The Poet as Con Artist

Pound was in danger of facing a firing squad. Holder was returning to his family and a hero’s welcome. Yet it was Pound who hopped antically about the aisles, marveling at Bermuda’s “feldspar” waters, declaiming verses and political opinions. Holder, meanwhile, with the insecurity of one who didn’t know his Pluto from his Plato, responded with a yokel’s diffidence.

That same diffidence besets those who try today to explain why such an unambiguously hate-filled man occupies such an unambiguously central place in twentieth-century literature. William Carlos Williams may have been right when he claimed that Pound possessed “the most acute ear for metrical sequences, to the point of genius, that we have ever known.” Despite its bric-a-brac construction, often bewildering syntax, and obscure allusions in two dozen languages, Pound’s gigantic poem The Cantos — composed in pieces between 1915 and his death in 1972 — stands high in the critical canon.

His career as impresario was even more commanding, taking him through English, French, Italian, and American culture, in each of which he was a major taste-maker. It crossed eight decades — Pound palled around with Henry James and listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles with Allen Ginsberg. He was William Carlos Williams’s earliest poetic friend. He took an inchoate project of T. S. Eliot’s and molded it into The Waste Land, the century’s central poem. He was the first champion of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He steered William Butler Yeats into the mature idiom for which the Irishman is most remembered. He founded, almost as a publicity stunt, the “Imagist” school of American poetry, which is still studied in universities, and launched the careers of its leading practitioners, Army Lowell and “H.D.” (Hilda Doolittle, to whom he was briefly engaged). He helped start Poetry, the most influential American poetry magazine ever. He gave Wyndham Lewis the name “Vorticism” to describe the only important English modernist painting movement. Without him, asks Pound’s greatest recent defender, the literary critic Hugh Kenner, “what literature would America have to show for this century?”

Yet for half that century, Pound practiced a politics — not in any flight of irrationality but in a sustained, premediated, and unrepentant way — centered on the menace of “the ubiquitous Yidd.” It filled huge sections of his most popular poems and was fairly well summed up by his plea on Mussolini’s shortwave propaganda station at the height of World War II: “For God’s sake, read the Protocols” — the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the turn-of-the-century forgery promoted by Nazis and other anti-Semites.

There is a mystery here: As society has grown steadily more appalled by this kind of politics, it has grown steadily more comfortable with according Pound a high place as both a poet and an influence on poetry. Most critics solve the contradiction by separating “the poetry from the politics.” But that leaves us with a problem. Withdrawing the critical skepticism that usually attaches to the work and redirecting it toward the life has only worked to Pound’s benefit. In an oblique way, and without any active anti-Semitism on anybody’s part, the act of separating his bigotry from his poetry has led us to overvalue Ezra Pound as a poet.

 

I

Two new letter collections show Pound during his postwar confinement in Italy and at St. Elizabeths. The letters he exchanged with his wife Dorothy Shakespeare Pound in 1945 and 1946 have long been known to scholars and mined by biographers. This edition of the letters, edited by Robert Spoo and Omar Pound (Dorothy’s son), adds FBI files, U.S. government cables, and letters to Omar himself. The Pisan Cantos Pound was working on at the time were an autobiographical stocktaking, so the descriptions of his poetry in these letters provide an unusually full picture of everyone who passed through the first half of his life — with excellent biographies in the notes. A reader who wanted to learn about his life from primary sources could find no better place to start.

That life is both very American and not very American. In later self-mythologizing, Pound would make absurdly much of his having been born in an Idaho mining town. In fact, his parents were fairly polished, and Pound owed his frontier birth to his father’s serving a youthful stint in the family mining business. Pound’s paternal grandfather Thaddeus had been lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, served several terms in Congress, and was denied a seat in the Garfield cabinet only when J. G. Blaine objected to his live-in mistress. His mother’s family, cousins of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, owned a posh New York boardinghouse. Pound grew up outside Philadelphia, where his father held an important job in the federal mint.

Friendless much of the time, drifting from the University of Pennsylvania to Hamilton College (where he took his degree), ignominiously fired from his first job as a French teacher at Wabash College in Indiana, Pound debarked in London in 1908 with a privately printed first poetry collection and a desire to turn poetry on its ear. Some would say the half-dozen volumes he wrote before the age of thirty-five made a start.

In 1921, Pound moved to Paris, declaring London corrupt — although the waning of his influence relative to T. S. Eliot’s was surely as much to blame. He found Paris little better. While he dabbled in opera-writing and Dada and met most of the expatriates then crowding the city, his feel for French literature was shaky, and the poets there obstinately refused to take him seriously. By the time he left for Italy in 1925, his life was pivoting. He stopped writing short lyrics and poured all his output into The Cantos, a single narrative that would reach eight hundred pages by the time of his death. And he turned to fascism.

When war came, Pound agreed to broadcast pro-Mussolini propaganda to the United States — which would result in the treason charge on which he was held for months after the war in a succession of military jails, including the “gorilla cage” he describes in his Pisan Cantos. He avoided trial by pleading insanity. For twelve years he lived at St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane in Washington. Prominent American writers — particularly Eliot, Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway — secured his release in 1958, arguing his continued incarceration was becoming a national embarrassment. The condition for his freedom was that he leave the country. He did so gladly, living in Rapallo and Venice until his death in 1972.

 

II

Almost the first thing Pound did when he arrived in London in 1908 was wangle an entree to the salon of Yeats’s sometime lover Olivia Shakespear. This was Pound’s introduction to the society of poets, and he seemed inclined to pursue a courtship with the much older Olivia. But it was her daughter Dorothy who fell in love. Partly through inertia, partly through familial pressure, Pound would up marrying her in 1914. Dorothy’s income of £ 150 a year (considerably more than Eliot’s starting salary at Lloyd’s bank) can hardly have been a disincentive. For all his later railing against “usury,” Pound well understood the artistic uses to which compound interest could be put.

There was always a resonating intellectual sympathy between Dorothy and Ezra — she even adopted his epistolary tics, like “yr” for yours and “yesty” for yesterday — though their amatory passions lay elsewhere. In 1925, just settled in Italy, Ezra fathered a daughter by his lifelong mistress, the American violinist Olga Rudge. Dorothy fled to Egypt, where she herself wound up pregnant with Omar. (Olga finally won the battle for Pound’s affections. Pound moved into her Venice apartment in 1962 and spent the last decade of his life with her; Dorothy lasted out the same decade in the company of her cleaning ladies.)

In their letters from 1945 and 1946, Dorothy keeps Ezra posted on the doings of his eighty-six-year-old mother, then living out her old age in Rapallo, and describes her own efforts to reclaim her American citizenship, which had “lapsed” during the war. They share their reading: for her, Joseph Conrad (“such a relief — no women!”) and Francis Bacon (the Novum Organum, although Pound himself inclined more to Bacon’s essay on usury); for him, Charles Beard, Confucius, and the Washington tabloids. Pound asks her to look up various Confucian ideograms and to make financial arrangements for his “other” family.

Dorothy’s letters also contain the news that Fascists all over Europe, including many of Pound’s colleagues, were being put to death by their outraged countrymen. October: “So Laval is gone the way of all flesh.” November: “Paresce shot.” But for the grace of his American passport, Pound’s decades-long descent into Fascist politics might have ended the same way.

That descent began in 1919 when he met Major Clifford Hugh Douglas at the offices of London’s New Age. Douglas was a civil engineer and amateur economist who sought to explain why war so often creates economic booms. His answer — that, since output gets diverted into capital goods, workers never get enough in wages to buy back the products they make — was not entirely loopy. But it became so in the hands of Pound. He combined Douglas’s social-credit theories with his own esoteric readings on money to create a critique of “usury” — which, in turn, came to mean a cabal of Jewish financiers starting wars for profit. Pound took to reading literature for usury-consciousness the way adolescents do for purple passages. (“Look up Jas Hilton whose ‘Random Harvest’ mentions money ONCE,” he writes from Pisa.) He even began devoting his poetry to social-credit theories: Canto 38, for example, which lays out Douglas’s “A + B Theorem” at great length. “Put your book aside,” he urged the poet Louis Zukofsky. “Take up Social Credit.”

Pound thought Mussolini could be trusted to institute social-credit policies. On January 30, 1933 (coincidentally, the day Hitler took power in Germany), he got an audience with Mussolini on the pretext he could arrange favorable coverage of the regime in the American press. The two talked for thirty minutes, the dictator leafing through Pound’s Draft of XXX Cantos and pronouncing it divertente. Pound was proud of that: While never a member of the Fascist party, he thought Mussolini not just a statesman but an “artist.” As Humphrey Carpenter notes in his masterful Pound biography, A Serious Character:

By looking at the dictator in this fashion, he had found a way of coping with the fact that the man was a dictator. If he was an artist, then obviously he had the right to do as he saw fit.

Pound went on to write two books about Mussolini — ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini — and offered, when war loomed, to talk up Italian Fascism on short-wave radio.

Pound had always been race-conscious. In 1917, he wrote of a visit to New York,

Unfortunately the turmoil of yidds, letts, finns, esthonians, cravats, niberians, algerians, sweeping along Eighth Avenue in the splendour of their vigorous unwashed animality will not help us.

But as time went on, Pound developed a race hobby that made such sallies look jolly. He was, for instance, fascinated by circumcision, speculating that it warped the Jewish mind. To William Carlos Williams he wrote in 1936 that “history is written and character is made by whether and HOW the male foreskin produces an effect of glorious sunrise or of annoyance in slipping backward.” He dismissed rumors that Ford Madox Ford had a Jewish ancestor on the grounds that Ford “could not have enjoyed digging in the ground the way he did if he had any Jewish blood.”

This race-preoccupation mixed badly with the Italian radio broadcasts Pound began in the summer of 1940 and continued until Mussolini’s arrest in July 1943. Four times weekly he would greet listeners: “Europe calling, Ezra Pound speaking.” Sometimes he did bitter comedic routines, acting a character he called “American Imperialist,” or airing a parodic “News from Nowhere.” Occasionally he discussed poetry. But for the most part the broadcasts were devoted to warning his countrymen about the machinations of “high kikery”:

You have got to learn a little, at least a little, about the history of your allies. About Jew-ruin’d England. About the wreckage of France, wrecked under yidd control. Lousy with kikes.

Their minions — the “aryo-kikes” — were everywhere, from the American president “Franklin D. Frankfurter Jewsfeld” to the Chinese leader “Chiang Kike Chek.” Pound subscribed to the Nazi News from Germany throughout the war and after the fall of Mussolini made contact with the Nazis’ puppet government to ask if he could be of use. As he explained in a May 1942 broadcast, “Hitler, having seen the Jew Puke in the German democracy, was out for responsibility.”

If Pound’s contemporaries were slow to condemn him as evil, it might be because his evil was always being outrun by his ridiculousness. “Treason is a little too serious and a little too dignified a crime,” said Archibald MacLeish, “for a man who has made such an incredible ass of himself and accomplished so little in the process.”

 

III

Upon his return to America on November 18, 1945, to face trial, his Hamilton College classmate Elihu Root recommended to Pound the lawyer Lloyd Struker (another classmate, who would later defend Alger Hiss at his first perjury trial). But, on the advice of his publisher, James Laughlin, Pound chose Julien Cornell for his defense instead.

Now the question arose of how to defend him. Pound had an idea. Before each of his broadcasts, an announcer had read a disclaimer of Pound’s own composing: “He will not be asked to say anything contrary to his conscience or contrary to his duties as an American citizen.” He therefore insisted that he could not be tried for treason since he had been sending not Axis propaganda but “MY OWN stuff.”

This insistence was foolish, since claiming coercion would have been his best avenue of legal escape. Dorothy’s letters fed her husband’s bad judgment. She even saw her lawyer “on the point that you were sending yr. own stuff. I think its v. important.”

The United States would, in the end, deal lightly with its citizens who made hostile broadcasts. Iva d’Aquino, the Japanese propagandist known as “Tokyo Rose,” got only ten years. (The comparison of her sentence with Pound’s would work in his favor when poets began agitating for his release.) But no one knew that at the time, and the climate among American allies had been anything but lenient. The British Nazi broadcasters John Amery and William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw,” with whom Pound had been in close contact throughout the war) were hanged. In France, Pierre Laval went the way of all flesh and Marshal Petain was spared execution only because of his age — making a big impression on Pound, if we are to believe Canto 79: And Petain not to be murdered 14 to 13 / after six hours’ discussion.

A more telling parallel was the case of Robert Brasillach, the French novelist whose writings in fe suis partout were presented as “pro-French.” They just happened to urge a Frenchness that involved collaboration with the occupying Germans and wholesale massacres of Jews. When Brasillach was executed in early 1945, despite strenuous objections and petition-signings from much of France’s literary class, a precedent had been set that neatly bundled treason, propaganda, and crimes against humanity — terrible news for Pound. Then, the week he arrived in Washington, the Nuremberg trials began. Under the circumstances, Julien Cornell decided his client’s best bet was to get himself declared insane.

The idea that Pound might be out of his mind didn’t come from nowhere. One of his Italian colleagues had found his broadcasts so confused and disjointed that he worried Pound might be broadcasting in code. In his often-interated wish to conduct his own defense — a wish that Dorothy devoted much of her correspondence to contravening — he sounded the same Superman note that he did on the plane to Lieutenant Colonel Holder. “I favour a defender who has written a life of J. Adams and translated Confucious,” Pound wrote his son. “Otherwise how CAN he know what it is about?”

His self-aggrandizement was extraordinary. While still captive in Genoa, he asserted that his knowledge of Confucius would allow him to settle the war in the Pacific. He asked the FBI agent who was interrogating him to take a telegram:

PRESIDENT TRUMAN, WASHINGTON. BEG YOU CABLE ME MINIMUM TERMS JUST PEACE JAPAN. LET ME NEGOTIATE VIA JAPANESE EMBASSY RECENTLY ACCREDITED ITALIAN SOCIAL REPUBLIC, LAGO DI GARDA. FEMOLOSAS, EXECUTOR AND TRANSLATOR OF CONFUCIUS, CAN WHAT VIOLENCE CANNOT. CHINA ALSO WILL OBEY VOICE OF CONFUCIUS. EZRA POUND.

He was indignant when told it could not be sent.

Even Pound’s Confucian scholarship is evidence of his disconnection. There is surely something out of whack about a person who spends half his prodigious energies ranting about his race obsession and the other half translating (from a language he doesn’t actually speak) classic works about balance, modesty, moderation, and honor. Pound came to think Mussolini’s problem was that he had not read enough of (Pound’s) Confucius:

Poor old Benito errd all right. I was assured he received first edition of this Confucian book, but when his secretary acknowledged the second edition (italian without the chinese text) it was too late.

Hitler, too, would have benefited from more Confucius — i.e., more Pound — and as the war ended, the poet proved willing to work his magic with Stalin as well. He told a visiting newsman’ in the first days of his Washington confinement that he had tried to travel overland to Moscow “where he hoped to persuade ‘Uncle Joe’ that the American Constitution was a superior instrument to the Soviet Constitution.”

Was it a mistake to plead insanity? That begs the question of Pound’s mental health. Four doctors testified that he was insane. But Pound never, in his twelve years at St. Elizabeths, received any treatment — not a pill, not a minute of therapy or psychoanalysis. His lawyer Cornell, who arranged the diagnosis, wrote to Dorothy that “a state which would, no doubt, appear to you to be normal, is defined by doctors as paranoid in character, to an extent which impairs your husband’s judgment of his predicament and renders him unable to properly defend himself.” One can call him insane or evil, but there’s no getting around the fact that the mental patient Ezra Pound and the raving anti-Semite Ezra Pound are the poet Ezra Pound.

The things that kept him off the stand are the stuff of his poetry.

 

IV

The critic Hugh Kenner has sought to excuse Pound’s anti-Jewish ravings on the grounds that he absorbed from Dorothy a benign British upper crust anti-Semitism:

One began by excluding whole groups: Catholics, Jews, Americans, the uneducated, tradespeople, provincials. One then readmitted individuals one by one. . . . When Jews began to enter [Pound’s] field of attention, it was easier than it should have been for him to think of them en bloc.

One does find exactly this type of discrimination in Dorothy’s letters: “The Brits are an unpleasant lot,” she says, “except ones friends!” But the publisher James Laughlin claimed of Dorothy that, when talk turned to the Jews, there would be “a gleam in her eye,” and the letters bear that out, too. Of a German professor she met, she writes: “I suppose there are newrich or oldusury in the show: haven’t yet discovered.” In later life, Pound sought to repair to the “milder” anti-Semitic tradition Kenner postulates, telling Allen Ginsberg in 1969, “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” (Some suburb that must have been.) But while the distinction between ethnocentric exclusivity and maniacal hatred is a meaningful one, Pound is unequivocally on the wrong side of it.

The editors of the newly published collection “I Cease Not to Yowl” describe Pound’s letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti as “the most frank expression we have of Pound’s political, religious, and racial views during the years 1937 to 1959.” (More accurately, from 1947 to 1959, since only five short letters predate his arrest.) They show Pound every bit as vehement in his hatreds as before the war. More vehement, even, since by now he had added the grievance that “obviously,” as he wrote Archibald MacLeish, “it is kikes keeping me in here.”

If these letters are about anything, they’re about Jews — or “mesopotamians,” as Pound took to calling them. In letter after letter, the now long-dead FDR appears as “Oozenstein,” “Oozenstink,” “the Ooze,” “Roosenstein,” “Jewzfeld,” “Goosenstein.” So does “Weinstein” Churchill.

A reading of Hitler’s Secret Conversations in 1953 leads Pound to a reassessment: Hitler’s problem, aside from his ignorance of Confucius, was that he was too Fewish:

The Hitler Conversations very lucid re/money/ unfortunately he was bit by dirty jew mania for World DOminion, as yu used to point out/ this WORST of German diseases was got from yr/idiolized and filthy biblical bastards. Adolf clear on the baccillus of kikism/ that is on nearly all the other poisons. but failed to get a vaccine against that.

Agresti had herself broadcast propaganda for Mussolini, but she had been horrified at Pound’s anti-Semitism even during the war and never considered Hitler anything but a “homicidal maniac.” Agresti was the daughter of the British anarchist William Michael Rossetti, and as such the niece of the poets Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti as well as the cousin of Pound’s friend Ford Madox Ford. She traveled in anarchist circles in Europe and America, helped found a number of international organizations, and embraced Catholicism in middle age.

Agresti saw the world as “lining up for one great struggle, that between Marxian materialism which leads to slavery . . . and [the] Christian conception of the supreme value of human personality and the sacred duty of respecting it.” She may have shown a jaw-dropping lack of perspicacity in having thought that Mussolini would protect her and her Catholicism from the twentieth century’s materialism, and considerable naivete in assuming that Catholic moral reasoning could show Pound the error of his ways. She may also have let friendship override politics to an absurd degree in praising Pound as “an all too rare example of fearless courage and great dignity during all these eleven years of most unjust treatment.” Yet she appears, in the handful of letters that find their way into this correspondence, as a gentle and decent person — never trimming her criticism of Pound’s inanities and always remonstrating with him on his anti-Semitism.

Her forbearance only goaded Pound into ever more extravagant denunciations:

Boris sez yu giv a MAGnificent whoop at Cuma/ but seems to think you have a blind eye for the bastids that Xified yr Svr. namely the Monds, Morgenthaus, Rothschilds and other filth of the mesopotamian mud flats. . . . Pity the pore uncawnshus “carrier” whether it be of bubonics, tubercles or the kikerian state of mind, the oily and spherical/ the so accurately defined by Wm Shx/etc. Not that the chew shd/ be prejudged/ he shd/ simply be watched for racial symptoms, and not allowed to infect the mind of the non-kike. Genocide? Unnecessary. Bar them from three professions.

Oddly, neither of these Mussolini fans sounds like an Italian Fascist. Agresti resembles Whittaker Chambers; Pound can be called, with no exaggeration whatsoever, a Nazi.

And an unrepentant one. “Autarchy was functioning,” Pound wails to Agresti. “One SLIP. war. does not invalidate benefits of autarchic drive.” Even before the end of 1945, enthusiastic visitors were beginning to arrive at St. Elizabeths, mostly poets and poetry groupies (the females appear to have kept Pound serviced sexually), but also a clutch of political epigones. Pound backed the young neo-Nazi John Kasper as he set up White Citizens’ Councils with the Ku Klux Klan and George Lincoln Rockwell. Kasper, who merits the comradely tag of “Der Kasperl” from Pound, slavishly aped not only Pound’s ideas but also his prose mannerisms, lauding American Nazis who “know what is fact and what ain’t.”

It was a partnership of commiseration. As Pound wrote Agresti in 1955: “Kasper has ascertained what I had long deduced, that our greatest historian Del Mar was a kike.” And in 1956: “Kasper acquitted of sedition/ public cheers. . . . None of the kikecution witnesses stood up under cross Xam. At least got a little publicity for the NAACP being run by kikes not coons.” The relationship would endanger Pound’s release in 1958.

 

V

A life like this has implications for the poetry. Canto 74 reads: the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle in gt proportion and go to saleable slaughter with the maximum of docility

Hugh Kenner’s defense that “one would think it evident that the group who ought to feel insulted are the goyim” is preposterous, particularly in light of the Agresti letters. One must take Pound as an evil anti-Semite or not take him at all.

The tendency of the poetry-reading public has been to take him. What did he achieve as a poet that makes us so willing to honor a Nazi?

A half-century ago, with large parts of The Cantos already in print, the critical jury seemed to have reached a verdict: Pound’s poetry was tightly yoked to Pound’s life, and the poetry was for the most part second-rate. His gifts as an impresario of poetry were, by universal agreement, formidable. According to the Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen:

One must never forget his important role in the poetic renaissance of thirty years ago. That importance may finally have consisted more in his critical stimulus and instigation than in his own work.

T. S. Eliot added that Pound’s technical virtuosity is an “inexhaustible reference book of verse form. There is, in fact, no one else to study.” But Eliot largely concurred in Matthiessen’s assessment, insisting that Pound be judged on “his total work for literature.” Malcolm Cowley was typical in calling the verse “imposing [but] spoiled like the man himself by arrogance, crotchets, self-indulgence, obsessive hatreds, contempt for ordinary persons, the inability to see the world in motion.”

Central to this low regard for the poetry was the widely held belief that Pound — in his poems as in his life — was an obscurantist and a poseur. The cliche about modern poetry is that its deliberate difficulty both reflects the disjunctions of twentieth-century life and demands the attention from readers necessary if poetry is to survive. Pound preached both doctrines, of course, but his contemporaries felt he was up to something else as well. Walter de la Mare dismissed his early Canzoni as “affectation combined with pedantry.” Eliot complained about passages in The Cantos that are “very opaque: they read as if the author was so irritated with his readers for not knowing all about anybody so important as [Martin] Van Buren, that he refused to enlighten them.”

What makes this showing off particularly galling is that Pound himself often knew little about Van Buren (or whatever else he was writing about) until he boned up. After reading the “Adams” Cantos, Archibald MacLeish wrote Hemingway that he was disturbed at Pound’s “conviction that he has read American history — which the facts don’t seem to support.”

A lot of people had this impression. The poet Richard Aldington said: “He has tasted an enormous number of books, yet I doubt if he has ever read one with concentration from cover to cover.” After hearing Pound sing the praises of the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, the classicist Huntington Cairns sought for weeks to get a single scrap of concrete information and came to the conclusion that Pound had never actually read Frobenius. To James Joyce, who had mailed him a manuscript of Ulysses, Pound wrote: “I think your novel is damn fine stuff.” But Pound, for all his enthusiasm about promoting Ulysses, never discussed it in any detail, and Joyce later came to doubt Pound had ever read it.

This pseudery is no mere mask or persona. In light of what we now know about Pound, his tics look like canny strategies for hiding an essential charlatanism. Take the table manners that horrified London: Pound affected not to care about them, in the interest of being Bohemian and epatant — at one dinner party he slowly ate a floral centerpiece — but at least some of his hosts perceived that his behavior was a way of avoiding un-intentional gaffes.

We should view the wacky letters Pound wrote throughout his life — the scribbles, annoying crackerbarrelisms, and indecipherable abbreviations — the same way. “Your incomprehensible scrawls are a torture to me,” Ford Madox Ford wrote him. Yeats asked, “I wonder if you could bring yourself to tell me what you want in old-fashioned English?”

Like Pound’s outrageous manners, his bombastic letters disguise an inability — in this case, to spell. This inability is undisguisable in the official letters he wrote to the “Attorney General” during his confinement, but it was present throughout his life, in all languages: “among” for among, “prologomena” for prologomena, “just prezzo” for gius to prezzo, “Santiana” for Santayana, “Brussels” for Brussels, “Teopile” for Theophile. It would seem a failing not worth mentioning — plenty of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Evelyn Waugh, have been atrocious spellers — had not Pound gone to such absurd lengths to hide it.

In this same category of fendings-off of scrutiny fall the sophomoric puns that pepper his letters: “Nude Erections” for New Directions (his publishers), “yourpeeing” for European, “Harry-stop-her-knees” for Aristophanes, and the “slopagandists” who praise the “bank (or stank) of England.”

What’s most striking about the newly published letters to Agresti is that they are more obscure — the language more private — than those to his wife. Pound’s public language is more private than his private language. The letters Pound wrote Agresti —

have I got to start on YOU, to keep even YOU from swallowing the god damned lies of the same god damned liars who lied re/Mus and Adolph. There is no witch hunt. They lie about McCarthy, the press in the hands of dirty jews and worse goyim.

— differ little from large chunks of the poem Pound meant to stand as the greatest epic since Dante:

Democracies electing their sewage till there is no clear thought about holiness a dung flow from 1913 and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud and the american beaneries.

If the Agresti letter seem an exercise in bullying and mystification — as they inescapably do — then we have no choice but to view the published poetry as a similar exercise, particularly when Pound grows heated and intolerant.

 

VI

For Pound more than for other poets, the quality of the work is dependent on the quality of the person. And yet, when one gets past the evasions and looks for the person, one doesn’t find much. This was a failing to which his contemporaries caught on early. Reviewing Pound’s first British volume, Edward Thomas found beneath the “turbulent opacity of his peculiarities . . . very nearly nothing at all.” Wyndham Lewis, looking back on their London days, admitted a tremendous talent but little else: “Pound is that curious thing, a person without a trace of originality of any sort. . . . Yet when he can get into the skin of somebody else . . . he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot.”

The greatest lines from his Pisan Cantos suffice to show that Pound at his most lynxlike is an extraordinary poetic animal indeed:

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, Paquin pull down!

The green casque has outdone thy eloquence

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare” Pull down thy vanity

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail, A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,

Half black half white

Nor knowst’ou wing from tail

Pull down thy vanity

How mean thy hates Fostered in falsity, Pull down thy vanity Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Twentieth-century poetry offers nothing more metrically dazzling than this — and little more moving. But much of its ability to move us comes from misreading it as a Poundian act of contribution, when in fact it’s an accusation. The lines — unfortunately — continue:

But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity

To have, with decency, knocked

That a Blunt should open

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

This is not vanity.

Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered.

The message is directed at us, not himself: “You pull down your vanity.” It goes a long way towards wrecking what came before. We’re in the presence not of a moral conversion but of a master ventriloquist with a lot of Ecclesiastes and Chaucer rattling around in his head.

The emptiness, the lack of identity, that Thomas and Lewis saw in the young Pound is not necessarily a failing. Goodness or badness rests in what one does to fill that emptiness, and poetry was Pound’s arena — maybe his only one — for doing that. If he chose evil, how can that not vitiate the poetry? The more so since there is real opportunism here. Pound’s artistry conceals that a gathering up of scraps is all the vision he has to offer. But it also aims at providing a sort of poetic asylum that would place his evil beyond moral scrutiny. In Pound, the modernist obscurantism and the anti-Semitism have the same source and are effected by the same means.

That’s why we must view his later public self-flagellation with suspicion. To Daniel Cory, his expatriate neighbor in Rapallo, Pound said of The Cantos in 1966: “I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make a work of art.” Leonard Doob of Yale, who edited the broadcasts for publication, reported of a 1961 visit to Pound in Venice: “He grabbed hold of my shoulders, stared straight into my eyes and said: “But don’t you see? There was something rotten behind it all.’ There were tears in his eyes and he looked utterly tortured.” Donald Hall remarked after a three-day interview for the Paris Review: “Gradually I understood that he doubted the value of everything that he had done in his life.”

Pound clearly had second thoughts about his ragbag, archive-plundering style of composition. Yet he did not explicitly renounce his hatreds, and we have no evidence that he ever reassessed them — only that he woke up to the damage they might do his poetic reputation. In 1959, he sent the embattled Kasper a letter warning, “Antisemitism is a card in the enemy program, don’t play it. they RELY on your playing it.” Far from being nuttily unconcerned with his politics, far from hiding in his “separate” poetic sphere, Pound was cannily strategizing. As he insists at one point to Agresti: “Gt mistake not to separate the CONSTRUCTIVE parts of heretical or innovative writers from their fantasies.” This has the ring of a preemptive strike against the harsh judgment of posterity, for Pound understood far better than any of his later critics how tightly his poetry was linked to politics. He had, after all, done the linking himself.

 

VII

This brings us to a disquieting paradox: In the heyday of political correctness, Pound’s critical star has risen even while information about his intolerance has grown, to the point where he is now considered in the very top rank of American poets.

It is not that we ignore that Pound was a Hitlerite; it’s that critics have eagerly tried to separate the bad man from the good poet. The Pound critic Christine Brooke-Rose, for example, asks: “Do we bother much now whether Agrippa d’Aubigne, the baroque religious poet, was on the Protestant or the Catholic side, except for points of exegesis?”

It’s foolish question. If d’Aubigne’s affiliations don’t matter, it is only because we don’t read him. Brooke-Rose’s flippancy leads us down the road at the end of which we resolve our ambiguities about what we want out of poetry by ceasing to read it. But more to the point, little as his religious affiliations matter to us, Agrippa d’Aubigne was a poet in the first place because he knew what side he was on.

And so did Pound. As Dorothy typed up the jottings Ezra had sent her from his Pisan confinement, she wrote: “Of course all these last, apparently, scraps, of cantos, are your self, the memories that make up yr. person.” The subject of The Cantos is Ezra Pound. The Cantos are his Apologia pro vita sua. And anti-Semitism is a well-spring for the poetry he wrote throughout his life — maybe the primary well-spring, for in all his writing it is the only motive principle never hedged about, encrypted, bundled with allusions, or mystified with intentional disjunctions of syntax: Let us be done with Jews and Jobbery, / Let us SPIT on those who fawn on the JEWS for their money.

This kind of anti-Semitism is in poetic terms just like every other thing in Pound’s poetry: It is one of the arrows in his quiver of obscurantism, meant to bully the reader away from a discovery of the poet’s essential shallowness. Pound could have picked another obsession for this purpose. (He seemed tempted for a while by sex.) But he didn’t. Pound made a choice, and the problem is not merely that the obsession he chose renders the poems offensive — it’s also that obsession is not much to build a poetry around. Flimsiness, crassness, and intellectual laziness are what make so much of his poetry flop. Deep down, everyone who has read Pound knows this. How have we lost sight of it?

The controversy over the 1949 Bollingen Prize was both the spring-board for the growth in Pound’s reputation and a bleak dress rehearsal for the way arguments about Pound have failed to rage ever since. In a weak year, with a gobbet of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson the only competition, Pound’s Pisan Cantos, by eight votes to three, won the award just established by the Library of Congress.

The pro-Pound faction, which included W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, and T. S. Eliot, seem to have viewed the award as a battle between the philistines and gentlemen backing art for art’s sake. There’s a worthwhile argument to be had here about whether poetry should be judged via esthetic reasoning from the inside out, or via moral reasoning from the outside in.

The voters for Pound, however, defied logic by concluding that he had so little control of his mental faculties that the government could not try him for treason, but such command of his poetic ones that the government should shower him with money and honor. This reasoning implies a poetry that was so important that it answered to no authorities save those set up by poets — and so trivial that no account needed to be taken of Pound’s services to an ideology under which people had been exterminated just four years earlier.

The Library of Congress fellows who voted against Pound — the poets Karl Shapiro, Conrad Aiken, and Katherine Garrison Chapin — were not any more astute about recognizing the Pound problem. According to Shapiro,

My first and more crucial reason was that I am a Jew and cannot honor antisemites. My second reason I stated in a report which was circulated among the fellows: “I voted against Pound in the belief that the poet’s political and moral philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standards as literary work.”

While either would be a defensible reason on its own, taken together they undermine one another. The second should suffice — that it was morally indefensible to give the prize to an anti-Semite. When combined with the first, though, it opened the door to an unproductive political correctness. By asserting that he voted against Pound because “I am a Jew,” Shapiro implied that morality requires an aggrieved interest group that exists, by definition, outside of poetry in the “other” realm of politics.

This was Pound’s opening. It was F. R. Leavis who realized most astutely that, in the long run, setting up such a duality between a “political” and an “esthetic” Pound could only lead us to overvalue him drastically as a poet:

Today it is assumed that if one withholds one’s admiration from the Pisan Cantos, it must be because one’s dislike of the Fascism and anti-Semitism in what Pound says . . . prevents one from recognizing the beauty and genius of the saying. But how boring that famous versification actually is — boring with the emptiness of the egotism it thrusts on us. A poet’s creativity can hardly be a matter of mere versification; there is no profound creative impulse at all for Pound’s technical skill to serve.

With modern Pound readers locked in a critical double-think — separating the poems from the man’s attitudes, even though the poems are about nothing but the man’s attitudes — a great deal depends on our being able to recover this earlier, wiser way of reading Pound.

 

VIII

The poet Charles Olson, who visited Pound over his first few weeks in St. Elizabeths before losing patience with his racist ranting, found him “terribly American, insecure. . . . He does not seem . . . to have inhabited his own experience.” Between the damnable choice Pound made to fill that emptiness and his Americanness, there is a link.

Pound was fond of passing off his crotchetyness as American. But his fellow literary expatriate Margaret Anderson stressed, “Ezra’s agitation was not of the type to which we were accustomed in America.” What Pound did have was the ability to play American insecurities like a fiddle. He understood the American fear of being thought “hokey” or provincial or philistine, because he had that fear in spades. He was provincial. The yellow overcoat and earring he wore during his early time in London struck his contemporaries as resembling nothing so much as the costume of a dandified “poet” from the Midwestern dance halls of the 1870s. Even his egomaniacal offers to settle the war in Japan have the ring of those back-of-a-magazine ads offering to “unlock the mysteries of the Orient.”

This Americanness was an opening for generosity towards his fellow countrymen — an opening that Pound, as a poetic promoter, frequently took. But more often, Pound used his insight into American diffidence as a means to self-aggrandizement, bullying, and con artistry. The rhetoric of his 1912 “To Whistler, American” (You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts / Show us there’s chance at least of winning through.) was no mere poetic stance. To Harriet Monroe, the energetic Chicagoan who founded Poetry magazine and paid his rent for years, he sold his dashed-off and pornographic “Contemporania” by insisting it was “your chance to be modern.” When Monroe bridled at even racier stuff, Pound replied:

These fools don’t KNOW anything and at the bottom of their wormy souls they know they don’t and their name is legion and if once they learn that we do know and that we are “in” first, they’ll come to us to get all their thinking done for them and in the end the greasy vulgus will be directed by us.

Pound turned out to be right. Americans proved willing to cut an outrageous amount of slack to an intellectual they didn’t understand or like — and to effect a separation between his politics and his poetry that has no basis in common sense. This is the Tocquevillian horror: a culture that, lacking confidence, looks imitatively to the next class up and creates a domino effect of amoral conformism. Pound’s evil is a standing invitation to prove we care about “the arts” more than we care about something so crass as what someone says — an invitation, in other words, to prove how chic we are.

And we continue to accept it.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.