Maatstaf. Jaargang 22

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Tarmo Kunnas Ezra Pound and Politics

Ezra Pound gave his support to Mussolini in the twenties, when he affirmed that one cannot compare democratic statesmen to Mussolini without insulting him. He wrote in the thirties several studies on the advantages of fascism underlining that money must be a certificate of work done, not means of speculation. He published some articles in the journal of the English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. He ended his political career by insulting American politicians in Italy, in Mussolini's propaganda radio. When the Americans landed to the Italy they emprisoned the ‘traitor’. He was declared later insane and interned for a good many years into a psychiatric hospital. This incident certainly saved him from a more severe judgment, for he was accused for treason. He was not freed from his hospital prison until 1958 when his admirer T.S. Eliot and his friend Ernest Hemingway demanded pardon for him. Pound returned to Italy to stay there the rest of his life till 1972. It reveals more of his eccentric way of joking than of his real political conviction when returning from America to Italy he made a fascist hail and declared to the astonishing journalists: ‘All America is an insane asylum.’

The British scholar John Harrison has admirably shown that Ezra Pound has had political reasons for sympathizing with fascism. Besides the economic idea that money should simply be the measure for work done, there were a good many political ideas which engaged the poet. He disliked the liberal, democratic tradition; he believed that an authoritarian, anti-humanist, anti-Romantic attitude was necessary in politics. His ideas result from the same ‘reactionary’ mentality we find in T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis.¹

Pound is an intelligent enough poet to have quite a coherent vision of life and it is necessary to take this outlook on life into consideration in order to comprehend the depths of his political concerns, so that we get a more human picture of his social ideas. As T.S. Eliot says, there is always a ‘pre-political’ area, an intellectual stratum down to which any sound political thinking must push its roots. It is the domain of ethics or of ‘theology’. Pound's attitudes towards politics are very similar, although he is not so conscious of the relationship between philosophy and politics. To a certain degree we can adapt Eliot's ideas to Pound's politics: ‘For the question of questions, which no philosophy can escape, and by the right answer to which all political thinking must in the end be judged, is simply this: What is Man? what are his limitations? what is his misery and his greatness? and what, finally, his destiny?’² Pound is less ‘theological’ but he has an outlook on life behind his economic ideas.

He reacts to politics much in the same way as the other important authors who were tempted by fascism. Like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robert Brasillach, Knut Hamsun and Gottfried Benn,³ he seems to identify not only his political and economic

1 Harrison, The Reactionaries, p. 111-138.

2 Eliot, The Literature of Politics, To Criticize the Critic, p. 144.

3 Kunnas, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste, p. 244-249.

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ideas with fascism, but almost his whole vision of life. Political problems are more or less on the surface: they depend on other problems, as these other problems depend on politics and economics. When the poet analyses, for instance, the ‘decline of Adamses’, when he attacks the tax system and liberalism, he does not forget the whole. Finally, it is the destiny of our entire civilization with which he is concerned: ‘What ultimately counts is the level of civilization.’⁴ The politics of Ezra Pound are more than economics, they are more than an attitude. One must simply have the patience to put the bits together to see the whole.

As with other ‘fascist’ writers, Pound is haunted by a kind of cultural despair. When he thinks that our civilization is menaced, he views the decadence of European culture in much the same way as Benn, Hamsun, Drieu La Rochelle or Céline have done.

In ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ he describes the cultural evolution in antiquity, but attacks indirectly the modern world: a brilliant culture has become an anemic civilization: dull, perverted moralism has replaced the former vital, fertile, instinctive creativity and joy of life. ‘Natural man’ has become a vicious, hypocritical, intriguing creature. Religion is a pretext for sadism and perversion in the modern world: ‘Christ follows Dionysus, / Phallic and ambrosial / Made way for macerations; / Caliban casts out Ariel.’ Beauty has degenerated into an empty status symbolism in the democratic world. Demagogues unable to appreciate sensual beauty replace artistically enlightened despots: ‘All men, in law, are equals. / Free of Pisistratus, We choose a knave or an eunuch / To rule over us.’⁵

Pound seemed to think fascism could in some degree heal the disease of modern civilization and that is why he made equations as incomprehensible as fascism = classicism.⁶

He was able to see the hysterical, irrational component in German fascism, but for him the greater evil was certainly the perverted rationalism of modern culture. This was the case of a good many writers who admired classical art and civilization and thirsted for a more spontaneous, more vital, more instinctive culture than ours. Drieu La Rochelle and Benn hoped that by stressing the irrational, the natural balance between the rational and the irrational, between the ‘spiritual’ and the animal, could be reintroduced. Like Brasillach and Maurras, they fail to see reason and instinct as strictly opposed, rather as two necessary components of a psycho-physical whole. Neither does Pound exclude the instinctive or the irrational from his ideal of classical man and civilization. He does not insist on the rights of personality in support of modern rationalism or intellectualism, but wants to underline the right of the unknown in human nature.

Pound's mistrust of one-sided rationalism is very clearly visible when, for example, he discusses Aristotle's position in the Middle Ages: ‘Aristotle was banned by the Church, I think, because he was discouraging. Some sort of vital instinct, down under the superficial intolerance and stupidity, felt the menace of logic-chopping, of al this cutting-up, rationalizing and dissecting reality.’⁷ Pound feels horror when facing a dull, pedantic rationalism which has lost its contact with real life.

For Pound, as for the other ‘fascist’ writers, fascist irrationalism was a welcome reaction against the tyranny of perverted rationalism; they did not see early enough that for real fascists it was, in fact, a pretext for political excesses.

His mistrust of rationalism leads Pound to a kind of pragmatism. Everywhere in his writings we find a hatred of pedantry, of theorizing, a vehement critique of anti-active, university spirit. This kind of ‘pragmatism’ also dominated Mussolini's early period and Pound, without any doubt, could identify his outlook on life in this respect with the ‘pragmatism’ of Italian fascism.

In the writings of Drieu La Rochelle, Céline and Brasillach we find an explicit admiration of

4 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 255.

5 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Personae, p. 198-199.

6 Harrison, The Reactionaries, p. 199.

7 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 45.

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fascist ‘pragmatism’. Like the others, Pound thinks that the modern intellect no longer serves man. He attacks not only the modern university system, but all scholarship that is overly theoretical. Philosophy in the modern world is something absurdly pedantic: it is a kind of intellectual and academic snobism cut off from its original purpose: that of advising and educating man. Modern intellectualism is a ‘superstructure’ in the most pejorative sense of the term. It is not philosophical decadence and even less social decadence: it is the decadence of moral values as well. There are no sincere intellectuals in the modern world: intellectual probity and social probity are two aspects of the same whole; when one is lacking, the other is, too. It is the lesson ‘Kung’ gives in Canto xiii: ‘And Kung said “Wang ruled with moderation, / In his day the State was well kept, / And even I can remember / A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn't know, / But that time seems to be passing”.’⁸ Modern man no longer has the courage to confess that his knowledge has very strict limits.

The poet prefers Mussolini or a vital capitalism to the ‘intelligentsia’, because they are a pretentious, pedantic ‘intelligentsia’ without ‘wisdom’: ‘If the intelligentsia don't think well of him (Mussolini), it is because they know nothing about the “state” and government, and have no particularly large sense of values. Anyhow, what intelligentsia? What do the intelligentsia think of Henry Ford? He has given people a five day week, without tying it up in a lot of theoretical bunk.’⁹ This scepticism towards ideologies is completed by the cult of action and this is pragmatism but not fascism, although Pound also finds it in fascism. That is why he sympathizes with Mussolini: ‘In a hide-bound Italy, fascism meant at the start direct action, cut the cackle, if a man is a mere s.o.b. don't argue.’ Pound believes more in particulars than in universals; he does not believe in liberty, in fraternity, in the rights of man, he believes in some liberties, in some fraternities, in some rights of man. That is why he cannot imagine abstract entities like communism or fascism, he just sees a series of particular phenomena quite independent of labels and thus he makes equations as surprising as: Jefferson = Mussolini. According to him one of the three common denominators between Mussolini and Jefferson is the ‘pragmatic’ attitude: ‘...a readiness to scrap the lesser thing for the thing of major importance, indifference to mechanism as weighed against the main purpose, fitting of the means to that purpose without regard to abstract ideas, even if the idea was proclaimed the week before last.’¹⁰

Although the poet frequently writes of usury, it is not only a monetary reform that re-establishes the ‘health’ - moral education is no less important: everything does not depend on economics, but everything does depend on everything: ‘We know that history as it is written (...) tells nothing of causes. We know that these causes were economic and moral: we know that at whichever end we begin we will, if clear headed and thorough, work out to the other.’¹¹ Believing that more perceptive art critics of the future will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree to which usury was tolerated in the age and the milieu that produced it,¹² Pound stresses the moral as much as the economic factor. To improve the values set up by a civilization, he attacks the capitalist monetary system. But his monetary reform is not an end in itself.

Pound's revolt against the domination of money is more Maurrassian than Marxian. He does not think that communism or Marxism could be a remedy for that disease. He seeks the remedy from more anti-rational, more anti-utilitarian attitudes. Happiness does not depend on possessions, it depends on mental harmony. That is why the poet does not necessarily protest against poverty: it does not always prevent the good life: ‘O generation of the thoroughly smug / and thoroughly un-

8 Pound, Cantos, p. 60.

9 Pound, Letters, p. 205.

10 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 64.

11 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 31.

12 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 27.

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comfortable / I have seen fishermen picknicking in the sun, / I have seen them with untidy families, / I have seen their smiles full of teeth / and heard ungainly laughter. / And I am happier than you are, / And they are happier than I am; / And the fish swim in the lake / And do not even own clothing.’¹³ Irony makes Pound's anti-materialism quite apparent. Modern man, capitalist or not, equates happiness with material happiness. Mussolini called this kind of thinking ‘animal’ and this anti-materialism certainly appealed to Pound as well as to the other writers attracted by fascism. These intellectuals thought that people speaking of Karl Marx still think of Henry Ford. Their problem was not, how to distribute capital, but how to free modern man from his materialistic hysteria and rationalization. A material thirst has strengthened the natural egoism of man, he has become an aggressive, neurotic, suffering cynic in his search for ‘utilitarianism’ and ‘reason’. That is why Céline, Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach are all looking for a ‘new man’ who has a spirit of disinterestedness and sacrifice, who has destroyed his materialistic instinct and has become more heroic and optimistic. These intellectuals believed that richness of life can be found only in the irrational, anti-utilitarian, gratuitous forces of life.¹⁴ They regarded the world as a kind of aesthetic phenomenon. Pound comes close to agreeing.

We find this anti-utilitarianism and cult of the artistic everywhere in his writings, for example, when he proposes that man should work only four hours a day so that he could get a great deal more out of life.¹⁵ Although here he is very close to the cultural ‘fascism’ of Céline or Hamsun, he is very far from the materialistic, industrious Germany of before the Second World War. In any case, he believed he could find the ideal of artistic disinterestedness in Mussolini. The artistic attitude of a ruler is a guarantee that harmony will be introduced into all civilization: ‘I don't believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you get muddled with contradictions.’¹⁶

God very often is the criterion of ethics and it is not surprising that Pound sometimes has the artistic as the foundation of his morals; for in his poems he sees beauty as a god: ‘O Dieu, purifiez nos coeurs. / Purifiez nos coeurs. / Yea the lines hast thou shown unto me / in pleasant places. And the beauty of this thy Venice, / hast thou shown unto me / Until its loveliness become unto me / A thing of tears. (...) Yea, the glory of the shadow / of the Beauty hath walked / Upon the shadow of the waters / In this thy Venice. / And before holiness / Of the shadow of thy handmaid / Have I hidden my eyes, / O God of waters.’¹⁷ Pound's beauty is closer to the Greek conception to kalón than to the ‘equivalent’ expressions in modern European languages, as indicated by the frequency of the Greek phrase in Pound's writings. For him there is no contradiction between beauty and morality as in Friedrich Schiller's aesthetics. Even less can beauty be ‘dangerous’ as in Marxist aesthetics, for the meaning of to kalón includes both what is morally good and what is beautiful and noble. It is a sort of ‘pagan’ aestheticism and we should also understand the poet's midway-morality as a ‘pagan’ midway, not as a midway according to standards of our civilization. It is not midway between Puritanism and Kantianism, but rather midway between Kantianism and Nietzscheism.

Pound's attitudes are in accord with a good many fascist intellectuals in affirming that Christians have made dirt a matter of morals: with their rigorism, with their laws and prohibitions they have infected the attitudes of ‘natural man’, who is not conscious of moral dilemmas and who fulfills his personality according to his natural needs. It is this pagan element of his thinking that has certainly furthered the poet's fascist leanings. Although

13 Pound, Personae, p. 94.

14 Kunnas, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste, p. 23-40.

15 Pound, abc of Economics, p. 42.

16 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 33-34.

17 Pound, Personae, p. 40-41.

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fascism as an ideology compromised with the Christian churches, it is a reaction against Christian values: the cult of heroism and of virility, national egoism, the ideal of struggle and anti-humanitarianism cannot easily be joined with Christian values, and the intelligent poets have understood it much better than the masses who supported fascism. In the thinking of all intelligent ‘fascist’ poets there is a clear tendency towards ‘paganism’. Pound also identifies his own pagan ideals with fascist Italy: ‘The Christian corruption has never been able to infect the Italian, he takes it easy, the Mediterranean sanity subsists.’¹⁸ Christianity represents decadent values in Pound's outlook on life, just as it did for Drieu La Rochelle, Céline, Hamsun or Benn.

An excess of moralism seems to Pound, as to the other writers, a symptom of decadence. In decadence attention is directed to futilities, not towards a beneficient and generous life which does not care for moral abstractions. The puritan is the type of modern man formed by usury-civilization: ‘The puritan is a pervert, the whole of his sense of mental corruption is squitted down a single groove of sex.’¹⁹ Chastity is the opposite op pagan freedom and harmony. Moral excesses lead to perversion, to fanatical, ill-balanced, unauthentic compensation, to moralizing religion: all this is characteristic of the ‘moeurs contemporaines’: ‘Mr. Hecatom Styrax, the owner of a large estate / and of large muscles, A blue and a climber of mountains, has married / at the age of 28, / he is being at that age a virgin, / The term “virgo” being made male in medieval latinity; / His ineptitudes / have driven his wife from one religious excess to another. / She has abandoned the vicar / For he was lacking of vehemence; She is now the high-priestess / Of a modern ethical cult...’²⁰ The hostility in Christian values towards the necessities of natural life has certainly displeased Pound. There is no natural harmony, no real ‘midway’, if what is gratuitous, instinctive in man is suppressed. When civilization has reached its

18 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 31.

19 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 185.

20 Pound, Personae, p. 188.

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culmination, it automatically has the right set of values. When the artistic, disinterested, classical, anti-usury ideal is dominant, there will be no moral excesses. Even duty and responsibility are possible in such a dream civilization.

It is not abstract ideas, the inner voice or society that make man moral. Moral improvement must begin on the individual level as in Confucian ethics. It is not ‘humanity’, it is you and me, here and now, that must begin moral education. As ‘Kung’ says in Canto xiii: ‘If a man have not order within him. He cannot spread order about him.’²¹ And here, too, in Poundean vocabulary, the word ‘order’ must certainly be understood in the Greek way; order that is beauty. Pound is very close to aestheticism in his morals.

In spite of his personal moralism, Pound sometimes comes quite near to certain ‘fascist morals’. He admires energy coupled with straightforwardness, ‘the direct shooting of mind’.²² He is even ready to accept pure fascist ideals, without thinking of the moral consequences of those ideals: ‘I ask whether the spirit of “76” is helped by a flooding the lower ranks of the navy with bridge-sweepings: whether war is won by mercantilist ethics and, in any case, whether men like Knox and Stimson and Morgenthau can be expected to fill the heart of the youth with martial ardor and spirit of sacrifice.’²³ Sometimes, Pound shows in his poems quite surprising moral attitudes. It is ‘blood’ that matters more than absolute justice: ‘Kung's’ advice in the Cantos always represents the ideals of the poet: ‘And they said: If a man commit murder / Should his father protect him, and hide him? / And Kung said: “He should hide him”.’²⁴ We must not take very seriously this aesthetic exaggeration, but we find in Pound's political writings in a very moderate form the same ideal of solidarity, of the loyalty within a group consisting of individuals of the same blood: ‘It is the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their share before worrying about the rest of the world.’²⁵

It has often been said that Pound was a pacifist. He is very close to Marxism in pretending that gun-selling favours wars and in affirming that a monetary system is responsible for wars. Thus he very often ironizes in his poems that kind of business spirit: ‘M. Pom-pom allait en guerre / Per vendere cannoni / Mon beau grand frère / Ne peut plus voir / Per vendere cannoni / M. Pom-pom est au sénat / Per vendere cannoni / Pour vendre des canons / Pour vendre des canons /’²⁶ In spite of this sincere anti-militarism, Pound is no more an absolute pacifist than Benn or Celine, who also are known as pacifists. For instance it is not moralizing when Pound portrays Bertrans de Born: ‘Damn it all, all this our South stinks peace. / You whoreson dog, Papiols, come. Let's to music. / I have no life save when the swords clash. / But ah. when I see the standard gold, vair, purple, / opposing / And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson, / Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.’²⁷ On the other hand, the poet's irony moderates the warrior's heroism. More serious in this respect is his comment about England during the First World War. In his general acceptance of life, he accepts vitality, even if it is immoral: ‘I don't like wars etc. (...) but given the state of decadence and comfort and general incompetence in pre-War England, nobody who saw that effort can remain without respect for England-during-that-war.’²⁸

It can be asked to what extent Pound's protest against war is specifically intended as a protest against war in our time. As Céline or Drieu La Rochelle, Pound perceives the hollowness of ancient ideals in the modern world. He is even conscious that the motives of militarism are never quite pure. However, his critique concerns the modern world as much as the war: ‘These fought in any case, / and some believing, / pro domo in any case... / Some quick to arm / some for adventure, / some from fear of weakness, / some from fear of

21 Pound, Cantos, p. 59.

22 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 160.

23 Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound, p. 140.

24 Pound, Cantos, p. 59.

25 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 69.

26 Pound, Personae, p. 282.

27 Pound, Personae, p. 42.

28 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 67.

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censure, / some for love of slaughter, in imagination, / learning later... / some in fear, learning love of slaughter; / Dies some, pro patria, / non “dulce” non “et decor”... / walked eye-deep in hell / believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving / came home, home to a lie, / home to many deceits, / home to old lies and new infamy; / usury age-old and age-thick / and liars in public places.’²⁹ This description of a decadent civilization is accompanied by an immense regret: young men have not anything to defend, not even a worthy culture: ‘There died a myriad, / and of the best, among them, / for an old bitch gone in the teeth, for a botched civilization, / Charm, smiling at the good mouth, quick eyes gone under earth's lid. / For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.’³⁰ This attitude is more cultural despair than real pacifism and it makes it easier to understand, why Pound, tempted by pacifism, favoured politics that were openly militaristic.

The avoidance of the imminent decline of our civilization must be effected, according to Pound, not with more democracy but with less democracy. His reasoning is not necessarily wrong or immoral: ‘Any wise man knows a great deal he can't impart to a man of mediocre intelligence.’³¹ Thinking so, he cannot be very fanatically for the majority. Although he is not absolutely against democracy, he does not trust the intellectual capacities of the majority, as can be seen in the thinking of ‘Walter Villerant’ in ‘Imaginary letters’: ‘This nonsense about art for the many, for the majority. J'en ai marre. It may be fitting that men should enjoy equal civic and political rights, these things are a matter of man's exterior acts, of exterior contacts. (Machiavelli believed in democracy; it lay beyond his experience). The arts have nothing to do with this. They are man's life within himself.

The king's writ does not run there. The voice of the majority is powerless to make me enjoy, or disenjoy, the lines of Catullus. I dispense with a vote without inconvenience...’³² Pound's scepticism concerning the intellectual capacity of the masses is akin to that of Benn, of Hamsun, of Drieu La Rochelle, of Céline. Unfortunately it is also parallel to that of Mussolini. It possibly flattered Pound when the Italian dictator promised to value people, not quantitatively as in democracy, but ‘qualitatively’. This tendency to less democracy is completed by the poet's despair of parliamentarism. Parliamentarian democracy is for him a tyranny of finances and of demagogical mediocrity. This Maurrassian attitude can be found in his ‘Poems of Alfred Vennison’; it is not the ‘common advantage’, but the trick of keeping in the saddle that leads parliamentarian politicians: ‘We are 'ere met together / In this momentous hower, / Ter lick th'bankers' dirty boots / an' keep the Bank in power. / (...) We are 'ere met together / ter grind the same old axes / And to keep the people in its place / a' payin' us the taxes. / We are six hundred beefy men / (but mostly gas and süet) / An' every year we meet to let / Some other feller do it.’³³ Pound's dream of an artistic élite as a responsible ruler³⁴ springs from his despair: he just hopes that people will not follow the majority, but the intellectual élite.

Close to the problem of anti-democratism is the question of individualism. It was certainly not always easy for Pound to try to achieve a synthesis between his own individualism and the fascist concept of ‘state’. His early poems reveal the extent to which he is an anarchistic, nonconformist individual. His whole outlook of life is basicly individualistic: ‘Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied, / Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by / convention, / Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.’³⁵ He overlooks the Hegelian tendency towards collectivism in fascism, affirming that fascism is very tolerant towards individuals. It is in this way he wants to see fascist economics: ‘But note that Mussolini is not a fanatical statalist wanting the state to blow the citizen's nose and monkey with the individual's diet, if, when and whenever the

29 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, p. 199-200.

30 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, p. 200.

31 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 127.

32 Pound, Pavannes and Divagations, p. 54.

33 Pound, Personae, p. 279.

34 Harrison, The Reactionaries, p. 119.

35 Pound, Personae, p. 279.

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individual or the industry can and will attend to its own business, the fascist state wants the industry and the individual to do it...’³⁶ The state is also important for Pound, in controlling the monetary system.³⁷ His dislike of the Romanticist individualism is certainly due in part to his fascism.³⁸ However, a real collectivism is for him a horror: ‘Communism as theory is not only against the best human instincts, it is not even practised by higher mammals. It suits monkeys more or less, and wild dogs are said to collaborate.’³⁹ This kind of attitude implies a profound contradiction not only between ‘Poundism’ and communism, but also between ‘Poundism’ and Hitlerism. The problem of Pound's nationalism is not much clearer. There is no fascism without strong nationalist tendencies. Pound's vehement critique of American civilization and his collaboration with the Italian fascists have created a picture of a confirmed anti-American. Anyhow, Pound has patriotic feelings too. His patriotism is the most beautiful form of patriotism, very far from the imperialism and chauvinism of fascists or national-socialists. It is cultural patriotism. Very early he dreams of a ‘Risorgimento’ of American culture and that is why he criticizes America: ‘...America has a chance for Renaissance and (...) certain absurdities in the manners of American action are, after all, things of the surface and not of necessity, the symptoms of sterility, or even of fatal disease.’⁴⁰ Pound's patriotism is the same kind of inquietude that we find in Céline, Brasillach, Drieu La Rochelle. It is a love that risks becoming love-hate. It can have very noble forms as can be seen sometimes in his poems: ‘The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep, / The thought of what America / The thought of what America / The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep.’⁴¹

The question of Pound's racism has also presented some dilemmas. It was not the anti-

36 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 69.

37 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 35.

38 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 299.

39 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 191.

40 Pound, Patria Mia, p. 24.

41 Pound, Personae, p. 194.

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semitism in fascism that attracted Pound, he admired Italian fascism before it was pre-dominantly anti-semitic. Furthermore: Pound's anti-semitism is not national-socialist. It lacks the biological fundament: he hates some Jewish individuals, but not necessarily the entire race. It is finally impossible to apply the terms racist or nationalist to a poet who is capable of forming a synthesis between non-European cultures and European tradition. It is only the equation: Christianity = Jewish religion that brings him very close to the general intellectual atmosphere in fascist countries.

Anti-communism was often a very important reason for the health of fascism, but in Pound's case, it does not explain the ‘engagement’. Even if communism is the culminating point of a rotten civilization, it sometimes has advantages in comparison to liberalism: ‘Damn the bolsheviki as much as you like, the Russian projects have served as stimuli both to Italy and to America.’⁴² However, Pound is very irritated when he sees communist or Marxist ideas conquer Europe. In some poems irony is coupled with anti-communism. Communism belongs to the symptoms of English decadence: ‘Manhood of England, / Dought of the Shires, / Want Russia to save 'em, / Lenin to save 'em, Trotsky to save 'em / (And valets to shave 'em) / The youth of the Shires.’⁴³ This kind of anti-communism does not prevent Pound from espousing implicitly socialist views in some areas. His politics are not only an outlook on life but are also political in a very narrow sense. As Celine, Brasillach or Drieu La Rochelle, Pound is a vehement critic of social injustice. Pound the ‘leftist’ can be found in Cantos: ‘five million youths without jobs / four million adult illiterates / 15 million “vocational misfits”, that is with small chance for jobs / nine million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial / accidents / One hundred thousand violent crimes. / The Eunited States ov / America / 3rd year of the reign of Roosevelt...’⁴⁴ It is not surprising that Pound was tempted by the socialist facade of fascism,⁴⁵ as were Céline, Drieu La Rochelle, Benn and many others.

We must not underestimate the social and economic side of Pound's politics, but very important for him is the question of to what extent this political movement could favour his dreams of a new, high civilization, in which power would be in the service of art: ‘The arts come into prominence and there is what is called an age of art when men of certain catholicity of intelligence come into power.’⁴⁶ Like Gottfried Benn, he thinks that when vortices of power and the vortices of culture coincide, humanity will enter an era of brilliance.⁴⁷ This era should be disinterested, aesthetic, joyous and heroic, rather than an era of materialistic, moralizing, neurotic attitudes. Fascism should be a defense of European civilization against inner and outer decadence: ‘...things being what they are in Europe as Europe, I believe in a strong italy as the only possible foundation or anchor or whatever you want to call it for the good life in Europe.’⁴⁸ Between this kind of dreaming and real fascism there is a latent misunderstanding. For fascists power is important, for ‘Poundists’ the moral and the culture are primary. Fascism is a political question while ‘Poundism’ is a cultural philosophy. Pound is often constructive; fascism was destructive.

We cannot take Pound very seriously as a political thinker, because his political thinking is dominated to a large extent by illusions. Interesting, original and constructive as some of these may be, they are far from realizable. However, we must not underestimate his honest, sincere and acute criticism of our civilization although his best intentions have turned out to be a political calamity. Could Pound's politics not be a symptom of the aspiration that mankind should improve the world in the future not by political means? However we view the case, it is clear that politics can prove to be the enemy of real wisdom.

42 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 104.

43 Pound, Personae, p. 266.

44 Pound, The fifth decade of Cantos, p. 29.

45 Harrison, The Reactionaries, p. 123.

46 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, p. 266.

47 Pound, Guide to Kulchur.

48 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 34-35.

[p. 62]

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Cornell, Julien, The Trial of Ezra Pound, London 1966.

Eliot, T.S., To Criticize the Critic, London 1965.

Harrison, John, The Reactionaries, London 1966.

Kunnas, Tartno, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste, Paris 1972.

Pound, Ezra, Cantos, New York, 1948.

idem, Guide to Kulchur, New York 1938.

idem, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, London 1935.

idem, Letters 1907-1941, London 1951.

idem, Patria Mia, Chicago 1950.

idem, Pavannes and Divagations, London 1960,

idem, Personae, London 1952.