Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  [268] The Essays of Virgina Woolf, vol. III, 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 3.

  [269] That is to say, precisely the situation that has emerged, when one talks for example of the “music industry,” or the “movie industry.” One might just as well also state: the “art industry,” and the “literature industry,” as culture is now all but dominated by commercial interests.

  [270] Ezra Pound, “The New Sculpture,” The Egoist, February 16, 1914, pp. 67–68.

  [271] Mullins, This Difficult Individual, p. 194.

  [272] T. S. Eliot, The Criterion, January 1935, p. 262.

  [273] Janine Stingel, Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

  [274] Some prominent advocates of “Douglas Social Credit” contend that the theory cannot be considered without reference to guild socialism and to A. R. Orage, and state that the original Social Credit articles that appeared in The New Age were co-written by Douglas and Orage. Orage’s advocacy of Social Credit split the Fabian socialists. See Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism (London: Routledge, 1997). Hutchinson and Burkitt allude to the term “Social Credit” first being used by Orage. See their “Major Douglas’ Proposals for a National Dividend,” International Journal of Social Economics, 21 (1994): 19–28, n4.

  [275] Ezra Pound, Social Credit: An Impact (1935) (London: Peter Russell, 1951).

  [276] The Green Shirts, the militant arm of Social Credit in England, marched through the streets with drums beating and banners unfurled, holding mass street rallies, publishing a newspaper, and throwing green painted bricks through bank windows to publicize their views when charges brought the perpetrators before court. It was militancy on par with Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts. See K. R. Bolton, John Hargrave and the British Greenshirts (Paraparaumu, New Zealand: Renaissance Press, 2001).

  [277] Pound, Social Credit, p. 1.

  [278] Pound, Social Credit, p. 6.

  [279] Pound, Social Credit, p. 6.

  [280] Pound, Social Credit, pp. 6–7.

  [281] There is a subtle difference between “money,” or notes and coins, and “credit” or book- (today, computer)-keeping entries; most commerce is undertaken with credit rather than with notes and coins.

  [282] Pound, Social Credit, p. 9.

  [283] Pound, Social Credit, p. 13.

  [284] Pound, Social Credit, p. 15.

  [285] Pound, Social Credit, p. 15.

  [286] Pound, Social Credit, p. 15.

  [287] Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 1935 (New York: Liveright, 1970), p. 126.

  [288] Pound was not originally impressed by Hitler, referring in 1935 for example to “hysterical Hitlerian yawping” (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 127).

  [289] Ezra Pound, A Visiting Card (Rome, 1942) (London: Peter Russell, 1952), pp. 29, 33.

  [290] E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St. Elizabeths (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984), p. 138.

  [291] Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 34.

  [292] Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 127.

  [293] The “corporate state” was the parliamentary structure of Fascist Italy based on occupational and professional representation rather than party representation. It was one of the syndicalist elements inherited by Fascism.

  [294] Pound, Social Credit, p. 7.

  [295] Pound, Social Credit, p. 19.

  [296] A clear reference to the use of state credit in New Zealand, and also in Australia and Canada.

  [297] Pound, Social Credit, p. 19.

  [298] Bertram De Colonna, “The Truth About Germany,” The Mirror (Auckland, New Zealand), 1938. See K. R. Bolton, Recovery: Hitler’s Financial Policy Explained (Paraparaumu, New Zealand: Renaissance Press, 2001).

  [299] Stephen M. Goodson, “Why the USA Forced the Empire of Japan into World War II,” The Barnes Review, vol. 14, no. 6, November–December, 2008.

  [300] Mullins, This Difficult Individual: Ezra Pound, p. 154.

  [301] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 135.

  [302] British Union Quarterly published eight of Pound’s articles between 1936–1940 (Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 137).

  [303] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 137.

  [304] Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Nelson, 1968), p. 226.

  [305] Ezra Pound, “The Revolution Betrayed,” BUF Quarterly, 1938. Reprinted in Selections from BUF Quarterly (Marietta, Ga.: The Truth at Last, 1995), pp. 48–55.

  [306] Ezra Pound, America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War (Venice, 1944) (London: Peter Russell, 1951). In their enthusiasm for Lincoln’s “Greenbacks,” monetary reformers generally do not appreciate that the Confederacy also issued its own state credit, the “Graybacks.”

  [307] Pound, America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, p. 5.

  [308] Orthodox Social Credit theory is opposed to “state credit” seeing this as akin to communism and leading to state serfdom. Any concentration of economic or political power is anathema to Social Credit orthodoxy. The orthodox viewpoint insists that “Social Credit” must be issued by an independent “credit authority” that is not associated with the state. This question however, causes considerable factionalism within Social Credit groups, which might seem analogous to the utter seriousness taken among socialist factions in their dispute over what constitutes “true Marxism.” In New Zealand’s successful experiment with “state credit” during the Great Depression, the primary advocate of state credit in the Labour Government, John A. Lee, commented that Douglas’ analysis of the flaws of the financial system is valuable, and that his New Zealand tour served as the major impetus for the widespread demand for banking reform in 1934, but that the actual methods of implementation by the Government would have to be through a State-owned Reserve Bank. See John A. Lee, Money Power for the People: A Policy for the Future Suggested (Auckland: n.p., 1937), p. 4.

  [309] Robert Skidelsky, Mosley (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 345.

  [310] Alexander Raven Thomson, The Economics of British Fascism (London: Bonner and Co., n.d., ca. 1935), p. 7.

  [311] Alexander Raven Thomson, Our Financial Masters (London: British Union of Fascists, 1937), pp. 15–16.

  [312] BUF Aberdeen organizer. See Stephen M. Cullen, “The Fasces and the Saltire: The Failure of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland, 1932–1940,” The Scottish Historical Journal, 83, 2008, p. 313. Chamber-Hunter’s Aberdeen branch was one of the few that were successful in Scotland, and Mosley presented him with the BUF Gold Award in 1937. He resigned from the BUF in 1939 “to pursue his interest in Social Credit (ibid., p. 316).

  [313] W. K. A. J. Chamber-Hunter, British Union and Social Credit (London: British Union, ca. 1938).

  [314] Alexander Raven Thomson, “Causes of the Slump,” BUF Quarterly, 1937; Selections from BUF Quarterly, p. 20.

  [315] Anne Brock Griggs, “Food or Usury?,” BUF Quarterly, 1936; Selections from BUF Quarterly, pp. 34–37.

  [316] Henry Swabey, “From Just Price to Usury,” BUF Quarterly, 1939; Selections from BUF Quarterly, pp. 71–78.

  [317] Ezra Pound, What is Money For? (1939) (London: Peter Russell, 1951), p. 12.

  [318] Ezra Pound: Selected Poems, 1908–1959 (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), “Canto XLV: With Usura,” pp. 147–48.

  [319] Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, p. 127.

  [320] Ezra Pound, What is Money For?, p. 12.

  [321] MacLeish also supported Social Credit.


  [322] Mullins, This Difficult Individual, pp. 196–97.

  [323] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 158.

  [324] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 175.

  [325] MacLeish had become assistant secretary in the US State Department.

  [326] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 176.

  [327] Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 86.

  [328] Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World, p. 86.

  [329] Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World, p. 91.

  [330] Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World, p. 92.

  [331] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 222.

  [332] Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World, p. 96.

  [333] Random House refused to include any works by Pound in a poetry anthology, although one of the editors had chosen twelve of Pound’s poems for inclusion. Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 416.

  [334] Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World, p. 98.

  [335] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, pp. 254–55.

  [336] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, pp. 228–29.

  [337] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 262.

  [338] Torrey, The Roots of Treason, p. 263.

  [339] Peter Russell, “Publisher’s Note,” 1950, Ezra Pound, Social Credit: An Impact.

  [340] Skidelsky, Mosley, pp. 493–94.

  [341] Stock authored The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Random House, 1970) and Poet in Exile: Ezra Pound.

  [342] Goacher, the British actor and poet, went to Washington in 1953 and became Pound’s secretary, typing his poetry and essays. He was important in campaigning for Pound’s release and thereafter visited Pound in Italy. Goacher became “drama critic” for Mosley’s European. See Nicholas Johnson, “Obituary: Denis Goacher,” The Independent, May 6, 1998.

  [343] Ezra Pound, “Ci de los Cantares,” The European, vol. 12, no. 6, February 1959, pp. 382–84. This issue also carries a review by Alan Neame of Ronald Firbank’s play, “Valmouth” (p. 372). Also in this issue is a revisionist article by Noel Stock, citing Harry Elmer Barnes, discussing financial sources for the Russian Revolution, and alluding Poundian-style to usury as the cause of civilizational collapse (“Blackout on History,” pp. 337–43). Alan Neame’s poem “Levant Elevenses,” appears in the July 1958 issue of The European, vol. 11, no. 5, p. 305. Denis Goacher’s poem, “In Memoriam New Statesman,” satirizes the bourgeois liberal of that magazine, and spoofs their obliviousness to the cultural decay of Britain, with its “rock and roll” and “stereophonic crooning . . .” (vol. 12, no. 4, December 1958, pp. 250–51).

  [344] Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and His World, p. 115.

  [345] Frederic Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Fascist as Modernist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 1.

  [346] In the Preface to Tarr: The 1918 Version, ed. Paul O’Keefe (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Black Sparrow Press, 1990) Lewis laments that Nietzscheanism has “made an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe.”

  [347] William H. Pritchard, Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 2.

  [348] Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (1932) (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Black Sparrow Press, 1984).

  [349] Bradford Morrow, “A History of an Unapologetic Apologia: Roy Campbell’s Wyndham Lewis,” Blast 3 (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), p. 11.

  [350] Morrow, “A History of an Unapologetic Apologia,” p. 11.

  [351] E. W. F. Tomlin, “Wyndham Lewis: The Emancipator,” Blast 3, p. 109.

  [352] Tomlin, “Wyndham Lewis: The Emancipator,” p. 110.

  [353] Tomlin, “Wyndham Lewis: The Emancipator,” p. 110.

  [354] William C. Wees, “Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism,” Blast 3, p. 47.

  [355] Wees, “Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism,” p. 49.

  [356] Blast 2 (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Black Sparrow Press, 1981).

  [357] Wees, “Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism,” p. 48.

  [358] Wees, “Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism,” p. 49.

  [359] T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” Speculations (1911), (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1936), p. 114.

  [360] Wees, “Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism,” p. 49.

  [361] See for example the Chinese ideograms illustrating the concept of Confucian social order in Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini (New York: Liveright, 1970), ch. 29, “Kung,” which he equates with Fascist order. Also the Chinese ideograms used in Pound’s Cantos LI and LIII.

  [362] Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up-to-Date (London: Hutchinson, 1950), p. 129.

  [363] Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (1918) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 25–26.

  [364] Wyndham Lewis, “The Code of a Herdsman” can be read at: http://www.gingkopress.com/09-lit/code-of-herdsman.html

  [365] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 78–81.

  [366] Roy Campbell, “Wyndham Lewis,” Blast 3, p. 15.

  [367] Campbell, “Wyndham Lewis,” p. 23.

  [368] Campbell, “Wyndham Lewis,” p. 16.

  [369] Campbell, “Wyndham Lewis,” p. 18.

  [370] Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 111.

  [371] Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Nelson, 1968), p. 225.

  [372] Wyndham Lewis, “Left Wings,” British Union Quarterly, January–April 1937, in Selections from BUF Quarterly (Marietta, Ga.: The Truth at Last, 1995), p. 137.

  [373] Lewis, “Left Wings,” British Union Quarterly, p. 137.

  [374] K. R. Bolton, “November 1917: Wall Street and the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution,” Ab Aeterno, no. 5, October–December 2010.

  [375] Lewis, “Left Wings,” p. 137.

  [376] Yet he rejected Pound’s admonition to study C. H. Douglas’ Social Credit economics and referred to “credit-cranks”—Lewis, The Hitler Cult (London: Dent, 1939), p. 26, apparently not offering a practical alternative to what he also termed “Credit Kings” and the “Emperors of Debt.” See Wyndham Lewis, Doom of Youth (New York: McBride, 1932), p. 35.

  [377] Lewis, Doom of Youth, p. 35.

  [378] Paradoxically, Lewis, despite his support for Hitler and Mosley, had never supported Italian Fascism, regarding it as being “political futurism.” Bryant Knox, “Ezra Pound on Wyndham Lewis’s Rude Assignment,” Blast 3, p. 161.

  [379] Wyndham Lewis, Left Wings Over Europe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), pp. 164–65.

  [380] Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), p. 262.

  [381] Spengler did not “disparage” other cultures; he sought to describe their inner essence as a detached observer.

  [382] Lewis, Time and Western Man, pp. 39–40.

  [383] Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 42.

  [384] Lewis, Time and Western Man, pp. 51–52.

  [385] Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 53.

  [386] Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 53.

  [387] Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 69.

  [388] Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 263.

  [389] Wyndham Lewis, Rotting Hill (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 257.

  [390] Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the “Melting-Pot” (New York: Haskell House, 1929), p. 196.

  [391] Lewis, Paleface, p. 82.

  [392] Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 138.

  [393] Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmi
c Man (New York: Country Life Press, 1949), p. 18.

  [394] Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, p. 27.

  [395] Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, pp. 30–31.

  [396] Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, pp. 158–59.

  [397] Wyndham Lewis, “If So the Man You Are,” 1948, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 73–74.