of imbeciles God DAMN all
those who take no active
part in eliminating these
evils. Damn those who
invade the private domain of
the individual directly or by
making of suffocating iniquitous laws.
against all these
maledictions &
major anathema
Ezra Pound | 7 May 1930
That is at least a handy summary of Pound’s pet hates in those years. Whether it had any effect on Judge Beals’s judgements is not, so far as I know, a matter of record. Nor is it recorded that the lady from Omaha was moved by Pound’s prose to a more active disgust at what he thought wrong with America.
‘A good state’, as Pound defined it in 1925, ‘is one which impinges least upon the peripheries of its citizens’; and its function ‘is to facilitate the traffic, i.e. the circulation of goods, air, water, heat, coal (black or white), power, and even thought; | and to prevent the citizens from impinging on each other’. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, he declared civilization to be impossible without an aristocracy; and ‘the duty of an aristocracy is to educate [the nation’s] plebs’. But this, he observed, aristocracies had regularly failed to do, thus bringing on their ‘own bloody destruction’, and leaving ‘the whole of woodenheaded humanity…to concentrate its efforts on production of another lot, equally piffling and light headed’. By 1930, still more paradoxically, he was looking for an individual leader to manage the state and maintain civilization:
THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass.
For example:…J. Q. Adams’ intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization…
Jefferson’s continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)
Apparently Pound considered the forcing of an enlightened programme on the mass of the people to be not tyrannous or oppressive. He may even have been implying that the failure to enforce enlightenment would have been due to allowing too much representation to the ignorant mass. ‘The democratic idea’, he had pointed out, ‘was not that legislative bodies shd. represent the momentary idiocy of the multitude.’ Yet that extreme way of stating the case might provoke one to reflect that ‘the democratic idea’ would not necessarily lead to the idea of ‘the great protagonist’ either; and further, that ‘the great protagonists’ in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.
In Pound’s mind, however, Mussolini was beginning to stand with Jefferson as a force for enlightened government. In November 1926 he remarked to John Price that ‘The more one knows of Mussolini the more one inclines to think Italy very fortunate, and the less credence one gives to hostile reports.’ That was a widely held view of Il Duce at that time. But then Pound’s previous remark has an odd inflection. ‘I don’t think the Fascio will object’, he wrote—object, that is, to his forthcoming magazine The Exile which he was discussing with Price. It is as if the shadow of Fascist censorship had crossed his mind, only without arousing his usual negative reaction to any form of censorship. The odd, uncalled for remark—uncalled for since the magazine was to be published in Paris, then Chicago, and was unlikely to be of any concern to the Fascio—is an indication of Pound’s disposition to think well of Mussolini and Fascism, and to be passive about things which, if he were to suspect them of America, would drive him to act out of anger and indignation.
He found plenty of reasons for taking the hopeful, positive view of Mussolini. He was impressed when Olga Rudge, after giving a private performance for Mussolini in 1927, reported that he played the violin himself, preferred the classic composers, and could talk intelligently about music. He was impressed too by Mussolini’s saying, ‘We are tired of government in which there is no responsible person having a hind-name, a front name and an address.’ That, ‘the raison d’être of Fascism’ for Pound, could be seen as at once an attack on faceless bureaucrats and their obstructive imbecilities, and an encouragement to individuals to act responsibly on their own authority, as the Rimini Commandante della Piazza had done in the matter of the library there. Mussolini’s style of leadership seemed to follow from that. In contrast with America’s ‘passport imbecility’, he had simply given ‘a comprehensive order re/ frontiers, to the effect that travellers were not to be subjected to needless annoyance’. More generally, Pound was moved to say in an interview with an Italian journalist that Mussolini’s ‘effective program, which includes land reclamation, the “battle for grain”, and the mobilization of the nation’s internal credit’, put him in mind of Thomas Jefferson; and that ‘Italy is the only country in the world…that can’t be governed better than it already is’. Altogether Pound was working towards the conclusion that Mussolini was, like Lenin and like Jefferson, a leader of the most effective type, ‘an opportunist with convictions’; or, as he would phrase it in 1933 in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, ‘an OPPORTUNIST who is RIGHT, that is who has certain convictions and who drives them through circumstance, or batters and forms circumstance with them’. By that date he would be convinced that Mussolini was contemporary Italy’s ‘great protagonist’.
It was the phenomenon of Il Duce, the effective leader of his people, that really engaged his increasingly enthusiastic support. But on occasion he would credit the Fascist Party with fulfilling the role of an aristocracy. In 1931, in ‘Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot’, a contribution to Samuel Putnam’s New Review, he equated aristocracy with a sense of responsibility. Capitalist democracy, he began, ‘does not, apparently favour the sense of responsibility or even ask for it in public servants’. In the most important matter of ‘the nation’s credit’, those who control it should, ideally, be ‘responsible to the nation’; but ‘the real complaint against “capitalism” is that an unjust proportion of this credit is diverted to the private use of usurpers and scoundrels’. That meant that power, in capitalist democracy, was with the Plutocracy; and the Plutocracy does not encourage ‘a greater degree of amenity or a higher critical selectivity in life and the arts’. Disgust with the failed state of democracy brought Pound to look favourably upon Communist Russia and Fascist Italy. ‘Possibly no other aristocracy in 1931 has so great a sense of responsibility as the new Russian “party”’, he wrote without irony, and although aware of ‘horrors reported’. (Those would have been the horrors of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan in which the Party’s Commissars ruthlessly forced through the collectivization of agriculture and the development of heavy industry at a terrible cost to both peasants and workers.) Elsewhere, he suspected, ‘the sense of responsibility…is confined to a few Italian Fascists and a few “god damned cranks”’. In his conclusion he effectively accepted, as the alternative to failed or corrupt democracy, a dictatorship of such aristocracies, as he had already in effect accepted the dictatorship of the great protagonist:
An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense.
Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.
Hindsight probes those terms and finds them dangerously empty of particular, defining instances. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini Pound would go some way to providing the needed particulars in the case of Italy, and to developing the implications of ‘the strongest’ and ‘the most wilful’ beyond a crude ‘might is right’. But did he know enough, and was he exercising his critical intelligence enough, to warrant his readiness to accept the dictatorship of those ‘aristocracies’ and of their leaders? He did know, when being critical of others, that ‘Thought, dogblast you, thou
ght is made up of particulars, and when those particulars cease to be vividly present to the consciousness in the general statement, thought ceases and blah begins.’
A striking feature of that ‘Fungus’ article is the evident loss of faith in the power of creative intelligence to influence the government of the state. There is no invocation now of the aristocracy of artistic genius. Instead we are told simply that ‘Plutocracy does not favour the arts’, and that ‘The exploiter hates the intelligenzia (with reason)’, as if there was nothing more to be said about the function of intelligence under democracy. As for Fascism, there it would appear that the artist had been displaced by the activist. That impression is confirmed by the terms in which Pound approved of Marinetti in 1932. In a letter to Zukofsky he mentioned that he had ‘Had amiable jaw with Marinetti in Rome and have come back loaded with futurist and Fascist licherchoor.’ Marinetti had dedicated Futurism to the service of Mussolini’s Fascist regime, ‘the glorious advent’ of which, in Mussolini’s own words, ‘Futurism had prepared with twenty years of incessant artistic warfare consecrated in blood’. Pound recalled, in one of his notes in the Rapallo paper Il Mare, Marinetti’s standing up in the public gallery during a session of the Italian deputies in 1919 to denounce Francesco Nitti, the prime minister, ‘A nome dei Fasci di Combattimento, dei Futuristi e degli intelletuali’, and to accuse him in unparliamentary language of sabotaging the victory. Gabriele D’Annunzio had congratulated him on that action; and Pound, in 1932, while conceding that Marinetti was not an especially good writer, saluted him as ‘Marinetti activist’ and suggested that he was to be honoured for having gone beyond writing into the further dimension of action. That achievement connected him, in Pound’s thinking, with Lenin and Mussolini, ‘the two who in our day know how to “move” in the highest degree, who are masters of speech that goes into action’.
That was the condition Pound’s own prose aspired to in Italy—‘speech that goes into action’. He began relatively mildly with a series of ‘Appunti’—meaning ‘notes to the point’ or ‘precisions’—in L’Indice, a fortnightly literary paper published in Genoa; but by the time of his wartime ‘Radio Speeches’ broadcast on Rome Radio from January 1941 to July 1943 he would frequently be playing the violent demagogue.
The score or so ‘Appunti’ contributed to L’Indice in 1930 and 1931 were not on the whole political. Pound’s commission from the editor, Gino Saviotti, was to inform Italian readers about foreign literature and culture, and he did that by repeating his usual literary propaganda—on Lewis, Cocteau, Hemingway, Joyce; on the little magazines he was in touch with; and on such themes as the importance of realism and the need for international standards. Going on from that, he took it upon himself to tell Italian writers that they must learn to match the economy of English by cutting out all their unnecessary words, and that they should bring their work up to date by digesting the best in modern American and French writing. He was trying to do for Italian literature what he had tried to do for America in his London years. There was the difference though that rather than writing with the exasperation of an alienated exile he was establishing sympathetic relations with Fascist Italy. He told his interviewer in 1931 that he expected the surge of energy Fascism had unleashed to bring forth a new renaissance. He told his readers in L’Indice that ‘every reinvigoration of Italian’ must come from its origins in Latin; and he acknowledged his own debts to their Dante and Cavalcanti. He went so far as to say that had he been living in Italy in 1912 to 1924 he would have made common cause with the Futurists, at least on the need, in Italy, to clean out the dead past and to have a live contemporary perception precedent to the work of art. When his association with L’Indice ended in December 1931—the paper apparently ‘went bust’—he intensified his effort to play an active part in the literary and cultural life of Italy by getting a local vortex going in Rapallo.
With Gino Saviotti and half a dozen other collaborators, notably Basil Bunting, Pound organised a ‘Supplemento Letterario’ which appeared every other week as an insert in Rapallo’s weekly paper, Il Mare. For eight months, from August 1932 to March 1933, it was a two-page supplement, and then, from April to July 1933, was reduced to a single ‘Pagina Letteraria’. The promise that it would reappear in October 1933, after taking a summer holiday, ‘with, as always, the collaboration of the best Italian and foreign writers’, was not kept. In its first phase the ‘Supplemento’ was determinedly international, with contributions from and about Italian, French, Spanish, German, and American writers and writing, and could claim to be giving a local focus to the most innovative and avant-garde work of its time. Pound contributed occasional ‘Appunti’, and recycled his Little Review ‘Study of French Poets’ and his notes on Vorticism. In one of his ‘Appunti’ he asserted that Futurism, the best of which satisfied the demands of Vorticism, had to be the dominant art of ‘l’Italia Nuova’.
Pound had not given up his kicking against ‘murkn imbecility and ignorance’. Towards the end of 1930 he initiated a correspondence with US Senator Bronson M. Cutting (1888–1935) of New Mexico, a Progressive Republican who had ‘advocated the liberalization of federal laws governing censorship and copyright’. In fact in the debate in 1929–30 on censorship by the customs authorities Cutting had won ‘the reputation of being the most literate and cultured man in the Senate’. In the course of his argument he had observed that censorship was ‘a tool of tyranny’, and that it was ‘characteristic of the Fascist government of Italy, and equally characteristic of the Bolshevist government of Russia’. Pound made no comment on those points, but heartily agreed with him that it had no place in a free democracy. He wrote to Cutting to encourage him to move next against the censorship still exercised by the Post Office under ‘Article 211 of the Penal code’, the then current version of the 1873 Comstock Act which he described again as ‘made by gorillas for the further stultification of imbeciles’. Cutting needed no convincing that ‘the Baboon law…ought to be out of the criminal code altogether’. But he was a practical legislator in the real world of the democratic process, and had to accept that there was not ‘the slightest chance of eliminating it’. However, he saw ‘a tactical advantage in leaving the criminal feature, because in that shape it would go to the semi-liberal Judiciary Committee instead of to the hopeless Post Office Committee’. Even so, his amendment died on that occasion in the Judiciary Committee. ‘Don’t be too hopeful’, he had advised Pound, ‘It is hard running up against the organizations of canned virtue.’ He kept on patiently trying to build support for an amendment in the following years, though still without success.
Pound, impatient with the Senate’s complicated workings and with Cutting’s pragmatic step-by-step activism, was inclined to hold democracy itself responsible, on account of its electing illiterates to represent it. He had asked Cutting for ‘a list of the literate members of the senate’, and been given the names of just ten Senators, ‘& I suppose Dwight Morrow’. That confirmed his conviction, expressed in a letter written to Langston Hughes in June 1932, that while ‘the American govt. as INTENDED and as a system is as good a form of govt. as any, save possibly that outlined in the new Spanish [Republican] constitution’, it allowed, as it was currently practised, ‘the worst men in it to govern and…[lent] itself repeatedly to flagrant injustice’. In time that conviction would reduce itself to the outraged and absolute simplification which irrupts in canto 91, ‘Democracies electing their sewage.’
The pursuit of ‘theoretical perfection in a government impels it ineluctably toward tyranny’. Pound could see that in the petty tyranny of customs inspectors burning with the righteous moral fervour of the crusade to preserve the nation from foreign obscenities such as Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet he did not see it writ large in Bolshevist Russia and Fascist Italy. And he did not see that his own drive for a perfect system of government, with his absolute intolerance of the compromises and imperfections endemic in the democratic system, was impelling him ineluctably toward the embrace of ty
ranny. He had recorded in canto 8 how Plato the Idealist ‘went to Dionysius of Syracuse | Because he had observed that tyrants | Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to’; but had he taken the point of the story, that Plato found ‘he was unable to persuade Dionysius to any amelioration’?
The ameliorations Pound desired were on the whole enlightened. The trouble was not with his ideas in themselves but with his lack of realism as to how they might be put into effect. There was nothing undemocratic about his campaign for the abolition of censorship, of restrictive copyright laws, of passports and visas, and of anything else which acted as a barrier to the free passage of new invention. He supported the workers’ demand for a universal forty-hour week—something proposed by Italy in a meeting of the International Labour Organization in September 1932, and opposed (then as now) by the government and employers’ organizations of Great Britain. He was even more enthusiastically with those who called for a shortened working day of four or at most six hours, with no reduction in workers’ pay. This he regarded as the workers’ just dividend from advances in industrial productivity; and also, in the Depression, as a better remedy for unemployment than the dole. Again, observing that ‘We live in a plutocratic era, i.e. de facto governed by money, with a thin wash of democratic pretense’, he wanted to see the Federal Reserve Board ‘democratized’, so that the nation’s credit should serve public need rather than private profit. All of these ideas were in the spirit of Jeffersonian democracy.
He campaigned above all, occasionally in violent terms, for the study of the causes of war, ‘to prevent another slaughter by millions for the benefit of a few’. He identified the ‘two causes of war’ as ‘the fight for markets’, and ‘the specific interest of the ineffable lice who want to make money by selling guns and munitions’; and he demanded detective work to expose the men and the forces making for war. These things should be news, he insisted, and wrote his own findings into his Cantos as ‘news that STAYS news’.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 16