Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  but it is made to sell and to sell quickly

  with usura, sin against nature,

  is thy bread ever more of stale rags

  is thy bread dry as paper, . . .

  and no man can find site for his dwelling.

  Stone cutter is kept from his stone

  weaver is kept from his loom

  WITH USURA

  wool comes not to market

  sheep bringeth no gain with usura . . .

  Usura rusteth the chisel

  It rusteth the craft and the craftsman

  It gnaweth the thread in the loom . . .

  Usura slayeth the child in the womb

  It stayeth the young man’s courting

  It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

  between the young bride and her bridegroom

  CONTRA NATURAM

  They have brought whores to Eleusis

  Corpses are set to banquet

  at behest of usura.[318]

  “With Usura” precisely reflects Pound’s position that the financial system denies the cultural heritage and creativity of the people, creates poverty amidst plenty, and fails to act as a mechanism for the exchange of the productive and cultural heritage, by making credit a commodity instead of a means of exchange. Creativity either fails to reach its destination or is stillborn. We might with this poem in particular understand why Pound felt the problem of banking and credit to be of crucial concern to artists.

  Caged

  From the late 1930s Pound began to look with favor at the economic system created by Hitler’s regime and regarded the Rome-Berlin Axis as “the first serious attack on usurocracy since the time of Lincoln.” Several years after referring to “hysterical Hitlerian yawping,”[319] and by this time aware of the war that was being agitated against Germany, Pound quoted from Mein Kampf in regard to usury:

  The struggle against international finance and loan capital has become the most important point in the National Socialist programme: the struggle of the German nation for its independence and freedom.[320]

  In April 1939 Pound went to the US to try and garner support against America’s entry into a war that he saw was approaching against Germany. He told Archibald MacLeish[321] during an interview for the Atlantic Monthly, that he had not come to the US to talk about literature, but to convince his countrymen to keep out of any European conflagration, in the hope that if war could not be averted, it could at least be confined.[322]

  In 1940, after having returned to Italy, Pound offered his services as a radio broadcaster. The broadcasts, called “The American Hour,” began in January 1941.[323]

  In July 1943 Mussolini was deposed, and Pound was indicted for treason by a grand jury in the District of Columbia, along with seven Americans who had been broadcasting for Germany. Hemingway, concerned at the fate of his old mentor after the war, suggested the possibility of an “insanity” plea,[324] and the idea caught on among some of his literary friends who had obtained good jobs in the US government.[325] Other interests were pressing for the death penalty.

  With the American invasion, Pound headed for the Salò Republic, the Fascist last stand, where he wrote a flow of articles, mostly on economic reform, and in December, 1943 resumed his radio broadcasts.

  Mussolini was murdered on April 28, 1945. On May 2, Pound was taken from his home by Italian partisans after he had unsuccessfully attempted to turn himself over to the American forces. Putting a book of Confucius into his pocket, he went with the partisans expecting to be hanged, as a bloodlust was now turned against those who had been loyal to Mussolini.[326] Instead, he ended up in an American camp at Pisa constructed for the most vicious military prisoners. Pound was confined in a bare iron cage in the burning heat, sleeping on the concrete floor, brilliantly lighted throughout the night. This was what Pound later called the “gorilla cage.” Esquire commented: “The dust and the light soon became intolerable; he became physically very weak; he lost his memory, eventually he broke down.”[327]

  He was transferred to a medical facility and lived in a small tent. “Despite his extraordinary predicament, Pound’s native spirit soon returned and he was writing his new Cantos.”[328]

  In November 1945, he was flown to Washington and jailed. While Hemingway, et al. had planned to have Pound declared “insane” to avoid treason charges, the conditions he had been subjected to had in fact caused him to mentally and physically break down, and by the time he reached Washington his lawyer, Julien Cornell, described Pound as being “in a rather desperate condition.”[329] On December 21 he was sent to St. Elizabeths mental hospital. Again, conditions were atrocious. The ward was for the criminally insane, and “reeked of sweat and urine.” He lived in fear of the other inmates. On February 13, 1946, formal hearings declared him to be of unsound mind, and was kept at St. Elizabeths for eleven years.[330] Here his literary output continued, and he translated 300 traditional Chinese poems that were published by Harvard University Press in 1954.[331] He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the “Pisan Cantos,” the award causing uproar amidst accusations of “Fascist infiltrators,” but scholarly interest in Pound increased widely.[332] Others tried to consign him to oblivion.[333]

  In 1958, the indictment for treason was dropped, after years of campaigning for his release by influential friends such as Eliot, MacLeish, Robert Frost, Congressman Usher L. Burdick,[334] and even UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld who maintained a correspondence with Pound and was among those campaigning for Pound’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[335]

  Throughout his ordeal, Pound maintained his political beliefs, and among the visitors to St. Elizabeths seeking the wisdom of “Granpaw” was John Kasper, a fiery young intellectual and admirer of Pound’s poetry who became well-known for his tours of the South defending segregation. Kasper saw Pound frequently and maintained a weekly correspondence. Kasper became Pound’s protégé. He established a right-wing bookshop and a publishing venture under Pound’s guidance, the “Square Dollar Series.” Kasper’s strident pro-segregation leaflets, which he distributed throughout the South, were inspired by Pound’s poetic style.[336]

  When Pound was released after thirteen years of confinement, eleven in an asylum, journalists who interviewed him concluded that Pound, while eccentric, did not display any signs of insanity.[337]

  On June 30, 1958, Pound set sail for Italy. When he reached Naples, he gave the Fascist salute to journalists and declared, “all America is an insane asylum.”[338] He continued with The Cantos and stayed in contact with political personalities such as Kasper and Mosley. He remained defiantly opposed to the American system when giving interviews, despite the protests of US diplomats to the Italian government.

  In 1951, Peter Russell, a London publisher, reprinted many of Pound’s pamphlets on economics, which he stated was “essential to the full understanding of [Pound’s] major poetical work, The Cantos.” Russell commented that although the publication of the pamphlets had no political motive, they are “a healthy reaction . . . to the vicious plutocracy and the destructive bureaucracy which seem today to be the twin tyrants of our uneasy world.”[339]

  Pound continued to write for Mosley as he had before the war, which drew the interest of a new generation of admirers of Pound’s poetry,[340] including the scholars Alan Neame, Noel Stock,[341] and Denis Goacher.[342] A 1959 issue of Mosley’s journal, The European,[343] carries Pound’s “Ci de los Cantares,” a mixture of Chinese characters and terms as well as references to Yeats, bygone statesmen, percentages and prices, and non-usurious banking practices: “Gaudin did not pay interest on government credit. Nor did Kang Hi.”

  Pound died on November 1, 1972, “the last of a generation which had tried to create art and literature on an heroic scale.”[344]

  Wyndham Lewis

  WYNDHAM LEWIS, 1882–1957, is credited with founding the only modernist cultural movement indigen
ous to Britain. Nonetheless, he is seldom spoken of in the same breath as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others of his generation.[345] Lewis was one of a number of cultural figures who rejected the legacy of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism and democracy that had descended on the twentieth.

  However, unlike many other writers who eschewed democracy, liberalism, and “the Left,” Lewis also rejected the counter-movement that sought to return to the past and embrace the intuitive, the emotional, and the instinctual above the intellectual and the rational. Lewis particularly denounced D. H. Lawrence for his espousal of instinct above reason and for what appeared to be a celebration of the doctrine of the “noble savage,” which has served as the basis of liberalism from the eighteenth century on.

  Lewis was an extreme individualist, while rejecting the individualism of nineteenth-century liberalism. His espousal of a philosophy of distance between the cultural elite and the masses brought him to Nietzsche, although he was appalled by the popularity of Nietzsche among all and sundry,[346] and to Fascism and the praise of Hitler, but to the rejection of these also as appealing to the masses.

  Born in 1882 on a yacht off the shores of Nova Scotia, his mother was English, his father an eccentric American army officer without income who soon deserted the family. Wyndham and his mother arrived in England in 1888. He attended Rugby and the Slade School of Art,[347] both of which obliged him to leave. He then wandered the art capitals of Europe being influenced by Cubism and Futurism.

  In 1922, Lewis exhibited his portfolio of drawings that had been intended to illustrate an edition of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, in which Timon is depicted as a snapping puppet. This illustrated Lewis’s view that man can rise above the animal by classical detachment and control, but that the majority of men will always remain as puppets or automata. Having read Nietzsche, Lewis was intent on remaining a Zarathustrian figure, solitary upon his mountaintop far above the mass of humanity.

  Vortex

  Lewis was originally associated with the Bloomsbury group, the pretentious and snobbish intellectual denizens of a delineated area of London who could make or break an aspiring artist or writer. He soon rejected these parlor pink liberals and vehemently attacked them in The Apes of God.[348] This resulted in a turning point—a downward turn—in Lewis’s career: “Raucous controversy followed.” The manuscript had been rejected by Lewis’s publisher, Chatto and Windus, and he had published the book himself under the imprint of “The Arthur Press.” Matters were not helped by Lewis’s Hitler in 1931. His close supporter Roy Campbell was also dragged down with him,[349] although Campbell would clearly have suffered the same opposition from Bloomsbury because of his own views.

  One biographer has written: “The triumphs of the late twenties, triumphs which included generally favorable critical response . . . were temporarily forgotten in the critical-legal-popular-cat hullabaloo . . . ,” and Lewis became a “bad risk” for publishers.[350] Bloomsbury was a powerful coterie that “could go so far as to excommunicate and to ostracize.”[351]

  To stand out against this kind of opposition was not easy. Yet that was precisely what Lewis did, despite lack of funds and a refusal to throw himself on the mercy of “well-connected” persons. During the 1930s, when it was the fashion in Britain to assume a left-wing viewpoint, Lewis would have none of it.[352]

  E. W. F. Tomlin remarks on Lewis’s revolt against the fashionable Left and its relevance today:

  When one reflects upon the radical political sympathies displayed by men who have since joined the Establishment, Lewis’s own refusal to be badgered, jockeyed, or inveigled into alliance with the left-wing intelligentsia shows stoutness of character and independence of spirit. And now that a New Left has arisen, Lewis’s work possesses fresh relevance especially as today’s radicalism combines its assault upon the “foundations of society” with the most pitiful essays in the scabrous. . . . How Lewis would have trounced it all . . .[353]

  Breaking with Bloomsbury’s Omega Workshop, Lewis founded the Rebel Art Centre from which emerged the Vorticist movement and their magazine Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex,[354] “blowing away dead ideas and worn-out notions,” as Lewis put it.[355] Signatories to the Vorticist Manifesto included Ezra Pound, French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and painter Edward Wadsworth. T. S. Eliot was also an adherent, contributing articles to Blast 2.[356]

  Pound, who described the vortex as “the point of maximum energy,” coined the name Vorticism. Although Lewis had found both the stasis of Cubism and the frenzied movement of Futurism interesting, he became indignant at Marinetti’s description of him as a Futurist and wished to found an indigenous English modernist movement. The aim was to synthesize Cubism and Futurism.[357] Vorticism would depict the static point from which energy arose. It was also very much concerned to reflect contemporary life where the machine was coming to dominate but rejected Futurism’s romantic glorification of the machine.[358]

  Both Pound and Lewis were influenced by the Classicism of the art critic and philosopher T. E. Hulme, a radical conservative. Hulme rejected nineteenth-century humanism and romanticism in the arts as reflections of the Rousseauian (and ultimately communistic) belief in the natural goodness of man when uncorrupted by civilization, and of human nature as infinitely malleable by a change of environment and social conditioning. Hulme writes:

  . . . People of all classes, people who stood to lose by it, were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty. There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing. There was, and here I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.

  One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

  . . . Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.[359]

  Hulme makes it clear that “romanticism” is the dogmatic underpinning of the dominant liberal paradigm of Western societies.

  Lewis’s classicism is constructed around a set of dichotomies: classicism versus romanticism, reason versus emotion, intellect versus intuition and instinct, masculine versus feminine, aristocracy versus democracy, the individual versus the masses, and later fascism versus communism. The Vorticist aesthetic lent itself readily to proto-fascist and conservative interpretations: “disciplined, blunt, thick, and brutal” designs, clarity and form as opposed to the art that dissolves in the “vagueness of space,” as Lewis described it.[360]

  Artistically, classicism also meant clarity of style and distinct form. Pound was drawn to the manner in which, for example, Chinese ideograms depicted ideas succinctly.[361] Hence, art and writing were to be based on terseness and clarity of image. The subject was viewed externally in a detached manner. Pound and Hulme had founded the Imagist movement on classicist lines. This was now superseded by Vorticism, depicting the complex but clear geometrical patterns of
the machine age. In contradiction to Italian Futurism, Vorticist art aimed not to depict the release of energy but to freeze it in time. While depicting the swirl of energy, the central axis of stability distinguished Vorticism from Futurism. Vorticism was however rejected by Lewis during the course of the First World War as being “bleak and empty,” as something that needed “filling,” while in literature, words and syntax should not be subjects of abstraction.[362]

  In his novel Tarr, published as a monument to himself should he be killed in the war in which he served as a forward observation officer with the artillery, he lambastes the bohemian artists and literati exemplified in England by the Bloomsbury coterie:

  . . . Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent Nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar bohemianism. . . . You are concentrated, highly-organized barley water: there is nothing in the universe to be said for you: any efficient state would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe—that old hat and the rest—as infectious, and prohibit you from propagating.

  . . . A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West . . . that any resolute power will be able to wipe up overnight, with its eyes shut. Your kind meantime make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in your neighborhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual: you are the advance-copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism. You are not an individual: you have, I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the apple and eat it too. You should be in uniform and at work, not uniformly out of uniform and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?