Pound: The Poet and the Fascist

IT DOESN'T TAKE much to begin to understand what Ezra Pound was like. He and Ernest Hemingway were good--if not close--friends, at least up until the mid-1930s. In 1933 Hemingway had written to Pound in Rapallo, Italy to say that it was from Pound that he had learned more about "how to write and how not to write than from any son of a bitch alive." Pound was an unquestionably important influence on literature in the first half of this century. But by 1934 Hemingway's impressions were shifting. Joyce had asked him to come along with him to dinner with Pound in Paris because Joyce was sure Pound was "mad", as Hemingway later wrote and he was "genuinely frightened of him." In the course of the dinner, according to Hemingway, Pound spoke "very erratically." Pound had always been a little eccentric. My favorite story about him has him at a dinner party with the literary effete of London. He was wearing his cape and single earing and when everybody sat down to dinner he refused to eat the regular course. Instead he began to talk excitedly and pick at a rose in the centerpiece with his fork. Before anybody could say anything he ate the entire rose. When Hemingway wrote of going to dinner with Pound, however, he was speaking not about Pound's minor eccentricities, but of the poet's developing world view of politics and economics.

And this identifies the problem with Pound's eccentricity. It may have been wonderful for a poet and all that. But it was slightly more sinister when Pound employed the same style in addressing and discussing economic issues. And when Pound employed his penchant for flair and strong language to support the Fascists during World War II, he became an accessory to genocide. C. David Heymann's new book, what he calls a "political profile," examines the process whereby Pound was transformed from an outlandish man of letters to a malefic man of the people.

POLITICAL PROFILE is probably not the best term to describe Heymann's book. It doesn't really spend much time attempting to explain how or why Pound did what he did. It is more a summary of all of Pound's political acts, spiced with a plethora of anecdotes and meaningless details that have accumulated around the poet's life. This in itself, however, is important, because none of Pound's previous biographers attempted to present the political side of Pound's life. In fact they've remained rather defensive about it, as if the artificial separation of Pound the poet and Pound the man were a rigid one and Pound's life was only worth examining because of his poetry.

Most people probably know that Pound was a traitor during the war, a collaborator with the Fascisti in Italy. But few probably know how he arrived at that point. It started with his departure from Paris in the fall of 1924--he was fed up, some of his friends say, with helping other writers with their works. By that time he had already edited Eliot's "The Waste Land" into shape and he had exerted a lot of energy getting enough money for Joyce to finish Ulysses in Zurich. Countless others relied on his abilities as a writer and editor.

Pound was reportedly disgusted with Paris, and that generally describes his feelings about London, when he left there for Paris in 1921. But whatever his motives for moving to Italy--it could have been sheer caprice--Pound, by the following year, was converted to Fascism. "I personally think extremely well of Mussolini," he wrote to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine in November, 1925. "If one compares him to American presidents (the last three) or British premiers, etc., in fact one cannot without insulting him. If the intellegentsia don't think well of him, it is because they know nothing about 'the state,' and government, and have no particularly large sense of values." Pound soon began to date his letters Fascist style, according to the March on Rome in 1922. But it was not until seven years later, in 1932, that the poet tried to get in contact with Mussolini. He finally saw II Duce in 1933 in a private interview. It is a measure of Pound's tremendous ego and equally enormous naivete that he interpreted Mussolini's remark about A Draft of XXX Cantos("divertente"--entertaining) as signifying that the dictator was a genius...because he recognized genius.

Pound praised II Duce in his book of 1935, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, for all of the usual things: "grano, bonifica, restauri, grain, swampdrainage, restorations, new buildings..." But clearly he was as much as anything else, carried away by his own rhetoric. In the same tome he called Mussolini an "OPPORTUNIST who is RIGHT," an "AWARE INTELLIGENCE," who was introducing "a new LANGUAGE in the debates in the chamber." He was according to Pound, a statesman of "deep 'concern' or will for the welfare of Italy," right down to "the last ploughman and the last girl in the oliveyards...." It seems that Pound wasn't aware of the irony, that the new language was, had been, totalitarianism, and the "sincere concern" was with the imprisonment of anarchists and other "dissidents" at that time, and would eventually extend to the internment and elimination of Jews.

Pound's articles supporting fascist policies in the thirties and during the war are legion, and Heymann recounts them all. But Heymann also introduces new evidence in the case of Ezra Pound, evidence released from the files of the State Department and the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. On a whole, these new documents don't clarify Pound's political behavior, which is as enigmatic as the Cantos are.

By 1934, with the publication of Eleven New Cantos (31 through 41), Pound began his rabid anti-Semitic attacks with lines like these:

The tale of the perfect schnorrer: a peautiful chewisch poy

wit a vo-ice dot woult

meldt dh heart offa schtone (Canto35)

Most critics link Pound's anti-Semitism with his economic concerns adopted from C.H. Douglas's Social Credit theories. He believed in government management of money (as opposed to either private banks or public ownership of the means of production), and in his attacks on banks he often atacked 'Jusury.' In 1935 he had agonized over his association of Jews with banks: "How long the whole Jewish people is to be a sacrificial goat for the usurer, I know not." But as time went on, as Pound got caught up in the rhetoric of Fascism, his antisemitism went beyond malevolent symbolism. Heymann tends to agree with Robert Fitzgerald's theory of Pound's anti-Semitism, that is, that Pound had become isolated and failed to understand the implications of Hitler's, Mussolini's and even his own rhetoric. But Heymann goes on to theorize that one of the causes of Pound's anti-Semitism was that "he had simply taken on too much...dispersing himself beyond his human limitations."

ANTI-SEMITISM was to remain an element in Pound's work and acts for the rest of his life, but there were several other importaat political expressions and acts that Heymann examines. Pound's radio broadcasts from Italy during the war, his reputed attempt to leave Italy on the last American diplomatic train out of the country, his trial for treason and the issue of his insanity, and finally the furor over the award to Pound of prizes for his poetry. Of these four problems, Heymann's State Department documents bring new light to three.

It is common knowledge that Pound's attempts to collaborate with the Fascists on the Ente Italiano Audizione Radiofoniche (EIAR), the statecontrolled radio-broadcasting agency, were at first rejected. The Fascisti thought he might be sending a code even after he began broadcasting. Heymann has turned up evidence that some even thought Pound was mad: "There is no doubt in my mind that Ezra Pound is insane!" wrote the manager of the National Institute of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Heymann shows that even as early as 1935 II Duce's office had criticized a plan devised by Pound as "eccentric" and "conceived by a foggy mind." Yet, Heymann apparently has no evidence as to why Pound's broadcasts were finally accepted; it remains a mystery of the Fascist bureaucracy.

There is another small point of contention surrounding Pound's collaboration with the Fascisti. Pound's defense was that he had a signed agreement with Mussolini's government--actually broadcast over the air--which read in part, Pound "will not be asked to say anything contrary to his conscience or contrary to his duties as an American citizen." The problem was really that Pound didn't understand the difference between intent and action. Even Camillo Pellizzi, the president of the Fascist Institute of Culture, said Pound was legally a traitor, but that the poet thought it was his "duty" to expose the American administration under Roosevelt.

A cloud of documents also surrounds Pound's claim that he attempted to leave Rome via the last diplomatic train to Lisbon in 1942. A report in the Library of Congress refers to the "possibility of the development of a misunderstanding between Mr. Pound an a consular official which might have unintentionally aborted Mr. Pound's 'attempt' to leave Italy." Heymann has unearthed documents showing that the U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Rome had called Pound a "pseudo American" in late 1941; he also found anonymous testimony gathered by the FBI stating that Pound "made very undignified remarks" about the U.S. and gave the Fascist salute when he went to the Consulate Office and the American Embassy. These all tend to corroborate strong tensions between Pound and the Embassy, but they don't settle the question. Heymann simply adds another theory: Pound may have stayed because U.S. officials refused to grant a visa to Mary, his daughter by his mistress, Olga Rudge.

There is also the issue of Pound's insanity. While Heymann explores this in depth and uncovers a few new tidbits about the inquest into Pound's mental state--especially the conflicting reports by psychiatrists--the issue really isn't part of Pound's political life.

FINALLY THERE IS the uproar over the award of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry in the Pisan Cantos in 1949, a matter that hits at the very heart of the conjunction of poetry and politics in Pound's life. Heymann simply recounts the attacks, defenses and counterattacks on the committee for making the award, without ever proffering his own opinion. Karl Shapiro--who was on the Bollingen committee, and voted against the award--seems to have had the best idea--that a poet's moral and political philosophy could not be separated from his poetry. But then Shapiro, like the rest of the critics of that time and since, suggests that the infusion of Pound's politics into the Cantos, "lowers its standards as a literary work," and this betrays the real problem with that particular award and all other literary prizes. They are symbols of the desire to dictate culture to the masses. It is meaningless to say one poem is better than another in some type of hierarchical order. Some poems will simply be read more than others and critics should spend their time writing about the individual poems and poets they would like to see being read more, and not waste their time over prizes. The question then is, should the Cantos be read? During the Bollingen controversy Robert Gorham Davis wrote that the Cantos are "a test case for a whole set of values, and stand self-condemned." But he also added an important point to the debate, that the Cantos "are important documents; they should be available, they should be read."

If one can't make distinctions between Ezra Pound the poet and Ezra Pound the man, one can still distinguish between the poet/man and the poetry.

Heymann gives us a profile of the poet/man, and in many ways it is deficient. It doesn't try to clean up the mess that has surrounded Pounds life, the almost inscrutable clusters of prose that make up Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, the incomplete information in Charles Norman's biography, published in 1960, 12 years before Pound's death or Noel stock's The Life of Ezra Pound, completed two years before the poet died. But for all of its problems, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower provides us with one particularly important piece of information. That at least early in the 1960s Ezra Pound was still supporting Fascism. Heymann gives us this information where Kenner had said that "silence descended" on Pound in 1960, as a result of his sickness and ensuing surgery. Heymann tells us this where Stock had said that in 1961 Pound "returned to Rome; he went into a clinic there in May and in June was brought back to" his home and a relatively quiet life in the North of Italy. Heymann tells us a different, more complete story. Pound had been sick, all right, but he enjoyed a "brief revival" in 1961:

It was in the center of Rome in the middle of the day. He [Pound] was photographed at the head of a neo-Fascist, May Day parade, stepping their way up the Via del Corso from the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina to the Piazza Venezia and the Vittoriana. They wore jack boots and black arm bands. They flaunted banners and shouted anti-Semitic slogans. They gave the Roman salute and displayed the swastika. They heaved rocks and bottles at the crowd, overturned cars, attacked bystanders....

Then silence "fell," as Heymann puts it, not quite as conveniently as it descended on Pound in Kenner's book, or as it seemed to pervade Pound's later life in Stock's biography.

Heymann's comment on Pound's conduct that May Day of 1961 is short, rhetorical, but necessary and correct: he simply lists the principles Pound had uttered all of his later life: "Sinceritas? Cheng Ming? [which means "precision" or "true definition"] Decency in his conduct? Persistent awareness?" None of these were at work that day in Rome, nor in much of Pound's life; and no defense can come to the support of Pound the man for his actions.