histoire générale, and Pound’s ‘China Cantos’, conclude upon an affirmative note. Yong Tching honoured his forebears and the spirits of fields and of heaven, and actively ‘sought good of the people’. He reformed the laws—‘No death sentence save a man were thrice tried’. The Christians were put out, for ‘disturbing good customs | seeking to uproot Kung’s laws’. Graft was put down, and the cheating of the poor. The distribution of rice was controlled, to maintain a just price and provide against famine. The history books were updated and reverenced. The emperor ploughed his ceremonial furrow, ‘as writ in LI KI in the old days’. And as the population increased new land was opened up and there were tax exemptions for bringing it under cultivation. Thus the Confucian paideuma once again brought peace, justice, and abundance to China. Meanwhile in Europe and in America violent revolutions were preparing against the oppressions of their rulers.
The ‘China Cantos’ told the story, for the benefit of Pound’s Europe and America, of how an enlightened idea of government persisted in China through several millennia—the idea that the government of the people should be for the good of the people, with the correlatives that those in office should not be self-serving, and that private greed should be constrained in the public interest. The moral of the story would be that while this idea of good government had been tried out and proved practicable time and time again, its being put into practice depended always upon there being governors ‘who had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the people’.
This fairly elementary lesson in the fundamental principle of Western democracy has been well taken by some but by no means by all. For Robert Fitzgerald, the translator of Homer and Virgil, Pound’s rendering of China’s entire dynastic history was ‘one of [the poem’s] most sustained and fascinating stretches’, making palpable in elaborate metre and rich imagery ‘the essentials: whatever in men, deeds and policies casts light on the practice of wise government.’ George Dekker wrote that for him ‘this survey of the human condition and the bases of humane government’ was ‘more moving and more instructive than Milton’s story of mankind’. But Randall Jarrell, in 1940 a brilliant young poet and critic, complained of ‘the monotonous didacticism’ and declared the history ‘almost unreadable’. ‘Unreadable’ is of course a common way of saying, ‘I can’t read them’, but Jarrell would not be alone in saying that of these cantos. Some would say worse. ‘There is no alternative’, declared Donald Davie, a devoted Poundian in his way, ‘to writing off this whole section of Pound’s poem as pathological and sterile’.
Part of Davie’s problem was that he could not follow Pound’s method of making music of history. Failing to make out that the detail of Hoang Ti ‘contriving the making of bricks’ was one note in a progression of cultural achievements, he looked for an explanation in terms of Pound’s supposed disapproval of bricks as a building material, and when that didn’t work concluded that Pound’s selection of detail was ‘wholly arbitrary’. What made Davie altogether lose patience was the way ‘the non-Confucian (Buddhist and Taoist) influences on Chinese history are consistently condemned in strident language’. Others have found this problematic. Hugh Kenner, in an otherwise illuminating chapter of The Pound Era, was struck by the apparent contradiction between Pound’s going along with the Confucian historians’ wholly negative view of Taoists while endorsing the other Confucian books in which Confucian thought is infused with Taoism. The paradox is readily resolved if only one remembers, as it is essential to remember, that the ‘China Cantos’, like the Comprehensive Mirror, are a rather specialized guide for governors, and that the defining virtue of the good governor is that his will is unswervingly directed to the welfare of his people. When it is government that is in question it is only reasonable to insist that a man who would rather be writing contemplative poems, and painting distant lakes and mountains, lacks that particular direction of the will and is therefore not fitted for the active life of government.
If we are a nation, we must have a national mind.—EP
John Adams, in Pound’s vision of him in cantos 62–71, was an exemplary governor, but more than that, he was to America what Confucius was to China, the man who most enlightened and formed the nascent mind of his nation. He did this, as Confucius and his followers had done it, by gathering together, and digesting and refining into clear principles, the tradition of common law and of natural law available to him; and by working out how the powers inherent in English law could be made to serve the cause of American independence. In his writings he defined in exact terms the ideas that would become, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the new nation’s animating and governing principles. Then, as a practising lawyer and statesman he carried those principles into action, and did this so effectively that he, more than any of the other founding fathers, is to be honoured, so these cantos would have it, as the progenitor of a free and democratic America—
| the clearest head in the congress |
| 1774 and thereafter |
| pater patriae |
| the man who at certain points |
| made us |
| at certain points |
| saved us |
| by fairness, honesty and straight moving (62/350) |
Pound’s part, as the poet of the cantos, is like that of the Confucian scholars who kept alive in their own time and passed on to future generations the shaping idea of their civilization. His ‘John Adams Cantos’ are all at once an Analects or sayings of Adams, a Ta Hio or digest of his wisdom, a history book for the guidance of America’s governors, and a book of odes in which all this is given musical form. 3
Pound’s method of composition, it does have to be recognized, is at its most disconcerting in these cantos. His notebooks and drafts show him skim-reading the ten volumes of the Works of John Adams, jotting down phrases and fragments, a half-line from here and a line or two from further on, and then typing up these bits and pieces into cantos, taking the fragments just as they came with little or no revision or rearrangement and with no respect for their original contexts. The result can seem to make, as Donald Davie thought, ‘a nonsensical hurly-burly of Adams’s life’. It helps, indeed it is probably imperative, to have at least a moderate knowledge of the received narrative of American history. Pound’s attitude would be that if his readers, especially his American readers, don’t already know in some detail the story of the founding of the United States then they should be driven to go and learn it. He is not going to tell over again the historians’ tale of what happened and who was who, being committed beyond that to drawing out of the historical record the active virtue of his protagonist. To that end he reads over the top of the plain sense of his source-materials, and picks out just the details, the sequence of notes as it were, that he can combine to create a new and deeper vision of Adams as a shaping force in the life of his nation.
There is a five-part overall structure deriving from the arrangement of the Works of John Adams:
This arrangement provides a layering of different perspectives on certain episodes, and also a narrative progression from Adams’s beginnings as a young lawyer in Boston through to his last years when he was out of office.
The theme of canto 62 is given in these early lines, ‘for the planting | and ruling and ordering of New England’, words from the charter granted by King Charles I in 1629 ‘TO THE GOVERNOR AND THE COMPANIE’ of the Massachusetts Bay Company. That is, the work John Adams is to be committed to in his own time, ‘planting and ruling and ordering’, in Massachusetts primarily, then increasingly for all the colonies. He is shown first arguing in a Boston case that the law, properly understood and applied, should be subject to reason and so should take account of human nature, of our emotions and passions; and yet at the same time it must be dispassionate, ‘not bent to wanton imagination and temper of individuals’. Next he is arguing for the natural rights and liberties of the colonists against the unlawful oppressions and tyrannies of the British parliament. ‘Are we mere slaves of some other people?’, he demands, as he makes the case against the colony’s judges being in the King’s pay; and Pound comments, ‘These are the stones of foundation |…| These stones we built on.’ From 1774 until Lexington, the first battle in the war for independence, he guides the public mind in the formation of self-governing state constitutions, and is recognized as the ‘Clearest head in the Congress’ as it moves reluctantly towards its declaration of independence and prepares for the war that will follow. ‘THUMON’ is Pound’s salute at that point, the Greek word meaning ‘that which animates, the breath, the energy, the force of mind and will’ which drove forward the revolution in the minds of the people and brought about the ‘Birth of a Nation’. Adams completes the process in Europe by securing diplomatic recognition of the United States of North America as a sovereign nation, and by obtaining the loans and treaties of commerce necessary for it to maintain itself as an independent and prosperous nation.
Then ‘a new power arose, that of fund holders’. This was the enemy within, financial interests looking to profit from the banking system set up by Alexander Hamilton while he was Washington’s secretary of the treasury (1789–95), a system modelled upon the Bank of England and designed to allow the few fund-holders or private bankers to profit from the public credit while accumulating ‘perpetual DEBT’ to the nation. Adams had to contend throughout his presidency with the manoeuvres of Hamilton and his faction to entangle the United States in wars which would ‘create a paradise for army contractors’. Pound emphatically condemns Hamilton on his own authority, ‘(my authority, ego scriptor cantilenae)’, as ‘the Prime snot in ALL American history’, thus setting him up to be the anti-type of John Adams, the subverter of his ‘active Virtue’ and of the just order he had conceived and fought for.
The cantos which give Adams’s own view of his part in winning independence for America run to twice the length of that first outline, twenty-one pages as against ten, and they give a much fuller and more complex narrative of the revolution that took place first in the mind and then in the state of the nation. The most significant new element, a theme which counterpoints Adams’s legal and political activity, is his appreciation of the abundance of nature, and of the agriculture and useful arts and manufactures which improve it. In canto 63 his following ‘the study | rather than the gain of the law’ is balanced by his noting Franklin’s care for ‘propagating Rhine wine in these provinces’ (63/352, 353). In the next canto he sketches an ideal scene in which the cultivation of nature and of the art of glass-blowing go together—
| Beautiful spot, am almost wholly surrounded by water |
| wherein Deacon (later General) Palmer |
| has surrounded himself with a colony |
|
of glass-blowers from Germany |
| come to undertake that work in America, 1752, |
|
his lucerne grass |
| whereof 4 crops a year, seed he had of Gridley of Abingdon |
| about 70 bushels of 1/4th an acre of land |
| his potatoes (64/355) |
A little later we have Adams improving his own land,
| lopping and trimming |
| walnut trees, and for felling of pines and savins |
| An irregular misshapen pine will darken |
| the whole scene in some places (64/357) |
Those lines stand against, ‘we saw five boxes of dollars | going in a horse cart to Salem for Boston | FOR England’, an indication of how England’s interest is in taxing, not improving America. Adams manifests a growing concern for the useful arts by which Americans can make themselves independent financially as well as politically. He remarks that ‘in Connecticut every family has a little manufactury house | and make for themselves things for which they were used | to run into debt to the merchants’ (64/360). (Pound rhymes that with Adams himself proving a homegrown match for the English in law.) Then he is struck by such industry on a larger scale, ‘6 sets of works in one building, hemp mill, oil mill, and | a mill to grind bark for tanners’, also ‘a fuller’s | mill for both cloth and leather’ (65/365); and in 1776 he actively advances on that by having one of his Congressional committees resolve
| To provide flax, hemp, wool and cotton |
|
in each colony a society for furtherance |
| of agriculture, arts, manufacturies |
| and correspondence between these societies |
|
that natural advantages be not neglected (65/367) |
—and also that the colonies may be not dependent upon foreign manufactures.
This second part of the decad closes with a diary entry made in 1796 when Adams was in waiting for the presidency. At this critical time, approaching the culmination of his political career, he presents himself as at home on his farm harvesting what he had cultivated—one is reminded of the austere Roman general Cincinnatus who was found ploughing when the call came to assume supreme command and save Rome from its enemies—
| July 18th , yesterday, mowed all the grass in Stony Hill field |
| this day my new barn was raised |
|
their songs never more various than this morning |
| Corn by two sorts of worm |
| Hessian fly menaces wheat |
| Where T. Has been trimming red cedars |
| with team of 5 cattle brought back 22 cedars (66/381) |
Breaking into this pastoral episode with its counterpoint of abundance and blight there is talk of the forthcoming election, and pressure is put upon Adams to make Hamilton his Vice-President, Hamilton whose funding scheme menaced the nation’s harvest. ‘I said nothing’, Adams recorded, but he took Jefferson as Vice-President. He had observed in his time as minister in London what decadent ‘magnificence’ could come from a national debt such as Hamilton proposed to create—his account of this is in the passage immediately before that diary entry. Adams had made visits to country estates, Woburn Farm, Stowe, Blenheim, and among them ‘the seat of the banker Child’—
| three houses, in fact, round a square |
| blowing roses, ripe strawberries plums cherries etc |
| deer sheep wood-doves guinea-hens peacocks etc (66/381) |
This banker’s seat, with its three houses wonderfully circling the square, its stuffing of hothouse flowers and fruits, and its decorative deer and peacocks, is in every way the inverse of the rational and useful cultivation Adams practised and promoted in America. And it is the product of a financial and social system which greedily if not corruptly appropriates the natural wealth of the land for private luxury. Pound’s Adams takes his stand against all such hogging of harvest.
The third part of the decad, an abstract of Adams’s arguments in his legal and political writings, has him making new the old laws of England by applying them to the unforeseen conditions of the American colonies, and then, after 1776, developing a system of law adapted to the new free and sovereign nation. He goes back to Magna Charta of 1215, and further back as far as ‘memory of man runneth…| Dome Book, Ina, Offa and Aethelbert, folcright | for a thousand years’ (67/387). He invokes the Bill of Rights won in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the English parliament deposed James II and brought in William of Orange to protect the rights of the people against the authoritarianism of the Stuarts. He discovers the neglected Act which protected American sailors from impressment into the English Navy. He fights the Stamp Act, which ‘wd/ drain cash out of the country’, and forces its repeal as ‘UNconstitutional’ (66/382). He exposes one scheme after another whereby parliament seeks to tax the colonies, and argues point by point from his law books for the rights and liberties of free men in their own country. All this he did ‘in the course of fifteen years…before Lexington’ to bring about the revolution ‘in the minds of the people’. Then it was time to seize the unique opportunity ‘to make election of government’. ‘When before’, Adams marvelled, ‘have 3 million people had option | of the total form of their government?’ He was ready with a plan, providing for a representative body which should be ‘in miniature a portrait of the people at large’, with separation of ‘legislative, executive and judicial’ powers to ensure checks and balances, and with the general ‘happiness of society’ as its aim (67/391–4). From those ideas came the United States Constitution with this proud ‘Preamble’:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
That the representatives of the people were of one mind in this foundation document was largely John Adams’s doing.
The history books tell us that the Constitution sealed America’s victory in the war for independence, and laid down the laws by which it should govern itself into a glorious future. In Pound’s special version of the story the victory which it sealed was the one that had been fought and won by Adams, with his law-books for weapons along with his clear head and constant will. Yet there is in these pivotal cantos of the decad little sense of the drama of Adams’s legal battling, and the reason for this is that the story is told almost exclusively in his own words and from his own point of view. The essence of courtroom drama, and of legislative debates, is the clash of opposing arguments and interests with something vital at stake and with the outcome uncertain. Here, though, we have only one side of the argument, the side that won and no doubt had right on its side; but the opposing side, the ‘party for wealth and power | at expense | of the liberty of their country’, is allowed no voice or force in the argument and remains a silent shadow cast by Adams’s brilliance. Properly instructive as this may be, it is unlikely to move the American reader to a more passionate observance and defence of the Constitution.
The record of Adams’s public service in his official correspondence, as selected by Pound in the fourth part of the decad, is very largely concerned with his furthering the emerging nation’s foreign relations, especially its relations with France and Holland. His duties as a minister abroad were to obtain loans to finance the war against England; to facilitate commercial trade both for the sake of the home economy and so that America’s exports might back its borrowings; to secure international recognition of the United States as a separate and equal nation; and to do all that while preserving its neutrality in regard to European politics and internal wars. Cantos 68 and 69 are consequently all about public money in one aspect and another, but mostly about how the loans were raised in Holland and recognition thereby secured in spite of French interference and English opposition. There Adams’s success is evidently due to his personal integrity and complete devotion to the public interest: in all his negotiations involving millions of money he keeps scrupulous accounts and never seeks to profit personally.
In counterpoint to his raising of finance abroad there is at home a severe depreciation of the paper money issued by the several states and by the Continental government; and in counterpoint to his integrity there are speculators and swindlers out to profit from the depreciation. Adams regarded the depreciation of the currency as a tax very properly paid by Americans in the cause of their liberty, and as giving them at the same time a commercial advantage in foreign trade. He did not foresee how speculators, friends of Hamilton benefiting from inside information, would buy up the depreciated money and make huge profits on it when Hamilton had the national government redeem it at face value. Pound, though, denounces Hamilton and his friends at the close of canto 69, giving their names, associating them with betrayers of the revolutionary cause, and consigning them to the lowest pit of Dante’s hell where Satan devours traitors. Pound singles out the part of Hamilton’s scheme which provided for the redemption of the certificates issued as pay to the soldiers of the revolutionary army and which had depreciated to a fraction of their value—
| Mr Madison proposed that the original holders |
|
shd/ get face value, |
| but not speculators who had bought in the paper for nothing. |
| ov the 64 members ov the House ov reppyzentativs |
| 29 were security holders. |
|
lappin cream that is, and takin it |
| off of the veterans. |
|
an’ Mr Madison’s move wuz DEE–feated. (69/408) |
‘These the betrayers’, Pound thunders, meaning betrayers of the essential spirit of the American Revolution, ‘these the sifilides’, the diseased spreaders of the contagion of money-lust. In his judgement Hamilton’s financial schemes had planted the evil root of greed in the United States fiscal system at its foundation. Adams’s way of putting that as he retired from public life was to write of his own Federal party, of which Hamilton was a leader, ‘no Americans in America | our federalists no more American than were the antis’ (70/410).
That sense of the betrayal of the revolution, and more generally of the failure of his fellow Americans to live up to their revolution, sets the tone of the final part of the decad. ‘After 20 years of the struggle’, Adams wrote in 1789, ‘After generous contest for liberty, Americans forgot what it consists of’ (70/412). Among other things it consisted of keeping their right to their own fisheries—that had been Adams’s ‘strongest motive | for twice going to Europe’—yet ‘there were Americans indifferent to fisheries | and even some inclined to give them away’. There were ‘westerners wd/ do anything to obtain free use of [the Mississippi] river | they wd/ have united with England or France’, even though doing so ‘wd/ put an end to our system of liberty’ (71/415). Clearly there had been no revolution in such minds. It becomes evident that in Adams’s view, and in Pound’s, the real war for liberty was against amnesia, indifference, and narrow self-interest; also against widespread ignorance and misinformation. There was abysmal ignorance about the banking set-up—
| Every bank of discount is downright corruption |
| taxing the public for private individual’s gain. |
| and if I say this in my will |
| the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy. (71/416) |
Pound put a black sideline against that for emphasis. Again, people neither understood nor attempted to understand their own Constitution. ‘How small in | any nation the number who comprehend ANY | system of constitution or administration’, Adams complained, and added, ‘[I] know not how it is but mankind have an aversion | to any study of government’ (70/412, 413). Because of that wilful ignorance public opinion could be led by a mercenary press with its ‘fraudulent use of words’—‘newspapers govern the world’ (as the French minister said to Mr Adams). Even worse, under that ‘pure uncorrupted uncontaminated unadulterated etc.’ state of democracy, as the newspapers themselves would have it, the documents and histories which ‘cd/ give true light or clear insight’ are ‘annihilated or interpolated or prohibited’. Altogether Adams, in Pound’s account, sees the revolution which he had brought about in the minds of the American people failing and being undone, again in their minds, in the twenty years after 1776.
In the first of the ‘Adams Cantos’ Pound saluted his hero as ‘pater patriae’, the father of the nation, and throughout the decad the nation’s welfare has appeared to depend above all upon this one man. Now that he is out of office it seems that ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. Looking back, Adams regrets that even as President he could not prevent the selling of rum to Indians, though ‘Little Turtle petitioned me | to prohibit it “because I had lost 3000 of my children | in his tribe alone in one year”.’ Again,
| Funds and Banks I |
| never approved I abhorred ever our whole banking system |
| but an attempt to abolish all funding in the |
| present state of the world wd/ be as romantic |
| as any adventure in Oberon or Don Quixote. |
When he reflects on the harm done by that banking system he thinks back to a primal image of abundant nature cultivated and shared with generosity, and to the loss of that paradise—
| their wigwams |
| where I never failed to be treated with whortle berries |
| black berries strawberries apples plums peaches etc |
| for they had planted a number of fruit trees about them |
| but the girls went out to service and the boys to sea |
| till none were left there…(71/416) |
That dying fall of nostalgic elegy is not, however, the end of the story.
On the next page two words stand out, one Greek, one Latin, ‘THEMIS CONDITOR’. ‘Θεμις’ Pound took from a letter of Adams to Jefferson in which he was discussing the merits of the translations into several languages of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus—Pound closes the canto with the hymn’s opening lines in the original Greek, as Adams had copied them in his previous letter. Conditor signifies ‘a maker, a framer, a founder’, such as Adams had been in the framing of the Constitution. But here it is not Adams who is the framer, but Themis, the very source according to the ancient Greeks of all law and order and justice. To invoke this idea that natural law and common law act together to bring about and to maintain civilized society is to recognize that the good society does not depend on any one man. It is to accept that it depends upon the physical laws of nature, the laws which regulate growth and abundance, and which also set limits; and that it depends at the same time upon the common laws and customs which regulate civilized societies. The idea of the abundance of nature with the whole folk in accord is near to that. The Greek Themis, however, puts more emphasis upon the laws agreed by common consent which express the collective will of the people at their most enlightened, laws which project and institute the moral conscience and desire for good order and justice of the people as a whole. That idea must be implicit in the democratic principle of government by the people and for the common good.
Following ‘THEMIS CONDITOR’ there is a coda resuming several of the leading themes and motifs of the decad, and then a 25-line finale consisting of an abrupt and violent passage concerning slavery, the absolute denial of liberty and equality; then a bridging line; and, to end, the opening (in the original Greek) of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus. Adams had ‘often wondered that J’s first draft has not been published’—that is, Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence—and had supposed ‘the reason is the vehement philippic against negro slavery’ (65/367). The draft had denounced slavery as waging ‘cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty’, but the paragraph was struck out in the debate so as not to lose the support of the slave-holding colonies. This fatal contradiction between the fine proclamation of the equal and inalienable rights of all human beings, and the determination of some states nevertheless to maintain the inhuman institution of slavery, would not be resolved until Abraham Lincoln could say in good faith at the dedication of the Civil War cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863, ‘Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ That was a precise and frank way of putting it, since what was proposed had been left unrealized.
In the passage concerning slavery from a letter written in 1818, forty years after the Declaration, Adams was not directly addressing the practice in America. He was quoting from the instructions of a certain ‘alderman Bekford’ to his overseers in the West Indies—
| ‘consider what substance allow to; what labour extract from |
| them (slaves) in my interest which will work out to this |
| If you work ’em up in six years on an average |
|
that most profits the planter’ |
| with comment: |
|
‘and is surely very humane IF we estimate |
| the coalheaver’s expectation: two years on an average |
| and the 50,000 girls on the streets, at three years of life (71/420) |
The passage expands the slaves’ loss of liberty and life, and the heartless calculation of profit, into a general condition. For Adams it represented the heartless attitude of Britain to its American colonies, and the fundamental justification of their revolt—Americans would not be ‘mere slaves of some other people’. And yet they themselves continued to practise and to permit slave-holding, in flagrant contravention of the great moral principle to which they were dedicated and on which their very right to exist as an independent nation was founded. Though unstated, indeed all the more because it is not stated, that must be in the reader’s mind here.
The bridging line, ‘“Ignorance of coin, credit and circulation!”’, seems to declare the cause of those crimes against humanity. Adams may have thought that, and Pound himself may have thought it in 1939. In 1972, however, he would write, ‘re USURY: | I was out of focus…The cause is AVARICE.’ The response to ignorance and its consequences is given here in the lines from Cleanthes’ hymn, which may be freely translated as—
| Zeus, |
|
glorious, undying, known by many names, |
|
shaping all things |
|
in every instant |
| giving to each thing its nature, |
|
and according to its laws |
|
guiding the universe |
In Greek mythology Zeus, the self-regulating life-force, and the intelligence of the life-force, begets Themis, the enabler and intelligence of self-regulating societies. Both are of course ideas, conceived and having their existence in the mind, and exercising their powers there. And it is as indestructible powers in the mind that they oppose whatever wars on nature and against human nature. When Pound, having noted that Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus was ‘part of Adams’ paideuma’, drew on it for the conclusion to this decad, he was executing a shift from the still unfulfilled promise of equality and liberty for all, to the undying idea and will behind the promise.
Pound made John Adams his exemplary American governor because the ideal of liberty and equality grew to its clearest and most powerful in his mind, and because, so far as he was able in the prevailing circumstances, he carried it into action as the formative idea of the new republic. It was not his idea, it did not originate with him, and that is important. It was in the air of the time as a natural desire; and it was written in the deposit of English common law going back a thousand years. Adams’s contribution was to bring the urgent desire for liberty into accord with the tradition of common law, thereby giving it the weight and force of natural justice. Once embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution the idea had its existence in the mind of the nation as its enduring foundation and guiding principle. The compelling ideal outlives the striving man of his time.
The ‘Adams Cantos’ are to be read as Pound’s instructions for the government of America. They do not recommend Italian Fascism as a system of government for America. Their clear message is that America should be true to its own enlightenment, that it should follow Adams in obeying the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution, and that, above all, its governors should serve the common interest before individual profit. He would have the United States be true to its own founding principle, that ‘governments are instituted among men’ to secure to all equally their rights to ‘life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness’. He meant to save America from its anti-American Americans.
1 The words Pound had in mind were apparently these from Mein Kampf (1924): ‘Der Kampf gegen das internationale Finanz und Leihkapital ist zum wichtigsten Programmpunkt’—‘War on international finance and LOAN CAPITAL becomes the most weighty etc. in the struggle towards freedom’. (Cited and translated by EP in a note, ‘The Nazi Movement in Germany’, one of a set of ‘Communications’, Townsman 2.6 (Apr. 1939) 13.)
2 that our minds be purged, says Confucius, and directed/to the light of reason.
3 John Adams, born 1735 in Braintree, now Quincy, a town a dozen or so miles south of Boston where his family had farmed since 1638. Graduated from Harvard College 1755, then took to the law and was admitted to the Bar in 1758; became legal adviser to the Boston Sons of Liberty, and in 1761 assisted in legal arguments against the searching of American vessels by English customs officers under Writs of Assistance. In 1765 led protest against the Stamp Act, by drafting the Instructions to Braintree’s representatives in the Massachusetts legislature, which were then taken as models by other towns; by writing powerful articles in the Boston Gazette; and by arguing before the Governor and Council that the Act was invalid because Massachusetts had no representation in the British parliament. In 1774 Adams was sent as a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and was the foremost advocate of its Declaration of Independence in 1776; during the war for independence he was president of the Board of War, and was influential in many other congressional committees. In 1779 he drafted the constitution of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. In the same year he was sent as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a treaty of peace and a treaty of commerce with Great Britain—in the Treaty of Paris, signed 1782, he particularly safeguarded US coastal fisheries; most importantly, he then secured recognition of the United States as a sovereign nation from Holland and other European powers. Served as American Minister to the court of St James 1785–8, and while in London wrote A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States (1787). Made Vice-President under Washington 1789–97; elected President 1797–1801, with Jefferson as Vice-President; while President resisted efforts of Alexander Hamilton and others to engage in war with France, preferring to secure peace by diplomacy. Defeated by Jefferson in the contest for the presidency in 1800, he retired into private life at Quincy, where he died 4 July 1826, on the same day as Thomas Jefferson with whom he had carried on a notable correspondence in their old age.