At the least this ideogrammic method, as Pound called it, has the virtue of forcing the mind to attend to the detail and to the various possible relations of the things that concern it; and thus of keeping the mind free from powerful and dangerously simplifying generalizations and abstractions. For Pound himself it was the antidote to the one-eyed or closed mind, and it made all the difference, in his own case, between the tendency in his propaganda to narrow down into murderous prejudice and the open and growing vision of his poetry.
In the second and third movements of canto 34 John Quincy Adams is back in America. He reflects upon the prevailing manners and morals there and finds little to praise. ‘Banks breaking all over the country’, he observes, most of them fraudulently, and ‘prostrate every principle of economy’. In the minds of statesmen, ‘moral considerations seldom | appear to have much weight…| unless connected with popular feelings’. Henry Clay, bidding to be Vice-President, is ‘Defective in elementary knowledge and with a very | undigested system of ethics’. In fact, ‘almost all eminent men in this country’ are ‘half educated’. When he was President, ‘They (congress) wd. do nothing for | the education of boys but to make soldiers, they | wd. not endow a university (in 1826)’. Later, from the House of Representatives, he tried unsuccessfully to prevent the states from sacrificing ‘all their rights to the public lands’. (He might have saved some of the nation’s land ‘for the nation’, Pound remarked in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, if he had not been ‘deficient in capacity for human contacts’.) Everywhere he observed greed subverting the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, principles which he still steadfastly defended—
The world, the flesh, the devils in hell are
Against any man who now in the North American Union
shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to
put down the African slave trade…
The canto closes with a Latin inscription, ‘Constans proposito.…| Justum et Tenacem’, words which, as Adams recorded, were applied to him in recognition of his constancy of purpose and his tenacity in the abolitionist cause. Alongside them Pound set the Chinese character for true sincerity, which he read as an upright man standing by his word.
With that character Pound seals Adams’s self-portrait in his diaries as a faithful upholder of the revolutionary values of Jefferson and his father. Indeed he appears to stand, in his own account, as the solitary upholder of those values among a mob of venal, corrupt, and hostile mediocrities. However, the canto, as a dramatic monologue will do, brings out other less flattering features. The other side of his self-righteous isolation might be that ‘deficient…capacity for human contacts’, a considerable handicap in a politician, and he does indeed declare himself at one point in the canto ‘a misanthropist, an unsocial savage’. Moreover, whereas Jefferson and John Adams established the revolution ‘in the minds of the people’ through networks of correspondence, John Quincy, as we read him, is talking only to himself. He may be dramatizing what has happened to the democratic revolution, that it now depends on the mind of one man. At the same time, though, he is revealing his own unfitness to govern efficiently in a democracy. He suffered from ‘puritanitis’, Pound wrote in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, implying an inability to take humanity as it comes and to be committed to the politically possible. He was too absolute in his demands for justice and for social justice, perhaps because too concerned to be justified. He saved his own honour, Rhadamanthus might judge, but the state he could not save. A less severe judge could say, he stood for what was right, but could not bring it into effect. In canto 37 it will appear that Martin Van Buren, whom Adams rather looks down on as ‘L’ami de tout le monde’ and as a protector of the scandalous Mrs Eaton against ‘the moral party’, will be more successful in defending the public currency against the greed of private interests.
The banking and financial system will be the dominant concern of a sequence of cantos starting with 37. First though, the story of the American Revolution is interrupted by two very different cantos.
Canto 35 is concerned, in its first half, with the condition of ‘Mitteleuropa’ in the aftermath of the 1914–18 war and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire. A series of anecdotes in the sardonic manner of ‘Moeurs contemporains’ suggests that with the passing of the imperial order the prevailing values are now those of the cultivated Viennese Jewish family, personal, aesthetic, most warmly familial. One comment is, ‘sensitivity | without direction’; but another goes, ‘and the fine thing was that the family did not | wire about papa’s death for fear of disturbing the concert | which might seem to contradict the general indefinite wobble’. The general impression, especially after the four cantos concerned with the values of good government, is that there is now little or no civic sense in Austria and Hungary. The second half cuts to Mantua in 1401 and Venice in 1423, to observe two varieties of civic sense in that earlier age of Europe. In Mantua a loan bank is decreed, ‘to lend money on cloth so that they cease not to | labour for lack of money’; and with that arrangements are made to give Mantuan cloth a competitive edge over the surrounding cities, ‘to the augment of industry’ and increase in the wealth of the city. Also, it is sardonically remarked, to the luxurious clothing of ‘Madame ὕλη, Madame la Porte Parure’, alias Lucrezia Borgia who came, in canto 30, clothed ‘with the price of the [altar] candles’. Venice also is wholly materialistic in its dealings, regulating all trading in and out of Venice ‘for the upkeep of “The Dominant”’. Both cases, the Mantuan and the Venetian, exemplify a civic sense directed by a rational but rather limited self-interest.
Canto 36, placed in the middle and as the pivot of the 1934 Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI, consists of a translation of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’—a radically different translation from the one printed in Rime and the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay—and to that is attached, as if in response, a passage drawing in the Carolingian philosopher Scotus Erigena (?800–?877) and the Mantuan troubadour Sordello (?1189–?1255). Suddenly we are in another realm from that of the surrounding cantos, in the realm of ‘the intelligence of love’, apparently at the furthest remove from the events and concerns of the capitalist era. That distance suggests the readiest relation of this canto to the other ten, that it is presenting a reach of intelligence lost to the modern mind. Certainly Pound’s American observers see nothing of it in the courts of Europe, nor in Napoleon, nor in the owners of banks and factories, nor indeed among the majority of their fellow Americans; and that could be because that concept of love does not enter into their conversation and is simply not part of their culture. Nonetheless it may prove pertinent to our understanding of Pound’s representation of them, and to his dominant concern with economic order.
He gave a hint in 1933, when, in responding to the question ‘what has been the most important meeting of your life?’, he wrote that it was with Guido Cavalcanti, and that the meeting of minds was important for its bearing on ‘le problème des surréalistes: état de conscience et (ou) force morale’. The problem would be in the ‘and (or)’—to cultivate hyper-real (or ‘super-in-human’) states of consciousness with a moral or ethical direction, or to go for the one or the other. The remarkable thing, given that Cavalcanti is likely to be thought of as a love poet, is that there is no mention of romantic love. His significance for Pound is now in the sphere of the intellect and the will to order.
The argument of the Canzone d’amore, very simply put, is that the Light which is the life of all we know illuminates the receptive mind, takes form there, and thus informs and directs it to enlightened action. When Pound wrote that Jefferson ‘informed’ the American Revolution, ‘both in the sense of shaping it from the inside and of educating it’, he is likely to have had that idea in mind. The form of the beloved in that case was of course not figured as a donna ideale, but as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States; and its shaping power was constantly manifest in Jefferson’s ‘verbal manifestations’, in John Adams’s c
are for justice (the subject of the later ‘Adams Cantos’), and also in John Quincy Adams’s clear sense of the principles of the democratic revolution. One might say that the essential form of democratic justice so profoundly possessed their minds that it directed their every political word and action. The effect of thinking back to their cantos in the light of the Canzone d’amore is to have the focus shift from their words and deeds to that ‘forméd trace in [the] mind’, a telling shift from what passes in time to what is ‘in the mind indestructible’. In the Pisan prison camp Pound will be encouraged by the conviction that the precisely defined Constitution, though ‘in jeopardy | and that state of things not very new either’, is among the resurgent icons ‘formed in the mind | to remain there | formato locho |… to forge Achaia’.
Following the paradisal canto 36 we descend again into the purgatory of political action, and then, in canto 38, into the inferno of those who profit from arms sales.
Canto 37 contains the major episode in Pound’s treatment of the American Revolution in this suite of cantos: the critical war for supremacy between the effectively private Bank of the United States and President Jackson representing the people of the United States. The war was carried on in the Senate, in the financial economy, and in the press from 1829 to 1835. Pound took as his principal source for that part of the canto The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (published in 1918). Van Buren (1788–1862) was Secretary of State and then Vice-President (1833–7) to Andrew Jackson, and succeeded him as President (1837–41). Pound credited him with having been the brains behind Jackson’s saving the nation by freeing the Treasury from the despotism of the Bank, and the canto could lead the reader to see him as the main protagonist in that war, and to assume that his is the epitaph ‘HIC | JACET | FISCI LIBERATOR’, ‘here lies the Treasury’s Liberator’. However, in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s fully documented account of the Bank war, in his Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the Working of the American Government (1854), the hero is unquestionably President Jackson, and Van Buren is not seen to play a leading role, in part because while Vice-President he chaired the Senate Debates and could have no voice in them. (That difference raises the question of historical accuracy to which I will return.)
The first third of canto 37 weaves together thirty or more items, most of them things said by Van Buren or taken up by him over the many years from 1813 when he was a New York state senator to 1840 when he was President. The passage is a prime instance of Pound’s method of adding one detail to another without providing the conventional syntactical and logical connections, in order to allow a more complex web of relations to develop. Banks fraudulently failing, wealthy landowners and factory owners, high judges and the Chief Justice himself, senators, financial speculators, all are implicated in defrauding immigrants of the value of their banknotes, in driving settlers off the land they would cultivate, in denying workers the vote, in preventing local government of local affairs, and in ‘“decrying government credit. |…in order to feed on the spoils”’. Van Buren exposes and opposes this systematic injustice of the wealthy and powerful towards both the people and the state. He reaffirms the basic cause of ‘our revolution’, No taxation without representation; he insists that government revenue ‘be kept under public control’ and not be given over to the banks to speculate with; and he endorses President Jackson’s saying ‘No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, | Wealth ain’t’. All the details add up to an account of Van Buren’s ‘life-long fight for economic and social rightness in the U.S.’; and at the same time they indicate a national state of affairs in which the Bank war was a major and symptomatic event.
A condensed account of that war, from Van Buren’s point of view, is given in the rest of the canto, interspersed with his views of certain of his contemporaries, mostly unflattering, and with some of his political opponents’ unflattering views of him. John Quincy Adams had remarked ‘servility’ in him, others that he was ‘a profligate’; he remarks in return that Adams ‘deplored that representatives be paralyzed | by the will of constituents’. In short, he observes the imperfections of others and they observe his in the usual way of politics. But in the serious business of putting an end to the despotic power of the Bank he is impersonal and coolly forensic. He gives figures for how much the Bank increased the amount it had out on loan, from forty to seventy million dollars within two years, when its charter was coming up for renewal; he mocks Daniel Webster’s then complaining that if the charter were not immediately renewed that thirty million dollars of loans would have to be called in; he gives figures again to show that while the Bank controls ‘6 millions of government money | (and a majority in the Senate)’, the President has control of only ‘15 to 20 thousand’; he charges the Bank with deliberately creating panic to obtain ‘control over the public mind’, and to keep control over the public credit; and he charges Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, with ‘controlling government’s funds | to the betrayal of the nation’ and never hesitating, on the precedent of Alexander Hamilton the Bank’s first founder, ‘to jeopard the general | for advance of particular interests’. In the event President Jackson vetoed the Senate’s bill which would have renewed the charter, gradually withdrew the government’s funds from the Bank of the United States, and so ‘saved the nation and freed the American treasury’.
Those are Pound’s words, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, only he was applying them there to Van Buren, as he does at the end of the canto. For that he could be open to the charge of misrepresenting the historical facts. But then it could be said in his defence that he was presenting an interpretation of the facts, as historians generally do. In crediting Van Buren with freeing the public treasury from private control he was in effect declaring that while Jackson wielded the presidential veto it was Van Buren’s brains and will that were the efficient force directing him in that act. There is more going on here than an alternative version of who did what. Pound was privileging the moral force over the mere fact, in order to create another Jeffersonian hero, an ethical hero, consistently committed to a just ordering of society.
‘Canto XXXVIII. where is FACTS’, Pound wrote to Ford in 1934, ‘where facts is what there aint nothing else BUT.’ He had been telling him how to read the earlier Hell cantos, and mentioned canto 38 in that connection, with the implication that it was a more ‘lyric’ hell and of ‘greater force’. Its hell is not that of England just after the war, but rather that of contemporary Europe at large; and its facts are mainly drawn from Pound’s current reading and recent conversations. It would have been thoroughly topical to the readers of Orage’s Douglasite New English Weekly in which it first appeared in September 1933.14
Its central and blindingly illuminating fact—a light from paradise, the canto declares it—is Douglas’s diagnosis of the canker at the core of capitalism, the fact that ‘the power to purchase can never | (under the present system) catch up with | prices at large’. That, Pound would have readers of his prose understand, is ‘THE evil of the capitalist system’, by which he meant ‘the basic evil causing all the particular evils’. The prevalent Depression would have been the most immediate particular evil, but this canto does not go into that.
Instead its final part brings into focus the anomalous fact that, while all else in the economy was sinking, the arms industry remained buoyant. Governments that could not or would not subsidize the consumption and thus the production of the necessities of life nevertheless could and did invest in the production and purchase of the means of mass killing. That meant that manufacturing and trading in armaments was more profitable, as Pound observed in one of his prose articles, ‘than the production of foodstuffs, the improvement of housing or any other act conducive to causing men to live like human beings’. In the canto he has ‘Herr Schneider of Creusot’ say, “More money from guns than from tractiles”’. Monsieur Schneider had said words to that effect in 1932, at a meeting of the Société Anonyme Schneider et cie at which a dividend was declar
ed ‘of 100 francs on every 400 franc share’. ‘“While our departments of railway and marine…are suffering considerably from the general crisis”’, he reported, ‘“the departments preparing the defence of our country have…been more than moderately satisfactory.”’ Another French manufacturer of both agricultural machinery and artillery reported likewise that the ‘works engaged on war material are going nicely’ thanks to important government orders, while ‘the others work with great irregularity’ because ‘orders from private concerns have greatly diminished’. The arms industry was becoming the dominant force in the French economy. It was able to draw on unlimited bank credit since profits were guaranteed by government investment and a sellers’ market of both ‘friends and enemies of tomorrow’; it was able to control the press through its shareholdings; and it had its representatives in parliament. In effect the Comité des Forges, the union of arms manufacturers, now held the position in France that the Bank of the United States had held in America a century before, that of a virtual state within the state, and one able and willing to put its own business interests before the interests of the nation—‘“faire passer ses affaires | avant ceux de la nation”’. The war now, as Pound saw it, was ‘between humanity at large and one of the most ignoble oligarchies the world has yet suffered’. And that oligarchy, that military–industrial complex, was the creation, as the private Bank of the United States had been, of the evil financial system.
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