The Gift (37 page)

And so we come to Mussolini. There is an oft-quoted letter of Pound’s to Harriet Monroe, oft-quoted because it is one of the first times that Pound mentions his Italian hero: “I personally think extremely well of Mussolini. If one compares him to American presidents (the last three) or British premiers, etc., in fact one CAN NOT without insulting him. If the intelligentsia 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.” The context of Pound’s remarks is not usually noted: most of the letter is addressed to the problem of artists being unable to earn a living. Monroe had asked Pound to consider a lecture tour in the States and he asked if it might pay enough to free him to work: “If I blow all that energy, I have got to have a few years free from WORRY AFTER it. Poverty here is decent and honourable. In America it lays one open to continuous insult on all sides …” Later: “You might devote a special number, poesy contest for best estimate of psychology of the man who paid 20,000 bucks for copy of Poe’s Tammammwhatever it is. Interest on 20,000 bucks wd. keep a live writer for life. Wot these bastards lack is a little intelligence.”

As I have said, Pound was attracted to any economic system that seemed hospitable to the artist and, in his estimation, Mussolini was a leader who knew his people needed poetry. Moreover, he was a man of action. He built people houses. He turned swamps into croplands. “From the time of Tiberius the Italian intelligentzia has been
talking
of draining the swamps,” says Pound, but only Mussolini got it
done.
He was “the De-bunker par excellence.” He took no guff from financiers:

Mussolini understood that a money system, particularly after the Industrial Revolution, should be directed toward the distribution of abundance, not the management of scarcity. Pound reports that Mussolini gave a speech in 1934 in which, “speaking very clearly four or five words at a time … to let it sink in,” he declared that the problem of production was solved and that people could now turn their attention to distribution. Pound was delighted; he sent an obituary to the
Criterion
in London: “at 4:14 in the Piazza del Duomo, Milano …, Scarcity Economics died.”

Finally, Mussolini was a man “filled with … the will toward
order.”
In a 1932 letter, Pound advised a friend, “Don’t knock Mussolini … He will end with Sigismondo and the men of order, not with the pus-sacks and destroyers. I believe that anything human will and understanding of contemporary Italy cd. accomplish, he has done and will continue to do.”

Which brings us to our last anecdote in which Ezra Pound gives a gift.

In the early 1930s Pound requested and was granted an interview with Mussolini in Rome. He had petitioned Mussolini’s secretary for the meeting some ten months before, explaining that he wanted to talk about the accomplishments of Fascism, the cork industry, and conditions in the sulfur mines. Late in the day on January 30, 1933, Pound was
admitted to see the Boss. He gave Mussolini a typewritten summary of his economic ideas and a vellum edition of
A Draft of XXX Cantos
, published a few years earlier in Paris. A later canto reports Mussolini’s reaction:

Pound accepted the remark as his laurel; his admiration of Mussolini took an exponential leap. Within a month he wrote his tract
Jefferson and / or Mussolini
(sending a copy to the Boss “with devoted homage”).

Isn’t this account a little strange? Did Pound really believe that Mussolini had read the
Cantos
before they met (or even afterward)? Had he never heard of polite conversation? And what could
Il Duce
have thought of the poet? Pound was firmly set in the habit of delivering his opinions without benefit of elaboration. We know for a fact that more than one Italian Fascist close to Mussolini found the poet “unbalanced” and his written Italian “incomprehensible.” In any event, it seems doubtful that Mussolini was as ripe to see the State Poet in Pound as Pound was to see the Poet’s State in Mussolini’s Italy. The meeting’s real significance, then, lies in Pound’s own cosmology, for Mussolini is the incarnation of Pound’s Confucian side. Stated in this fashion, Pound’s gift of the
Cantos
to the Boss concretizes and marks the moment when the imagination is given over to the will. In 1933 Pound literally handed Song over to Authority, a gift that cannot but break its own spirit, for neither the gift nor the imagination can survive as servants of the will toward order.

III • The Jew in the Hedge

It is difficult to speak directly of Ezra Pound’s economic ideas. He was a man who rarely uttered a simple “2 + 2 = 4.” He would say, instead, “2 + 2 = 4, as anyone can see who isn’t a ninny completely ballywhoed by the gombeen-men and hyper-kikes who CHOKE UP the maze of Jew-governed radio transmissions.” The specifics of his argument emerge with a tag line, a challenge or a baiting remark, and we must speak of both—both the substance and the style—if we are to speak at all.

Here we inevitably approach the question of Pound’s sanity. Pound stayed in Italy when the Second World War broke out. He worked for several years at the Ministry of Popular Culture in Rome, making radio broadcasts to America and to the Allied troops in Europe and North Africa. His broadcasts were a mixture of economic theory, insults to the Allied leaders, and exhortations on the wisdom of Fascism. When Italy fell, the Allies captured the fifty-nine-year-old poet and put him in a prison camp. They treated him poorly, as I have mentioned, confining him to an outdoor isolation cage until he collapsed. After his breakdown, Pound was given a room of his own indoors and allowed to write. After a long delay the army flew him to Washington to be tried for treason for the
radio broadcasts. His publisher, New Directions, hired an attorney who suggested to Pound that he plead insanity. Pound agreed, and after government and private psychiatrists had examined him, the plea was accepted. He was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Declared too crazy to be tried and treated as too crazy to be set free, he spent the next twelve years in a sort of legal limbo. The government finally released him in 1958. He returned almost immediately to Italy.

It was not just the government or Pound’s lawyer who thought he was a little crazy. People close to him had had the same reaction for some time. When Joyce saw him in Paris in 1935, he thought Pound was “mad” and felt “genuinely frightened of him.” Afraid to be alone with him, Joyce invited Hemingway to go with them to dinner; Hemingway found him “erratic,” “distracted.” Later, T. S. Eliot also concluded that his friend had become unbalanced (“megalomania”), as did Pound’s daughter, Mary (“his own tongue was tricking him, running away with him, leading him into excess, away from his pivot, into blind spots”). For the flavor of a man “away from his pivot,” one need only read a few of the radio broadcasts. Rambling, erratic, frustrated, full of an anger uncut by humor, humility, or compassion, they fatigue the reader and leave a bitter taste.

There are two pitfalls to avoid in speaking of a crazy side to Pound’s economics. First, we must be wary of reducing the ideas to psychological categories. As Thomas Szasz points out in his essay on the Pound case, it is an easy power play to take a man’s ideas and, instead of saying “You’re right” or “You’re wrong,” say “You’re crazy.” It impugns the status of the thinker and cuts off the dialogue. On the other hand, once we’ve restrained ourselves from taking the ideas as “merely psychological,” we cannot turn and take them flatly as ideas, either. Listen to thirty seconds of Pound at the microphone:

Pound’s ideas emerged so helter-skelter, so full of obsession and so stained with their maker’s breath that to make of them a coherent ideology is to do a work that Pound himself never did and, therefore, equally to falsify the story.

To approach the crazy side of Pound’s economics, we may begin by looking for those places in his presentation where the tone suddenly slips, where his voice becomes unaccountably shrill. Pound constantly addresses himself to money, for example, but it is the Jew as moneylender who comes in for the strange twists of phrase and affect. Pound could write an entire Money Pamphlet with sufficient cogent ideas to make his argument discussable, but then on the last page suddenly say that “the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers” have been hiding the facts from the public.

If we list the topics that come to us with this fishy smell we find the following: stupid and ignorant people, lazy people, the Americans and the English, the Allied leaders (Roosevelt and Churchill in particular, American presidents in general), usurers, monetary criminals, the Jews, and, to a lesser extent, the Protestants. The elements in this list are all connected to one another in Pound’s cosmology: the lazy are ignorant; the ignorant are usually Americans; the Americans elect “their sewage” (the best example being Roosevelt, whom Pound thought of as a Jew, calling him “Jewsfeldt,” “stinkie Roosenstein,” etc.);
England hasn’t been the same since they let in the Jew, who, of course, is the best example of the usurer and the monetary criminal. We are not dealing with discrete elements here, we’re dealing with a lump. If we speak of any part of the lump, we will be well on our way to describing the whole. The part I shall focus on is the Jew as he appears in Pound’s writing.

“Pound’s Jew,” as I would call this image, seems to me to be a version of the classical god Hermes. One of Pound’s early poems invokes Mercury, the Roman counterpart to Hermes:

Hermes is a god of trade—of money and merchandise and the open road. I shall say more about him in a moment; for now we need only note that the poem says this deity could free the poet from some confinement. If Hermes were to answer the
call—with a little shop, some dirty money, and cheap sex— Pound might be released from the troublesome burden of his profession. My position here is that Hermes did in fact respond to Pound’s invocation, but that Pound backed off, refused his approach, and consigned the god to his own shadow.

In psychoanalytic terms, the “shadow” is the personification of those parts of the self that
could
be integrated into the ego but for one reason or another are not. Many people leave their feelings about death in the shadow, for example. They
could
be carried in the daylight self but are left unspoken. Random sexual desire remains in the shadow for most people. It could be acted upon openly or it could be acknowledged and dismissed (which still removes it from the shadow), but it isn’t. What the ego needs but cannot accept the psyche will personify and either present in dreams or project onto someone in the outer world. These shadow figures then become objects of simultaneous fascination and disgust—a recurrent and troubling figure in dreams or someone in the neighborhood we don’t like but can’t stop talking about.

Pound began to become obsessed with the money question around 1915, so I take that to be the approximate date when Hermes answered his invocation. But, as I say, Pound backed off. Then, like any spurned deity, Hermes began to increase in power, taking on a more and more threatening aspect, until, by 1935, he had enough power to pull the ego from its pivot. By then Pound had projected this “destructive” figure from his own darker side onto the Jew. His image of the Jew has in fact little to do with Jews; it is, as we shall see, an almost verbatim description of the classical Hermes.

If we imagine an ancient road at dusk, a road passing through no-man’s-land and connecting two towns but itself neither here nor there, we will begin to imagine the ancient Hermes, for he is the God of the Roads, identified not with any home or hearth or mountain but with the traveler on the
highway. His name means “he of the stone heap”: a traveler seeking the protection of Hermes would pile rocks into a cairn by the road or erect a herma, a stone pillar with a head on top.

At these roadside altars Hermes assumed his other ancient forms, the God of Commerce and the Protector of Thieves. He wants everything to be on the road: travelers, money, and merchandise. And as his patronage of
both
merchants and thieves shows, the moral tone of an exchange does not concern him. Hermes is an amoral connecting deity. When he’s the messenger of the gods he’s like the post office: he’ll carry love letters, hate letters, stupid letters, or smart letters. His concern is the delivery, not what’s in the envelope. He wants money to change hands, but he does not distinguish between the just price and a picked pocket. Hermes still appears at a country auction whenever the auctioneer awakens our daydreams of “making a steal,” that Hermetic mixture of commerce and larceny that cannot fail to loosen the cash. When we come to our senses later, wondering why we bought a cardboard carton full of pan lids, we know that Hermes was the auctioneer.