The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him, don’t shoot the President.

  Assassins deserve worse, but don’t shoot him. Assassination only

  makes more murderers … Don’t shoot him, diagnose him,

  diagnose him.

  ezra pound

  in a radio broadcast from Rome,

  February 18, 1943

  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:

  This war is proof of such vast incomprehension, such tangled ignorance, so many strains of unknowing—I am held up, enraged by the delay needed to change the typing ribbon, so much is there that ought to be put down, be put into young America’s head. I don’t know what to put down, can’t write two scripts at once. The necessary facts, ideas come in pell-mell, I try to get too much into ten minutes… Maybe if I had more sense of form, legal training, God knows what, I could get the matter across the Atlantic…

  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:

  O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,

  Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-

  shop,

  With the little bright boxes

  piled up neatly upon the shelves

  And the loose fragrant cavendish

  and the shag,

  And the bright Virginia

  loose under the bright glass cases,

  And a pair of scales not too greasy,

  And the whores dropping in for a word or two in

  passing,

  For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

  O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,

  Lend me a little tobacco-shop,

  or install me in any profession

  Save this damn’d profession of writing,

  where one needs one’s brains all the time.

  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, Her
mes 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.

  Hermes is not greedy, however. He likes the clink of coin but he has no hidden pile. Pictures of Hermes usually show him with a little bag of change, just enough to get the trading started. He’s no miser asleep on heaps of gold. He loves the fluidity of money, not the weight. When he’s a thief he’s usually a generous thief. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the newborn god steals some of Apollo’s cattle but immediately sacrifices them to the other gods. Later he invents the lyre and makes it a gift to Apollo, who, though he’s still angry about the cattle, gives Hermes a staff in return. Hermes is hardly a god of gift exchange, but as the gift is marked by motion, he is not its antagonist, either.

  Unlike the other gods, Hermes is never identified with a place. He can stay “on the road” because he has no territory to defend. Other Greek gods have, as it were, an ego position to uphold; they can always be pinned down, therefore, caught in a streak of vanity. Hermes is untrappable. It’s not that he’s humble, he’s shameless. After he steals Apollo’s cattle, Apollo (who’s very serious about right and wrong) takes the thief before Zeus. But Hermes just invents a fantastic lie, until Zeus, who knows very well what has happened, begins to laugh at his brassy denials. In that laugh Hermes remains free; he can’t be hooked on Apollo’s moral tone.

  Hermes is sexually shameless as well. In the Odyssey Hephaestus makes a magic net and catches his wife in bed with Ares. The gods gather around, laughing at the trapped adulterers, and when someone says, “Can you imagine yourself in Ares’ position?” only Hermes pipes up: “Yes!” He can climb into bed when the chance arises, but never gets stuck there. He has none of the virtues of the hearth. He’s a god of what we call “cheap sex,” sex on the highway. People who go through a series of casual affairs after a divorce have put themselves in the care of Hermes. Their other gods, those who call for more durable affection, may speak up (“Will he be with you on Christmas?”), but the first sparks of erotic fantasy cannot be struck from such serious tones.

  Hermes can’t be trusted, of course. They say “he either guides the way or leads astray.” If you are stuck, Hermes will get you into bed or sell you something or push you down the path, but after that there’s no guarantee. In this way he is identified with intellect and invention. In a Hermetic mood we will make a hundred intellectual connections only to find, when we check them with a less restless god, that ninety-nine of them are useless.

  Homer tells us that Zeus gave Hermes “an office … to establish deeds of barter amongst men throughout the fruitful earth,” and he has done his job well. He may be the twentieth century’s healthiest Greek god. He is present wherever things move quickly without regard to specific moral content, in all electronic communication, for example, or in the mails, in computers and in the stock exchange (especially in international money markets).

  Hermes will exchange gifts, but he is quite different from any god of the gift because his connections are made without concern for lasting affection. He isn’t opposed to durable bonds, he just doesn’t care. In a strict gift-consciousness, then, or in any consciousness with a high moral tone, Hermes will be forced into the background. If your god says, “Thou shalt not steal,” Hermes will not leave (he’s too tricky), but he will have to disguise himself. He’ll turn his collar around and sell Bibles over the radio.

  There are obvious connections between the mythology of Hermes and the European myth of the Jew. When the double law of Moses fell into disrepute, Christians identified themselves with the first half of the law, the call to brotherhood, and remembered the Jews primarily for the second half, the permission to usure. When a “limit to generosity” was dropped from the collective attitude, it reappeared in the collective shadow as a tricky Jew, skilled in trade and not part of the group. Furthermore, ever since the Diaspora the Jew has been seen as the uprooted one, the wanderer and the stranger. Jews in Europe were taken to be alocal, able to live in a place without becoming identified with it. Jews have always been attacked, therefore, in times of local nationalism.*

  Ezra Pound’s image of the Jew is basically an elaboration of this mythology. First of all, for Pound the Jew was an international force, bearing allegiance to no particular country and therefore destructive to all. Pound tells the English, for example, that they used to have a fine empire, “but you let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your Empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. Your allies in your victimized holdings are the bunya, that is, the money lender.”

  Second, as this quote already makes clear, for Pound the Jew is the usurer, not simply skilled in finance but a sneak thief who bleeds the nation. The “kike god” is monopoly, and “the first great HOAX” of these evil people “was substitution of kike god … for universal god.” The main trick of Jewish bankers is to secretly steal the banking powers away from local governments. “After Lincoln’s death the real power in the United States passed from the hands of the official government into those of the Rothschilds and others of their evil combine.”

  Third, for Pound the Jew is in charge of communication. Not only are the newspapers actually “Jewspapers,” but “the Morgenthau-Lehman gang control 99% of all means of communication inside the United States and … they can drown out and buy out nearly all opposition …” Jews fill the press and the radio waves with lies for their own selfish gain: “An artificial ignorance is diffused, artificially created by the usurocratic press …,” and so on.

  Finally, as you can see, Pound’s Jew has remarkable powers. He secretly controls huge nations, he controls ideas and intellectual life, he controls the money and he controls “99% of all means of communication.” Surely we are in the presence of a god! And though Hermes himself is not marked by the greed that Pound finds in this character, all the rest is pure Hermes—the Protector of Thieves and God of Commerce, the Messenger of the Gods and the Lord of the Roads.

  The character Pound seeks to describe has one final trait: he is diseased (or disease-transmitting). Pound once wrote a newspaper article with the simple title “The Jew: Disease Incarnate.” The sickness is sexual: “Jewish control is the syphilis of any gentile nation”; Jews are the “gonorrhoeal elements” of international finance. “Usury and sodomy the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.” The image here is an extension of the natural metapho
r out of which Pound works (as natural increase is sexual, so its enemy is a sexual disease), but I don’t think we will get very far trying to connect this part of Pound’s Jew to Pound’s ideas. Nor does it have much to do with Hermes. It has to do with psychological repression. An aspect of the self forced to remain in the shadow invariably takes on a negative cast not at all inherent in it. It becomes dirty or violent, trivial or huge, diseased or evil. To integrate the shadow with the ego involves holding a sort of dialogue with it in which these negative aspects fall away and the repressed element comes forward in a simplified form, accepted as “no big thing” into the daylight self. So long as the ego refuses commerce with the shadow, however, the shadow will always seem repulsive.

  There is a strange fairy tale in the brothers Grimm collection which pulls together all the threads of our story so far— Pound’s generosity toward his fellow artists, his turn toward money and political economy, his devotion to Mussolini, his willfulness, his Jew, and the consequences of repression. The tale is at once a drama of the Jew in the shadow of the European Christian and a parable of Ezra Pound’s life.

  The Jew in the Hawthorn Hedge

  Once upon a time there was an honest and hardworking servant who worked for a rich miser. The servant was always the first one out of bed in the morning and the last one in bed at night. Whenever there was a hard task no one else wanted to tackle, the servant would take it in hand. He never complained; he was always jolly.

  The miser kept the servant around by never paying him his wages. After three years, however, the servant announced that he wanted to see a bit of the world and he asked for his pay. The miser gave him three farthings, one for each year, saying, “That’s a bigger and handsomer wage than you would have received from many a master.” The good servant, who understood little about money, pocketed his capital and went on his way, up hill and down dale, singing and skipping to his heart’s content.